The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (48 page)

“What are you offering, your grace?” she said.  Gilgamesh had worried about Tiamat getting touchy about Hoskins being in her house, but instead, they treated each other with an exaggerated politeness.  They had dealt with each other enough in the past to know how not to set the other off.

“Our service, Commander?  Is there some task that needs doing?” Hoskins said.

“If there is anything I can do for you, Commander Hancock, I would be glad to,” Sinclair said.  “This is my life on the line, here.”

Tiamat leaned back and eyed them speculatively for a moment.  Then she smiled.

“All right, for the sake of my friendship with Gilgamesh, and since this is for the Cause, I won’t charge you as much as I could.  I want two things.  First, the complete story of what’s going on, including the Crow and Noble politics, from each of you.  I want to know if your enemies are the same as my unknown enemies.”

Sinclair, Gilgamesh and Hoskins all looked at each other, and then Gilgamesh nodded.

“Second.”  She turned to him.  “Gilgamesh, Crow Sky told me to tell you that his and Focus Rizzari’s latest project is all but completed.  You know what that means.”

Gilgamesh’s spirits fell.  He knew perfectly well; while he had been learning to be a Guru, he hadn’t been working on his dross cleaning business.  Sky had bested him and won Lori’s hand.

He gave Tiamat a small nod, burying his emotions until later.

“I want you to join me here in Detroit and start working with Focus Rickenbach.  You’ve worked with her before, and I’m positive my training’s messing up her place as badly as I messed up Focus Frasier’s place in Chicago.”

Gilgamesh took a deep breath and glanced at Duke Hoskins and Sinclair.  They both nodded, willing to owe him for this.  “I can do that.”

“Commander Hancock?” Hoskins said.  “I have one other thing to offer if you’re interested.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Do you have an interest in sparring?  I find it difficult to find challenging partners, and it’s been a few years since we’ve had a go.”

Tiamat smiled faintly.  “Don’t you think that might be a little dangerous? An opportunity for some natural conflicts to get out of hand?  You do appear to be a little stressed.”

“Perhaps,” Hoskins said.  “However, sparring is a great cure for stress.”

Tiamat smiled wider.

---

“Wait,” Gilgamesh said, trying to push Tiamat away.  It was amazing how fast she could make the clothes disappear when she put her mind to it.

“What do you mean ‘wait’,” she whispered in his ear, while her hands did things to make thinking difficult.

“Just wait a minute,” he said, his voice hoarse.

She laughed her evil predator laugh and ran her hands lightly down his torso from his shoulders down almost to where he really wanted her touch, and then stopped.  He moaned.

“Well, if you really want to wait,” she said, “why then, we’ll wait.”

“Damn,” he said, his voice a whisper, no longer interested in waiting.  He tried to pull himself together, and took several deep breaths.  Tiamat watched him with her dangerous smile from several paces away.

All right, all right, he thought.  Just a few minutes.

He concentrated.

The first dross construct fell apart almost before he started, but the second one held.  He laid it into the floor.  The next one went on the wall that bordered the hallway.  After that, he simply stretched them to cover the rest of the room.

“What on earth are you doing?” Tiamat said from where she watched, sitting Indian style on the bed and flipping her empty diaphragm case through her fingers.  She was astonishingly beautiful.  She never seemed to understand her own beauty.  Lean and strong and graceful, like a panther in the jungle.  Dangerous and powerful and seductive.  Oh so seductive.

“Dross constructs,” he said.  “This set blocks a Crow’s metasense.  In a minute, I’ll block a Chimera’s.”  Her training from Sky must be paying off.

Tiamat raised both eyebrows at that.  “Oh, really?  That’s a very nice little trick, Guru Gilgamesh.”  She laughed her dangerous laugh.  “In a bit, I’m going to ask you all about your progress.  But first though, finish that up and get over here.  We have business to attend to.”

Carol Hancock: August 10, 1972 – August 15, 1972

“Your houses always boggle my mind,” Lori said.  “I can’t imagine one person living in someplace this large.”

I grinned.  Lori did that to me.  “Zielinski thinks it’s some kind of turf thing.  All the Arms like lots of space.  You have everything arranged?”

“I got someone to take my classes all week, so I’m here for the duration.  I don’t teach a lot of classes anymore, so arranging time wasn’t too difficult.  Does this little project of yours know I’m coming?”

I nodded.  “She’s delighted.  She’s very impressed with your research, and the way you buck the first Focuses.”  Lori was so close, and this time she was on my turf.  I found my nerves tingling with excitement, and I wanted to close my eyes and lose myself in my metasense.  How manifestly unfair that I was about to leave.

Lori smiled a nasty smile.  “Well, we’ll see how delighted she is after I’ve been here for a week.”

I shook my head in mock dismay.  “What are you planning to do to her?”

“Just give her a little challenge in her life.”  Lori poked me in the chest.  “I think you’ve fallen for the young Focus’s beautiful glow and you’ve gotten all soft on her.  I remember what you and Keaton did to me three years ago, and I know for a fact you’re not hitting her anywhere near as hard.”

“Well, she isn’t quite as tough as you were,” I said.

“
She will be.
”

I turned over toward the picture window that looked out on the back yard.  A cool late summer rain soaked the patio furniture.

“Carol?” Lori asked.

I shrugged, a small motion.  “At times, I don’t know how hard I should hit her.  I want to toughen her up, and the toughening is necessary, but I enjoy the nasty stuff so much I don’t trust my judgment.  I’m going to have to live with her when I’m done, so I don’t want to hurt her so badly that she hates me, but I can’t afford to go easy on her, either.  I think I’m pushing her as hard as she’ll take, I worry that she’s not progressing fast enough, and then I worry that my own urges are screwing up my thinking, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

“You’re worried about your unknown enemies.”

“Of course I’m worried about
our
unknown enemies,” I said.  “I’m an Arm.  They might easily decide to strike if I’m not here.”

“You think I’m in danger?”  Lori snorted.  I nodded, appalled at her arrogance.  “I’m always in danger, and spending my time in some other Focus’s household will leave me far less exposed than when I’m teaching college students.  Trust your teaching.”

I let my face go blank.  She would have her entire suite of juice pattern tricks out looking for trouble, as well as her contingent of well-trained Inferno bodyguards.  The problem was psychological, not logical, as I wouldn’t be here in my territory to properly protect her.

It’s an Arm thing.

“I’ve got news on another front,” Lori said.  I nodded and motioned for her to continue.  “Based on supply orders, the Network’s spies think United Toxicol is putting together a duplicate of their Kansas City élan production setup in their Denver lab.”

“Denver?  That’s not good,” I said, disgusted.  Nobody important stayed in Denver long among the Arms or Crows.  Something about the city was off, and nobody knew why.

“I know.  We don’t have a single useful Network contact in Denver at the moment, and Denver’s Focuses are beyond useless.”

“Amy still thinks we’re facing a big new superpowered enemy, and these days she’s got me more than half-convinced she’s right,” I said.  “I don’t know if this means shit or not, but she fingered Denver as the most likely place our supposed new enemy lives.”  Denver gave me the willies, the same way Pittsburgh did.  I was suddenly glad Haggerty had me doing full time research; otherwise, a thorough sweep of Denver was something I would normally be assigned.

The trip to New Orleans was a whole lot more appealing than any theoretical time in Denver.  I had charged Gilgamesh, because I needed his participation in my Gail project, but truthfully, I would have gone with him for free, simply to be able to protect him.  A chance at flushing out some of our hidden enemies was just gravy.

“So,” Lori said, after a minute of contemplation, “have you been keeping a dream journal?”

I nodded, still staring out the window and stewing.

“Well, then, why don’t you let me have a look at it?”

I sighed, and turned toward the stairs.  Lori followed.

“Look, while you’re here,” I said, as I headed up the stairs, “Mary Beth will take good care of you, and you and your people can make use of any of the facilities, but I’m going to lock up some of the rooms, and I’d appreciate it if you’d leave those alone.”  Even though Lori was a special case, I still felt uneasy leaving anyone in my home.

“Don’t worry,” she said, as truth echoed through her soothing charisma.  “I’ll take good care of your house and I won’t try to get into anything you’ve locked up.”

“Hmph.”  She read me too easily.

“Now, about this dream journal,” she said, wrinkling her pert little nose at the smell.  I couldn’t come up with any reason not to give her the journal.  I snagged the notebook off the shelf and extended it to her, but she didn’t take it.  She was too busy looking around at my bedroom in curiosity and red-faced fascination.

I realized that she had never seen my bedroom before.  If I had thought about her reaction, I might have left her downstairs, but with her here, I enjoyed watching her face turn red.  Poor Lori.  She had never really shucked what she learned as a child from the nuns.  She tried so stubbornly to maintain a worldly attitude, and despite her best efforts, sex still embarrassed her.

My bedroom was a long way from the world of the nuns and a long way from the mores of the Inferno household, which from a normals’ point of view was hedonistic and uninhibited.  Big room, big bed, and quite an assortment of other props, some of them pretty nasty.  Not all of my people liked their sex clean and straightforward, and I had my own set of less than wholesome urges.

“Journal?” I said.  She jumped, and took the journal, attempting to ignore the room and the smell of sex that had sunk into the very walls.  I grinned.

“Ah, yes,” she said.  She started reading.  Then she sat down on the bed and kept reading.  After the first dozen pages, she frowned as she read, and turned the pages worriedly.  I watched her, enjoying the way she looked as she sat on my bed, and wondering if I would ever get a chance to take advantage.  My body wanted lust, and this time I didn’t fight my desires.

“Oh, Carol,” she said, when she reached the end.  “I had no idea your dreams were all bad.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “All bad?”

“These nightmares.”  She waved the journal at me mournfully.  “Your journal’s full of them.”

I frowned.  “Show me,” I said, as I sat down on the bed next to her.  She flipped through to one of my earlier dreams and handed me the journal.  I looked over the dream description.  Blood and death.  Screaming and terror.  A picture of a huge serrated knife, dripping blood.  I grinned.

“That isn’t a nightmare,” I said.  “That’s an erotic fantasy.”

Lori stared at me for a moment, and then looked around at my room again.  “Oh.”

I flipped through the journal until I found a nightmare.  “
This
is a nightmare.”  A dream of Bobby and Arm Svensen, both deceased, scaring the crap out of me.

“Hmm.  They’re both dead, right?”

I nodded.

“They’re trying to scare you off of your dream bed, which terrifies you.  Any idea why?”

I shook my head.

“The dream bed is your territory?”  I nodded, again.  “Okay.  They want you to leave the country.  They want you to ditch the Cause.”

“Makes sense,” I said, shivering.  Lori’s words loosened a dam in my mind, and I began to understand.  None of the dead people I saw in my nightmares were people I directly killed.  They all died near me, or indirectly, via mistakes I made, or attacks on me, or due to my weakness and youth.  “They’re sympathetic figures, save for the part about sneaking up on me and scaring me to death.  You think they want me to leave the country?”

“Yes.  These nightmares are an attack, and, no, they’re not from the Madonna of Montreal,” Lori said.

“You want to try to interpret the rest of these?” I asked.  “I know the symbols are a bit dark from your point of view, but they might give a hint as to who’s attacking me.”

Lori gathered herself together.  “I said I’ll help you out with this, and I will.  Translating the symbols might take a little time.  You seem to, ah, attach different emotional meanings than are standard for Focuses.”

“Well, some of this is easy.  Knives are almost always good.  They’re a symbol of power and status and hunting.  Blood is another good one, a symbol for life.  Blood often represents juice.  Normals are prey, again good.  An abundance of normals implies an abundance of prey.  Security and comfort.  Wings,” I ran my hand over a stylized butterfly-like airplane, “happiness, satiation, a juice draw.”  I pointed at a man – beast drawing.  “That’s a Hunter.  My opposition.”  I turned the page to a Madonna and Child sketch, and didn’t say a thing.  Lori knew full well who that represented.