“There’s something we’re missing,” Amy said, echoing my thoughts, Lori’s thoughts, Zielinski’s thoughts and Gail and Van’s thoughts. “Something big and nasty, and we’re not going to like it when we finally find out what it is. You know I suspect we have an ultra-powerful hidden Major Transform enemy. This looks a whole lot like that enemy in action.”
“Perhaps.” I understood her worries, having run into her number one suspect in one of his many identities not too long ago. A Major Transform he was not, though the rest was true. Amy twitched and winced, another wave of pain riding through her, as her body did the Arm thing and healed, despite the pain the healing caused.
“It’s all right,” I said, gently. She relaxed in a glow of happiness. She held my hand against her cheek, and I could almost hear her purr.
“So what do we do now, boss?”
“Well, for one, we need to get you a whole bunch of juice so you can heal that leg. There’s one woman in storage here at Littleside, two days from going Monster.” I would take the kills, and use our tag link to pass her the juice she needed.
She nodded. “I sense her.”
“After that, I’m going to need to hunt.” Amy would need an appalling amount of juice to fix her leg. I would get Giselle to help, the sort of thing a younger Arm would be willing to do to up the favor balance with a touchy older Arm like Haggerty. I already knew Giselle possessed the self-control to give up her kills to an Arm superior.
Amy looked down, away from my eyes, when she realized how much I was going to do for her. Then she tilted her head back and to the side, to expose her neck as fully as she could. Vulnerable. If she had been healthy, she would have prostrated herself at my feet. I hesitated a moment, and then laid my fingers gently on the artery throbbing there, to feel her life’s blood pulse under my control.
“I’m yours,” she said, with a musical whisper.
It was moments like this that reminded me why I cared for her so much. “You’re mine.”
So beautiful. I left my fingers on her neck and closed my eyes, basking in that warm, semi-sexual glow of possession.
“Tell me what you know about how the FBI’s going to be protecting the ruling Firsts,” I said.
“They’re going through Assistant Director Patrelle. The trap I sprung was a part of the deal. After they took me out, the Arm Task Force was going to be protecting Adkins, Schrum, Teas and Fingleman. The Task Force was the only FBI group able to take on Major Transforms. Other than six Special Agents trained in Monster tracking and killing, they don’t have anyone who’s ever faced a Major Transform.” Meaning: the rest were useless as protection. “I’ve got the names of the Special Agents in charge of protecting each of the four, and their assigned manpower.”
I thought about it for a minute. “We can’t sit on this. It’s got to go to Keaton. We’ve got to go to Keaton.”
“I’m only going there on a direct order,” she said. “Keaton screwed me, blued me and tattooed me last time I was there.” Haggerty eyed her leg, and I could see her thinking of having it cut off, to get herself out of a trip to visit Keaton. Then she sighed, and I knew she would obey.
“Yeah, I know. But we’ve got to go. We’ll get you healed up as much as we can, but in a few days you, me, and McIntyre get to make a trip to Los Angeles. Lori, too, to present herself.”
“Keaton’s going to kill McIntyre and Lori.”
“I’ll admit that wouldn’t pain me any to see McIntyre go, but you’re mine and he’s yours, so that gives me an obligation to protect his puckered smarmy ass. Keaton’s too smart to go after Lori. I hope. In any case, we go.”
Gail Rickenbach: December 13, 1972
Carol strode past her without even acknowledging her existence as the Arm crossed the midnight darkness of the Branton’s lobby. Gail winced. Carol had been with Lori for hours this evening in an unoccupied part of the Branton, and everyone in the building felt the storm. Fighting, making up, fighting, making up, a week of professional and personal spats compressed into one rough evening. Carol had been sleeping with Lori regularly, something Inferno had both hoped for and feared for years. They loved Carol, but weren’t sure she was a good influence on their Focus. Certainly not now, with Carol’s beast on the prowl. No sex tonight, or no sex Gail could metasense. Just a lot of sturm and drang. Carol, Lori and Amy needed to catch an airplane tomorrow morning to go meet with Keaton.
Gail badly needed someone to talk to, someone knowing and senior to her as a Major Transform. She saw things more clearly than before, and she didn’t like what she saw. Freeing Carol from Patterson’s dreaming attack and Bass’s screwy tag should have banished Carol’s beast, but didn’t. Worse, with the foreign influences gone and Carol no longer under orders to torture her victims every day, her beast became even more seductive. Gail’s tag with Lori made things worse, not better. Gail had tried to talk to Lori yesterday about her fears, and all she got was an invitation to join Carol and Lori on their nighttime city cleanup expeditions.
This, however, was business. To hell with politeness. Gail yanked on Carol’s tag and put some juice behind the yank.
“Gail, what do you want? I’m busy,” Carol said, not even breaking stride.
“I’m farther along. Can we try one more time?”
Carol stopped her trek across the dark lobby. She sighed, looked over her shoulder and gave Gail a predatory stare. “Only if we can do this quickly.”
Gail nodded. She had waited here in the dark lobby for almost two hours, knowing Carol would need to come by here on her way out.
Carol stalked over to the main stairway and started to run up the stairs, not looking back, daring Gail to make even one squeak about how she would rather use the elevator. Nope, no elevator this time. Gail jogged up the dimly lit stairs behind the Arm, signaling to Gilgamesh to grab Van and Zielinski, and meet them in the upper floor bedroom they used for their experiments. Gilgamesh and Van met Carol and Gail in the room, but Zielinski lagged behind. When at last Zielinski shuffled in half-asleep, to a withering glare from Carol, Gail stripped off her blouse and lay down on the familiar bed.
The room was a plain place, just a spare bedroom in the huge hotel that still wasn’t completely full. Sylvie had set it up with the intent of housing the occasional visitor, but there had been no visitors. Just Carol and her experiments, and the rare moment for Carol and Gail with no experiments at all. The room housed an uninspired painting of a couple of ducks that even the previous owners didn’t bother to take with them. Sylvie’s crew had dropped a double bed here, one of the Wheelhouse’s old beds that the household had carried around uselessly ever since. The bed sported a deep trough in the center, and anyone who lay on it couldn’t help but roll toward the middle. There was an old children’s dresser, another hand-me-down, and nothing else. The room was sterile and passionless, except for the lingering scent of old lust soaked into the walls and bedding, remnant of juice cycles and Carol’s intimate experiments.
Gilgamesh retreated into a corner, and Gail almost lost track of him. Zielinski set up his equipment and Van knelt near Gail, notepad in hand. Carol snuggled up next to Gail, bare skin in contact, such hot, smooth skin. Gail started playing juice music.
What she wanted was one last attempt at the Arm juice transfer. This time she was sure she possessed the correct bit of juice music.
Her first step was to make the juice buffer accessible. Gail got the buffer on her second try. Next, Gail attempted to establish the link between herself, Carol, and the juice buffer. The flowing juice stroked her mind and tried to seduce her into its pleasure, but Gail did her best to ignore the distraction, and managed to establish the link. Finally, once all this settled in, she belted out the tricky part of the tune, the juice pattern to move the juice. The score was an incredibly difficult variation on a simple pattern, a quartet of instrument voices straining her juice music capabilities. Gail played quickly because the music needed to be quick, and she played as carefully as possible, doing her bes
t to ignore the tingling stimulation of the juice flowing through her.
Slam! She hit the opposing wall with a dull thud and sank to the floor, her head spinning from the sudden impact. Her training took over and she forced herself groggily to her feet. The juice-stroked pleasure was gone, and for a moment she couldn’t remember what she was doing here.
“Keep your hands off my juice, Focus,” Carol said, with a predatory snarl. Before Gail could blink, Carol snagged her clothes and was on her way out the door.
“Damn,” Gail said, as her memories settled back into place. Gail had yanked Carol’s juice around so many times in this project that it surprised her to see Carol so horsy about such a simple little mistake. Gail opened her mouth to make her usual comment about lack of commitment, but bit her tongue before she spoke. Given Carol’s mood, she would be lucky to escape with her life if she made an angry comment.
Gilgamesh, fast on his feet, got between Carol and the door before Carol made it out. Gail’s eyes opened wider than wide. She had never seen Gilgamesh do anything like this before.
“Get out of my way, Gilgamesh,” Carol said. Carol glared at the lot of them, and the itchy cloying feel of Carol’s basement filled the room. The blood and gore didn’t drip down the walls and across the floor – yet – but suddenly it sure felt that way. Hungry hyenas crawled around behind Gail; she could practically hear them laughing at her, ready to gnaw the marrow out of her bones. Gail used one of her simple juice music pieces to steady herself and fight off the madness.
“Given the process, if she can move the juice one way around your native resistance, she can move the juice the other way,” Gilgamesh said, unfazed by Carol’s predatory display.
“Gaiiiiil,” Van said. He knew, having seen such things too many times before.
Zielinski looked up from his charts, of all things buoyed by Carol’s aggression, wide awake now. If he was the least bit bothered by Carol’s predator vibes, he didn’t show it at all. “What happened?”
“Gail used the wrong beat structure in the second movement,” Gilgamesh said, in his soft voice. “Instead of moving the juice into Carol, she moved it out.”
He and Zielinski stared at each other and then they both began to grin. Men! Gail wanted to put her head in her hands and just moan. How did she miss something that obvious? She just hated these mistakes, especially with Carol being so damned predatory.
“Let’s try it again, Carol,” Gail said, sitting up and bending a little charisma into her voice. She wasn’t about to give up when they were this close to success, no matter how much her own mistakes embarrassed her and how much the Arm terrified her today. Carol winced and turned to stare at the ducks, glaring as if she would like to skin them on her basement rack. She took almost thirty seconds to settle her anger and reign in her beast, but when she turned back to them, the room no longer felt like a nightmarish crime scene waiting to happen. She grimaced and then sighed. Then she stalked back to the bed and curled up again. Waited. Refused to talk. Her lean face was so hard, so cruel.
Gail lay down, and found herself rolling back towards the center, right up against Carol’s hard body. This time, Gail’s arms shook when she hugged Carol, the little voice in the back of her mind still trying to convince her that even with the tag, the Arm wasn’t safe to be around now. On her next attempt, she blew the juice buffer access. Gail thought she was going to crumble into hysterics, but as she worked on her self-control, Carol hissed out, right in her ear: “I didn’t say a thing, I wasn’t even thinking about my basement.” Gail barked sudden explosive laughter, echoed by Van. A moment later Gilgamesh and Zielinski joined in, even Carol after a moment, and the room echoed with laughter. As Zielinski and Gilgamesh traded wry and crude comments about Arm basements, amid Van’s futile protests, Carol covered her face with her hands and howled laughter, the loudest of all.
Gail glared the men into submission and they tried again, but the next attempt collapsed when Carol got the giggles, muttering about dueling with soldering irons and dental picks. Gail waited Carol out, a smile on her face now…and on the third attempt, the juice moved. Ahhh.
Just a few points before the pattern collapsed, but the juice moved. Correctly this time, from Gail to Carol. Ecstasy, pleasure beyond even the juice cycling. Gail gasped in surprise, not sure she correctly metasensed her success.
“You did it, Gail,” Carol said, her voice now husky. No aborted juice draw horrors this time; even a point of juice satisfied an Arm. “You really did.” She held Gail tight and didn’t let go, detonations of happiness rolling through from the tag.
Gail grinned so wide she thought her jaw might split. “It worked,” she said, words tumbling out in her sudden excitement. “Just exactly. I can do this again, any time you want, and I’ll get better with practice. I need to practice the score some more, and once I get good at this, I’ll get it for you every time. How many points do you want? Fifteen? Twenty? I can run whatever juice count I want to because I can take juice from my buffer, and now you can, too.” This was it. Everything she had worked for. The world-changing breakthrough.
Carol stroked Gail’s face with a gentle affection that Gail hadn’t felt from her in months, and hot bedroom eyes beyond refusing. “That was magnificent.”
“Yeehah!” Zielinski said, and hopped to his feet. “We got it!”
“What’s next?” Gail said.
“Perfect this,” Carol said. Her smile was so broad that she almost glowed.
“Pass the pattern on to Lori,” Gilgamesh said. “I think we can all agree she needs something to distract her right now.” Gail looked at Dr. Zielinski and Carol, who both nodded, and didn’t say a thing.
---
Two in the morning and Gail was up on the roof of the Branton. What she wanted was to drop into the Dreaming. For all her talents in the Dreaming, though, she could rarely reach it unless she was in her box, and her box was unavailable. Kurt and John still hadn’t managed to find a secure location for her darkroom since the move to the Branton. Zielinski’s old rental was now gone, and Littleside was too far away. The best she had been able to come up with was the Branton roof, up against one of the large metal contraptions connected to the Branton’s heating and cooling system. The electrical interference from the machinery drowned out most of her metasense and pushed away her household, a necessary prerequisite. Unfortunately, it also interfered with her ability to Dream.
To make it worse, the sky spat sleet pellets on her.
“You need to talk?”
Gail turned her head from where she was staring morosely into the lights of the damp city. Gilgamesh, of course. No one else could approach her undetected. His wet hair stuck to his temples, and his clothes were rapidly becoming soaked through. He didn’t seem to care.
“Yes, but…” She interrupted herself before she said something crude and cruel. She didn’t want to talk to Gilgamesh. He was one of her problems, as was Carol.
He smiled and leaned his elbows against the low wall that rimmed the roof, right beside her. “I could go kidnap Beth for you,” Gilgamesh said.
“Okay, I’m sorry, yes, some of it’s girl talk stuff.” Gail hadn’t been able to resist Carol’s advances tonight. She wasn’t sure what she thought of herself. “Some of it isn’t.”
Gilgamesh nodded and waited. The sleet dripped, and Gail pushed a damp lock of hair out of her eyes. “It’s the juice buffer access,” she said, willing to gab about one of her two big problems to Gilgamesh. “I knew I blew the pattern once tonight, but that was just the stress of the project and being next to Carol. Most of the time, these days, I can just sort of whistle that tune in my head and get at the buffer whenever I want to. The buffer access is doing something to me.”
“I understand the moral dangers,” Gilgamesh said. “Several years ago, when Lori first got access to her juice buffer, she got…strange…for about six, nine months. Tied herself in knots. She wouldn’t talk about what she was going through, and neither Sky nor I could stand
to be with her. I managed to squeeze out of Connie that Lori kept volunteering for the worst Inferno punishment jobs, saying she deserved them.”
Typical Lori. “Uh huh. Juice buffer access isn’t fair. I took nearly two years to get comfortable with the Focus basics, holding the lives of all my household Transforms in my hands. Then my damned charisma came in, along with a whole new set of moral problems, because all of a sudden I could spin nearly any normal around whenever I wanted. I didn’t make peace with myself about charisma use until last year, and for a while I swung the other way, using the charisma as a crutch against thinking. Now this. This damned juice buffer access is much more seductive than anything else I’ve ever played with, and sometime down the road, we’re going to have some big problems when some young undisciplined Focus gets access to it.”
Gilgamesh put his left arm around Gail’s shoulder and gave her a hug. His warmth was a pleasant contrast to the cold sleet. “You can pump yourself into mindless pleasure all the time if you want. That wouldn’t be good for any Focus.”
Gail nodded. “Gail the junkie.” She had seen junkie Focuses before. Linda Cooley had been one, once, until the Commander fixed Linda’s junkie habits…and when the stress hit, Linda still backslid. “The temptation scares the crap out of me. Abusing this can cost lives, Gilgamesh, by reducing the number of Transforms I can support. And even if it doesn’t cost lives…” Her pleasure took away from the pleasure of the people in her house. The numbers didn’t lie. Worse, she could trivially lose herself in mindless hedonism.
“There’s more,” Gilgamesh said. “For instance, there’s the Focus – Arm juice support problem. Carol uses a lot of juice. If you give her all the juice she needs, you won’t be able to support all the men in your household.”
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 7