An Age Without A Name Page 4

  I stood. “All right, you want sex? You’ll get sex. But this time, we do the sex my way.”

  He raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. I stalked close to him and ran my hands along his chest, stirring fire in his juice as I did. He caught his breath, startled at the simplest of my foreplay tricks I hadn’t bothered with while he had been forcing himself on me.

  I pulled his head down towards me. “Loose my beast a bit,” I whispered in his ear. I felt a stir inside me. A little aggression, a little fire. “More,” I said.

  Ah, there it came. Pure power, aggression, and dominance. I felt the heat rising inside of me, this time the heat of the old, deadly lust that had been mine since my transformation. I touched him again, stirring his juice and his nerves. I sang to his mind with my predator effect, rousing his own lusts, calling them under my control. Our scant supply of clothes disappeared, as I worked my magic on us both.

  His body and mind responded, hard and fast, and out of his control. He stared at me in gap-jawed astonishment. Then, I felt him pull away from me, as he carefully throttled back his passions. Aroused, but not out of control. Human level reactions, tame, safe.

  I grabbed hold of his cock and squeezed, hard. “Don’t you ever hold back on me,” I said, my voice bedroom-husky. “When I fuck you, I want all of you. You need everything you’ve got to satisfy me.”

  I felt him surge in my hand, and his reactions slip his control again. He held me, and I could feel the iron strength in his arms. Huge, powerful. The thought made me hotter.

  “Are you sure you want this?” he said, holding just enough control to speak. Sweat beaded on his face, and his body blazed hot against me.

  “You owe it to me, beast,” I said, and pushed him down to the ground. He growled as he fell and so did I.

  It was hours until morning.

  I lay face down on the floor in a post-orgasmic glow, while Mizar picked broken glass out of my back. Damn, this had been good. I never realized before how much I held back, even with Gilgamesh and Sky. I demanded Mizar give me his passions without restraint, and he called up mine in return. I hadn’t even noticed when I rolled through the glass.

  It was a good thing we chose a trashed room to begin with, because the room was sure as hell trashed now.

  Mizar picked out the last of the larger pieces and started in on the smaller ones, but his fingers were too large. He bent down and began to lick the places where the slivers lodged. My skin felt hot, and I felt the cuts healing, slowly pushing the glass out, some trick of his. He pulled several shards out with his tongue, and spat them into the corner. It would have taken me hours to do that on my own.

  He winced as he turned his head. I chuckled. He wore as many cuts and bruises as I did.

  He was as happy, too. Before me, he hadn’t always had to hold back – old Monsters were pretty damned tough – but he had no experience at all with someone who could rouse his passions so intensely. Even Lori couldn’t tangle with his beast. His expression of wonder was beautiful to see. All that time in the Yukon, and he never imagined I could do something like this.

  Amazing what pleasures you can discover when both participants are voluntary.

  He finished with the glass, and licked my back again in a gesture that was pure affection. He laid down on the floor beside me, and I snuggled close, to lay my head on his shoulder. Through the broken window, the sun slowly lightened the city. He held me in his arms, and it was a good feeling.

  He really wasn’t a bad sort, once you got past the dominance thing, and I couldn’t complain about someone else’s use of dominance. Not with my background. If he could get past his attitudes about women, he would be positively decent. He did have a lot going for him. He was exceptionally sharp, with a lot of experience as a Transform, and some top-notch capabilities. He was honorable, trustworthy, and honestly tried to do the right thing. Coming back to our brave new world promised to be hard on him, but he did so anyway.

  Once he adjusted to our world and lost his archaic chauvinism, I thought I might come to like him. Certainly, he was capable of some spectacular sex. His dreams and visions of the future easily earned my respect. I smiled. I wondered if I would fall in love with him eventually.

  Then I wondered how much of this was the juice talking. With all the juice in our relationship, I didn’t know how much of my thoughts were my own and how much were the juice. Certainly, my tag on him made me feel more affection toward him. Presumably, his tag on me made him feel affection towards me. Then, there was whatever tinkering he did to my emotions. I more than suspected he could make me feel affection for him with that tag.

  I considered ordering him not to tinker with my emotions, save that I would need to give up giving him orders through my tag on him. No way would that happen. Besides, a tagged relationship where we forbid each other to use the tags wasn’t exactly what we had gone up to the Yukon for.

  I hated the thought that my mind wasn’t my own. It was mine, damn it! If my own mind wasn’t mine, what was?

  “Are you tinkering with my mind right now?” I said. My voice shouldn’t have sounded accusing, but it did.

  As I watched, the warm affection on his face closed down to distant coldness. He sat up, and put on his discarded breechcloth and blanket. I felt my own affection fade into the old icy cold reserve. The loss of that warm affection between us twisted, hurt, as if some small piece of me was tearing loose.

  “I’m sure you have business you need to attend to,” he said as he headed for the door. “I’ll see to our pack.” Polite, even helpful. Cool.

  “I have a suggestion if you want to get into Gail’s bed,” I called after him. He hesitated. “Take a damned shower! You haven’t washed in a decade!”

  His coolness grew colder. He didn’t look at me as he walked out.

  ---

  “…and after that, we spent some time talking to Focus Frasier about how she treated the Donnelly family,” Tom said. We met in the Brookside room in the Branton, a small room that was the only still usable meeting room in the place, and only barely. Part of the ‘barely’ came from the room’s cheap wooden chairs. It was amazing what weeks of exposure to winter damp could do to upholstery.

  Tom sat while he gave his report, but his back was military straight, and his brown face frowned. “I’d swear she wanted to drive this perfectly acceptable family of non-Transforms away so she could better control Angie.” Angie Donnelly transformed three years ago at age fourteen, and miracle of miracles, her family hadn’t deserted her.

  I dragged my attention back to Tom. The not-quite argument with Mizar this morning still bothered me. Worse, my nerves tingled, and I wanted another round of wild, passionate sex. My own urge. Mizar was out of range.

  I also suspected Mizar hadn’t put my beast back to bed after we finished last night. I felt a sort of irritable aggression that made me want to strike out at anyone who crossed my path. Nothing major, but I had gotten out of the habit of watching my reactions, up in the Yukon where I was far from civilization, my beast in hibernation. I needed to get back in the habit pretty damned quick, if I was going to avoid doing something I would regret.

  So now the plain but hard working seventeen-year-old Angie Donnelly and my old Focus friend Gloria Frasier were fighting. I had the urge to bang my head on the table. Of all the things I expected from Tom and my organization, the ‘save the Transform from idiot Focuses’ routine wasn’t one of them. Gloria wasn’t even a particular idiot, as far as Focuses went. I had worked with her extensively in the past, and she was about average for a Focus, with some above average talents and some below. Gloria wasn’t good enough for Tom, though, and he and Gloria never got along.

  Since I left, Tom had been on a tear, sending my people out to talk with the Transforms, wring them out, and try to fix any problems they had with their Focuses. Ostensibly, he started dealing with the local Focuses to convince them to use the latest Transform training techniques. All the Chicago Focuses should be training their Transform bod
yguards up to Inferno standards. In his mind. The confrontations went downhill from there, and he had been raising holy hell with the middle and bottom level Focuses Abyss had been protecting from the Hunters. Even better, after my training, he could stand up to Gail’s charisma.

  I had heard about his and Gail’s little brouhaha from both of them. The fracas was all settled now, but I couldn’t say I liked their foolishness. I had put Gail in command, dammit, but Gail was also supposed to be canny enough to avoid using strong-arm charisma on those who would notice. No, I wasn’t stupid enough to open up a settled issue. As far as I was concerned, those incidents never happened.

  However, nothing got any Focus’s back up faster than loose talk about money, the reason for their disagreement. That topic was nearly as bad among the Focuses as territory was for Arms. I made a mental note of the issue, also remembering some of Gilgamesh’s comments about Lori way back when he was first getting to know her. Was it all Focuses, or was I just attracted to Focuses who got their emotions tied up in the money?

  I looked at the balance sheet in front of me, appreciating the irony. Here I was, dealing with money. No problems. We had money again. In addition to the Von Cat investments, Tom had done the usual scrounging, and more, almost enough to make me feel guilty. The Hunters had trashed the legit side of my operations, save for my car dealerships in northwest Indiana. Colonel Loess had reduced Littleside to a burned-out shell, though the people and a good fraction of the research got out fine. I lost another house, not to any great shock of mine, but they also trashed my backup lair.

  For some reason, that hurt more.

  The Hunters had even taken out the China Garden. That was low. Worse, I would never hear the end of it from Granny Tien.

  My people? Well, I had seen worse. Keaton had Darryl and Ila, safe back in Philly for the moment, and I took Keaton up on her offer to keep them there until the fighting ended.

  Fred Raindorf had died in the Pittsburgh aftermath, of all the crazy things, a direct-to-Monster transformation right in Littleside. As Sky said, our theories about Transform Sickness and its effects weren’t complete – or as Hank would say, our first order approximations couldn’t predict third order effects.

  Losing Fred hurt. Yes, he had been shit on the bottom of the cesspool of life, but he had been my shit, and the valve that let me safely discharge my darker urges for many a year. It was probably better for me that he was gone, but I would still miss him.

  I also had new people to tag. My fighting force was nearly twice as large as before, and that was after the carnage of the Chicago fights. No, I didn’t have a damn thing to complain about. Tom was good, and he knew it.

  However, where had he gotten the idea to save difficult and talented Transforms from prickly Focuses, anyway? I reviewed his statements on the subject again in my head, and figured it out. Tom used the term ‘dumb as dust bunnies’, a Zielinski term, rather than my preferred ‘dumb as horse shit’, when referring to low-end Focuses. Hank had gotten to him, no surprise there. Hank could wrap nearly anyone’s brain in knots if he tried. The surprise was the subject. Hank was the original ‘only Major Transforms matter’ guy. Had transforming turned Hank into the Karl Marx of household Transform rights? That didn’t match the Hank I knew. Even if he and Gail disagreed, his innate reaction would be to blame the Focus, not empower the Transforms. Something must have happened to him.

  “Good,” I said, surprising Tom. “Keep up the good work, and keep leaning on the Focuses who aren’t pulling their weight.” He had been ready for me to come down on his extra-curricular activities. I saw no reason to. It appeared I had inherited a new aspect of the Cause, Transform rights within households, in specific, the right to self-defense. “If you need me to terrorize them, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Practically with a salute. Pleased.

  “Now I’d like you to tell me everything that went on in Hank’s life from the time I left until he went west with Inferno.”

  Tom started, and I listened closely. So Hank got to spend time in the no-hope Transform bins? Caught the Transform cause from a less fortunate Transform who hadn’t survived? Young and female, too – I knew his weaknesses and his buttons. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the change, including the fact that Hank had passed his new fervor on to Tom. This would dovetail extremely well with the long-term Church of the New Humanity project of mine I sure as hell hoped the Hunters hadn’t disturbed. Especially for the sake of the Arm I put in charge of watching over them. I didn’t think Christine Naylor would survive my wrath a free woman.

  Oh, and all these troubles and tribulations would be good for Hank. All Transforms needed to go through hell just after they transformed. It knocked them loose of whatever they used to be. Hank, though… I wished I had been here to see it.

  Poor Tom couldn’t get me to explain why I was smiling so much, no matter how he tried.

  ---

  “I want a status report on the first Focuses,” I said. We met in the Brookside room again. I had claimed the place for the entire day. I suspected Keaton’s new sexy look was more convincing if you couldn’t see all the weaponry she hid under the silks. And even so, I suspected I missed several of her armaments. I couldn’t tell if Shadow carried weaponry or not.

  Tonya didn’t look happy at the demand, but the damned Focuses were her responsibility. Keaton and Shadow both wore masks of supposed indifference, but they watched me the way a hungry Focus watches a dollar bill. Yes, I knew about how close Tonya and Shadow had grown over the months. Yes, I knew that Keaton thought of herself as ‘in’ Tonya’s household. Yes, I knew that between the three of them they practically owned the Major Transform community east of the Mississippi.

  Or what was left of it.

  Tonya sighed, closed her eyes, and started reeling off a report. “We haven’t bothered Craig and Rocha. The Crows examined them and report that they’re so messed up with dross contamination it’ll take Mentor work to get them to the point where you can talk to them rationally. Corrigan is being used as a test subject by Occum in his project to ferret out the Noble equivalent of the Pack Mistress.” I made a note to myself to get Lori to talk to Occum, as she worked on a similar project with Mizar. “Holder and her household fled to England. It turns out her household wasn’t as bad off as she was, and they were the ones who organized the escape. Luckily for us, she’s got enough bad juice problems she can’t talk to the press without mad laughter and nonsense non-sequiturs, and the media, thankfully, doesn’t listen to Transforms. Yet.” Craig, Rocha and Holder had been left out of the take down of the first Focuses last year because we judged them to be so far out of the loop as to not be worth the effort. Rose Webberly had corralled them anyway, afterwards. “After you went north, Webberly took Fingleman, but only after an epic manhunt. After we talked on the subject, she handed Fingleman to Connie Webb.” Webberly was good. The Focus community now owed her a lot, and I’m sure she carefully reminded them of it on a regular basis.

  “I’ve heard about Webb’s problems,” I said. Yet another item on my to-do list, though given the universal lack of success on the subject, I didn’t expect much.

  Tonya continued down the list. “Patterson and Schrum remain dead.” Humor from Tonya, good god. She even smiled. I guessed having Shadow around was good for her. “Adkins is part of the Webb mess. Claunch is holding down the fort at the Philadelphia school, and we both have her tagged.” At some point, I wanted a tour of Tonya and Stacy’s Philadelphia School for Wayward Women. A few young Arms with Focus-like diplomatic and charismatic skills, a few old Focuses with Arm-like discipline and self-defense capabilities. A tiny blip on the radar, but perhaps one with potential.

  “Mutual, in my case,” Keaton said. That said a lot. I had metasensed the extra tag on her, but didn’t realize it came from Claunch. Keaton carried a lot of tags these days, including one from Shadow, one from Tonya, the one that had to be from Claunch, and one from a Crow I didn’t recogn
ize. The tags gave me solid, heartening evidence that she followed the path I had laid down.

  “In that case, there’s one mind scrape that can go farther down the list,” I said. Keaton shrugged her juice.

  “Morris joined up with Arm Whetstone, voluntarily, and I’ve personally checked on both, twice, to make sure there’s nothing underhanded going on,” Tonya said. “Those two get along well, and Morris has caught the ‘Monsters are people’ bug and is attempting to lobby the Council to recognize them as such.” Tonya didn’t quite make a face; she definitely wasn’t in the ‘Monsters are people’ camp. “Pitre is in the care of Inferno, in California. Do you know about what Inferno’s been up to?”

  I nodded. I had been watching them from the Dreaming.

  “Teas is in our care, Julius vanished, Cash…”

  “Wait a second. Julius?” I winced. Hank warned me about her before Pittsburgh, and I expected a well-deserved tersely worded I-told-you-so from him on the subject when he got the chance. “How the hell did that happen?”

  Tonya chewed her lower lip; she shouldn’t have expected that one to slide by me. “Julius escaped or was helped to escape by unknown parties on the night of January thirteenth. She’d been being held in Littleside, awaiting transfer to the care of Focus Laswell.” Ah, she wanted to protect Gail from my wrath. She didn’t have to worry about that. I knew Gail did her best, with limited resources.

  “Crap,” I said. I still didn’t like having one of the Firsts escape. “She hasn’t caused any problems, resurfaced or anything?”

  “No,” Tonya said.

  I turned to Keaton. “You researched her up the ass. How’d she do it?”