Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (14 page)

“I don’t trust him.”

“I know.  He’s useful, though.  He’s the one who convinced me that I’m not as far along on the personal signifiers as I thought.  Oh, and he’s convinced the Hunters are farther along on their war preparations than we realized, and he wanted me to pass the information along to you.”

“Stupendous,” I said, deadpan.  I didn’t have time for the Hunters, unfortunately.  However, if we waited too long, they would certainly have time for us.  I swore this Dark Star Crow was a font of useless distractions.  “Anything on the other projects?”

Hank closed his eyes for a moment to shift mental gears.  He looked like crap, neglecting his exercise again.

“I can give you a verbal report on the Arm self-modification project,” he said, after opening his eyes.  I motioned with my hand for him to explain.  “I’ve tested eight different Arms so far, and certain patterns are emerging.”

“What sort of patterns?”

“Every Arm manifests some variety of physical change.  Four of the eight are taller.  Rayburn’s hair is real blonde these days.  Mostly the changes are minor and benign.  Eye color, hair color, skin texture.  After Arm Billington, Arm Whetstone’s changes are the most dramatic.”

“But?”

“Not all the major changes are benign, such as Arm Webberly’s shackle galls around her wrists.  Arm Rayburn suffered hearing loss in the high frequencies after hiding out in an airline hanger for several days when she was having difficulty with the authorities.  There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be able to regain her full hearing, but she can’t.”

I frowned at the implications.  “Why is this happening?”

“As far as I can tell, virtually all the major alterations have a psychological basis, and most of the minor ones as well.  Arm bodies subtly adjust themselves to fit the self-image of the Arm.  Rayburn thinks of herself as blonde.  You think of yourself as taller.  Billington thinks of herself as black.”

“Hank, this is a weapon,” I said.

He nodded.  “This is very dangerous information, and I fear someone else is familiar with this, someone intimate with Transform physiology, and Arm physiology in general, and used this at least once in the past.  If I could just prove this beyond a reasonable doubt…”

My eyes opened wide at Hank’s Transform doublethink accusation.  He flat out accused Bass of causing Keaton’s psychotic break and the death of Arm Svensen.  He didn’t have the proof, but he suspected…and Hank wasn’t one to ever take flights of fancy.

Hooooooly shit.

You Want To Live, You Follow Orders

“It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

Tonya Biggioni: September 14, 1972

“What the hell do you think you’ve been doing!”  Suzie’s usual icy cold voice devolved into a broken wreck of uncontrolled fury.  Tonya stared at the telephone in shock.  One of the year’s first cool breezes wandered through the curtains into Tonya’s office, as the late afternoon sun dropped the window into shadow.  Tonya grabbed at a couple of loose papers before they blew off her desk.

“Suzie, what’s…”

Suzie didn’t let Tonya get the words out.  “You’re going to pay for this atrocity, bitch!”

“Suzie!”

“You just think you can ignore my wishes with impunity?  Well, I’m tired of your fucking incompetence!  I should have brought you to heel years ago.”

“
Suzie!
”  Tonya was impressed.  Suzie rarely lost her cool, but when she did, she did it proud.

“You shut the fuck up, you fucking wop.  Send me Delia.  No.  Both you and Delia.  I want you to watch as I turn your favorite into a mindless zombie.  You’ll be crying blood, you fucking twat!”

“
What happened
?”

“It’s your fault, you fucking bitch! Your fault! You work with those fuckers.  You should have stopped this. This is all
your
fault.”  Then, astonishingly, Suzie began to cry.

“Suzie, tell me what happened.  What’s wrong?”

“
It’s your fault!
”  Suzie’s scream now overwhelmed.  “Fucking bitch.  Bitch.”

Tonya waited as Suzie cried.  After several minutes, the sobs subsided.

“Listen to me, you useless piece of shit,” Suzie said, in a hollow attempt at her usual ice cold.  “Nobody walks into my own household and murders one of my people and gets away with it.  I want the head of the killer on my doorstep by Saturday, or you and Delia are going to come by and pay for screwing up.”

Or else I’ll expose your crimes to the FBI, and you’ll spend the rest of your life on the inside of a tiny cell as a vivisection subject for their researchers, Suzie didn’t quite say.  Damn.  Tonya’s gut felt hollow, as the attack Suzie described echoed Wandering Shade’s kidnapping of one of Wini Adkins’ favorites far too closely.  Wandering Shade’s attack had led, through many improbable steps, to Tonya’s fall in the Arm Flap.  To untold deaths and misery.  To a place Tonya would rather never go again.

“Suzie,” Tonya said, placating.  “I’m sorry, I really am.  I don’t know how to track down rogue Crows, or how to kill them.  Last time it took a war.”

“
You hear me, bitch?
You want to live, you follow orders. 
You Hear Me?
”

“I hear you, Suzie,” Tonya said.

She maintained emergency procedures for disasters like this.  She and her household could disappear into the woodwork and…

“Rogue Crows?” Suzie said, her voice breaking again.  “What the fuck are you talking about, you moron?”

“You weren’t attacked by Crows? Or their enslaved beasts?”

“No, goddammit, by an Arm! 
An Arm!
  Crows?  Incompetent fool!  Didn’t you put
any
work into getting the Arms back in line?”

“Arms?  You got hit by an Arm?  What the
fuck
are they doing attacking you?” Tonya said, her voice a half octave too high, her mind whirling in sudden confusion.  Arms didn’t attack Focuses, at least not without authorization from the Council, tacit or otherwise.  Her sudden anger gave way to fear.  No baby Arm possessed the skill or organization to carry off such an attack, and none of the senior Arms would do something like this without political cover.  She hoped Carol and Lori weren’t behind this, because she would likely end up joining them in their outlawry, if they called in her debt to them.

Utter quiet descended on the other end of the line.  Too many heartbeats later Suzie began to dial a rotary phone, and Tonya recognized the phone number from the whirring of the dial.  Shirley Patterson.  The chief of the first Focuses, and Tonya’s private nightmare.  Tonya shivered and sweat pooled on her lower back.  “I know the Crows hit you, Tonya.  Tell me what else is going on with the Crows,” Suzie said, after a minute, in her whispered conspiratorial voice.  Shirley Patterson would hear every word they both said.

Tonya told the story, starting with the cease-and-desist letter to Crow Gilgamesh, the exposure of Focus Innkeep’s people and ending with Shadow’s latest promise to do something to stop the Crows stupid enough to ignore the normal Crow dictum of staying out of other peoples’ business.  If he could.

“Tell me what happened to you, Suzie,” Tonya heard Shirley Patterson say, a tiny whisper from the speaker on the other phone in Schrum’s hands.

“One of the goddamned Arms, one of the short ones, waltzed right into my compound, juice sucked one of my Transforms, then fucking fought her way out again!  No matter what we did, we couldn’t kill her!”  Suzie started crying, again.

Crap!  Keaton herself?  What the hell?  No one had enough pull to order a hit on a first Focus!

“Put the phones down, Suzie.  I’ll send Anne and her people over to take care of you,” Shirley Patterson said.  Anne was Anne Trail, a first Focus who lived out on Long Island, not too far from Schrum’s place north of New York City.  A nice lady, not a politically active Focus at all.  Suzie’s crying retreated to the background after she put the phones down next to each other.

“Tonya, I think it’s time for the two of us to lay our cards on the table,” Patterson said.

Tonya didn’t say anything, nearly too petrified to talk.  Shirley Patterson once had Tonya tagged, and the tag messed with her mind so much she hadn’t been able to tell anyone anything about Patterson.  Such as, for instance, Shirley’s many powerful Focus tricks.

“I see several choices, Tonya,” Patterson said, her voice sugary and calm.  “I’ll let you stay independent, but only if you produce results.  Your other option is to give up your independence voluntarily.  If you stay independent, and fail, I’m going to invite you and your household for an extended educational visit to Hilltop.”

“Ma’am?”

“Don’t dissemble, Tonya.  You know exactly what’s going on and what I’m saying, even if Suzie is clueless.  I’m sure your dreams have been as tremulous and apocalyptic as mine, recently.”

Tonya almost fainted.  Part of Patterson’s bad dreams almost certainly came from Tonya and Polly’s own plotting to remove the first Focuses from power.  Tonya’s dreams mostly didn’t deserve comment.  Monsters hunted her.  Darkness crept toward her from all sides.  The usual vague feelings.

“Cat got your tongue?  I’m sorry about the past, Tonya.  I didn’t understand, back then.  I handle discipline better now.”

She had cut her own beating heart out of her body to offer to Patterson, once.

“I know you’ve been independent for years.”  Tonya still couldn’t respond.  “So be it,” Patterson said.  “What’s been done to Suzie mustn’t happen again.  I’m giving you back your old job as Arm liaison, this time with the responsibility to keep the Arms in line.  I’ll handle Donna, there won’t be any trouble.  Your first task is simple: you put a stop to Arm poaching on the first Focuses, or else.  I already stated the price for failure.”

“Ma’am,” Tonya said, her blood cold as an ice flow, her mouth a dry desert.  She and her household would join the green-eyed zombies in Patterson’s compound if she failed.  As controlled slaves.  Forever.

Tonya would rather die.

The other phone on Schrum’s desk clicked off.  Suzie’s crying didn’t stop.

---

Summer hung on strong in Los Angeles, the temperature in the high eighties as Tonya approached Keaton’s Los Angeles lair.  The Arm’s home base was a huge split-level house up in the hills, and Tonya wondered why the Arms needed such damned big houses.  Entering an Arm’s lair always forced unpleasant comparisons to the crowded poverty of Focus households.

Patterson’s mission didn’t come with plane tickets, which Tonya purchased herself.  When added to her payment last week to Suzie, it meant her entire household would be pinching pennies for the next month.  Tonya firmly pushed her resentment aside.  Strong emotions made her vulnerable, and showing any vulnerability would be most unwise.  She felt vulnerable enough without her bodyguards.

One of Keaton’s students opened the door, an abused-looking Arm with observant eyes.  She couldn’t have been more than three months past her transformation.

“I’m here to see Arm Keaton,” Tonya said, and walked in the door.  The young Arm gave ground reflexively.  “Where is she?”

General irritation made Tonya more forceful than she intended, and the young Arm blanched.  “Ma’am, if you’ll wait here…” she started, but Keaton interrupted from the doorway into the kitchen.

“Well, well, terrorizing baby Arms already.  What’s wrong? You run out of kittens?”

Tonya ignored Keaton’s barb.  “You should have heard Suzie Schrum on the telephone,” she said, grinning, as she walked to the kitchen.  “She was so mad she cried.  Just broke down and sobbed.”

Keaton grew smug, giving Tonya all the information she needed to know.  “Oh, really?”

Tonya recited as much as she could remember of the conversation with Suzie, lingering in glowing detail over every sob and hysterical pronouncement, while leaving out the conversation with Patterson.  By the time they finished, she and Keaton both sat in the living room while one of the students served them summer sausage and various cheeses as a snack.  The student possessed rock hard emotional control, strange in an Arm still so normal looking she possessed age wrinkles.

“So now you tell me,” Tonya said.  “How tough was Suzie?”

Keaton grinned and didn’t answer.  She picked up another piece of summer sausage by its toothpick and popped it in her mouth.

“Oh come on.  Out with it.  Did you go in yourself?”

“Nope.  I watched from a distance,” Keaton said.  “Bass did the snatch.”

“Holy cow,” Tonya said.  She didn’t show her true reaction, fear, the result of too much time spent listening to Hancock’s endless phone complaints about Bass’s treachery.  “
Bass
got into Suzie Schrum’s lair and drained one of her people?”

“Yup.”

Tonya shook her head.  “Wow!”  Bass.  Shit.  How much of a danger to them was she, anyway?  Given both Bass and Keaton’s hostility to the Cause, this threatened the Cause Focuses as well.  “If you don’t mind me asking, how tough was the caper? What kind of defenses did Schrum have?”

“Plenty.  Alarms, booby traps, and heavy weaponry in the hands of well-trained people.  There were even a few juice-based traps.  A normal wouldn’t have stood a chance, and I don’t think Lori and Inferno, or a single junior Arm, would have come out alive.  Although Bass did sneak in and do the dirty deed without any problems, she got badly shot up on her way out, and almost didn’t make it.”

No information on how Bass could drain a Transform in a short amount of time without fainting in ecstasy, though. Or even if she actually did.

Stacy smiled her best predator smile.  Then she snapped her fingers and another Arm appeared, this time at the stairway that led to the bedrooms upstairs.

Tonya didn’t recognize Arm Bass.  She was short, almost as short as Keaton, barely more slender, and possessed the muscles and grace of a mature Arm.  She limped, carried numerous wounds, and stank of blood and death.  Her emotions, though, gave her the aura of a Noble who had just completed an arduous proving quest.

“Arm Bass,” Tonya said.  The Arm nodded, but didn’t give Tonya her full attention.  Mostly, she studied Keaton.

“The Focus here wants some answers,” Stacy said to Bass.  “Tell her the story.”

They didn’t finish until the afternoon turned to evening.  Tonya was pleased with the information she learned about Schrum’s defenses.

“Excellent,” Tonya said, sipping on a glass of milk.  “You did a fantastic job with this.”  Stacy loved approval.  Buttering her up never hurt, and she deserved the praise this time.  “We need to hold off on any further experiments along those lines, though.  Right now, the first Focuses are all worked up, and we need to let them settle down.”

Tonya was at her most gently persuasive with those two sentences.  After three hours of well-earned bragging about her success, Stacy should be open and persuadable.  If Tonya convinced her to back off, Patterson’s demand, this would not only save her own skin but also give the Cause valuable information.  A success all the way around.

She didn’t expect any problems, as Stacy always saw reason when Tonya turned on her charismatic charm.  Subtle persuasion was Tonya’s specialty.  Oh, Stacy would probably refuse at first, bargain a bit, extract something nominal from Tonya, but Tonya always needed to give ground when doing business with an Arm.

After only a couple of words of Tonya’s command, though, Stacy grimaced slightly and kicked on her full predator effect.  Something made Stacy angry enough to be beyond the control of any Focus’s charisma.  Angry enough for the Arm’s emotional control to crack, an extreme rarity.  Tonya studied Keaton’s reaction carefully, as Stacy Keaton was one of the most dangerous people on Earth, a sadistic serial killer with a torture chamber in her basement.