In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (38 page)

Gail turned red as she metasensed the Grimms at play.  Gail certainly knew about sex, and she knew intellectually and by far too much observation since her transformation that even older people did it. However, she thought they could be at least a little bit restrained. That after thirty the sex ought to fade off or something.

Nobody seemed to have explained that to Helen Grimm, because she and her husband got down and dirty every chance they got. Any time of day, any time they could get some privacy. And the things they did! Gail considered herself moderately knowledgeable about sex, but she had learned things from watching Helen Grimm that she would have never even imagined.  Following Tonya’s suggestions about helping her people’s marriages, Gail ignored her embarrassment and pumped Grimm’s juice, taking her juice high enough to turn her on even more. She did this now with all her people when she metasensed them getting amorous, embarrassing the crap out of her every time. However, there was a heck of a lot more loving going on in her house than before. Her help hadn’t been enough to save the Carlow marriage, but she hoped her little extras would help some of the others.

Vic got out and opened the door for her.  Gail and Van got out of the car and made their way into the church through the beautiful falling snow. The new snow covered the gritty blackened remnants of the older snow, and made the trees glitter and covered the church in peace. The snow crunched under their footsteps and under the wheels of the car as Gordon drove off to park it. Gail gave Van another kiss, while snowflakes drifted into their hair.

They headed up to the parlor then, while Gail wondered why everyone gathered there. The parlor was usually a busy place in the evening, but not as busy as this. She hoped there wasn’t something wrong, and suppressed the concern. She refused to ruin her happy glow with worry.

They made it up to the parlor and Gail stopped in the doorway in shock.

“Surprise!” her people shouted, grinning around a cake on a table in the center of the room. A giant sheet cake, with
Congratulations Dr. Schuber
written on it in blue frosting. The kitchen crew had outdone themselves, the cake fantastically decorated in frosting flowers, and someone had managed little frosting graduate caps and little frosting diplomas.

Gail turned to Van and grinned to see the pole-axed look in his eyes. She felt the delight at the surprise rising in her and ignored the little voice telling her they only did this for the juice. She firmly took the generous act at face value and shared her delight with everyone in the household.

People came crowding close, grinning from ear to ear and congratulating Van. They pulled him into the room and fed him cake, all while he looked around with the most amazing expression of astonishment.

The gathering turned into a real party then, as everyone ate and laughed, with the women Transforms she had talked to earlier rubbing up against her – with their clothes on, at least.  Beth assured her the trick worked better with more skin contact, but Gail wasn’t quite up for that.  At least in public. Gail mingled and smiled, while people found excuses to come by and offer her more cake and more punch. Or find out if she needed anything. After a while the Narbanors came in and joined the party, with the rest of the household that had been at the service.  The Grimms showed up a few minutes later. Even the normals caught the mood, and the room became a riot of happy adults and raucous playing children.

Gail looked around at the crowd in the parlor, and admitted that she found them a lot more loveable now than before. She couldn’t say that she loved them, but she didn’t hate them any more either, and if they hated her, they kept their hatred well buried.  Her new attitude about juice moving had changed things for the better.

Her eye fell on Elaine’s baby and she smiled. Little Abe had just turned one and wasn’t really a baby any more. He toddled over to the table with the cake on unsteady legs.  He stuck out a pudgy hand into the side of the cake, to take a fist full of frosting. Elaine and Vic hadn’t noticed, but Ruth Narbanor did, with her experienced mother’s eye, and she intercepted the little reaching hand before he got more than a few fingers’ full. The boy hollered, but Ruth found him a small piece of cake for his own, and he sat happily on the floor, under the table.

Ruth was just starting to show and hadn’t yet broken out the maternity clothes. Gail shook her head in amazement. She had assumed their five kids would be enough. It showed what making assumptions did for her.

Elaine didn’t show at all, and as far as Gail knew, she wasn’t pregnant, but Gail didn’t expect this to last. She strongly suspected that they were already trying.

She spotted Sylvie, as she crawled under the table to visit with Abe, and felt a pang of sorrow. Sylvie, unlike the normal women in Gail’s household, was infertile, made so by her transformation.  Children attracted her like a moth to flame, and her infertility still pained her. Kurt and Sylvie had looked into adoption, but Transform Sickness made them unsuitable parents in the eyes of the adoption agencies.  The whole damned world was unfair, and annoyance at the unfairness built up inside of Gail.

Once she mastered this Focus thing, she would do something about the unfairness.

Over in the far corner, the older kids were talking. Gail noticed a particularly admiring look in the eyes of Narbanor’s eldest as she eyed the second oldest of the Carlow boys, and made a mental note to keep an eye on that. At least make sure the girl knew the basics of birth control. Gail liked to think fourteen was too young, but she also knew enough not to count on being right.

Trisha Bluen had changed her hair again.  Her short magenta hair hurt the eyes to look at, but she looked happier than she used to. The household had mostly forgiven her for her thief boyfriend, and she worked in her own shop now. The hairdressers at her old shop had tried to bad-mouth her to her clients, but Detroit wasn’t some small rural town where everyone knew everything about everyone else. Many of her clients never got the word that she was a Transform, and they stayed with her through the change. Now, Trisha cut hair, Melanie helped her and tried to learn the skills, and the household contributed people to make the business succeed. They added little personal touches, to make the clients feel cared for, and little decorating touches to make the shop seem welcoming. The business was going upscale and Trisha’s client list was growing. Soon, Trisha would be able to raise her prices.  Gail missed her old job at the Olde Oak Barrel, the one she gave up when they moved here.  She also missed the good old research days.  These days she spent her time strategizing finances and scouting around nearby areas for housing opportunities and business opportunities, as well as visiting with the other local Focuses.  She still had a lot to learn, but she had learned a lot in the past few months.

Gail settled into her chair, watched her people and smiled. John Guynes’ oldest daughter, all of four years old, came to bring her another piece of cake, and so Gail smiled at her and thanked her politely, while over by the table, Ann Guynes watched her daughter with approval. Normals doing things for her always surprised her. The Transforms she understood, but the normals got nothing. Yet, many of them treated her with the same deference that the Transforms did. Now Ann was teaching her daughter to do so as well.

This was far from the only surprise. Melanie’s new boyfriend was another. He was a normal, but his mother was a Transform in Katie Anderson’s household down in Cincinnati.  He had done most of his growing up in a Focus household. He paid for college with scholarship money and a wing and a prayer, and he had a terrible time with dorm living after the closeness of a Focus household. Gail suspected he visited not because of his fondness for the emotionally shuttered Melanie, but because he wanted to feel part of a household again.

Gail liked him. He was a sweet kid and unbelievably polite.

“Sylvie?” Gail said.  Sylvie finished with tending Abe and came over, wary.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to talk to you for a moment, in private.”  With the party rolling on its own, nobody would miss them.  Across the room, Kurt and Vic had corralled Van, ragging on him hard about his new PhD status.

“Sure.”

Gail led Sylvie to a quiet nook barely within range of her bodyguards, and sat on the floor.  Sylvie joined her.

“Do we have a problem?”

Gail smiled.  “I have some disquieting news, and a proposal.  Given how this crazy Transform stuff works, you might take the proposal as an order, but if you’re not comfortable with what I’m proposing, I’m ordering you to refuse it.”  That bit of crack-logic was something Van had come up with to cope with situations like this.  Wonderful man.

Sylvie shook her head and muttered something about wringing Van’s neck, knowing who came up with the mind-bending ideas in their household.  “Hit me.”

“Yesterday, I learned from Beth about a pregnant Focus who’s about to have her baby,” Gail said.  She went on to tell Sylvie about Focus Rizzari, Crow Sky and their household, Inferno.  “You probably know why I’m telling you this.”

“Uh huh,” Sylvie said, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes.  Gail took Sylvie’s hands in hers, carefully monitoring her household.  She kept Sylvie at her juice optimum while she kept the partiers pumped and her bodyguards lower than optimum to enhance their wariness, one of the tricks she had mastered in the last month.

“You’re not a Focus, and we don’t have any Crows in our household, and I don’t know of any way to turn Kurt into a Crow, so this isn’t a solution now,” Gail said.  “However, I don’t want you to give up.  We’re finding out more about Transforms every day.  Someday…”

“Someday,” Sylvie said.  She wiped her eyes.  “Thanks, Gail.”  She gave Gail a hug that shivered Gail’s juice, and for a moment the juice whooshed around randomly, upsetting the nearby Transforms, but Gail got it back under control in a moment.

“The proposal is a bit dicey,” Gail said, after Sylvie untangled herself.  “I’ve been talking to quite a few other Focuses recently and found out that there’s a common household position we don’t have.  I want you for it.”

“What sort of position?”

“There’s a lot of names for it: Focus’s aide, Number Two, Focus’s secretary, the Lieutenant, just to name a few.  You can likely match the name to the household model from our old scribble board page on household models.  This is the person who speaks for the Focus when the Focus isn’t available, and the Focus’s right hand gal when the Focus is available.  The position’s most commonly held by one of the Focus attendants.  It’s going to be…”

“Yes!”

Gail cleared her throat.  “This will be a lot of work.”

“Yes with cherries on top!”  Sylvie gave Gail a true Sylvie 500 watt smile.  “It’s time one of
us
got a say in what’s going on in our household.  You know I’m going to be ragging on Bart, though, if you give me this.”

“Rag away.  That’s what the position is for.”  Gail leaned forward.  “You’ll speak with my voice, and have far more responsibility than any of the other Transforms.”

That comment got a lick lip of worry.  “What about Kurt?”  She didn’t want to leave her young husband behind.

“Soon, but not yet,” Gail said.  She had been thinking about this for two days.  “Head of security.  As soon as our bodyguards finish Bob Hilton’s three month course and I find a way to spring it on the old farts.”  Gail’s bodyguards took their job seriously and they expected her to take their job seriously as well.  After last week’s Monster rampage through Detroit that made the newspapers and national television news, her household muttered about adding more bodyguards to her detail.

“So tell me these secrets!”

“The big one is that I’m not an average Focus,” Gail said, whispering.  She went on to detail what she had learned from Beth and Tonya.  “This is why I demanded the Clinics send me another triad.  I think I can take at least one more, but I’m worried that making us a ten triad household will make us more of a target.”

“Gail,” Sylvie said.  The idea that Gail was an exceptional Focus had shaken Sylvie, and she was only partly mollified by Gail’s insistence that all young powerful Focuses resembled bulls in china shops.  “You’re talking about lives.  Do it.”  Sylvie paused.  “But only after we get Kurt in.  We wouldn’t want to upset the old farts too much too soon.”

Gail chuckled at Sylvie’s ‘we’.  Viva la revolución!

“Another thing you get to keep quiet about is my libido problem,” Gail said.  She explained the frigid Focus issues.  “Van’s love is important to me, and I’m willing…”

“Brain, you mean?”

Sylvie’s comment earned her a mock glower.  “Both.  I thought having an extra triad would be a huge libido improvement, but I barely noticed any changes.”

“It helped your mood,” Sylvie said.  “That I noticed.”

Gail nodded.

“So how are you holding up.  You, personally,” Sylvie said.  “I know it’s been hard.”

Gail had to turn away from Sylvie’s vast understatement.  “Yah.”

“Gail…”

She sighed.  “There are times when I think I’m turning into the household drug pusher.  I’ve found I like keeping people happy and I try not to get too annoyed when people do me favors just so I’ll pump their juice.  But I pump them more when they volunteer to do things for the household.  Do hard work.  Cooperate, not fight.”  Sylvie nodded.  “Things are much better than when I started.”  Gail still saw people’s fear of the bad times, often when she inevitably lost control of the juice when her emotions ran hot.  She feared this would always be the case.  “I like what Matt’s doing these days, the full immersion baptisms, his willingness to hear confessions, tolerate people putting statues of saints around the sanctuary and add Baptist spirituals to the hymns.”