A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (46 page)

“Because of our weakness, the Crows or the Focuses could organize against us and destroy us. 
We cannot permit them to do so.  To become what we should be, the bosses of all Transforms, we must strike at them first.  To do that, we need numbers.  This plan shall provide us the numbers we need.”

The Wandering Shade jumped to the ground, plucked a rolled up map out of the invisibility he carried with him, and rolled it out on the picnic table he had been standing on.  A map of Chicago, with hunting territories marked on it.  Enkidu got the part of Chicago he
requested, the central third, from the loop to the west.  All three Hunters acknowledged their Master’s choice.

“Master,” Joshua said.  “Where is my pri
ze?”

The nerve!  Odin and Enkidu both growled as they faced the Hunter Joshua.  Wandering Shade didn’t seem upset.  Instead, he clapped his hands.

Five lesser Hunters, masked from Enkidu’s metasense, stepped forward through the trees, a naked woman in chains dragged between them.  The prize they held between them chilled Enkidu’s heart.  What had his Master wrought?  What horror was this, to feed Joshua’s lusts?

“Joshua, I present you the former Focus Abernathy, Focus number thirty in the United States. 
I and my other charges rescued her from the awfulness of first Focus Schrum’s torture and punishment pit, deep in withdrawal, her mind broken into the perfect silence we all know so well, where all things are possible.”

The Wandering Shade continued.  “
We left the corpse of a woman Transform, already gnawed upon by wild dogs, to confuse the Focuses and cover our tracks.  I personally remolded Focus Abernathy and brought her within the Law.  She is now our first Pack Mistress and is now yours, Joshua.  Use her as she was meant to be used, my Hunter.  Do not give in to your abhorrence and treat her as an élan source.”

Enkidu had talked to the Wandering Shade about what they would do with Focuses when they got them.  He
never imagined he would see a Pack Mistress so soon.  How did the Wandering Shade arrange this?  The deviousness of the Wandering Shade never ceased to amaze Enkidu.  He couldn’t imagine what he would do without his Master.

“Shall I name her, then, Master?”  The love of Joshua toward the Wandering Shade was apparent to all of them.  With this gift, the Wandering Shade bought not only Joshua’s life and love, but
also his soul.

“Yes,” the Wandering Shade said.

Joshua strode forward, and grabbed the wild-eyed yet strikingly beautiful Focus by her hair.  He roiled her internal juice.  “I name you Delilah, and claim you as my Pack Mistress.”  The juice moved, an immense amount of juice, and Joshua’s élan as well, binding the new Pack Mistress to Joshua and his pack as severely and permanently as any of the Pack were bound to any of them.

Delilah’s eyes cleared.  “Master?”

“I am Joshua,” he said.

“I will serve and protect you, Hunter Joshua,” Delilah said.  “I am yours.”

Enkidu smiled.  Oh, this was fine, to see a Focus Bitch brought so low.  With her, they would be able to keep male Transforms alive.  Eventually, Pack Mistresses would enable Enkidu’s dream of juice and élan enslaved normals in number to serve as cannon fodder in his army.  Then the world would shudder as it felt his righteous wrath.

Enkidu’s smile became a
hungry
smile.

Enkidu knew exactly what payment
he wanted from the Wandering Shade next.  Oh yes.  He looked at Joshua’s Pack Mistress with lustful admiration.  Oh yes.

Tonya Biggioni: March 30, 1968

Tonya invited Polly Keistermann down from Long Island immediately after getting back to Philadelphia.  Tonya held herself away from her household, and her bodyguards, and the household leaders.  They deserved
the story, but not yet.  The invitation to Polly was for a full spread, for Polly and her entourage, full honors for the Council President.  Rhonda, her new house financial officer, almost died on the spot when Tonya told her the cost.  Tonya covered the spread out of the last of her personal money.  After this, she was bankrupt.

Financially and morally both.

Not to her surprise, her phone stayed silent.

She and Polly did pleasantries and entertainment, and finally a meeting in a basement corner where Tonya made sure were no wiretaps, bugs or eavesdroppers.

“Here,” Tonya said.  She dropped a box of paperwork down beside Polly.  “I’m resigning.  It’s high time I become one of those useless Focuses like Allison Spivey and Gwen Crushank.  I can read the handwriting on the wall and I have no desire to fight
my fate.”

Polly stood
, God looking down on Moses.  “Like hell you will.”

“Polly?” Tonya said.  Polly rarely went after Tonya with her charisma.

“You’re not allowed to quit just because you ran into a few minor difficulties.  You think you’re the only one with problems like this?”

The world swam in Tonya’s vision.  Around her, she
metasensed agitation in her household.  Tonya consciously fixed up the juice flow.  Stressed, she instinctively started pulling juice from them like a yearling Focus with no self-control.  “Minor difficulties?  Wini set me up to fail, Polly.  She wants me out of my Council seat.  Without her support, I’m nothing.”

Polly laughed.  Tonya felt about two inches high.  “
Lest you forget, Wini doesn’t control your Council seat, Suzie Schrum does.  Suzie thinks you did a fantastic job.”

“Which part?  Telling the idiots at the CDC how to break Hancock?  Or helping Keaton fix Hancock afterwards?  I’ve betrayed everyone I could possibly betray, Polly.  Even you.”

“You lived, Tonya.”  Polly sat back down, grabbed Tonya’s hands, but didn’t let up on her charisma one bit.  “Normally, you’re good enough not to get caught up in messes like this, but messes happen.  I’ve been put through the ringer several times myself and I haven’t quit yet.  Tonya, we need you.  Nobody can handle the sheer range of problems you can.”

“I failed.”

“You found out Hancock wasn’t the one killing household Transforms.  Once you proved her innocence, it didn’t matter what you did with her.  Yes, I would have liked you to have gotten her physically under our control, but if she isn’t the one grabbing the Transforms, it means Rizzari was right and Hancock is part of us already.”

“She won’t be.  Not after this.”  Tonya paused.  Polly’s eyes were like augers, digging deep into Tonya’s soul.  “She didn’t recover consciousness, Polly.  When she does eventually recover, I’m dead, if I can be found.  She’ll take me and my household, and
I can’t do a damn thing to stop her.  That’s the way Arms think.”

“You’ll find a way, Tonya,” Polly said.  “You always do.  And you’ll
‘find a way’ from a Council seat.”  Polly let go her charisma, and sat back, a smile on her face.  “Do you think they always agree on everything?” ‘They’ being the first Focuses.

Tonya shook her head. 
The first Focuses often disagreed.  Their boss, everyone’s boss, Shirley Patterson, didn’t always reign in her peers.  Her mind often worked in a different level of reality than the other Focuses, and her spiritual and religious interests often trumped whatever political causes she still pushed.

“Her nibs didn’t have a strong opinion on the subject at hand. 
Nobody nabs Transforms from
her
household!  When Shirley doesn’t care, the other strong ones start playing.  This time, Adkins and Fingleman wanted Hancock dead, while Claunch and Teas wanted Hancock alive.  Schrum wanted you to remind the world that Focuses are strong and terrifying.”  Well, okay.  Perhaps she had succeeded at Suzie’s mission.  “They all wanted to stab each other in the back.”  And her.  “No one else gave a hoot.”

Tonya stared at the wall of the basement room.  Rank after rank of National Geographic magazines
filled rickety wooden shelves. “This fiasco wasn’t an accident.  Shirley had to have given Wini the go-ahead for the Transform snatch, perhaps for the whole thing.  Five years I’ve been dancing to their tune.  Someone had a grudge and all of a sudden they don’t care how loyal I’ve been or how well I’ve served.”

“Tonya,” Polly said firmly, “these things happen.”

“No,” Tonya said. “They don’t just happen.  The first Focuses don’t like their underlings to become strong.  This is why you do the ditz routine in public.  Then I didn’t stop the exposé of Marcia Abernathy’s Mutie Mill.  They thought I should have buried the whole business once things became clear the first Focuses backed her.  I’d become too strong and independent.  I even started to worry about minor details like right and wrong.  Of course they had to yank my leash.”  Suzie Schrum in particular.  Suzie was behind the Mutie Mill.  Tonya suspected that once she reminded everyone about how terrifying a Focus could be, Suzie made sure Tonya wouldn’t be receiving any rewards for her efforts.

‘A weak little housewife, too used to doing what she was told.’  She
had told her tale to Deborah, but her situation hadn’t changed.  The only changes were a succession of masters.  Her husband, once.  The doctors.  Her household.  Now the first Focuses.  Had she ever
not
been someone’s pet dog?

Polly looked at Tonya for a long time while Tonya bored holes in the National Geographics with her gaze.  “I’m going to do you a favor,” Polly said eventually.
“I’m going to forget you ever said this. You know better than to express thoughts of this nature, even to me.  Especially to me.  Now let me try this again.
These things happen
.”

It was long moments before Tonya let her gaze fall.  “These things happen,” she
said with a sigh.

“Good.  You got chewed up?  Get over it.  Pick up the pieces and go on.”

Polly wouldn’t let her quit.  Suzie Schrum, her boss, so handy with the leash, didn’t want her recently humbled and well leashed subsidiary Focus to quit, either.  Tonya resigned herself to her fate: more time on the Council.  Fighting the first Focuses was a losing cause.  “It would be nice to have the support of Claunch and Teas for once.”  Both of the two had undermined Tonya for years.  They thought of her as an impediment in their attempts to deal with Arms – which meant ‘deal with Keaton’.

“I didn’t say that.  Claunch’s pissed off
because you told the CDC how to break Hancock, and Teas…  You know Teas.  Anything connected to Suzie Schrum must be evil and twisted, and she includes you in that cadre.  Both of them understand Hancock’s withdrawal wasn’t your fault and would have happened even if she hadn’t broken.”  Polly took a long look at Tonya.  “So, what did Keaton do to you, anyway?  You look half broken, yourself.”

“You don’t want to know,” Tonya said.  “I’ll tell you if you want, but you’ve never wanted the details of my dealings with
the Arms before.  The details aren’t pretty.”

Polly went flat faced, emotions totally masked.  Arms were uncivilized and did uncivilized things.  Polly didn’t like ‘uncivilized’.  “I think I need
to, this time.  At least the basics.”

Tonya sipped tea as she took firm control of her emotions.  “After the rescue, after Keaton dislocated my hip for backtalking about how she
trained Hancock, Keaton decided the only way to save Hancock was to feed her clinic Transforms.  Hancock sucked them down as fast as we could provide them for her, stuck in the Arm version of the Focus healing trance.  I provided the Transforms, making damned sure I took only the riff-raff and those without hope.  Keaton made me tag them – real household tags, dammit – before Hancock juice sucked them.  Hancock took them while tagged so I could feed her juice out of my household juice buffer.  My juice buffer is so low now I need to keep my entire household barely above periwithdrawal just to keep them alive.”

Polly’s face went white.  “How many?”  Polly
had lost two of her household Transforms once, when the trailing car in her entourage had slid off a road in a snowstorm.  Polly had been incommunicado for weeks, afterwards.

“Seven, before Keaton let me go.  In two days.”

“Oh, Tonya, that’s so horrid!” Polly stood and gave Tonya a rather dry and limp hug.  “You’re a treasure.  I don’t think there’s a Focus on the planet who could have stood up to this sort of treatment without going insane.”

At least
Polly mixed in a little empathy with her icy backhanded compliment.

“Tonya, there’s one other thing I need to talk to you about.”
Polly still hugged Tonya, and whispered in her ear. “About the daughter of yours you’re visiting in Queens.”

“
How do you know about her?
” Tonya pulled back from Polly, her face pale.

“I dream, sometimes,” Polly said, voice soft.

“Damn,” Tonya said.  Polly’s dreaming capabilities were legendary, but Tonya never imagined anyone would be able to pick up such detail in the Dreaming.  “Who else knows?”

Polly shrugged.
“I haven’t told anyone.  But I’m not the only Focus who dreams.”

“Does Suzie?”
Tonya thought of Deborah and her unborn baby as pawns in Suzie’s games, and her stomach twisted.  Suzie would latch on to them the minute she found out.  They were so close to her.  They would be a leash better than any other.  Threaten them and Tonya would jump.  Hurt them to punish Tonya, whenever she wanted to.  Suzie liked punishment.