Polly nodded. “Sky, Armenigar, Beast and the first Focus. The Lost Tribe. A long time ago.”
“What the fuck is the first Focus?” I asked. “Are you talking about the Madonna of Montreal?” That’s who I thought ‘Focus’ was, from the Lost Tribe.
“Yes, they’re one and the same,” Polly said and gave me a conspiratorial grin from her own bloody face. “Anne-Marie Sieurs, the first Focus to survive. She fled Europe in the early sixties, barely one step ahead of the Purifier.” A dream image of the Purifier’s black-cloud-with-eyes combat disguise flashed in my memory. Was this what the Madonna tried to send to me?
I hated blundering into the nasty deep waters where nothing made sense. I hated myths and magic. If I wasn’t caught in a battle, I would have staged an Arm-quality hissy fit. “Sieurs is supposed to be dead,” I said, likely a little beastly. That’s what Van put into his book.
“You think only Arms can do identity changes?” Polly said, with a harsh laugh. I wasn’t sure what to think, save that the idea of group feeding sounded strange. “I studied the trick, so as with all the other forbidden tricks, I could use it in a crisis. I assume you know it as well, Rumor?”
“Yes, Focus.”
Polly turned to me. “You, Haggerty and Sokolnik juice suck it. Rumor and I take the extras from you so you don’t die or go Monster, and feed the waste to the Nobles.” Arms couldn’t go Monster from juice sucking a Transform. This process, though, apparently put us at risk. I grew more unhappy.
“There’s élan in that thing,” I said, snarling. Enough to register as a Monster to my Monster amulet.
Élan could turn anyone into a Monster.
“Yes. You’ll have to let us take the élan from you, so the élan doesn’t corrupt you.”
“This is worse than Monster élan,” Haggerty said, the Arm master at surviving off Monster juice, if she had Crow help. Even she had problems doing so. “Won’t it corrupt all of us?”
“Keep it moving,” Dowling said. “Don’t let it settle. It’s like taking juice from an old Monster; you take in the élan, puke it out, then take it in…and repeat several times, or you’ll pass out like a young Arm taking her prey.”
Nobles knew the strangest things.
“Tighten the tags, Commander,” Haggerty said. “All the way to double tags, but allow it to go both ways. Make us one.”
“You’re crazy.” There were a thousand ways this could go wrong, and the bad possibilities filled my head. The whole concept of mutual double Arm dominance tags itself was wholly unnatural. What, each of us were going to get to order the rest of us…
“Do it. Trust me, dammit!”
This was Haggerty. This was a battle situation. I had to trust her. My tactics in battle didn’t measure up because I thought too fast and got lost in my own mental bunny trails. Battle lust. I needed to keep my focus on the big picture, not just the squad I was with, or I would overthink everything.
Haggerty had good combat instincts. She studied crap like this for fun. She had lived off Monster juice on her Eskimo Spear quest, aided only by a single mid-rank Crow.
I looked at my Major Transforms. They all nodded, giving me permission. So I did as Amy asked and tightened the tags.
We became one.
Amy, Dolores and I leapt and grabbed the yellow mess, and started to suck juice. In the back of my mind, Rumor worked his magic. There was over nine hundred points of juice in this thing, and about eighteen hundred points of dross, whatever that meant, since I knew of no way to measure dross. The rest of the Major Transforms siphoned off the juice and dross.
There was no pleasure in this draw; this was worse than taking juice from a Monster. The thing fought back, but against me – no, against our oneness – the élan beast fell.
Time passed, and eventually, we finished dissipating the yellow ick. The double tags evaporated as well, as none of us had the will to support them when we finished.
Big smiles grew on each of our faces as we recovered. We were all full up on juice and dross, including Polly and Pearl’s Transforms. An incredible icky sea of fresh dross surrounded us, the mess we couldn’t use. Juice trace strings radiated away from us, lines of blood from a fresh kill. I raised my hand and made a fist, not holding back my feral snarl.
“Charge!” Dowling said, with a bear roar. We roared with him, and charged.
Henry Zielinski:
His eyes opened to incredible brightness, and he closed them again. Head aching and hands shaking, he stumbled to his feet. Somebody helped him up. Female. Terry?
The area around him was a chaos of bodies and disaster. People collapsed, others bleeding. Bodies covered the street and spilled onto the small urban lawns. People wove their way among the bodies, tending and attempting to bring sanity to the chaos. “Man, you’re a mess, Doc,” Terry said. She didn’t look so healthy herself, all torn clothes, blood and bruises. She reeked of sweat and gun smoke.
What was he doing mixed up with the Inferno people? Wasn’t he supposed to be with group four?
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve finally disabled the last of the Crows Patterson set against us, and we’re getting our shit together to advance.”
Zielinski bent over and vomited. “Feel better?” Terry said. “Three of them skunked your group but good on your way over to help us.”
“Yes,” Zielinski said. He should be helping the wounded. Dammit, his head still ached. “Where’s Lori? How badly hurt is she?”
“Doc?” Terry said. “She’s fine. You should see the other guys, though.”
Zielinski heard Lori’s voice, and tugged at Terry, who helped him over toward where The Focus stood among a cluster of wounded but functional combatants, despite his shaking legs and arms. “Terry, you’re wounded.”
“That’s why I’m back with you.”
“Let me examine you,” he said, instincts at work. Terry showed him the shoulder wound, an in and out. “Let me patch that,” he said. “Why are you still up?”
“Uh, I don’t know, Doc. I was down for a while.” The wound had stopped bleeding on its own. No, someone had stuck a rolled up piece of cloth in it, a Crow trick. Had to be Sky. No one else came up with idiotic tricks like that. Zielinski decided to patch over the wound, for now. He claimed his black bag from Terry, who carried it for him.
“Hank!”
Connie Webb’s voice. “Over here,” he said. Connie and two of her Transforms ran up, dodging wounded as they ran.
“Stay down, dammit,” she said. Zielinski shook his head. “You’re impossible.”
“Lori?” Zielinski said.
“Figures,” Connie said. “Let’s go.” She led him through the crowd, to where Lori gave orders to the now combined groups two and four. “Viscount Nash got a leg blown off, and he’s over there, sewing it back on,” Connie said, her mouth puckered in distaste. Chimera healing techniques weren’t for the squeamish.
Too many of the dead and wounded around them were from Inferno. Way too many. No shortage of Patterson’s fallen, either, and with many of the fallen visibly untouched, Hank suspected Lady Death had done her thing again.
“Billington,” Lori said to the Arm in front of her. The Arm’s eyes were wide and wild, and Hank would have considered her too dangerous to approach, but she nodded and obeyed Lori. “As soon as Sky finishes cleaning that crap off of Armenigar, I want you to get the other Arms together and do the group predator thing. I want you to scare off the chaff between us and Patterson’s warehouse. We need speed. We’re behind schedule.” She turned to Hank as Billington jogged back into the combat. “Shit. Let me fix that.”
The urge to vomit went away and the world didn’t seem as bright. The pain receded, and he practically bounced with health. His mind cleared, and he blinked twice.
“What did you do to me, Lori?” he asked. “I thought Focuses could only help with Transforms…” His voice ran out of gas.
Oops.
“Let’s go,” Lori said, and point
ed in the direction of Patterson’s warehouse. She picked up her bullet-riddled black cloak, and slung it over her shoulders, Lady Death again. “Hank, I think you’ve just suffered a midlife crisis of epic proportions.” Pause, deadpan. “Welcome to Inferno.”
He had transformed. He was now a Transform. For once, Hank was speechless.
“Run, you people!” Lori said, with her Boston fishwife bellow. Everyone still functional stood up to follow. “The poo’s about to hit the paddle!”
Gilgamesh:
Even as a child he had hated to perform. Nothing matched the terror of public speaking, even before he became a Crow.
As a Crow, performing was a nightmare. His legs and hands shook as Shadow directed him to the dueling ground, and Thomas read the rules, such as they were. No this, no that. Everything stays in the marked area, including the duelists. Nobody from outside the marked area could interfere. In this duel, all he needed to do was last a minute. He didn’t even need to defeat Phobos. He didn’t even need to speak.
That was good, because Gilgamesh could barely breathe.
His fight against the ogre Hunter, Jack, had been easier. Too many eyes stared at him. He would even have a hard time panicking efficiently, not with over fifty Crows in metasense range. Even hemmed in by crazy restrictions no Focus other than Gail would have stood for, many of the visiting Crows were too wary of Gail to step out of the shadows they hid in. Arm Debardelaben sat in her wheelchair, beside Gail, barely holding in her anger. None of the Crows but Shadow would even acknowledge her existence.
Gail’s eyes on him were the worst. This was like performing for his mother. Or wife. If he blew this, he doubted he would be able to face her again.
The maternity section terrified him more. How had Tiamat talked him into allowing all of them to come? They had all slept with him, and he loved them all, in a strange and new sort of way. Well, realistically, the reason he let them come was that when the Commander said jump, he jumped. He would feel a lot better with Tiamat in the audience, because at least Tiamat understood the risks of combat, and knew you didn’t have to win every battle to win the war.
Only, in this case, he had damn well better win this battle, or the war would be long and nasty.
Phobos walked out and took his place, cocky and sure of himself. Gilgamesh walked out across the muddy field on his shaky legs. Only at the last instant did he remember to acknowledge Thomas, which he did with a bow.
“Start!” Thomas the Dreamer clapped his hands, and a barely visible red line sprang up around them. Just a marker. The responsibility to keep their dross effects inside the ring fell upon each of the duelists.
Illusions of Monsters walked toward Gilgamesh. Fear of being eaten assailed him. All induced by Phobos’s wizardry, Phobos, the Crow master of fear.
Gilgamesh golf bombed the Monsters, treating them as real. Either way, they were going to be distracted. At Phobos, he hurled a handful of marbles.
Two could play mind games, and Gilgamesh had studied the multi-Arm predator effect intensely. Just in case Kali and her crew decided to pay him a visit.
Each marble represented an Arm. Figuratively.
Phobos shrieked.
Gilgamesh fell to the ground, the club of a Beast Man close enough to his head to ruffle his hair.
Gilgamesh shrieked as well, and detonated his ‘many duplicate Gilgameshes’ golf bomb ground zero as he rolled. Illusion? Real? Gilgamesh didn’t have time to think, just react.
This was going to be a long minute.
Tonya Biggioni:
She simultaneously existed in two worlds. In one world, she inhabited the holy halls of the glorious Focus’s palace, and she was Acolyte Tonya, loyal Focus servant of Gloriana, the glorious Focus, the only Focus favored by God’s grace. She held in her grasp the hideous dark one, the Keaton-Monster, now hers.
In another world, she was Tonya Biggioni, witch, Council Focus, and rebel. She sat in a dingy corrugated metal warehouse, captured by her own personal nightmare, Focus Patterson, the leader of the first Focuses. In her grasp was her old friend and recent enemy, Stacy Keaton, who looked like she had been tortured unmercifully, missing an eye, an ear, several fingers, and with three ribs open to the air. Patterson’s goons had chained Keaton to one of the rusty I-beams that held up the dingy warehouse.
In both worlds, they had tagged each other. Tonya’s will was her own, again, at least as much as ever. She waved Danny away after telling him to get the rest of her people out of the line of fire. Danny scurried off.
“Fucking Biggioni, what did you do to my head! I know I’m chained to a wall in a rundown warehouse, not stuck in a goddamned fairy princess’s castle.”
“We tagged each other, Stacy.” They sat on marble tiles, spackled with quartz crystals that glittered like stars. Or maybe on a filthy concrete floor, layered with the refuse of decades.
“Well, let’s untag each other.” Keaton lay heavy in Tonya’s arms, and her hard face was pale. “What the fuck? I suppose I can kill you to get free of this.” She twitched, but moved no more. “Okay, so I can’t kill you, either. What the fuck did we do to each other? Get out of my mind!”
“Focus your willpower on the illusion. I can see both the illusion and the real,” Tonya said. “You should be able to, as well.”
Keaton’s eyes narrowed and she stared into the opposite wall for eight or nine seconds. “Okay. That worked. Now what? Let me guess. You aren’t in here to rescue me, are you?”
“No. Carol’s taken over. Shucked your tag, even.”
“Bitch.” Stacy sighed. “She didn’t tag you, though, save with that piddly little thing. Big mistake.”
“If you think I’m going to let you continue your idiotic plan, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“Oh, big fucking shit, how are you going to stop me?”
A sudden, flaming, unreasonable anger at Stacy’s challenge filled Tonya. “Like this.”
Tonya leaned on her tag to Keaton, which provided an ‘in’ for her charisma.
“That’s called empathy, Stacy, and guess what? You’re about to learn all you ever wanted to know about empathy.” She pushed her face up against Keaton’s and sprayed the Arm with spittle, snarling and almost biting at her.
After just a few seconds, Keaton yelled “Stop, ma’am!” Tears leaked from the corner of Keaton’s eyes. “Please! I’ll do anything!”
Tonya stopped. Keaton shivered in her arms. “Good, because I’ve got something to ask you,” Tonya said. Something strange oozed through her mind. She felt like a damned predator herself, as if she had just challenged Stacy as an Arm, and won. “If I fed you juice, could you rip free of this I-beam?” Tonya didn’t understand what Patterson intended when she had sent Tonya to replay her memories, but Tonya doubted she wanted this. Tonya tagging the Arm? Yes. Tonya letting Stacy tag her back? Tonya picking up a dose of Arm aggression? Not fucking likely.
“You don’t know how to fucking feed me juice,” Stacy said, her voice hoarse. “Besides, what are we going to do, go up to Princess Fairytale and ask her politely to give up? Unless you want to undo this empathy shit, because I’m not killing nobody with this crap in my head.”
“There’s a difference between killing enemies in self-defense, and killing and torturing innocents,” Tonya said. “The world isn’t written in black and white. Most of us live in the gray. There are few innocents here.”
“Goddamned Focuses,” Stacy said. “She’d better stand still, too, because the motherfuckers beat on my head with crowbars and I’m still dizzy. I kept Patterson from grabbing my mind by hiding my will in my quiet pools, but that didn’t stop her goons from physically taking me apart. I’m not sure I can even stand without help.”
“I’ll help you the old fashioned way,” Tonya said, wondering what in the bloody blue blazes a ‘quiet pool’ was. She found a Transform not wearing a tag from the nearest Focuses. She caught the Transform’s eye, and with charisma, carefully directed the woman Transform over to t
hem.
“Milady?” the Transform said, with a curtsey. She wore a long dress and head covering like something out of the middle ages. “What service may I do for you?”
“Look the other way,” Tonya said. “Back toward us slowly.” The Transform obeyed.
The Arm did her thing, as gunfire erupted near the door of the warehouse. Tonya fed Keaton juice from her juice buffer, through a temporary tag on the hapless Transform. Through Keaton, Tonya experienced the thrill of the kill, an emotion she hadn’t felt since she and her household had given up Monster hunting nearly a decade previous. She smiled. Killing was as good as she remembered.
“Couldn’t we find a way to save this idiot?” Keaton said, as she held the helpless woman in her arms and sucked juice. The woman’s skirt turned gradually pink with Stacy’s blood.
The new link with Keaton affected the Arm as much as it affected Tonya.
The thunder of a thousand lions shook the walls. Transforms scattered back toward Tonya and Stacy, except for Patterson, two other Focuses, a Crow and a baby Arm.
“Stay. Out!” Patterson screamed, and waved her hands. Patterson and her Focuses used a multi-Focus effect, something more obscure than a standard juice pattern. It caused the same echoes in her mind as the trick Occum pulled when he had redirected the Noble Terror roars. Horrific screams echoed into the warehouse from outside.
“What happened to you and your team? How did She take you?” Tonya asked, her voice lost in the mayhem surrounding them.
“Treachery,” Keaton said. The Arm lay back against Tonya with her eyes closed, processing the memories of her capture amid the bliss of the juice draw. Tonya wondered if she noticed that she gently stroked the cheek of the dying Transform. “We blew our way in, knocked out her minimal guards, and rushed her fucking warehouse. We caught her with her knickers down, using a Dreaming trick to make her think we’d be attacking at sunrise, coming from the east. Only…” She paused. “We got jumped by this pulsing yellow cloud thing that took out my merc army, froze Flo in place, and forced me to retreat into my quiet pools.”
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 35