All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (32 page)

Gilgamesh twitched, for him a shrug.  “Should they?  They feel safe to me.”

Lori opened her mouth to say something, and then shrugged.  Hank began to understand the attraction between Lori and Gilgamesh: both of them loved quiet and contemplation.  They allowed events to thrust them into the public eye only due to their own sense of obligation and morality.

“We’re in big trouble, you know,” Gilgamesh said.  His quiet voice suited the night stillness of the room.  A couple of stars shone through the near window, the only light.

Lori grunted.  “How so?” Hank asked.

“I had some time to think on my way here,” Gilgamesh said.  His voice sounded pained.  “I’m positive that much, if not all, of the harassment that’s happened to us ever since the emergency Council meeting at the end of January is from the first Focuses, or some of the first Focuses, and not Rogue Crow.  I managed to scrape up evidence that the information that got sent to the Detroit FBI office came from a Focus household.  I’m positive we’ll find that the stuff Haggerty uncovered will turn out the same.  Also, I think the timing on this is no coincidence – I think the FBI information was sent to keep Carol out of Boston, one way or the other, the same way the FBI information kept Keaton out of Boston.”

This mirrored Hank’s thoughts on the subject.  Gilgamesh was right.  They were in big trouble.

“So, Gilgamesh, Hank’s worried he’s wasting time doing administration,” Lori said.  He hadn’t said anything out loud, but she knew anyway.  She clearly didn’t want to think about the war against the first Focuses they now fought.  “What do you think?”

Lost down esoteric conversational byways, he eventually fell asleep, only to awake when Autumn Idoux waved a plate of scrambled eggs under his nose around breakfast time.  Gilgamesh and Lori had at least left him the blanket.

---

“There’s no sign of any Transform involvement.  The attackers were hired by the Antonella family – mobsters – and the Antonellas operate out of the Bronx.  You know any reason why a bunch of mobsters would be after you?”

They sat around a table in the Inferno dining room, an hour before noon, and the room was quiet except for the four of them. The serving plates held a considerable quantity of food, intended for Lori, but Carol was the one making use of it.  Keaton and Sky were out patrolling, each leading an Inferno squad.  Hank would have loved to see what Stacy was doing with the Inferno Transforms right now, but he was under virtual house arrest, with his own bodyguard, Autumn Idoux, shadowing him.  Gilgamesh sat closest to Lori, and the tension between Gilgamesh and Carol was thick enough to cut.

Lori shook her head.  Hank monitored her ongoing condition uneasily.  He still wasn’t confident of her health.  She had gone into renal failure earlier in the morning, and Hank had led the Inferno medics through the procedure to bring her out of it, stabilize her, and clean up the mess she left behind.  Carol showed up about an hour later, which Hank considered no coincidence at all.  Deep links connected the two of them, and the links seemed to work just fine over multiple miles.  Carol spent a while bitching about the bad hunting in the Boston area, and the amount of territory the Nobles had marked as off limits in the northern Boston suburbs, and gave Lori another round of juice.  Those rounds of juice worked miracles, and were the reason Hank was merely uneasy.  The one round this morning got Lori up and moving again, and likely cut another week off her total recovery time.  Now, if she would just lie down and rest for a while, she might actually get better.

Hank should have guessed that Chimeras didn’t pee on light posts to mark their territory.  They left elaborate élan messes even an Arm could recognize.  Carol had told him all about the marks, in excruciating and inevitably profane detail.

“Gilgamesh has a theory about…” Lori started to say, cut off by an impressive Arm glare from Carol.  “You weren’t here when we got word, but Polly and Tonya are pinned down as well – Focus Schrum released her blackmail material on them to the FBI and several New York and Pennsylvania prosecuting attorneys.”  Carol’s ire vanished, as her face turned to blank stone.  “I’ve also verified that Focus Bentlow and Focus Webb were both hit; their households were firebombed and burnt to the ground.”

“That’s good circumstantial evidence.  Unfortunately, unless we can penetrate the Antonella family, there’s no way we can verify that one of the first Focuses was behind the assassination attempt on you,” Carol said.  “I don’t think any of us has the time to look into that.”

Everyone sitting around the table nodded.  Carol grabbed another bowl of pea soup, and dug in for a few minutes.  Then for dessert, she grabbed the entire plate of chocolate chip cookies, doing yet more damage to her diet.

“How about Arm Haggerty?” Lori said.  “Could she look into the Antonellas?”

Carol blinked.  “Perhaps.  I don’t want to over-use her.  Being a young independent Arm isn’t easy, as you know from when you first met me.”

Lori nodded.

Carol turned to Gilgamesh, keeping her face blank.  “So your hypothesis is that this is all to stop the presentation about the Hunters to the Council?”

Gilgamesh nodded, and raised a finger.  Carol motioned for him to continue.

“I found some evidence in Detroit regarding the FBI’s move on Arm Keaton,” he said.  “The people who hired the couriers to deliver the materials carried minute amounts of Focus produced dross on them, from an out-of-town Focus.  Given the denials we’ve gotten from Focuses Fingleman, Teas and Claunch, I suspect Focuses Patterson and Schrum are behind this.  I believe they’re behind all of the recent moves.”

“If you’re hypothesis is correct, then this is the opening shot in a war,” Carol said.  She leaned forward and lost her stone face, back to being the snarling Arm.  He could feel her guilt, for going after Haggerty and depriving Lori of some of her protection, through his tag.  Her guilt quickly turned to anger.  “We’re going to have to take down Focuses Schrum and Patterson.  We need to go mobile, corral ourselves a small army, and strike quickly, before Shadow can figure out what we’re doing and throw one of his monkey wrenches into the fight.”

Lori and Gilgamesh nodded, chilling Hank.  This seemed all-too-familiar to him, the small attacks, the nudges, the blackmail material releases.  He had seen this from the other side, from the takedown of Focus DeYoung during the Julius Rebellion, or at least the start of it, before he managed to extricate himself from Tonya’s clutches.  Focuses Schrum and Patterson had been helping Tonya, then.

“Ma’am,” Hank said, attracting Carol’s attention.  He needed to get her thinking in Commander mode, not in hassled-Arm-protecting-her-Focus mode.  “This reminds me far too much of Tonya’s story about the takedown of Focus DeYoung.”  The first supposed Commander.

Carol glared at him for a moment, a classic Arm ‘don’t you dare get between me and my prey’ glare.  She didn’t speak, and he didn’t apologize.  She slapped her knife on the table and leaned forward, into his personal space.  They held the tableau for half a minute, his mind whirling tag-tag-tag, fear sweat from Carol’s predator pooling under his hands, before Carol relaxed back down into her chair and eyeballed the ceiling.  “It’s a Commander trap, then.  They’re pissing on my territory and trying to entice me into chasing them.  Trying to induce me into thinking that my superior command skills can buy me a quick and cheap victory in just a few days.”  The Council meeting was only three days away.  “Okay, that’s not going to happen.  Instead, we’ll go to ground, keeping our heads down before the Council meeting and afterwards.  Save for the Focus rescue, there isn’t much I have to do before the wedding save prepare for the wedding defense.  No panic, no retaliation.  If they want to challenge us, have them do so on our turf.”  Hank nodded and relaxed.  If Focus DeYoung had hunkered down and defended herself properly, Tonya wouldn’t have been able to take her down so easily.  He felt the force of both Carol’s Commander-style inspiration and her Commander-style analysis.  He had no problem with her advice now.

Carol turned to Gilgamesh.  “One thing about your hypothesis, though: you can’t seriously be thinking they understood Haggerty enough to predict she’d go all Arm-stupid in my lair.”

“No, ma’am,” Gilgamesh said, nervous and sweaty.  “Consider, though: if Haggerty had traded the information to you, without violence, what would you have done?”

“I would have been stuck in Texas attempting to figure out how to save my organization, nowhere near Lori, or any of the Council Focuses,” Carol said.  She shook her head in disgust.  “We need to remember Shadow’s involvement in this.  Haggerty had a map board with push-pins in it, labeled with all the local Transforms’ contact information.  Including Shadow’s old place.  Which she learned about before whatever happened there.  And, according to her, there weren’t any Transforms involved in the so-called attack.  I think when she cracked Shadow’s defenses, she forced him to fake an attack on his place and take up being Wandering Shade full time.”

Gilgamesh shook his head.  “There’s another explanation, Carol: Haggerty’s detective work allowed Wandering Shade to find Shadow and attack him, enabling Wandering Shade to steal Shadow’s identity and ruin his name.”

Glare.  “I think you’re taking your loyalty kick way too far,” Carol said.  She stood and stalked off, radiating exasperation.

“Ouch,” Lori said.

Gilgamesh nodded.  Ouch indeed.

Lori turned to Hank.  “Henry,” Lori said, with her cold bitch Focus voice.  “I’m beginning to get more than a little worried about how your transformed adrenal gland is affecting you.  Coming here was too risky.  You should have stayed in Houston.”  He could also say the same about his standing up to Carol a few minutes earlier.  Or his standing up to Haggerty back in Houston, which got him mildly tortured from a so-called ‘good guy’ Arm who disliked torture.  “You need to get that thing out of you before it entices you into doing something fatally stupid.  So…” she paused.  “If you don’t agree to the operation, I’m going to formally and charismatically order you to do it.”

Hank raised his hands in surrender.  “I give up.”  Lori’s argument had finally convinced him.  “Just don’t come complaining to me if my old worn out body expires on the operating table.”

Carol stuck her head back into the kitchen, and smiled, flicking her magical tongue of healing at him.  “Don’t worry,” Carol said.  “I’m not going to let any of those nasty ol’ doctors kill you.  You’re mine, remember?”

Tonya Biggioni: April 4, 1969

Ten o’clock at night, and she still hadn’t gotten to the meat of her visit.  Tonya sighed.  The waiting room was beautiful.  Lush and ostentatious.  Queen Anne chairs, elegant cherry occasional tables, delicate crystal vases and ornate porcelain figures.  It would have been wonderful except for that ‘waiting’ part.  Wini had been absent for over an hour, finishing some household issues.  When Wini came upstairs, they would finally get down to business.

The end-of-March Council session had turned out to be anticlimactic.  With their failure to intimidate Polly and her conspirators into silence, the first Focuses as a group had dropped their objections to the recognition of the existence of the Chimeras and Crows, and had, through their unofficial representative on the Council, Cathy Elspeth, offered an implied deal, suggesting the Council label the Hunter variety of Chimeras as ‘irrevocable enemies’.  The final vote was unanimous.  Tonya had actually enjoyed the Council session for once; her work with the Arms and her success negotiating an end to the Rizzari rebellion had won her enough acclaim to make her, for the first time ever, the strongest voice on the Council after Polly.

Wini came in, eventually, followed by a female Transform with a large plate of sandwiches and exquisite homemade candies.  Whatever else one might say about Wini Adkins, she did have the courtesies down cold.  Wini had decorated her personal section of her household richly, in the same fashion as this waiting room.  From what Tonya had seen, the rest of Wini’s current household was little more than a slum tenement.  The disparity hadn’t been so sizeable during Tonya’s last visit, five years ago.

She wondered if the luxe was a side effect of Wini tagging her household’s bad juice, or whether it was a natural progression of Wini’s personality and her people getting older.  Tonya couldn’t remember the last time she heard someone refer to a radio as a ‘Hi-Fi’.

“So, tell me what sort of emergency the Council has thought up,” Wini said, sitting in her elegant chair with her ankles genteelly crossed, sipping from a thin porcelain cup of expensive tea.  Tonya sipped her own tea and kept an iron grip on her self-control.  This wasn’t a courtesy call, which they both understood.  Tonya noticed the tiny signs of stress in the stiff way Wini’s hands moved, in the occasional twitch of her left foot.  She did her best to keep from showing any signs of her own stress, and wished Wini didn’t know her so well.  This visit should have been Esther Weiczokowski’s job, as the Midwest Council Rep, but Esther wasn’t in a cooperative mood right now, with either the rest of the Council or, apparently, Wini.  Therefore, Tonya ended up stuck with the dog job yet again.

“The Council has received some information pertaining to an operation you’re running in Detroit, concerning the training of Focuses to act without households.”

Wini sat up straight and the blood rushed to her face.  A massive loss of control, except Wini had never mastered the juice-powered control Tonya and the other Council Focuses possessed.  Wini didn’t have much charisma, and she had never learned to hide her true emotions and feelings.