The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (17 page)

“I know,” Shadow said, “but Crows are cautious.”

“What about you?  You see the problem, don’t you?  Why don’t you find a Focus?  If you do it, lots of Crows will follow.”

“Slowly, Gilgamesh, slowly.  Yes, such a pairing sounds interesting.  Yes, it even sounds like it might be a good idea.  Yes, I even have a Focus in mind.  But no, I’m not willing to rush into things, especially given the fact I’m working full time on ramping up my capabilities and my personal defenses.  The Arm-Focus fight can’t be ignored, and I’m sure you’re feeling the hungry eyes of the Hunters.  Things are too dangerous now.  Give it some time.”

“Damn.”

“Gilgamesh,” Anita said.  Gilgamesh was attempting to talk a mid-morning snack out of Isabella Wheelhouse.  Rather successfully.  Isabella had decided somewhere along the line that he needed the same amount of food as a Focus, and took it upon herself to make sure he was well fed.  She gave him snacks, special plates at meals, and kept him supplied with a variety of special treats in his room.

“Yes?” Gilgamesh said to Anita as she came into the household dining area, what used to be the hotel restaurant.  Anita was the household’s receptionist.  She answered the phone, took messages for all the different household businesses, directed delivery people, handled the mail, and did all the other miscellaneous similar jobs a household could generate.  She was a thin woman, with bright bottle-red hair, and a good attitude toward life.

She had tested positive for pregnancy yesterday.

“I got a letter for you this morning,” she said, waving an envelope.

Gilgamesh frowned.  He received his mail through a PO Box.  No one who would send him mail was supposed to know he lived here.

“Thanks,” he said, as he took the letter.

“Problem?” Isabella asked.

“No, don’t worry,” he said.

She frowned but let him be.  “Are you sure you don’t want another cinnamon roll?  You need to keep your strength up, and these are fresh this morning.”  Isabella made truly wonderful cinnamon rolls, the recipe from Focus Hargrove’s household, but Gilgamesh shook his head.  He already had three on his plate.

Except for the pack of preschoolers getting their own mid-morning snack, the dining room was empty at this time of day.  Gilgamesh took his plate of rolls and the letter to a table and sat down.

The letter was a single sheet of paper.

Gilgamesh,

Your policies are dangerous, your teaching false, and your skills inferior.  Your call for Crows to join with Focuses is an abomination and an offense to all Crows.  As such, I deny your claim to the status of Guru.

You are hereby challenged to a Wizard’s duel, to prove that you deserve the title of Guru that you pretend to.  As the challenged party, you may choose time and location.  Respond within seven days or be considered in forfeit, and all claim to the status of Guru abandoned.  Your representative should contact Chevalier to arrange terms.

Phobos

There was contact information at the bottom.

Gilgamesh read the letter three times, and then let it slip from numb fingers, overwhelmed by disgust.

Here we go
again
.

Carol Hancock: December 20, 1972

The pounding of the rotors was like a hammer on my head, and I was briefly less than grateful for the enhanced hearing my transformation gave me.  The helicopter pilot was pale from flying at this hour of the night, or from the stress of four Arms traveling with him.  I spotted Adkins’ household off a couple miles to the northeast.

No going back from this point.

I would take Adkins.  Haggerty and her crew would take Schrum.  Nothing would go wrong, well, unless Bass showed up on the enemy side.  Teas and Elspeth?  I had my doubts, although I hid them well.  They weren’t as important, and we hadn’t put as much
Commander
into them as the others.  Thinking in Commander mode proved difficult for me these days.

“Coming up!” the pilot said.  Adkins’ apartment complex appeared almost below us.  I restlessly adjusted the straps on my parachute and Rose, Giselle and Mary did the same.  We shifted into position and the pilot slowed the helicopter to a hover, high above the household.  I nudged him over just a bit farther north, and then a hair to the west.

One, two, and we were out the side, chutes opening almost immediately, to catch air for only a few scant seconds before we landed.  Hard impact, hard enough to kill a normal, but we took advantage of our Arm bodies.

As we expected from our scouting missions, Adkins’ tamed and tagged bad juice guarded the perimeter of her compound.  Not here.  Not on her roof.

We cut the cords to the chutes and let them fly, almost before we hit roof, and then moved again.  I ignored the shooting agony in my shins and started the burn as I ran.  Little gravel peas skittered under our boots as we crossed the gravel and tar rooftop.  We ignored the guard.

I came to the edge of the roof and leapt without slowing down.  Rose, not even a full step behind me, grabbed my ankles and braced herself.  I swung in an arc and threw a brick ahead of me, to smash the glass.  I passed through the window while the glass still fell.  Daggers of glass sliced through me and made wounds nasty enough to kill a normal, but for a second time I ignored my wounds.  I kicked the shards away from the base of the window as Rose fell from the roof and caught herself by the sill.  She landed in the room only a heartbeat later.  Giselle and Mary followed Rose in, swinging over on a rope.

All four of us already burned juice into our predator effects.

The joint predator froze Adkins in place.  She lost her hold on her tamed bad juice, unable to complete the summons and the predictable deadly bad juice attack.  I put a bullet in her heart to keep her quiet and activated two dross scramble bombs at her feet, Gilgamesh specials, another obstacle to prevent her from using her tagged bad juice.  Mary and Giselle went to the door to Adkin’s suite and jammed it shut.  The predicted Attack Focus began her charge from her guard duty at the entrance to Adkins’ apartment building.  Adkin’s captive Crow, which I hadn’t expected, went into climax stress the instant Adkins’ hold on him vanished and he metasensed us.  Useless.

Ten seconds since we landed on the roof.  Heh.

The guard on the roof shouted to awaken the household.  Shots popped outside, Tom’s people offering up a distraction.  The household guards squandered a few precious seconds attempting to figure out the threat.

Webberly leapt out the window, and I followed immediately with a semi-conscious Adkins across my shoulders.  Down.  Giselle and Mary backed through, covering us against attacks from the rear, but Adkins’ Attack Focus guard didn’t reach the door to Adkins’ apartment until we were already on the way to the front gate.  By the time I reached the front gate, Rose had it open, and Giselle had pinned down three of Adkins’ people, surprising them from invisibility and being careful not to actually hit anybody.  Shots rang out at us, but we passed through the gate before they got the searchlights on, and the shots went wild.  I tossed the last of Gilgamesh’s dross scramble bombs behind us as we passed through the gate, cutting Adkins off from her tagged bad juice and allowing us to relax our predator effects.  By the time the household got the searchlights on, we were three blocks down the road and inside our getaway car.  The Attack Focus lost us on her metasense before she got to the parking lot.  She followed on a Harley, but turned the wrong way on Telephone Road.

Clean!  I smiled my feral smile as I glanced longingly at Wini Adkins bleeding out on the back seat, pinned between Giselle and me.  At my signal, we reactivated our predator effects at a lower level, now tuned to terror.  Mary leaned over and got into Adkins’ face.  Adkins practically pissed herself.

“You can’t do this,” she said.

“We just did,” Mary said, singing a song with her words.

“Gwen Larson sends her regards,” Giselle said, her voice echoing years of Adkins’ maltreatment of the Ontario Focuses.  Adkins lost her composure and her water.

I pulled the waiting gag and shackles from the floor and bound Adkins tight.  Then I put my hand in the hole in her chest and squeezed her heart, just to watch her thrash.

“I’ve got plans for you, little Focus,” I whispered in her ear.  “You can’t imagine how bad your life is about to be.”

Five years.  Five years and now the bitch who arranged my juice withdrawal was mine.  The pleasure was so intense it was orgasmic.  Old scores and recent ones.  I owed her pain for her years of making Gail’s life miserable.  Oh, and for what she did to Littleside, as well.  Those were my thugs her thugs killed, before they got to the Focus bodyguards and ran out of easy targets.

I called in our success to Ila, and sped to the regional airport in Sterling Heights.

By the time we reached my Chicago house, it was nearly six, local time, and we had dear Wini well softened up.  I regretted not being able to play with her some more, but duty called.  I packed her in a secure box I had especially prepared in my basement, a box the size and shape of a coffin.  A few air holes so she could breathe, heavy iron bands to hold the lid down tight, and a dross repulsion field care of Gilgamesh.  I didn’t expect her to give anyone any trouble while I was otherwise occupied.  I had gotten the idea from Gail, in a conversation where I mostly convinced her she didn’t want to get involved in the attack.  I found Gail’s bloodlust a bit disconcerting; one Lady Death in the world was enough for now.

It hurt to leave Adkins.  There was nothing I wanted more than to spend days and weeks pulling apart her mind and body.  Orders, though, so I consoled myself with the thoughts of what I would do with her when I got back.

Ila gave me the news from Haggerty.  Haggerty, Lori, Betsy, Lori’s Inferno bodyguards and Haggerty’s top merc squad got Schrum clean, and were on their way to Jackson.  Lori had actually done a victory dance on Schrum’s corpse.  I sure as hell hoped the attack had sated Lori’s bloodlust, or she would be the one dragging
me
into the endless dark void.  Nothing from Keaton’s crew.  The Student Arm running the phones, Sokolnik, had nothing to report.

Webberly, Giselle, Mary and I changed and showered.  We put Duval in charge of guarding Adkins and we were on our way to Utah within a half hour.

I missed Shadow’s phone call by five minutes.

Elspeth still hadn’t beefed up her household security or called in the police to help.  Her Transform rights organization didn’t appear to care about their lack of security or the ease of penetrating their ranks.  Hell, two members of Elspeth’s organization were Fed plants, and another was from a fringe commie labor group.  Still, there had to be something to this woman besides rabble-rousing and moneymaking.  She did hold a seat on the Focus Council, the only first Focus to do so, and she held her own.  I knew from Gail that Transform rights was no cakewalk, a miasma of vicious politics, yet here her household sat in the comfortable suburb of Granite, open to the first Hunter or angry Focus goon squad who stomped in.  I suspected we had another Focus Webb here, with some screwy secretive defensive capability we would need to overwhelm.  I sent in my hirelings to trip the expected traps and attrit her defenses.  Nothing.  My pathetic hirelings of the rob-the-corner-liquor-store-if-they-got-lucky variety walked in and took out Elspeth’s household without a fight.

Elspeth wasn’t at home.  She was out for a morning jog, her first morning jog in at least a year, according to my people’s espionage.  Normally, she went running just before midnight.  She jogged up to the four of us Arms, no metasense protections, no fear, no worries, no nothing.  She even sent her bodyguards home after she spotted us.  In the early morning light, Elspeth was sunlit beautiful, tall and leggy, with long dark gold hair, an elfin angular face, a slim girlish body, and a metapresence even her scars couldn’t ruin.  She was fit and athletic, but no fighter.  I gazed at her with thoughts of ownership in my mind, and desire caught me like a fire, starting in my abdomen and making every nerve clench.  This one, I
wanted
.

“So this is it?” she said.  I nodded, looking up to one of the few women I had met taller than I was.  Mary, Webberly, Giselle and I then hit her with the Arm predator to subdue her.  The predator effect slid off her like water off a duck, sparking a momentary fear of an impending disaster.  Instead, she just blinked and held up her hands for us to bind.

“Ila?”  I was in a phone booth by a closed Esso station having its underground gasoline storage tanks swapped out.  Elspeth was gagged, bound, and in a body bag in the back seat of our recently stolen car.  Although her easy surrender disturbed me, Elspeth remained well behaved and obedient, and I hadn’t made her any more miserable than I needed to.

“Boss, thank God!”  My stomach sank as I heard the tone in Ila’s voice.

“What went wrong?” I said.

“I got the call from Shadow just after you left Chicago!”  Ila’s words came out in a rush.  “Keaton lost!  She went in with sixty normals armed with her stolen military toys, and with Bass and Rayburn, and she still lost!”