The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Read online

  “Ma’am, yes,” an older man said. “Several evenings a week.”

  “You are?” I asked, though I already knew both his names.

  “Here, I’m Crow Dusk.”

  “You aren’t a Crow.”

  “I’m an Appointed Crow. That’s the way we do things here.”

  I rolled my eyes in feigned disgust. “The world has enough Crows already without someone needing to fake being one,” I said. Lying. The ‘appointed Major Transform’ thing was my idea.

  “Ma’am, if there’s a problem…”

  I interrupted him. “Who’s the real boss, here?”

  A younger man wearing a worn yet conservative suit raised his hand. His hand shook, and needed washing. “I am. I’m Reverend Louis Michnik.”

  “Are you a real minister, or are you just appointed, like this supposed Crow.”

  “I am, or was, until I got disgusted with my old denomination, which…” I chopped my hand to cut him off; I knew as Angela that Michnik could prattle on for hours about absolutely nothing.

  “You need to move out of Chicago,” I said. My predator effect was full on, now, and the lot of them cowered in terror, as far away from me as they could scramble. “Look at me.” They did. How could they not? “Earlier today, my enemies staged an attack on a place I consider mine. I barely survived. I allowed you to stay in my city, as I think your group is sort of cute, but my enemies are going to go after anything that even hints of being mine, and that includes your group. I don’t have the resources to protect you.”

  Their expressions turned from terror to horror, but in the face of my predator, they didn’t say anything. “You don’t need to go far. Milwaukee would be fine.” I would slip them some money so they could survive. “Consider this another piece in your ongoing spiritual transformation. Every Transform goes through something similar to what you are about to go through; your people should do so as well.”

  They nodded, as this did fit with what some of their group already said, if you define ‘some’ as my tamer alter ego, Angela. With any amount of luck, they would regroup in Milwaukee as a proper Transform household would.

  I wasn’t sure, though. They might need more prods.

  I would provide. Eventually.

  ---

  “So what did we learn from the Littleside attack?” I said. I had my entire Arm crew coming by, tomorrow – no, later today – and I wanted to sleep and get juice from Gail and make up with Lori and kiss her into submission. Eat a prime rib roast. Finish healing. Take another shower. Mourn the loss of my mission RV, Gomorrah, blown to bits by RPG fire during the initial Attack Focus assault. On purpose, given that nothing else in the parking lot suffered more than surface damage.

  Little charred pieces of crispy Carol still wafted from me whenever I moved. I refused to look in a mirror. Damn, burns hurt like hell.

  But, no, I was stuck chairing a goddamned meeting at one in the goddamned morning. No Hank; the bastard had held out on us until he practically fainted from blood loss from the bullet he took in the fleshy part of his right leg. That left Gail, Lori, and Sky in the River Room of the Branton. The room was a comfortable place filled with old overstuffed chairs and littered with miscellaneous newspapers and magazines. A plate with half of a two-day old cinnamon roll hid behind somebody’s barf-green hand-knitted afghan. If I didn’t know I was going to get some real Arm food once I finished the damned meeting, that half a roll would already be gone.

  “Adkins doesn’t know our real capabilities,” Lori said, slumped down in her chair and half asleep. A judgment I agreed with.

  “Well, I learned prophetic warnings aren’t useful. Also, having combined households let Lori tag back a wounded Transform of hers that I tagged for support purposes without forcing my tag off,” Gail said. She remained nervous and hyper-aware, typical for any Major Transform after her first real battle.

  “Not unexpected,” I said. “Patterson has multi-tagged Transforms.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Sky said. He sat curled in his chair with his arms around his knees, Crow nerves finally catching up with him. I expected him to start shivering at any moment. “Now we’re at best only five years behind her.”

  “For once, I saw no signs of Bass in the attack,” I said. “Did any of you?” Heads shook around the room. “I guess that’s something.” Was Adkins the only one of our enemies Bass wasn’t cooperating with?

  Gail tapped a well-chipped index fingernail on an end table, loud. “What was going on out there, anyway? Why were you letting Carol juice suck you, Lori?”

  Lori watched Gail, heavy lidded. “I had to do something about Carol’s battle damage. I know a few tricks other Focuses don’t seem to be able to learn.” Crap. Here’s Gail putting all this work into learning how to give juice to an Arm, and Lori manages to feed me juice just when she needs to. I wondered how I would be able to convince Gail that just because Lori could do something didn’t mean any other Focus in the world could duplicate it. We needed something repeatable, not just another insane Lori Special.

  “But what did you do?” Gail said.

  “I sequestered my fundamental juice so Carol couldn’t get at it. Then I just gave her a bit of my supplemental juice to get her started, pumped in juice from my juice buffer, and let her go. I figured I could cut it off when I needed to, and she wouldn’t do any damage because she was only taking supplemental juice.” Lori grimaced. “My trick didn’t work. Carol’s too strong. She sucked up the juice patterns I was using for the sequestering and drew my fundamental juice anyway.”

  Gail turned to me, and her expression of appalled horror was priceless. “You didn’t kill her! How!”

  I laughed. Damn, my lungs still hurt. I needed to crawl into bed and sleep for an entire four hours. “The tag. Drawing Lori’s fundamental juice hurt me as much as it hurt Lori. I stopped functioning on automatic and interrupted the draw.” Gail nodded thoughtfully, considering the problems with Lori’s method of giving juice to an Arm. About how Lori was likely the only Focus on the planet able to both set up and survive such an appalling trick.

  “How’d you manage to learn that trick, anyway?” Lori asked. She had asked before, but at the time, I was dead on my feet. “I didn’t know Arms could interrupt a draw.”

  “I learned it one painful mangled male Transform at a time,” I said.

  Lori winced. Gail didn’t.

  Ominous.

  “So what was with the formality when you were healing John?” Gail said, to me. Twisty Focus she was, she could change the subject with the best.

  “You felt it. An Arm taking a knife to a Focus’s Transform is an attack, even if we’re all tagged together like a Gordian knot. No surgeons back when we evolved…” From Gail’s reaction I realized I didn’t answer correctly. “So you felt it, too, when you gave me juice?”

  “Yes. You’re in my heart, just like Van and Gilgamesh.”

  “Now do you understand why I was so leery of us tagging each other? Juice effects are dangerous when they muck with the mind.”

  “Speaking of mucking with the mind,” Lori said. “You need to do the official tagging of Inferno. Keaton didn’t say you couldn’t, and I think we’re going to need every trick we can think of when we pull off our attack. You saw how weak Morris was? I smell a big rat, and I’m going to give you long odds that you’re going to find Focus Elspeth much more than you can handle without Inferno’s backing. If you want to bring her in alive, that is.”

  I nodded, not sure I agreed with Lori’s ‘rat’. Morris, a first Focus leader, being a relative pushover while Pitre, a first Focus but not a leader, took a hell of a lot of Arms to turn… An awful small sample size for generalizations. Still, I wasn’t interested in taking any chances, and the track record on Lori’s gut-feel warnings was far too high to discount. “I agree. Now, what was that comment about prophetic warnings, Gail?”

  “One of my Dreaming friends gave me some ideas to chew on just before you dragged me out of Detroit. She predi
cted I would be attacked by an Attack Focus.”

  “Who?”

  Gail turned away for a moment. “The Madonna.” I winced. She hadn’t appeared in my dreams recently, probably due to Patterson’s malign influence. “She doesn’t predict the future, Carol. I think she saw someone’s plans without realizing what they meant.”

  I glared over at Lori, and she just shrugged and turned away. No, my partner in darkness wasn’t going to say anything more about the Madonna of Montreal. Despite the fact that said Madonna had been protecting me and manipulating me since the day I transformed. I still didn’t like it.

  “Did the Madonna say anything else?” The only thing worse than mystic mumbo-jumbo was correct mystic mumbo-jumbo.

  “Let’s see. She also said ‘the day of Transform ascendance approaches due to Gilgamesh’s inspiration’ and ‘the true enemy is she without family’. I think the first was about fertility and Crow tagging, and the only thing that makes sense for the second is Arm Bass, because of the fact unknown enemies kidnapped her pre-transformation family last year.”

  “True enemy?” I snorted. Bass had certainly put a knot in the Cause’s tail, that’s for sure, and made my life utter hell, and wanted me dead or dominated, but I certainly didn’t put her in the Patterson – Enkidu league, or anywhere close.

  Unfortunately, the Madonna’s track record for her warnings was even better than Lori’s.

  We did the household tagging the next morning, at breakfast. Gail’s household would have freaked out beyond repair at what I did. Inferno? I cooked them breakfast, personally handed them their food in the kitchen, gave them a big kiss on whatever body part they felt appropriate, and tagged them as they went by. They loved the attention.

  Tagging Inferno affected me differently than tagging Gail’s household did. Sure, there was a bit of the older lust involved, but since it wasn’t Friday they exuded ample Yankee primness, even the young lusty ones. Instead, they all radiated something unexpected. Battle lust. Intellectually, I knew exactly what Inferno did, and how – but emotionally? Emotionally, they were a poor defenseless Focus household that the big nasty Arm needed to protect.

  Fat fucking chance of that. Their Hall of Memories, with all those pictures of fallen Inferno members, was larger than a goodly number of Focus households!

  I, for one, wouldn’t want to be a big nasty Arm trying to take them. I would end up a big nasty dead Arm. When you go after a household like Inferno, you need your own army on your side or you’re doomed. Consider what happened to Adkins’ formerly alive Attack Focus and her thirty-three goons, against only six Inferno Transforms (we could discount Hargrove’s idiots as a negative factor, but not Gail’s people, who did an excellent job).

  In any event, with two households under my belt, I started to think those traitorous thoughts again. How many more households would I need, to be able to flip Keaton and tag her? Possibly another four or five, and I wasn’t sure I was up to supporting four or five more at the moment. No, I needed a few more Arms mixed in to the pot, as well. A few Nobles wouldn’t hurt, either. If that hunk Dowling would get off his ass and set himself up a Barony, I would be on his doorstep the next day, phobia or no phobia…

  Of course, dealing with Inferno did have its costs. In this case, the cost required me to tolerate Ann Chiron playing court fool, whispering in my ear about hubris and how I had just proved that Arms aren’t predators, but hunter-gatherers. Proved? Alas, my generosity in dropping those untagged Transforms off on Gail for her to tag had spread to Inferno. Inferno expected similar treatment, although their standards were quite a bit higher than Gail’s, as they wanted their dishwashers and housecleaners to be geniuses. Calling me a hunter-gatherer, though…that irked, even with supporting data.

  Gail gave me juice again, after I finished tagging Inferno and after I made the rounds at Littleside as Doc Hancock with her magic healing tongue. She took three tries to get the transfer right, but when she did, she gave me eight points.

  Incredible. Juice, just like that. I was going to need to take a break for a few days, or she would give me too much. Too much juice. I could hardly even imagine.

  My crew, with Lori as an honorary Arm, had a meeting scheduled at my recently acquired Chicago house to go over our final attack plans. I managed to talk Gail and Van down beforehand; they had a crazy idea about Gail going in on the Adkins attack. I pulled in Gilgamesh and buttered them up with the responsibility for keeping Chicago safe, and got them to agree. Even Gail admitted to being worried about the hungry Dreaming eyes the Hunters kept on Chicago.

  Lori forked over years of intelligence she had gathered on Schrum, buying permission to join Amy in the attack on Schrum and reducing my organization’s workload by about an Arm-week. I had thought the Fingleman secret info toe-curling; what Lori gave us on Schrum amazed even me, not just in the depths of Schrum’s evil, but in Lori’s restraint. Knowing what Lori knew, I would have karked the bitch years ago. Schrum’s withdrawal imprinting tricks were beyond any evil I had ever imagined.

  Giselle showed up over an hour early and all beat to crap, and we got to hear a story about an encounter of hers with a Monster pack of five near Janesville Wisconsin, Hunter controlled, but with no Hunter on site. This was new and worrisome, but Giselle at least made the story entertaining – the comic-opera version of a Haggerty heroic story. Even Lori found Giselle’s affectations amusing, such as her ability to kneecap Monsters with low-caliber firearms to deprive them of their movement. The more I saw of Giselle, the more I liked.

  Rose Webberly and Amy Haggerty showed up together a half hour before the meeting was supposed to start, which, given how much the two Arms despised each other was an amazing event in and of itself. Their juice structures were even more interesting. Haggerty was walking again. With a limp, but walking. The metal contraption had come off yesterday, and Zielinski thought the rod could come out in a couple of days. Haggerty had gone through an appalling amount of juice since the surgery.

  “What the hell is that?” I said, as soon as they came in the door.

  Haggerty pointedly sniffed the air and frowned. Normals might not notice, but there was no hiding the stench of a torture chamber from an Arm’s nose and she didn’t approve. I didn’t let myself sigh. This was war, and with Bass on the other side, interrogation was my job now.

  “They’re tags,” Webberly said, with a smug smile.

  “I can see that. You want to explain them to me?”

  “I’ve been working with Betsy and Mary on the tag project while we were checking out Teas and Elspeth, and I figured a few more things out.”

  Hell, did everyone have something else they thought they needed to do instead of track Focuses? My old orders never seemed to go away, they just got added to the new set.

  Except that wasn’t quite fair in Webberly’s case. Research projects weren’t the same kind of project as tracking Focuses. It made perfect sense that she didn’t consider there to be a conflict between the two assignments.

  I smiled at her in honest pleasure at her success. “Go on.”

  We sat down in the living room of my new house and listened to the wind rustle the bare branches of the trees in the back yard. This place felt better than my warehouse stronghold, and it was certainly better for entertaining. Tom came downstairs and joined us, and I heard Mary Beth in the kitchen, hurrying to prepare some food for the early-arriving Arms. My old country-style home had a huge kitchen and high ceilings, reminding me of the home where I grew up.

  Webberly leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, muscles rippling below the skin of her brown arms. “As we’ve already reported, tags are quite variable. I’ve managed to codify two of the axes of variation, and they’re both useful, ma’am.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The first I’m calling intensity, and it’s a step function. Unless you object, I’m referring to our normal tags as ‘full tags’. It’s pretty straightforward to go one step less intense than full tags, and t
hat’s the tag I’m wearing right now. The ‘half tag’.”

  I nodded. The half tag was clearly from Haggerty, but the tag sensed like it wasn’t all quite there. A pale imitation of a full tag. “What does it do?” I nodded briefly at Mary Beth as she set a plate and glass beside me. You served Arms based on rank, and it didn’t matter whether someone was a guest or not.

  “Mostly, it’s courtesy,” Rose said. “No accidental dominance signals, basic respect, there’s some obedience, but not as much as a full tag. Half-tags definitely ease the problems of getting on with the other Arm, as you can do mutual half-tags if you like.”

  “But?”

  “They aren’t as strong as full tags. You can’t run the predator effect echo through them, for instance. I think they would hold some of the tag effects I’ve seen you do, but not all of them.”

  Useful. I liked. “How difficult are half-tags to create?”

  “Not bad at all.” This was from Haggerty as she took a plate of summer sausage and a glass of iced tea from Mary Beth. Amy shifted a little, to ease the ache in her leg. “The half-tag doesn’t happen on its own like a full tag does, but it only took me a couple of minutes to figure out how.”

  “So, you like it?”

  She turned her hands one way, and then the other. “I would like a full tag on her, but the half-tag is better than nothing.” Of course she would rather have a full tag. After throwing Webberly out of her own territory, she should be glad for any tag at all.

  I nodded thoughtfully. We had hypothesized tags were an Arm specialty, potentially as useful as juice patterns for Focuses. Now, here was the first proof of our hypothesis.