The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (9 page)

“One of the Arms massacred a church full of congregants just before dusk, in Phoenix, Arizona, before she set the building on fire,” Focus Keistermann said.  She settled in the other high backed chair.  “The picture is from an hour or so ago.”  Right.  Phoenix was two time zones west.

“How’d they know an Arm did this?”  Amy sat in the center of the couch, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, engrossed and feeling the responsibility of being the number two Arm.  Sinclair wondered if she would bore a hole in the television with her glare.

“They’re not saying,” Focus Keistermann said.  “Or describing the horror inside the church.”

“What sort of Arm might do this?” Sinclair said.  “Do we have a Rogue Arm?  Or is this something Kali” the head Arm, Stacy Keaton, “ordered?”

Amy shook her head, never moving her gaze from the screen.  “This isn’t Keaton’s style,” she said.  “If one of mine did this, there’s going to be hell to pay.”  That is, Arms Hancock and Sibrian.  “I could see either Bass, Naylor or Billington doing this – sick crap is their style.  More likely, though, is one of the recent Arm graduates.  I’m not impressed with either Whetstone or Bartlett’s self-control.”  Sinclair nodded in agreement.  Young predators, whether Arm or Chimera, lacked the iron self-control their elders possessed.

The news special changed back to the anchor, who started to go into the history of Transform fights and massacres, including the Battle in Detroit, in which Sinclair had participated.  He had managed to stay out of the Clearing of Chicago, and of course had no problem avoiding the Bavarian Insurrection, as it was in East Germany.  On the other hand, Amy’s tight, predatory smile grew fiercer at each of these that they mentioned, as she had managed to be involved in all of them, especially the Bavarian Insurrection, where her successes had earned her her Arm nickname,
the Hero
.  The anchor went on to reiterate last week’s atrocity, where a group of four Monsters, probably Hunter led, killed seven people in a Kansas City coffee shop, two of them senior managers at some pharmaceutical company named United Toxicol.  Little Transform-created problems surfaced every month or so.  Sinclair shrank back, worried as always about the fact the Transforms and their problems no longer flew under the media radar.

“Now if there were only some way to reign in the Hunters,” Amy said.  “Besides fighting them, of course.  Which we can’t get much support on, Polly.”

An old issue.  Focus Keistermann sighed.  “Most of the Council Focuses just aren’t interested in any sort of aggressive fighting, Amy.  I’ve tried.”

“You could lean on them.”

“Leaning – strong arm tactics and blackmail – is exactly what the Cause is trying to avoid,” Focus Keistermann said.  She was new to the Cause, converted to public support only after the revelation of the Eskimo Spear.  “We can’t be the ‘good guys’ if we use the same old rotten tactics the first Focuses use when we’re trying to get our way.”

Yes, a very old and well chewed argument.  Unfortunately for the Cause and its desire for inter-Major Transform cooperation, this little group in Focus Keistermann’s study was about as good as it got, with all four varieties of Major Transform sitting together and talking.  Well, save for Sir Chet, who had fallen asleep on his feet while serving as Sinclair’s nominal bodyguard.

“Wait!” the news anchor said, on the television.  Startled.  “This just in, from Chicago.”  Another aerial shot, of another burning building, this time in the darkness of night.  “The FBI apparently found and attacked one of the monstrous Arms, in Chicago, the Arm said to be responsible for the Phoenix massacre.  At this point, all we have is preliminary information, but it appears that no one made it out of the house alive.”

Shit!  The Commander?  Sinclair turned to Amy, expecting to see the Arm doing something wildly emotional and hazardous to his health.  Hancock, the Commander, was Amy’s responsibility because of their tagged relationship, and she was Chicago’s Arm.  No matter which one bossed the other around, though, the two Arms were very close and worked together well.  Amy frowned, unhappy, but didn’t go berserk.

“I don’t think so,” she said, in a whisper.  She closed her eyes, to meditate.

Focus Keistermann did the same.  Sinclair decided to spend the time and the juice to meditate and contact the pheromone flow.  He should be able to determine whether a senior Major Transform, such as the Commander, remained among the living.

The Focuses termed the shared mental space of the Major Transforms ‘the Dreaming’, but each variety of Major Transform named and experienced the place differently.  Sinclair, as with all of Guru Shadow’s Crows, experienced the pheromone flow as a big game board, with important Major Transforms and other important people as game pieces.  All illusion, of course.  No one understood how the pheromone flow worked, as with many of the screwy Major Transform senses involving radio, chemical scents, and other imponderable things.  In his mind, he thought of himself as a crow in a business suit.  Focus Keistermann appeared as a woman army officer figure, and Amy as a motorcycle helmet.  He ranged out across the country, though place was a difficult concept to translate into the flow.  Distances weren’t constant, but in his own mental map, he found Chicago and Crow Newton, the Newt, with ease.  He found the Commander a moment later, appearing as a butcher knife, which meant she was both alive and pissed.  When she wasn’t pissed she appeared as a butterfly.

Another figure appeared in his mind, the angelic Madonna of Montreal.  She picked up his presence in her illusionary arms and carried him like a baby out west.  Nobody else in the flow could move him this way, but the Madonna was always a special case.

Los Angeles, perhaps?  He spotted two Arms, Kali (her image in his mind matched her name) and another Arm he didn’t recognize who appeared as a set of brass knuckles.  Sinclair went deeper into his mind, and dredged up a name: Arm Billington.  He also picked up the fuzzy munged-together signatures of Kali’s student Arms.  He didn’t spot any of the senior Crows he expected to see in that area of the country, to his surprise.  Then, for no apparent reason, the Madonna picked him up again and moved him all the way over to the other side of the country.  Bleeding crab?  Hell, Hoskins, you idiot!  What the crap are you doing fighting!

Duke Hoskins, the Noble head of Sinclair’s barony and the leader of all the Nobles, wasn’t in the flow and thus out of contact, but Sinclair did sense Hoskins wasn’t hurt badly.  The words he heard when he saw Hoskins in his mind, incongruous for a place as quiet as the Pheromone Flow, he ignored for now.

Sinclair opened his eyes, jolting his mind back to Focus Keistermann’s quiet and very concrete study after the mystical symbology of the Flow.  “The Law is a lie,” the voice had said in his head.  Typical Flow nonsense.

A few moments later, Amy and Focus Keistermann opened their eyes as well.  “I’ve got to get going,” Amy said.  “Carol’s one righteously pissed Arm right now, and I need to be there to support her.”  Amy was notoriously piss-awful at the Dreaming, and Sinclair doubted she even got into the Dreaming proper, but she at least seemed to be able to pick up a few emotions over a tag link.

“Don’t forget the information I gave you, Amy,” Focus Keistermann said.  Amy patted her black leather motorcycle jacket.

“Got it,” Amy said, and vanished at Arm speed.  A moment later, Sinclair heard the roar of Amy’s over-powered Harley dopplering into the distance.

Something from his meditations clicked in his mind.  Symbols.  As a Crow Master, he was, if one used the terms of the Cause, a Shaman.  Everything he sensed, or did with dross, was symbolic.  “Focus Keistermann, the information you gave Amy regarding Arm Billington is connected to this, somehow.  What was in it?”

Focus Keistermann gave him a puzzled look.  “I just passed along some technical information.  How could that be connected to this mess?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

Focus Keistermann raised an eyebrow, gave him the ‘Crows are screwy’ look, before calling for one of her people to bring in some more food.  The food previously on the coffee table a moment ago had suddenly vanished – suddenly being when Amy left.

“Arm Billington went into her baby Arm training as a white woman and came out a black woman.  I was just making sure Zielinski knew.”  Then her face lit up.  “The Madonna pointed this out, right?”

Sinclair nodded in understanding.  Screwy information of dubious use directed toward the Good Doctor, as Dr. Henry Zielinski was known among the Crows and Nobles?  Standard behavior for the Madonna of Montreal.

“Did you have the feeling, Focus Keistermann, of this being some sort of attack on the Cause?” Sinclair asked.  One never knew where one got any of the screwy ideas in the flow.  Crow Nameless, the Crow mind behind the Eskimo Spear quest, now believed that many of these screwy ideas came from the recently awakened dross network of the last Transform efflorescence, the Progenitors, which didn’t make Sinclair at all happy.

A large plate of deviled eggs, stuffed olives, stuffed mushrooms, egg rolls and petit fours arrived.  Focus Keistermann made an immediate grab for the stuffed mushrooms.  Her catering business had some excellent cooks.

“Yes, Master Sinclair, just as Tonya and Shadow feared.  Unfortunately, I don’t understand the connection.  Or connections.  Or who or what was behind this.  Did the Madonna seem upset to you?”

Sinclair shook his head.  One of Shadow’s big worries was that the Progenitors might turn out to be an enemy.  He grabbed a stuffed olive, and thought dark thoughts.  Yes, the dual attacks carried all the stench of bad times coming.  He was going to have to think on this, and talk to Duke Hoskins and Shadow.

---

Callie came into Sinclair’s room with a bowl with a little bit of green salad in it.  She had been an attractive woman once, but now most of her hair had fallen out, and her lips had become thick and gray.  Sinclair sat in the middle of his bed, surrounded by books and notebooks.  Today, his prize was a book sent over from Japan, in Japanese, on social structures during the Tokugawa Shogunate.

“Master Sinclair,” she said in a soft voice.

“Yes, Callie?”

“Could you try the salad for us? Anne and I couldn’t remember if we were doing it right.”

Sinclair took the bowl and looked.  Inside he found very finely shredded pieces of various vegetables: lettuce, bell peppers, broccoli, radishes, and carrot peelings.  Not the carrot, just the peelings.  He ate a bite.

“Excellent.  This is perfect.”

Callie smiled, relieved.  “You don’t think we cut it too small? We couldn’t remember how big the pieces should be.”

“That’s the wonderful thing about salads,” he told her.  “All sorts of different sizes work.  This is just fine, and if you chopped the pieces larger, that would have been just fine, too.”

A normal might not care for Callie’s odd salad, but compared to the food he ate back when he was eating from garbage cans, Callie’s salad was practically gourmet.

Callie almost glowed with happiness and sat down on the bed beside him, on top of all his books.  Sinclair winced, and quickly put a gentle smile back on his face before Callie noticed.  She snuggled up close and put his arm around her.  All the girls had a constant need for physical contact.  Commoners lived a rough life, and the only counter to the pain the girls suffered was the stark fact that without the pain, they would be dead.  The options for a Transform without a Focus weren’t good.

In Callie’s case, though, he suspected she had a little more on her mind than just snuggling, and he was proved right just seconds later when her hand found its way between the buttons of his shirt and down under his belt.  She was eighteen days along, just three days from peak, and high juice lent a certain urgency to her body’s needs.

Sinclair checked the time, 4:32, plenty of time before his appointment with Sir Randolph at 5:00, and reached for her.  His own juice count wasn’t doing too badly either, and those odd gray lips of Callie’s were soft and sensitive, and very mobile.

The books would just have to manage on their own.

On his way to the barn, Sinclair deposited Callie back in the kitchen, and waved to Anne as she attempted to cook dinner.  Hopefully, they wouldn’t end up with crispy blackened ‘boiled’ vegetables again.  He checked, and as usual, Greta scrubbed the bathroom floor.  Greta had a thing about clean bathrooms.  On his way out back, he found Diane, Angie, and Hazel in the living room knitting.  Knitting was an excellent activity for many of the girls.  They didn’t knit anything very complex, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in quality, and the knitting did steady their minds.

Sinclair stepped outside and found David pulling weeds in the yard.  David was another one of Sinclair’s successes.  Most male Transforms in Noble households weren’t allowed out of the house.

Sir Randolph McGee was out in the barn, shadowboxing.  Sinclair checked the time and paused.  He needed to be ready exactly at 5:00, not a second before or after.  Nobles needed order.

Before he joined Sinclair’s household, Sir Randolph had drifted a long way from human.  To start with, they had returned him to his human shape, to bring his mind back.  Now, with his mind stable, they taught him an improved beast form to replace his old non-combat usable one.  Sir Randolph’s old beast form was almost nine feet tall, with pallid hairless skin and an even dozen unnaturally long and flexible arms and legs.  With small toothed suckers.  Sir Randolph’s new form no longer possessed the extra appendages that once sprouted from his shoulders, the dome of his skull was no longer wide and flat, and his skin oozed corrosive slime only when he wanted.  He maintained a human-normal intellect in his beast form these days, the biggest improvement of all.