Not much of a fight. It started, and then stopped abruptly.
“So Sinclair’s group was over here,” Arête said, then walked toward Del. “And over here the other Hunters?” He got down and looked at some tire tracks, and looked some more. “Interesting. I’d say that when the fight was over, two of the Hunter’s trucks went with Sinclair. Or am I just seeing things?”
“No, you’re not,” Del said. “Look at this.” Arête walked over and knelt beside Del. She pointed out a set of three creature tracks in the damp ground to the east of the parking area, deep impressions.
“Hunters, running away, back toward their trucks,” Arête said, after giving the tracks a sniff.
Del laid out the fight in her mind. Sinclair’s group stopped and set up a defensive screen right at the overlook. The Hunters pulled in one at a time, not really enough room to properly park all their big rigs. A fight started and stopped quickly, likely before all the Hunters and Monsters got out of their vehicles. One at a time, the Hunters’ semis turned around and left.
The front semi never tried to turn around. By its tracks, it stopped and then started up again heading west. West, the direction Sinclair’s group went.
“The second semi tried to turn around and leave, but got stuck,” Del said, from over by the westward section of flat ground. Deep tire imprints in the mud, a foot or more deep. Footprints of a diverse group of creatures, just as deep in the mud. “Later, Sinclair’s group pushed the semi out of the mud. Muscle power.” She walked to where the third semi had been. The third one managed to avoid getting stuck, but they were sure in a hurry. The earlier seen Hunters tracks had been running toward this one.
“That happened after the fight. Why did the rest flee?” Arête said.
“I couldn’t tell you, Arête, but it looks like to me that Sinclair made off with two of seven big rigs.”
---
“That’s them,” Arête said, and pointed at the large mass of assorted vehicles pulled to the side of the road nearly a mile ahead. They had been following the meandering path of Sinclair’s group’s wandering all day and night, through some of the most appalling back roads of western Utah and eastern Nevada, with only one brief pause to collect some sleep. Straight line? No, not Sinclair’s group. Del wondered if they even had a map. This road wasn’t even paved.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Damn if I know,” Arête said, looking around in the early morning light, the sun still behind the mountains to their east. “If that set of mountains up ahead is the Egan Range, we’re forty or fifty miles north of Ely.” Nevada. Nevada all looked the same to Del. Scrubby desert flats, rock strewn steep sided mountains running north and south, endless straight blacktop or gravel roads.
Sinclair’s people had pushed a pickup truck across the road, perhaps a thousand feet ahead, and Del slowed the Harley to a crawl. Dust from the strong crosswind obscured the parked vehicles. Tiny static discharges filled the small rolling dust clouds and streams. They flashed in her metasense, creating ghost images and sometimes even blanking out the juice signatures of the visible Monsters. Del found the entire situation unnerving.
“We want to talk to Sinclair,” Del said, as Monsters came up and surrounded them. A horse with teeth and claws, an ape that must have weighed more than three hundred pounds, a giant rat, a praying mantis, and two wolves. The rat and one of the wolves looked like old Monsters, years past their transformations. One of those could potentially fight an Arm to a standstill.
They all stared at her blankly. “Your boss,” Del said.
“Get off the chopper,” the ape said. She was almost seven feet tall, and looked like an oversized gorilla except for the full-sized human breasts. She looked human enough that her nudity was disconcerting. Del and Arête stood quietly, and the ape frisked them, far too thoroughly for Del’s liking. The ape chuckled when she lifted the last of Del’s knives, and then flipped it in the air before passing it to the rat for safekeeping.
This close to the Monsters, Del metasensed identical scars on each of their juice structures, and those scars raised goose pimples on her arms and legs. The Law.
The six Monsters surrounding her made patterns as they moved. The same awareness that she gained when Bruja Torres and Master Gemelo opened her to shamanism now left her open to this. The Law tugged at her, tangling her metasense. It lured her mind into its own pattern, and she couldn’t break free. She didn’t know if this was coincidence or design, some sick prank of Wandering Shade, or a necessity of culture, but to her élan attuned metasense, the Law appeared as a stylized cross, the vertical mark a corkscrew, and the horizontal crossbar the looping sideways eight of the infinity sign. Insidious, seductive and dangerous. The vision made Del edgy and brought forward her Arm aggressiveness.
The Monsters reacted to the smell of angry Arm with anger of their own. The old wolf growled, the horsie and the rat showed claws, and the mantis hissed. Del looked around at the narrowed eyes and combat stalks and realized that they were all a mere twitch away from a fight.
Damn, they couldn’t afford a fight, not here. She took a deep breath and forcibly ignored the threat. Slowly, her predator effect faded to that low simmer of danger that was an Arm’s normal state. Behind her, Arête sighed with relief.
The ape sent Del onwards with a hard push to her upper back. The mantis pushed Arête, and the entire crew of them headed through the large camp, pushing and shoving as they went. Del passed a couple of crocodilian dragons lying on the ground next to a half dozen juice-enslaved males. They all looked exhausted, perhaps from a fight. Farther on, Del saw a bear Monster lying on the ground and twitching, but she couldn’t metasense any wounds on her. A snake and a giant bird watched Del and Arête with hungry eyes, looking at them as food. A leopard watched them with a different kind of hunger, and the leopard bothered Del the most. The leopard’s hunger hid itself from Del in her mind, gibbering in her quiet pools and refused to surface and let itself be known.
Ghostly apparitions walked among the exhausted army, illusions that played with her metasense and made her want to flee in terror, run and run and run until she herself was exhausted and could not run any more. Arête shivered beside her, barely resisting whatever madness attempted to crawl into his Crow mind. She nestled him up as close to her as she could stand. The seductive nature of his juice structure called to her, a powerful magnet in such a stressful place, aching to be one with her. These were Hunter ghosts, something she knew of only second-hand, and they repulsed her.
The two of them had talked about exchanging tags, back before they left Amy. They decided not to, that it was too much loss of control for so early in their relationship. Now, Del was glad, here where everything involving the juice twisted it, in the midst of what might be deadly enemies if Sinclair didn’t run this mob.
The wind rose to gale force as they rounded the corner of the parked truck, and the sand and dust blasted Del’s face. She raised her hand against the wind, and felt the cloying call of élan, the sickness of bad juice and madness, drawing at her mind. Their captors still pushed them forward, and the ape led them to a large tent ten paces past the semi, decorated by spray-painted images of eviscerated human corpses and wolf-heads, all enhanced with élan. Signs of Enkidu. Territory markings of Enkidu. Del almost ran when she saw them. It took all her will to hold her position. Then their captors pushed them into the tent.
A Hunter waited for them inside the tent in his half-beast form, a snake barely larger than a man. Not much of a Hunter. Instead of scales, his snake body appeared to be normal human flesh, and he didn’t have the mass of muscles she expected from Hunters. By his side sat a cloaked and élan-sodden Pack Mistress so long removed from being a Focus that Del barely metasensed her for what she was. Beside her, another Hunter stood guard, a powerful muscled creature in his combat form, a form best described as a carnivorous moose. All were marked deeply by the Law, and Del called on her will to quell her urge to fight, fight until either all the Law-marked were dead, or
she was dead herself.
Beside her, Arête froze, drenched in a sudden paralytic terror. Del glanced over to see his panicked face and realized with a plunging stomach that even a Guru was helpless in this condition. An old, experienced Crow handled such circumstances as these by avoiding them. No Crow, Guru or otherwise, was equipped to face enemies such as these. Arête’s life was in Del’s hands. If he was to survive this, she would need to save him.
“Hunter,” Del said to the snake as she slowly walked forward with her hands out in a sign of peace. The guards behind her let her go. Sweat dripped down between her shoulder blades and she remembered other old, bad circumstances, from her days as a student in Ma’am Keaton’s hands. She could handle sweat. She could handle this. She had to.
Arête broke free of his fears and followed, behind her. “Do you command here?” Del said. Tribes of Hunter illusions stalked her metasense, fading in and out through the canvas walls of the tent as if they weren’t there. She realized that she wasn’t sure even how many people shared the tent with them. This horrific place wasn’t what she expected to find when she volunteered for the rescue attempt. All this, and she still didn’t know where Sinclair was.
“I command,” the snake said. “But I’m not a Hunter, Del.”
Del stopped short, four feet from the snake, and Arête stumbled into her back. She knew the voice. “Sinclair?” The numbing strength of this place now made sense to Del – the creatures in the tent were both Law-linked as well as immersed in a Noble Barony’s affinity bond. The whirlpool sucking of élan and dross, perceptible only because she was open to the shamanistic aspects of her own nature, stripped away at her thoughts and identity, colors dripping from a painting sprayed by water.
“They call me Emperor Caveworm, Del,” the snake said. “If you want to live, you’d better do the same.”
“What did they do to you, Crow Master?” Arête said. His voice choked in terror. His whole body shook as he clutched desperately at Del.
The Sinclair-snake had no eyes, but despite that, he seemed aware. Metasense, most likely. How did they turn a Crow into a Monster? Del hadn’t known this was even possible. Yet, she realized, she had seen it once already, in the ruined thing in Denver that named itself Ezekiel. She hadn’t understood until now. She had envisioned the Crow Ezekiel remade on torture racks by mad scientist surgery, not with the direct application of élan. Now it was clear. Whoever remade Ezekiel did so with élan. A whole science of horror opened itself up to Del, and she shivered once, violently, when she saw how any Transform doused in élan could be so sculpted. What were the limits? What shapes were possible? Was this always a tool of horror and punishment, or could it be harnessed in some more moderate fashion?
Sinclair – Emperor Caveworm – laughed at Arête. “You? It’s a little late to be trying to cast me out again, Crow. Feed him to the Monsters.”
“Wait!” Del said, as the world around her slowed. The ape and the rat grabbed Arête and pulled him and his juice structure from her, slow molasses pouring from a spoon. Her sluggish hands reached achingly toward the knives no longer on the inside of her leather jacket, motion she couldn’t even stop. Arête said he could defend himself and not to worry about him, but Arête wasn’t in any shape to do anything in this enclosed madness of the Emperor’s Barony of Law. This wasn’t a place for a Crow. They were going to conk him on the back of the head any moment now.
“We’re here to help you, Emperor Caveworm,” Del said, her palms sweaty and her heart pounding like that of a terrified rabbit. She willed herself quiet and slower, and forced herself not to leap after Arête and defend him from the guards. They weren’t here to fight Sinclair, dammit!
Caveworm raised an arm – no, a two-tentacled mess made from an arm – and the ape and rat stopped moving. Arête shivered in their grip, and Del guessed she had only moments before panic would send him into unconsciousness. “Help? You’d better explain. The last thing I need is any more help from you betrayers.”
Hopeless fear washed through Del, an aching need to act. Sinclair was no longer one of their people; the Law etched as deeply in him as on everyone else. She hadn’t known Arête was one of the Crows who cast Sinclair out last year. She should have pressed more, but hell, in their juice-besotted bliss it was just too easy to relax into the wonder of compatible juice structures and forget about important questions.
“We came here to help you, Master Sinclair,” Arête said, ignoring his panic and terror through an effort of immense will. The ape knocked him to his knees. Arête hissed pain. “Sir. Emperor Caveworm. I’m here to atone, to help save you from the Hunters.”
“We don’t need any help to save us from the Hunters,” the Pack Mistress said. “These two could be front line material, though, if Hecate makes good on her threats to us.” With a start, Del realized that this was likely Focus Elspeth. Visions of Focus-Monsters played in Del’s mind, the horror of Patterson’s death in Pittsburgh. Yet, this Pack Mistress’s Monsterhood was all internal, scary and horrible in a very different fashion than what oozed alive from the shell of Patterson’s remains.
“What’s your plan, Emperor Caveworm?” Del said, holding on to her self-control by the tips of her fingers, gripping the bare edge of sanity as she swayed above the abyss of the lunatic Law.
“You think I’m going to tell you that? To a betraying Crow and the junior Arm from hell? Let me just say that the Hunters once had proper leadership, under Wandering Shade, and that I’m going to provide it again.”
All she knew about Wandering Shade were stories, myths and legends. He founded the Hunters years before her transformation, the first Major Transform to find a way to stabilize Beast Men and keep them sane and intelligent, and he had worked and schemed with all his will to find a way to break the power of the Focuses and put himself in their place. His was a horror few if any Transforms would ever be willing to see rise again.
“We are here to help,” Del said. Her words sounded limp, even to her.
Caveworm slithered out from on top of the hassock he had been curled up on, and he and his madness came far too near to Del for her comfort. “You’ll help, alright. Especially after I put the Law on you.”
Del tried to backpedal, but her muscles no longer obeyed her. “Stop this!” Arête said, then after a meaty clunk to his head from the ape, he pitched forward to the dusty carpet.
“Idiot Crow,” Emperor Caveworm said.
“Sinclair!” Del said, commanding, as predatory as she could manage. “Beth is worried sick about you. She’s depending on you to come back to her. We don’t need the Law – we’ll help you despite…” With a careless wave of a tentacle, Caveworm stole her voice and brought silence.
“Without the Law, you’d get torn apart by the others the first time you act aggressively,” Emperor Caveworm said, ignoring her predator. Gibbering terror wove nets in Del’s mind, stealing her strength. She had been skunked by a Crow Master and his power, his juice, placed her fully under his control. “Don’t worry about Beth – I’ll attend to her in good time.” The Crow began to alter her juice with Crow Master tricks Del barely metasensed. Things she had seen the Brujas and the Duendes do – but not to her, and not like this. In her subconscious, Emperor Caveworm replaced her symbols with his.
Her croaking frogs vanished in a scream of Beethoven and Twain as her juice destabilized. God’s indelible marker began to write the Law upon her juice structure, and in pain, as she entered the same madness that had enveloped Sinclair, Del passed out.
Henry Zielinski (3/25/73)
“There. Just like that.” The pinprick on his arm stopped bleeding.
“Hot damn,” Ellen whispered. She let go of Denise’s hand and brushed a strand of wispy red hair from her eyes with an elegant hand. “Is it going to break security if I call Gail and tell her about this? Walk her through the procedure?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Hank said. “Why?” They gathered in his laboratory in the Oak Valley Nursing Home, and the a
ir smelled of sour chemicals and old juice. Hank worried an acid stain on the old black lab table with his fingernail.
He had brought in the Stone Point Barony Focus because he thought she might be able to find some witch method of amplifying this new healing technique. As it was, the Focus healing method he discovered remained both weak and inefficient, at least so far. Well, not as inefficient as keeping some poor Transform pumped for weeks while they healed normally, but still…
“Because she’s been hot for figuring out how Focuses could heal ever since I met her. We even spent several fruitless hours experimenting back in Chicago, a week before the Hunters’ attacks started.” Ellen smiled at him, a wondrous sight. Ellen was so much easier to be around when not in her tin-pot dictator mode. “You know, this might even get you back into her good graces, Hank.”
“We patched up our differences,” Hank said. Ellen was dangerously perceptive. Hrrumph. He didn’t want to think about his differences with Gail, or the sorry adventure of his early transformation. The memories would drag him back into depression.
Denise smiled and Ellen cleared her throat. “Save that she still calls you Dr. Mengele behind your back.” She paused to skewer him out of the corners of her eyes as she gathered up papers and a couple of sacks of supplies she had been trading with Inferno, ammo, to be precise. “She needs to get back on the bandwagon and worship the ground you walk on like the rest of us intelligent Focuses.”
Hank shrugged. He had never put Focus O’Donnell in that particular category, but a Focus of her talents didn’t broadcast her feelings. Hank had talked her into tagging him, despite the way she ran her household, because, for him, the more tags the better. Her tag informed him that he never wanted to find himself on her bad side, as she would have made a hell of a leader Focus during the Quarantine years. Luckily, as an ABD – All But Dissertation – she possessed a high opinion of over-educated arrogant men like him. As long as he behaved professionally.
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