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

  “Turn her over to me, now, and report to Arm Haggerty for a debriefing.” I didn’t have time for this. I had Amy set up in my fancy warehouse backup lair doing post-attack analysis and disaster coordination.

  “Ma’am, debriefing?” As in: ‘who the fuck are you to be giving me orders?’ No, Billington wasn’t the smartest Arm around, but any Arm of average intelligence and average social skills should realize she had just issued a formal challenge. I took a moment to examine Billington more closely, fearing enemy mind control or some other nasty bad-guy trick. I soon realized the real problem: when she saw me she saw the humbled Carol Hancock wearing a bunny suit, sucking shit in front of Keaton’s students, not the current me, the Commander and the boss Arm. There was no way she could bring herself to submit to me as a senior Arm with the bunny suit picture in her mind.

  Okay, a real challenge, not some mind-bent idiocy dropped into her brain by one of my many enemies. I shucked my coat and weapons and stalked toward her, crunching my way through the three inches of hard frozen snow lying below my feet. Her four people moved to intercept, but she waved them back and charged me. Good thing for her, as her four were but a mere second or two from death from my people.

  Five feet from me she settled into a boxer’s crouch, her favored combat form. Given her relative youth as an Arm, I could humble her with a single blow, empowered by my stature and my charisma, but I chose not to. Instead, I decided to work out my stress and tension. On her. Thus her surprise when I settled into a boxer’s crouch myself, and started punching. We were even the same weight class; although I had almost five inches on her, she balanced the height difference with her far heavier muscles. As with Giselle and Betsy, her pectorals almost came up to her ears, and she was another of those Arms who carried so many muscles she barely could pass as a normal man.

  I punched her out after forty seconds, and then backed off. I wasn’t anywhere near as de-stressed as I wanted to be, so I waited while she shook off the effects of my last flurry and burned juice to get back to her feet. When she recovered enough to be worth my efforts, I waded back in. She blinked at me, puzzled, wondering why I didn’t finish her off after she went down.

  Only after I punched her to the ground the second time, and for a second time backed off to let her recover, did she realize the depths of her problem. This was the first time one of the senior Arms had pulled the ‘I can beat you when I’m blindfolded and one of my arms is tied behind my back’ crap on her. She also knew the expected outcome, as it was part of our Arm lore – the defeated Arm ends up tagged against her will, the humble servant of the senior Arm, likely for a good long time.

  Now Billington fought with true desperation, using her holdout weapons and all the dirty martial arts tricks an Arm of her limited experience could muster. I kept boxing as I disarmed her, a tight sneer on my face as I beat it into her head that me, Carol Hancock and speed Arm, could beat her fighting with her combat specialty, boxing. She even ran in panic, after the fourth knockdown. I didn’t bother giving chase. As I expected, her own Arm instincts brought her to a halt a hundred yards away, after she turned to see me not giving chase but standing in a boxer’s crouch, simply motioning for her to come back with a gentle wiggle of my index finger.

  I didn’t need to say a word as she worked out my non-response in her head – that I could run her down with ease, even after a hundred yard head start. Given my juice count and my speed tricks, I expected I could run her down even if I gave her a three hundred and fifty yard head start. She slunk back, put up her hands, and let me continue to beat the crap out of her.

  Good for her.

  “Please, I give up!” Billington said, her voice a panicky alto. She lay on the now red-flecked snowy ground, arms and legs twitching uncontrollably, and having lost her water; I had beat her to the ground nine times, and I was feeling appropriately de-stressed. I no longer even minded the fact she stank of Houston air pollution, as she held one of my former territories as hers. Of course she gave up, now. She had burned her juice count down into the low 90s, leaving her with nothing left to burn for healing, or even standing.

  Perhaps now we could have a rational discussion. She no longer thought of me in terms of bunny suit images. Instead, she thought of me as one fast-moving bare-knuckled fist after another coming toward her now bloated and bruised face.

  “Me, Haggerty, or Webberly. Pick one, but you wear someone’s tag.” She still wore Keaton’s tag, and it would need to go, but I was saving that discussion until she entered my chain of command. I owned her now.

  I followed her thoughts as she considered her options. Webberly had just thrown her out of Oakland, and was less than a year older than she was, too close to her age for her pride to stand taking a tag. Amy might have been a good choice, but not everyone liked Haggerty’s heroic and often hyperkinetic style. Under other circumstances, she might have chosen me, but the humiliating way I beat her made that option a lot less attractive.

  “Choose,” I said. “You can pick who you work for, but you’re entering my chain of command.” The latter was more than just a tag demand. For an Arm, ‘in my chain of command’ meant she would be bossing around some of my subsidiary Arms, holding their tags. Thus, a carrot. Given the fact I was the boss Arm, a big carrot.

  She shivered, a lingering reaction to the misery of my efforts. “If I take your tag, will you treat me more gently?”

  “I always treat my people well.”

  She sighed. “I’m yours.” The juice moved.

  She smiled then, and relaxed. Her eyes held a look of wonder, the same look that always accompanied a new tag.

  “Well, this is a hell of a lot better than I expected,” she said. I smiled myself, and touched her cheek before I began to bandage up her wounds. Billington had character, and I could sympathize with an Arm bamboozled by Keaton. Besides, like nearly all of us, she distrusted Bass.

  “So I’ll follow you,” she said. “What do you want me to do with my Focus?”

  I gave her the address and began to fill her in on the intricacies of her new ‘chain of command’, and what had happened to her four thugs, now in the custody of my entourage.

  ---

  Wini screamed a scream of utterly inhuman terror as I put her gently back into her box. I had fed her, watered her, and wrapped her carefully in cloth bandages until she couldn’t move.

  I hadn’t hurt her. Not even a little.

  I had been blessed with an inspiration.

  I had first wanted to do to her what she had done to me: torture her, drain her of juice, and send her into withdrawal. The thought of it filled my fantasies.

  Then it occurred to me that while that treatment would be the stuff of nightmares for an Arm, dear Wini was a Focus, and the rules were different for juice producers than they were for juice consumers. A juice consumer fears the lack of juice more than anything in the world. I knew, however, that withdrawal for a Focus or a Crow wasn’t quite the horrible experience an Arm would suffer. Bad, yes, but not a Focus’s worst nightmare. They couldn’t drive themselves into withdrawal and they could dig themselves out by taking a short nap.

  For a juice producer, of course, the horror was too much juice.

  Normally, this wasn’t an issue for a Major Transform, because there were ways to burn off excess juice. Exertion, for instance, or healing. This was even less of a problem for the predators, as any extra juice just fell off. Exertion, though, wouldn’t work for a Focus bandaged tightly and locked inside a small box, far away from her household.

  She didn’t understand my plans yet. She worried, of course, in those endless hours in her box, but she didn’t know. Fully healed, she ran a juice count of 82.1 according to my little TI. Perfectly adequate for a Focus.

  Once she hit a hundred or so, I expected our conversations to become interesting. Once she got above 110, I expected her to tell me everything she could think of, to try to convince me to take her juice level down. I would listen and ask my questions, of course, bu
t I wouldn’t be taking down her juice. At 114, she would go Monster. I thought twenty-nine hours and eight minutes as a Monster sounded appropriate.

  In the meantime, I let her rest in her little box, dark and quiet, as she had done to so many of her own people for so many years.

  Appropriate.

  I danced my predatory stalk into the next room of my basement, hot and eager to enjoy myself. I won’t talk about the inventive cruelties I dreamed of. The Focuses cringed when they saw me.

  The larger room held four of them, each in a different corner, all chained and gagged, all with hearing range of Wini’s heartrending screams. Sibrian had been taking good care of them. Julius slept the healing trance of a Focus killed twice in one day. Morris hit the floor in a full prostration when I came into the room, as much as her bonds would let her. Elspeth and Teas watched me, wary.

  This room wasn’t the torture chamber. That was the next one over. The Focuses, of course, could smell it.

  Teas tried to trick me with her charisma. She failed. The charismatic message said she was important and interesting, and I should deal with her as an ally. Gail likely did better when she was a year past her transformation.

  I ignored Teas and checked Julius, who appeared to be healing nicely, and who hadn’t pulled any of Billington’s feared tricks. Morris also seemed adequately under control. Her bonds were secure and she seemed as healthy as I needed her to be. She shivered when I touched her and so I stroked her possessively along her sides.

  “You’re doing what I want,” I said, whispering in her ear. “Keep going as you are, and you’ll be fine.” She just stared at me, eyes wide and terrified, and I let her be.

  Elspeth was beautiful, like fine china among the heavy stoneware when compared to the other three. I did enjoy possessing her. She studied me carefully and did exactly as I wanted, adjusting position so I could inspect her bonds, shifting and turning to my cues. As an experiment, I indicated with a little twitch of my face muscles that I wanted her flat like Morris, and she laid out on the floor without hesitation. She used none of her impressive personal charisma on me. Whatever trick or tricks she possessed in her arsenal, she held them in reserve.

  By the time I returned my attention to Teas, she was practically twitching with frustration. I ignored her frustration and checked her bonds the same as I had checked the others. She wasn’t nearly as cooperative, and so I managed to make the process excruciatingly painful, and make it take quite a bit longer than with the others.

  Her already poor charisma took a nosedive when the pain hit, but she kept trying. She seemed to think I wouldn’t recognize her manipulations. I took her gag off.

  “Commander,” she said, immediately. Her comment was supposed to be ingratiating, but the pain from the contorted position of her ankle interfered.

  I snagged a weight bench from the corner storage pile and sat down quietly, waiting to be entertained.

  “Thank you for removing Focus Schrum from existence. I’m sure you know how long I’ve been looking forward to that blessed event.” At least this wasn’t a lie. “Commander, you know I’ve helped you in the past.” Save for when she opposed me. “Is this the way you treat a trusted compatriot?” Calling herself a ‘trusted compatriot’ was a lie beyond the bounds of the word.

  “Take your clothes off,” I said.

  Teas couldn’t control her shock. A sado-masochistic rape scene played in her head, with her in the receiving role. “Well, I think that may be a bit difficult for me,” she said, and rattled her chains. Her false laugh, which she put at the end of each of her little speeches, grated on my nerves.

  “If you really want to obey me, I’ll do it for you. If you ask me nicely.”

  She worked through the implications of my words. To get anywhere with her schemes, she realized she needed to placate me.

  “Why certainly, I would love it if you would take my clothes off for me.”

  “Not nice enough. Try again.”

  The look of frustration on Teas’ face was priceless. She took a breath and tried again. “Please could you take my clothes off?”

  I smiled. “Certainly. Since you ask so nicely.” I cut her clothes off. It took no more than a second or two, and the shreds fell to the floor.

  I eyed her body appraisingly and Teas began to sweat in the cold. She was beautiful, even better looking with her artifice stripped from her. Of the Focuses in my basement, she showed the least damage to her juice structure. She was salvageable; I just wasn’t sure how to get around her mental issues. “Anything else, Commander? I like working with you. We complement each other very well.”

  Teas didn’t mean a single word she said. Instead, she wanted to take the next jet across the pond to England. I couldn’t blame her, given the circumstances. Although Teas had fed Lori and me random information for years in exchange for trifles, Lori was convinced Teas’s bragging to Schrum about her dealings with Lori had goaded Schrum into the now dead first Focus’s more egregious backstabs against Lori. Teas feared Schrum – and me – and regularly played us against each other.

  “I have a dog,” I said. I didn’t, but I was sure I could get one of Gilgamesh’s student Crows to dig one up if she actually went for this. “An English Mastiff, six feet long from nose to tail. I’m going to bring him in here and I want to see you fuck him. Do a good job for me, all right?”

  Her eyes went wide with horror. Amazing. I thought Teas would do anything. I had actually hit a limit, which was too bad. It would have been hysterical to see one of the ruling first Focuses actually try to fuck a dog for me. I reached for the gag, slowly enough that she could see what I was doing.

  “Something else?” she said, panicked at the sight of the gag and the disappearance of her precious opportunity. I shook my head. I would love to play with her, but I was out of time. I stuck the gag back on her and left her lying bare ass naked and shackled to the cold concrete floor. She regretted not taking me up on the dog. Fool.

  Elspeth, Tonya and Gail’s paragon of virtue, didn’t move the entire time I harassed Teas. I dragged my bench over to her and took off her gag.

  She didn’t say a word. She hadn’t minded my work with Teas until I mentioned the dog, and now she thought less of me. I signaled her to get up to her knees and she did so.

  “So what am I going to do with you?”

  “Ma’am,” Elspeth said, still with no trace of her charisma. “I’ll do what you want. I won’t give you trouble in any way.”

  Nope, not a fool.

  “I hear you. Why are you being so cooperative?” I tipped her face up with my toe so that she looked at me.

  Her blue eyes darkened with weariness and fear. “When I’m here, my household is at risk.” She feared the Hunters. In her fear I sensed, finally, what my people’s research had missed: her secret merc army, a large merc army of Monster hunters and anti-Hunter scouts. My people missed them because, unlike normal Focus merc groups, they didn’t spend their time in Salt Lake City ready to defend Elspeth’s household. They wouldn’t gather around her until the Hunter war came. “Resisting you would be stupid. Games don’t seem like a good idea.” She indicated Teas with a tiny nod. “The inner circle’s power is gone. What other option do I have save obedience?”

  “What about your loyalty to Patterson?”

  “Are you going to defeat her?”

  I nodded and she looked away.

  “I hate her,” she said.

  “No you don’t.”

  Elspeth didn’t answer. I looked her over thoughtfully. Too many odd emotions ran through her, all tied up with Patterson. I recognized most of them. On me, with Keaton. On Tonya, with Patterson.

  “You want to hate her, but she owns you,” I said.

  Elspeth nodded.

  “How long?”

  “I met her for the first time a week after the escape from the Quarantine. I’d been a Focus for less than six months.” Fourteen years. Not good.

  “You can break free of her. Biggioni did
.”

  She smiled just a little and looked at the chains that held her. Freedom wasn’t exactly wandering around in abundance down here. I shrugged. What could I say? I wasn’t going to unlock the chains. Patterson could take over Elspeth long-distance at any time, I knew from my experiences with Tonya.

  “So, do I belong to you now?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to?”

  “I heard the call from your person, the one who said Patterson had captured Arms Keaton, Bass and Rayburn. You’re in charge now, ma’am.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Assuming I succeed in taking down Patterson.”

  “So now I work for you. What do you plan to do to my mind and body?”

  I enjoyed possessing her, but she seemed a bit too eager. I kept my expression under firm control as my emotions swung between the lust of possession and the snarls of paranoia. Fourteen years, her entire Transform life, and she had been under Patterson’s control. Not the straightforward hierarchy of an Arm tag, and not even the odd household ownership of a Focus tag, but something of Patterson’s twisted design.

  Elspeth thought she needed to be owned to be free. Such a sad Focus, but wise, very wise, all reflected in a once beautiful juice structure, ruined by years of ownership. She was right. We wouldn’t leave the first Focuses free to work their schemes again. For most of them, it would be the loss of a freedom they didn’t deserve. For Elspeth, we would deny her the freedom she never had.

  At least, I promised myself, I would use her better than Patterson. I told her so.

  She nodded. “Is there something I need to do to make it official?”

  “Just say the words: ‘I’m yours’.”

  “I’m yours,” she said.

  The juice moved.

  I held her in my arms as we lay on my bed, and she nestled comfortably against me, long and lean, looking around my fallback bedroom in my warehouse, and not at all appalled by the remaining paraphernalia on the walls.