All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Read online

  “Gail, huh? You sure there’s nothing going on between the two of you?” Lori, he realized, was the jealous type.

  “Positive. Whenever her fiancé shows up, she gets all gooey-eyed and her emotional state goes haywire.”

  “Ah, love.” She cuddled up closer to him. “So you’re doing miracles with every meal, and you’re still despondent?”

  “I’d rather be back with Carol.”

  “Good,” Lori said. “One fewer thing I have to talk you into.”

  Gilgamesh cleared his throat. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “Fine by me.” Lori climbed on top of him and smiled. “Let me tell you about a trick Sky mentioned once. Walking zazen, but as a Crow, at night, while connected to the pheromone flow. Let the flow guide you. I think you might be able to use this trick to solve your mystery.”

  Gilgamesh grimaced. “The way things are going, I’d just stumble into a new nest of Attack Focuses or another sea Monster in the St. Clair River or some other ultra-secret plot of the senior Crows or first Focuses.”

  “You need faith. You aren’t alone, and people are looking out for you.”

  He sighed. “I can give it a try. Carefully.”

  “Carefully.”

  Lori was sitting on something, and it wasn’t just him. “The other thing I want to talk you into is making a baby,” she said. “With me. I’ll have to warn you, I think it’s going to take a lot of sweaty work.”

  Gilgamesh smiled. “Yes,” he said. He wasn’t jealous of Sky about anything except Cloud. He had been dreaming of a child of his own, but worried he might never have the nerve to bring it up. “You’ve talked me into it.”

  Chapter 7

  “Like the Himalayas

  Good men shine from afar.

  But bad men move unseen

  Like arrows in the night.”

  – The Buddha

  Carol Hancock: March 21, 1969 – March 22, 1969

  It was nearly six when I finally made it back home from my acreage near Lake Houston, and I was ravenous. Now that I had finished healing the hole in my arm, I had started working on my juice handling skills. Zielinski had a theory that I could exert some conscious control over how I consumed the juice, and therefore gain more efficiency out of it. He said that since I could control the burn, that implied there was some way to control normal consumption as well. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I gave it a try. I hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be as hard as slowing down juice draws, in which I was tallying up an impressive set of failures.

  I had also been trying to find a training optimum for Arms, based on Hank’s similar discovery about Transforms. I had accumulated a large enough amount of data to prove to Hank, that as with Focuses, Arms didn’t have a training optimum, just a broad range in the 120s where training worked best.

  I thought I had left homework behind when I quit college. Foolish me.

  I also had more time for training and my military reading. Tom ran the money-making operations now, and did an excellent job. He was off with the team in Phoenix right now, casing out another one. Tom had made me my first million in February, and he was working more cautiously on million number two.

  I didn’t expect anything unusual when I came back to my home, with Tom out of town, Hank busy running the research lab, Fred banished to permanent thugdom, and no plans for a visit from Hephaestus. The only people who should have been in my home were Consuela, my housekeeper, Frances, pulling secretarial duty, and Rikard, one of my recent thug acquisitions, who I used as a semi-permanent house guard for when I wasn’t around.

  I parked my car in front of the garage door, got out and smelled blood.

  I practically flew into my house, ready for combat. Nothing. I stopped, examined the area with my normal senses and extended my metasense. I took in everything in an instant: Frances lying dead in the entryway with her guts spilled out, her throat slashed and her pistol in her hand, Rikard unconscious and bleeding from his head against the wall to my left, the sobbing of Consuela in the bathroom, the labored breathing of someone in the weight room, and the smell of Amy Haggerty. My metasense didn’t pick up anything.

  My vision narrowed, my mind went white with rage, and I fell into a stalk. If Haggerty was here, she was dead. For a moment, I burned juice hotter than a steam engine as I sprinted to my weight room. Only one person there, and since it wasn’t Haggerty, I dropped the burn and let the stalk fade. I also took my knife from the throat of the person who was there – Hank – ill-used and hanging, bound to the Nautilus machine.

  “Carol!” he said, his shriek far too late to affect anything. Terror came off him in waves, until he belatedly saw that I wasn’t stalking him. I had never gotten to him this bad before, his heart racing at over a hundred fifty beats a minute, dangerous for an old man like him.

  I cut him down and laid him out on the floor. “Don’t move, I’m going to heal you,” I said, and began my examination and my healing. He wasn’t in as bad a shape as I feared from all the blood spread about. I had recently put him through a stiff exercise regimen, and in all but looks he was a man of forty-five again. I took a few moments to check on Rikard and let Consuela know she could come out of the closest. Then I knelt beside Hank, wet my tongue and began to lick. Healing.

  “She kicked my left leg and my left knee’s out,” Hank said, his voice weak and reedy.

  “I’ll have to cut.”

  “Do it,” he said. Sweat poured off his forehead. “The longer you wait, the worse it’s going to be.”

  I knew the reason for his sweat. “Don’t remember the pain,” I said, bending my predator to the task. Anesthetic didn’t work once my tongue got involved.

  I worked, and after Hank calmed down he began to slowly fill me in.

  “Haggerty came in here looking for you. Rikard wouldn’t let her in and she KO’ed him. Frances was here with me, ran to the front of the house and drew a gun on Haggerty. Haggerty killed her. She chased off Consuela and told me that she had an information trade for you.”

  Uh huh. “So what’s with your wounds and your right hand?” Two dislocated fingers, fixed by someone awkwardly popping them back into place. Haggerty wasn’t into pointless torture. The finger damage was a combat wound, and I suspected I knew exactly what sort.

  Hank was embarrassed. “She kicked my .45 out of my hand.”

  I didn’t bother with the ‘I told you so’ and went back to healing. I had warned him not to pull his piece on an Arm. At least he was smart enough to admit his mistakes.

  However, I was afraid my exercise regimen, along with his partly transformed adrenal gland, had made him too aggressive for his own safety. Something would have to be done about this, and soon.

  Frances, though. My first recruit after my incarceration in the CDC. All my people tried to be heroes, to be like me. She should have known better. Hell of an epitaph, and no, I wasn’t backing off on blaming Haggerty.

  “The other wounds are my fault,” Hank said. “I pushed her.”

  I grunted and continued to lick. I wanted details. I trusted he wouldn’t do such a stupid thing as pushing an Arm without a reason. I wanted the reason. Actually, I was rather impressed that his wounds weren’t more severe.

  I don’t recommend pushing an Arm. Ever. Hank, though, did have talent in that area. Again, I blamed his partly transformed adrenal gland for this bit of stupidity.

  “She balked at doing the information trade with me. I told her that you were going to explode about having your territory invaded and one of your people killed. She claimed self-defense and refused to believe me.”

  Haggerty, socially inept with a vengeance. Still.

  “Nevertheless, I got the information,” Hank said. I smiled and cut knee. Damn, I hated healing major tissue wounds, especially ligaments. “You’re getting better at suppressing my pain,” Hank said.

  I didn’t comment. He had screamed like hell when I cut, actually. He was getting better at not instinctively fighting off my pr
edator. By the time he made his comment, he had already forgotten the pain and the scream.

  “Out with it,” I said, grunting around my tongue.

  “Haggerty’s infiltrated the FBI’s Arm Task Force. Yesterday, the Feds got a package with your picture and a complete information dump on your Dallas operation.”

  God dammit all anyway! Fucking douchebag city! “Shadow.” The rage came again, and I stopped my healing work for a moment to grip Hank tightly. Protectively. He was mine. I hadn’t protected him well, and he paid the price. And he still found a way to drag information out of Haggerty.

  “My guess as well, given what happened to Stacy last week,” Hank said. Some unknown, proven already to not be Focus Adkins, had sent the Detroit FBI office information on Keaton’s latest recruits, the ones she had recruited after the FBI started nosing around her old Adkins-infiltrated organization. Volcanically pissed didn’t come close to describing my boss’s emotional state right now. “Um, Carol, I thought…”

  “Hush for a few minutes,” I said. We didn’t do sex, or much body contact of any nature, but the juice wanted me to do something. I did it, some kind of screwy healing boost involving lots of skin contact and a fair amount of spit. Hank passed out for about five minutes, running a transitory fever. I wasn’t sure what else the juice did, but Hank’s unconsciousness did allow me to finish up his knee. This wasn’t the first obscure juice effect during healing I had encountered, and I suspected it wouldn’t be the last.

  It gave me a few moments alone where I could think those dark thoughts of mine. I would have to close down Dallas and my merc operations there. Keaton wouldn’t be pleased and I might end up paying for it in her basement, given her current mood. I was damned pissed myself. We needed those thugs for the wedding battle, and after dealing with Haggerty, I was going to have a big mess to clean up.

  “How’d she find my house?” I asked, after Hank was back among the conscious.

  “If you can believe Haggerty, what she did was sniff you out at the local gyms to find the section of Houston you lived in, track you to this neighborhood by the normals you deal with, and let her nose lead her to this house. According to her, normals who deal with Arms react different than other normals.” Hank hadn’t believed a word Haggerty said. I, unfortunately, did.

  I would have to up my security. This was not acceptable.

  ---

  “Interesting,” Hephaestus said. I had called Tom and his crew back from Phoenix and Hephaestus in from his sculpting studio to help me strategize. Having other people around helped me to remember not to lose myself in my rage. “Based on the fact that the information was passed to the FBI in Washington, I’d say that Shadow doesn’t want anything to do with Houston proper,” Hephaestus said. As always, he was the one of us closest to the door.

  I really missed Gilgamesh. He handled my moods a lot better than Hephaestus did, and Hephaestus was a Guru, a damned senior Crow.

  The world needed better Crows.

  I looked around the vacant house I claimed for the moment. Tom sat on the floor with his back to the wall near the kitchen, fiddling with his old army knife. Hank lay on the brand new cheap carpet with his eyes closed, still tired from his healing. I cracked my knuckles, while attempting to avoid the smell of Haggerty that lingered in my nose, and growled. Notice that I didn’t say I had lost my rage. “Either he’s too afraid of us, which means that the wedding trap won’t work, or he doesn’t have anything approaching his full resources available to him right this instant.”

  “The latter would be my guess, given what happened to his Patriarchs in Dallas,” Tom said. “Sounds like more of his manipulation and harassment, not a full-fledged attack.” I nodded.

  We blamed Shadow for the hit on Keaton as well, based on negative evidence – the information had come from nowhere, a standard Crow trick. The fact Shadow hadn’t been able to chase Keaton out of Detroit made me suspect that he hadn’t wanted to. He thought he might be able to take out Keaton in the wedding attack if she didn’t have an army of operatives to back her up. Get a majority of his enemies at once. Efficient.

  Now I was his target.

  “Next on the agenda is Haggerty.”

  “Why, Tiamat?” Hephaestus asked. I was definitely Tiamat right now.

  “Arm stuff,” I said.

  Hephaestus looked puzzled and Hank stepped in, eyes still closed. “Think predators,” he said. “Carol will lose face to Haggerty if she doesn’t strike back.” He was close enough that I didn’t need to comment. Tom nodded. He understood as well.

  “You three see if you can find some strategy for locating Haggerty. I’ve got a phone call to make.”

  “Eh, dude, how’s it hanging?” Keaton said, over the phone, with a male voice. Great. Keaton, the surfer Arm. At least she was in a relatively good mood, somewhat over the exposure of her own organization. I tuned out the noise from the rush hour traffic behind me and explained my problems. Grunt, grunt, no comment from my boss Arm. She knew what I faced, trying to put my non-Houston organization back to work. The Dallas mercenaries weren’t the only thing exposed by this bit of nonsense.

  “Should I attempt to re-contact the Dallas mercs or should I start over?” I said. We had been counting on that group for the Wedding trap.

  “Don’t bother doing either; I think it’s just been proven to both of us how useless normal soldiers are when gathered ahead of time, when we have someone like Shadow as an opponent,” she said. Ah. I would recruit a few squads of normal mercs immediately before the wedding, but nothing before. She paused and lowered her voice. “I’m not going to help you chastise Haggerty.”

  Hmm. If ‘chastising Haggerty’ was so obvious to her, then it might be obvious even to Haggerty. That might present some problems. “Ma’am.”

  “I want a full report when you’re done.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You fuck this up and end up wounded again, such that you can’t fight in Detroit, you’ll pay, Hancock.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Keaton hung up. Well, that was about as useful as a downpour at a wiener roast.

  “So, what have you got for me?” I asked the three men when I finally got back to my borrowed house. I had placed my phone calls from a phone booth outside a stop-n-rob within metasense range of my house. Paranoia. It had taken me nearly two hours to get in contact with Keaton, and in the end, I got the phone number physically delivered to her and she called me.

  “Got her,” Tom said, referring to Haggerty. He was happy, and paced my now paper-strewn living room waving his arms. It must have been his idea. I was impressed.

  “Tell.” According to Keaton, Haggerty had originally planned to set up shop in Los Angeles, with a nice house ready for her, all the false IDs she would ever need, and preliminary contact with Focus Rodriguez. When she ditched Keaton’s tag she vanished. She never showed up in Los Angeles.

  “I called around to some Crows to find any places with a noticeable number of Crows who vacated around the time that Haggerty graduated,” Hephaestus said. He had found a nice corner by the front door and tucked himself into it. “That narrowed it down to several large metropolitan areas.” I nodded. There were quite a few reasons why a Crow might vacate a city, not just an Arm moving in. UFOs, drought, bad losing streak for a local sports team, whatever. This used to be a better trick, back before my CDC incarceration. Once upon a time, all of a city’s Crows would vanish when an Arm moved in.

  Hank knelt in the middle of the room among the papers, trying to sort them into organized piles. “Needless to say, asking the Crows directly about Haggerty’s location got us nowhere,” he said. That earned him a dirty look from Hephaestus. “Three guesses as to why, and the first two don’t count.” Another dirty look.

  Right. Standard Crow dictum: don’t get involved.

  “And then…” They’re not Arms, I told myself as I pushed down impatience with the slow unfolding of information. Firmly. They had no idea how close they are to
a full-blown challenge fight.

  “And then I had this bright idea about the effect an Arm has in a metro area,” Tom said. I furrowed eyebrows. “Consider, ma’am, how many Monster conversions and male withdrawal cases do you allow in Houston?”

  I saw his point and barked out a laugh. “So we can track Arms by the fact the transformation death rate goes down where we live?” Blessed irony. “The fucking Feebs ought to be thanking me, not hunting me.” I looked at Tom, who was still pleased. “I take it you leaned on Barnstead for the information on Monster conversions?”

  He nodded. None of them appreciated Barnstead’s true worth to me. He worked as a reporter for the Chronicle, and knew the best sleazy local dives for ferreting out hot urban gossip. He was almost passable as a reporter, as well.

  “It was a simple matter of data correlation,” Hank said. “In order of rank, there’s the New York City metro area, Cincinnati and Denver.”

  “How much better is New York?” I said. There was a timing coincidence here I didn’t like or understand. Shadow, our Rogue Crow, vanished from New York not long after Haggerty ditched Keaton’s tag, leaving behind a fight scene. Had Haggerty been the one who attacked Shadow?

  “Quite a bit better.”

  “Only we can’t use this to pin it down past ‘metro area’, from central Jersey to Connecticut,” Tom said. “You’ll need an army if you want to find her quickly.”

  And my army of mercs was suddenly off limits. Hell. “Luckily, I know where there’s an army I can hire. You three stay here and prep up some preliminaries for an emergency move. I’ll be back when I’m finished.”

  ---

  “What, did you expect I’d kidnap you and torture you to get your cooperation?” I said to Lori and her people. I hadn’t called ahead, coming in disguised as a more than normally pushy Jehovah’s Witness. I got into the Inferno kitchen before I revealed myself. They called Lori and she beat feet back from Boston College to talk to me. Somehow, I had messed up their assumptions on how Arms worked.