In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (23 page)

She leapt down the wall, to the floor, then rolled, cartwheeled, and leapt over to them.  “So?”

Sky signaled Gilgamesh, and turned on his area metasense shields.  Even to Gilgamesh’s finely tuned metasense, the three of them vanished.

“Yes!” Carol said, punching the air with a short leap off the ground.

Carol’s leap shattered Sky’s shields with a faint metasense flash.

“You immediately see the problem, and why I need to practice covering an Arm doing Arm things, ma’am,” Sky said.

“Well, let’s get on with it.”

---

“There’s one other thing,” Carol said, after she exhausted Sky of his patience and a fair amount of his available dross.  They had made some progress, but Gilgamesh envisioned many more days of practice before Sky mastered his new trick.  These new shields did use up Sky’s dross like nothing Gilgamesh had ever seen before.

“Yes?” Sky said.  He leaned up against the wall, bleary and almost puddle-like.

Carol sat beside Sky and tousled his hair.  “I owe
you
for the event that has Lori pissed off at us.”  She stared Sky in the eyes.  “I think I know how to make it up to you.”

“Ah, that,” Sky said.  “There’s no need…”

Carol menacingly lowered an eyebrow.  “You would find working with me a lot easier if you didn’t hold a certain image in your mind, the one of me as I was.  You know: unwashed, no make-up, dirty thrift shop clothes, no control over my emotions or my facial expressions, brains of a smart monkey, and the attitude of one of the smarter Monsters.  I’d rather you thought of me in a more positive light.”  She looked over to Gilgamesh and winked.  “It shouldn’t take much.”

Sky slowly licked his lips.  “Might you be willing to listen to a few suggestions about deportment?”

Carol laughed.  “You want me to get cleaned up first?  I can do that.  I’ll even make you dinner.”

“Mademoiselle Arm, you have a date,” Sky said.

At this Gilgamesh smiled and exited the room, leaving the two of them to their privacy.  Carol had tipped him off that she might try this, and he hadn’t objected.  The date with Sky was appropriate, certainly far more appropriate than when she chose, ugh, Fred, for the evening.

---

“You want what?” Carol put her fork down on the plate of waffles with a clank.

Sky had held off his idea until morning, until after Gilgamesh had returned.  Sky had mentioned it to Gilgamesh on the way to Houston, and hadn’t listened when Gilgamesh told him this was a bad idea.  Repeatedly.

“I want all of us to go grovel to Lori.” Sky hadn’t touched his own waffles, or vegetable juice, or omelet, or cinnamon toast.  “You especially.  The way to get to her is to throw ourselves at her mercy.  Wait,” he said, as Carol made to interrupt.  “I have a theory.  The trigger for this mess was a Crow letter to Lori, from a Crow I didn’t recognize and who didn’t exist, as far as any of my Crow contacts knows, until April.  From when I was recovering from my exertions and you were recovering from withdrawal.  I think the supposed Crow involved is actually Focus Biggioni, and she set Lori off on purpose.”

“Do you have any proof of this?  Is this wild speculation, here?  Or one of your tall tales?” Tiamat said.  Carol was gone.  Sky faced the real Arm across the kitchen table, and the real Arm was pissed.  Her set-to with Hera wasn’t something you wanted to talk about with Carol.  Not unless you needed a little Tiamat action.

“It’s a gut feel, plus logic,” Sky said.  “I’m rarely wrong about these things, ma’am.”

“It’s true,” Gilgamesh said, reluctantly.  He grabbed a couple of pieces of bacon and a slice of the cinnamon toast, figuring his opportunity for breakfast was fast disappearing.  “According to Shadow, Sky had Rogue Crow pegged for what he is, back when we were in Chicago changing each other’s diapers.”

Tiamat rolled her eyes and snorted.  “This thing between Lori and me would have come up eventually,” Tiamat said.  “It’s her problem, not mine, since she’s the one who’s refusing to talk to me.”  Tiamat growled and glared at Gilgamesh, before turning to glare at Sky.  “Why don’t you two go and convince Lori of this.  I’m willing to let her scream at me for hours on the subject, and after she’s vented herself into exhaustion she might perhaps be willing to listen to my side of things.  But I’m not doing any groveling, thank you very much.  Now…scram!”

Yup, ticked off Arm.  Gilgamesh boogied after Sky, not the least bit interested in dealing with a righteously angry Tiamat right now.

At this rate he was going to wear out his truck going to and from Boston.

And at this rate he would soon be unwelcome in both places.  There had to be a way out of this mess, but so far he hadn’t come up with any possibilities at all.

Viscount Robert Sellers: October 24, 1968

“She’s moving,” Sellers said.  “If we angle to the right a bit, we should be able to metasense her in an hour.”  The sun shone down over the rocks, grass and weeds, but provided little by way of heat.  Winter came early this far north.

“Finally,” the Duke said.  They had searched for over a week before Sellers had managed to pick up any real sense of the Monster with his special Farsight tricks.  Before then, the best they could do was eke out vague hints of a proper search direction with the Duke’s cloud vision.

All three of them were hungry, cold from hunger, and now, because of the amount of time they had spent hunting, low on juice.

“Damn, but this has taken too long,” Count Knox said.  “Each day, the weather gets colder.”

“You worry about the Commoners too much,” Duke Hoskins said.  He stopped and stretched, working out the kinks in his carapace.  Or so it appeared.  Sellers pawed the rocky ground, impatient.  “It hasn’t snowed in days.”  The Duke waved his crab claw hands in the air.  “And all the early snow has melted,
if
you’ve noticed.”

The Count gave his boss a demonic frown and turned away, edgy.  “Garawwwaah!”  His shouted annoyance ended with a leap at the Duke, and there they were again, fighting.

Knox had gone after Sellers three times yesterday, and this was the second time today he had gone after the Duke.  This hunt had strained all their tempers; Sellers himself carried healing scars from his last fight with Hoskins, after Hoskins had intimated he would make a good guard dog for Inferno…and then started describing an imaginary spiked dog collar for him.

Something was wrong, Sellers decided.  Not with the fighting – he and his peers regularly fought, at times over the most minor aggravations, or just sparred because they were bored.  The
why
of their recent fighting bothered him.  He backed away, to avoid getting caught up in the combat, and considered the question.  Was this enemy action?  Not according to his metasense.  If not, they had likely run into another flaw in the household structure.  He would alert Master Occum when they returned; this wasn’t the first time they had uncovered one of these flaws, and it wouldn’t be the last.  Their Noble household constantly struggled with problems of this nature – too much structure sapped people’s initiative, while too little structure gave their beastly instincts too much play.  Perhaps they needed official times for combat, then they…

Sellers caught a faint metasense flash, interrupting his train of thought.  A metasense flash from the
wrong direction
.  He barked warning, enough to attract the Duke’s attention from where he sat on Count Knox’s back, pounding the Count’s face into a large tuft of dead grass.

“She’s hunting
us
, sneaking up from behind and downwind,” Sellers said.

“The Monster?”

Sellers answered with a growl, and pointed his nose in the Monster’s direction.  The Duke got up, grabbed Knox with his larger claw, shook him, and stood him on his now wobbly hooved feet.  “Shit.  I can’t metasense a thing.”

“She’s just under three miles out.”

“We need cover.”  The Duke scanned around, for something, anything, and pointed to a rock knob sticking up perhaps thirty feet above the surrounding terrain.  This was a bad spot for a fight, rocky, relatively flat, with an unnamed lake to their east and no forest anywhere near.  In fact, this area was the first huge open area they had found on their search, a several year old forest fire scar.  They had spent too much time circling and backtracking in this ridiculous terrain that was more like ‘islands in a single lake’ than ‘many lakes’.

Huh.  The Monster’s timing was no coincidence, was it?

“The Monster planned on attacking us here, my Duke,” Sellers said.  “Look at this place.  This is the first large open space we’ve encountered…”

“Why in the hell wouldn’t the Monster want cover, though?”  The Duke paused, and smashed his lesser claw into his larger claw.  “Oh, shit.  It’s because she’s big.”

“What?  Big?” Count Knox asked.  His face remained bloody, but he didn’t stagger as he walked.  With an enemy to fight, Knox’s problems with both of them dissipated into the past.

“You can’t trust the Focus’s Dreaming.  It isn’t accurate,” the Duke said.  “It’s a known problem.  We need to be ready to run.”

He situated them behind the rock knob, plotted out an escape route, and gave them strict orders not to charge the Monster, or speak.

They didn’t wait long.  Sellers spotted the Monster and pointed with his nose, what the Duke had annoyingly called ‘on point’ far too many times.

Daaaamn.  At least he had described the Monster’s approximate shape correctly, Sellers thought.  She was, however, over
thirty
feet from snout to tail, far weightier than he had imagined, and he had missed her chameleon-like ability to blend in to the landscape.  She was a six-legged creature, but he had missed the horns on her head, and the frond-like short tentacle-appendages hanging from her mouth.

She was no lizard.  She was a dragon.

Hoskins shook his crabby carapace, his equivalent of shaking his head.  He gave the signal to run, and run they did, around behind the rocky outcropping and away.

At least the heavy dragon Monster was slow, and couldn’t chase them down.

Three miles away, safely escaped from the exposed plain of the maze of lakes into a sparse forest of stunted pines, they stopped running.  Now that Sellers had seen the Monster, she couldn’t mask her glow enough to keep him from locating her.

“She’s a goddamned dragon, a goddamned
huge
dragon,” Count Knox said.  His demonic head horns steamed in the cool afternoon air.  “There’s no way we can subdue that thing.  And she’s got juice tricks!”

“We don’t have the juice for a fight with a Monster that stout,” the Duke said.  They had never before seen so large a Monster, much less fought one.  “We’ve used it all up in the search.  We’ll have to go back to camp.”

Their camp was over two days away.  Sellers growled in disgust.

“If she found us here, she’ll be able to find our camp,” Count Knox said.  “She might go after them.”

“You doubt our Master’s ability to handle a Monster?”  The Duke clawed at the ground.  Sellers took a moment to raise his right hind leg and pee on a tree, and gave the problem some thought.  What advantages did they have?

They were Major Transforms.

Their Terror calls would be more powerful than any Monster’s fear roars, despite her age and size.

There were three of them, and one of her.

Given the creature’s size, none of their advantages would guarantee a victory…and Sellers couldn’t come up with anything else.

Tonya Biggioni: October 24, 1968

“Ma’am, hello,” Beth said, over the phone.  Tonya leaned back and closed up the manila folder on the yearling Focus Brueggen and her never-ending money problems.  Cocktail party dresses and gold jewelry!  The crazy Focus had blown her household’s savings for their next place to live on dresses and jewelry!

Some Focuses needed a large kick in the head.

Beth, not at all in the same category as Brueggen, sounded overstressed.  From the background noise Tonya knew she wasn’t calling from her home phone.  “I’ve got a problem and I’m in over my head.”

“Talk to me,” Tonya said.  All her spies reported good news: Carol and Lori weren’t speaking, Lori was on the defensive trying to keep her rebellion from fracturing, Keaton absorbed the information Tonya dribbled out to her and was reacting just as Tonya wanted.  With any luck she would finish reeling in Carol within two or three weeks and this distasteful episode would finally be over.

“Ma’am.  Uh, last Monday, the 18
th
, I was officially ordered to visit the house of Focus Adkins.  She told me to cut off contact with Focus Rickenbach until she specifically lifted this restriction.  Even indirect contact.”  Beth sounded ready to scream.

Well, phooey!  The day had been going so well.  “Let me think on this for a moment,” Tonya said, feeling the weight of her work pressing down on her shoulders again.  Wini definitely knew how to hold a grudge, but this was extreme for even her.  “Do you know if it’s just you?”

“No, ma’am.  Uh, I mean, yes, ma’am.  Sorry, ma’am.”  The well-flustered Beth paused to collect herself.  Tonya didn’t bother with any encouragement.  “Focus Adkins told me the local Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Ontario Focuses are similarly restricted.  I was also ordered not to speak of this to anyone, including you.”