In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Read online

  He feigned panic, first angling left, then back to the right, and back to the left again. The dragon Monster didn’t move. Dammit, this was where they had the trap set up, with the scent of the household on the move covering the scent they had dropped when they built the trap. She had to charge here.

  Ah.

  He feigned more panic, and then fell in faux exhaustion.

  Ten minutes later, the dragon Monster began to creep forward. He let her approach to within forty feet before he startled up, feigning more panic.

  Yes! The dragon Monster charged. He limped away, faster than a walk but slower than a run. Not fast enough to evade the Monster as she crashed through the pines, knocking over the smaller ones as she moved. She continued to charge, her weight shaking the ground, six-legged thunder with dangerous halitosis and a bad attitude. His stupid instincts wanted him to turn and fight, or run like mad, but he managed to keep up his limping fast walk through the trees, toward the trap, barely ahead of the dragon Monster.

  Closer. Closer. Now!

  He leapt up and over the trap, belying his faux wounds. The dragon Monster, alerted to the possible danger because of his too-wounded impossible leap, tried to skid to a stop, but she was too late. She crashed through the thin twigs and pine straw covering the trap, and fell fifteen feet down into the pit they had carefully built in the days since their fight with her.

  The Monster screamed in agony, skewered on the sharpened logs they had prepared. Sellers looked over the sloping edge of the pit, saw, as Master Occum suspected with a pit this shallow, that her wounds weren’t fatal, and if they didn’t hurry she would slither off the sharpened logs, climb out of the pit, and escape. In the distance, he picked up the Duke and the Count sprinting back this way, at his extreme metasense range.

  He ran as fast as possible in this not-fully-beast form over to the carefully prepared weapons cache, grabbed the .707 semi-auto, and ammo bag with his quite human hands, hurried back, sat down on his haunches, took aim using his somewhat human arms and shoulders, and shot out the Monster’s left eye. The bullet didn’t penetrate the Monster’s braincase, and she roared and struggled, breaking several of the sharpened logs. She, perhaps recognizing his .707 as a firearm, swiveled her head back and forth to avoid giving him an easy target. He continued to shoot, reloading with a new magazine when necessary, and backing away from the pit when she clambered out.

  She charged him, spewing blood and intestines torn from her body by the sharpened pointed logs, and he dropped the .707 and ran away, four legged, on his two real hind legs and his two human arms. He didn’t need to be quick now, not with the Monster so wounded, but his ass did catch the edge of one of her acid coughs, burning like the world’s worst case of hemorrhoids.

  The pain of her acid attack finally pushed him over the edge, into his beast, into his mental combat space where the world became him and everyone else became an enemy. He circled her to fight, came up from her backside, and started to worry her intestines and other organs. Bite. Pull. Back off. Charge. He became the glorious red blood world of no time and eternity.

  He fell to the ground, a weight pressing on his mind he vaguely recognized. A drum sounded, beat, beat, beat. “Who are you?” a voice said. “Remember your name. Who are you?”

  “Robert Sellers,” he said. The ground smelled of blood and shit. His body twitched, and he saw his right hand, no longer a hand but his paw. An immense hunger filled him. Juice hunger.

  “Who are you?” the voice said, demanding. “Remember your name.”

  Repetition. Always repetition. “Viscount Robert Sellers.”

  The drumming continued. “Who are you…”

  Oh. He blinked and recognized Master Occum. Growly snarly stooped and gnarled Master Occum, not a wound on him. A hundred feet away, Sir Dowling complained that dragon Monster meat was nearly inedible.

  “I am Earl Robert Sellers.”

  Gail Rickenbach: November 6, 1968

  “What is it about being a Focus that bothers you so much?” Tonya said.

  The phone call had ostensibly been about some strange mix up with Beth’s Focus superior, now all fixed up. All Gail knew was that for a few weeks, someone had forced Beth to cancel her appointments with Gail. Now the mix up was over, and Tonya apologized and said the mix-up never should have happened.

  Tonya called Gail once a week. Just to check up. To help. Their conversations often wandered into areas regarding Focuses and their households, for which Gail was eternally grateful. Too many problems and issues didn’t have rote solutions. Every Focus household was different.

  “Focuses have too much power,” Gail said. “You know, ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.”

  “Well,” Tonya said, “that might be a good saying, but I think it’s a little simplistic.”

  Gail shook her head. With Tonya, nothing was ever simple. Tonya and her goings on seemed to inhabit a whole different world, one she saw at most a pinhole into. She had asked Tonya about it last week, trying to figure out what was going on with Beth. Tonya had replied with a surprised ‘urk!’, and told Gail that she didn’t want to throw Gail into the deep end too early. Which Gail thought was fine. As she and her inner circle had discussed, Focus politics appeared to be deadly.

  “Simplistic how?” Gail said.

  “Because the aphorism doesn’t always apply.” Gail made a prompting noise, and Tonya continued.

  “Look at families, for instance. Parents have a tremendous amount of power over their children, and some of them abuse their power, but the vast majority of parents love their kids and honestly try to be good parents.”

  “But I’m not their parent, and they aren’t my children,” Gail said.

  “No, but you wanted a case where your axiom isn’t true. And there it is. You might want to think about why it’s different for parents and children.”

  “Well, because they’re family,” Gail said. “They love their kids.”

  “Hmm,” Tonya said. “Maybe you might want to let yourself love the people in your household. Have you thought about that?”

  Tonya was right. Being a Focus was quite a bit like being a parent, something she had noticed months before. However, treating some normal, thirty years older than Gail, someone married to a household Transform, as a child? Gail didn’t see how this would ever work. While Gail tried to come up with an appropriate response, she heard a commotion nearby. With practiced ease, she metasensed several Transforms in the area who weren’t hers. Gail concentrated on her metasense and picked up Beth’s pattern – and sensed Beth, as well.

  “Hey, Tonya, Beth Hargrove just showed up, and I’ve got to run.”

  “Hi, Beth!” Gail said, loud and happy, before she saw the other Focus. Gail jogged down the corridor to the narthex and greeted Beth’s entourage. Bob Hilton, the man who would be training Gail’s bodyguards, waved from over by the coat racks, having already corralled several of the trainees.

  “How’d you know it was me?” Beth said. “I thought I’d come by and surprise you today, help get Bob started off in his training.”

  Gail shrugged. “Metasense.”

  “Metasense? You can identify me and my Transforms that easily?” Beth said, with a grin. “That’s neat. I’ve never been able to learn that trick, myself.”

  Gail blinked. She didn’t think of such an obvious thing as a trick. Before she could say anything, Beth rolled on.

  “I love the church and what you’ve done with it,” Beth said. She bubbled. “See, I told you that a little creativity could go a long way.”

  “Thanks,” Gail said, then smiled. Her household had found a decent place to live before the Michigan winter had rolled in. Just barely. The place they found was St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in the inner city of Detroit. The old church had stone walls and stained glass windows, a real pipe organ and antique furniture. Big and comfortable and absolutely perfect.

  “How’d you find this place, anyway?” Beth said.
r />   “I’ll tell you, but first,” Gail paused, and caught one of her Transform’s eyes as she came out of the church office. “Hey, Melanie? Do you think you could rustle up a snack for us?”

  “Sure, Gail,” Melanie said, and walked off with a smile. Melanie had mixed feelings about Gail, but she still wanted to do Gail favors.

  Gail had noticed something strange over the last month: not only did her people want to do her favors, but they also wanted to do favors for any of the visiting Focuses. Grace Johnson, a black woman and another Detroit Focus, had visited last week, as Gail’s household had been moving into the Church. Her people, not the most liberal enlightened white folks in Michigan, had treated Focus Johnson like royalty.

  “And this is Van,” Gail said. Van, pacing up and down the hall with his dissertation in his right hand and red pen in his left, flickered his eyes at Beth, then back at Gail, and grunted a perfunctory ‘hello’ that didn’t last a second before his eyes flashed back to his work. “He’s oblivious to the world, editing while he’s pacing. PhD dissertation.”

  “Ouch.” Beth didn’t appear to be impressed. Gail didn’t blame her; with his dissertation defense coming up soon, Van couldn’t afford much in the way of social niceties.

  Gail led Beth and her entourage down into the basement, where the meeting rooms were located, chattering all the way. “Twenty years ago, St. Luke’s was a thriving church – bustling, busy, a force in the community and all that,” Gail said. “Unfortunately, the community’s changed, and the people who used to live here all moved out to the suburbs. Now, it’s a black neighborhood, and they don’t go to this church. According to what Matt found out, service attendance was down to no more than twenty people, all over seventy. The whole church was dying. This beautiful old building, but no people.” A beautiful old building with a vandalism problem, as well.

  Gail directed Beth to a meeting room. The room once held old pews and Sunday school chalkboards on wheels. The household had already moved a few of the old pews out, but the place was still packed. Didn’t matter. The household needed a meeting room. Her people had dragged several tables into the room. The pews they used as impromptu chairs.

  “More, more,” Beth said, as she sat in a pew across from Gail.

  “Late last summer, the old pastor, some poor guy barely younger than his parishioners, had a heart attack. He didn’t die, but he had to retire from the ministry. Well, Matt Narbanor – you’ve met him, haven’t you?” Beth nodded. “Matt Narbanor had been heating up the phone lines with his Bishop, talking about the need for a ministry to the Transforms. The Bishop dropped a hint about St. Luke’s and we went to have a look. We fell in love with the place on first sight, and Vic Crawford, one of my bodyguards,” Gail said, still fighting off the urge to blush when she said the word ‘bodyguard’, “had the bright idea that we might be able to move the entire household into the Church. At least for a while.”

  “See how good things can seemingly come up out of nowhere! I told you things would work out,” Beth said, flashing her breezy smile.

  Gail sighed. “Yeah, but making the idea real took a lot of work. I swear the wheels of bureaucracy have a flat tire. But anyway, the Bishop gave Matt a posting as senior pastor at St. Luke’s, with a commission to minister to those affected by Transform Sickness. We were real quiet about our idea of moving the household in, because we didn’t want to mess anything up. So anyway, right after the posting came through, Matt went to visit the Bishop, and told him about how bad things were for our household.

  “The Bishop didn’t offer the church, or any help at all, but he did agree to come visit us at the Ebener’s place. When he saw the household, with the misery and the mud and the shivering kids, he offered us the use of St. Luke’s. We only have until spring, and we promised to fix the place up while we’re here in lieu of rent. So here we are. This place is the next best thing to heaven.”

  “So,” Beth said, “what sort of ministry is Reverend Narbanor going to set up, anyway? Just for Transforms?”

  “No, no. Anyone’s welcome to come. It’ll be Methodist, of course, but Matt is planning to be real flexible. Turns out Methodism has a lot of flexibility. Matt spent a bunch of time talking to his Bishop about the problem, but he thinks he can stretch the forms and rituals a bunch. He’s been talking to our first attendees, and everyone wants the forms and rituals of the church they knew. It’s a problem, but Matt is convinced he can figure out something acceptable.”

  Gail smiled at Matt’s commentaries on the subject. “Religion is a strong thing,” he had said, “You don’t help it by taking things out.” Then he muttered harsh things about Unitarians under his breath, which Gail didn’t quite follow. He did say he would be willing to add things from other denominations to his services, though.

  “Think there’d be any problem with some of my people attending?”

  “Problem? I was just wondering how many of your people we could drag in here,” Gail said.

  “Oh, lots and lots,” Beth said, with a twinkle in her eye. “So, how are you coming on setting the place up for living? It took us several households before we figured out the difference between what’s a necessity and what’s a luxury.” Melanie took that moment to come in and start laying out a snack, mostly home-baked goods, including some fresh black bread from a recipe passed down in Phyllis Zarzemski’s family (the Kieshnicks) for generations. Gail’s household was still poor, but now, with St. Luke’s institutional kitchen available, the food was plentiful.

  “I don’t know if we’re ever going to fill this place up for services – the sanctuary can seat nearly six hundred. Huge! Plus, St. Luke’s has all these extra rooms for meetings and schools; did I tell you they ran a parochial school here back before World War II? Anyway, that gives us lots of places to set up with beds and cots and partitions for sleeping. We’re going to hold three of the rooms out for play rooms for the kids during the week and Sunday School on Sundays. Kurt thinks we can set up the parlor as a giant family room during the week.” Gail cut herself a slice of fresh bread, slathered on the butter, and ate. The smell of fresh baked bread constantly filled the basement of St. Luke’s these days. The smell made Gail hungry every morning and afternoon. She had worried she would get fat from all the food she ate, but once her weight got back to what she thought of as normal she had stopped gaining weight. She did have to go thrift store shopping again for clothes, though. Her jeans didn’t fit around her rear end and her breasts bulged out her bras. Embarrassing.

  “I’m going to get one room in the church office and Matt’s going to take the other, and Anita’s going to act as church secretary,” Gail said. “Best of all, ‘round the corner down the hall is this absolutely huge Fellowship Hall, with a fantastic institutional kitchen where we can make our own food, like this fresh bread. Plus, there’s the manse next door – it’s a real house for the minister and his family.”

  Unfortunately, they only had one shower. The shower was over in the manse and demand was so high that showers were limited to no more than three minutes if you took the shower between 6:00 and 7:30 A.M. There was a sign-up sheet and Helen Grimm policed the hall with a stopwatch. You showed up naked with your towel and left dripping, and if you wanted to wash your hair, you used the sink. Heaven help you if you ran over your time, because Helen would shut off the hot water. Every morning, at least three people left the shower with a leap as the shock of ice cold water hit them. The poor people at the bottom of the sign-up sheet had it worst because the hot water always ran out anyway. Gail smiled to think about the shower situation. Not being a fool, and because she had the flexibility, being unemployed after the move, she took her own shower around noon.

  “Aside from a few minor problems, I think we’ve really got it going,” Gail said.

  “Great!”

  “So,” Gail said, and leaned forward, lowering her voice: “I want the scoop on the dirty Focus politics. What was all this hoo-rah last month?”

  “Nope!” Beth said
, and grinned. “I’m not going to drag you into any more problems than you already have. We can save the bitch patrol Focus politics for another year. They play for keeps and you don’t want to know.” Gail turned away and winced. There were always more secrets to dig up and she was itching to explore them. She would have to find out the mysteries of Focus politics some other way. Beth paused, and looked Gail clean in the eye when Gail turned back. “You need to think about making up with Focus Adkins, though. She can really help you.”

  “Like hell,” Gail said. If she ever met Focus Adkins again, it would be one time too many.

  “No, really. She’s got some of the most amazing local political contacts. You need something fixed with city hall, Focus Adkins can often get things fixed for you.”

  Okay. Beth had Gail’s attention. “She’s the senior Focus in the area, right?” Gail said. According to their admittedly spotty research. Maybe Adkins would be willing to spill something about Focus politics. Beth nodded. “She does more than just sneer at other Focuses?”

  “Oh, yes.” Hesitant. “I’m not going to say she’s perfect; she is a real bitch sometimes. She’s just a useful bitch.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Gail said. Grudgingly.

  “Great!”

  They ate bread in silence for a few minutes. Gail pulled her nerve together. “Ah, Beth, I’ve got a small problem I don’t know how to deal with,” Gail said, her voice almost a whisper.

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s, well, um,” Gail said. Blushed. “About sex.”

  Beth snorted. “You and every other Focus. Us Focuses are all a bunch of frigid ice queens, remember?”

  “But what do I do? I don’t want to lose Van.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s, um, my boyfriend.”

  “Van’s your boyfriend? How long?” Beth said, blushing. Like most, she had written Van off at first glance.

  “Three years.” Gail had met Van at a political get-together during the ’66 midterm campaign. He stood out in the anti-war crowd as, well, different. He thought Vietnam was wrong not because it was a war, but because it was the wrong war. Because America had stepped into a pre-existing struggle between two sets of oppressive thugs, still hashing out the problems left behind after the fall of the old French colonialist regime. As a historian, he had nothing good to say about colonialism. Or communism. Or unfettered free-market capitalism. Gail had attached herself to him immediately, despite his overly intellectual demeanor and his sensitivities. He had been a tremendous help to her as a Focus, acting as her first head researcher, her sounding board and her emotional anchor. Only he had slipped her extra food before Beth enlightened her about how much extra food a Focus needed. “As a normal I was, um, flat chested; Van and I were snidely called the ‘pencil twins’, the tall one and the short one.” Gail wasn’t short for a woman, but next to Van…