In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (7 page)

Juice jockey?  No contact with other Focuses, just past her transformation, and the one thing she learns is the slang.  “Certainly she will.”  Especially after I tell her to, Tonya thought.  “I know you’ve had your problems, but it’s useful, perhaps essential, to have other Focuses to talk to.  I’ll talk to her and have her give you a call.  I’ll call you, too, from time to time, just to find out how you’re doing.  You can call me any time you want to.  Here, let me give you my number.”

“Thank you,” Gail said.

“Now, I’ve got the time and the money, so don’t be shy.  I’d like to know what’s happened to you, and how you’re coping.”  The way to win the trust of any Focus who had been through hell was to listen, Tonya knew.  From experience.  And being a ‘lone Focus’ was deadly.  That she also knew from experience.  She still didn’t have any feel for Gail and her household.  They could be, well, anything.

“I can do that,” Gail said, voice trembling.  “Like all new Focuses, I suppose, as soon as I used up my initial burst of juice from my transformation, I ended up in peri-withdrawal because the Clinic couldn’t get me Transforms fast enough.” Tonya heard kitchen and dining area household noises along with Gail; the young Focus didn’t have an office, just a typical house telephone, not private at all.  From some faint changes in timbre, Tonya suspected Gail leaned against a wall, perhaps underneath a wall-desk.  She wasn’t as ignorant as Tonya feared – for one thing, Gail knew about peri-withdrawal.  “Because of my low juice problems, well, I didn’t think to try moving juice outside the Clinic, which, as Focus Adkins said, had ‘gone bad’, filled with what the Crow, Watchmaker, termed ‘bad juice’.  So everybody suffered, and my inability to move the juice got me started off on the wrong foot with my Transforms.  Once I got outside of the Clinic and metasensed the bad juice, I figured out how to move juice and fixed up all my Transforms.”

Tonya put down her pencil and took a deep breath, using her charisma for self-control.  Holy Mother of God!  “Focuses can’t normally metasense bad juice,” Tonya said.  Sensing bad juice!  Communicating with a Crow!  Was Gail some sort of Focus-Monster or Sport?  “Do you have any trouble moving juice, now?”

“Well, yes,” Gail said.  Damn.  Tonya began to plan an intervention, to salvage any of the likely near-Monster women Transforms and near-psycho male Transforms.  “No matter what I do, I can’t keep the juice moving speed down; the damned stuff just moves, whoosh!  And it reacts to every little emotional change of mine.  My research team, uh, sorry, man does that sound pretentious…my amateur researcher team, including me, figured out that many if not all of the household’s juice problems come from me yanking around their juice too quickly multiple times a day by accident.”

“Okay,” Tonya said.  She noticed her hands were shaking.  Nope, not a Focus-Monster or Sport.  The speed of Gail’s juice moving told the tale: Gail was a top-end Focus, the first Tonya had found through the mentoring program.  Finding one was both inevitable and stressful, and also inevitable that she would be one of her trouble-Focuses.  Young powerful Focuses always made a hash of things.  Even more important, how Tonya handled Gail would set all sorts of precedents for her tenure.  Tonya remembered what she and Polly had been like five months in (enslaved and terrified of their own capabilities), and what Focus Rizzari had been like (vicious brainy tyrant who didn’t think of herself or her Transforms as human).  Powerful Focuses had far more potential problems than the weaker ones, because of what they were able to do to their households and themselves.  Worse, if handled wrong, young top end Focuses also had a tendency to rebel, as had the megalomaniacal Focus Martine DeYoung.  Tonya needed to win this Focus’s trust, regardless of the time cost and phone bill.  “Sorry for the interruption.”

“No problem, as this leads to, well, my days as a sort-of enslaved Focus,” Gail said.  “There we were, fresh out of the clinic, and…”

---

It was midnight before Tonya hung up the phone.  When she did, she leaned back in her chair and rubbed her temples.  Gail was so deep in the hole she couldn’t even see the surface any more.  She was so ignorant she didn’t even know how deep she was, even with her list of problems.  Nor did she know the worst of her problems.  Pissing off Wini Adkins was her worst problem, and if true, she would need to mortgage her soul to buy herself clear.  A Focus like
that
should never have someone like Wini as a mentor.

“Delia,” she said. “Delia, I need you to send out a letter for me.”

Delia came in from the room across the hall, and Tonya handed Gail Rickenbach’s file to her.

“Copy this, and then send the original to Gail Rickenbach.  Make sure you take out everything but the first page.  It needs to go out in the morning’s mail.”

“Yes, ma’am.  I’ll get it,” Delia said, but she didn’t leave.

“What is it?” Tonya asked.

“Are you done for the night, ma’am?” Delia asked. “You should rest.”

“Maybe in a bit,” Tonya said.  There were still a hundred things to do.

Delia’s eyes were sad and wise. “You’re tired,” she said, “and worn out.  Take a rest.  It can wait ‘til tomorrow.”

Worn out.  That was a euphemism, and Tonya checked the juice counts of the household around her.

“Oh, no.  I’m sorry Delia,” she said as she fixed the juice flow.  The juice wasn’t off by more than a little, but Tonya didn’t like to slip even that minor amount.  Maybe she was more worn than she knew.  “Just give me a few more minutes and I’ll be done.  Go to bed yourself.  I’ve kept you up far too late.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Delia smiled.

Tonya shook her head sadly as Delia left, and thought of the youthfully talented Gail Rickenbach and the other two screwed up Focuses that she had discovered.  She hadn’t expected it to be this bad.  Now she only hoped not to find too many more.

Gilgamesh: August 22, 1968 – August 24, 1968

“What was that?” Carol said, slipping a little Tiamat into her voice as she sat up.  Gilgamesh fully woke after a fitful hour of sleep, tired, worn and sated.  Distant breakfast smells wafted through the air conditioning ducts and the windows of Carol’s oversized bedroom showed the light of the early morning sun.

He hadn’t had to ask, just think the thoughts, to get Carol to slip in a little Tiamat into their lovemaking.  The edge of fear, in bed, turned him on.  The power of an Arm being an Arm was his dirty secret, his fetish, the dangerous edge that had held him to Tiamat in St. Louis, Philadelphia and Chicago long before they had ever even spoken.

The sex was as good as he hoped it would be.  He still tried to think what he could give Carol in return, what would be safe and what might turn out to be a stupid Crow-dross trick to play on a lover.  Crow sex tricks didn’t make it into any of the Crow letters.

“Uh,” Gilgamesh said, excavating himself from the soft blankets.  He thought, trying to get a handle on Carol’s emotions.  Worried, edgy, befuddled, and a bit angry.  She thought he might have tried something.  “I was having one of
those
dreams,” he said.  “Earthquakes, storms, game board pieces, snippets of flower gardens, lab equipment, and snow covered pine trees.  Nothing made sense, but I do suspect someone was trying to tell me something.”  No matter what he tried, in any of his meditation modes or in his preparations for sleep, he couldn’t get the pheromone flow, as many other Crows named it, to be anything other than a chaotic mess.  “Ah,” he said.  “Perhaps the information was in what was lacking.  I’ve never had such a strong dream that didn’t include Beasts.”  What did that mean?

“Dreaming.  Right,” Carol said, flopping back down on the bed in disgust.  “I haven’t had anything this coherent since my incarceration.”  When she had invited the Madonna of Montreal into her dreams, to chase off the Patterson image.  “I really hope this isn’t some lingering effects from what Rogue Focus did to me, because this one was more than a little Freudian.  The parts that made any sense, anyway.”

Gilgamesh grunted and wiggled, trying to twitch away some aching back muscles.  Carol sounded like she was slowly coming out of what Kali called the chaotic dreaming phase.  He couldn’t help but be a little jealous.  “What did you see?”

“Two women.  Monsters?  I’m not sure.  They appeared on my, um, bed and started fighting me and each other.  They wore black feather coats.  Their weapons were bed toys, except the bed toys kept changing shape and becoming children.  Then the Madonna appeared, giant sized, and swung a pillow at the lot of us, sending me and my opponents flying off the bed.”  Carol paused.  “That’s when I woke up.”

“What were you fighting with?”

“I was unarmed.  Whenever I tried to pick up one of my knives, it skittered away from me.”  She grimaced.  “Being unarmed is bad.  The rest doesn’t make any sense at all.”  Another grimace.  “Yet another stupid needless distraction,” she said, her voice low.

“I disagree,” Gilgamesh said.  “Even if we can’t figure out its exact meaning, there is one thing we can say about the meaning of these dreams: we need to look out for trouble.”

“I’m always looking out for trouble.  As are you.”  He didn’t respond.  She sighed.  “Okay.  I’ll look harder.  Be more cautious.  That’s not the only hint I’ve gotten recently that it’s a good time to be cautious.”  She flipped him over on his stomach and started to rub his back, knowing exactly where to rub to work out the aftereffects of the previous night.  He practically purred in response.

Carol wasn’t selfish in bed.  She didn’t need to be, to be dominant.

---

“Gilgamesh,” he said, as the two Crows approached.  One continued forward, but the other held back.  They met at the current common Crow meeting place in Houston, a set of vacant lots near a bayou a half mile south of the South Main Transform Center, just past midnight.  Gray clouds hovered above, threatening rain.

“Talisman,” the closer Crow said.  The other didn’t speak.  That matched Carol’s report.  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

For what? Gilgamesh thought.  “I bid you welcome.  Midgard said you were interested in helping the Rizzari rebellion.  I’m here to help you help us.”

“Thank you for your kind words, sir.  I am but a minor Crow, with no aspirations, just with a desire to help.”  Talisman slowly slunk forward through the overgrown weeds.  He was a short young man, with curly red hair and light freckles.  He spoke with a Midwestern accent.  “Sir, I don’t understand anything about the setup in Houston.  Hephaestus is a Guru, but neither you nor Midgard are his students.  You feel like you belong to this city, the chief local Crow, but you also feel younger than I am.  And, sir, you’re fiercer than Midgard and Midgard is nearly too much for me to handle.  As is the other Crow I haven’t met, the other one who hangs out with the Good Doctor and, at times, the Arm.”

Sinclair, then.

“Midgard left the initiation for me.  This will help you see and understand.  Follow, please,” Gilgamesh said.  Calm and firm, Carol had said.

The advice worked a little.  Talisman didn’t run, and did follow.

They chatted as they walked through the south Houston streets to Tiamat’s graveyard.  Talisman had been a Crow for four years, studied under Merlin, and knew the rudiments of making dross constructs.  He was limited to stationary dross constructs, though, and showed some interest in practical dross construct applications.  He distrusted Focuses, but had heard good things about the rebellion Focuses.  Shadow’s letters had lured him here, the ones giving Gilgamesh credit as the leading Crow supporting the Rizzari rebellion.

“What is this place you’re leading me to?” Talisman said, when it became apparent where they were going.  They had crossed under the Loop and entered a less populous section of Houston, of empty lots, cheap businesses, and occasional run down homes.

“A place of excellent dross,” Gilgamesh said.  He rarely had to take dross from Tiamat’s graveyard.  Access to Tiamat’s place of residence gave him far more than he could use.  “You’ll find it spicy, but quite potent.  It’s the source of the advantage Midgard and I have.”  Hephaestus wouldn’t take any; he was more than happy subsisting off the same Houston Focuses he had subsisted off the entire time he had lived here.  Despite the effort Hephaestus had put into becoming a Guru, the good work he was doing experimenting with Crow development and his teaching specialty of ‘interactions with normals’, Gilgamesh found the older Crow too set in his ways for Gilgamesh’s taste.

They reached the graveyard, an empty lot behind an abandoned discount window distributor.  Gingerly, ever so gingerly, Talisman crouched to the ground and took dross.

“It burns,” Talisman said.  Gilgamesh squatted next to him and smiled slightly; the dross in Tiamat’s graveyard was well aged and to him almost bland.  “It is potent, though.”

Try direct from the Arm, Gilgamesh thought.  Far spicier and far more potent.

If he said his thought aloud, though, Talisman would run.

“This is Arm dross, isn’t it?” Talisman finally asked, a half hour into taking dross.

“Yes.  This is her graveyard.”  He went on to explain how Arms lived, who they fed on, and the troubles their hunting caused.  “Tiamat, or if you’re following Sky’s nomenclature, the Commander, is the Arm who lives in Houston.  She considers Arms and Crows to be natural allies.  The Rizzari Housebound believes all Major Transforms should ally.  Focuses need Crows to keep their Transform households free from bad juice, as do the Nobles, who are a Crow-stabilized allied group of Boston Beast Men.  Her allied Focuses have several openings for willing Crows.  In addition, all of the three Arms regularly visit Boston to protect Focus Rizzari, and while they’re there they dispose of their fallen prey in a shared graveyard.  Over time, by taking some of your dross from the Arms, you’ll find yourself better able to function as a Crow.”  And join in our fierceness.