No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (6 page)

“Remember Zielinski’s story about the Crow who attacked the people in the hospital in Atlanta with bad juice?  While the Feds held you, the Washington Post dug up some old records of three other similar incidents.  They also dug up the fact that in India the Crows are a part of the Transform community. They’re secretive and called ‘Creatures of the Night’, but they’re out there.  I’m guessing the Crows themselves leaked much of this to the media.  Certainly they leaked the Crow name to the media.”

“No Crow I know would do such a thing, but I don’t know many Crows,” Gilgamesh said.  “It does sound like more crazy senior Crow politics in action.”

This was more information than I was ready to absorb.  I didn’t remember.  Instead, I thought.  Keaton turned off the television, went and got a snack, then sat down beside me on the floor.  “I won’t bite.  You’re on to something.  Tell me.”  Keaton did seem to value my opinions.  I wasn’t sure why.  Perhaps some things I had said as a reluctant student had proven out.  The word ‘groundbreaking’ came to my mind, but I didn’t understand my magical insight.

“The Arm tag idea.  If you’d tagged me immediately you would have been able to teach me faster.  Perhaps we might be able to get more Arms.”

Keaton gobbled cheesecake.  “Continue,” she mumbled with a mouth full of food.

“You could teach them.”

Keaton frowned.  “You’re volunteering
me
?”

“I apologize ma’am.  I didn’t say that right.”

“I’ll say you didn’t say that right.  What the fuck do you mean?”  Okay, I had successfully gotten on her nerves.  Was this a good thing or a bad thing?

“If and when I recover I would teach Arms too.”

“Like hell you will,” Keaton said.  “Baby Arms are
mine
.”

I let my entire self be confused.

Gilgamesh edged away, and then vanished.  Behind the corner to the kitchen, I think.  Smart man.

“Ma’am.  How can I help?”

Keaton paused.  I sensed her go through what she had said and figure out what was correct and wrong with her statements.  “If this works out you’re going to be the one providing me the baby Arm,” Keaton said.  She stuffed some almond torte in her mouth.  “You’re going to need to be back up to your full capabilities for the extractions, and you’ll only do them when the risk is manageable.  The Feds will be running traps on baby Arms.”

I nodded.  I thought she had decided to teach the baby Arms.  That pleased me.  I remembered the baby Arm Mary Fouke, and how much I had wanted to beat her.  It would have taken work for me to get over that response.

Keaton smacked her lips.  “You’ll also provide me enough kills to tide me over until the baby Arm can start learning to hunt.  Which won’t be as hard as it sounds; something bad is happening with the Focuses and they’re not keeping up with the supply.”

I nodded.  “I’d noticed that in my time in Chicago hunting just kept getting easier and easier.”  I tried to put ‘figure out why Focuses are fucking up’ in my memories, but I wasn’t sure it took.

“You’re also going to need to supply me with data.  Getting the appropriate handle on a young Arm requires good background information, so I can understand her.  The difference between you and Mary was information – I had background information on you, and nothing on Mary.  I refuse to go through that sort of disaster again.”

Reasonable.  Information was good.  Information helped the magic work.

“Ma’am, I’ll need to practice that ahead of time.  Espionage hasn’t been my specialty.  If you have any pointers you’d be willing to share, I’d be most anxious to listen.”

Keaton chuckled.  “Old Carol couldn’t do espionage because she was built for punching Beasts to death with her bare knuckles.  New Carol should be able to train herself to walk by normals in the daylight without them noticing.  The goddamn Japanese Ninja claim to be able to do things like that and they’re normals.  I’ve seen you do stealthy and quiet already.  Pay attention to Gilgamesh.  Learn.  You’ll figure out how.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  She was right.  I needed to stop thinking of myself as the ham-fisted knife-thrusting gonzo I used to be.  I possessed new strengths now.  I could, I had learned, stealth along with Gilgamesh just fine.

Oh.  Another new strength seemed to be an ability to talk my boss, Keaton, into immense long-term projects.  Such a skill might prove useful as well.

Later, Keaton did take me out to work on my tagged Transform issues.  Gilgamesh suggested one of the locals, Focus Gladchuck, as the target.  She had humiliated him recently, I remembered from his stories.  He too knew how to carry a grudge, which brought a big smile to my face.  For his suggestion he got to go with us, Keaton using the situation to give him some real-world practice using his panic to improve the aiming of his sick-ups and rotten egg tricks.  I, of course, got to play target.

I didn’t learn to keep control over myself while in range of a tagged Transform until just after sunrise.  By then I had made enough mistakes and Keaton or Gilgamesh had stopped enough of my berserk charges on Gladchuck’s household that the place was a twitchy armed camp.

When we finished Keaton dumped a couple thousand in twenties into a satchel, wrote a note and tossed the whole mess inside Gladchuck’s perimeter.  “Ma’am, may I ask why?” I said.

“Saves me the bother of writing yet another formal apology letter,” Keaton said.

I didn’t pretend to understand.

---

The next night we hunted, ‘we’ being all three of us.  I expected some panic out of Gilgamesh, but he seemed fine with this.  It took me nearly an hour to figure out Keaton had been using him to track down untagged Transforms during my recovery.  Cheater!  Cheater!  After I figured out Keaton’s game I suffered through a long case of the giggles, which neither Gilgamesh nor Keaton appreciated.

“Turn left at the next light,” Gilgamesh said, hidden in the back seat.  He was getting better at his hiding in plain sight trick.  This wasn’t the same trick Officer Canon had used in our confrontation or that Rumor used when he hid from me in plain sight.  This was more like Rumor’s normal state.  Gilgamesh was growing up fast around us Arms.

“Your target’s in the third small house down at the end of the next left.”

I tagged myself for self-control, figuring I would need it.  Keaton parked her car when Gilgamesh said we were just over a quarter mile away from the target.  “Let’s go,” she said.  To my shock, the kill appeared in my metasense after just a few steps.  Magic.

Magic filled my life.  Oh, and dogs running away.  Ocean smells, too.

Gilgamesh stayed behind.  “He’ll join us in a bit,” Keaton said.

My instincts told me this was about to be a disaster.  Wasn’t there some kind of problem when Keaton came with me on my hunt?  Or had she fixed that?  She seemed confident enough and so I shrugged and let my worries go.

I led Keaton into the back yard of a suburban ranch house, sneaking along as best as possible.  I wished Keaton would be quieter, though, a bad omen.  When we got to the back door, I tapped on the handle and deadbolt with my fingernails.  Locked, I heard.  Keaton had supplied me with lock picks and I opened the locks without a problem.  The prey sat alone in the living room, after a sleepless night.  I smelled a woman and one child, but they weren’t home now.  He wore shorts, slippers, and handgun.  Normally, handguns weren’t a standard male fashion accessory, at least as far as I remembered.  He studied the gun intently when I entered, perhaps wondering what might have been wrong with it.  I could have told him his weapon was in perfect working order and recommended a holster, a more common male fashion accessory.  Poor guy, so close to withdrawal.  He had to be in pain.  Keaton cleared her throat behind me, probably wondering what I was doing.  The man raised his gun and fired at me, but I saw when he tightened his finger on the trigger and I made myself be somewhere else when the bullet went by.  I took the gun from his hand.  Weapons fire was a bad omen, my instincts said.

“I think you need to die, sir.  Before withdrawal.”

He nodded, and then anger filled his eyes.  He didn’t want to accept my judgment and wanted to fight.  Not allowed!  I gave him a hug and drew his juice.

Yum.

When I recovered, many minutes later, I stood and looked at Keaton.  “How’d I do, ma’am?”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Thank you, ma’am, for hunting with me.  Shall we go back to your place, ma’am?”  My body wanted what my body always wanted after a kill, and she was so nicely available.  I gave her a lusty grin.

Keaton rolled her eyes.  “The body, Hancock, the body.”

I looked down.  The body.  Yes, a body.  “Are we supposed to do something with the body, ma’am?”

Keaton patiently explained to me about body disposal, cops, and similar unfortunate problems.  “I apologize, ma’am.  The connection between killing and body disposal seems utterly arbitrary and magical.”

“Yes, I realize that.  Other than that bit of telling information, when hunting you are utterly quiet, you hide extremely well, and your senses are better than they used to be.  You did tap on the lock to tell whether it was locked, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”  I didn’t remember bodies being so heavy, before.  It took work to put the man into the body bag.

“You could have gotten to him before he discharged his weapon.  Why didn’t you?”

“Doing so didn’t seem necessary.”

“You do realize that the neighbors might find a gun discharge in their neighborhood disturbing and call the police?”

“Now that you mention it, ma’am, you are correct.” I stopped.  There did seem to be a problem with that, but the logic escaped me.  Obviously, I needed to heed bad omens when I hunted.  “I’ll avoid that problem next time.”

“Good.  You’re also fast.  I’d swear you actually dodged the bullet.”

“I saw his finger about to move.”

“Ooookaaaay.”

I struggled to lift the corpse in the body bag.  “Let me,” Keaton said.  She did it one handed.  As soon as we had the body in the bag, Gilgamesh appeared.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said, a ritualistic whisper.

Keaton nodded and we left the man’s house.  Gilgamesh stayed behind.  Strange.

“Ma’am.”  Something had been bothering me.  “Once, you couldn’t hunt with me.”

“Yes,” Keaton said.  “The inability to give up a prey Transform is a weakness.  I decided to correct that problem.”  Keaton didn’t like weakness, in herself or anyone else.  I understood.

After we returned to the car, Keaton tossed the corpse in the trunk.  When we got back to her place, I rubbed up against Keaton and suggested we use the bedroom.  I remembered that once I hadn’t considered this behavior to be appropriate.  I thought there must have been something wrong with me.

This time, Keaton smiled.

Many hours later, she gently twirled her fingers in my hair, making little loops and curls of the wispy strands. This was Stacy, the tender lover, the caring protector.  I snuggled close, safe in her embrace.  Stacy was much better than my lord and master, who gave me orders, or the demon, who thankfully confined herself to appearing in the outbuilding with the men ready to be tortured.

She watched me with a languid smile.  Then the smile faded to a look of sorrow.  Regret?  She leaned over and kissed me carefully on the forehead, and then on each eyelid.  So delicate.

“This is so stupid,” she said, her voice so low I barely heard her.

I didn’t say anything.  I just waited, open to anything she wished to tell me.

She shook her head and then rolled on her back to stare at the ceiling, hands behind her head.

“I shouldn’t have ever let myself care for you, you know.  The damned training.  Nine fucking months with you under my power.  How the hell was I supposed to know what that would do to my head?”

She didn’t say anything more.

“Ma’am?” I said, hesitant.

She shook her head again and rolled back to me. “Don’t you worry.  This is my problem.  I’ll take care of you, get you put back together, tag you like you want and send you off.  You’ll be fine.  Just don’t get yourself fucked up like this again, okay?”

She was going to tag me!  Her words felt so good.  I wiggled in pleasure.  “Ma’am.”

I almost understood.  She felt for me.  Much of it came from the twisted logic personal to her alone.  I had been the victim of her tortures and she loved me for my pain.  I was weak now and in her power, and she loved me for my weakness.  Some of her affection came from the more normal psychology of an Arm.  I was her possession and she loved me for being a possession, too.

The logic was too complex for me, but I did understand the emotions.  This was Stacy, my lover, the aspect of her I loved most, and she did love me back.  I snuggled against her, warm in the knowledge she cared for me.

A little while passed before we started talking again. “You’re shedding,” Keaton said.

“Ma’am?”

“Your fur is falling off.”

She was correct.  I picked at my fur, and, indeed my fur was falling off.  “So this wasn’t a permanent change?”