The Commander put down the two briefcases, the net-sack with the half dozen Monster rifles, and after tossing Betsy the most appalling oversized pistol Gail had ever seen, freed her hands. Betsy smiled and pointed the pistol at a spot about a foot in front of Focus Adkins.
“Commander,” Adkins said, after she recovered her poise. “You do know how to make an entrance.” Adkins studied the tableau in front of her. “I know we haven’t spoken since you came to Detroit, but I did notice your arrival, as well as what you were doing with Gail. I haven’t interfered in the slightest with your project.” Implying Gail owed Adkins for looking the other way. Typical Adkins.
“I noticed.”
“Don’t forget I like fighting Focuses,” Adkins said. This time, her smile was genuine. “However, I’ll let you take the heat this time for leading a helpless Focus astray from her motherly path of protecting the weak and innocent. In fact, I believe this Crow here is the heat.” Adkins paused and cocked her head slightly to the side. “Sort of pathetic, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps.” The Commander’s eyes turned predatory. “Crow, are you the one behind this mess?”
Surfer blinked, but didn’t answer.
“Well, darn, the Guru’s right. I missed one. My mistake,” Adkins said. The cloud of bad juice roiled around the Crow and he screamed, the panic taking him fully as he attempted to flee. His feet scraped the ground but Focus Adkins’ grip didn’t relax. “Try again, Commander.”
“Crow.”
“Yes, yes, ma’am, I ou..ou..outed her people. I was only following orders, Tiamat Crow-friend. Save me, save me! I mean yah..yah..you no harm, truly!”
The Commander shook her head in palpable disbelief. Gilgamesh raised his hand, and the Commander nodded her permission. The curtains waved in a sudden breeze and the bodyguards twitched, scanning the area for invisible intruders. They found nothing in the simple breeze but phantoms caused by nerves.
“Surfer, do you look to Guru Chevalier?” Gilgamesh asked.
Surfer shook his head. “Guru Excelsior.” A Crow Gail had never heard of.
Gilgamesh shrugged; he recognized the name. “How did you end up on this mission?”
“The quest? I, uh, uh…”
“Tell the truth, now,” Gilgamesh said.
“I volunteered.” A whisper from Surfer.
“Why?”
“I’m an artist, and I wanted to earn Guru Chevalier’s support.”
The Commander closed her eyes and shook her head again. No, Surfer wasn’t going to get rescued.
Gilgamesh continued his questioning. “Is Chevalier commanding this personally, or is someone else the field boss of this insanity?”
“Not Guru Chevalier. He hired a Crow to direct this operation.”
“Hired? Who?”
“Crow Echo, sir,” Surfer said. His voice was barely audible.
Gilgamesh shivered and turned away in anger after hearing the name of his long-time Crow enemy. Gail, remembering Crow Newton’s long captivity after he stumbled into Focus Adkins’ defenses, suspected Surfer wouldn’t see the light of day again for years.
“So, no rescue then, Commander?” Adkins said. “I’m fully willing to bargain for his release.”
The Commander waved her hands and eyed the ceiling. “I’m not sure what I would do with him even if you gave him to me. I’m certainly not paying anything substantial to ransom this idiot. Keep him, or if you want, I can give you Guru Shadow’s contact information and you can negotiate with him.”
“Keep him? You misunderstand my goal, Commander,” Focus Adkins said. “In the same way Detroit is your Arm territory, Detroit is my Focus territory. Nobody, especially Chevalier’s Crow minions, messes with my Focuses in my territory.” Without my permission, Gail mentally appended.
“I’m not arguing this at all,” the Commander said. Gail froze, no longer breathing. If Focus Adkins continued with anything stronger, saying Gail was hers, in any way, the Commander, Gilgamesh and Betsy would attempt to kill Adkins right here in her household’s gathering room.
“Then it’s settled.” Focus Adkins grimaced and her tagged household bad juice began to roil again, fouling Gail’s metasense. Surfer screamed piteously for just a moment. For an instant Gail wondered why Surfer stopped screaming, whether Focus Adkins had decided to free him.
Gail almost fainted when she metasensed the truth. Focus Adkins’ juice weapon tore at Surfer, his legs and arms going from healthy Crow tissue to decaying Monster parts in seconds. A gobbet of something semi-solid dribbled out of the Crow’s pants and Gail stared at it for several long moments before she realized it was a decayed chunk of Surfer’s leg, falling off his body. As it oozed down to the floor, a stench arose from it like from a rotted corpse, days dead and foul beyond any reek Gail believed possible. A second gobbet escaped from Surfer’s pants, and his hands fell from holding onto Adkins’ arms. As they dropped, the surface of his forearms wobbled like jello, and a gob separated and dropped to the floor. The gob splashed, and the reek of the closed room got worse.
Sylvie covered her mouth to stifle a muted scream as first one, and then both of Surfer’s legs fell off. The legs failed to escape Surfer’s pants and leaned sideways at an unnatural angle for several moments while more monstrous liquid escaped from the bottom and also soaked the fabric of Surfer’s clothes. As the weight of the detached legs tugged at the pants, the waist sank lower and lower until finally the pants fell, to leave nothing but a detached torso dripping fetid gore.
The legs began inching forward across the floor.
Van sunk to his knees, hand over his mouth to keep from vomiting. All her guard’s eyes turned to her, waiting for any signal. Gail held steady, leaning hard on her charisma to keep herself from reacting in any way.
Beth fainted.
Gilgamesh shrunk back out the door into the foyer and vanished.
Focus Adkins’ actions were insane. The idiot Crow had hurt Gail’s household financially, not physically. In a rational universe, such things would be tried in a courtroom, and recompense made, in big wads of money, or given the general Crow lack of such things, personal service. Surfer certainly deserved to be punished, but his actions didn’t deserve death, and certainly not a grotesque death like this.
Surfer’s now dead Monster arms fell off, and his torso began dropping organs, intestines, then vertebrae and ribs, until all that was left was his neck and head, still in Focus Adkins right hand. The organs oozed together on the floor, tying themselves into a grotesque gelatin of lumps and bits and blood, swallowing bones and skin and ooze. The foul stench, now laden with an immense cloud of half-alive dross, worsened. The remains smelled like a rotting corpse left in a moist closed garage in a heat wave, like vomit aged and ripened, like a backed up sewer after a plague of Montezuma’s revenge. Only worse, far worse. When the stench reached them, two of Gail’s bodyguards vomited. Gail took an instant to turn off her sense of smell with a tiny juice pattern.
As Adkins took him apart Surfer remained alive and conscious, his eyes screaming the horror of his end. When at last his shoulders detached from the last vertebrae of his spine, Adkins cocked her hand forward to show the fading mind of Surfer the ruin of his body.
“This is the fate any Crow who breaks the old agreements will suffer, if they come after my Focuses,” Adkins said. “Tell all with ears to hear. Detroit is mine.”
Neither the Commander or Betsy moved. They, too, focused on Gail and her reactions.
“I understand,” Gail said. Boy did she understand. Years ago, before Gail’s wedding, the Hunter named Enkidu had rampaged through Detroit. Not long after the wedding fight, Focus Adkins had promised she would never again permit such things to happen.
Now Gail understood what allowed Focus Adkins to be so confident.
“Okay,” Adkins said. She dropped Surfer’s now lifeless head in the rest of his slithering remains. “This isn’t a good time for normal Focus courtesies, but, Gail, if you want, I’m giving
you an open invitation to come by and discuss how we can better cooperate against our enemies, support our friends, and how I can help you get your people replacement jobs.” Focus Adkins and her guards turned and left, Adkins stopping at the door with a heartfelt “Goodbye for now, and the best of luck to you all”, gleefully mouthing a subvocalized “I’ve got my own Tonya now to partner with!” at the end of her comment. Thankfully, Adkins’ tagged bad juice left with her. No one in the room moved until Akins and all her people closed the last door to their cars.
“She just said I own all of you now,” Gail whispered, after Adkins’ car drove off and the slithering remains of Surfer ceased their slithering and died for real. “She thinks she now owns us all.” Gail helped Beth to her feet, the piteously weeping and shaking Beth unable to regain even a remnant of her Focus poise.
“Today she does,” the Commander said. She studied the fallen Crow and radiated well-masked anger. “Are you willing to take some advice?”
“Yes, of course.” Gail didn’t understand the Commander’s fury. Certainly she hadn’t been upset by the grotesque cruelty, and Adkins had limited her excess to the Crow. For a bad Adkins encounter, her household had gotten off relatively clean. Gail hadn’t been tortured, blackmailed, beaten up, or forced to mutilate herself. Unlike in previous Adkins encounters.
I underestimated both Focus Adkins and Guru Chevalier. This is my fault, Teacher sent, using Sibrian’s juice singing trick. Gail relaxed a tiny amount. I don’t know how, yet, but I will make this right.
“Don’t take any of the jobs Adkins offers,” Teacher said aloud. She picked up one of the briefcases she had been carrying when she arrived and handed it to Gail. “This will keep your household afloat until we can come up with a better way of dealing with these issues.” The briefcase held money, as did its companion. Lots of money. Teacher had expected Focus Adkins would negotiate in a standard Focus fashion, likely with Guru Shadow, as if Adkins retained some shred of normal humanity and didn’t have bats in her belfry competing with the bees in her bonnet. Teacher had brought the money to pay off any negotiated settlement.
Teacher looked around at the tableau around her, at Gail’s puking normal bodyguards, the glassy-eyed Transforms Gail kept from seeing the foul steaming reeking Crow remains, a shaky and barely controlled Betsy Whetstone who felt one surprise twitch away from a psychotic rampage, the weeping Beth Hargrove, Beth’s passed out or puking guards, and the supposedly hidden Gilgamesh who huddled around the corner of the entry foyer and fought off the panic shakes.
“Grawwah!” Teacher said. She stalked off with an angry wave of her hand, Arm Whetstone leaping after her.
Gilgamesh: September 20, 1972 – September 28, 1972
“Carol,” Gilgamesh said, from the alley behind the Railway Diner, now long closed.
Carol started, turned, and gave Gilgamesh an instant of Arm predator before she recognized him and damped it out.
“With all this shit going on, this isn’t a good time to be sneaking up on an Arm, you know,” Tiamat said. He didn’t respond, unsure how forward to be. “Gilgamesh? Is something wrong?”
Gilgamesh nodded. The almost full moon barely illuminated the shadows of the dark alley. “Carol, whatever you’re doing with Gail, it’s not working.”
The Commander froze, and her false pleasant presence faded. Gilgamesh shivered.
“What do you mean, ‘not working’? Gail’s turning real, as is her household.”
“Gail’s generating so much dross her household is a cesspool, and when you’re training her in person, it’s worse. Newton and I did a full cleanout a week ago, Carol. Her household needs another cleanout already. We can’t ignore this. If something randomly catalyzes the dross, which can happen when it accumulates in these amounts, the dross will go bad in an instant. Think ‘CDC’.
“So clean. It’s just dross, right?”
“Nope,” Gilgamesh said. “When you’re training her, she’s producing slippery dross. When she’s practicing her new juice patterns, she produces something completely new and different, something I’m still researching the proper handling techniques for.”
“Slippery dross? What the fuck’s slippery dross? Belay that. Who produces slippery dross?”
“The hard and talented Focuses. Focus Biggioni. Focus Bentlow. That type.”
“Shit.” From previous discussions, Tiamat knew the problems Crows had with certain hard Focuses. “And you say she’s now producing something worse?”
Gilgamesh nodded.
“Fine. I’ll pay you. Lots.” Tiamat came to within twenty feet of him, and Gilgamesh stepped back uneasily.
“Carol, you’re not hearing me. You’re generating this crap as fast as Newton and I can clean it up. Something’s wrong, and if you push her any harder, or convince her to work harder, the dross buildup’s going to destroy both her and her household.” Beat. “Ma’am.”
“Unacceptable,” the Commander said. From the stubborn set of the Commander’s jaw he knew he wasn’t getting anywhere.
“It won’t do the Cause any good if you get juice from a Focus and use her up in the process,” Gilgamesh said.
“I know that, dammit!” She paced, a shadow in the darkness, restless and predatory. Gilgamesh shifted up the wall and to the side, leaving a fake dross ventriloquism dummy behind him. Dealing with Tiamat in a mood was never fun. “All right, tell me exactly what you know.”
Gilgamesh did, at length. His information didn’t make Tiamat any happier. When he finished, she stood still and thought for several minutes.
“Let me borrow your metasense,” the Commander said. “I need to metasense what’s happening with something better than my own half-assed dross sensing capabilities.”
He wasn’t happy to come so close to an angry predator, but he gritted his teeth, merged with his now superfluous ventriloquism dummy and did so anyway.
The Commander snuggled into his arms. “It’s the stress,” she said in a Crow-like whisper. “This pushing the Cause shit is getting to all of us, and it’s not leaving me enough time to protect the people I need to protect.” She paused for a moment, and let herself relax into Gilgamesh.
Time passed as the Commander studied. Gilgamesh held her in his arms, forcing himself to relax, even taking some time to pick a few bits of stubborn dross off her. As he relaxed she became more calm. Then Tiamat straightened her spine, a decision made.
“How safe are you here?” Tiamat asked Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh blinked at the unrelated question.
“Not at all,” he said. “The only way I’m staying safe is by continuously moving. Chevalier’s going to take Focus Adkins’ Crow-murder as a declaration of war, so we’re living in the bullseye. Worse, her action is going to taint Shadow’s Crows, and if we lose the respect of the neutral Crows, we’re going to end up being fair game for Chevalier’s allies.”
She nodded. “So you need protection?”
Gilgamesh eyed her warily. “A little.” Her tone of voice gave him a bad feeling.
Tiamat smiled. “So, how good a job do you think you could do controlling that dross if you were living in Gail’s household?”
Gilgamesh stared at Tiamat. “Living in her household? I thought you were trying to make me safer, not put me in more danger.”
“What’s your problem with Gail?” Tiamat said, disentangling herself from him. She went back to her pacing, again filled with her restless energy. “You’ve known her for years!”
“She’s not the sweet kind Focus she used to be.”
“Damned straight.”
“Carol, she was the only one besides you who didn’t fall apart in the Adkins encounter.”
“This is not a bad thing.”
“She’s tougher than Arm Whetstone, an Arm graduate of Keaton’s school! She had Arm Whetstone ‘ma’am’ing her! Besides that, how am I going to protect myself from her charisma? Dammit, Carol, she got you yesterday during whatever insane practice session you had going.”
Tiamat
sighed. “She did, but only because she needed a break.” She paused. “I guess I could have objected…” Another pause. “What we’re working on is legitimately dangerous, and I needed a break as well. I’m teaching her to manipulate her juice buffer via force of will, so she can learn how to access it with her juice patterns. One wrong move and…” Tiamat made a throat slitting motion. “Okay. Her charisma is a problem. I understand.”
Gilgamesh shook his head, profoundly unconvinced.
Tiamat put one foot up on a garbage can and leaned forward on her knee. “Gail is mine. She wears my tag, she does what I tell her, and she’s not going to betray you because I won’t let her. I’ll be able to tell if she rolls you – I’m the charisma expert, remember? You’ll be safe, you’ll be under my personal protection, and you’ll be able to clean up the dross. Think of how much this will benefit the Cause! A win all the way around.”
Gilgamesh glowered. Charisma specialist or not, today Tiamat didn’t convince.
“Besides, how are you going to be able to build the Affinity bond you need to build with her and her household unless the two of you live under the same roof?”
He growled to himself, as he had come up with the same argument right after the Adkins fight. “Okay. I’ll move in. Just don’t let her turn me into a house Crow.”
“You’re a Crow Guru. You’ll do fine.”
He remained unconvinced.
---
“…and meditation to help my self-control,” Gail said. They sat in Gail’s office, he in the chair nearest the door, and she in the other guest chair. The room smelled of under-spiced spaghetti from Gail’s dinner earlier in the evening, working at her desk, plus musty stored furniture and clothes, and faintly, the odor of decay from many years wear on a foundation of cheap construction.
He and Gail had been meeting once a day to help him integrate himself into her household. With her training from Carol, her juice pattern practice and her other Focus responsibilities, the meetings were shorter than they needed to be. Gilgamesh still hadn’t been able to convince himself this was now his home; instead, his stay here remained nothing more than a long visit.
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 15