The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Read online

  Tonya scanned the cameo with her metasense and sensed the embedded juice pattern. “It’s the ‘someone is hiding from my metasense’ pattern,” Tonya said, and whistled. “But how? That’s way above your juice pattern capabilities.” They had talked about this many times; Gerry possessed only minimal personal capabilities, compared to the other Focuses of her age, but obviously possessed hidden power. She was damned difficult to charismatically affect, her metasense acuity was legendary, and she shrugged off juice patterns like a pro.

  “I know. Crow Gilgamesh was right when he told me he recognized the same problems he had, in me. The pattern was so much easier to stabilize when I attached it to a physical object and could build it up incrementally. Of all the things, I’m an object-oriented witch.” She sighed. “And now I told you.” The first Focuses would go after Gerry as soon as they found out about her newly awakened talent, the same way they had crushed all the other amulet and potion-creating Focuses down through the years.

  “You’re only going to get into trouble from me if you don’t develop this,” Tonya said. “My opinion about Focuses is ‘the stronger the better’, especially now. Just watch out for side effects. One of the reasons why we generally dissuade Focuses from fast ability development is the effect this sort of thing can have on their household and their personal life.”

  Gerry nodded. She and Tonya had already exchanged horror stories about the side effects of their newly learned access to their household juice buffers. For a Major Transform, any new trick always carried far too many risks. “I’ll be careful.” She paused. “I just can’t guarantee I’ll be able to give you any warning if the Commander calls and I need to leave town.”

  “I understand,” Tonya said, using her own charisma on herself to keep from spitting figurative nails in anger. “I understand.”

  How In The Hell Had Gilgamesh Done It?

  Faith Corrigan – Focus #5 – June 1955. Although known to suffer from occasional bouts of depression and the occasional day where she cannot rouse herself from bed, Focus Corrigan is the oldest of the first Focuses who is still active in the world of Focus politics. She managed the mentoring program for young Focuses until 1968. “Young Focuses should be thankful for the risks we took to keep us all out of the hands of the doctors and bureaucrats, and should listen closely to our advice and comments on the proper way to run a household.”

  “Lives of the Focuses”

  Carol Hancock: December 10, 1972

  What the fuck?

  Figures something like this would show up while Gilgamesh and I were making love, Major Transform style, and while Gilgamesh was using my Monster talisman as a sex toy in our lovemaking.

  Given where the toy was now, this was most embarrassing.

  Gilgamesh froze as well.

  “Normally Monsters don’t drive cars,” I said. I didn’t know yet the full potential of my carved bone Monster talisman, awakened three days ago by a crazy apparition of a dead Crow shaman in the Pheromone Flow, but I already knew, when in contact with my body, it enhanced my metasense range as far as metasensing Monsters was concerned. I metasensed our car-driving Monster at two miles.

  “She’s not a Monster,” Gilgamesh said. Focused on his metasense, his face turned vacant, his eyes seeing nothing.

  “She?”

  “An Arm, and not one I recognize, wearing a Monster skin cape.”

  “Business, then. I need to get cleaned up.”

  Gilgamesh did the manly honors and retrieved the Monster talisman without a word. He joined me in my quick shower, helping me soap myself up. Teasing me. Nasty man. “I’m going with you, Carol. Remember Sinclair’s story?”

  The one where Chevalier lured Sinclair out of his household and shut down his metasense with a senior Crow trick, nearly leading to his death. I opened my mouth to object, but Gilgamesh pulled on my tag and I cut short my objection.

  The psychology of the Crow tag involved ‘having each other’s backs’. Of course he would want to serve as backup in a situation like this. I wouldn’t need him if this was what it appeared to be, a confrontation with another Arm – but what if this was a scam? Who was to say this wasn’t Chevalier fooling our metasenses? Or a new and unexpected Hunter trick? Or, worse, Bass and Crow Echo, who possessed the capabilities to run this scam whenever they wanted.

  Backup would increase my survival odds if this turned out to be a trap. And if Echo was involved, Gilgamesh would get a chance at the revenge he had been lusting after for months. He wouldn’t be turning down a chance at Echo, no matter how slim.

  I rinsed him off and carried him out of the shower. “Stay safe and bring your weapons,” I said, throwing on my gear at Arm speed. As we dressed, the unknown parked her car about a half mile from my house and came in on foot, at a slow walk, and not directly toward my current residence. “New Arm contacts often turn bloody.”

  My name is Carol Hancock, and I’m an Arm. I’m a Major Transform and a victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome, and to stay alive I need to kill Transforms for juice every two to three weeks, juice being the substance all Transforms produce and require. Arms don’t produce enough juice. Crow Guru Gilgamesh, my lover and close companion, is a male Major Transform juice-byproduct scavenger, and professionally paranoid. I’m often called the Commander because of my military command talents, talents I didn’t get to use as often as I wanted to these days.

  Gilgamesh and I currently walked on the thin edge of disaster, as my Arm boss, Stacy Keaton, had turned on the Focuses, the third variety of Major Transform, the variety that keeps the male and female Transforms alive. At the moment, Keaton was gunning for the ruling first Focuses, a move against a deserving group of scumsuckers that would have made all the other Major Transforms happy, except for their legitimate fear that they would be Keaton’s next target.

  Unfortunately, while we plotted our violent attack on the first Focuses we turned our backs on the Cause, the effort that we hoped would save us from the coming Transform Apocalypse, when nearly everyone would transform and civilization would fall. We also turned our backs on the threat from the rival Hunter civilization; they wanted to enslave the lot of us. Even worse, Keaton’s top strategist at the moment, Arm Bass, was a mortal enemy of mine. Cunning and devious, I wouldn’t put it past her to arrange an attack on me of this nature.

  We were all in deep deep shit, and there was nothing I could do about it at the moment.

  I walked out of my remodeled warehouse as the other Arm entered my metasense range. The blustery northeast wind almost lifted me off my feet, my current Chicago stronghold in the Rogers Park neighborhood being close enough to Lake Michigan to be subject to its stiff wind. I glared at the flakes of blowing snow and snarled, but as usual my predator effect didn’t part the flurries. This year’s hard and early winter refused to retreat, and the temperature had dropped close to zero again tonight. I would be stuck in this shit location for another week before I moved into a real house and turned my warehouse into a backup residence.

  I focused on my metasense, attempting to get a good read on the Arm intruder. She stopped her approach when I walked ten paces from my home, remaining in Leone Beach Park. She had gotten me with her metasense, despite my standard metasense masking tricks. Not shabby. The fact she didn’t charge meant this wasn’t an overt Arm-style dominance challenge.

  My Rogers Park home wasn’t what it appeared to be on the outside, that being a grimy unmarked two story former warehouse and storefront complex a block from the ‘M’ line. Inside, I had set up the place as a fortress, and inside the fortress I had set up a relatively luxurious faux-home. I walked under the El, Gilgamesh at my back, and turned southeast toward the beach park.

  “I don’t believe she’s a senior Arm,” Gilgamesh whispered, after a few paces. I nodded, as I pegged the Arm as a middling-age mature Arm, similar to Arms Naylor and Sibrian. I didn’t trust my observations, though. I also metasensed multiple tags on her, eight by my count, all Focus tags. This wasn’t Armenigar, but
someone who recognized the stature benefits of wearing the tags of established Focuses. She carried the stature of Bass or Rayburn, as us Arms measure such things, stature far beyond her years.

  Eissler could pull off this trick, only I thought I knew Eissler’s metasense signature from the Dreaming, and this wasn’t her. Still, this Arm’s metapresence did feel a little familiar, and information from the Dreaming was notoriously unreliable. Why would Eissler come here, though, without a word of warning first? Not to challenge me; pffht, I would find out about such a challenge only after Eissler pasted me into next Tuesday. She was that good. As to why the masquerade, well, we did have a war on. We were all being paranoid.

  “Anything besides the one Arm?” I whispered back to Gilgamesh. We were now only five hundred feet from the beach park. The wind howled off the lake, blowing the snow pellets sideways and cutting visibility to near nothing. I swore three quarters of the streetlights in this part of town were out, as well.

  “Nothing,” Gilgamesh said, whispering from safely upwind of me. “Carol, if I’m not mistaken, she’s an Armenigar-trained Arm.”

  His comment clicked open one of my memories. I recognized her now, a Montreal Arm I once metasensed in the Dreaming, an Arm I had a good feeling about. I relaxed a bit, my wariness reduced to the Bass and Echo scenarios. This sort of crap would be just like Bass.

  I relaxed a bit more, fifty paces on, when I saw the Arm through the blowing snow. Sheltering in the wind shadow of the park’s fifty-year-old bricked-up boathouse, she stood five ten and possessed the heavy muscles of a power Arm. She wasn’t the far shorter Arm Bass in disguise. Hell, she carried more muscles than any five-ten human man; this was an Arm who would have a hard time walking around in public in any disguise without attracting attention. Gilgamesh, invisible, eased away from me when he decided the situation was what it appeared to be, a tense Arm meet and greet.

  When I became visible thirty feet down the beach from her, the Canadian Arm didn’t bow to me, her obvious superior, eliciting an instinctive growl from me. She did put down the last of her weaponry, most of which already lay at her feet on the snow covered sand (she liked big swords and big guns), and she did turn her gaze to my feet and fill her mind with humble thoughts to match her posture.

  I readied a charge, to knock her back a bit and take her measure, but the quiet soft voice in my head I normally ignored, the one that always wanted me to act in a civilized manner, began its hopeless pleas. Did I need to turn everything into a fight? Alone, this bulky and likely glacially slow Arm was no more of a physical threat to me than, well, Gilgamesh. I was armed, juiced-up, and fast. I could take her unarmed whenever I wanted. She reeked of humility and humbleness; she knew she faced the Commander, and these days my reputation was darkest black, beastly and bloody.

  So, instead of punishing this Arm for her effrontery, for barging into my territory without prior permission, I heeded the soft voice and decided to save my righteous wrath for later, and only if needed. She was a foreign Arm, following different Arm protocols, and although she wasn’t showing the proper humility a Keaton-trained Arm would show in this situation, she wasn’t being personally aggressive.

  “Why are you here, Arm from Montreal?” I didn’t hold back on my predator, though.

  She shivered at the force of my predator and almost ran, but caught herself and showed decent self-control. “Ma’am.” Well, at least she knew something about proper submission. “Commander, my name is Giselle Debardelaben, and I am here to offer you alliance.”

  I spent a moment reading her and metasensing her and the truth of her words. I did appreciate her Monster-skin cape. Her trophy belt and its myriad pieces of skin I appreciated less, but it did explain where Duval, exiled from Canada as a baby Arm, got her quirks.

  “I hear you,” I said. I walked toward her, not a charge, and took my time, testing her nerves. Would she flee or hold her ground? Would she panic and pick up one of the weapons at her feet, to defend herself? Would she offer me the excuse I needed to beat her silly?

  She held her ground, but I sensed the effort involved. I terrified her. Good.

  “You tried to train Arm Duval and failed,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t tell her with words to tell me the story, but did so with my predator effect, and she complied, able to read my signal with ease. This was a well-trained Arm, despite the fact she spoke English as a second language, with a noticeable Quebecois accent. “I caught her after she poached a Transform from one of my Focuses. She wouldn’t accept either my tag or those from any of my Focuses, and I was too weak to hold her mind and keep her from disobeying my orders. I faced the choice of killing her or exiling her, and chose exile, hoping she might find her way to Arm Keaton, whose ability to train difficult Arms is well known.”

  I snorted, as I was one of those ‘difficult Arm’ trainees. “Duval is currently being trained by Arm Rose Webberly.” An Arm with less than six months more experience than Debardelaben, and who possessed nowhere near Debardelaben’s stature. “If you are to serve me in any way, you will need to vacate all claims to Duval, as Duval is Webberly’s, and Webberly is mine.”

  “Ma’am, I renounce all claims.”

  I circled Debardelaben, impressed with both her simple quitclaim, stated without hesitation, and her musculature, which for a two and a half year old Arm was fucking amazing. “Who else, besides Armenigar, trained you?”

  “Focuses Annie of Montreal and Larson of Toronto.”

  The former explained both her poise and her stature. Annie of Montreal aka the Madonna of Montreal had a reputation for decorum and politeness, as well as a tendency to enforce both with her charisma. As Crow Sky, a confidant of the Madonna’s, said many times: ‘Her, you don’t challenge.’ I stopped behind Debardelaben’s left shoulder and stood in silence, letting the Arm squirm in discomfort at my implied threat. At my back, Gilgamesh took to the roof of the boathouse, ignoring the wind and searching for enemies. With me distracted by an Arm-style meet and greet, this would be a perfect time for one of my many enemies to show up and make my life more miserable.

  “Why are you here, now?”

  She paused to focus her mind in the face of my daunting predatory presence. The wind chose that moment to blast snow from the roof of the boathouse across my face. Both of us ignored it. The snow slowly found lodging on our coats and hair, camouflaging us to suit the white beach. “Ma’am, I am here to serve you in the coming fight I do not know how to properly and politely reference.”

  “Something told to you by the Madonna of Montreal, perhaps?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I told Keaton the Focuses would learn about her planned attacks in the Dreaming, but she didn’t care. Now I got to deal with another piece of fallout resulting from her disdain for strategic-level secrecy. “Why are you interested in this fight?”

  “Ma’am, my closest Focus friend, Gwen Larson, has been humiliated repeatedly by Focus Adkins of Detroit.” My number one target. “She seeks vengeance for the pain she’s suffered over the years, although she doesn’t state her desires in words, just in her heart.”

  Debardelaben didn’t consider the Madonna her closest ‘friend’, eh? That made clear who dominated whom in their relationship, now didn’t it? Not at all surprising.

  “And?”

  The fact I pierced her minor lie by omission, and so trivially, made her shiver. “Ma’am, the Hunters are going to attack soon, both here and in Canada, and I want in on the Hunter fight. I want to, need to, prove my worth to you first.” Someone had warned her I would take her apart, piece by piece, if she pulled anything. Her Arm instincts, though, fought back. The stupid Arm part of her wanted to balk, and I read her as she forced down the challenge in a way that reminded me of my own internal struggles.

  “Why not fight at Armenigar’s side?”

  “Certain aspects of my personality bother her, ma’am.” She carefully touched her trophy belt, her hand moving slow enough to make clear s
he wasn’t issuing a challenge. “We don’t work together well.” That I understood. Armenigar didn’t think of herself as a predator but as a force of nature, and showed as little sadism as my former boss and current number two, the Arm Amy Haggerty aka the Hero. Debardelaben’s dark predatory beast appeared to be more toward the center of the Arm behavioral curve. Of course they didn’t get along.

  “Meaning she would need to tag you to work with you.” Debardelaben nodded. “I am going to require the same.”

  Her face went stony. “Ma’am, I would rather not go forward in such a fashion. Is there something else I can do for you to fix…”

  Definitely too much training from the Focuses. “Shut up.” She shut up. “I like you,” I said, almost surprised by my own words. I did like her, the first Arm who I instinctively liked. I could deal with her without a tag, as I was naturally the dominant Arm here, again something new to me. “I don’t trust you, though. The current conflict’s filled with too much treachery, much of which I’m going to need to tell you about.” And she was a spy, that much was clear. “You’ll also be dealing with my Arm organization, of which you’ll be the sixth Arm under my command, and you’ll need the tag to get along with them.”

  “Sixth?” she mouthed, politely soundless. “Ma’am, my information on your organization appears to be out of date. I will accept your tag. I am yours.”

  And you are mine, I thought, mentally planning out a quick tagging ceremony for later today, such as after the sun rose.

  The juice did its thing and created the tag anyway, without a ceremony, based on my mental acquiescence. Goddamned juice. I sighed and covered my slip as best I could. “Welcome to my organization,” I said, now filled with the love and power of ownership a new Arm tag always created. Yes, this was an Arm tag to make me smile. This was an Arm I would in time be able to trust.

  I signaled for Gilgamesh to come over. “Here’s the deal. I get to edit all the reports you’ll be giving to your spymasters.” She nodded, relieved not to need to explain the obvious to me. “You’re going to be dealing with Transforms and normals of all kinds, in large numbers, and you’ll be polite when you do, to all of them, unless I order otherwise. Let’s start with Gilgamesh here, the Crow I work with.”