An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Read online

  This didn’t look good. Daisy almost never winced, well, unless Hank was handing out a disgusting and onerous task to her.

  “Mr. Schuber?” Arm Webberly asked.

  “I’m not sure I agree with your analysis, ma’am,” he said. He paused, a bit flushed, but Arm Webberly didn’t indicate he should stop. “The Chicago victory left the defenders, especially the Nobles, unable to continue the fight and finish off the Hunters. I’m most worried about the Nobles and the magnitude of their losses.”

  “Continue,” Arm Webberly said. By her lack of reaction, he suspected she already contemplated this line of analysis.

  “It’s like the battle of Eutaw Springs, late in the Revolutionary War, ma’am,” Van said. Now Hank understood Daisy’s wince. Van’s arguments did often wander into the utterly obscure. “The British won a tactical victory in that battle, forcing General Nathanial Green’s army from the field. However, despite their tactical victory in the battle, the British weren’t able to follow up their success and stop Gen. Nathanial Green’s army from taking over South Carolina. The parallel here is that the Chicago forces were able to keep General Enkidu’s troops out of Chicago, but in doing so tacitly ceded everything between here and Chicago to the Hunter Empire. I see this as a strategic victory for the Hunter Empire.” He paused, but Arm Webberly didn’t challenge his assertions. Nor did Van back down from an entire roomful of Inferno leaders glaring at him for raining on their expectations of overall victory. He extended his pause several beats too long before continuing, enough to trigger Hank’s instinctive ‘uh oh’ response. He had seen this many times in many an academic conference over the years – preparation for the verbal shiv between the shoulder blades. Finally, Van spoke again. “Don’t forget that the next battle after Eutaw Springs was Yorktown, the British loss that ended the war. A mere month later.”

  Ouch. Ouch!

  “I still believe that Enkidu’s ‘victory’ will cost him more than a month of recovery time,” Arm Webberly said, her voice nowhere near as laden with Arm charisma as before. “Still, you’re correct. Some potential dangers do remain. We should talk, officially, about this.” She turned her gaze to Connie Yerizarian, the Inferno household president, who nodded.

  Ouch, again.

  Van’s observation and Arm Webberly’s insistence now put him on the Inferno household leadership team. This wouldn’t be the first time a non-Transform sat on the team – Dr. Robert Masterson, the head of the ‘Bob’s Barn’ engineering crew, was a member of the household leadership team until Gail separated Bob’s Barn from Inferno.

  So much for Van’s quick and easy return to his wife and his old household, though.

  Carol Hancock (3/8/73 - 3/9/73)

  The heavy double doors to the gym opened, and I felt that familiar adrenaline surge as I prepared my body for combat. If she would challenge, it would come now.

  If she operated on instinct, she would challenge. Just one fight between us, and then I left for the Yukon. A younger Arm would certainly challenge. Keaton, though? She was old, and hard, and certainly capable of overriding her instincts if the occasion demanded it.

  Keaton came into the room slowly, and I blinked when I got a good look at her. This sure as hell wasn’t the Keaton I knew. Half-naked, for one, and feminine for another. What little clothes she wore were gauzy and translucent. She didn’t wear shoes. Her gracefully alluring slow movements almost disguised her heavy muscles. Any man who saw her would want to sleep with her, and half the women would too, except that she gave off an air of deadly danger along with the allure. Every step she took announced that she would cut the throat of anyone who hinted at such a thing.

  Did she have any plans to cut my throat? Not if she was smart. We were stuck in a war, my area of strength. Also, I had gotten a lot stronger while I had been away, both physically and in stature. Taller as well. I knew a hell of a lot more about fighting Monsters and Chimeras than before. The confidence in my own abilities echoed with the arrogance of the world’s oldest Chimera inside me. Reason would tell her that she should avoid a challenge, and instead wait for me to make a mistake.

  She behaved, so far. With Lori’s help, I had been in phone contact with her since we hit Edmonton, over a week ago. I bet she found it disconcerting to have phones in phone booths, diners, hotels, gas stations and the like ringing whenever she walked by. Keaton must have thought she was being haunted, and as for the explanation, I told her to talk to Lori about it, that the phones were Lori’s trick, not mine. Lori’s trick should have made her a hell of a lot more wary about challenging me until she knew what other new tricks I squirreled away in my pockets.

  Of which I had more than a few.

  Instincts were a pain, though, and phone contact is a hell of a lot different from meeting in person. I half wanted to pick a fight, myself, just to prove my dominance over her. I suppressed the urge. Nice, yes, but I was too experienced to fall for foolish juice pressures.

  I stalked forward into the open area in front of the empty dumbbell rack, signaling dominance. Keaton stopped about five feet away from me and sank down to her knees. She lowered her head and touched it to the floor.

  Ah, no challenge, then. I smiled, and relaxed slightly. I enjoyed the sensation of Keaton kneeling to me. After all those years of her hell, this was sweet revenge. I felt a hint of the old lust in my nerves, echoes from my now-distant beast.

  “Ma’am,” she said, absolutely respectful.

  I came close and touched my fingers to her neck. She obligingly tilted her head to the side, to expose her neck further. Underneath her tricky Arm-style illusions, I picked up on partly healed battle damage, the worst being that the outer bend of the lower four ribs on her right side were cartilage instead of bone. Her juice structure ached with stress, likely from juice overuse and whatever tricks she had come up with to allow her to recover from it in a timely fashion. Given that she had Shadow around to fix up her juice structure, this said a lot about the intensity of the Chicago battles.

  “You’re mine,” I said.

  “I’m yours, ma’am.”

  I smiled and ran my fingers through her hair. Then I sat on the floor in front of her and she lay on her back with her head in my lap and smiled back at me.

  “All right,” I said, still stroking her head. “We’ve got about fifteen minutes before I have to go supervise a train wreck. Give me the highlights. What happened to you after Pittsburgh, and how the hell did you turn into a modern-day Artemis?”

  My name is Carol Hancock, and you wouldn’t recognize me from the, what, ten previous volumes of my memoires. Or was it eleven? Hell. I’m the same wise-ass juice-sucking predatory chaos-loving Arm I’ve always been, but these days I stood six feet tall, with a Focus’s good looks (well, low-end Focus, so sue me), and fur. Which I intended to keep, thank you very much. With Mizar’s support I was queen of the goddamned Major Transform universe, though more of the Chess queen than sitting my ass in a throne sex-object queen. Mizar, the world’s oldest Chimera, was my new ‘mate’. Certainly not my ‘love’ – I left that to Lori, as she and Mizar had fallen for each other in some crazy-ass fashion I didn’t understand. I went north to tame him and win him to our side. I failed in the first, which didn’t distress me as much as it probably should, as the second proved to be far more advantageous than I previously expected. He was far more than a muscle bound piece of meat, with enough brains to match Lori and I – and Sky, when and if he bothered. Now, if we could just keep from tearing each other apart, as rival predators and as fellow male and female arrogant chauvinist pigs, the world would be our oyster.

  I’m a realist, though, and I wasn’t holding my breath for this miracle. Consider the following:

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Gail said to Mizar. One train wreck, in progress. Gail was four months along and her pregnancy wasn’t showing yet, but I could see the pregnancy in her juice structure. She and the baby seemed healthy so far. She, as a mere Focus, had the muscles to punch me out and
the skills to kick my ass in combat if I didn’t burn juice to compensate. I thought of her as my greatest creation. “Haven’t you learned anything from our Dreaming interactions?” Oh, and she could be an asshole to rival myself and Focus Tonya Biggioni whenever she wanted.

  Mizar pulled himself up straighter. “You’ve joined my family, Gail, and I’m the Chimera, the only true man in the family. Thus, conjugal relations will be required. In addition, until you prove yourself to me, you will wear my tag, but I will not wear yours. This is not a demand, my dear little girl, this is a statement of fact, the pattern established by the rest of your family when we met in the Yukon. I see no reason to change the pattern.”

  Gail gave me a quick glance, an ‘I can’t believe you put up with this’ glare, followed by a hotter ‘you had better not be backing him up’ eye-stab. I smiled and shrugged. It wasn’t as if Lori and I hadn’t tried to convince Mizar that the world had changed while he twiddled his thumbs guarding the Progenitor’s cave in the Yukon. Sky hadn’t bothered trying.

  Several minutes earlier, Mizar made the same demand to Gilgamesh, minus the conjugal relations part, but including a part about ‘nor may you sleep with Focus Rickenbach until you and she have won my trust’. Gilgamesh hadn’t contested Mizar’s assertion, but neither did he agree. Instead, he had vanished from Mizar’s metasense, as annoyed at me as Gail. The Branton was Gilgamesh’s home turf, and he had been altering and upgrading his dross construct-based building defenses when I showed myself to Gail. Now, he stalked the building invisible to everyone but Gail and me, and he and Gail were meta-chattering at a gazillion words a minute, concocting some plan. I didn’t know if Gilgamesh thought he hid from me or not, but as of yet, he hadn’t pulled on the tag or signaled me in any fashion. He was one pissed Crow.

  When last I had seen the two of them, Gail and Gilgamesh had been treating each other with careful formality, not in love with each other by anyone’s definition, but starting to come to grips with their arranged ‘marriage’. Now, forged by who knows how many battles over the course of the war they thought they had won – sigh – they were now in love.

  Their utopia wasn’t all perfect, though, not with the total absence of any scent traces of her normal husband, Van. That was a waste of good resources, and I wondered if Gail would flip out if I went and married him myself. I considered the option, and wondered why Van left. I added another item to my to-do list, to have a session with Gail regarding Van. Right after the item involving learning the strange and quick meta-chatter techniques Gail and Gilgamesh used.

  That mental list was already long, and I had only started interacting with my people. First up had been Keaton, of course. After I finished with Gail and Gilgamesh, I needed to hunt down Tom and the rest of my personal crew. My organization sensed of being fed through a meat grinder, and I knew I had some patchwork to do. After that – hell, there weren’t enough hours in the day for what I needed to do.

  “No,” Gail said to Mizar. I expected her to bluster and argue, her old style, but instead, she just crossed her arms and stared at my new ‘mate’.

  “This would be better if voluntary,” Mizar said. “But it doesn’t have to be. As I said, you’re already part of the family, and this is part of the agreement involved in my joining the family.”

  I stood and watched the collision. Mizar’s excessive brainpower masked, in my humble opinion, an emotionally naïve and simplistic way of approaching the world. Lori and I did quite a bit of ‘whatever it takes’ in our efforts to civilize Mizar, and what we did cost us more than pride. Unfortunately, all we accomplished was to carve out exceptions to his mental rules that women were, well, limited to being traditional women. He considered Focuses and Arms to be objects of desire, or, if the Arm was hostile, to be fought and killed as an enemy. Yes, Mizar’s arrogant sense of self-importance was why Armenigar ended up six and a half feet tall. It was the only way she could get any respect out of Beast.

  Lori fought him and lost, physically, but she could have won if she had been fighting for any reason save anger. From that, Mizar should have realized some Focuses could defend themselves. Not consciously, though. He categorized Lori and I as exceptions to his hidebound rules and little more.

  Neither of us could talk to Mizar on that subject. He didn’t explain his views regarding such personal subjects to us women, and only infrequently to Sky. He remained a reserved man, capable of going for days without saying a thing beyond a grunt.

  It probably didn’t help that Lori hadn’t gone full out with her juice pattern witchery at any time in Mizar’s presence. He still didn’t understand how dangerous a modern Major Transform could be, including the ones on ‘his side’. He was about to get a surprise. I had trained both Gail and Gilgamesh, and knew exactly how nasty those two could be when they got annoyed.

  “I’m willing to give you a chance to see the light, Mizar,” Gail said, her back up as only a Focus of her experience, stature and talents could manage. I swear her words froze the water out of the air as she spoke. “On the other hand, I should warn you that my patience with your sort of behavior is not large. I have other responsibilities besides you. As far as I’m concerned, the family I joined is based on the idea of mutual tags. In my book, if you have a problem with that, you shouldn’t have joined my family.”

  Mizar did his thing with his damned Chimera tag. I still couldn’t sense the trick directly, dammit, despite some serious effort I had expended in that area. I metasensed his actions through my own tag on him, though. A moment later, he lay flat on the ground in front of Gail. Well, in front of Gail and Gilgamesh, as they had been standing hand in hand, Gilgamesh hidden from Mizar. I was impressed – whatever they did had combined juice music with Gilgamesh’s dross objects and a bunch of advanced Crow techniques I didn’t follow.

  “That was ill-considered,” Gilgamesh said. “The sixth rule of Noble behavior states that…”

  “I’m not a Noble,” Mizar said, shocked to be disabled so easily and annoyed to be classified as a Noble. He tried to wiggle out of whatever hold the two of them had on him, and didn’t get anywhere. Then he pulled on my tag for help, but I refused. “Carol?”

  We told him to behave, to treat our family members, friends and allies with respect. He refused to listen to us, so I guessed he would need to learn on his own. “You look like you have this well in hand,” I said, to Gail and Gilgamesh. “I’ve got some business to take care of. See you later.”

  I came out of the Dreaming when I heard the door open. I had a million things I needed to be doing, but at two o’clock in the morning most of the people in Gail’s exhausted horde were asleep. Even the Arms. I had taken the opportunity to hold some conversations in the Dreaming. The Madonna of Montreal had taken the opportunity to give me her usual nightly tour of the major Hunter groups. She hadn’t been feeling chatty, just exhausted.

  Still no sign of Cathy Elspeth, though. I wondered if she had tried to contact me during those long weeks when Mizar had me trapped in his cave, cut off from the Dreaming. It was possible that she had given up, after so long with no success. I wondered if she thought I had abandoned her.

  Mizar slammed the door behind him, and I did my best not to grin. He wore both Gail and Gilgamesh’s tags, and didn’t smell of recent sex. His clothes remained nothing more than a breechcloth and blanket, although I knew a couple of Crows planned to borrow some clothes from the Nobles for him in the morning. Sky and Lori had disappeared as soon as Gail and Gilgamesh finished with Mizar, Lori to talk to Gail, and Sky to Gilgamesh. I hoped they kept it short. Gail and Gilgamesh needed their sleep as much as anyone. Jill and the Monsters were down in the Branton garage, where it was dry and there was room for them to stretch out.

  “What the hell is wrong with these Focuses?” he said. “Are they all this damned impossible, or do you just have bad taste?”

  I gave up on hiding my grin. “All the good ones are bad, and I go for the best.”

  Mizar shook his head, disgusted, a
nd then looked around at the room. My fifth floor suite in the Branton was a moldy mess of rotted furniture, reeking carpet, and broken glass. He wasn’t impressed. Me, it tore at my heart. It hurt to see the evidence of the Hunters’ depredations in my home.

  Mizar was damned attractive, I couldn’t help noticing. His human form perfected, he looked both powerful and majestic. Oh, and sexy. I felt my interest stirring.

  Damn him.

  “No,” I said, and backed up my refusal through the tag.

  The heat between my legs faded. Mizar stared at me, brows down. I stared back, and didn’t give.

  “If you want a family, that means sex,” Mizar said, after a moment.

  “My call. I’m not interested.”

  “You haven’t been interested for two weeks.” With Mizar, at least. I had kept Sky plenty busy, though worries about the sterile sex lives of my family were starting to bubble up on my internal to-do list. Lori and Sky were married, dammit, and they hadn’t slept together, alone, in over a month. Or screwed in the last two weeks. Oh, and both Sky and I were into, um, variety, and the two of us being stuck with each other wasn’t necessarily a good thing. For either of us. And given how Mizar reacted whenever Lori and I hinted that we needed a little time together, well, that wasn’t happening yet, either. Then there was the problem of the rest of the family: neither Nora, the Monster Arm I now owned, or the family Monsters, were getting any. Nora, for one, was getting more than a little cranky. “You came up to drag me out of my home because you wanted a family, you said. Then as soon as you get one, you’re not willing any more. That’s bullshit. If you want a family, you need to do your part.”

  I hadn’t been willing up north. Rape does sort of affect the attitude. Unfortunately, he did have a point. We wouldn’t be able to maintain the family link if I wouldn’t sleep with Mizar. I might not like it. I didn’t like it. However, it would be damned stupid to go to all that work to fetch him here and ruin our work because of my old ‘I don’t fuck the Chimeras’ urges. I wasn’t some normal, where a bad experience or two might throw me off sex completely.