All Beasts Together (The Commander) (32 page)

That made the panic worse, because he remembered the sick
-up’s effect on the Skinner.  If he incapacitated Tiamat the same way, they would both die.  However, he couldn’t stop it in a situation this stressful.  The minute she came close enough he would lose control and sick-up all over her.

She stopped.  Just out of range, thank heavens.  Gilgamesh teetered
precariously, only barely holding the backflowing dross inside of him and blessing whatever blind luck had made her stop short of disaster.  If his involuntary reactions took him she stood just feet from where the edge of the effect would be.  Of course, she was still within range if he decided to direct the vomited dross at her.

She stepped back, three long paces.  To just out of range of his directed sick
-up.

Gilgamesh’s stomach dropped in shock
: blind luck had nothing to do with this.  Somehow, she knew his range exactly.  He thought he knew her, but he didn’t know her like this.  He thought she was as dangerous as he could imagine, and it turned out his imagination lacked.

“Crow.  Who are you?” she
said, her soft demand reeking of threat.  Hunting him.  She dressed as a man.  Some part of him was surprised; he never metasensed her clothes with any clarity.  She wore a business suit and a fedora over crew-cut dark blonde hair.  She even wore careful makeup to coarsen her skin and give the illusion of a five-o’clock shadow.  Her shoulders of the dark suit were broad even for a man.  He might have believed she was a man if he didn’t know her.

He was encouraged she knew he was a Crow
, but frightened also, because as far as he knew Tiamat had never dealt with any Crows.  How did she learn of his kind?

“
A Beast Man is coming,” he said, as sweat streamed down his face.

She ignored his warning and shifted over to the right with a stalk like a tiger’s, circling in odd counterpoint to the Beast Man only a scant half mile away now
, creeping closer, lured by the sudden activity at the China Garden.

“You know who I am, Crow,” she said in
her soft, threatening voice, watching him so carefully with those predator eyes. “What weapon do you have that you think will work against me?”

He didn’t think, he knew.  How did Tiamat know about Crows but not the sick-up?

“A Beast Man is coming,” he said again, his whisper low to keep it from quavering.  “He’s coming closer right now and he’s hungry.  He’ll kill us for our juice.”

Tiamat kept circling
, ominous, slow.  Gilgamesh found himself with his back flat against the brick wall of the China Garden.  Tiamat stopped her circling at the rickety wooden fence that formed the other side of the alley.  To go further would bring her back within his range.  She started circling back the other way, graceful and dangerous and barely controlled.  Her heartbeat was slow and strong and gave no hint she might concerned about the Beast Man.  Gilgamesh watched her like a deer watches the headlights of an oncoming car.

“A wise man once told me that although your instincts may serve you well in a fight, you can choose not to follow your instincts.  You don’t have to attack me, Crow,” she said, her voice soft and speculative. 
He realized Tiamat was confirming or denying her suppositions by watching his reactions.  He wished for the hard stone face of an older and colder Transform, but couldn’t summon it past his terror.  “You’re a young Crow, aren’t you?”

The soft voice turned harder and the cold light of anger appeared in her eyes.  All of a sudden she had a gun in her hand.
“So why are you poaching on
my
territory?”

She thought he threat
ened her juice supply!

Tiamat was much worse than he
had thought over those long months watching her from a distance.  He never expected her to be able to read faces as if she read minds, or the intense personal presence of her.  In his mind, he knew how terrible she was, and even mostly in his heart.  He had never been her prey before.

He
shook and the sick up tried to come up again, when and where it would have no effect on anyone.  She could kill him with that gun.  Shoot him from out of his range and he had no way to fight back.

“I’m not poaching.  I’m a scavenger,” he
said.  “I live off what you leave behind.”  He hoped not to give away more than he had to, but he needed to convince her he didn’t threaten her juice supply.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment and he wondered if he had startled her.  She never stopped
her cat-like stalk, back and forth, just out of range.

“Hey, I’m a neat freak.  I’m not at all sloppy with the juice,” Carol said, suddenly sardonic.  “Perhaps when I accidentally drained that Monster, but not normally.”

Gilgamesh froze, surprised by her sudden change of tone and her wit.  He hadn’t suspected wit.  He couldn’t respond.  He didn’t have any wit in him right now.

“So what kind of juice do I leave behind, Crow?” she asked, her voice soft
and threatening again.  The Beast Man came closer, almost into Tiamat’s metasense range.

“Please,” he
said, plaintive, pleading and shaking.  “The Beast Man is coming.  I live off your kills when you’re done with them.  I don’t want you to die.”

“Do you eat them?”  Tiamat said.  The threat from Tiamat diminished as her curiosity increased.

She only knew such a tiny amount about Crows, he realized.  Damn it!  Wasn’t she afraid of the Beast Man?  Or did she simply have nerves of steel?  The Beast Man had to be in her range, now.  Why couldn’t she metasense him!

Tiamat was so cold, so controlled,
and her face gave nothing away.  He remembered watching her in the Skinner’s warehouse and recognized the results of those long months of cruelty.

Something changed inside of him, then, as th
e constantly increasing terror grew suddenly
too much
.  He felt like he floated, all connection to his body gone.  His body shivered and stammered and shook, but it wasn’t his anymore.  A foreign thing, only loosely driven by his will.  The fear disappeared, replaced by a giddy, buzzing high.

“How do you sense him when I can’t?” Tiamat
said.  She seemed distant, as if the whole tableau in the alley had moved far away from him.

The Beast Man charg
ed and would be here in a matter of seconds.

Gilgamesh
understood now.  The Beast Man masked himself from Tiamat.  Masked from an Arm!  His trick only masked him from one Major Transform at a time.

“He
’s masked himself from your metasense.  I love you,” he heard himself say, as if his voice came from someone else.  His body laughed madly.  “You are the Goddess of Death and Destruction.  You should go back to the parking lot to fight the Beast Man.  You don’t want to fight him trapped in this alley.”

Tiamat stopped and looked at him with narrowed eyes. 
He laughed harder.  Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized he had gone too far.  He had damaged something inside of him, either mental or physical, or both.  He wondered if he would heal or if he would always be like this.  Tiamat flattened against the side of the alley and cartwheeled back to the parking lot, where she could both watch for the Beast Man and keep an eye on Gilgamesh.

T
he Beast Man’s charge brought him close enough for Tiamat to metasense, and she tensed, battle ready.  Close, only a hundred yards away.  Her head turned slightly toward him and then turned back.

“Run if you have to, but promise me you’ll contact me later,” she
said, in no particular hurry.  Nerves of steel.  Gilgamesh laughed again at her incongruous order.

“Yes, Carol, of course.”  If he ever stopped running.

Tiamat crouched as the Beast Man hove into view amid the squealing of tires as some passer by fled from what looked like a Monster.  Tiamat flicked the pistol back at the Beast Man and emptied the magazine.  Every shot hit and every shot bounced off.

The Beast Man was a chit
inous thing, covered in hard, shiny black.  His arms and legs split in a way Gilgamesh’s mind had trouble seeing.  The long bones in his calves and forearms had separated, to produce four legs below the knee, and four feet, and four arms below the elbow and four hands.  Each hand a construct of impossibly long fingers, each finger a rasp of razor sharp file at the tip.  He wore a loose coat, but he ran on all fours.  Eights.

The coat fell away in tatters as he came close, torn apart by the bullets.  His hard outer exoskeleton wasn’t even scratched.  He roared as he charged, a hissing and clicking sound louder than a jet engine that froze Gilgamesh’s muscles in place.  Tiamat put her pistol away and came up with a knife in each hand.  She crouched to receive his charge.

Didn’t Tiamat know how to fight?  The Beast Man outweighed her three times over and charged at 40 miles an hour, a speed Tiamat couldn’t maintain for any real distance, even if she burned juice.  Even with her immense strength, the Beast Man would hit her like a freight train.  Gilgamesh cowered in fright, imagining the impending collision.

Hancock didn’t move an inch.  The Beast Man didn’t question his
luck.  He lowered his horned insectoid head and put on more speed.  She would be plastered across the asphalt pavement like road kill.  Gilgamesh heard the rising rasping growl of triumph from the Beast Man.

The Beast Man was bare inches from her when she jumped.  Up and over him she went as he passed beneath her. 
Her hands flashed and one of his finger tentacles bent and bled.  A wounded stripe on her thigh appeared where that tentacle had torn her with its saw-like edge.  Whatever she had tried with her other hand hadn’t worked and the Beast Man showed no wound for it.

The Beast Man was going too fast to stop once she jumped out of
his way and he slammed headfirst into the hard brick wall of the China Garden with a thump that rattled the ground.  Tiamat darted close before he recovered and sliced at his rear legs where they joined his torso.  She didn’t do more than minor damage as the exoskeleton protected the Beast Man, even at the joints.

The Beast Man still hadn’t recovered so she darted in again, this time aiming at the case cover
ing the Beast Man’s oversized genitals.  The Beast Man spun on his rear legs and attacked her again with his finger tentacles.  The fingers sliced several shallow cuts in her torso before she slipped out of their reach, safely distant from twenty feet away across the pavement.

She laughed then
, a cruel, predatory sound that sent shivers down Gilgamesh’s spine.  He wondered what went through her head, and if the fight went as poorly as it appeared.  Those two, the Arm and the Beast Man, looked far too evenly matched.

The Beast Man charged again but Tiamat was too fast for him.  She dart
ed in from the side, again going for the finger tentacles.  She suffered several more long, shallow slashes, but broke three more of the fingers.  She was damned lucky those cuts were shallow.  Those saw-edged tentacles could have laid her open to the bone.

Gilgamesh
finally realized what had been bothering him all along.

She wasn’t burning.

Didn’t she consider the Beast Man a threat?  Or was she feeling him out for weak spots before she committed herself?

Gilgamesh realized
Tiamat would win this fight.  If she fought the Beast Man evenly without the burn, she would tear him apart when she finally did decide to use it.

So during the Beast Man’s next charge, Gilgamesh ran, counting on the combatants not to notice his departure.  The buzz still sounded in his mind, his balance was shaky, but he still made inhuman speed as far as he could in the other direction.  Distantly, he regretted the loss of his truck, now known to Tiamat and therefore lost to him.

He stumbled several times and ran out of breath and energy far before he should have, while the buzzing grew to overwhelm everything else.  A quarter mile away, as he passed out of Tiamat’s range, he sensed the massive explosion of dross as the Beast Man died.  He kept going anyway, incoherent and lost to everything but the need to flee.

He fled from other dangers besides
Tiamat.  If the Beast did have a master with him, his master was likely an older Crow.  He had seen Shadow hide himself; he didn’t need to stretch his imagination to suppose an older Crow might be able to cover a Beast Man.  Gilgamesh needed to survive in order to warn Shadow and the others of the possibility.

Worse, Crow Killer
might be after him
personally
, a loose end from the Philadelphia massacre.  The Beast Man had gone after Gilgamesh first.  He needed to warn Sinclair and Ezekiel as well.

Tiamat didn’t come chasing after him.  Gilgamesh thought through the buzz enough to change the direction of his flight, to run at right angles to his previous path. 
He didn’t see any point in being easy to find.

Later,
Tiamat drove off with the carcass of the Beast Man in her car, or possibly his, to some distant unknown location.  The buzz ate at his mind until nothing else remained, and Gilgamesh felt the reassuring darkness of unconsciousness slip into him.  Soon, the darkness would take him whether he welcomed it or not.