In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (11 page)

Kurt shrugged and parked the car next to two others along the wall of the warehouse.

“Hello?” Gail said.

One of the Transform men stopped as he climbed into the truck to pull out more furniture.  “You want something?” he said.  His voice wasn’t particularly unfriendly, but it wasn’t welcoming either.

“I’m – um – Gail Rickenbach,” she said.  She had been about to announce herself as a Focus, but at the last moment, her nerve failed her.  The Focus title seemed so pretentious.  “Beth Hargrove invited me here.”  Her comment came out as more of a question than a statement.

The man’s expression changed immediately, the cold distance gone.  “Oh, Focus Rickenbach.  Beth’s been expecting you.  Come in.  Come in.”  He jumped down from the truck and showed her towards the open door.

Up above, before Gail got to the building, a young woman poked her head out of a second story window.  She was a cute kid, with bright red hair and freckles, and didn’t appear to be older than nineteen.  She looked like something off a Peter Maxx poster or concert handbill, the ones where they did up the women supernatural like, with little shiny stars in their hair.

“Gail,” she said.  “I’m up here.  Come on up.”

Oh.  The cute kid must be Beth Hargrove, and she couldn’t possibly be nineteen.  Gosh.

“I’m coming,” Gail said.  She smiled and waved, but her smile and wave weren’t as warm as she intended, because her stomach chose that moment to do flip-flops from nerves.  Like Focus Adkins, Beth was nearly impossible to metasense unless Gail concentrated.  Then whoosh! there Beth was, glowing like a small sun.

Gail and her crew entered the warehouse, a large open space with a few narrow windows.  Moving boxes and furniture lined the walls.  Whatever organization was going to occur clearly hadn’t started.  Nobody lived here yet.

“Oh, you cut your hair!” Beth said, as she came down the stairs at the other side of the warehouse.  “Good for you.  It took me almost a year to get up the gumption and I looked like an idiot the entire time.  Sorry for the mess,” she said, waving her hands about as if she was about to fly.  “We’re moving in here in two weeks, so this is disaster time, but my old house is pretty clogged up with bad juice and I thought you might like this place better.”

Gail thought about her time in the Detroit Transform Clinic and the misery she suffered there, and nodded.

“This is fine,” she said. “Thanks.”

Beth Hargrove did indeed appear to be a cute nineteen.  She was of medium height, an inch shorter than Gail, with an athletic build, and covered with freckles from head to foot.  She wasn’t at all dressed for today’s early Fall weather, in her tank top and shorts.  One glance at Beth and you thought ‘summer’ and ‘beach’.  Her hair was bright red and wavy, waist length, with twinkles as if it had stars in it.  She had an infectious smile.  Gail relaxed, Beth being nothing like prissy Focus Asshole Adkins or archly proper Focus Big-Boss Biggioni.

“Come on,” Beth said, indicating a stairway. “We can get a little privacy up top.”  She leaned to the side and called out, “Hey, Phil!”

A young man carrying a large box poked his head in the door.  “Yes, ma’am?” he said, cheerfully.

“I think Evie packed some food in the cooler.  Can you bring most of it upstairs for us?”

“Sure.  No problem.  Just let me get rid of this box.”

Beth smiled and led the way upstairs.  Gail followed, with Kurt and Buddy tagging behind.  Following them was the man who greeted them initially.  Beth stopped halfway up the stairs and turned back.

“You two might like to stay down here, and visit,” she said to Kurt and Buddy.  “I’ll bet you haven’t had much chance to talk to people who are members of other households.”

Kurt nodded, but Buddy missed the hint.

“Huh-uh,” he said, and shook his head.  The man following frowned and Gail noticed Phil put his box down and move closer.  “I’m staying…” Buddy said, but Beth cut him off.

“Your Focus and I will be having a private conversation,” Beth said, all the friendly warmth gone out of her voice.  She smiled, but
this
smile was a cold thing and didn’t touch her eyes.  Gail turned red and wished Buddy would, for once, decide not to be a royal pain in the ass.

This time, at least, Buddy seemed to find Beth more than he was ready to tangle with.

“Ah,” he said, backing down.  “I guess I could stay down here.”

“Good, good,” Beth said, the warmth back in her voice.  “Phil, Bob, take care of our friends here.  Make them feel welcome.”

Wow!  What Beth did had to be real Focus charisma.  Gail had never seen Focus charisma at work before, and she practically panted in desire.  Taking the side of her people never entered her mind.

“Sure,” they said.  Buddy and Kurt went back down the stairs as Gail followed Beth up the stairs.

The second floor was much like the first, with more windows and an open ceiling where the rafters showed.  Boxes and clutter spread everywhere, except for the far end, partitioned off by blankets draped over a clothesline.

“I’m sorry about that,” Beth said, when they got to the top. “I shouldn’t have stepped in over your bodyguards, but they didn’t appear to be used to taking orders yet, and I really did want to be able to talk to you…”

Beth hadn’t metasensed a nail sticking up from a two-by-four under a thin layer of spread out newspapers, and stepped toward it.  Gail grabbed Beth and gently yanked her so she wouldn’t get her foot poked.  “Sorry.  You must have missed the nail.”

“Huh?” Beth said, stopping and giving Gail her hard look.  She then turned and kicked the newspaper off the board, revealing the nail.  She stopped, turned to glance at Gail again, slowly, and shook her head.

“Sorry if I startled you,” Gail said.  “Sorry about Buddy, too.  He shouldn’t have behaved like that.”

“If you’d be more comfortable with them up here, just say so,” Beth said, uneasy. “I know it can be a little unnerving to be somewhere strange without your backup.  Should I go ask them to come back?”

Gail most emphatically did
not
feel more comfortable with her bodyguards.  She hated having them lurking over her like jailors.

“No, no problem,” she said.  She took a deep breath and smiled a little bit.  “Thank you, actually.  It’ll be much easier to talk if they’re downstairs.”

Beth nodded. “Yeah, I thought so.”  She led Gail over to the curtained-off section at the far end of the warehouse, back toward the way they had entered the building.  Beth must have been up here when she stuck her head out the window.

“Really,” Beth said, as they wound their way between the boxes and furniture, “you shouldn’t have to worry about your security while you’re here.  Bob is a respectably decent bodyguard and most of the rest of the men here have had at least some training.  We’re pretty well protected.”

Gail remembered the hard stare Bob had given her when they first arrived, and decided she believed Beth.  Bob didn’t look like much got past him.

“Training?”

Beth nodded.  “Yeah.  There’s a lot more to bodyguarding than standing around and looking muscular.  Hey, I apologize for the mess.  We’re not moving for another two weeks, but the old place is so bad I take every chance I can to be over here.  I set up a little area so I can even do some work here, during the day when most of my people are out of the house anyway.”

“No, it’s fine,” Gail said, wishing she wouldn’t apologize so much.  She had the urge to start apologizing for her many apologies.  Nearly as many as Beth’s…

They came to an opening between a couple of sheets and passed through into the enclosed area.  The area was about eight feet deep at the end of the warehouse.  In the small area sat a student desk and a couple of wooden chairs.  Over to the right was a table, and to the left, the usual collection of boxes and furniture.  Beth led them toward the chairs.

“So are you as nervous as I am?” Gail said.  Tact and subtlety had never been her strong suit.

“What?” Beth said, surprised.  After a little thought she smiled with the tiniest hint of a blush, and took a quick glance at the floor between them.  “Well, yeah.”

“Me, too,” Gail said, a real smile coming through.  Unlike Focus Adkins or Focus Biggioni, Beth talked like her, munging her syllables together in the usual fast-talking Michigan fashion.  Welyah.  Meetoo.

Beth laughed, and pushed her sparkly hair back from her eyes.  “Well, I never met you before, you know.  We have only four Focuses here in Detroit, and I’m the youngest.  Out of the blue, Tonya calls me up, Tonya Biggioni yet, good Lord, and wants me to mentor you because Wini Adkins wasn’t doing a good enough job.  Yikes!  That’s the sort of Young Focus League business I’d expect to hear about from Lori or Linda, not from goddamned Tonya freaking Biggioni.  I mean, I’ve only been a Focus for five years!”

Gail laughed too, caught in Beth’s laughter. “Well, I’ve only been a Focus for a little over five months, so you’re well up on me
.
”  Gail wondered who Lori and Linda were, or what the Young Focus League was.

“So what happened between you and Wini?” Beth said.  “Sit down and tell me the story.”

“She said
what
?”

Gail stood and did it proud, with her nose in the air, and with a mincing, superior voice that pronounced every syllable in every word.  “You are a fool, and too young and stupid to be a Focus, young lady.”  She sniffed a little sniff, and her nose went up higher.  “When you’ve screwed yourself up so badly that nobody else can even begin to help, then you’ll come crawling back to me.  If they let you out of your closet.”  Now she added a little hip wiggle and a toss of the head.  “And maybe, just
maybe
, I’ll consent to help you out.”

Beth laughed so hard that Coke came up her nose, and she gasped and coughed and laughed.  “She didn’t really say that.”

“Well, loosely translated,” Gail said, laughing as she sat back down and took another sandwich from the stack.

“Loosely translated!  Listen, I’ve got to tell you about the Christmas party we had last year.  The party was at Wini’s household, and you wouldn’t believe…”

“Oh, no.  Everybody has a miserable time of it at first.  You should have seen the mess I made.  Back when we were at the damned Detroit Clinic, and everyone was so miserable, you remember how that goes?  One of my people, one of the normals, decided I might feel better if I drank myself into a stupor.  I was so miserable I was willing to try anything.  But, get this, he also thought a party would be good for the rest of the Transforms, too, and so here everyone is, and alcohol isn’t allowed in the Clinic, so they’re smuggling in this huge supply of vodka, God knows why vodka, but they brought in must have been twenty of these huge bottles of vodka, and he figures they need something to mix it with, so they’re bringing in Coke, and fruit, and God knows what all else, but I swear they brought in some of everything anyone’s ever mixed with vodka in the entire history of mankind.

“So they’re smuggling all this in up through the window to the second floor, and they’ve got this little rope pulley they’ve set up, and they’ve got look-outs posted for the nurse, and I swear any time you thought they’d finally brought everything up, there’d be some other guy at the bottom with another load.

“So everyone starts drinking, even the normals because they didn’t want to be left out, except for the Everetts, who are wonderful, but I swear they’re older than God and they were standing in the hall going ‘
you youngsters
’ and wagging their fingers at us.  Both of them.  They looked like some kind of puppets with the string cut, you know, bobbing up and down, up and down.  Have you ever seen somebody actually wag their finger?  Nobody does that. But there they were, up and down, up and down.

“So then…”

“So she says ‘
Well, I’m not bad looking, you know
.’ Here we have this guy who’s run off with our entire bank account, and she thinks he likes her because she’s ‘not bad looking’.  What do you say?  Stop being an utter dumbass?  Make use of the brains God gave a gingersnap?  She thought he was in love with her!”

“Hell, I don’t know what to do.  They’ve been married for twenty years, and now the marriage is falling apart, because she’s a Transform and he can’t cope.  Their kids are all upset because they hate this whole Transform thing, and they hate where we’re stuck living, and now their parents are fighting.  Hell of a thing for all of them, and I can’t think of a damned thing to do.”

“Yeah, I remember my first real trouble with one of my people.  I didn’t have anybody try and steal anything, but I did have this one guy that was pissed, just pissed, about what I did with his juice supply.  He thought I was controlling his mind.  Every time I yanked around his juice supply, he thought I was picking on him on purpose, like this was all some huge plot on my part to screw with his head.  And of course I was brand new and had no control over the juice, so every time somebody blinked near me I’d start sucking away his juice supply, and being young and new I’d never notice until it was too late.”

“So what happened?” Gail said.

“Well, things kept getting worse and worse.  One day, I saw him coming, and I was tired already, and he’d been ranting at me for weeks, and I couldn’t stand it anymore.  So when he came toward me, he was real mad looking, so I thought he was going to scream at me again, and I took his juice down.  Not on purpose or anything.  I was just upset with him, and so his juice came down, without me even thinking.  You know how that goes.”