The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Six (8 page)

“That would be Occum.”  Gymnast thought for a moment.  “Strange.  Our housecats never show their tails when Sky’s around.  Do you Crows have individual animal affinities?”

Gilgamesh shrugged at the strange question.  Many Crows kept dogs, he knew, but he had never felt the urge.  There always seemed to be cats around, though, wherever he went.  “If we do, I think for me it’s cats.”

“So.  Sky says you’re trying to be an adventurous Crow, like he is.  What’s your mission?”

“I have two.  One is personal, the other is from my Guru, Shadow.”  Gymnast smiled in recognition.  Gilgamesh wondered if she had met Shadow or just exchanged letters with him.  “My personal mission is to figure out what’s going on with Crows as Major Transforms.  As I hinted at over the phone, my other mission is to figure out who’s been killing and kidnapping Crows.”

He didn’t mean to blurt that out.  Right after Thomas the Dreamer told him to be secretive.  Had he fallen for the tiny Focus’s charisma?  That was easy to believe.  He found her quite likeable.  Her personality was as magnetic as her glow.

“Hold on,” Focus Rizzari said, more forceful.  “When did this killing start?”

“After the Philadelphia Massacre.  I think the mastermind behind it is the Beast Master of the Beast Men, who Carol knows as Officer Canon.  I also think Officer Canon and those Beast Men are behind the tagged Transform kidnappings you Focuses are so worried about.  Stacy Keaton shares my views on the subject, but neither of us has any real data to back it up.”

The Focus bit her lip.  “So they can sneak up on Crows as well.  I didn’t think anyone could sneak up on a Crow.”

“Neither did the Crows,” Gilgamesh said.  “Wait.  As well?  The Transform kidnappers are using Transform stealth tricks?”

“Yes.  In several cases the Transforms were kidnapped from within a Focus’s metasense and eyesight range.”

Gilgamesh tried to contain his glee.  A real, obviously relevant piece of information!  Maybe this questioning business would work, despite his doubts.

“I think I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be,” he said.  He looked up when he didn’t get an answer.  Focus Rizzari stared at him, but her mind wandered elsewhere.

Gilgamesh waited.  He was good at waiting.

“Sorry,” she said, about five minutes later.  She appeared to be happy, but she was successfully masking her emotions again, so he wasn’t sure.  “If you’re ready, we can go inside.  Let me show you around.  Take whatever dross you want.  Please!”  She stood and he followed, after he stood and smoothed his rumpled suit.  He still hadn’t had time to dry clean the suit the Skinner made him buy.  The suit was getting a little worn and dirty from his almost two weeks living out of a car.  Hopefully it didn’t stink.

The house was huge and heavily modified.  The household had combined a parlor, sitting room, living room and dining room into one huge room, likely big enough for the entire household to gather for house meetings.  A steel I-beam crossed the center of the room, to make up for the removal of the load bearing walls, and they had covered the I-beam with polished walnut panels to match the style of the house.  The household had enlarged the kitchen as well, now with a restaurant sized stove and two dishwashers.  A handmade wall hanging proclaimed “All that we are is the result of what we have thought – The Buddha”, instead of an expected bible verse or paean about cats.  Interestingly, the household members avoided him.  They found him intimidating.

Well, he found them intimidating as well.  He had never run into a Focus household so atypical.  His Crow panic wanted to send him running for a safe culvert.

“Where are the refrigerators?” he asked.  The Focus blushed.

“In the utility room, where a washer and dryer and some cabinets used to be.  We had to replace the wiring in this part of the house twice and you wouldn’t believe the mess that makes.”

Gilgamesh nodded.  He passed something labeled ‘the apocalypse clock’, a fancy piece of art counting time backwards, and shook his head.  He didn’t even want to know.  The thing under the stairway attracted his attention, though.

“If I may ask, why do you have a slide in your house?”  At least this looked like a slide, made of polished and over-waxed hardwoods, ending in a set of two cushions.  Very high quality work.  He stuck his head in it and looked up the ramp.  The slide appeared to be functional.

“Oh, that.  An experiment, probably a waste of time and money, but some of my craftsmen and women wanted to see if they could make it work.  No one uses the slide much anymore except the kids.  There’s been talk about taking it out and reclaiming the space.”

“But what’s this for?”

“Uh, you get on the slide on the 2
nd
or 3
rd
floor, slide down, and get off down here.”

“The slide is here just for fun?”

Gymnast nodded.  “Angelo tried to convince everyone the slide would be useful in an emergency, but it’s not.  It does make a good conversation piece, though.”

Her emotional control had relaxed, and from what he could tell from her glow she was conflicted about him, some form of emotional attraction and a complex set of fears he couldn’t understand.  He had run into this before from many Crows: he just wasn’t what people expected a Crow to be.

Well, she wasn’t what he expected a Focus to be, either, so they were even.

Brick

“It’s a Monster,” Viscount Sellers said.  “I’m sure of it.”  He paused and raised his right back paw to scratch behind his ear.  Fleas.  Someday he would like someone to tell him how he always ended up with fleas only hours after completing his shift from human form to combat form.  It just wasn’t natural, or fair.

“
It’s not a Monster.  It’s different,” Count Horace Knox said.  He trotted forward along the suburban sidewalk with a click of claws, shaking his head and his, well, antlers.  Horns.  Master Occum had found a way to stabilize Knox’s combat form, such that every time Knox changed into it, it appeared the same, by getting Knox to add branching antler-like horns to his demonic head.  In the relatively cold late April night, Knox’s horns steamed, making the Count appear truly demonic, which Sellers thought most appropriate.  “Its glow doesn’t feel Monsterish, but neither does it have the feel of one of our more Monsterish Commoners.  Could this be one of the opposition’s pack Transforms?”

The dreary rain picked up to a heavier downpour, almost heavy enough to drown out Knox’s words.  They were now
one hour into their six hour patrol through the Boston suburbs, their regular contribution to the Cause, keeping the Boston Focuses and their Transforms safe.  More often than not they patrolled during the day, in their man-forms, but Master Occum had been heavily training them this past month, getting them used to switching from form to form, and gaining experience in fighting in each of their forms, be it man-form, part-beast form, or pure-beast form.  By consensus, all three of the Nobles considered the pure-beast form their true combat form.

“I have metasensed the Hunters’ pack women, and they metasensed nothing like this,” Duke Jeremy Hoskins said.  If you ignored the extra clicks as he spoke, Hoskins had the clearest speaking voice of all of them in his combat form, a fact that still annoyed Sellers.  The Duke’s combat form was the most absurd of all, with
his horizontal crab-like body, on two powerful muscular chitin-armored legs, and size-appropriate and vicious crab-claws for arms.

Sellers
still liked his combat form best, especially when he relaxed enough to think of it as his Rover-form, the pony-sized dog.  He couldn’t mete out as much raw damage as the Duke or Knox did in their combat forms, but he fought faster.  He thought his combat form far more elegant.  He still had speech problems in his combat form, though.  He had done some reading at the library – in his man-form, of course – and found out that his combat form speech problems resulted from an inability to articulate any fricative consonants, changing them all into stop consonants.

The Duke’s knowledge
of the Hunter pack women came from a secret mission the Duke and Occum had conducted in March.  They had come back chastened, and wounded, but otherwise refused to speak of the experience.  They did return knowing more about the Hunters, though.

“Let’s investigate, and give chase,” Sellers said.  Besides, he could run faster than his two Noble peers.
  Heh.

The Duke chortled, the sound of a vacuum cleaner mixed in with that of an auto engine trying to start, while low on oil.  “Let’s do it.”

Ignoring the pouring rain, they ran toward the non-standard Monster, at the Duke’s running speed, barely fast enough to pass slow automobiles obeying the urban speed limit.  Though they were patrolling in their most beastly forms, few normals noticed them, because of the night, and because, well, the three Nobles didn’t want to be noticed.  It wasn’t exactly a trick, or so Sellers thought, but more of a consequence of intent.  They certainly could attract notice when they wanted.  Or relaxed.

The Monster didn’t speed up, not surprising, as Monsters didn’t have any metasense.  They, however,
did have a good sense of smell and the older ones, such as this one, had almost a sixth sense for danger.  They stayed downwind as they approached the Monster, crossing the invisible line between the suburbs of Newton and Needham, and near their normal patrol limit, their five mile or so metasense range of Focus Rizzari’s household in Brookline.

Sellers saw the Monster first, perhaps a quarter mile
farther ahead, across the sodden golf course they traversed.  The Monster was one of the chimpsters, a knuckle-walker with the body form of a heavier-than-normal boned Chimpanzee with the size of a small Gorilla.  “Problems,” Sellers said.  “She’s carrying a rifle and a shotgun across her back.”  No knuckle-dragging chimpster could walk and fire a weapon at the same time, but if she stopped, she could…and once she sensed danger, she would be up in the taller trees and shooting at
them
.  Unfair to have a Monster shooting at them, but what in life was fair?

Worse, only Knox could climb, and as he likely outweighed the chimpster three to one, he would
easily get outclimbed.

The Duke growled his most annoyed buzz-saw growl, and began to sprint, sucking down his élan in buckets.  He didn’t need to order Sellers and Knox to sprint, and they all did, Sellers scooting ahead at highway automobile speeds.  The chimpster didn’t even bother to look back, though; as soon as Sellers started his sprint, the chimpster took off at a dead run, making
for a ragged stand of forest dividing one part of the golf course from the rest, and reaching it before he caught up.  Sellers slowed his sprint to forest-manageable and continued on, until he realized the chimpster was fast enough to make it across the entire golf course, and back into the suburbs, before Sellers could catch her.  Keeping the chimpster in his metasense, he slowed until Hoskins and an embarrassed winded Knox lumbered up.

“Very good,” the Duke said.  “You’re getting better at not giving in to the chase.”

Sellers sighed a most doggy sigh.  He could have kept up the chase for minutes and minutes, and had, in the past, endangered himself by separating himself from his combat companions.  Chasing things down was so much fun!  “We’re going to need to run this one down, tire her out, before we can take her.”

What, though, was that?  Sellers turned right
, toward the metasense flare; something strange was approaching them, in a vehicle.  He had metasensed this Major Transform before, twice; it wasn’t a Beast, Crow, Focus or Arm.  Before, it had kept its distance, though from its actions, it appeared to be another of Focus Rizzari’s hired protectors.  This time it approached them.

“Boss, the Unknown is coming, and almost here.”  The Unknown was difficult to metasense; Sellers had picked it up
only a quarter mile away, well inside his normal metasense range.

“Stop,” the Duke said.  They stopped.  “Contact with the Unknown takes precedence.  Besides, our prey is nearly outside
of our patrol zone.”

The Unknown drove up and stopped, a little over a hundred yards away, and parked
its ride, a motorcycle, in a legitimate parking spot along the road at the edge of the golf course.  This close, Sellers metasensed the physical shape of the creature as male, and that it possessed the glow of a woman Major Transform.  “It’s a Sport, boss.”

“Well, this is different,” Hoskins said.  “Let’s
try and make friends.”  Hoping against hope.  Contact of this nature often went bad.  However, the Unknown was an older Major Transform, and following Master Occum’s orders, the Nobles were supposed to show deference to older Major Transforms, at least until they attacked.

The Sport walked toward them
across the seventeenth green, raising splashes of water with each squelching step.  He was short, perhaps only five feet tall, and extremely muscled, body-builder style but more so.  He moved with a rolling gate that screamed ‘combat training’ to Sellers, but carried no visible weapons.  He hadn’t bothered with a motorcycle helmet, and he ignored the steady rain as if it wasn’t happening.  His spectacular glow brimmed with power, and juice, far more like a Beast or an Arm than a Crow or a Focus.

“You goddamned idiots, don’t you know a fucking distraction when you see one?” the Sport said. 
Sellers bristled, and Knox, beside him, growled, but the Duke only did a low band-saw chuckle.

“The thought had crossed my mind, Sport,” the Duke said.  “I was going to reign in the boys if we got too far from Focus Rizzari’s palace.”  The Sport paused in his commanding walk toward them, muttered a ‘huh’, and continued forward.  “May I ask your name, kind sir?”

“You are one hell of a scary motherfucking beast,” the Sport said, as foul-mouthed as their Master, Occum, in a bad mood.  “How the fuck can you talk in a form like that?”

The Duke didn’t answer
, but he did look pleased.  Sellers eased sideways, as did Knox, giving them a good combat angle on the Sport, if things came to, well, the expected for contact with other fighting Major Transforms.

The Sport looked them over, noticed their combat preparations, and stopped.  “You can call me Brick,” the Sport said
, finally deigning to answer the Duke’s question.  “Glad to meet you.”

“I’m Duke Jeremy Hoskins, a Noble in the household of Master Occum,” Hoskins said.  “The demon is Count Horace Knox, and the giant dog is Viscount Robert Sellers.”

Sellers sniffed.  Not only did Brick metasense as a contact of the Rizzari household, he smelled of them, or at least one of them, the big ugly woman, Tina.  Like must call to like, he decided.

“Well, if you want to do your job, then, you might want to get the fuck back to the Inferno area, because if this is a distraction…”

“…then that’s where we’re being distracted from,” the Duke said.  “Good point.  If I may be so bold, sir, you do look like a powerful fighter.  If you like fighting, perhaps you might care to join us, as I predict a fight may be approaching.”

Sellers sniffed, as they were downwind of the Rizzari household, and smelled only Transforms.  He concentrated his metasense in that area, and sensed nothing extraordinary.  If there were enemies in the area, that meant normals, or even more dangerous, metasense-masked Transforms or Major Tran
sforms.  Dangerous.

Good weather for fighting, though.  Sellers always fought better in the cold and damp.

“Huh,” Brick said.  “Lead on.”  Brick swiped the back of his hand across his face, wiping away the rain, and tensed.

“Sir,” Sellers said.  “You won’t be able to keep up, even on your motorcycle.  And the Charles River lies between us and Inferno
, as well as badly placed bridges and traffic.  I can carry you, though.”

“
Huh,” Brick said, and shook his head.  “I weigh more than I look.”

“Unburdened, I’m faster than my boon companions,” Sellers said.  “Carrying you will not slow our group.
  We wouldn’t want to miss the fight.”

“So, you guys like to fight?” Brick said.  “Being ennobled didn’t rip that off of you?”

“No, sir,” the Duke said.

“We love to fight,” Knox said
, sticking out his demonic chest and preening.  “It’s good to let the beast out of its cage.”

“Well, fuck me sideways,” Brick said.
  If anything, the Sport appeared pleased.  “Let’s try and make a go of it.”

“Climb on,” Sellers said.  Brick did, and as Brick had said, he was heavier than he looked.  They leapt for
ward, Sellers regretting his offer, as Brick did slow him enough so that he had to expend extra élan to keep up.  However, the dash was worth the cost, as it gave his running muscles more of a workout than he had given them in quite a while.

“Cute trick with the invisible sack of weapons,” Sellers said, over his shoulder, as they ran over the nearest bridge over the Charles River.  In this well-lit street, with their blood up, people did notice, screeching their cars to a halt, several burning
treads off tires as they conducted screaming U-turns and headed the other way.  When their blood was up, they rarely escaped notice.

“You can see them or metasense them?”

“No, sir.  I just feel their weight, disturbing your balance and mine.  Because I know they’re there, I can metasense a faint outline of their presence.”

“Huh.”  Pause.  Brick looked around as
Sellers ran, passing cars, and became uneasy.  “Remind me never to get into a marathon with you boys.”  Pause.  “You’re the one the Inferno Transforms call Farsight, aren’t you?”

“Uh huh.  I can do things with my metasense nobody else can do.”  No
bobby.  Bah.  Even after all this time under Master Occum’s care, he still wasn’t able to fix his Rover-form speech impediments.

“Sense ahead.  Open up your mind.”

Sellers did so…and there was another presence in his metasense.  He was sharing Brick’s metasense!  Well, Brick was a Sport, and Sports were able to do the impossible, but this was amazing.  Such interesting details…and lack of detail.  He was bothered, though, by the incongruousness; when Master Occum had told him about Sports, his Master had more than implied that none of the Sports was as talented or as powerful as the regular Major Transforms.  He would have to tell him about Brick, and how he was more powerful as a Major Transform than any of the three Nobles.

“There, near the south end of Brookline,” Brick said.  “What are those?  Metasense disguised un-tagged male Transforms?”

He swore he heard a hunger in Brick’s voice.  “They’re wearing glow-extensions, what Master Occum calls Focus juice patterns.  They may not be tagged, but they are working for a Focus.”