The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (17 page)

“You sound like Keaton.  What do you need?” Tonya asked, her voice still rough with sleep.  Wary, as well.  With good reason.  I never trusted her, and she never trusted me, and so on and so forth.  Our mutual distrust might even have had something to do with her part in breaking me when I had been a captive in the CDC back in ’68.  She had switched sides since, and paid her debt to me, but still, no matter how hard I tried, she always seemed to me to be ‘the other side’.  Lori kept insisting that Tonya held to her word, and represented the Cause in a wonderful fashion on the Council, but I knew the bitch didn’t have her heart in the Cause, no matter what anyone else said.

“I need a Focus,” I said.

“That’s interesting.  I’ve been trying to get hold of you for three days, ever since the FBI took out your Chicago businesses,” Tonya said.  Shit.  Probably half of Zielinski’s urgent ‘call me’ notes were due to Tonya’s insistence on phone contact after every little bump in the road.  Why couldn’t that bitch go do some real work, like Lori, instead of spending all her time with a telephone stuck to her ear?

Well, I didn’t want to hear her expected warning to stay away from the FBI, so I waited her out.  Eventually, Tonya gave in.  “A Focus? What do you need a Focus for?”

“Experimentation.  All you fine fat Focuses flush with juice still haven’t figured out a way to give juice to an Arm, and it’s time to do something about the problem.  I want a nice young Focus, about five years or so, old enough to know what she’s doing, and I’m going to train her.  We’ll see how far your Focus abilities can be trained, and I’ll bet when we do, we’ll find in there somewhere the ability to move juice to an Arm.”

Tonya groaned.  “Lots of Focuses train their abilities, and some of us have been training them for years.  No one can move juice to an Arm.”

“Focus training isn’t worth spit in a hurricane,” I said, no sympathy for her annoyance.  “You have no conception of discipline and real training, and the pathetic noodling you call training is a joke.  When I say training, I mean real training.”

“Oh, no.  I’m not going to turn some Focus into your hands for Arm training.”

I laughed.  She should be begging me to train Focuses, dammit, if she had brains for anything besides politics.  You would think what Keaton and I did for Lori when we trained her, what Keaton did for Wendy Mann and what I did for Linda and Gloria would have brought Tonya and her East Region Focuses begging to our door, but Tonya and reality were at best on speaking terms, and the two of them didn’t get along very well.  “You don’t think Focuses are tough enough for that?  It would be interesting to see what a Focus did with real Arm training, but I wasn’t thinking of something quite that serious.  Pressure and sweat, but no egregious torture and no personality breakdowns.  The point is to train her abilities, not to tame a killing machine.”

“You think this has a chance to work?”  Finally.  A little bit of thought from Tonya.

“Perhaps,” I said.  “We’ve got one case of a Focus giving juice to an Arm.  If we apply some training and some stress to the right Focus, we might be able to reproduce the event, perhaps even reliably.”

Tonya paused in thought, and I heard her greedy Focus mental gears turning.

“You going to be using Zielinski on this?”  Then again, maybe not that much thought.

“Of course I’ll be using Zielinski on this.”

“I think something might be arranged,” Tonya said.  “What are you offering?”

At times I wondered if Tonya made her household Transforms bargain for their juice.

“Not a thing,” I said.  “You want this as much as I do.  You’ll give it to me for free because you want this happening under your control rather than somewhere else.”  I paused, and just before she spoke again, I continued.  “Besides, we’re on the same side, remember?  Getting Focuses to work with Arms and vice versa is one of the core goals of the Cause.”  As I said, her allegiance to the Cause was just a little too superficial for my tastes.

Besides, if she gave me too much grief, I would go to Teas or even Claunch.  I had been doing a complex dance with both first Focuses for the past three years.  Teas, the idiot, thought she was hot shit enough to manipulate me, and I took merciless advantage of her to ferret out information about the first Focuses.  As did Lori.  Claunch, on the other hand, really was hot shit and, annoyingly, occasionally useful, though she was clearly the sort of person whose right hand didn’t know what her left hand did.  She had approached me from her position as the official head of the Focus Network, but I played coy.  No, I wouldn’t approach Claunch unless forced, but Tonya knew full well about Claunch’s dance with me, and how much it would hurt her politically if Claunch and I really started to tango.

I had gone after the entire Council a couple of years ago and won, not as a nasty blood dripping Arm, but as a devious politician.  They hadn’t known what to make of me.  My weapon was the Lucy Peoples Memorial Fund, which I set up and sponsored.  The fund, named after the first Focus who had been accidentally killed by the first American Arm way back in the late ‘50s, was run and administered by the Council specifically to provide monetary aid to new Focuses in need.  I still got a good snicker whenever I thought about how well the fund worked, as I not only bought the good will of the Council but also got them to buy into the sub rosa world of Arm finances.  The fund also got around the ‘Arm pet’ problem of subsidizing individual Focuses.  The nicest thing about the Lucy Peoples Memorial Fund was the fact it also attracted donations from a great many external sources.  There was even talk on the Council of taking things a step further in coming years, following in the footsteps of the United Negro College Fund.

“Well, if we’re working this as an official Cause project, I can live with that.  I have a few questions to ask you along those lines, myself,” Tonya said.  She was a damned eel.  “What are you looking for?  Just a young Focus, or do you have other requirements?”

“About four or five years old, with top-end talent in all areas.  It would be good if she were also open-minded and flexible.  Oh, and she needs to be living in the Midwest Region.”

“I’m so glad you gave me a lot of choice to work with,” Tonya said, after a noticeable pause.  Funny.  She sounded as exasperated with me as I was with her.  I didn’t snicker, but I wanted to.  “Since you’ve already decided who you want, why are you bothering with the charade?”

“Oh, you have to do that with Focuses.  If they don’t think they’re manipulating something, they get constipated.  Have you decided which Focus you’re going to give me?”

I heard Tonya’s teeth grinding all the way from Philadelphia.

“Okay, then, I have someone for you,” Tonya said.  “Done the name Gail Rickenbach ring a bell?”

“Oh, she will do just fine,” I said.  Exactly who I wanted, of course.  Yup, I was moving to Detroit.

Biggioni never did get around to warning me to stay away from the FBI.

---

“You don’t have to be quite so gentle with me,” Tom said.  “I won’t break.”

I looked at him and grinned.  I would be gentle with him whether he wanted me to or not.  He was the most precious thing I owned.  Besides, this was my first Detroit kill, which did make things special.  A newly transformed woman, ripe with juice and with no Focus yet.  She hadn’t even known she had the Shakes.  She had been a fabric quality inspector at the local mill, and I caught her at dawn on her way to work.  Ecstasy.

I worried, though.  The kill had been too difficult to come by in this day of ever-increasing transformations.  If I didn’t know the home of every Arm in the US, I would almost suspect some other Arm was hunting my new territory.

I ran my finger down Tom’s sweating chest and admired him.  Forty-three years old, skin a medium brown, he was hard and hard-used.  He stretched, relaxing in the steamy post-sex glow.  Impulsively, I grabbed him back to me and held him tight.

He was beautiful, wonderful, talented, and a good lover, too.  I had recruited him four years ago, and he was one of my three top lieutenants, and the only one of them I slept with.  My real lover, where all the others were just pale substitutes who I only used at all because I refused to burn Tom out while attempting to sate my needs.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.

He pulled back and looked me in the eyes.  “Really?”  He had beautiful eyes, rich and brown and dangerous.

I sighed.  “Fuck.”  After four years, he read me nearly as well as I read him.

He nodded, and leaned his head back on the pillow.  “How long are we out of Chicago for?”

“No idea,” I said.  “At least long enough for the hunt to cool down.  Worst case?  Permanently.”

“You coping all right?”

Was I coping all right?  Hah!  Chicago was my territory, my love, my pride and joy.  Leaving Chicago cut at my soul.  Losing territory hurt a lot.

“I’m not as bad off as if I was forced out by another Arm or by the goddamned Hunters,” I said.  I remembered all the work spent clearing Chicago of the Hunters, and I ached inside.

Tom looked at me, doubting.  He knew me too well.  He had all of my people treating me like a stressed out Focus, with little presents of food, everything clean and spotless, everyone overly polite.  Gaah.  Made me want to wear a sundress, sit in an easy chair, sip tea and plot out how to backstab my allies with sly innuendo, artless gifts and false compliments.

“Okay, I’m hurting,” I said.  “I’ll get over the hurt in time.”

He accepted my explanation and kissed me, long and deep and hot, waking urges that hadn’t been asleep in the first place, not immediately post-kill.  I pushed him away, before I gave into my urges and did something I would regret.  We had done enough, and I had no intention of pushing his limits.  He was forty-three years old, and I refused to burn him out.

“How bad off are our finances?” I asked.  With Amy bossing me around and demanding I continue with the research projects, I had pawned off the financial work on him.  Well, running around my financial people.

I put work into controlling my breathing.  I really wanted to jump him and go on to other things.

Tom raised his eyebrows, and rubbed his knee slowly between my legs.  “Stop that!” I said, and he grinned.

“You’re not done, and I’m not that fragile,” he said.

“Money?”

He shrugged.  “We have enough to get by.  Littleside is expensive.  With Sammy gone, we’re going to have a problem with research.”  He looked away, still not over Sammy’s death.  Sammy had been one of his, and while normals didn’t understand possession the way Arms did, he had still cared for Sammy, and his loss when my house burned still hurt.

“I know.  I’ll do some recruiting.”

“Even if you find us a replacement, it’ll take a while before he gets up to speed.  Our Arm-trained operatives are far above your run of the mill gangsters and buttonmen.  We’ve got a few jobs already in the pipe, but we’ll still likely have a lean period.”

“Yeah.  That’s not a good thing, because despite how bad things are now, there’s worse coming.”  I just hoped Amy and Gilgamesh were wrong and I wasn’t up against senior Crows.  They always made such a chowder out of normal life.  “I’d like us to have a good padding of cash.”

“What kind of trouble?”

I shrugged.  “
More
trouble.  I think I’m going to see if I can find you a couple of research guys, and maybe we can step up our moneymaking effort as soon as they’re ready.”

He nodded.  “Whatever you command.  I’m yours.”

‘I’m yours’, he said, aiming right for my soft spots.  I pulled back and eyeballed him suspiciously.

He smiled.  “I’m yours.  Do you remember when you recruited me?  How much it took to get through my bullheaded skull?”

Oh, yes, I remembered.  I could feel the heat between my legs at the mere thought.  “You’re an evil man,” I said to him, as my good intentions collapsed.

He smiled, and whispered into my ear, “I heard that you liked it so much that you used to pull Darryl into your bed every night, just so you could pretend he was me.”

All right, I thought, as my body responded to his whispered words, maybe I did get carried away with the gentle treatment.  Tom was tough as old shoe leather, and he wouldn’t have a heart attack just from some intense sex.  I pulled him to me, and wiggled in just exactly the right way.  He caught his breath as his own body responded to mine, fast and hard.

“Mommy?” Stephanie said.

There in the doorway, all of four years old, peered Stephanie Abbott, Ila’s youngest daughter.

Fuck!

“
Ila!
”  What the hell was her kid doing in my bedroom?  Tom grabbed the sheet and pulled it over us.

Stephanie froze, her eyes wide.  She figured out she wasn’t supposed to be in here, but she just stood there.  Where the hell was Ila?  Then I remembered hearing Ila’s voice, back when Tom and I had been distracted the first time.  Something about going out to look at real estate, and could Darryl watch her kids?

Fuck!  The kid was supposed to know better than this.

Crap, she did know better, but only back in my old house.  All of Ila’s kids knew they weren’t supposed to go upstairs, but my Detroit safe-house was a small three bedroom ranch, and the little girl had no idea my bedroom just down the hall was off limits.