All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Page 36

  I wondered if Hargrove was among them. Much to Hargrove’s chagrin, I had made her bodyguards hand over all their ammo. They could have arranged to get more. My metasense caught only one Focus and household shooting the wrong way, though.

  Outside, Keaton’s chopper went down and burst into flame. Predictable. Keaton and her damned toys. At least I convinced her to leave her howitzer at home and not put it on the reception hall roof.

  Decoyed, dammit. I made a decision. Shadow hadn’t skunked me yet, but if I sensed anything funky, he would be a headless Crow. I lifted him one handed and dragged him with me as I moved over to the shot up Focuses’ mess. Which proved to be a bad mess.

  The fucking bride had played bodyguard and saved Tonya’s life. What was with Focus bitch Tonya, anyway, to get so lucky? Although Gail had gotten herself perforated quite nicely, Tonya took only one dead-on bullet, and that one right through a tit and a shoulder. The rest of the low-powered ammo hit Gail first. Tonya would not only live, but likely had already recovered. Some people live charmed lives, I guess.

  Tonya’s bodyguard, Pete the normal, was a goner. My old traveling companion Delia, a Transform, would recover if she got hospitalized. I wouldn’t even have to use my magic healing tongue this time. Marty, Tonya’s third bodyguard, had taken two bullets and still stood. He too was a Transform, so too would recover without my help. The fucking bride’s normal bodyguard might die, but I saw how to save him, and it would only cost me my hold on Shadow. What the hell. My instincts told me Gilgamesh had been right all along and Shadow was on our side. I let Shadow go and yanked the cummerbund off the bride’s bodyguard, using it as a tourniquet on his plinked right arm. That would keep him from bleeding to death. Damned normals.

  “Where’s Hank?” Tonya said, in my ear, at speed.

  “Down,” I said. Hank, caught with Focus Hargrove and her people, had been doing a good job shooting, using a Monster rifle from one of our hidden ballroom weapon stashes, until one of the giant turkey Monsters had leapt the table and stepped on his right leg, breaking it. Hargrove had killed the Monster, hand to hand, but Hank was out of the fight, dammit.

  “You save her,” Tonya said. She grabbed Shadow, who still kept himself hidden from my metasense and night vision. Holding on to Mr. Invisible looked strange. How had Gail managed to spot him when I couldn’t? Was she that talented a Focus?

  Tonya edged farther into the Focus juice metabolism state. Something roared Terror, too far away to raise my hackles. Seconds crawled. Focus Anderson and her crew were dead. The ballroom was momentarily safe.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said, still at speed.

  Gail’s wounds were worse than what I suffered when the FBI took me down in Chicago. Even I wouldn’t be able to live through what had happened to Gail. Was Tonya right, though? Although Gail hadn’t taken any bullets in the brain, the one through the neck looked like it had taken out some spine.

  “Try. Heal her enough to let her healing trance take over.”

  I dropped the burn, knelt and grabbed Gail. Took a deep breath. What in the hell was I turning into, anyway? Florence Nightingale the Arm? Keaton would laugh for months.

  Dammit, I couldn’t resist. Some Focuses were just too beautiful to ignore, and I liked all Focuses to begin with. Gail was another one, not as irresistible as Lori, but real damn close. A metapresence to die for.

  I healed soft tissue in her neck until my tongue went limp. Quickly. Progress. Gail didn’t die as fast as before. I still guessed I would run myself out of juice before Gail’s self-healing kicked in enough to save her, though it turned out she hadn’t taken one in the spine. The problem was obvious: she was too young a Focus and she had never healed significant damage before. She did all the wrong things. I metasensed her heal this, heal that, heal this, heal that, and nothing she healed was at all critical. Her juice metabolism didn’t even kick in correctly. This was a waste of time.

  “Take it,” Gail said, a breathless whisper. Her voice grabbed my attention; she shouldn’t be conscious enough to talk. I was dealing with a baby super-Focus, no doubt about it.

  Her face was close to mine, her body bleeding all over me, and we had about as close a contact as possible. She tried something with the juice, but all she succeeded in doing was starting up the screwy juice cycling thing that Lori and I had experienced.

  “Stop trying to heal yourself, Gail. You’re just wasting juice.”

  “Use mine, then.”

  I did. “Not enough. All you gave me was your supplemental juice.” The juice from her juice buffer slowly cycled through me, but I couldn’t touch the juice buffer, the Arms’ Holy Grail. In theory, a Focus should be able to give us Arms juice from her juice buffer, and support us directly, the same way she supported male Transforms. We wouldn’t have to kill for every fucking last drop of juice. We would able to be human again. Well, no. We would be able to be civilized again.

  “I’m dying.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “No one does.” Hell. Now I was her father confessor. I mean, here she is, going to heaven, and she wanted to confess her sins to an Arm who was Satan’s handmaiden in spades.

  “You’re beautiful. Are you an angel?”

  “I’m Carol Hancock, Gail. An Arm. Spree killer. Mass murderer.”

  “You’re the Commander, the Angel with a sword.” Fuck. Not this again! My reputation would never recover. Nope. Never.

  “There’s this bright light calling me, Carol. I think I’m going.”

  “Hang on, hang on, keep feeding me juice and I can get this healed.” Right. No fucking way. I wasn’t sure she had anything left of her aorta. How could I heal body parts splattered all over fucking Biggioni, anyway?

  Worse, her localized juice metabolism started to fail.

  “It’s so beautiful. My body…”

  All of a sudden, she grabbed me with her juice in some weird-ass fashion I didn’t understand, as if I was a tagged household Transform. However, if this was a tag, it wasn’t like anything I had ever metasensed or experienced before. Insanely big. Shit! This I didn’t need. Then I saw the juice buffer, huge, far larger than I had expected, so large I couldn’t accurately get a read on its size. Could I use it? Yes, dammit. Whatever Gail had done, she opened me up to it. It wasn’t reversing the juice cycling flow. I didn’t know what had happened to me. How in the hell did I walk myself into this one? The juice pattern she used wasn’t simple, either. It was as complex as some of the things Lori had shown me, perhaps more so. The trick was Gail’s, all the way. Arms just didn’t have the metasense and fineness of juice control necessary to set something like this up.

  However, I didn’t need to understand it to use it. I got right to work. Quickly. I had a battle to lead.

  Gilgamesh

  “Let me at her,” the voice said. Gilgamesh stopped his howling and looked up to the figures standing over him. Focus Keistermann, the Arm, the gaudily decorated Larson Focus who was supposedly from Canada and two of Larson’s bodyguards.

  “She’s gone,” Gilgamesh said, still holding Lori’s limp blood-soaked body in his arms. The ballroom was a madhouse of screaming and shooting and blood. Emergency lights cast uneven shadows on the upturned tables, scattered chairs, and crouching people. The din was so loud it almost hurt.

  “Not by a long shot.” Polly did something with the juice and restabilized Lori’s glow. Gilgamesh leaned back, the panic building to where he wanted to run and hide. No Focus should be so powerful. Lori was in withdrawal-death. “You can save a Major Transform in withdrawal if you can get to her within ten minutes or so,” the Focus said. “She won’t even have any major side effects afterwards.”

  “Focus Scar uses that capability as a weapon,” Gilgamesh said. Intimating more than he could say. Panic running his mouth. Lori moaned and twitched in his arms, dousing him with another gusher of fresh blood.

  “I learned this from her, but the day I stoop to the level of doing t
hat to my people is the day I untag them all and blow my brains out, sonny.” Bah. Another Major Transform who read him like a book. He was going to have to do something about that, someday.

  “Can you heal her, either of you?” Gilgamesh said.

  Larson shook her head, causing the glowing metallic gold highlights in her snow white hair to sinuously wave, as if she was underwater. “Gilgamesh, healing someone else is beyond the capabilities of any Focus,” Polly said. She even knew who he was! “When we reach out beyond ourselves, the only thing we can touch besides the juice is a person’s mind.”

  Gilgamesh turned to the large Arm. “You can heal. Do so!”

  “There are those of my kind who can heal others?” she said, her eyebrows up to where her hairline would be if she wasn’t shaved bald. Then her brows came down again. “You’ve met one who can. Hancock? So she is who they say she is?” Gilgamesh nodded. “I’m sorry. My talents lie in other areas.”

  “What may I call you, ma’am?”

  “Call me Arm,” she said, a hint of a smile on her face, then turned toward the shattered window. Shit. Sky’s Arm! As terrifying as he had ever imagined. “They’re coming. Twelve Male Monsters, the masked Crow, and eight intelligent full Monsters. A mass of Male Monster-stabilized household Transforms, at least a hundred. The psychotic Arm, the Arm-Focus and a small group of allied Male Monsters are fighting them, with their army of normals, but they’re about to be overwhelmed and then the fight will roll in the ballroom. The first wave was just a distraction. You’re bleeding. Can you cope, Crow?”

  “Probably not, Arm.” He didn’t think he was bleeding, but in his current state, he wasn’t sure if he would even notice.

  “Can you help defend Gwen, Polly and this Focus?”

  “Yes, Arm.”

  “Then I need to go defend the ballroom.” With that, the Arm ran off. She no longer bled.

  “Where’s Sky?” Polly said. Except for a few spots of blood on her dress, she still looked civilized. Every hair in place, and calm as a boulder in a thunderstorm, even while people ran by on whatever mad business they had found, or shot out through the window at the attackers outside.

  “He’s out there,” he said, then waved. Outside. Focus Larson’s two bodyguards crouched in front of Focus Larson, and Focus Larson knelt, hands over her knees, overwhelmed by the violence and spewing charisma in more varieties than Gilgamesh recognized, trying to regain her self-control. Gilgamesh would have given anything to be able to curl into a fetal ball himself.

  “Can you make agreements for Focus Rizzari?” Polly said.

  “I don’t understand.” The emergency light directly above them went out, for no reason, and threw them all into the shadow of the upturned table beside him. Lori moaned again, but didn’t regain consciousness. Gilgamesh shivered as a distant Terror rang out, a wolf’s howl. Enkidu.

  Polly squatted down across from him. Incongruous to see someone so civilized squatting, even in a firefight. “I can save her by teaching her how to save herself. There’s a cost, though.”

  Shit. “Lori would rather die than be forced to join the cause of the first Focuses, Focus Keistermann,” he said, quieter now, their negotiations private.

  “That’s not what I’m asking. Would she be willing to join me? I’ve been watching Focus Rizzari for years, even before she found a way to save Tonya from Her. There are few who have the talents I need, and Focus Rizzari is one. There are even fewer I’d be willing to trust, and Focus Rizzari is one of those, too.”

  His mind spun in juice panic. Too young, too much stress. Battles. Insane Focus politics. “I don’t even know the questions to ask, Focus Keistermann. You’re the Council president, ma’am. The Council sits at the pleasure of the first Focuses, ma’am.”

  “Crow adventurer, the Council is mine. If the first Focuses remove me, Biggioni, Webb, or Bentlow from their Council, we’ll start up a rival Council and prevail.”

  Polly’s words didn’t make any sense to him at all. “Focus Biggioni has talked to us, and made amends. Can you do the same?”

  She looked him over, carefully. “I have nothing to make amends for. You consider Focus Rizzari your leader?”

  “Among the Focuses, yes.”

  “Interesting,” Polly said. “At worst, I make Focus Rizzari an ally, not a follower. I’ll just have to gamble on the other issue.” Focus Keistermann closed her eyes and put her hand on Lori’s blood soaked chest. The juice moved, an insanely intricate and massive dance of juice far beyond what Gilgamesh understood. Focus Keistermann had used her household juice buffer to power up the most complex juice pattern Gilgamesh had ever seen.

  A moment later, Lori opened her eyes and looked around. “What have you done to me?” she asked. “Focus Keistermann? Polly?” Her voice still burbled with blood from her lungs, but was stronger.

  “I’ve given you access to your juice buffer. Live.”

  Lori tried to nod and then stopped with a sharp breath as she found the limits of the muscles in her wounded neck. Gilgamesh noticed her right eye didn’t track. He couldn’t figure out how Lori’s blood moved, as her heart didn’t beat, though she did breathe again. “Thank you.”

  “Of course, now that I’ve shown you the pattern, I can’t stop you from figuring out how to do it yourself,” Focus Keistermann said. “A few months of practice should suffice, for someone of your skills.”

  “If that.” Lori couldn’t move her head, just her left eye. “I’m still in big trouble, Gilgamesh.” Despite her calm voice, her muscles around her wide eyes were tight with strain. “One of the bullets went through the back of my head. I can heal it, but I’ll have to create new brain cells. I’ve lost a lot of motor cell memories. I’m going to have to relearn a lot of physical things, like perhaps walking. You’re going to have to protect me.”

  “I will. I’ll help.”

  Lori’s remaining good eye tracked to Polly. “What’s this tied up in?”

  “You can’t teach anyone else this trick without starting an open war against Shirley Patterson. You will have to publicly proclaim that you’re my follower, my pawn and my apprentice…and give up your Cause.”

  “I will never be the pawn of the Council, nor will I ever give up the Cause. I’m past that.”

  “Appearances will have to be deceiving.” Polly smiled.

  “My friends?”

  “Can know the truth, but only if they can keep the secret as well. We’ll all be walking a very thin line.”

  “I can agree we’re going to be doing that.”

  Crazy Lori. Crazy Focuses. His love was clinically dead and still she bargained hard.

  Earl Robert Sellers

  “What the fuck?” the Duke said.

  “Arm Keaton, in a helicopter,” the Earl said. The hard rain had become a downpour, and turned the battle into a soggy chaotic mess. The Arm, or someone with her, sprayed heavy gunfire from the helicopter into the real attacking army, now a block away from the wide avenue in front of the hotel parking lot. The weapons fire from the reception hall rooftop was almost deafening, but they fired into the illusory army, not knowing the difference. They were going to be low on ammo when the real army arrived.

  “Ready yourselves,” the Duke said. “We’re going after their near flank, as soon as the main group crosses the parking…”

  His voice vanished into a yelp, as they all ducked back. Arm Keaton’s helicopter spun out of control and fell with an explosion, into the parking lot not a hundred yards away from them. The Earl metasensed the Arm jump free from the chopper, hit the ground with a roll, and sprint off toward a parked van. Helicopter debris clattered by, ruining cars on the way, and ended up only thirty feet from the Noble group’s outpost at the edge of the reception hall.

  “Reposition!” the Duke said, motioning with his larger claw and starting to move. “Use the burning helicopter as cover.” He led them around the burning wreckage and motioned for them to halt. Twenty yards away, Keaton opened up the back of the van, unlim
bered some RPGs, and started firing into the real army. Arm Haggerty came blazing over to Keaton, grabbed a .50 caliber heavy machine gun that no human being should be able to fire without a mount, and began to spray the enemy, firing with one hand and feeding the ammo belt with the other.

  Perhaps they did have a chance. The Arms were far better at combat than Sellers had ever imagined. He did notice that few of the enemy fell from Haggerty’s machine gun fire. Dammit, devious Crow tricks still covered the attackers.

  The real attacking army, now spread out in an open formation, appeared through the smoke as they crossed the avenue and slowed to a walk as they reached the parking lot. A car-sized wolf – Enkidu – called out an order, and from the main group, a small group of Hunters and pack Monsters split off, coming their direction. Toward the smaller ballroom, the one Sellers thought of as the dining hall. The second flank attack the Commander feared.

  Behind them, Sellers metasensed the Commander leap out of the window and make her way toward them. Master Occum relayed orders via hand signals. “We’re supposed to attack Enkidu’s small group,” Sellers said. Windblown rain whipped into his face, the worst of the storm arriving with the Hunters’ main army.

  Dimly, Sellers metasensed a third group behind the Hunters’ main army. They metasensed as weak, untrained, and beastly. Ancillaries. Lesser combatants. Baby Hunters.

  The coup-de-grace squad.

  The enemy wanted them all dead.

  “Then let’s do so,” Duke Hoskins said. “Charge.”

  They charged.

  Enkidu, Joshua the red-furred ape, an oversized lizard they had only heard of before, Thunder, and a fourth mature Hunter, a nameless miniature tyrannosaur, and their packs all awaited them.