In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (2 page)

They all looked up at me when I came in and I sighed.  “Your lab equipment came in?” I said to Hank.  I really needed to be off with the Crows, but that would have to wait, along with all the other critically important things I really needed to be doing immediately.  There just wasn’t enough time in the day.

He nodded happily, and so we left Ying and Greg and went to his moldy second floor office, where he and Jeannie ran me through the most amazing and complete examination I had ever gone through as an Arm.  When I was done, he sat on his little rolling doctor’s chair and looked at me with evaluating eyes as I dressed.

“Okay, cough up.  You’ve been sitting on something since the Rogue Focus fight,” I said as I decided to skip binding down my miniscule boobs.  If someone managed to correctly decipher my gender through the male suit, more power to them.  Maybe they would be a good candidate for recruitment.

Hank pointed to the chart in his lap, but I watched his eyes, not his papers.  “You still have a point of extra Fundamental juice inside you, actual sludge dross, worse than the gristle dross you’ve already had removed.  I suspect this sludge dross is behind your difficulties with composition.”  My composition skills resembled that of a sloppy fifth grader, one of the few still lingering effects of my trip into withdrawal.  “Based on my extensive albeit chaotic conversations with the Crows, this is a problem that’s out of their league,” Hank said.  “You know about our only other option.”

I grimaced.  Running myself down to near withdrawal and burning off the extra Fundamental juice just wasn’t high on my list of things to do.  I weighed options and risks.  “It’s on the list,” I told him.  “It’s not at the top.”

Hank looked unhappy, but he nodded.

I left him to his worries and his new aide and headed off to my real top priority.  The Crows.

Gilgamesh, alas, was already off on his next bit of Crow business.  I understood his thinking – he was as serious and as professional about the Cause and his Crow career as I was about being an Arm, and he could no more afford to hide under my shadow than I could afford to hide under Lori or Keaton’s shadow.  That left me with Midgard, a Crow too skittish to meet me, save in the presence of other serious Crows.  He was my guard, at least as the Crows defined such things.  From my perspective, he functioned as an excellent extra set of eyes and another Major Transform with whom to talk.

So: the phone.  I sat on my new couch in my new house and picked up my new phone.  White.  With push-buttons instead of a dial.  I felt very cutting edge.

“Hey, ma’am, what’s up?” Midgard said, answering his phone.

I looked through the message log.  “I see there’s a new Crow in town.”

“Uh huh,” Midgard said.  “Two, actually.  The older Crow’s name is Talisman, a magician follower of Merlin.  He’s got four years of experience.  He’s here with his lover, another Crow named Mercado.”

According to Sky, about a quarter of all Crows were homosexuals.  Zielinski had a similar prediction about Arms.  Me?  I wasn’t so picky that I restricted myself to one sex.  Keaton was equally undiscriminating.  “Any hope I could get to talk to either of them?”

“Talisman looks bribable,” Midgard said.  I repressed a sigh.  My preferred term was ‘donations to Crow well-being’.  Midgard was nowhere near as politic as me.  “He’s a bit of a show off, but he’s under orders not to get seduced into your personal service.”

Everyone I worked with was under orders.  Again, I could sympathize.  There were times when I thought the only reason I was near the top of the Arm heap was the fact that there were only three of us, and the third was a student.  “I can live with that.”

“Unfortunately, ma’am, Mercado is a shadow Crow.  The only human he’s willing to deal with is Talisman.”

I had heard of shadow Crows from Gilgamesh.  He believed we needed some psychotherapist Focuses on our payroll to deal with these dysfunctional Crows.  Right now, we had nothing.  “In that case, I’ll make sure that Talisman gets an extra-large donation.”

Midgard grunted.  He was unhappy with my largess, only mollified by the fact that I kept the scale small.

“I’ve got an idea I want to pass by a Crow to see if it sounds tacky,” I said, leaning forward and sifting through papers on the coffee table.  The Houston Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.  Also Guns & Ammo, Soldier of Fortune, Newsweek and the Economist, plus three medical tracts Hank wanted me to read, two papers on eastern bloc brainwashing techniques I had gotten from the Network, and a first draft of Gilgamesh’s new book I was supposed to be reviewing.  Of the set, the only ones I wasn’t behind on were the brainwashing papers and Gilgamesh’s book.  I found the legal paperwork under a New England Journal of Medicine article on cortisol rates in Focuses.  “I’ve just put together a lease on my nascent research facility,” a nearly abandoned tiny office building, “and I was thinking that I might put a petty cash bin there for any and all Crows to use.  Is this too crazy an idea?”

“Hmm.  That sounds like a very good idea, but it’ll need protections.  I’ll bet I can arm-twist Hephaestus into providing them, though,” Midgard said.  Hephaestus was the local top Crow, an actual Crow Guru.  We had a good, but distant, working relationship.  “If I can arrange the protections, you won’t need to worry about misuse.  If anything, you’ll have the opposite problem.”

I wasn’t willing to even ask.  I had a theory that among the Major Transforms, Crows’ thought processes were the least like normal humans.

“That would work,” I said.  “So, any feedback from Hephaestus’s students?”  Before I found and recruited Jeannie, I had a talk in Memorial Park with Hephaestus about our proposed Crow-Arm art gallery.  His students were scheduled to get close enough to talk, if they wanted, but I hadn’t heard a thing.

Midgard sighed.  “Pork Belly, the youngest, panicked himself crazy, and the other young Crows caught it.  Sorry.”

“I understand.  With experience they’ll get better.”  I hoped.  I didn’t understand Crows well enough to have a good feel for them at all.  I was starting to put some credence into Sky’s wild theory that there were over a dozen Crow varieties, each as different from each other as Arms were from Focuses.

Next on my list was some more thug recruiting.  I took a deep breath and plowed on.

Enkidu: August 3, 1968 – August 4, 1968

“This job is punishment, Cleo,” Enkidu said, sitting on the edge of the mold-blackened tub as he watched Cleo dress.

“Punishment?”  Cleo glanced at her pancake makeup face in the cracked bathroom mirror.  “Dressing me up as a Focus is hard work and pretty disgusting, but how could this be considered punishment?  We’re going after our enemies, dammit.”  With care she attached a set of eyelashes to her left eyelid.  Her real form, part Monster, didn’t have eyelashes.

“Our Master is of the opinion I somehow tipped off Focus Casso, allowing her to flee before we attacked.”  She had been his promised Focus, dammit, and his Focus hadn’t been home when he showed up.  Nor any of her people.  They had vanished in the night, hours before Enkidu arrived.  “Which is patently impossible, as we were still here when she left.”  Here being his pack’s ramshackle farm and stockade, on the Fox River just west of Oswego, close enough to Chicago to do his Master’s bidding and hunt for potential pack Transforms.  He paused to let the bad taste out of his mouth.  “The real problem is this Focus we’re going to collect is going to Odin.”

“Okay, now I believe it’s punishment,” Cleo said.  She stuck the fancy wig on her head, somewhat cockeyed.  “Tell me what you think, hun.  Do I look like a Focus now?”

“I think we’d better cut the lights to the place
first
,” Enkidu said.

Cleo hissed and cuffed him, hard, before going back to her makeup job.

“They’re the Master’s orders,” Enkidu said.  “We cut off the lights, go inside, get all haughty and push people around, distribute the evidence he’s dreamt up, snag the Focus and her household, and leave.  They’re going to be light-staffed today.  Something Wandering Shade’s arranged.”

They had Gwen doing the driving today.  Gwen didn’t like doing so, but she could pass as a man if she dressed for the part.  No Focus would have just one male bodyguard, and although Enkidu did fit the part (male, clean-shaven, huge), none of the pack Boys did.  They were too hasty with outsiders and left far too distinctive a trail of destruction when they passed by.  Hoffman, his student, still hadn’t mastered his man form, so he, the Boys and the more Monster-like Gals had been left behind.

“So, if this Focus isn’t for you, when do you get one?” Cleo said.  “Are you getting anything out of this?”

“I’m getting a surprise, according to Wandering Shade,” Enkidu said.  He leaned forward and peered over Gwen’s shoulder.  “Stay on Ogden until we get to Western, then turn left.”

“Gotcha, boss,” Gwen said, her voice a gargle of barely audible clicks.  By necessity she would be portraying the strong silent bodyguard when they got to the Clinic.

Enkidu leaned back on the tour bus seat behind Gwen.  He worried about the tour bus.  It smelled like ass, the engine ran on for minutes after they turned off the ignition, and it rattled worse than any vehicle Enkidu had ever known.  They should have stolen a better bus.

“The Master should have allowed us to rush in and take Casso’s place without all the preparatory pussyfooting around he wanted,” Enkidu said.  “The time we spent scouting out the area around her house, watching her guards for patterns, figuring out when her household Transforms came and went, all that stuff?  Worthless.  We should have just hit the place at dawn, taken down her guards in one big rush, and counted on speed and surprise.  Smart tactics my aching mange!”  His mind felt like mush; his Master had revised the Law again and although it left him stupider than the last version, he did feel more aggressive.  ‘Too much debate, not enough action’ his Master had said, explaining the necessity of the change.  The memory of the change in the Law was fading away; Enkidu suspected he would forget about the change completely within a month.

“It’s his day job,” Cleo said.  “All the time Wandering Shade spends as a police officer has infected his mind with the weaknesses of the normals.  Still, without his job we wouldn’t have access to the fancy weapons and the weapons training.”

There was that.  Enkidu couldn’t help but growl at the Master’s overelaborate over-cautious plans.  “We’re Hunters.  We’re supposed to be fast and terrifying.  Consider what we’re doing today – another plan that’s not going to leave a trail of destruction.  It’s like he doesn’t want the world to know we’re here and what we can do.”

Which led Enkidu into his worst nightmare – he feared the Hunters would eventually become the Hunter Police Force instead of the Hunter Empire.

“Focus Casso?” the Clinic guard said.  “Ma’am!  We’re having a situation…”

“I don’t care about any situations,” Cleo said, haughty.  It was Enkidu’s idea to disguise Cleo as the Focus he had lost.  When the guard didn’t immediately move, Enkidu backed up Cleo with a muted terror growl.  “I want Focus Frasier now.  We’re moving her to a more secure facility.”

“Ma’am, but…”

Enkidu growled again.  The guard backed off several paces, allowing Enkidu and the five other pack Gals masquerading as bodyguards through the entrance.

The Clinic stank of humanity, a foul reek urging him to lash out and gut someone, anyone.  Three guards lined up to stop them, but with a Focus leading the way they kept their weapons holstered.  Focuses were precious, or so they thought.  Precious princess bitches one must obey.

One more growl and they too gave way.  Deena and Mary herded them to the far side of the common room, where they couldn’t cause problems.  Enkidu, Gwen and Cleo badgered the head guard until he led them, terrified, to where Focus Frasier and her tiny household were staying.

“Focus Frasier?  I’m Focus Casso, acting on Focus Council orders.  We’re here to escort you to a more secure facility,” Cleo said, after she knocked on the door to the Focus’s tiny Clinic room.  The Focus opened the door, bleary and scared.  Dim battery-powered emergency lights lit the hallway.  Several of the Focus’s people opened their doors and peeked out into the hallway as well.

“Monsters!”  The more-intelligent-than-Enkidu-expected Focus screamed out her warning before Enkidu could put a meaty hand over her mouth.  As his Master said, Frasier was a new Focus without any of the standard Focus tricks.  She was normal-ugly, disease-smelly and had no Major Transform charismatic presence at all.  He bent down to her ear.

“You will cooperate, or you will die,” Enkidu said, a forceful growl.  With
his
charisma.  “You will not talk.  If you speak even one word, you will die and your people will die.  Nod if you understand.”

Frasier struggled for a moment, and then got a good look at Enkidu’s wolf eyes.  She shook and collapsed.  Enkidu took her now limp form as a ‘nod’.  “Very good.”

“Follow your Focus,” Cleo said, dropping notes, letters, and other paperwork in Frasier’s room and in the hallway.  False evidence.  Wandering Shade had given them false evidence to distribute, to, in his words, ‘to plant the seeds of distrust and paranoia in the bitches’ minds.  He hadn’t appreciated Enkidu’s counterproposal, to rape the Focus live on national television.