All Beasts Together (The Commander) (37 page)

Sky’s voice caught in his throat.  “Say the word, and I’m gone.  I care for you too much to do otherwise.”  The gaping pit in his stomach cried ‘no!’ at his words, but he knew them to be true.

“I won’t,” Lori said, still watching the trees in the arboretum.  “I’m willing to put myself through this.  I just want to warn you ahead of time that I’m going to make mistakes.”

“Don’t worry about your household,” Sky said.  “They want you to do it, as well.”

“They’re dreaming if they think this will make me easier to live with.”

No, dearest Lori, they think it will make you more human, to allow them to love you.
Sky turned the sentence around in his mind several times, adding and subtracting words like ‘selfish’, ‘robotic’, and ‘elitist’…and decided not to say it.

“You know,” Sky said.  “I’ve always wanted to see the Boston Garden.  I wonder if the Bruins are playing in town tonight.”

“This is so utterly stupid,” Lori said.  They sat on cold stone benches in Winthrup beach park, facing the icy cold wind, watching the waves roll into the beach across Massachusetts Bay. 
They held hands and pretended to be cold.  “I can’t leave Boston.  You have your responsibilities in Toronto.  You can’t stay in my household; your nerves won’t tolerate it. You said so.  The analytical part of me says I should go back to being what I was, and you should, too.  I don’t want to, though.”

“Could this sort of mess be otherwise for those like us?  Besides, the action is down here, not up in Canada.  I
know of a couple of Crows I can kick into being more active.  Get them to deal with the local Toronto Focuses.  If anything, I’ve held on to my old life for too long.”  Sky turned to look at Lori and found her face close to his.  He bent over the few centimeters remaining and kissed her, slowly, carefully.  Lori leaned into the kiss, and into his body, but after a few moments, broke away and rested her head on his chest.

“I can’t separate my desires from my mind or what the juice is doing to me,” Lori said.  “I’ve never been so afraid of anything in my life.  It’s like the juice wants something, but that’s idiotic.  The juice isn’t intelligent.  It
can’t want anything.”

“It’s all one to me,” Sky said.  “I’ve heard other Major Transforms say the same thing.  The lust is strongest in the Arms.” 
A Focus’s lust appeared to be as overwhelming in the stupid-making department as an Arm’s, which didn’t surprise him.  “They also consider juice emotional effects to be separate from their normal emotions.  The juice doesn’t affect the male Major Transforms separately from our emotions.”

“What does it want?”

Sky looked at Lori with his metasense.  Normally blinding, she had become almost overwhelming.  Even so, the patterns within her were obvious.  Once he found his answer, he turned his metasense outward again, always on guard. “I can hazard a guess, if you’re bold enough to hear what I can metasense, most gracious lady.”

“Fire away, master Crow.”

“Your juice wants you to reproduce.”

“I was afraid of that,” Lori said.  “It makes too much sense.  Especially since I’m intellectually open to the idea.”  Lori’s voice dripped ire.

“Not today, I presume.”

“Not if you want a sane partner.  Even I’m not icy enough to do something like that simply by the cold calculus of logic.  Don’t worry.  I just need time to come to grips with what my body is doing.  I want you back in Boston next Saturday, Sky.”

“Do you need me to stay in Boston in the interim?”

The waves crashed as Lori thought.

“I broke some unwritten rule or something, didn’t I?” Lori said.  Sky tensed.  With each passing hour he stayed with Lori, she saw deeper and deeper into him.  Between that and her charisma, his free will would soon disappear completely.

“It’s nothing.  You are what you are, mademoiselle Foyer.  I sought you out, knowing full well that I stepped into the whirlwind.  You shall test my resilience as I test your patience.”

Lori laughed.  “I’m a control freak,” she said.  “As a young Focus, I practically had my Transforms’ days planned out to the nearest five minutes.  I took two long years to learn what I was doing wrong and it turned out to be a difficult habit to break.  Fate giving me a lover is a bottle of wine given to an alcoholic.  I must take this one day at a time.

“So.  I can arrange
for my weekends to be free,” Lori said.  “Would you like to come visit me some weekend soon, Sky?”

“I’ll be here next Saturday.”

“Why haven’t you run away, Sky?” Lori asked.  Faneuil Hall
meant nothing special to Sky, but it resonated with Lori strongly.  “It’s more than me.  I’m no prize, I should warn you.”

He almost answered without thinking, back down the romantic road he
had trodden so often today, but the look in Lori’s eyes had one message: she wasn’t fishing for complements, but openness.  “Are you asking me as a Crow or as a man?”

“Can you separate the two?”  She was being polite
, and didn’t say ‘Aren’t you the one who said the juice and your desires were one in the same?’  He couldn’t deny his inconsistency.

“Emotionally, no.  Intellectually, yes,” Sky said.

“As a man, then.”

“Ah,
phooey,” Sky said, gamely trying to match his speech patterns to Lori’s.  “I don’t have an answer as a man.  As a Crow, the Cause is more than enough of a lure, despite how I’d like to wring a few necks among your Transforms.”

Lori didn’t rise to th
e bait.  “Older men hate crazy pushy young women like me.”  She referred to some of her Transforms.

“I’m newborn,” Sky said.  How stern was the gracious lady now holding his hand, anyway?  “About the time you were introducing yourself to Focus politics, I went through a low juice event
bad enough I lost consciousness for about two weeks.  That changes someone.”

“Withdrawal?”  She didn’t seem spooked.

“I don’t know.  I didn’t lose all my old memories but I do know I once looked at the world as a different person.  It was after that episode I went back to my childhood Buddhism, as a way of retaining my sanity.”

“Well, that removes a negative, but what’s the positive?” Lori asked.

Sky shrugged.

They sat quietly, lost in their own thoughts.

“Can you tell me about these Canadian Focuses you’re working with?” Lori asked.

“Yup,” Sky said. 
They weren’t any big secret.  “You know about Henni – Focus Russell, in Toronto.  There’s Focus Gwen Larson, also of Toronto, whose household goes itinerant whenever necessary, and Fayme Jeanlouis, a more standard Focus living in Quebec City, Quebec.  All three of these Focuses know I clean dross from their households.  Then there’s Tania Eskowitz, a young Focus in London, Ontario.  I clean her place but she doesn’t know about me.  Lastly, there’s Annie, in Montreal.  We don’t have a dross…”

At the last, Lori’s juice flared brightly and her eyes opened wide.  Sky stopped.  He
had seen this reaction from Lori once before.

“You know her well, don’t you?”

Lori nodded.  Yes, those were goosebumps on her arms.  “She visits me in my dreams.  In some strange fashion she’s become my teacher.”  A pause.  “So, Sky, do you like what you’re doing with your life?  What are your big plans?”

Sky shrugged.  “I’m a Crow.  I remove dross and help Focuses.  I get involved in silly activities like my current mission that other Crows sneer at as ‘adventures’.”  He shook his head.  “Big plans, like big dreams, are too dangerous to even think about.  I
know better now.”

Lori smiled knowingly
and nodded her head in agreement.

“I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed chasing around Boston with you, Sky,” Lori said.  “How much your presence in Inferno brightens
up the place.”  She leaned up against him and took his hand in hers.  “You were right to push.”

Sky smiled, but didn’t say anything.  He didn’t want to ruin the moment.  He
would be happy sitting here next to Lori like this forever.

“I enjoy your stories.  If you wouldn’t mind,
would you tell me more about your life as a Crow, Sky?”  None of Lori’s ferocious charisma infused her question.  Sky’s smile grew wider.  She wanted him to talk about himself.  That wouldn’t be a problem.

“Well, before I transformed, over ten years ago, I was a truck driver…”

A nightclub wasn’t a place Sky would normally visit.  Not as a Crow.  After dinner, he had the sudden urge to dance and Lori pointed out a place.  Veiled Tears. 
A couple miles north of downtown Boston, a trendy place enforcing a rigid dress code.

The bouncers didn’t stand a chance against Lori.  Sky and Lori spun together on the dance floor, or gyrated to rock, or did the twist when the old rock and roll songs came up.  Sky gazed at little else except Lori’s eyes but still had enough presence left to not
e the revelers who came close to them on the dance floor and found themselves in corners shortly thereafter, pawing each other and tossing clothes with abandon.

“You dance like an artist!” Sky exclaimed.  Lori was inhumanly graceful, her gymnast background showing.

“Hey, watch it!  That means something different around here,” Lori said.  “You, Sky, are so incredibly light on your feet.  Whee!”

Sky rolled his eyes.

“Let’s sit and talk.”

Lori let him lead her to a table.  “This is fun.”
  With Major Transform hearing, they had no need to holler over the raucous music.

“You act like you’ve had too much to drink,” Sky said.

“Giddy with love,” Lori said, followed by: “Oops.  I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say that word.”  She turned red.

“I’ll pretend you said ‘dance’,” Sky twinkled.  “I think you over-stimulated yourself.”  He
had done it to himself many times, seen it in other Major Transforms as well.  Especially Arms.  All the Major Transforms lived life as if their funerals were next week, belying their ever-youthful features.

“Betrayed by my body again,” Lori said, and leaned forward with her chin balanced on her steepled fingers.  “Did I ever tell you how much I hated being turned into a Focus?”

“I’ve heard the story.”

Lori let a pout chase across her face.  “How about
the times I had my lunch handed to me by the Focus Council?”

“When they chewed you up about whether people like me existed?”

The pout got larger.  “Or how about the story about how my household is full of gossips?”

“I’ve experienced that.”

Lori laughed. “Take me home and nail me to a bed, Sky.”

When Lori relaxed her reserve, she lost
everything
.  “You’d never forgive me.”

“Make me pregnant.”

He remembered a certain Foyer emptying a silenced handgun at him.  “You’d have everyone in Inferno hunting me down to try and kill me,”

“You don’t think I’m acting um, being willing er…  Rational.  Something?”

“No.”

“Well, let’s get out of here, then.  If you’re turning me down, I
must have caught the goofies, even though I floored and awaiting can’t tell.”

Floored and awaiting?  “Yes.”  He wondered if the nightclub was too much like the stimulation of her Friday nights, but without the spiral down into exhaustion caused by the lowering of her juice.  Sky led her outside, into the fresh air, away from what Sky feared was true: an entire nightclub of people Lori had filled with lust.

At least her instincts and her traitorous Focus body had kept her from dragging a normal or a Transform through this.  He wouldn’t have been able to cope.

They walked down the boulevard while Lori giggled and told old jokes, years of bad jokes she
had overheard and remembered.  Eventually, Lori grew silent, contemplative.

“That was weird, Sky.  I can’t be that powerful.  Can I?”

“I’m afraid you are.  What did Ann call it?  The pheromone wind?  Something like that.  You’re a walking love potion.”

“Pheromone flow.  That’s Occum’s term for the Dreaming,” she said
.  The explanation made little sense to him.  The Dreaming was the Dreaming.  Of course, everything he knew about the Dreaming he had learned from Anne-Marie.  “Are you sure it’s me, Sky?”

“Who else could it be?”

“You.”

“Me?”  Sky thought, trying to remember anything in his past remotely similar.  “You
might be right, because, amazingly enough, the situation is new to me as well.  None of the Focuses I’ve dealt with ever felt right to me.”

“This feeling right.  What is it?” Lori said.  Pushing.  Sky smiled.

“You just said you didn’t want to use that word, tonight.  I agree.”

“Gurgling poo,” Lori said.  “We could just get this over with.”

Gurgling poo?  No, Sky decided, he didn’t want to know.  “Nope.  Not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because, when a woman is in the mood you’re in, gracious lady, what they want to ‘get over’ is the man, as well as their frustration.  I haven’t won your heart, I’ve charmed your juice.  Even a half hour from now you’ll feel different and judge me by what I did and didn’t do.  Despite your immediate desires.”