“What’s the meaning of this!” Tonya said, as she took in the gore-dripping room. Lori and Carol turned to her, both covered in blood. They were the only ones left standing in the room. Men and women littered the floor, messily dead. The bed was covered by people, Transforms of many varieties, not dead, but many wounded. Parts of several corpses hung from the draperies, half open doors, and the ceiling light fixture. Blood dripped from the doorjamb surrounding Tonya. Juice patterns, some of them quite deadly, filled the air, in the process of starting their decay. The pooled blood in the room began to roll out the doorway, around three corpses that dammed the gore. Tonya’s slippers slowly grew red.
“They tried to kidnap me.” Cathy Elspeth’s voice, from underneath several bodies, on the bed. Now things started to make sense. Those were Inferno bodyguard bodies on top of Cathy, wounded but alive. Protecting her. Tonya shook, and relaxed an iota when her conscious mind finally realized the dead Focus wasn’t Cathy and not one of Carol’s own. This wasn’t an Arm having a psychotic break. There had been enemy action here. There was at least some rational thought behind this egregious violence.
Carol snarled and didn’t otherwise answer Tonya’s question. Instead, she bent down and hacked the head off another Transform, then picked up the corpse and tossed it over Tonya’s head. She took a knife from the hands of one of the Inferno people, jammed the head on it, and handed it back. The Transform had been dead before Carol beheaded it.
If Tonya hadn’t ducked, the corpse would have smacked her in the face. “Stop this,” Tonya said, in her best take-control voice. This was ridiculous behavior.
Tonya tuned her charisma to slow down a berserk Arm. “Calm…” she said, or started to say. Lori ran over to her, past Delia as if Delia was a statue, and put her bloody hand on Tonya’s chest. A physical touch-based juice pattern came through: calmness, I’m your friend, this was an attack on Cathy and the Newt. Tonya froze.
Lori was naked.
So was Carol.
Gore splashed Tonya’s nightgown as an invisible someone staggered by her and vomited – invisibly – in the hallway outside. One of Carol’s many Crows. She noticed her hands and feet were numb, approaching the sensation of nightmares where her hands felt like basketballs moving through mush. It would wake Tonya up instantly every time, only there would be no waking from this. Tonya used her charisma to control her own desire to spew her evening snack.
“I killed her,” Lori said, hand still on Tonya’s chest. “My call.” Some of the blood was Lori’s, from a bullet wound in her upper thigh. A trickle of blood still ran down Lori’s leg and now dripped on Tonya’s slipper. Blood drenched Lady Death or no, Tonya had no reason to distrust Lori. Behind Lori, Carol beheaded another dead Transform, and forced the head onto another Inferno knife. The Arm was deep into her own darkness, her beast.
“Who?” Which Focus died? Tonya’s breath came in short bursts as she began to put together more of the details. People crowded in behind Tonya; Gail and Polly and their bodyguards, Suzanne Morris and more of Carol’s people, serving as Morris’s bodyguards. Carol, Lori and, if Tonya’s guess was correct about the vomiting Crow, Sky, had just thwarted something with the potential to fracture the Cause, a kidnapping and hostage situation.
“Maybelle and her bodyguards,” Lori said. Huh? Maybelle Roznovski was one of the witches Lori had secretly trained, one they had invited to be part of the Patterson attack group. Polly had vetted her. Tonya remembered the paperwork from last afternoon. Tonya had met her many times. Pleasant, not exceptional, not political in the slightest. Her household specialty was photographic supplies and accessories, and they attempted to hawk decent but not exceptional black and white photos. Her people weren’t going in on the attack because of their lack of military training.
“Impossible,” Tonya said. “Patterson couldn’t have gotten to her. What had Maybelle been thinking?”
Carol snarled again, moved over to a different Transform, and carved off another head. Carol proved herself not totally berserk when she held up the Transform’s firearm – 9 mm with silencer – and showed it to Tonya and the rest of them. Not one of the weapons they planned to use in the Pittsburgh attack or the clean up afterwards. “Traitors die,” the Commander said. This wasn’t a random attack. This was an attempt to ‘rescue’ Cathy, a first Focus.
The three Inferno Transforms finally got up off Cathy. Tonya recognized two of them: Ann Chiron and Steve Overshown. Ann was wounded, a nasty bone-shattering wound to her right shoulder. She had to be in tremendous pain. After an Inferno kid holding the doorway between Carol and Elspeth’s suite tossed a first aid pack to Steve, he began to dress Ann’s wound. Ann fought through the pain with Focus-like aplomb and carried one of the heads on the point of her knife. Tonya couldn’t tell if her grimace came from the pain of her wound or the fact she was carrying a head on a knife. Then Ann looked at Carol and nodded. Carol gave her another head for her other hand, this time on the end of one of Carol’s own knives.
Once the Inferno guards moved off Cathy, an unknown Major Transform man tried to skitter away from the bed, but Cathy held on tight, and he stopped. His face was bloody and puffy, the result of a punch or more likely a pistol butt to the head. A Crow. This had to be Newton. For a moment, Tonya met his eyes, and saw ‘you twitch, I skunk you’ in them. Tonya edged over to Shadow and Newton calmed.
From the hallway, Tonya heard Gail start to give orders about securing the area and organizing a cleanup crew. Hardly upset at all.
Tonya opened her mouth to speak, and then stopped. What was there to say? ‘It was just a kidnapping – couldn’t you have just stopped them? Subdued them?’ ‘You didn’t have to kill them all, did you?’ ‘They’re dead already, stop ripping them to ribbons, please?’ No one else appeared to be the least bit bothered by this bit of egregious and still – ewwww – ongoing Arm excess. Not Polly, not even Gail. Tonya turned to Shadow, who remained by her side. He didn’t appear to be bothered, either. He did maintain his disguise, though.
“The Commander protected a Crow from a traitorous Focus,” Shadow said. “This is a good thing.” Of all things, he took her hand in his and squeezed. Tonya felt calmer just listening to Shadow.
Hell.
Carol appeared in front of Tonya, yet another head in her hands. Tonya moved her hand away as if it was a live electric wire.
“Do it,” Carol said, all blood-soaked demon predator.
“You’re crazy,” Tonya said.
Carol came closer, until she was just inches from Tonya. “We make an example of traitors in my army. And you follow orders, bitch, or you fucking take a walk.”
Yes, far too much rational thought here. Carol was strengthening her dominance, and Tonya understood her motives and the kind of blood-soaked authority she wanted to establish. Heads on spikes as a warning to people who defied her, iron control, Arm-harsh discipline. People would follow her, too. Even Tonya, her least reliable follower, would follow, now neatly trapped into a choice between obedience and exile. She felt a cold shiver in her nerves at the vision of the coming darkness and slowly held up her hand to receive the dubious prize.
“Carol, no,” Polly said, stepping into Carol’s predatory path. Carol turned on her with a snarl. “There’s a better way.”
“What the fuck better way?” Carol was angry, but not so angry, thank heavens, that she wouldn’t listen.
“We don’t want to distract people from the war,” Polly said, reasonable, logical, and at her most charismatically persuasive. “We need people to be worrying about Patterson, not bloody internal fighting on our own side. We need to play this down, not up. Make this as minor an event as we can.”
Carol glared, but reason found its way through. She nodded. “For now.” Expediency still ruled, thankfully, barely more appealing to Carol than the brutal dictatorship she wanted to establish. Expediency wouldn’t always hold such valid trumps, or Polly’s unstoppable calming charisma backing them. Tonya shivered to think what would
happen then.
“This didn’t happen,” Polly said, her voice officer-firm. “Not this way. The official story is that we exposed Roznovski as a traitor and she and her people tried to fight their way out afterwards.”
They all fell into the Commander’s blood-soaked darkness. No one even dared comment on Carol still holding a bloody head as it leaked gore down her naked arms.
“Tonya, Gail, Lori,” Polly said. “Before we leave tomorrow, we need to re-examine the other witches, this time with multi-Focus charisma. This was our fault.”
The Commander looked up, laughed, and flicked her knife to toss the bloody head into a corner. It landed in a bloody puddle and spattered more dark red droplets against the wall. “A bit late for that, now isn’t it? Feel free to examine all you want, but you won’t find anyone else. If Patterson had other plants, they would have struck at the same time. Motherfucking traitor Focuses!” She made a two handed fist and brought it down on the skull of one of Maybelle’s wounded and unconscious normals. One that was still alive. Gore flew. “Traitors die!”
Tonya nodded and didn’t speak. For the first time, she began to wonder if the cure for the first Focuses’ ills would turn out to be worse than the disease.
Carol Hancock:
“What do you mean, she won’t participate?” I said. Tonya stepped back, intimidated. I only asked a question; I wasn’t trying to intimidate. Tonya needed to get used to her new self and my new self. If I had a week, I would get Haggerty and put Tonya through some Focus training, Arm style. She needed it. Getting sexed up had cost Tonya what little remained of her edge. She hadn’t even killed anyone in last night’s little fracas.
I didn’t have the fucking week necessary to fix Tonya.
I hoped I did the right thing by listening to Polly. I needed to instill some serious and necessary discipline in my army, but every time I thought about it, I decided that Polly had been right. There just wasn’t time.
Maybe after the battle, though. I could see uses for a standing army, and I knew that a significant fraction of the people here would follow me if I asked them to join me. In addition, it would be a hell of a lot easier to enforce my will with an army at my back.
We needed a little enforcement now. We would need more afterwards, for when the Hunters struck. The Hunters strength was at the squad level, which meant a guerilla war. They would be hitting us everywhere, and only harsh discipline would keep our side from dissolving into anarchy.
“Bentlow’s gone to ground. Pulled her entire household and gone on vacation, in her words,” Tonya said. I shook my head. Five. Only five Focuses in the actual attack. Proportionally, as bad off as the goddamned Crows. Fucking embarrassing. The other nine Focuses would do logistic support of various kinds, all under Gerry Caruthers’ command, and to my horror, Beth Hargrove and her people were the best of that sorry lot.
“This, too, Commander,” Tonya said, and handed me a short report. Predawn meetings in my command tent, much like the bad old days of the Clearing of Chicago fight. An oversized army tent in the center of my army. It still smelled of must and dust, and I had been trying to air it out for the last two days.
“Ma’am,” Sky said. I ignored him as I read what Tonya handed me.
“What’s this shit about Claunch now?”
Tonya and our most dearest renegade first Focus, Michelle Claunch, had been arguing with each other for days. Claunch seemed to think she had been helping us by letting the Cause use the Network, and that we owed her, now that the rebellion was on. Arrogant bitch.
“She’s offering a deal,” Tonya said. “She’ll give us her information about Patterson. In return, she wants official status as a rebellion Focus, meaning she won’t get taken out by the Arms.”
“I don’t want her anywhere near the rebellion until after I mind scrape her. That list of deeds she’s done to help us since the start of the Cause did clear up some mysteries, but until I clear her in person, she’s not in.”
“How about you grant her immunity from Arm attacks in return for the information on Patterson?” Tonya said.
I shook my head. “Too open ended. I want her to agree to a mind scrape. She’s got too much of a history to just ignore, Tonya.”
“A mind scrape with Lori and me and her Crow, Road, present?”
“How good is this Crow, anyway?” I said. “I’ll want Gilgamesh there in any event, but I don’t want some random whoop ass Mentor-quality Crow anywhere near me.”
“Shadow talked to Road after Patterson took Keaton. He’s leery of Road as well, and I think he wants to do to Road what you want to do to Claunch.” I nodded, visions of Rogue Crow dancing in my head. Reasonable, since Road was one of the followers of Innocence from long, long ago. “He thinks Road has fallen, in his terms, ‘deep into the Crow – Focus symbiosis’. He puts Road about on the same talent level as Sky and Rumor.”
Ouch. Both Sky and Rumor had danced with me in the past, and both were Crows I would rather not face on the other side of a fight. “In that case, I’m not going to agree to anything without Shadow present.”
“I’ll pass that along. I think I can get Claunch to agree to this, with a mind scrape put on your calendar after the Patterson fight, and us getting her Patterson information now. On the other hand, that means she won’t be physically involved in the Patterson fight.”
“I can live with that. I’m not sure how far I’m going to trust her, even after a mind scrape. She’s as twisty as you are, Tonya. Even in the best of circumstances, it might be a few years before I’m going to be comfortable with Claunch at my back.”
Tonya nodded.
“Ma’am,” Sky said. Again. He had been haunting the back corner of my command tent for the last half hour, attempting to attract my attention with about every honorific and tag-pulling trick he could think up. I was tired of Tonya, and decided to give him his turn.
“Yes, Sky?” Although I relented, I still gave him a beastly glare.
Sky took a deep breath. “Commander, how much of an open mind are you, regarding your army? There’s a situation to talk to you about regarding…”
I raised my hand. Sky would go on for a half hour with pleasantries like this, if you let him. “Out with it. I’ll take just about anything able to walk and talk, and I’ll waive the latter if their boss can talk.” Occum’s menagerie was a bit much, but I was learning not to drop into a stalk when his tamed non-human Monsters walked by. Well, at least most of the time. There were so many of them, and they all filled my head, thanks to my quite functional Monster amulet.
“I would like to present, then, Courtier Freeman, who wishes to speak to you.”
Haggerty appeared by my side in an instant, all eyes and ears. She had been in the tent next door, working through the lists of Transforms and normals who were a part of my army. She burned to get over here. No danger vibes from her, just an air of extreme interest.
I knew Freeman from the Eskimo Spear quest. “So he’s Courtier officially now, not a Goldilocks?” I asked Haggerty.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, practically a purr.
Haggerty was terrible at recruiting people for her personal organization; I don’t think she ever owned more than a half dozen at any one time, and I had to help her for several of them. However, she balanced it out by ‘making friends’, lots of friends, only a few of which I had ever encountered. Some were disastrous in their own way, such as a certain Focus Keistermann. On the balance, she made her method work. There were times when I swore she had met nearly everybody.
“Send him in,” I said, to Sky. Freeman was a Goldilocks who didn’t like the name or the idea that Goldilocks’ were useless, and was out attempting to change their image. He envisioned these ‘Courtiers’ as Transform diplomats, and he made it work, at least a little. The only Major Transforms who recognized Courtiers and used them for diplomacy were the Nobles, who apparently needed them regularly. It would have helped if Goldilocks were more common, but they weren’t, and there were fewer
Goldilocks than there were Crows. They were just an uncommon Transform variant without the fertility problems or any need for Focus support. It would be interesting to see a Courtier working professionally. They were all absurdly resistant to Major Transform charisma.
A minute later, Courtier Freeman came in, a lanky medium height man with black hair and a piercing stare, with the poise of an ex-military man who had taken well to Transform life. He wore a close-cropped black beard, and his hair was similarly short. He had a lesser Noble I didn’t recognize as a bodyguard. The Noble had already changed into his combat form, which was a man-weight wolf. Courtier Freeman bowed to me and offered his hand for me to sniff.
That little whiff of his hand told me what was going on. I let a small smile creep over my face, and wondered why Giselle wasn’t involved. Had I seduced their spy farther into my service than they trusted?
“Commander, I have a set of proposals for you,” he said.
“I’ll listen,” I said. For diplomacy, I banked down my predator.
“A substantial group of Canadian Transforms wishes to join in your conflict. They will ally with you, and work under your command. However, there are protocol issues that need explicating.”
Freeman was impossible to read, and well trained, the equivalent of Lori’s best. “I’m going to want standard half tags on all the Major Transforms in your group, including Sports, plus quarter tags on the rest. Does your Arm,” no, I wasn’t going to say her name, yet, “think this will be sufficient?”
“I’m not familiar with your terminology, Commander.”
I slapped a half tag on Freeman.
“Oh,” he said, afterwards. “There isn’t much to this form of tag, is there. What The Arm was talking about was something she refers to as a dual Eissler tag.” ‘The Arm’? What hubris. Yet, what else to call her? Arm Armenigar sounded perverse. She did have prior claim to the name.
“We would call that a mutual Eissler full tag. I’m going to need to talk to her in person regarding that.” I wasn’t giving one of those away for free.
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 28