Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) (41 page)

“Who might you be?” Zielinski said.  His bodyguards didn’t hear him speak, either.  As usual, bodyguards were proving to be no protection whatsoever against the more talented Major Transforms.

“The Crow La Brea.”

Not a familiar name.

“What can I do for you?”  Hank paused.  “And why do you say she set me up?”

“My people want to help Arm Keaton in her struggle, and we have an information packet we want to pass along to her, as a gift.”  The Crow’s voice was a whisper, barely heard.  “We’ve enclosed several letters as well.  We thought we’d be able to hand these over to Focus Rizzari today, during her visit, but since she isn’t here, we’ve come to a different conclusion regarding the day’s events.”

“I don’t believe Focus Rizzari is in contact with Arm Keaton.”

“We see no need for direct contact.  We give the information to Focus Rizzari, to pass to Focus Rickenbach, then to Arm Hancock, and then to Arm Keaton.”

“I see.”  Typical Crow caution.  La Brea was a thin man, about Zielinski’s height, with short light brown hair and eerie dark blue eyes.  He put no effort into hiding his Crowness, complete with the half-distracted air of someone paying far more attention to his metasense than to his eyes.  “Can I ask which first Focus the information is about?”

La Brea smiled.  “Our files on you appear accurate, Dr. Zielinski.”  He paused, and for a few moments, his face went blank.  Zielinski perked himself up with sudden shock.  Metasense-based verbal communication!  “Guru Athabasca agrees.  The information concerns Focus Fingleman and a business your faction has investigated; we seek to ally with Arm Keaton.”

“I’ll make sure to pass this along,” Zielinski said.  Chrysanthemum.  Shit.  La Brea had just fingered Fingleman as one of Chrysanthemum’s owner slash directors.  “So, what is Focus Rizzari up to today?  Why did she set me up, as you claim?”

“You tell me.  All I have are wild guesses and suppositions.”

Zielinski nodded, then realized in horror he
knew
.  Lori had sent him chasing this particular wild goose to keep him away from her while she made a blind leap into the darkness.  How ludicrous was it that this strange Crow fell for the same lie Lori told him, and met him in this empty house.  Zielinski kept his face blank while his stomach churned.  “I have no idea,” he said, a bald-faced lie.  “Do you have any interest in setting up contact with me?  I’m always interested in conversations with previously unknown Crows.”  Especially Crows using techniques his Crow friends hadn’t mastered.

“We are in contact with a friend of yours, a Dr. Van Reijn.  If you wish, we can pass along word to him that you can contact the Judges through him.  He won’t know the names I mentioned.”  Van Reijn, eh?  Well, that cleared up one mystery.  Dr. Van Reijn, Zielinski’s European counterpart, had been in contact with American Crows for about five years, but he had never been able to pry from Van Reijn
which
Crows.

“Judges?” Hank said.  It was a strange name for a Crow faction.

“Our name for ourselves.”  A faint smile crept over La Brea’s face.  No, La Brea wouldn’t answer his question.  “Goodbye, Dr. Zielinski.”  With that, La Brea vanished from Hank’s sight.  A two inch thick manila folder appeared on the floor where the Crow had been standing.

Carol Hancock: November 24, 1972

I waved at Darrell as I got out of my car.  He watched from the lookout tower disguised as a children’s tree house.  His giant afro bobbed as he nodded in response, but he made no other motion to attract attention.

The scent of stale take-out Chinese greeted me as I opened the door from the garage.  I sniffed, disgusted, and tried yet again to figure out when I could squeeze some time out of my schedule to do some real cooking.  Not tonight.  I needed a shower too badly, and then I hoped to get a couple of hours of actual sleep.  I mopped my face, again, with the towel hanging around my neck, took two steps toward the bathroom, and stopped.

I heard someone in my torture chamber.

Besides the victims, that is.  I shook my head in disbelief.  No one was supposed to be able to break in past my perimeter guards, enter my torture chamber, and entertain one of my guests.

No one was supposed to want to.

I had already put in twenty hours of work today, prompted by my meeting with Keaton the previous week, and I fought exhaustion.  The Network takeover still ate vast amounts of my time; no matter how many Network operative jobs I fobbed off on my Arms, Keaton’s list remained far too long.  I refused to do any of the Network jobs in a sloppy fashion.  Whether Keaton fucked up or not, the Network was
mine
, after this.  Which, until Keaton fucked up, if she ever did, made it
hers
.  I continued to towel off and backed up to one of my storage rooms, where I put on my new combat boots and oiled my elbow and knee callus pads.  It figured the first time I might need my new combat method would be after an hour and a half of sparring with Webberly; my body was one large head-to-toe ache, and I didn’t have the juice count I would need when I went after Haggerty or Bass.

Finished with my preparations, I crept down the staircase, my own metapresence masked, trying to ignore the sexual heat of my own torture chamber.  The intruder entertained Walter, and Walter didn’t enjoy the ministrations.

My meeting with Keaton last week hadn’t been a disaster.  Just Rayburn, Keaton’s students and me.  Keaton treated me like shit, picky and second-guessing, but she showed no interest in my basement work, my side projects, or my relationships with my former Cause allies.  No, just her orders, and how well I followed them.  Which I had.  My success didn’t please her at all, and it should.  I remained in her doghouse, and came out of the meeting with more time consuming projects to complete.

I held three men in my abattoir of blood and gore, Thanksgiving leftovers.  Two of them remained chained to the wall on the far side, and one man, Walter, had been freed from his wall chains and chained across one of the racks set up for play.  Frank the serial rapist and murderer followed me with wild mad eyes from his wall chains, while Davie remained curled up in a fetal ball, his mind nearly gone.  Perhaps I had been a little hard on him in the past days, but I didn’t like men who raped eight year old boys.

I stopped, frozen on the third to last step, when I realized the intruder was not only masked from my metasense, but also invisible.  Not invisible to Walter, though.  Poor Walter, so successful at being a predator.  He worked at an insane asylum, and he liked to indulge in a little torture on the side.  A lot of torture, actually.  For a normal, he knew his stuff.  Walter knew enough to hit his helpless victims right where they were weakest, and he carefully and slowly would drive them farther and farther into mind-broken insanity.

So, what did Walter see?  I took to the ceiling, spider style, and scuttled along while studying Walter with all my capabilities.  I knew Walter enough to be able to read his mind like the proverbial open book.

Walter saw Death in its popular conception: skeletal, black cloaked, the scythe, the works.  I made my guess and dropped to the floor, giving up any pretense of stealth.

“Lori.  What the fuck are you doing here?”

No answer.  Had I guessed wrong?  I assumed the worst and advanced at Arm speed, using my new combat tricks and burning juice as I approached.  I located my target based on where Walter saw Death and attempted a body grab and toss.

I grabbed nothing but air.  No surprise, unfortunately; the concepts behind my new combat method were my take on Lori’s standard combat tricks.  If we both went after each other this way, we might not hit each other even once during the fight.

“Talk to me, Lori,” I said.

“Why?”

Lori’s voice, but from everywhere.  She had me.  I couldn’t tell where her charisma effects stopped and her witch effects started.  Her next step? Take me, break me, and get me to lead her to Keaton at a time when Keaton’s Arm entourage wasn’t protecting her.  Lori would successfully surprise Keaton, and Keaton wouldn’t walk out of the encounter alive.  Whether Lori walked out of the encounter alive or not was a big question, but I understood her strategy.  One Focus, albeit a physically powerful one, was a worthy sacrifice to the Cause if she took Keaton down with her.

However, this idiocy was
not
why I ‘invited’ Lori to Chicago.  She was supposed to defeat me and find a way to rip me out of my darkness.  I refused to let a Focus I loved take the hits that should be mine to absorb.

“Dammit, Lori, you were supposed to think of a way to get us out of this mess, not make it worse.”  Instead, she came up with
this
.  Crap.

“Getting us out of this mess is your job, Commander,” Lori said.  “Come up with something better than my idea.”

I sat down on the blood-dampened floor and gave up on any pretense of self-defense.  Lori had me if she wanted, and, truthfully, getting her to take me down was why I wanted her in Chicago.

“What’s your idea, Lori?”

“My idea is to join you and Keaton,” Lori said.  I heard lust in her voice.

No!  I buried my head in my hands.  The Focus I loved had gone around the bend.  “If this is some sort of half-assed attempt to send me on a guilt trip, it’s not going to work.”

“I told you long ago that Suzie Schrum was mine to kill,” she said.  “That’s one.  Keaton knows enough about Focus psychology to know her plan won’t work.  That’s two.”

Damn.  Lori was serious.  My beast had seduced her back into full Lady Death mode.  I felt the repressed ache in my loins again, growing, growing.  The beast inside thought Lori’s idea was wonderful.

“If the Arms start to poach Transforms, no blackmail imaginable is going to work on the Focuses, and there goes Keaton’s political power over them,” Lori said.  “That’s standard Focus psychology: the lives of their Transforms come first.  Keaton understands this, so I’m guessing she’s got something else in mind.”

She gave Keaton more credit for logical thought than I did.  “Besides Schrum, what do you get out of this?  You and the witches, that is.”

Lori laughed.  She became visible, finally.  Blood soaked the hem of her black cloak.  I wasn’t sure whether the image was real or illusion.  “The other witches told me to go to Chicago and work miracles with Gail.  Ordered me to stick my head in the noose.  I warned them they might regret sending me here.  They didn’t listen, or, in Polly’s case, wanted this.  Tonya and Connie even thought I might talk you into breaking with Keaton.  They didn’t listen to me when I hinted that I thought Keaton’s plan was better than the plan we were working with.  Commander.”

Damn.  Keaton’s plan did have the advantage of being faster, and Lori’s personal visualization of the Cause always led her to be the most time conscious of us all.

“Keaton’s way lies anarchy.  The collapse of civilization.”

“Nothing either you or I or anyone else has come up with leads anywhere else.”

“Inferno disagrees.”  Inferno’s idea, an armed assault on Keaton, also led to anarchy.  In my opinion.

“My esteemed colleagues are stalling for a miracle.  So am I, but I think the miracle is more likely under a Keaton world dictatorship than with a dead Keaton.”

Ah.  Keaton this, Keaton that, but no mention of Keaton’s current strategist.  “And if in the process you goad Bass into trying for you or one of your Transforms, you’re convinced there’ll be one less Bass in the world.”  One less Bass, and leaving Lori close to Keaton, to influence the boss Arm away from Bass’s idiocy.  I began to see the possibilities of Lori’s plan.

“I didn’t mention
her
,” Lori said.  “You did.”  Standard Major Transform doublethink.  Don’t leave home without it.  “Don’t forget, Commander, that you’re the one who bridled and nurtured my darkness.  I don’t have the urge to torture innocents, or even flawed humans like Frank and Davie who just deserve death, but, well, you saw what I was doing with Walter.  Eternal torment is too good for ones such as him.  Keaton’s path is seductive.  I feel the call deep inside me.  Arms aren’t the only ones who want more freedom of action.”

Lori, or the illusion of Lori, put her hands on my shoulders.  Her power washed through me, her anger and her need to ‘just do something’.  “I lost my job, my career and my position as leader of the likely-dead Cause.  I can’t be in the same room as the Eskimo Spear anymore, and I can barely find anyone in the Dreaming.  I’m pathetic at Hank’s new codified juice crap and Inferno’s ready to lock me in a closet and make me a Weak Focus household’s Weak Focus for real.  All Sky and I ever do any more is argue, the Crow I truly love is stuck with my
student
, and there’s something about Rickenbach and Hargrove in the same room together, and gossiping, that makes me want to pull my hair out.”  She paused.  “So, Commander, which way shall we go?  Tell me you have a better idea than mine.”

I laughed.  Lori’s idea about joining me was far better than anything I had come up with.  “Let’s say you agree to join me.  Then what?”

“We tag each other.  We can’t trust each other without mutual tags in a situation so ripe with betrayal opportunities.  I’ve seen how well your mutual tag with Gail works.  We can save you tagging Inferno for later, for instance, if you need an instant army for some reason or other.”