No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read online

  The patrol milled around, confused, and as Tiamat hoped, scattered. As one of the normals investigated the sense of wonder rotten egg, ignoring a barked order to fall in, Tiamat started a burn-fueled sprint toward him.

  Damn she was fast.

  Four groups of Transforms left the Clinic right after she started her sprint, one of the Transforms speaking into a walkie-talkie as Tiamat grabbed the normal, slowed, and ran off while laboring under the normal’s weight. Not to Gilgamesh’s surprise, she plucked her captive’s weapons from him as she ran.

  She had the captive, but her escape path also left her boxed in.

  So was he. Panic would soon force him out of Tiamat’s metasense range. This was far too dangerous for him.

  “Use your panic to your advantage,” the Skinner had told him. Often. With sneering emphasis. “It’s a weapon, dammit!”

  Perhaps he would be able to lead Tiamat out of this mess, anyway.

  Carol Hancock: July 24, 1968

  Gilgamesh ran into my metasense range and signaled that four more groups, from the Clinic, were out.

  I wondered if Rogue Focus had planned this, setting up her first group as bait. I couldn’t tell. I slammed my squirming captive to the ground, gave him a dose of piss-loosing predator, picked up my now non-squirming captive and headed off.

  My captive weighed as much as I did, which limited me to a jog over the long haul. Gilgamesh fled, thank heavens. I had held myself together, but the situation had been worse on me than on him. He was mine, my delicate flower of a Crow, and risking him like this drove me crazy. Or so my instincts said, instincts that hadn’t shown themselves to me until after I slept with him. I hoped my all-night-lover hadn’t noticed my weakness.

  I would train those instincts away or else. I refused to give up sleeping with Gilgamesh because my unruly subconscious behaved like a six foot six Marine vet around his helpless beautiful buxom eighty-pound sedentary wife.

  Captive didn’t have any juice patterns on him, according to my metasense. He didn’t appear to have anything like Rizzari’s Transform training and his hand to hand abilities wouldn’t win him many normal bar fights, either. I sure hoped to hell that he knew something, because otherwise this loser was nothing more than a nasty waste of time.

  In front of me, a juice trace appeared out of nowhere. I had never seen anything like it. Monster? I didn’t think Monsters left juice traces, though, as I had never seen one while out hunting.

  I followed the trace, as the trace went the way I jogged. I figured what was going on when I metasensed four more juice traces, in the shape of arrows, written on the ground beside the screwy juice trace I followed.

  Ah. Gilgamesh’s juice trace. He improvised, which brought a smile to my face. Crows didn’t leave juice traces…well, unless they wanted to.

  I liked working with a partner who had real brains. The four arrows pointed to the groups trying to box me in. I made a mental map and took to the roofs, the dumpy houses in this old part of town being conveniently very close together. To get to the roof with Captive I burned juice. At this rate I would have to hunt soon.

  Gilgamesh’s juice trace turned to the northeast, toward South Main and farther along toward Rice University. The group behind me passed close by, now on wheels, circling and hunting. Two houses farther along I metasensed a juice trace note: Focus.

  The pedestrian approach wasn’t working. They would get me eventually this way, no matter how canny I played this. With Rogue Focus leading the hunt, I might actually be in real danger.

  I waved my hands, assuming Gilgamesh was still close enough to metasense me. Car. North. West. Corner. Rice. U.

  I slugged Captive unconscious, leapt down to street level, kicked car window glass, opened up the car, tossed Captive in, hotwired the car, and sped off. South.

  I picked up the Focus on my metasense almost immediately. After running a red light I turned east, toward her, then at the edge of her metasense range I turned south, gunning the stolen vehicle.

  My metasense tingled; Rogue Focus tried to do something to me when I passed by, briefly in range. I inspected the car. Yes. Juice pattern in the shape of a vagina, just what I would expect from our Freudian Rogue Focus. Four miles south I ditched the car, stole another, and circled widely around to pick up Gilgamesh. I only had to roll by the northwest corner of the Rice campus twice before I caught Gilgamesh on my metasense and picked him up.

  Thank the Lord.

  ---

  “Carol, something’s wrong,” Gilgamesh said, as we pulled into the Sunshine Motel’s parking lot. At the tone of his voice, I cruised through the parking lot and out the other side, stopping in the next-door Mobil station.

  “What?”

  “The Good Doctor’s not here.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Metasense. He should have a miniscule amount of dross in him, what his partly transformed adrenal gland should have produced today. I can only sense his dross within a hundred yards or so” Focus-range, necessary for both Crows and Arms when we’re doing intricate metasense work “and he’s not anywhere nearby.”

  “Trouble,” I said. At 1:50 AM, Hank should be asleep. I looked around with care, memories of the lead-up to the Chicago firefight that took me down echoing in my mind. Yes. Four of the cars in the Sunshine’s parking lot tweaked my instincts; all were the same make and model. No Transforms – Gilgamesh would have mentioned that. From the license plates on the four cars, local Houston cops. “Plainclothes detectives,” I said, my most reasonable guess.

  Gilgamesh sighed. “You don’t want to run, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Roof time.” I parked my ride behind the gas station, out of sight of the Sunshine’s parking lot. I also made sure I had Captive tightly tied and gagged in the back seat of my ride, and tossed a blanket over him. I led Gilgamesh to the back fence of the motel. Up and over, then up on the low slope of the motel roof. We crouched low, so our profiles didn’t become visible from the road.

  “Seven in our room, one out front,” Gilgamesh said, whispering.

  I concentrated on my sense of smell, and my hearing. “They don’t realize they’re after an Arm,” I said, whispering back. The detectives carried nothing but their normal service weapons.

  This had to be Focus Peshnak’s work. Based on our research, she had Fed connections, and so I predicted the Feds would be arriving soon, to take over, or as backup. Would she have told the Feds to watch out for an Arm?

  I suspected not. Doing so would invite too many questions about her.

  The adrenaline shock of a plan going bad washed out of me, replaced by a growing livid anger. The hotel room was mine! My lair, in my territory! Nobody violated my territory!

  Gilgamesh pulled away. “Carol, ma’am?”

  “Hank and the rest are on foot.” Hank’s ride was still in the Sunshine’s lot. “Find them, please.” I tried to keep the predator out of my voice, but I didn’t succeed. Not fully. “Can you take the car?” The car with Captive in the back.

  He shook his head, stopped and thought, wincing at the end. “I must,” he said, shaky and wary. Too much Tiamat from me, alas. In this situation, though, I couldn’t properly damp my emotions.

  “Find the rest, if you can. If you can cope, get them to our emergency meet in Conroe,” I said. Next town to the north. “If you can’t, find a way to get my attention. I have some work to do.”

  Gilgamesh shivered and vanished, through fast movement and metasense shielding. He knew exactly what I was about to do, and he didn’t want to be here when I did it.

  I waited, barely able to hold in my anger, until I heard Gilgamesh drive off. Then I crept over the peak of the roof, and leapt over the edge, above the door to my room. I used one hand to twist around, in the process kicking out at the one detective waiting on the walkway outside of the room. He went flying one way, his weapon the other. He would need hospital care, and soon.

  I was through the door to the hotel room before he hit t
he ground. I came in high, and stayed high, and burned. They had been waiting for me, with the lights off, bad for them. Time slowed as it does in combat, as I kicked one in the head, the second in the center of his chest, broke the arm and elbowed the side of the head of the third as he readied to shoot me. I was running out of time for the easy fight I wanted – killing the cops would attract too much attention and likely force me out of Houston permanently. I switched to disarming attacks on the last four, the seventh and last a large problem because he was short, squat and nearly as well muscled as me. I grabbed his trigger finger as he tightened it, about to shoot me in my left shoulder. He ended up with broken and dislocated fingers.

  My anger didn’t fade; the bastards had tossed the place, and the contents of my suitcase lay scattered all over the floor.

  I think they all lived through what I did to them. No, not a Keatonic torture session, but I didn’t want any problems, and I wanted information, fast. I made sure six of them were unconscious, not good for them at all, and those I stuffed into the closet, after I stripped them and wiped down the closet. The one I didn’t stuff into the closet, the fifth detective I had taken down, I tied face-down on the stripped bed and questioned.

  My gut said this one would be the easiest to make talk. I didn’t have time, and used pain. “Why did you come here?” I said, in my male voice. Lucky for me, my suitcase contained only men’s clothing. Nothing here screamed ‘Arm’.

  “Gotta hot tip,” the detective said, after thirty seconds of excruciating nerve pokes removed his will to resist. “Someone spotted one of our fugitives in this dive, a hitter named Mechlenberg, and his crew. Only something’s not right. You’re not Mechlenberg, are you? The people who ran? Who were they?”

  This was what I wanted to hear – the detectives hadn’t corralled any of my crew. I throttled the detective until he passed out, cleaned out the room – which took two trips – wiped the place down, cleaned out our other two rooms, and was gone before the detectives’ backups arrived. I also slit the tires on their rides. Petty, yes, but I was still Arm-angry over the violation of my lair.

  I found a Gilgamesh metasense sign along the feeder road a half mile north – a north-pointing arrow and four cheery-metasensing dots. He had found our missing people. Whichever of my thugs spotted the local cops on the way, and got my people out, would get a reward.

  I ditched the car, found another after I trashed the first, and drove off to Conroe. I calmed down a little on my drive to the back-up meeting point, but only another Major Transform would have been able to tell the difference. Thus the trashing of the first car, a wild and safe fury I let loose far from prying eyes, half anger management and half workout that left the vehicle in bent parts on a piney country road. I torched the car when I finished, growling and swearing as it burned.

  I had lost my Houston territory, at least for now. Unless Keaton ordered me to find another one, my loss was only temporary. Focus Peshnak was going to pay for this. Hard.

  ---

  I found my people in Conroe, right where I expected, eating an early breakfast at the local Denny’s. I couldn’t reward my thugs – Hank had joined them on guard that night, fearing exactly what happened. He knew Focuses far too well, and I realized I needed to sit him down and get him to tell me everything he knew about the various games Focuses played with cops and security.

  “I’m going to question Captive,” I said to them. We sat in the remotest corner and the waitress hadn’t yet summoned the nerve to come take my order. “If you’re smart, you won’t bother me.” I still wasn’t much into kindness or small talk. Gilgamesh wouldn’t come close to me or my crew, and vanished once I found them. He hadn’t revealed himself to Hank or the rest, just following my people after he had located them. Hank and the boys had stolen a car, driven to Conroe, and ditched it when they got here. The car theft had been Ricky’s work. Ricky was tense and sweaty – using his initiative made him nervous. I would make sure he knew I appreciated his work, later, after I calmed down.

  Captive had survived all my abuse and turned out to know more than he realized. The worst bit of intel I picked up was that when Rogue Focus took her extra male Transforms out of peri-withdrawal they became superbly motivated berserk fighting machines. She had a small fearless army at her disposal.

  The second worst was the fact she already had police in Houston and private detectives in neighboring cities out hunting for my home base before Gilgamesh and I stumbled into her juice patterns.

  We were up against a smart, organized and powerful enemy. Taking her out wouldn’t be trivial…and, one way or another, I was going to take her out.

  Chapter 11

  Male Monsters Molest Mission

  The Community of Christ Evanston Mission reports that on the night of June 26, 1968, three Male Monsters ransacked their mission, kidnapped a Mission worker (name withheld pending notification of kin), and stole a large quantity of food and clothing.

  “Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

  Carol Hancock: July 1, 1968

  I knocked at the door of Keaton’s old horse barn and tried to quell the churning in my stomach. My anger at the loss of my territory had turned to resigned grief, a weakness I couldn’t afford to show in front of my boss. She wanted to visit with me in private, never a good thing. I had stashed my successes back at her main house: Gilgamesh, Zielinski and Captive. I wondered what she had done with the baby Arm I gave her. Or if the Arm remained alive. I hadn’t seen her since the day I delivered her and I had no faith in Keaton at all.

  I found out soon enough, as Amy Haggerty answered the barn door. Still alive, at least, but only barely. I almost didn’t recognize her when I spotted her. She was a much different creature from the leggy beauty I had brought here. This starved creature looked like she had recently crawled out of a grave and still belonged there. Or in a third world refugee camp.

  Then there were the injuries. Haggerty wore a T-shirt and shorts, the same T-shirt and shorts I had worn myself on so many occasions, and both hung on her skeletal frame, her body covered with bruises and small burns. Two of her fingernails were gone from her swollen and purple hands. She had scars along her legs, the skin under her shirt showed lumpy and discolored, and she hobbled when she walked.

  Such a pathetic, broken thing. She cringed away from the door when she saw me as I came in.

  “Where’s Keaton?”

  “Follow me, ma’am,” she Crow whispered, flinching from the question.

  “When was her last kill?” Keaton’s juice count was always a critical piece of information. Haggerty cringed again when I spoke. Her cringe irritated me, but I found I no longer considered her the threat I had when I brought her here. Nothing remained of the predator in this ruined wreck. Keaton’s work. Intentional work. She wouldn’t tolerate a competitor either.

  Haggerty sweated, terrified to have my attention on her. “Ma’am, I, uh, uh…the day before yesterday. I think. I’m sorry, ma’am. I lose track of the days sometimes. I’m really sorry.”

  I wondered if I had ever been such a pathetic creature as this, a disturbing thought. I found her both revolting and irritating.

  She did wear Keaton’s tag, though Keaton didn’t need a tag to keep this thing in line. At least Keaton followed her own advice.

  I put the baby Arm out of my mind. Keaton would demand my full attention.

  Keaton looked pensive, and her pensiveness didn’t vanish when I went down on my knees and reaffirmed I was hers. She started by exercising both Haggerty and me. I didn’t require supervision, knowing exactly what Keaton wanted. Keaton was vicious with Haggerty.

  We ate lunch up the hill in Keaton’s house of pain, a comfortable place if you ignored the basement. The meal came from a refrigerator, clearly catering service food (cold roast chicken, cream cheese Jell-O salad, potato salad, and rice pudding for dessert). I decided Haggerty couldn’t cook. Keaton grilled me on everything I had done since my last visit, including my espionage mi
ssion. I couldn’t pick up on why Keaton stayed so pensive, so I risked a leading comment.

  “Haggerty seems to have learned a little respect since the last time I was here,” I said, nodding at the baby Arm, who was cleaning up after lunch.

  “Damn, Hancock. You would not believe.” Keaton leaned back in her chair and put her arm over her head. I was astonished. She didn’t seem to be damping her reactions at all. She looked hassled.

  My nerves sang with tension at the strange behavior, but I made a polite inquiring noise. My boss clearly wanted to talk.

  “You’ve never seen such a disaster in your life. The idiot has no sense whatsoever. Besides that, she’s stubborn. I knock her around some, try and teach her some respect, and she doesn’t get it. Every time I try and teach her something, she has her own ideas of how things ought to work. Every time I turn around, she wants to argue with me.”

  Keaton brought her arm down and turned back to me.

  “On top of that, she has moral issues. She keeps wanting to be the good guy. What’s more, she wants me to be a good guy! I talk to her about hunting and she comes up with all these ideas about how to keep the body count down at only moderately increased personal risk. I tell her I don’t care about the body count itself, just the risk factor, and she argues with me. She argues with me! So I beat the crap out of her and then she gets mad. And snotty. So I beat her up again and then she sulks.”

  Some brand new Arm getting into a contest of wills with Keaton? I remembered Mary Fouke and wondered if this one would do a better job at survival.