Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (25 page)

He brushed the thought of Lori and Inferno away.  She was gone for good, and he had another Focus now.  He spotted a minute amount of dross embedded in Melanie’s juice structure.  He imagined his projected metasense hands as delicate surgical instruments.  Carefully, imagining a little suction, so small as to be almost microscopic, he sucked up the tiny amount of dross.  Melanie turned to him and smiled.

“Hello, Melanie,” Gilgamesh said.

“Hi yourself,” she said, coming toward him.  “You want a cheese puff?  Isabella makes these wonderful cheese puffs.”

Gilgamesh nodded and took the proffered cheese puff.  “Thank you.”  She sat down on the couch next to him.

“So what are we supposed to call you, now?  Guru Gilgamesh?”

“How do you address your Focus?”  Gilgamesh asked.

“Oh, well, mostly we just call her Gail.  Unless we’re in public, or she’s pissed off.  Then we call her ma’am.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “That sounds fine with me, too.”

Melanie grinned.  “So do you get pissed off much?”

“I don’t think so, actually.”  Melanie moved closer to him, and pressed her leg up against his.  If he didn’t know better, she appeared to be interested in more than just a little conversation.

Not too surprising, given her juice count.  Gail was putting a lot of effort into juicing everyone into a good mood for the party, and Melanie definitely rode a juice high, with all the libido high juice implied.

Well, he thought to himself, as his body responded in no uncertain terms, this certainly cast a new light on things.  He wondered what Gail would think if he slept with one of her women.  No, he didn’t need to wonder.  Lori’s visit, with a half dozen Inferno people, had changed Gail’s world and convinced her to commit to the Cause.  Knowing the lusty Inferno women, he couldn’t imagine they hadn’t told Gail and her people about all the benefits of having a Crow in the household.

He smiled at Melanie.  If he wasn’t mistaken, Melanie was now fertile, at least with him.  How strange.  How Sky-like.  He wondered if he would be able to father children, too.  Besides Lori, two Transform women of Inferno had each defied the Transform infertility problem to produce a child with Sky.  Certainly not enough to reverse the oncoming collapse of humanity, but enough to give hope.  And he would love a child or two of his own.

Melanie turned away from him.  “Oh, no.  John!” she said.  Carol had just tripped up one of Gail’s bodyguards and was in a clinch, getting hotter by the moment.

“All right, everyone, let’s find somewhere else to party,” Gilgamesh said, putting all the authority he could manage into his voice.  There on the floor, clothes began to fly.

“Will he be okay?” Melanie said.

“He’ll be fine,” Gilgamesh said.  Except for the Commander and the bodyguard, the whole room eyed Gilgamesh.  “Let’s just give them some privacy.  He’ll be fine.  Come on.  Out of the room.”

People started to move.  One white faced normal woman grabbed hold of his hand and said “That’s my husband.”  Gilgamesh winced.

“He’ll be fine,” he said, as he shooed her out the door.  “Don’t blame him for this.  Carol can do some things to a man that aren’t exactly natural.  This isn’t his fault.”

“Is he going to be all right?” the woman said, even more worried.

“He’ll be fine.  I promise.  He’ll be fine.”

“Come on, Ann.”  The speaker was an older man, a normal, and he took Ann’s hand in his.  “It’ll be all right.  Come on into the kitchen.  You can stay with Isabella and me.”

Gilgamesh let her go, satisfied she was safe.  He found Melanie still attached to his side.

“I know where we can find some privacy of our own,” she said.

Gilgamesh smiled.

Gail Rickenbach: October 9, 1972

“This sounds too good to be true, Gail,” Beth Hargrove said.  Her green eyes lost focus momentarily as she scanned Gail’s household.  She metasensed the new improvements immediately.

“We can take the benefits even farther than this,” Gail said, bouncing on her toes in the hallway.  She hadn’t taken the time to braid her hair this morning, and it flowed like a chestnut river today, a full yard behind her as she bounced.  “But even with what little we’ve done, I’ve got room for at least one more triad.  Possibly more, but I don’t want to push yet.  These mutual tags are amazing, and there’s a Crow in the house for the first time ever.  Can you feel the improvement?”

Beth nodded, her sparkling red curls bobbing.  “Yes.  What’s the drawback?”

“I haven’t found any, yet.”  Gail led Beth into her office, and offered Beth a seat.  “So,” Gail said.  Too excited to sit in a chair, she perched herself on her desk.  A couple of papers wafted from the desk to the floor.  “If you want to help, I’ve got an offer.”  Gail’s office was a cheery place in its college-student style cramped chaos and the absurdity of piled-high furniture and lines of boxes arching overhead.  A plate of cookies already waited for them on the tiny table between the guest chairs.

“An offer.”  Beth took a deep breath.  “What sort of offer?”

“How’d you like to do this with your household?”

Beth blinked.  “How?”

“Well, think of the numbers.  There’s about as many Crows as Focuses, but only a few Arms.  So each Arm is going to get to support multiple Focus households, and I’ve talked to Arm Hancock, and she’s open to the idea, if we can come up with a Crow for you.”

“Uh, Gail, I’ve never met a Crow.  That I know of, at least.”

“There were some at my wedding reception,” Gail said.  She suspected Beth had been using her charisma to shove her politically hazardous dealings with Crows into her subconscious.

“So you say.  I seemed to have missed them.”

“Well, the Crow who’s moved in here, Gilgamesh, has a friend who works with him named Newton.”

“Okay.  Invite him over, and we can talk.”

Gail blushed.  “It’s not that simple.  Newton’s a bit more skittish than Gilgamesh.”

“So the drawback is the Crows, eh?” Beth said.  Gail nodded.

“I knew there had to be something.  What do I do, then?” Beth said.  She smiled and picked out an orange and black pumpkin cookie from the plate.

Gail had been through this years ago.  “You start by writing to the Crow.  Leave him gifts.  Then talk to him on the telephone.  Think of dating the shyest boy in high school, and then realize the Crows are even shyer than that, and you’re going to be the one making all the moves.”

Beth laughed.  “Let me guess.  Doing the wink wink nudge nudge ‘come over here big boy’ routine sends Crows screaming the other direction.”

“Yes.  Worse, they’re all practically immune to Focus charisma, and they aren’t talkative.  I’ve known Gilgamesh for years, and I still don’t have a good feel for him as a person.”

Beth ran her hands through her buoyant curls, and smiled.  “Sounds like you need to do some work yourself, Gail.”

“Uh huh.  Yah, I need help.  At times, it’s almost as if he’s not here, save that the household just works better and the dross seemingly walks out of the place on its own.  I’d like someone else – you, Beth – to compare notes with.  How hard can it be to partner with a Crow if a rough-and-tumble Arm can do it, anyway?”

“Uh, right.  Knowing Arms, she probably saved his life in a fight to the death or something.”

Gail giggled.  “The first time they met in person was during a fight against a Hunter.”

“Gads.  I can’t see that working for Focuses.”

“Yeah.  We’re going to need to come up with our own way of working with Crows.  Here’s Newton’s post office box addresses.  He doesn’t own a phone, or at least not that Gilgamesh is willing to admit to me.  If you can figure out how a Focus can make friends with a Crow, you’ll be doing us all a whole lot of good.”

“Well,” Beth said.  “I can give this a try.”

Tonya Biggioni: October 12, 1972

“Carol?” Tonya asked, shocked.  No ring of the doorbell, no call from the guard.  Tonya had merely sensed something odd, and came to investigate.  She hadn’t expected an Arm on her doorstep, especially one not normally welcome in her household without an invitation.  Tonya glanced around warily for her guards.

“Sorry, toots, sudden change of plans,” Hancock said.  She barged right on in as if she lived there, trailing a dolly piled with boxes.  As she went around a hallway corner, she started whistling.

“Ma’am, why did you open the door?” one of the guards asked.  Neither he nor the second door guard showed any sign they had seen or heard Hancock.

What if this wasn’t Hancock?

Tonya paled.  “Lock down the house.  No one goes in or out until I give the all clear.”  She sprinted down the corridor after Hancock, leaving the unnerved guards scrambling to follow her orders.

One of her cooks met her halfway down the hallway to the kitchen.  The woman walked dreamily toward Tonya while wearing a juice zombie’s will-less eyes.  Tonya muttered a fierce obscenity under her breath, and sprinted faster.

Tonya found the intruder in her household’s kitchen, unloading a truly massive amount of food from her cargo boxes.  No, not food,
ingredients
.  Enough roasts to feed the entire household.  Oysters.  Huge portabella mushrooms.  Fresh Italian sausage.  Fresh vegetables.  White chocolate.  More.

Tonya stopped, took a deep breath to calm herself, and followed the deep breath with a charismatic self-calming.  She cranked up her metasense.  Yes, an Arm, someone and something new, carrying two Arm tags, a Crow tag and a Focus tag, along with the ‘weight of the world’ shadow associated with the effects of a Focus’s tags on her household.

“Put the mushroom and the knife down, turn around and start explaining yourself,” Tonya said.  “Whoever you are, you’re not…”

“‘Put the mushroom down’?  Tonya, that’s limp, even for you.” The intruder did turn, and she and Tonya locked eyes, dueling with their charisma.  The intruder laughed.  “Hey, you really think I’m some sort of enemy, don’t you?  How come?”

Tonya sighed and gave up on the charisma battle.  “You don’t metasense like Carol Hancock.”

“You picked up on the improvements?  That’s part of why I’m here, to give you the good news.  We’ve made a breakthrough.  We being me, Gail, and Gilgamesh.”

“You got the juice draw working?  Or the household tuning?”

“Nope.  Something completely different.  Here’s the deal,” Hancock said, and tossed Tonya a thin report.  “All we were trying to do was speed things up, but instead we’ve solved a bunch of problems we didn’t know we even could solve.  We’ve just saved a ton of lives.  It’s time for the Focuses to celebrate.”

Tonya weighed the odds and decided the intruder was Hancock before she scanned the report.  After reading the report she sank down into a wooden stool as she flipped through it again.  “Holy Mother of God,” she whispered.  “Salvation and apocalypse in one easy package.”  Instant Inferno-style households.  Just add Crows, Arms and tags, and you end up with at least a triad worth of openings plus fertile Focuses and Arms, at least with the Crow, plus marginally fertile household women.  “This is going to turn the whole world upside down.”

“Unfortunately, here’s the bad news,” Hancock said, and tossed a soiled and partly mangled galley proof at Tonya, loaded with bookmarks.  Tonya caught it, and read the title.

‘Two Arms too Many’, written by an Edward N. Mackey.  There was something familiar about that name, so Tonya used a small juice pattern to summon up the memory.

“Your stock clerk Ed, from Philadelphia,” she said.  Carol’s lover from the time of her training with Keaton, six years ago.  Hancock nodded.  Tonya muttered an unhappy word under her breath, and flipped hurriedly through the marked sections.

“This Ed person, if he actually wrote the book, refers to me as Tuberculosis,” Tonya said, not amused.  “According to Shadow, that’s a term Chevalier’s Crows use for me.”  TB.  Tonya Biggioni.  “This is a setup.”

“Read on,” Carol said.

Tonya read.  In the galley proof, he referred to Hancock as ‘Beth O’Neil’, an identity she used during her training.  “Keaton as ‘Suzie Patterson’?”

“Some asshole Crow must have been stalking me after my recovery from withdrawal,” the Commander said.  “Suzie Patterson was an identity I used then.”  Tonya shook her head.

Mackey referred to only two Crows, ‘The Writer’ and ‘Mr. Panic’.  Tonya read a marked section about feeding surplus male Transforms to Stacy, and in another section a rough outline of her little lucrative side business, evaluating stolen goods for several families of organized criminals.  “Damn.”

“It’s going to be pretty tough to do much about Ed,” the Commander said.  “Read the afterward.”

The afterward was the usual ‘this book would not have been possible without the help of…’ After a list of mundane names and likely Crow aliases was the name Erica Eissler, and the information that the author currently lived in Stuttgart, West Germany.  Ed, if he existed at all, was under Arm Eissler’s protection.

“I got a letter from Shadow, first week of October, stating Chevalier’s group had agreed to stop harassing other Major Transforms after a certain nasty Detroit Focus forcibly reminded them of the old agreements,” Tonya said.  She was glad she hadn’t been present when Wini killed the Crow spy.  She preferred to remember the relatively kinder, gentler and saner Wini from a decade ago.  “The agreement didn’t last long, apparently.”