In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 7

“Talisman,” the closer Crow said. The other didn’t speak. That matched Carol’s report. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  For what? Gilgamesh thought. “I bid you welcome. Midgard said you were interested in helping the Rizzari rebellion. I’m here to help you help us.”

  “Thank you for your kind words, sir. I am but a minor Crow, with no aspirations, just with a desire to help.” Talisman slowly slunk forward through the overgrown weeds. He was a short young man, with curly red hair and light freckles. He spoke with a Midwestern accent. “Sir, I don’t understand anything about the setup in Houston. Hephaestus is a Guru, but neither you nor Midgard are his students. You feel like you belong to this city, the chief local Crow, but you also feel younger than I am. And, sir, you’re fiercer than Midgard and Midgard is nearly too much for me to handle. As is the other Crow I haven’t met, the other one who hangs out with the Good Doctor and, at times, the Arm.”

  Sinclair, then.

  “Midgard left the initiation for me. This will help you see and understand. Follow, please,” Gilgamesh said. Calm and firm, Carol had said.

  The advice worked a little. Talisman didn’t run, and did follow.

  They chatted as they walked through the south Houston streets to Tiamat’s graveyard. Talisman had been a Crow for four years, studied under Merlin, and knew the rudiments of making dross constructs. He was limited to stationary dross constructs, though, and showed some interest in practical dross construct applications. He distrusted Focuses, but had heard good things about the rebellion Focuses. Shadow’s letters had lured him here, the ones giving Gilgamesh credit as the leading Crow supporting the Rizzari rebellion.

  “What is this place you’re leading me to?” Talisman said, when it became apparent where they were going. They had crossed under the Loop and entered a less populous section of Houston, of empty lots, cheap businesses, and occasional run down homes.

  “A place of excellent dross,” Gilgamesh said. He rarely had to take dross from Tiamat’s graveyard. Access to Tiamat’s place of residence gave him far more than he could use. “You’ll find it spicy, but quite potent. It’s the source of the advantage Midgard and I have.” Hephaestus wouldn’t take any; he was more than happy subsisting off the same Houston Focuses he had subsisted off the entire time he had lived here. Despite the effort Hephaestus had put into becoming a Guru, the good work he was doing experimenting with Crow development and his teaching specialty of ‘interactions with normals’, Gilgamesh found the older Crow too set in his ways for Gilgamesh’s taste.

  They reached the graveyard, an empty lot behind an abandoned discount window distributor. Gingerly, ever so gingerly, Talisman crouched to the ground and took dross.

  “It burns,” Talisman said. Gilgamesh squatted next to him and smiled slightly; the dross in Tiamat’s graveyard was well aged and to him almost bland. “It is potent, though.”

  Try direct from the Arm, Gilgamesh thought. Far spicier and far more potent.

  If he said his thought aloud, though, Talisman would run.

  “This is Arm dross, isn’t it?” Talisman finally asked, a half hour into taking dross.

  “Yes. This is her graveyard.” He went on to explain how Arms lived, who they fed on, and the troubles their hunting caused. “Tiamat, or if you’re following Sky’s nomenclature, the Commander, is the Arm who lives in Houston. She considers Arms and Crows to be natural allies. The Rizzari Housebound believes all Major Transforms should ally. Focuses need Crows to keep their Transform households free from bad juice, as do the Nobles, who are a Crow-stabilized allied group of Boston Beast Men. Her allied Focuses have several openings for willing Crows. In addition, all of the three Arms regularly visit Boston to protect Focus Rizzari, and while they’re there they dispose of their fallen prey in a shared graveyard. Over time, by taking some of your dross from the Arms, you’ll find yourself better able to function as a Crow.” And join in our fierceness.

  “And this Focus I would be working with? How safe is that?” Talisman said. He stopped taking dross to look at Gilgamesh warily. “Focuses are dangerous.”

  Right on cue. “That’s where I come in. The Rizzari Housebound and I will talk to the Focus involved, setting up an agreement between you and the Focus. We don’t need you and the rebellion Focus to interact directly at all, unless both of you choose to do so. One common practice is to work with an intermediary – a household Transform – to keep problems from arising.”

  “They won’t need me to live near them?” Talisman’s Crow companion, who had hung back at what Gilgamesh suspected was his hearing range, nodded as well.

  “They won’t even need to publicly admit you exist.”

  Talisman shivered and went back to taking Tiamat’s graveyard dross. “I hate the older Focuses, the ones who are so mean to their Transforms. Foul things. I want to hurt them through this rebellion.” He paused and shivered again. “I like the idea that Tiamat is helping the Crows, but Arms in person scare me. Whenever she comes close I run.” Close being ‘metasense range’. Five miles. Gilgamesh had a hard time believing he had ever been so fearful, yet Talisman was years older than him.

  Alas, Talisman’s feelings were common among the Crows. Gilgamesh had arranged for Tiamat’s graveyard to be out of Crow metasense range of her house for just that reason. Nobody had thought of it at the time, but having the Good Doctor’s research offices similarly outside of Crow metasense range of her house also helped.

  “I understand your worries, but they shouldn’t prevent you from helping us.”

  “I do want to help, if I can,” Talisman said. “And with Merlin teaching me dross constructs, I need more dross than ever.”

  The real reason Talisman was involved now. “If you can negotiate access to the inside of a Focus household once or twice a month, you’ll have enough dross,” Gilgamesh said. Range mattered a lot. Hanging back outside of Focus metasense range when a Crow took Focus dross wasted nearly two thirds of the dross, more if you counted the extra cost of drawing dross at range. “If you give me a way to contact you, I can start the work of setting you up with one of the rebellion Focuses. If we work together, we can have her entire household out of her house when you take dross.”

  “Yes, thank you, sir,” Talisman said. He gave Gilgamesh three post office boxes and two local telephone numbers, both pay phones.

  Gilgamesh kept his glee inside. If this succeeded, Talisman would be his first success as the Crow ‘coordinator’ for the Rizzari rebellion.

  ---

  “I hate to ask this of you, Gilgamesh,” Carol said. “You just got back. But I’m falling behind in my recruiting and I don’t have time to do a follow-up trip to Philadelphia.”

  Gilgamesh grimaced and fought off the panicky urges. “You want me to spy on Hera?” he said, nearly a squeal. He took a deep breath. “Sorry. It’s just that Focus Biggioni is one of my personal nightmares.” The affair with Hera got under Carol’s skin. She had bent over backwards offering to settle the issue, and Hera’s lack of response really irritated her.

  “I know the feeling,” Carol said. She slipped out from under her bench setup and slapped on a couple more forty-five-pound plates. “I have three notebooks of leads that need to be followed up on, mostly the business end of things. I’m fairly positive she’s dirty, involved in some way in organized crime. If I can get that nailed down I’ll have something real to use against her. Also, I need to know what her next move will be. All she did after my last attempt to get her attention was to bark at Lori and refuse to negotiate with me unless I capitulated to her demands. She’s got to be doing something.”

  That wasn’t the way Lori explained the conversation to him, but it was at least close. Arm and Focus realities were as different from each other as they were from Crow reality. “As long as you want data and not interpretation of Focus behaviors, I’ll do the job,” Gilgamesh said. He was happy to help Tiamat; helping Tiamat not only kept her happy but he knew she was good for the implied return favors later. He knew ho
w quickly disaster could strike any of them. “But if I vanish, come get me fast. Hera’s nobody I want to tangle with in person, and using what she did to you in the CDC as an example, I’d end up being her servant after not too much time.” Or sent to Pittsburgh to be enslaved by the Nightmare Focus, as Sky theorized happened to Crows who ran afoul of the nastier East Coast Focuses.

  “Great. Thanks,” Carol said. She smiled as she lay down on the bench under her loaded bar. “Before you leave…we do have tonight.”

  Gilgamesh smiled back.

  Tonya Biggioni: August 23, 1968

  Gracious Crow Cheshire:

  As you have agreed never to pass this on to Crow Polaris, I would be glad to speak of this panicky incident directly. It is not an exaggerated story, as many have intimated. It is instead a sad story. I was barely recovered from an earlier bad adventure involving Tiamat (who has later grown, in a proper Crow-understandable fashion, into being The Commander). Tiamat was not fully recovered from withdrawal, suffering mental maladies that remind me of what happens to Crows with low juice when they are cut off from all human contact. I was protecting the Good Doctor, but he was more interested in butting heads with Tiamat than being protected and paying attention to my signals. Tiamat had come up with a new juice trick she wanted to use on the Good Doctor to bind him to her, but he wanted nothing to do with some strange new Arm experimental juice technique.

  So Tiamat went Dominatrix on him. Maudite marde! If you want to know the details of what she was doing to the Good Doctor, espy a Professional Dom at work, with a mad on, with a Sub willing to use ‘go unconscious’ as his safe word. To save him from a fate as bad as death, I subtly attracted Tiamat’s attention in such a way as to transfer her anger to me. I knew what I risked, and Tiamat did not disappoint. No, it was not consensual, as I am a sane Crow without any interest in being dominated, tortured, or otherwise physically manipulated. Besides, Tiamat was laid à faire peur au diable and well resistant to all my subtle suggestions she might take a shower beforehand. So, yes, I was raped, and not for the first time by an Arm. Being able to rape men must be necessary to Arm survival, and the knowledge of how to make it the most unpleasant experience imaginable has to be instinctive to all Arms.

  Yet it did work; it did calm Tiamat down, and no further violence occurred. I would not call Tiamat ‘consumed by darkness’, though. She suffers from the common Arm problem of diving into problems head first and coming out of them only after being chewed up and spit out, or worse, as if she had dived into a meat grinder. She has grown immensely in the past six months, but do not think she has become ‘nothing more than a Focus with muscles’. Arms are closer to being human than us Crows or even the Focuses are. Whether this is a good or bad thing only time will tell.

  With pleasure,

  Sky

  Focus Rizzari

  I bring this to your attention only with greatest reluctance.

  Crow Cheshire

  Carol Hancock: August 26, 1968 – September 1, 1968

  “You admit it?” Lori said. I paced my Houston home office, phone in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other.

  I didn’t like being grilled by Lori, either as a friend or as an ally. She was pissed but attempting to hide her emotions. At least part of her hidden anger was at Sky, who had been keeping his secret from her and still refused to talk about the events. He hadn’t been the one who had coughed up this bit of darkness. That invited the question of who had.

  “Yes,” I said, again. “Raping Sky was the only way out of a bad situation.”

  “Unacceptable,” Lori said. “I’ve put up with a lot from you Arms, but I think I’ve made a mistake and put up with too much.” I heard ‘betrayal’ echoing in her now audible anger, which caught me up short, unable to respond. What betrayal could possibly be involved? “I don’t hold with the rape of any of mine. You are no longer welcome in my household.” Click.

  I tried to call Lori back at her Boston College office, several times, but she wouldn’t pick up the phone. I tossed my unfinished apple in the trash, sat down, and glowered at the wall. Lori’s anger hurt and hurt badly. The pain lay there in the darker part of my personality like a warrior angel, judging me, sneering at my choices. I understood Lori’s anger a little: Sky was the father of her unborn child, and although they had broken up she still had feelings for him. The rape confirmation must have triggered her protective Focus instincts, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand the magnitude of her anger. She had sounded angry enough to kill. I mean, it was just rape.

  Lori had to know I often did far worse than rape. She also obviously knew Sky didn’t hold it against me, at least not beyond considering I owed him one, a far more reasonable response. Why this overreaction, and why now?

  I didn’t understand something here, enough to quell my immediate and likely petty desire to call up Focus Biggioni and volunteer my services against the Rizzari rebellion. I saw no need to apologize to Lori, and had far too much of a desire to drop in unexpected and loudly call her on her unjustifiably claimed right to judge me and my actions. It took work, but I decided to let things cool down before I acted. Then I would send Gilgamesh to Inferno and invite Sky here, all in the hope of applying some sanity to the situation.

  This wasn’t good. Not good at all.

  ---

  Tom Delacort was a retired Army Master Sergeant and I found him in late August while trolling for recruits in a bar in Tulsa. He was a black man in a white bar, and they wouldn’t have tolerated him there except for his service in the Army. He was there every Friday night, where he would drink four shots of Jack Daniels over two hours. No more, no less.

  My instincts said he was exactly what I wanted, strong but wounded. I recognized the strength and the will by the way he restricted himself to those four drinks when he so clearly wanted more. I recognized the wound by the fact he was there at all, both the drinking and the fact he chose a white bar.

  Tom had joined the Army in 1947, at the age of 18. In the modern Army, they most likely would have recognized his talent and made him an officer, but not in ‘47. By the time the Army’s attitude changed, Tom was too old for serious consideration. He dealt with the injustice with no particular resentment and gave his life to the Army.

  He retired after 20 years of service. Retired, he discovered that he no longer knew his children or wife. After three months, she found someone else to sleep with. They divorced within the year. He supplemented his Army pension by working as a gym coach at the local school, but he didn’t like the current generation of kids. They could tell, and returned the favor.

  At thirty-nine years old, he was strong, talented, and slowly sinking into death, hoping for lightning to strike.

  That’s me.

  I went to see Keaton a little more than a week in with Tom. He was my masterwork, the strongest, most capable person I had ever tried to recruit. I synthesized all my learning, over all my multitudes of recruitments, both successful and not. I pored over research on the subject of psychological manipulation, Soviet and Chinese brainwashing, and American de-programming. Also neurology, endocrinology, psychiatry, and psychology. I had studied Freud and Jung and even found Jung’s work on archetypes to be useful when the juice was involved. Everything I knew and learned, I poured into the vessel that was Tom Delacort.

  The days had been hell for him. After twenty years in the Army, he knew what I was doing. He didn’t understand how he could be falling apart so fast, however. He couldn’t understand how I could feel his weaknesses through my skin, hear them in his heartbeat, taste them in his sweat. As the days went by and I endlessly watched him, I knew him the same way I knew myself. I knew when each crack formed in his psyche and I was there, prying the crack wider. His mind unraveled underneath him, and he couldn’t stop the process.

  Obsessed, I was.

  Keaton still schemed and planned, spending a great deal of time in Detroit working with her now active criminal organization and in Boston playing with the N
obles and helping Sky and Inferno keep the rebellion safe. If she found out how important Tom was to me, she would want to put her own twists into him. The thought filled me with an irrational panic. He was mine, all mine, and no one else, especially Keaton, would be allowed to touch him.

  If I avoided the visit, that would only attract her attention. I decided to play a game, instead, one Zielinski had taught me by example: using the tag against her. I decided to challenge Keaton.

  “Ma’am, I was wondering,” I said, once we sat down to go over what I had been doing since the Rogue Focus takedown. She sat in her easy chair, while I sat on the ottoman. The last rays of the setting sun through the western windows gave the white room a rose red glow. Haggerty was somewhere back in one of the bedrooms, ironing sheets. Punishment, I assumed. “Have you looked into the salt mine yet?”

  Keaton almost backhanded me. She was the one who caught me out with the little unexpected surprises, not the other way around.

  It hadn’t crossed her mind that the salt mine might be worth looking into until I mentioned the detail. I continued: “If you recall,” a subtle insult all on its own, “I once thought my Officer Canon person was a Focus. What if I was right in that, but wrong about Officer Canon being at the top of the food chain? What if Rogue Crow has Focuses working for him? That would explain why someone kidnapped baby Focus Frasier in Chicago. You once followed a Transform woman who looked different from all the other Transforms you’ve seen. Could she have been a warped Hunter-version Focus? Trained to be a secret agent, maybe, or something similar? You said she disappeared down a salt mine – a salt mine in the Detroit area. What else is down…”

  She slapped the arm of her chair. “Hancock, that’s my business, not…”

  “This is all of our business, ma’am,” I said, interrupting, making sure she was good and pissed at me. “I got tortured in the CDC because the Focus Council blamed us for the attacks by Rogue Crow’s organization.”