In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (10 page)

“Coriolis, here,” the other Crow said.  He hung back, hiding behind Sellers.  “I’m awestruck to have the chance to make the acquaintance of you two legends.  Guru Shadow has said so much about you.”

Gilgamesh nodded, embarrassed.  Shadow was recruiting again; Coriolis wasn’t even a part of Gilgamesh’s extended letter circle.  He made up for that omission by exchanging addresses with the youngish Crow.  Coriolis had light brown skin, black hair, small jug-handle ears, and a quick smile.  Gilgamesh took a liking to him immediately.

“We’re all worried about that team,” Nameless said.  “One of them, the leader, carries a tiny bit of dross on him, enough to illuminate the directed withdrawal scarring in his mind.”

Interesting.  Gilgamesh studied the normal in question, a mile away, and after far too much study finally verified Nameless’s observation.  “That’s one of Scar’s people, then,” Gilgamesh said.

“Scar?  Wicked Focus Schrum, you mean?” Viscount Sellers said.

“Yes.”

The Viscount growled, enough to raise hackles on Gilgamesh’s arms.  “She’s been sending teams out, her own and those of another local Focus she has well under her thumb, to lean on our Queen’s own Focuses to defect.  This would be the fifth we’ve seen, but the first not to have any Transforms involved.”

“That isn’t what’s going on,” Sky said.  “They’re too well armed for a simple parley.”  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a Crow or Noble who could verify that bit of Sky-ish metasensing, which did give all of them pause.  Gilgamesh didn’t think Sky was pulling their legs.  Would he, about something this serious?

Gilgamesh couldn’t answer ‘no’, unfortunately.

The Viscount turned to Gilgamesh.  “Should we intervene?”

Right.  Shadow’s work had left Gilgamesh as the coordinator of this mess.  If he was here.  And he didn’t give orders, just suggestions.  And stay unfailingly polite to all the élan hungry Beasts.  “Intervene in what?”  Be polite!  “Sir.”

“Whatever they’re going to do,” Sellers said.  “If we take them out before they cause any harm, then this will save us all a lot of trouble.”

The Viscount’s comment elicited a short chorus of panicked ‘we?’s from Nameless and Coriolis.  Predictable.  At least they hadn’t run.  Yet.  Sky called this panic reduction the ‘Noble Effect’ in his letters.  This was the first time Gilgamesh had seen the ‘Noble Effect’ in person.  He studied Nameless and Coriolis’s emotions closely, liking what he saw.

“Let’s get closer,” Gilgamesh said.

A quarter mile closer, in a cozy neighborhood of small row houses, he turned to Sky, who had been lost in thought, not paying attention to the situation.  “Sky?  Is it my imagination, or is there something bad going on inside Focus Ackerman’s household?”

Sky stopped, put his fingers to his forehead, and made a show out of a simple metasense scan.  “Marde!” he said, a moment later.  “I’d say we’re needed.  The inside negotiating team’s grabbed a ten year old kid.”

The enemy action made the decision easy.  “No killing.  Just disable,” Gilgamesh said, signaling for them to run forward.  The Viscount stayed with them, actually steadying Nameless and Coriolis and helping them keep up.

As they ran, two members of the enemy watcher team ran forward to the Ackerman household, took the hostage from the inside team, and retreated.  The inside people stayed inside, presumably to continue their heavy-handed negotiations.  Gilgamesh followed as best he could with his metasense, relying on Sky’s commentary for real understanding.

The Scar Focus had to know she was up against Crows, sending a team of normals to kidnap a normal as part of their negotiating strategy.  Only Sky could have picked this out, and from what Sky had said, he was rarely out on any standard patrols, save for the ones around Inferno.

“Friend Noble, may I ask if Focus Ackerman has ever heard your Terror roar?” Gilgamesh said, as they drew within sight of the cluster of rowhouses that constituted Focus Ackermann’s household.

“You talk funny, but the answer is ‘yes’,” Viscount Sellers said.  He blinked, and then smiled.  “Oh?  May I?”

“Charge and scatter?  Yes.  That would be wonderful,” Gilgamesh said.  Just don’t scatter any of them this way.

The Viscount took off at a sprint, followed by a wildly bounding Sky.  Gilgamesh slowed to a walk and turned to Coriolis and Nameless, who now looked properly spooked and panicky.  And exhausted.  “There’s good cover over here,” he said, pointing back toward the main street, to a back alley to the side of the Jeremiah and Villone sporting goods store.  Coriolis and Nameless managed to summon sufficient energy for another jog, motivated by the lure of a hiding place, and the three of them waited behind the dumpster, metasensing the fight.  The fight didn’t turn out to be much of an actual fight, as Seller’s Terror barks and Sky’s dross constructs scattered the enemy with ease.  Sky swooped down to ground level, corralled a very short person (likely the kidnap victim), asked the Viscount to do something (picking up the enemy team’s fallen weapons, likely fallen because of Sky’s dross constructs), then approached Focus Ackerman’s place.

Sky returned a half hour later, accompanied by the Viscount.  The Viscount carried a heavy bag filled with weapons and ammunition.  He dumped it on the ground in the alley, where it thudded heavily.  The three Crows crept out from behind the dumpster to stare at the impressive collection of armaments.

“Well.  I think I talked Flo out of bolting the rebellion, but I’m not sure,” Sky said.  “Of all things, to get Scar’s minions out of Flo’s household in a peaceful manner, I had to agree not to tell any Focuses or household Transforms about this little deal gone bad.  Or they’ll take it personal-like, moving on from kidnapping to violence.”

“They forgot to forbid you to write about it in your letters, didn’t they?” Gilgamesh said.

Sky nodded, giving Gilgamesh a cat-eating-the-canary grin.  He turned to Nameless, whose black skin made him almost invisible in the darkness, even to a Crow’s eyes.  “You saw this coming, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Nameless said.  “I’m not one to be able to solve problems the way you adventurers do, or keep them from occurring, but I have found that if I attract the right companions, good things often happen.”

“Uh huh,” Viscount Sellers said.  “I guess this strange talk you Crows do is what you mean when you say you’re mystical.”  A term often applied to Nameless.  “Are you a mystical Crow too then, Gilgamesh?”

That accusation panicked Gilgamesh enough to back off a step.  “No sir, not me, not mystical at all.  I’m an engineer.”

Nevertheless, if he wasn’t mystical, then why did he have a bad feeling the Rizzari rebellion was in bad shape?  Kali’s training, then.  The question on his always-paranoid mind was: how many of these normal-led negotiation teams had already gotten to the rebel Focuses?

Gail Rickenbach:  September 4, 1968

Gail had been daydreaming over the last few days about what it would be like to have another Focus as a friend.  Someone who understood all of her problems.  The loneliness never hurt like this before, until she knew she might not be alone.  If Beth Hargrove disapproved of her too, she didn’t know how she would cope.  She wished her live-in boyfriend Van Schuber was here for support, but he was off butting heads with his fussy PhD dissertation advisor and probably needed as much support as she did.

Maturity and responsibility, she mused, wasn’t half as wonderful as she once had anticipated.

She had already showered and dressed in one of Vera Bracken’s better suits, two whole hours before the meeting.  Gail stared at her reflection in the mirror and tugged futilely at the jacket.  The jacket didn’t fit her and made her look awkward.  Her body shape had changed since her transformation, with more bust, more ass and embarrassingly less belly.  None of her own good clothes fit her any better than this and none of them hung as well as Vera’s Executive Secretary suit, anyway.

She checked her face in the mirror, but her face still glowed.  No zits, no blemishes.  She hadn’t tried to put on make-up.  She wasn’t any good at make-up, and besides, her face didn’t look too bad on its own.  Not anymore.

Something was definitely wrong with her hair, though.

“Gail?” Trisha said, tentatively, from the door.  The tentative voice was normal for Trisha these days.  She had been a lot more subdued since her damned boyfriend had run off with the household’s money.

Gail approved of the change.

“There’s something wrong with my hair,” Gail said, tugging at a lock in frustration.

Trisha came into the room, looking still rumpled and sleep-fogged, followed by Betha Ebener trailing after.  Betha, an older Transform, and her husband owned the small farm where Gail’s household lived.

“Can I?” Trisha said, wary of Gail.

“Yes, please.  Tell me what’s wrong,” Gail said, as she checked Trisha’s juice count and fixed it.  She automatically checked these days, because she was still mad at Trisha over her thief boyfriend.  She constantly fought the urge to stick Tricia into peri-withdrawal until she begged for mercy.

“Your hair looks fine to me,” Betha said.

Trisha came close and held Gail’s hair up, while Betha puttered around beside her.

“Your hair changes,” Trisha said. “Right out to about six inches from your head, it’s gorgeous, rich and full, with little bits of red and gold highlighting the brown.  Sort of exotic.  After six inches, it’s normal hair again.  Limp, dull brown, ordinary hair.  Put your hands in your hair.  You can feel the difference.”  Trisha lost her tentativeness completely when she started working with Gail’s hair.

Gail put her hand to her head and ran her fingers through her hair.  The new hair was softer and thicker.  Probably another crazy change caused by her being a Focus.  She had an entire page of her research group’s scribble board covered with such changes.

“Can you do something about it?”

Trisha positioned Gail back in front of the mirror again and started arranging her hair.  She took a section of hair from the top of Gail’s head and laid it along the back.

“The old hair ruins the effect of the new hair.”  Trisha paused and Gail metasensed her worry.  “I’m sorry.”

There was an obvious solution to
that
.  “Cut it off,” Gail said.

“Are you sure?” Betha said, panicky and horrified.  Trisha echoed her, but without the panic and horror.

“Yes.  Cut it off.  Get rid of the old hair,” Gail said.  Whatever anyone else might think, she was a Focus.  The least she could do was get rid of her damned old normal hair.

Gail’s head felt light every time she moved.  It was odd to be without the extra weight of all her hair.  She had worn her hair long since she was a child.

It was as some writer said, about waiting for a hanging clarifying thought.  For once, her mind was clear, alive, and taut.  Trisha wasn’t doing so well.  Not a new story in her household, which had an epidemic of ‘not doing well’.  Trisha still had a job, one of the few, but the other hairdressers at her shop knew she was a Transform.  The management didn’t fire her, because Trisha had a loyal clientele.  No one told the customers, but they could still make life miserable for her.

Gail studied Kurt’s brown head as he drove, and remembered how she hadn’t been entirely honest with Focus Biggioni.  She had a little secret, a secret likely to make the Focuses reject her yet again, if they ever found out.  Before her confrontation with Bart, her house president, she had found out Kurt was dealing drugs.  Taking the profits and donating them to the house.  His actions made Gail want to cry because of the risks he took as a normal for the wellbeing of a Transform household.  Gail had approved his actions.  She suspected she had lost Kurt’s friendship forever, but, in the process, the household had gained a selfless friend.

Secrets, though.  Those weighed mightily.

“Gail?” Kurt said, from the front, where he was driving. “According to the address, the place should be nearby, but I can’t find anything that looks like a Focus Household.”

Gail read the paper Kurt handed back, and Buddy Attendale craned to look over her shoulder.  Gail got a nose full of unwashed male body and winced.  Buddy worked afternoons and evenings down at the Red Wrench Auto Parts store, so he was almost always the one tapped for morning bodyguard duty.  Gail was getting tired of him and his smell.  He showered before he went to work, but not earlier, and the odor could get real ripe.  How he stayed a married man was beyond her.

Gail reached her arm over the seat and pointed. “What about that little driveway? I think I spotted something back there.”

“It’s just a driveway going back to the loading docks,” Kurt said. But he ignored his own protest, put the car into gear again and followed the driveway anyway.

“This is the place!” Gail said, before they had gone more than twenty feet.  She metasensed the presence of Transforms ahead of them.

‘The place’ was another warehouse, just like the others, except set farther back from the road and accessible only by the narrow pothole filled driveway.  The place was run down and depressing, surrounded by pavement, with no plants in sight save for a few weeds poking up through the parking lot.  Except for several men unloading furniture from a U-Haul truck, Gail picked up few signs of any other people.