Hargrove settled in on the other side of Arm Haggerty.
“What’s got you so ticked off, Beth?” Amy said.
“What doesn’t? It’s official. I thought there still might be hope, but just after we left for Pittsburgh, Newton eloped with Elspeth. They’re on their way to Salt Lake City as we speak.”
Amy chuckled.
“It’s not funny!”
“Eloped isn’t exactly the right word for what Major Transforms do when they start acting strange.”
“Okay, what is the right word?” Beth said, her bitchy Focus side out. Sinclair hadn’t seen her since the Battle in Detroit, where she had been, well, rather humiliated. He was impressed that she got invited to participate in the Pittsburgh attack. Everyone was getting a step up in the world but him. He got cast out, he got saved, he persevered with what he thought was the top Noble household around, but did Shadow suggest he become a Guru? No.
Worthless.
“Dumped. He left you for another Focus, Beth.”
“I know that! He used me, two-timed me, ditched me, cut me off, creeped me out, ArRrrrRgh!” Beth pounded the ground, and then threw herself up against Amy. In the process, Sinclair ended up with his fingers intertwined with Beth’s. Embarrassed, he gave them a gentle squeeze. “If I ever get involved with another Crow again in my life, someone hit me on the back of the head, hard!”
Sinclair repressed his sudden urge to vanish into the night.
Beth paused again, trying to figure out why Amy’s sad eyes were twinkling. “So,” she said, to Sinclair. “Who are you, sir? One of Amy’s motorcycle engineers?”
“No, Focus. My name is Sinclair.”
“Sinclair,” Beth said, her voice quiet and almost breathless. “Oh, that was good, Beth, real good,” she said, to the stars. She turned back to Sinclair. “Master Crow, forgive me. I’m just angry at Newton.”
“Oh, you’re not the first Major Transform to be angry at the Newt. He’s rather much to handle.” Sinclair told Amy and Beth the story of a Crow meeting in Boston that included Lori and Sky, after the rescue of Hancock from her incarceration in the CDC, where Newton, as a wet-behind-the-ears baby Crow, had broken Lori’s well hidden and highly secret fake Crow letter-writing identity. He had the both of them howling in laughter by the time he was finished.
“So, Focus Hargrove…”
“Beth.”
“…Beth, I want to congratulate you on your success in the battle in Pittsburgh. I…”
Beth interrupted. “Uh, me and my people were just driving the trucks and doing body extraction. Leadfeet, corpses and pitchforks, that’s us.” Oh, Beth could be nasty when she needed to.
Sinclair whispered “Sorry.”
“Hey, it’s not your fault,” Beth said, the bounce back in her voice. “Ever since I told Gail I’d help her, it’s as if the world decided to staple a ‘kick me’ sign on my butt.” Beth then told a story about Adkins planting a traitor among her Transforms, and where it got Beth. She wasn’t half bad at storytelling, herself, Sinclair noted. It wouldn’t have taken much to make that story a ‘pity me please’ story, but, instead, she told it as a comic romp, even making the part about begging for her life from Lady Death sound hilarious.
That took character.
“So, Amy, what are you going to be doing with your life, now that you finished beating the FBI into submission?” Beth said.
“There’s always more FBI Agents where those came from. Like coat hangers and cockroaches.”
“Right. Don’t you ever get tired of hunting them?”
“Actually,” Amy said. “I’m hoping it will be a good long while before they go after us again. No, I was thinking of leading the FBI to Bass, after providing them with the information they need to link Bass to the Phoenix Church Massacre. Think of it as the Amy Haggerty garbage removal service.”
“Won’t that take you into Hunter territory?” Sinclair said. They had all heard the story about Bass and Patterson. Dirty scum-sucking traitor, selling out to Patterson.
“Yah. We need to find out what those idiots are doing. I’m getting real tired of running into Hunter territory markers wherever I go, and I think it’s time for us to settle the Hunters, once and for all. Selling the Commander on my plan’s going to be a piece of cake, considering her dislike of the Hunters.”
“That’s not a good idea if it costs us an Arm,” Beth said.
“I wouldn’t mind some help,” Amy said. “You ever think of getting involved in the fights, Beth?”
“Me? Or my household?”
“Either.”
“Well, uh, I’m not going to ever do the physical fighting nonsense. As Gail’s young crew says, my fists suck. I’m working on witch, though. Dr. Zielinski seems to think I’m a natural, at least regarding juice music.” Beth paused. “As much as I love Gail, I can’t take being her bratty ne’re-do-well older sister for too long without a break. I need to go out and do something to earn my keep. You think you can train me and my people to do something besides serve as truck drivers and handy combat targets?”
“Positive,” Amy said. “Training isn’t going to be easy, though.”
“Training never is.”
“How about you, Sinclair?” Amy said. “I wouldn’t mind having the top Noble household out in Hunter country, to give me a hand.”
“Oof! Oof! Twist my arm! Oof!” Sinclair said. Laughed. “You mention your plans anywhere near the Duke, and he’s going to pick me up and carry me after you, no matter what I say. He’s been itching to be out on the real front lines for months. The only problem is going to be working out the command issues.”
“Let me guess. He’s tired of being a second banana, too.”
“You bet. The Commander does get hard to take, at times. At least from a Noble point of view.”
Amy chuckled. “You think she’s bad as a boss? Oh, she’s wonderful as a boss, compared to what she’s like as an underling. I’ve always half wondered if the root of Keaton’s sadism comes from spending too much time trying to boss Hancock around. She’ll drive you nuts! You ever hear the story about how she got the Commander title?”
Sinclair answered no, echoed by Beth. Amy told the story, equally hilarious, about how Keaton realized that Carol did a much better job when she was in charge of a project, or at least thought she was in charge of a project, and how Keaton maneuvered everyone into making sure the Commander name and responsibilities stuck. Even though Carol remained Keaton’s subordinate through the entire charade.
The story was much better than the truth.
“What is that Crow doing?” Beth said, a few minutes later.
Sinclair followed Beth’s eyes. “That’s Nameless. He’s a mystic Crow, in tune with all sorts of strange things.” Nameless capered wildly in an illusory fire, just dancing and dancing.
Amy nodded. “He’s the one who had the dream that sent me after the Eskimo Spear last year. He’s got something nobody else has.”
Sinclair nodded, familiar with the story. Beth opened her mouth to ask questions, but closed it again as she studied Nameless’s dance.
A few moments later, an illusory hand and arm, the size of a skyscraper, reached out of the sky and started heating up an illusory piece of metal in the fire, and then began to beat on it with an equally improbably large hammer. One could almost see a giant illusory face in the distance, hidden in the darkness, hidden in the shadows, directing the hammer blows. Almost hitting Nameless in his dance through the illusory fire.
“So what does his dance mean?” Beth said, tightening her fingers on his.
“I have no idea,” Sinclair said. He didn’t want to say that the illusory shadowed face was, of course, that of Shadow, and the iron in the fire represented Shadow’s Crows. At a minimum. He thought that was a bit cheeky for Nameless to put something like that in his dance. “I feel honored to see one of his dances in person, though. Supposedly, he only does these mystic dances when important events are occurring, such as the Clearing
of Chicago. Nothing to do with us, I’ll bet. We’re just a bunch of second bananas, not at all important in the greater scheme of things.”
At least that’s what Sinclair hoped and prayed. Going out to the front lines to harass the Hunters, whose growth in numbers had been nearly unstoppable, wasn’t exactly sitting by the fire, writing magazine articles and turning Beast-Men into Nobles.
Gail Rickenbach:
Someone had done a hasty cleanup on Carol’s tent, and as the largest tent around, it made the perfect meeting spot. Gail wondered what churned through the Commander’s head. She seemed ultra-subdued. In fact, just about everyone invited was subdued, though Gail wasn’t sure about herself.
She didn’t have the nerve to ask why she had been invited to this private talk, though, or, more improbably, why her husband, Van, rated an invitation.
Carol, Lori, Sky, Gilgamesh, Gail, and Van.
And Armenigar.
Armenigar herself was enough to awe Gail into silence. Gail had known of the Arm’s existence, of course, from the other survivors’ tales of the Battle in Detroit. She had missed the fact Armenigar, all six foot whatever of her, had been in the camp in the Adirondacks and in Carol’s Pittsburgh entourage.
From the tales told from Detroit, Gail had expected the jolly green giant, ten feet tall, ugly and impossible to miss. After she heard Armenigar’s voice, Gail knew Armenigar had been boisterous earlier that evening, though she had paid the voice no mind. Now, Armenigar was quiet and respectful. Nor did she match her description in the stories: she was only about six foot eight or so, and with a wig and makeup, she would be a stunner. Her shaved head made her outrageous.
“So, does everyone here know what my real name is?” the Madonna said. She sat in Carol’s own chair, and the Commander sat on the cot. Gail sat next to Van on the floor.
Gail shook her head, as did Gilgamesh.
“My birth name was Anne-Marie Sieurs.”
Gail almost died. The first Arm and the first Focus! In the same tent, with the first Canadian Crow, Sky? Oik!
“You can call me Anne-Marie,” the Madonna said. Carol, for some reason, had a big grin on her face now, but didn’t say a thing.
“Anne-Marie, why did you call us here?” Gail asked. “Or, pardon me for asking, why me?”
“Oh, this, that and the other thing. Because you are who you are, and more important than you realize. You are the discoverer of the witch method of giving juice to an Arm, for one. But, actually, one of the more important reasons for you to be here is because your husband was the one who asked me to set up this meeting.”
Huh? Gail turned to Van, who tried not to look like a cat with canary feathers on his lips. Utterly unsuccessfully.
Carol shook her head, after shooting Van a glance that said ‘I’ll talk to you later’. “So, can you just wave your hands and banish the beasts that I’ve been nurturing in most of the other people, here? Or is it too late for that?”
Oh. What Van had really said a few moments ago was how difficult it would be for him if Gail put a torture chamber in the household basement. He did have a point. She had a whole list of Detroit bad guys she wanted dead. A few of them were bad enough she had been thinking of giving them to Carol. For Carol’s basement.
“Do you want these beasts gone?” the Madonna said.
“Yes,” Carol, Lori and Sky said.
“No,” Gail said. “I want their beasts subdued.”
Well, you could have heard a pin drop. The glare Lori gave her would have etched glass.
The Madonna turned to Gail. “You understand innately, don’t you, child?”
Gail nodded. “I hate to admit it, but without Lori and Carol’s darkness, I don’t think either of them could have pushed me hard enough for me to succeed. Their beasts are a weakness, but their beasts are also their edge. We can’t afford to lose their beasts. We need them controlled.”
“She’s a good one, Annie,” Armenigar said, giving Gail a gooey eyed look. “You take good care of her, Carol.”
With a shock, Gail realized that the fearsome Armenigar had a weakness for Focuses wider than she was tall.
“Oh, I will,” Carol said, just as gooey eyed.
Great.
“I just don’t understand,” Carol said, turning back to Anne-Marie. “How in the hell can I control my beast? Sure, it gives me an edge, but part of the edge is because it’s not under my control.”
“That’s because you don’t have a fourth.”
Armenigar slapped her forehead, a sound as loud as a gunshot. “Dumb,” she said. “It’s so obvious I could just kick myself.” Armenigar turned to Carol. “Up north, in the Yukon, lives the first Chimera. He’s gotten too strong for me or Sky or Annie here to control. I’ll bet you and Lori and Sky working together can, though. Believe you me, those pansy-assed Nobles I saw in your army certainly won’t qualify as your fourth. There isn’t a one of them who can stand up to you and draw down your darker self when you need it. Beast can, if you bring him back to humanity. Hell,” she said, a hungry look in her eye, “I’ll even give you some training on how to fight Beast. You look like you could use some real combat training instead of the crap you’ve been getting from the psychotic midget.”
“Beast,” Gail said. Memories connected in her head, along with memories of the bear who followed the Madonna around in the Dreaming. “Crow and Arm and Focus and Beast and Mother and Father…that wasn’t just a story, was it? They still tell stories about the Lost Tribe, around Transform gatherings of…” she paused, and slightly reddened “…and I’m sitting across from the other three of you, aren’t I, making my usual ass of myself.” Clumsy Angel, indeed!
“Yup,” Armenigar said. “That you are.” The three so named laughed, and everyone else joined in a moment later. Gail got redder. “Kiddo, Beast’s even worse in person than he is in your dreams. You’ll see.” So, who was Armenigar in her dreams?
“So,” Carol said. “How does this help?”
“First,” Anne-Marie said, “what you call your beasts are actually your internal coping mechanisms for Major Transform urban life. Evolution tuned us Transforms to pre-civilized lifestyles, not modern civilization. Our urban civilization puts all Major Transforms, especially the leaders, under far too much stress. I know this from far too much personal experience. Out in the wilds, you don’t need your beasts, and they will diminish all on their own. Secondly, if your little group here had a true Chimera peer, you’d get your beasts dragged down through his efforts. And you’d get dragged on more vacations as well, which your group needs. Trust me, this worked for the Lost Tribe, though we didn’t know what we were doing at the time.”
“Well, there goes the rest of the damned hockey season!” Sky said.
Carol shook her head. “I’ve got way too much work to do. I don’t have time to go trekking through the Yukon” Carol said. Lori nodded, in agreement with Carol.
“And if you do that work, you will destroy everything you’ve worked for your entire career, either by being too strong, if I don’t remove your beasts, or by being too weak, if I remove them.”
“Who’ll hold down the fort?” Carol said.
“Who’ll maintain Inferno?” Lori said.
“Who’ll teach my students how to tune Transform households?” Sky said.
Anne-Marie turned and looked at Gilgamesh and Gail. Gail shivered.
“No way,” Gail said. “I can’t do any of this. Nuh uh.” Hell, it will be more fun than anything I’ve done so far, Gail thought. “Tonya’s going to eat my lunch. The Commander won’t have anything left to come back to.”
“You’ll make mistakes, and when your Commander returns, there will be numerous problems. She’ll cope. But you, girl, need to exercise your own beast, develop your own edge, if you want to be the player you itch to become. That you need to become. Figure out how to deal with Tonya as a peer. You can do it. Tonya will have her hands full with the Focuses and her new partners in life. But, who will lead the Arms? The C
rows? The Nobles? More importantly, who will coordinate all the Major Transforms? The last, girl, is your job, for now.”
“I can’t do it alone,” Gail said, with a whimper.
“Get help.”
“I don’t want to be the big boss of everything!”
“You won’t be, long term. On the other hand, the plans of your group won’t succeed if you make the Commander your single boss. Your group will need many bosses, working together, as equals. Now, Gail, now is when you get your boss training.”
Anne-Marie turned to Carol, Lori and Sky. “You three? Leave with the Canadians. Get out of here as fast as you can, before your business ensnares you. Tell your underlings it’s their job to clean up the messes you’ve made and just skidoodle! Go!”
A half hour later Carol, Lori and Sky left with the Canadians. The world felt very heavy on her shoulders. Van was still as happy as a kitty in a catnip patch.
Gail still wasn’t sure she believed what just happened. Their three darker friends off to tame the self-stabilizing Chimera bear the Madonna, Sky and Armenigar couldn’t tame? She smelled a logic flaw somewhere in this, as if she had been rolled, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on where. As far as she could tell, the Madonna didn’t have much more charisma in her than Beth. Surely she was mistaken. This would all work out in the end. Wouldn’t it?
In any event, she needed to go talk to Tonya.
To be continued in
Beasts Ascendant
(The First Chronicles of the Cause)
Afterward
The best of the Focuses are only as good as the Transforms and non-Transforms in her household.
“Lives of the Focuses”
(Van Schuber, Pub.1973, St. Martins)
Fiction By This Author
Transforms Universe:
The Commander Series Novels
Once We Were Human
Now We Are Monsters
All Beasts Together
A Method Truly Sublime
No Sorrow Like Separation
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 40