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

  I nodded. Ila’s information confirmed what I had learned from Webberly, and it appeared as though Cathy Elspeth would be a minor challenge at best. I had met Cathy Elspeth several times at Council meetings, when I exercised my right to attend after Keaton gave up on the Focuses. She possessed a once gorgeous scarred metapresence, stunning beauty, plus a good combination of decency and strength of character. If not for the bad luck of falling into the power of the ruling First Focuses, she might have even been a decent human being. The thought of owning her appealed to me.

  “Sarah Teas.” Sarah was my closest ally among the first Focuses – stretching the ‘ally’ word a bit – since before the Fight in Detroit. She thought she was Mata Hari reborn and had a habit of not being quite sure who she needed to betray today, or why. Teas always plotted something, but in her plots and her convolutions, the fantasy outweighed the reality by at least ten to one.

  Ila grinned with a smile that had become feral over the last few years. “I got her.”

  I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table, and beside me, Tom did the same. “What did you get?”

  “I finally cracked her organization. She’s sloppy, and she hops from project to project, and she doesn’t always tie off her loose ends neatly. I found a senior normal lieutenant, not part of her household, who ended up pissed over his treatment by Teas and interested in some money on the side. He gave me the opening I needed and now we’ve got people all over her organization.” She dropped a thick folder on the table. “Preliminary report. People, projects, finances, the whole deal. She’s wide open, and there’s more info coming.”

  Yes! “Good work. Excellent. And Suzie Schrum?”

  “She’s harder. Schrum’s a nutcase, but she’s a damned sharp nutcase. Her organization is small, smaller still because most of the Network and anybody else with a remnant of sanity won’t have anything to do with her and because a certain someone you’re associated with” Lori “has been putting the screws to her contacts for years. The people she’s got, she’s got tight. They practically piss themselves when her name even comes up, and none of them would ever dream of crossing her. I’m getting a bunch of around-the-edges info from standard research, but no ins to her organization.”

  Not good news, but not unexpected, either. “Keep trying. Adkins?” I put work into saying the name without a snarl.

  Ila looked away. I frowned.

  “What’s wrong with Wini Adkins?” So much for no snarl.

  Ila straightened her back and stared right at me, jaw set and face pale. “Ma’am, I regret to report failure there again. Even my attempts at standard research have been unusually fruitless. In addition, I found two different attempts to subvert our people which I suspect she’s responsible for, and while I can say for certain that we’re making no progress against her, I cannot swear that she’s not making progress against us.”

  Ila relaxed her spine, and faded back into her seat. “I’m sorry ma’am, but she’s better than I am. I’m outclassed, and I’m afraid that my attempts on her only leave us more vulnerable to her.”

  Shit. I leaned back and thought while Ila studied me uneasily. She had been mine for years, and she knew what I was like when my beast prowled.

  Tom frowned. “So we do brute force.”

  I nodded. Adkins’ organization wasn’t necessary, however much I wanted it.

  I did want it. I wanted to rip loose and destroy every single thing she owned, and then start on her. Priorities, though, I told myself. If I got Wini Adkins herself, everything else was gravy.

  “Pull back. Quit any attempts on her and focus those resources on Schrum, but let me vet them all before we transfer them.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She looked at me suspiciously, still waiting to hear the punishment she expected.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not going to applaud you for failure, but I won’t punish you either. If you give me your best effort, and then admit it afterwards, you’re clean. It would have been different if you tried to cover it up.” She knew this already, but she still needed the confirmation. In a few years, she would be hell on wheels, but not yet.

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you ma’am.”

  I turned to Tom. “Military next. Tom, beef up our defenses. The Focus Bitch” Adkins “is going to hit us here, perhaps Littleside, perhaps Gail and Inferno.” Tom nodded. “How are we doing on…”

  The telephone rang, interrupting me. Mary Beth was out for the evening and so Tom reached behind him and snagged the receiver off the wall.

  “Hello?”

  Panic blasted from the other end of the phone. Shouts, screams, and someone who sounded an awful lot like Haggerty letting loose a string of blistering invective. I moved before Jeannie, Zielinski’s nurse, even started speaking.

  “We need Commander Hancock!” she said, but I was already out the door.

  The minute I got within a hundred yards of Haggerty, I yanked on her tag and she froze.

  No screaming at my people on my turf, thank you very much. She wasn’t my boss anymore.

  She had been too distracted to metasense me coming in, but she metasensed me now and followed my movement, warily. I pointedly sent my displeasure down the pipe, and did not get the expected response of meek submission.

  Challenge. I stalked into the building in high temper, and then froze when I caught the scent.

  An old, old scent, one I remembered from so many years ago. Even now, the scent brought back memories. Bad memories.

  I ran, covering the distance to Haggerty’s clinic room at full Arm speed. I had him slammed against the wall with a knife to his throat before he even knew I was there.

  “I belong to Haggerty!” McIntyre said.

  I barely heard him, my kill lust so strong my vision contracted down to a point, centered right on FBI Special Agent Patrick McIntyre. I pressed myself against him and forced him back against the wall. Drops of blood began to ooze from his neck.

  McIntyre.

  I dreamed of him at night, of all the ways I could hurt him. There had been a time, back in the CDC, when visions of revenge were all I had to cling to. He had hurt me in so many ways, from the torture back when I first transformed, to my capture as a young Arm and subsequent interrogation. Even today, I treasured my dreams of revenge.

  Once, four and a half years ago when she rescued me from the CDC, Keaton ordered me to delay taking revenge on my captors for five years. Those five years would be up in April. April fourteenth, to be exact, 109 days from today. 109 days from now, I would take my revenge, and first on the list was Agent Patrick McIntyre.

  A boot to the center of my back knocked me aside. I rolled automatically and came up armed, to find myself facing a one-legged Haggerty.

  “I said he’s mine!” she said. To the side, McIntyre retreated into a corner with Zielinski and Tommy Bates. Everyone else ran. Even my Crows, Focuses and Arms over in the research wing started in on the Pissed Arm Drill. I suspected Giselle was getting an earful.

  “Oh, no,” I said, softly, as I began the stalking dangerous dance of combat. Haggerty, with her mangled leg, didn’t try to oppose me. “He’s mine. He’s been mine for years.”

  Her face was pale with fear and pain. “He’s mine. I tagged him.”

  “You bitch,” I said. How dare she claim my prey? Insubordinate, betraying, turf-stealing bitch. I just beat the crap out of her, and I was going to carve her ass into ribbons and make her eat them if I needed to do it again.

  “He’s mine,” she said. She didn’t even try to mount a physical defense, futile because of her bad leg. “He’s one of my people now. I took him because of your orders.”

  Karma. Punishing someone for obeying my orders. I licked the drops of his blood off my knife hand, and the taste was unmistakable. Haggerty’s tag. I felt a shivering in my bones, a rage so intense I almost went Keatonic.

  He was hers, though. She took down the FBI’s Arm Task Force and made off with their leader. Because of my orders.

  I w
asn’t Keaton. I refused to be Keaton.

  Ruin. Dammit! Ruin if I followed my instincts, ruin if I suppressed them. This wasn’t fair, damn it! I was tired of having to suppress my instincts. Why couldn’t the world just let me alone to follow them?

  In a flash of frustrated rage at Haggerty for putting me into this situation, I swept her single leg out from under her with my own and she fell, knocking a rolling cart against the wall with a bang to spill clamps and bandages of all shapes and sizes to the floor. She could have dodged if she was healthy, but not now. I landed on top of her with my knee pinning her securely by her wounded leg and she let out the beginning of a scream.

  “He’s mine,” she whispered, face white with pain.

  “What the fuck is he doing here?” I asked her, my nose just inches from her face.

  “He’s got information we need on the ruling Firsts,” she said. “Everyone but Patterson. You were right. The FBI has been protecting them ever since Bass moved on Schrum.”

  Fuck. Life as an Arm was fucking impossible.

  I took a deep breath to steady myself. Business would at least distract me. “Hank.” I looked around to find him. He looked pale. “What’s it going to take to fix her leg?”

  Over in the corner, McIntyre was red with fury, and Bates held him back, to keep him from doing something stupid. There, the final confirmation that McIntyre was hers. I didn’t understand how Haggerty had recruited him, but she owned him solid if he raged at me for my mistreatment of his Arm. Bates wasn’t any too happy with me either, but he covered it better.

  “The cleanest solution would be to amputate her leg and let it grow back,” Hank said.

  “Growing a leg back will take weeks. Too long. What else?”

  “It’s possible I could reconstruct her femur the same way I reconstructed your humerus after the Dallas fight with Wandering Shade’s crew. If I lay a basic framework of a femur within her leg, and then she burns through a significant amount of juice to speed the healing, her leg might be functional again in less than a week.” Zielinski glanced at Haggerty, his color returning and his face turning unreadable. “This would involve a multi-hour operation on her leg.” A multi-hour operation with no anesthesia, because she was an Arm. The operation would be excruciating. I remembered how bad the operation on my mis-healed arm had hurt.

  Good idea, Hank. An appropriate idea.

  “Yes. We’ll try it.”

  He nodded. “I’ll need your help. Also, you understand that this is just a chance? This is much worse than your humerus break, and there’s a significant possibility this won’t work and we’ll still need to amputate.” Heh. Hank was such a treasure. I closed my eyes for a moment and reigned in my beast. Everyone here was mine already, even goddamned McIntyre.

  “Yes. We’ll still try it.”

  I sat on Haggerty’s hospital bed with her head on my lap and she rubbed her head against me with a desperate eagerness to please. We were in one of the patient rooms at Littleside, in the early hours of the morning, dark and silent. Giselle had come in and out once, after I signaled to her through the tag link that I had another of my Arms for her to meet. She handled Haggerty perfectly, no dominance display, a measure of curiosity and a willingness to let Haggerty befriend her. The more I learned about Giselle, the more she impressed me. After introducing her to Haggerty, I set her up doing close-in patrols around Littleside. This would be a hell of a good time for one my enemies to attack.

  As if there weren’t any times these days which weren’t.

  Haggerty remained pale and shaking from the long operation, and profoundly vulnerable after the hours of agony. Under other circumstances, she would have gone to ground and pulled the hole in after her, and the fact that she couldn’t only made everything worse.

  What I had Hank do to her was cruel, but I still didn’t appreciate Haggerty sticking me with this ridiculous annoying sideways challenge. Vulnerable, trapped with an angry superior, she couldn’t do anything but try to ease my displeasure. Thus, the head rubbing and the meek humility. She was vulnerable, afraid, in pain, and utterly miserable.

  Served her right.

  “So how the hell did you fuck up your leg so badly?”

  She studied me warily and tried to press herself further against me, but the contraption on her leg held her immobile. “Ma’am, when they blew up the building I got hit by falling concrete, breaking my leg in a couple of places. I needed to keep going because I was in the middle of a fight, but ending the fight chewed up my leg worse, ma’am.”

  Of course the fucking Hero did the entire FBI firefight with a broken leg. If I weren’t so pissed at her, I would be impressed.

  “Ma’am, then, after I got away,” she said, “I got the leg set, but I didn’t give it long enough to heal afterwards. When I tried to exercise, the leg shattered again. That’s when I came here, ma’am.” She looked at me eagerly, hoping to please me without giving me one of her long-winded overblown heroic tales. I just shook my head.

  What a disaster. She should have come to Zielinski first, instead of going to ground. As it was, she got herself truly screwed before she came for help.

  That operation had been a hell of a mess, as bad as Zielinski predicted. He had put metal rods through her hip and knee, and when I pulled her leg to its proper length by raw strength, Zielinski inserted more rods to keep her leg extended. Then he opened her up and put another rod into her leg where the femur should have been and attached all the bone he could find. I would be feeding her juice as fast as I could find kills and she would heal her femur back into existence. When Zielinski decided the bone was strong enough on its own, there would be another operation to remove the metal rod.

  Fortunately, Haggerty had long ago mastered the controlled muscle growth tricks, or we would have muscle problems to deal with on top of everything else.

  “And McIntyre? How did you get him?” My hand clenched her hair on its own when I thought of McIntyre. He was the heart of the reason I was pissed.

  “Ma’am,” she said, hesitating for fear of my reaction.

  “Speak.”

  She butted her head against my hand, silent plea for forgiveness, or at least gentle stroking instead of a fist in her hair. “Ma’am, getting him wasn’t hard. He was ready, I think due to your conversations with him in the CDC all those years ago.” Her face took on a gentle look and it was clear she cared for him.

  Dammit! How could she care for a sadistic bastard like McIntyre? Except, of course, there was no accounting for Arm likes and dislikes, and if nasty personal qualities disqualified a person from Arm affection, I wouldn’t have collected either Fred or Consuela.

  “He’s been beaten down by the years,” she said. “He’s been hunting Arms for so long, with so little success, and all he’s ever had to show for it are the dead bodies of his men. Is it any wonder he began to doubt his own convictions?” I remembered my discussions with McIntyre in the Detention Center in Virginia so many years ago. Even then, I had seen hints of doubt.

  She looked up at me, willing me to understand. “The FBI committed the entire Arm Task Force to this operation, and when it was over, they were destroyed. There’s nothing left but neophytes, Washington lard asses and him. You know, there’s only so long you can fight a losing battle before you realize your opponent was right all along.”

  “So you recruited him.”

  Her voice grew soft, remembering. “I’d been in contact with him ever since I returned from Europe, trying to convince him he was wrong about us. He hadn’t turned, yet, but he was friendly enough with me that he would only go after me if his superiors gave him a direct order. After the fight I said ‘come’, and he came.

  “He almost resigned when he got the orders to set up the trap. He and Assistant Director Patrelle got into a screaming match over the orders, and Patrelle yanked him from the mission and sat on him while the fight went down, not trusting him to obey his orders.” Patrelle was another FBI man on my own personal most-wanted list. �
�Then the bastard ordered him to investigate the fight cleanup and aftermath, and try to hunt me down.

  “He was so miserable after the fight. He cared for his men, he really did, and he held himself responsible for not being able to stop the operation. I needed to keep him from killing himself. Then I listened, and told him I respected his capabilities, and told him his only problem was that he was on the wrong side. He practically talked himself around by himself.”

  I shook my head. She did like him as a person. Compatible personalities. She liked those blue-suited FBI men, and they liked her. Even the ones she fought against respected her professionally. If she had been male and not a Transform, she probably would have made a fine FBI agent herself.

  “Ma’am?”

  I saw deeper into this morass than she did. “This was a trap within a trap. Patrelle, under someone’s orders, fed McIntyre to you in an attempt to drive a wedge between us.”

  She closed her eyes and did her analysis fugue thing. “Yes.” Pause. “But who?”

  “Ordinarily I would say ‘Bass’, but Bass isn’t good enough. She might know enough to do this, but she lacks the necessary talents.” Patrelle rarely left Washington. Bass didn’t possess the skills to control someone like Patrelle long-distance.

  “Schrum? She’s the most likely enemy to have an in with Patrelle.”

  “She wouldn’t know what to do. Consider – whoever set this up needed to know about your work with the FBI, the fact the FBI had a trap set up for you, my feelings about McIntyre and your history with him. They couldn’t have predicted the outcome of your trap fight, meaning the order to McIntyre had to be given as the situation happened.” Adkins did things like this in Detroit, but she never left Detroit. This was her style, though.