The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (32 page)

“You! What do you think you’re doing? You’re supposed to be a Master Crow, with responsibility over my household – my household! And you can’t even be bothered to figure out what your responsibility is, much less live up to it!”

Gilgamesh stepped back, shocked, and bumped into the stove.  Hoskins spared a glance of contempt for Gilgamesh before he stepped forward to Sinclair, but Sinclair wasn’t having any of Hoskins either.

“And you,
your grace
.  You’re supposed to be the war leader of all the Nobles in the country, and you’re so stuck on your pride you’re going to let your quest fail rather than use your normally useful brain.  Did it ever occur to you to find out
why
Gilgamesh has a problem with Chimeras? No? Instead, you spend all your time yanking his chain so you
can’t
work together.”  Sinclair’s face turned bright red.  “Grow fucking up, dammit!” He slammed his hand across his cup of orange juice and sent it flying across Sumeria, spraying orange juice everywhere.  “Leave me alone so I can fucking sleep! And if you would shut the fuck up, I might even get better!”

Sinclair stood up and almost fell, but steadied himself on the corner of the bunk where Brenda lay.  She, awake now, watched them all with wide eyes.  As Sinclair tottered unsteadily toward the larger bed in the back, she slipped down off her bunk and followed him.  She sat down next to him when he sat, and held him.

He cried.

They stopped for the night just short of the California border, off on a side road in the desolate Yuma Desert, where even to a Crow’s eyes there was little sign of human habitation.  Hoskins eyed the empty expanse as they drove with longing in his eyes, and Gilgamesh could tell he thought the desert was beautiful.  Gilgamesh found the desolation depressing.

Gilgamesh and Hoskins hardly spoke to each other, and when they did, they did so with exaggerated courtesy.  Brenda spent much of the morning with Sinclair, and then came to the front passenger’s seat to talk to Hoskins.  Gilgamesh rode in the back while Hoskins drove, looking out the window and weighing his diminishing odds of surviving this quest.  Tonight they would draw Brenda, and Gilgamesh’s stomach churned at the thought.

Sinclair stayed awake, thank heavens.  He and Gilgamesh sat together outside Sumeria as Hoskins took Brenda to look at the stars.

Gilgamesh had never seen stars like this, so clear and so bright.  His Crow eyesight let him see things that normals couldn’t see without a telescope.  He had never dreamed there were so many stars.  The darkness sucked his gaze out to infinity, and he wished he could stay out there, far from the earth and its troubles.

Hoskins and Brenda did much less stargazing.  They were barely beyond a small rise when Hoskins began to stroke her skin.  Brenda, not quite at peak juice count but close enough, responded.  Soon, things progressed further.

Something in Gilgamesh kept expecting Sinclair to tell him
when
, but Sinclair couldn’t.  Without his metasense he couldn’t sense what Brenda and Hoskins did behind the rise.  He only saw now with his eyes.  Gilgamesh wondered if Sinclair’s enhanced Crow eyesight would fade too, over time.

Gilgamesh stood, wishing he understood the procedure better.  Sinclair nodded at him, encouraging.  They crept around the rise to where the couple remained entwined.  Brenda started when she felt Gilgamesh’s hands on her shoulders, but Hoskins whispered in her ear.

“Shh.  This is how it’s done.  Enjoy yourself.”

Hoskins’ body was magnificent when nude, and Gilgamesh couldn’t help feeling as if something sacred gathered around this ritual of sex and life under the desert stars.  He sensed some of the same otherness about Hoskins he felt about Tiamat, a god come to earth, inhabiting the primordial passions of humanity.

Hoskins shifted on top of Brenda, and did things that normal men couldn’t do, and she screamed her pleasure to the glittering stars.  Gilgamesh frowned over her in concentration, and slowly, and oh so carefully, did the trick Shadow taught him and destabilized her juice structure as Brenda panted and screamed, and Hoskins’ breathing deepened.

This wasn’t where Gilgamesh wanted to be, and he couldn’t help the fear as he destabilized her.  He turned her Monster with his one act, five days before she would have gone on her own.  The mixture of dross and juice he created, élan, exploded around him, a thick sludge a Crow couldn’t take.

Brenda’s life now depended on his speed and effectiveness.  Hurriedly, he used Shadow’s second trick, the more important one, the trick separating the élan into dross and juice.  With his will, he held as much of the dross as possible away from her, keeping it from contaminating her juice structure.  Some juice came with the dross, no problem, as the Noble would feed on both.

Hoskins fed, drawing that mixture of dross and juice into himself as his own passion gripped him.  Under him, Brenda screamed again, not pleasure this time, but pain and horror at the destruction of her life.  Sinclair said commoners learned to enjoy both the pain and pleasure over time, but Brenda hadn’t learned any such thing, and she only knew the pain.

So fast.  Gilgamesh stumbled over himself, and felt the dross slip through his metapresence fingers as he worked, trying to pick up every last bit and feed the sludge to Hoskins.  Was too much juice coming with the dross?

“Stop,” he heard Hoskins say, and he looked up.

“No! She’s still got so much!”

“Stop,” Hoskins ordered again.  “She’s gone into withdrawal.”

Gilgamesh stopped.

Hoskins lay on top of Brenda, pinning her down, and she still screamed.  A hysterical note crept into her screams now, a note of madness.  Spittle flew from her mouth.

Gilgamesh metasensed Brenda, and examined her tattered juice structure.  Withdrawal.  He had botched the élan separation, and taken too much of her juice with the dross.  She screamed in pain now, but soon the pain would overwhelm her and she would pass beyond screaming.

Worse, he had taken too little dross with her juice.  Dross thoroughly contaminated her juice structure, termite damage in rotting wood.

She remained a Monster, a Monster in withdrawal with a shattered mind.  The whole point of the Noble draw was to keep a Transform woman from going Monster, and he had failed.

If Sinclair had done this, Brenda would have been fine.

Hoskins stood, still holding Brenda in his arms.  She screamed more, and tried to bite him and claw him with her fingers.  Blood seeped out of the skin on her back as her Monster change began.  Hoskins ignored the wounds she inflicted on him and looked at her gently.

Then Hoskins twisted her head around and broke her neck.

Gilgamesh sat on the ground with his back to the front driver’s side wheel of Sumeria, and tried not to think about anything.  A faint breeze stirred his hair, the silence so complete it crowded him.  Sinclair was inside Sumeria, asleep or unconscious; his mind was as far from here as possible.  Hoskins remained at the shallow grave, where they buried the brand new and now dead Monster.

Hoskins had taken the rest of her juice before he buried her.

No, don’t think.  This was no worse than Tiamat.  Tiamat certainly would have done the same.

He had killed the woman.  Hoskins broke her neck, but he killed her.  His miserable incompetence.

She had trusted him.  She thought they would save her.

No, don’t think.

What brand of idiocy made him decide he was qualified to be a Master Crow to a Noble? Transform Sickness had corrupted his brain at last, driving him crazy.  Not the first bit of evidence of his madness, starting with the fact that his lover was an Arm.  Hell, maybe he had always been crazy, Transform Sickness nothing but a mad fantasy.  Any minute now, the men in the white coats would come and give him his shot, and everything would be fine again.

He tried to ignore Hoskins as he came back to the motor home, but Hoskins came around to Gilgamesh’s side.

“What do
you
want?” Gilgamesh’s voice shocked the silence.

“This is my fault, Master Gilgamesh,” Hoskins said.  He was clothed again, in his slacks and golf shirt.

“What? What’s your fault?”

“It’s my fault the draw went bad.”

“How the hell is this your fault? I’m the one who screwed up,” Gilgamesh said.

“Yes.  But it’s still my fault.”  Hoskins squatted down on his haunches and the dry ground scrunched under his shoes.  He settled farther into the squat than a normal human would, and his knees went slightly higher than normal, reminiscent of his crab-like combat form.  This was the first time Gilgamesh had seen any hint that his current form wasn’t perfectly human.

“I should have compensated more for your inexperience.  I’m the more experienced of us, and it was my responsibility to cover both of us.”

“What could you have done?”

“I should have watched what you were doing more closely.  If I’d been trying, I could have gotten more of the dross.  Also, I should have called a halt sooner.  Bad habits on my part.”

“Huh.”  Gilgamesh glared at the stars, and they didn’t say anything for several moments.  “So how was this supposed to work?” he asked.  The stars hadn’t answered his glare.

“Theoretically? You should have been working with an older Crow, until you gained enough experience to do this on your own.  We work the same way with young Nobles.  There’s always an older Noble with them the first several times.”

“You should have had a real Master Crow with you on this trip, not me.”

Hoskins shrugged.  “There weren’t any available.”

“Hell.”

“Don’t take things so hard.  If we hadn’t come along, she would have probably died anyway.  Most Transforms do.”

“You say it so easily.”

Hoskins stared down at the ground for a moment, drawing random patterns in the dirt with a small stick.  “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t kill people, Master Gilgamesh.”

Gilgamesh blinked, startled by the comment.  “Not even before your transformation?”

“I don’t remember before my transformation, or what passed as my life as a Beast-Man.  My earliest memories are of Master Occum.”

“Oh,” Gilgamesh said.  Depressing, to lose all one’s memories.  Gilgamesh wondered what Hoskins had been before his transformation, and what was special in him, allowing him to survive when so many others died.

No form of Transform had life easy, and Hoskins did a hell of a good job with a bad hand.  Probably better than Gilgamesh.  Hoskins had managed to become a decent person, mostly, which said a lot given the barbarity and beastliness of most of the other Beast Men.

Given how difficult a path Hoskins walked, it seemed petty all of a sudden for Gilgamesh to make his path harder.  Hoskins could no more help what he was than Tiamat.

“Your grace,” Gilgamesh said.  Just a small courtesy.

Hoskins gave no hint that he heard, for which Gilgamesh was grateful.  He simply broke his small stick into smaller pieces and tossed it to the side.

“What happened with you and Chimeras, anyway?”

Gilgamesh settled, and stared out at the mute stars.

“Have you ever heard of the Philadelphia Massacre…”

“…not just my relationship with Tiamat.  Every Arm, save for Kali, has at least one Crow following her around, so for Crows, that’s a genie firmly out of its bottle,” Gilgamesh said.  “When the evil Crows cast out Sinclair they listed three crimes: consorting with Beast Men, consorting with Focuses, and ignoring the instructions of his elders.  Substitute ‘Arms’ for ‘Beast Men’ and I’m so much worse than Sinclair it isn’t even funny, your grace.  My relationships with Gloria Frasier, Linda Cooley, Gail Rickenbach, Lori Rizzari, Flo Ackerman and Geraldine Caruthers are all as close as Sinclair’s with Council President Keistermann.  Only Sky is worse than I am with Focuses.”

“You’re afraid your days are numbered,” Hoskins said.  He cracked his knuckles and stared at the stars.

“I’m afraid I’m
next
,” Gilgamesh said.  The air tasted of acrid dust.  “I’ll let you in on a big secret, your grace: I’m no more suited to being a standard Crow Guru than you are.”  Once he started talking about his fears, the fears he kept locked away inside for so long, he couldn’t stop.  “Chevalier and his cronies sent the letter to me, knowing that.  I only got about a third of the way through Guru Shadow’s training before I, well, something happened.  My progress slowed to a crawl.  Give me a decade, and I might…”  Gilgamesh’s voice trailed off as the pain of his failures crawled through his mind, hungry and biting.

“So you’re not standard,” Hoskins said.  “I guess it’s a benefit of being one of the first Nobles, but to me being ‘non-standard’ is normal.  Truthfully, ‘standard Nobles’, of which there are far too many these days, bug the crap out of me.”

“Too many Crows came before me,” Gilgamesh said.  He guessed for a predator, this had to count as sympathy.  “You’re right, though.  One of the reasons Shadow wanted me gone was his own frustration at not being able to follow along with me on my objectified dross construct work.  He thinks of me as ‘almost a Guru’ simply because I can do things he can’t do, even if such things are, in the long run, tricks pre-Guru Crows of my ilk will someday learn as young Crows.  On the other hand, any of the other Gurus can swat me like a fly.  Until I can self-train my own unique tricks to Guru level, I’m going to be looking over my shoulder far more often than is healthy for me.”