The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (50 page)

She sat back for a moment and thought about it, and then took another bite.  “The celery is a little old.”

I smiled.  “Yes.  The gumbo would be better if the celery were fresher.”

“I could make something this good.”

“Yup.  I do believe you could.”

“It’s good to have the old standard dishes, but if you want to be a really five star restaurant, you need a few specialty dishes of your own.  You can work up your own list over time, but let’s see if we can start you off with a main dish that’s completely new, and a few house variants of some other standard dishes.  You need a really good bread pudding, for instance.”

“Helen?”  I stood in the back of the kitchen as the kitchen crew set up for the lunchtime crowd.  Helen turned to me from where she was working with one of the prep cooks, showing him how to cut celery exactly right.

“Yes?” she said as she came my way.

“Can you stand some more advice?”

She smiled.  “I can stand any advice you want to give me.”

Every day, I liked this Focus more and more.  I nodded at the prep cook.

“He’s good with people, but he sucks as a cook.  You ever consider using him as a maitre’d?”

She looked over at the man, six foot three, burly muscles, and a sailor’s tattoo on his arm.  “Maitre’d?”

“He’ll give your place character.  Plus, he’ll be a lot happier out front.  You keep him juiced up and happy, he’ll spread so much good cheer, people will feel welcome the minute they walk in.”  The jolly happy giant trope.

She shook her head doubtfully, trying to get her mind around the idea.  She trusted me, though.  I expected she would try my idea.

“You want another?  You’ve got a kid, I never caught the name.  Seventeen or so, kind of quiet, shaggy black hair and an attitude problem?”

“Vince?”

“Vince, then.  You’ve got him doing busboy, and he’d do better in the kitchen.  He’s got a feel for food.”

She nodded and looked around her kitchen with a look of wonder in her eyes.

“This is really working,” she said.  “You’ve only been here five days, and there’s a real difference.  People are already starting to notice.”

I hid my anxiety from her.  The five days had been nerve-wracking, as both Hoskins and I knew something was out there.  Waiting.  Watching.

“Huh.  You just keep working on your sense of smell.  Then you’ll see a difference they’ll notice.”

---

In my dreams, I sat in my bed.  A bed in my dreams.  Objects littered the bed, some still, some moving.  I couldn’t focus on any of them enough to identify them.  Consuela and the two children I accidentally killed during a hunt, years ago, howled at me from beyond my dream bed.  From behind me.  When I turned I caught only a bare glimpse of them.  Then they vanished, only to appear behind me again.  When they began their howls my heart caught, terrified.

Other dream-things flickered close by, again so out of focus I couldn’t make them out.  I knew what the nightmarish ghosts wanted: for me to flee.  Run and never stop running.  Give into my panic, the way a baby Crow would.

The damned thing was, I realized they were making progress.  Each appearance drove another wedge into my sanity; eventually my sanity would break and I would do as they wanted.

I attempted to concentrate on the attackers.  Instead, I lost the dream and fell back asleep.

In my dreams I sat in my bed.  A bed in my dreams.  Objects littered the bed…again.  Here.  I needed to do something, or the ghosts of Bobby, my old lover, and Carl Oldman, my deceased moneyman from my first stay in Chicago, would succeed in breaking my mind.

I vaguely recalled attempting to concentrate on the ghosts, and having the attempt not go well.  So, what does any Arm do when she’s in deep deep shit?  Burn juice.

I burned juice, concentrating on forcing the ghosts away.  I succeeded in forcing them away by tossing myself out of the dream.  I fell back asleep.

In my dreams I sat in my bed.  A bed in my dreams.  Objects littered the bed…well, you know the drill.  This time my dead were the nameless Transforms I juice sucked while in my initial captivity in St. Louis, as a baby Arm, back when I could no more control a juice draw than fly by flapping my arms.

I vaguely recalled failing to banish the ghosts via concentration and by burning juice.  I vaguely recalled not being terrified of the ghosts before, and not having to edge away from them, to the edge of the dream bed, whenever they appeared.  They were winning.

Lori, help me!
I said, in my mind. 
Madonna, help me!

For the first time in my dreams I opened myself up to help, to the dreaming world outside the bed.

In response I attracted a tattered angel, with part-broken wings, wounds, bruises, and wild eyes.  Angels I could cope with.  I opened my heart more, and almost lost myself in panic when I recognized my own tag on the Angel.  Gail.  Her wounds came from me and from Lori.

Carefully, oh so carefully, I reached out with my tag and touched her.  Healed her.  Established pathways sprung up between us, created when I brought her back from the dead in the Battle in Detroit.  Spoof!  Gail became an Angel in full glory, filled with holy glowing light.  Her eyes became great ‘O’s, surprised at my ability to do anything in the dreaming.  How did I know this?  I had no idea.

I pointed to the ghosts, and Angel Gail nodded.  She did something, I wasn’t sure what, but she pulled on my tag for power of some unknown sort or other.  The dead Transforms changed their shape and melted together into a woman limned in shining white light, with ash blonde hair, dressed as a medieval queen.  Focus Shirley Patterson.

She laughed, and I
heard
her laugh.

Angel Gail rushed over to me and grabbed me.  I grabbed her.  We both quaked in fear.  Patterson laughed – and I still heard her laugh.  Patterson held out her hands, and in them she held two hearts.  I looked at Angel Gail, and saw her heart missing.  I couldn’t see my own dreaming self, but I knew my own heart was gone.

I panicked and forced myself out of the dream.  In a moment I fell back to sleep.

I lay in my bed in my hotel suite, and watched the sun rise through the crack between the curtains.  I lived in a little hotel in the French Quarter, several blocks from the Beaux Bon, with antique furniture and ornate ironwork.  Sinclair slept in the other room with the ever-complaining Hoskins.  My little surprise occupied the next room over.

I worried that my little surprise wouldn’t turn out to be big enough.  Sinclair, like Lori, thought we were going to be hit, and hit hard, and he didn’t do much sleeping.  Gilgamesh slept on a foldout bed in the living room, but only so I could get a few hours of sleep of my own.  The rest of the time, Gilgamesh was a very comfortable presence in my own bed.  I had finally extracted the details of his fight with the Hunters in Texas.  He was embarrassed about his new Guru talents, and a little afraid I would bump him over to front line combatant in my mind because he helped Hoskins kill a Hunter.  My favorite Crow was now one of the leading Crows, which brought a big smile to my face.  Having Gilgamesh as a Guru would make my favorite long-term project, taking out the Hunters, just a little bit easier.

Hopefully, we would all survive long enough to enjoy his new status.  I agreed with him.  Those Hunters in the East Texas piney woods had been a trap, sent by one of our enemies, and we sat here in New Orleans like a giant target.  Very soon, the enemy who sent the Hunters, or a different enemy, would pull the trigger.

The hotel suite phone rang, when nobody knew to call me here.  I answered, anyway.

Unexpected Battles and Revelations

“I have picked up over two dozen rumors of a different group of Progenitors, appearing in southeastern Europe and over east to Tibet; tied to a group the archeologists term ‘The Sea Peoples’, active from about 1500 BC to about 1000 BC.  True or not?  If true, did they leave any artifacts behind, and if so, are they also active?” – from Arm Haggerty’s Speculative Projects List

Gail Rickenbach: August 11, 1972 – August 15, 1972

Gail looked forward to Lori Rizzari’s arrival, not only because of the opportunity to learn from one of the premier Focuses in the country, but also because Lori Rizzari impressed the hell out of Gail.  She had not only graduated from college as a Focus, but she had also earned her PhD.  She was a professor, a research scientist, the primary Focus expert on Crows, a revolutionary, and a witch so powerful she left other Focuses shaking in their boots.  Gail found the idea that someone like Focus Rizzari would come a thousand miles just to train her, personally, to be exceptionally inspiring.

Oh, and a little more selfishly, Gail wanted a week off from Arm training.  She had learned a lot from Teacher, but she needed a break, and some time with someone who might be a little less cruel and a little more sympathetic.  Gilgamesh coming by to tell her that after he returned from New Orleans he would be helping with the research project was just gravy.

Life was indeed looking up.

So on Saturday morning, Gail made ready.  The whole household was spotless.  She borrowed some better furniture for her office and got the stored furniture temporarily moved elsewhere.  She primed the kitchen to supply snacks and meals all day long.  She had people ready to run errands, guards prepped with the appropriate courtesies, and everyone in the household briefed about how to behave.

Gail was ready for a visit by a distinguished Focus.

She wasn’t ready, though, for a visit by Lady Death.

Focus Rizzari’s metasense-masked arrival, as if she attempted to dodge an army of Hunters, was the first hint.  The second was the floor length hooded black cloak Rizzari wore, and the third was the ‘death’ radiating from her Focus charisma, almost as bad as Teacher when she got in a mood.

Gail’s step faltered as she approached Focus Rizzari to welcome her, and her reflexes kicked in.  After weeks of training with Teacher, she had experienced every variant of Arm predator effect she imagined possible.  Her only defense was now automatic: she kicked on her own Focus charisma, full power.

Focus Rizzari glared, displeased, and she
became
Lady Death.

Oops.

Lady Death looked at Gail as if she was some insect that had crawled across her sandwich.  Her people stood behind her with cold eyes and bodies so fit they made her own well-trained people look like the ladies’ luncheon club.  Gail’s own people just stared, frozen in place, because Gail hadn’t prepared them for
this
.

Not for long, though.  Sylvie and John took one look at their Focus with her charisma up and settled into fighting formation on either side of her, ready for a fight.

No fight happened.  “So is this how you greet visitors here?” Lady Death said, her voice dripping contempt.  Gail’s own Focus charisma sputtered out immediately in embarrassment.

“I’m so sa…sorry,” she said.  “Really, I didn’t mean…  I don’t know how, ah, it happened.”  Gail reddened at her verbal stumbles and looked over at Sylvie and John, standing beside her in their defensive stances.  “No, no, Focus Rizzari is a visitor.”  She looked back at Focus Rizzari, but Lady Death still looked back at her, as if she were a two-year-old who had made a particularly disgusting mess in the living room.

“Come in?” Gail said, her voice suddenly weak.

Lady Death’s bodyguards glared at her with stone-faced disapproval, save for one, a forty-ish woman Transform, with brown hair, pale blue eyes and a weathered look to her face.  Once Gail realized the woman hid a smile she realized she had been, in Tonya’s words, ‘rolled’, and her sense of the visiting Focus as Lady Death vanished.  Focus Rizzari had used her Focus charisma on Gail, slipping past Gail’s own charisma as if her charisma didn’t even exist.

Hell.  Focus Rizzari came in, picked a fight, and won, all in the first ten seconds after she walked in the door.  Gail doubted anyone else even realized what happened.

No, that wasn’t right.  The woman Transform with the smile understood.  Maybe some of Focus Rizzari’s other people.  Neither of her own, though.

Hell.

“Extend your metasense outside yourself and absorb the feel of your household.  Can you feel the boundaries of your household?  Sense how your household pervades everywhere your people spend their time, even if they’re not present right now?”  Focus Rizzari sat on one of the borrowed chairs, a high backed wing chair that would have looked considerably more natural in a living room than an office.  Her Boston Brahmin accent was clipped, and hadn’t lost the note of contempt.

“Done,” Gail said, focusing her charisma on temper control and ignoring Rizzari’s contempt.

“Sense how your household juice buffer extends through the space, even the places empty of your people.  The presence of the juice in the juice buffer is what allows you to see everywhere in your household.”  All in black.  Focus Rizzari’s robes draped over the chair like a pool of darkness.  Why did she decide she needed to do that death thing, anyway?  Gail had been so ready to extend a welcome, and this woman remained intentionally unpleasant.

Gail nodded, carefully maintaining a polite expression.

“This is the tool you have to work with.  Your household.  You control your household by forcing a pattern on them.  The first and most powerful pattern is the one you laid when you claimed your people as yours, allowing you to manipulate their juice.  The basal pattern is only a start, though.  Even the most ignorant Focus should be able to understand the nature of the tagging pattern and its many ramifications.”

Gail carefully unclenched her teeth and nodded politely at Rizzari’s gratuitous insult.  “I see.  You might want to know that Dr. Zielinski has already given me some training in juice patterns.”

“The blind training the ignorant?  If you don’t have basic competence with juice patterns to begin with, you won’t be able to make sense out of a Zielinski diagram.”  Zielinski diagram?  Not only did Focus Rizzari know about them, she had
named
them!  “Now, the tagging pattern is the starting point.  You use the same control over the juice to make other patterns, patterns able to produce a considerable variety of effects.  As with any ignorant Focus, you’re creating them unconsciously, all over your household.  Here, here and here.”  When Rizzari pointed them out, Gail couldn’t help but agree.  Unconsciously created juice patterns she had semiconsciously learned to tune out as distractions.  Check.

“The domain of the Focus is the mind.  An experienced Focus, one far beyond your limited capabilities, can extend her effects to the body, using the juice and other hormones as intermediaries.  When you consider possible effects, consider the emotions, the senses, thought, all the properties of the brain.  Fight or flight reflexes.  Even nausea.  Even a completely incompetent Focus ought to be able to master a few tricks.”

Gail’s charismatic control over her temper fell apart under the continuing assault.  “Are you accusing me of incompetence?”  What, was she supposed to reveal all her tricks to some unknown Focus during her first hour as her student?

The disappointment ate at Gail.  Instead of a comrade, all she got was another holier-than-thou bitch who wanted to insult her competence.  After so much hell, she had thought she would get a few days of escape.  No escape, though.  Just another demon.  Even with Teacher gone, her long arm reached out to torment Gail.

Focus Rizzari raised an arch eyebrow.  “I didn’t apply the word to you.  You did.  Are you feeling sensitive in that area?”

Dammit!  Gail wanted to smack the catty little bitch and her Regional Council Session pettiness into next week.  Instead, she unclenched her teeth again and said, “Certainly not.  Please continue.”

“Let’s try a basic juice pattern.  A localized interference with the juice flow.  This is as basic as it gets.  I’m sure even you can manage this without a Zielinski diagram.  Close your eyes and…

Gail lost her temper again; she had been through all this crap with Zielinski.  “What is
with
you?” she said.  “You’ve been after me since you walked in the door.  I’ve never done anything to deserve this, and you can damned well be polite.”

Focus Rizzari looked Gail up and down with her chilly, contemptuous Lady Death stare.  “As I was saying, close your eyes and extend…”

“No, dammit!” Gail said.  She found herself on her feet, glaring down at the short but profoundly unintimidated Focus.  “What is your problem?  Why are you dumping this shit on me?”

Rizzari didn’t move.  She only stared up at Gail as if Gail were a child, not disturbed in the least by Gail’s outburst.  “You’re weak, you’re unreliable, you’re overly secretive and you’re incompetent.  Why shouldn’t I treat you like a failure?”

Gail froze, her mind white with rage.  “Well fuck this shit,” she said, Crow-whispering through her tight throat.  “You can take your self-righteous bullshit and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, because I’ve had enough.  Find some other sucker to shit on.”  She turned away and stalked toward the door.  This self-righteous bitch could stay in here until her ass rotted to the chair, but Gail refused to eat shit for her any more.

The juice pattern hit Gail two steps from the door, a standard Focus tag.  Only this Focus tag was a hundred times stronger than any she had ever metasensed.  Impossible.  No Focus had such power to work with, not with a Focus’s low juice problems.

Without the slightest pause, the pattern settled into her mind and her juice structure, tagging her, relegating her to nothing more than one of Rizzari’s woman Transforms.  A half a heartbeat later, another juice pattern followed, something frightfully complex and not very powerful.  The ghostly pattern came down the pipe the tag opened and slid right through all of Gail’s defenses like cheese off a hot pizza.

All of a sudden, Gail understood her failures.  Her eyes opened wide, the horror hit her, and she moaned.  Focus Rizzari’s pattern flipped a switch in her mind, turning on a light illuminating all of her failures, ripping them out of the nice neat memory cages Gail had built for them.  The day Trisha’s boyfriend ran off with the household’s money, the way her household feared her when her temper slipped, Teacher’s icy contempt.  The day Helen Grimm lost her job because Gail wasn’t maintaining her juice flow.  The way she had tortured Matt Narbanor because of her own guilt.  Her uneven dealings with Wini Adkins.  All the mistakes she made when she had just started her work with Transform rights.  The disasters associated with her Focus charisma coming in.  Her contemptible mistakes with Stacy.  Her worse mistakes with Teacher.

So much, and all at once.  So many mistakes.  She never before realized how bad she had been, but she knew now.  She was the most abysmal, awful, selfish, incompetent, destructive failure the world had ever known.  The self-hate poured in like a spring tide, unstoppable.  Gail tore at her face with her hands, tearing long gouges down her cheeks, and fell to the floor.  Tears came, the terrible misery flowed out of her in a flood, and she shook with wracking, shuddering sobs and tore her cheeks again.  If only she carved her skin away, maybe the misery would escape, and leave her empty and free.  Maybe if she stabbed herself in the heart she would die, and the pain would stop.

Focus Rizzari snapped her fingers.

The misery stopped.  Gone.

Gail looked up at Rizzari from the floor through the blood and tears covering her face and shuddered.

“You’re weak, you’re unreliable, and you’re incompetent,” Focus Rizzari said, in that same soulless voice.  “Now close your eyes and extend your metasense.  You
are
going to attempt to create a basic juice pattern even
you
should be able to manage.”

Witch.  Gail shuddered again at Rizzari’s inhuman eyes, as dead and cold as Teacher’s eyes.  The tears didn’t stop, but did slow to a trickle.  She shivered as she closed her eyes.

---

“What is with this shit, anyway?”  Gail’s miserable few minutes of self-hate still ate at her.  Hating herself so much frightened her, and the mistakes Rizzari brought forward remained in her mind.

“What shit?” Sylvie said, as she pounded on Gail’s back, attempting to pound the tension out of her as she lay on the living room floor in Gail and Van’s apartment.  Over at the kitchen table Kurt and Van discussed Transform Sickness demographics, something about exponents and non-linear terms.

“All this shit.  Here we were, portraying a nice ordinary Focus household and keeping our heads down, when all of a sudden, every mean bitch Major Transform in the entire country decides they want to come through and crap on me.  I mean, Teacher is bad enough.  How many Focuses have an Arm beating up on them three times a week, anyway?  But now we have Lady Death stomping through, and she has a whole new way of crapping all over me.  Why the hell is everyone picking on us now?”