All Beasts Together (The Commander) (16 page)

Joshua didn’t sound
particularly smart, not with nothing but clichés for conversation.  He did feel older as a Beast, but after a bit of thought, Enkidu decided Joshua’s problem was lack of élan.

Enkidu backed off and r
an, first away from Joshua, then in a wide circle around the clearing commandeered by Wandering Shade.  He put on speed as Joshua, helplessly addled by low juice, gave chase.  As Enkidu intended, he soon became the chaser, and soon after becoming the chaser he sprung at Joshua’s back, wolf ears pinned back, snarling his terror.  He took Joshua down into the rich forest loam and sunk his forepaw claws into Joshua’s neck.

“I acknowledge your victory,” Joshua said, the Law echoing in his voice.  Enkidu howled terror and bent his juice to the task of making Joshua’s humbling real.

“Now that’s different,” Wandering Shade said, appearing next to Enkidu.  “What did you do there, at the end?”

“I reinforced his defeat, amplifying the
relevant parts of the Law,” Enkidu said.  He snapped at Joshua’s neck once more just because.

“You enslaved him?”

“I wish,” Enkidu muttered.  His Master coughed and Enkidu bowed his head.  “Forgive me, Master.  He now cannot challenge my superiority without cause.  I now
outrank
him.”  Enkidu hoped Joshua wouldn’t find cause any time soon.  With enough élan, Joshua would be much stronger than Enkidu, not a good thing at all.

“Very good,” Wandering Shade said.  Enkidu backed off and Joshua got to his feet, unsteady.  “You
’re improving yourself, as I wished.”

Joshua slipped and went to one gorilla-knee
into the mud.  Enkidu growled at him.  Not to Enkidu’s surprise, Joshua growled back as he got to his feet.

Wandering Shade frowned.  “I sense the two of you can’t work together, any more than Odin can work with either of the two of you,” Wandering Shade said.  He took his
police officer’s cap off, flicked off a few late-season fallen leaves, and stuck it back on his head.  “Do you have any idea why?  You were able to work with Grendel.”

Enkidu scratched at a flea with his back right paw and nodded his head.  “
We worked together because we weren’t full Hunters, Master.  I didn’t become a full Hunter until after I lived through my fight with the Ugly Arm.  The fight proved my status at the juice level.”

“Now that’s interesting,” his Master said.  “To me
, the Philadelphia fight was a failure.  I still think so.” He walked over to Joshua, examining the other Hunter.  “But I’m not a Hunter, and my views on your status should properly carry no weight at the juice level.”

“Hunters don’t share,” Joshua said.  At least his voice sounded humble.

“Hunters do trade,” Wandering Shade said.  He turned to Enkidu.  “Joshua needs to learn your élan drawing tricks.”

“What am I offered?” Enkidu asked, following the Law.

“My method of élan drawing,” Joshua said.  “It’s usable on any Transform at any time, including Monsters.”

“I will accept.”

Now he understood Joshua’s problems.  Joshua’s trick involved drinking Transform blood, like a vampire. 
He preserved the humanity of male and female Transforms in his pack, but his trick was otherwise worthless as it generated so little élan.  His pack women weren’t Gals and his pack men weren’t Zombies.  He couldn’t even mark them with the Law!

“Master,” Enkidu said, after the lessons were over.  Joshua had wandered away to sit by himself and think.  What the other Hunter had learned today
had humbled him greatly.  “Where did Joshua come from?”

“I work with other Beast Men from time to time,” his Master said. 
The drizzling rain had passed and the overcast clouds showed the first hints of dawn.  Enkidu leaned against the giant oak while Wandering Shade sat on top of a cooperative Marcie, who lounged with her scaly back against a hickory tree.  “I found Joshua in Texas several years ago.  Like you, he could maintain his mind without the Law, and he had already developed his blood-drinking method of obtaining élan.  I wanted him to be a Hunter, but he wasn’t interested.  He only gave in after he heard the many stories I’ve told him about Hunter successes with their packs.”

“You told me I’d lose my humanity without the Law,” Enkidu said.  He scratched at his fleas again.  Damned things.  He
would have to spend some time in man-form to lose them.

“You would have.  So would Joshua, if he had refused the Law.”

“So he was under the Law, even while working alone, not a Hunter?”

Wandering Shade nodded.  “How goes it with you, these days?”

Enkidu gave his Master his spiel about his improvements and his pack’s improvements.

“
In my terms, you’ve discovered how to do limited guided shape-changing to your Gals,” Wandering Shade said.  “I’ll pass your discovery along to the others and see what they can do with it.”

“In payment I want another crack at the Talking Arm,” Enkidu said. 
The concept of a talking Arm disturbed him.  Arms were just the Monster form of Focuses.  How had one of them managed to maintain her intellect?

“No,” Wandering Shade said.  “
The Arms know you and your tricks.  You’ve had your chance.”

Fuck. 
“Odin has a scheme, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” Wandering Shade said.  “He thinks he might be able to negotiate with the Talking Arm.”

“I wish him all the luck in the world,” Enkidu said.  “I don’t believe it’ll work, though.”

“He deserves his chance,” Wandering Shade said.  “If he doesn’t succeed at negotiation, we
’ll try more violent means.”

Enkidu sighed, which came out as a wolf whine.  “There are more Beast Men than Arms,” he said.  “We can afford to lose a few of us, if in the process a few of us are able to prove ourselves as full Hunters.”

“Indeed.  There aren’t that many Beast Men, though.”

“There’s another path we could take, Master,” Enkidu said.  “Because there are so few Arms, we could ignore them for now.  Put work into increasing our numbers and our skills.  Eventually…”

“The Arms are too dangerous to ignore – they’re your competition as predators,” his Master said.  “They must be neutralized or destroyed, as soon as possible.  I’m counting on you Hunters to do so, but if you can’t, I’ll have to do it my way.”

“Master?”  His way? 
That didn’t sound good.

“I can’t tell you the details, but understand ‘my way’ is dangerous to all of us. 
We would be declaring war on the Transform community.  If I’m forced to go that route too early, there’s no telling what might happen.”

Carol Hancock: November 18, 1967

I loved this town.

Middle November and snow.  The cold north wind.  The smells, the stenches.

The dumb as horseshit Focuses.  After dealing with
the impressive Focus Rizzari I spent a day or two studying the five Focuses of the Chicago area.  Two housewife clones, an aluminum foil goddess, a business woman and her ‘volunteer’ labor supply household, and a piece of juice moving machinery her own Transforms wheeled out of the closet and fed three times a day if they voted she did a sufficiently good job moving the juice.  The latter I was tempted to rescue, but I suspected I would get in deep shit with the Network again if I did so.  Not worth the grief.

Those Focuses
seriously tempted me to move to Boston.

Chicago held a lot more
than Transforms, though: money to make, deals to complete, minions to recruit.  The place overflowed with wonderful people of all colors and stripes.

I
inhaled smoke filled air and the reek of too many sweaty bodies as I took in Bunny Bileki’s performance at the Stratos Lounge in my Chicago home suburb of Skokie. Bunny, a popular local comedian, was about three quarters of the way through his hour long set when I metasensed the odd presence.  He had the mostly tipsy patrons rolling off their chairs and under their tables.  Moses, Jesus and Moshe the Tailor arguing in heaven.  Now this.

“The woman comes down the aisle of the church, all done up for her wedding.  Oh, her mother from the old country says, ain’t she done up pretty.  Ah, it’s going to end up bein’ nothing more than a game, her aunt says.  A game? the mother responds.  Well, the aunt says, consider who she’s marrying.  Not anyone from the old sod.  No, she had to go and marry some continental guy, not a proud Irishman.  It’s all going to be some sort of game.  When they see’m comin’ down the street, it’s going to be like their announcing the end of that game our men play down at the Rotary hall.  You know, when they say Czech, and mate!”

Howls of laughter.

Only in Chicago would that sort of crap count as a joke.  I just loved this town.

That’s when I metasensed the Chimera, right out there, a quarter mile away.

That, I didn’t love.

I excused myself from
my normal date.  Carl Oldman, a widower in his early fifties.  I had put a lot of work into getting to know him and his ample bank accounts.  He enjoyed the show.  Hell, he was the one who had introduced me to the entire concept of borscht-belt comedians.  He owned a successful tool and die shop, and he was ugly beyond compare.  I was the first reasonable woman interested in him since an ambulance ran over his wife.  Ugly didn’t bother me.

Carl grew
a delicious darkness within him.  It reminded me of Keaton’s darkness and I wanted it for myself.  Carl wanted to get back at society and needed me to help him.  He wouldn’t have to hire any more dominatrices when he needed to get his rocks off.  He now had me.  Unfortunately, I wanted more than his money.  I wanted his soul.

I recognized the Chimera’s location, dammit.  The upper west side, my own home turf, a ten-mile square area of Chicagoland centered in Skokie.  I lived it, breathed it, felt every heartbeat in my bones. Nothing went on here without my knowledge.  So I thought.  The Chimera nosed around at a kill site, where had I killed a new Monster only three days ago, my attempt to be a good member of the community.

The Chimera
didn’t notice me.

I couldn’t go anywhere without stumbling over the damned things
, or their traces, now that I understood what to look for.  Or their stench.  Chimeras weren’t hide-in-the-bushes stealthy creatures, like the one Crow I encountered.  The bastards stood out up close, up front, personal and nasty.

After my fight with Enkidu in the Quad Cities I
had encountered an ape Chimera in Milwaukee while I checked into Focus Warren, my Focus contact with the Apostates.  He roared at me, I sought him out, and he and I had made threat displays to each other before we walked away without a fight.  I found piles of Chimera shit outside the Springfield Illinois Transform Clinic, the large state Clinic.  I found a Chimera’s graveyard in Battle Creek, Michigan.  This was my first sighting in Chicago proper.

This Chimera was ugly and large.  Think black bear, but instead of fur growing out of
his skin, he had fur growing out of thick bone plates.  Instead of a short stubby bear tail, he had a lizard tail with a hammer on the end.  He lurked down in the undergrowth by a small creek winding through a subdivision of little boxy homes.

I was pissed. 
This goddamn Chimera was on
my
turf!  Neutral turf, well, I could show a little tolerance.  Not here.  I would kill the fucking thing or die trying.  I parked my car a block away, in front of a pink house with a single baseball bat left forlornly on the front lawn.  Few lights shone from the quiet homes, and the only noises came from crickets.  I popped the back of my trunk, extracted my two cut-down M-16s, my fifty pound pack of magazines, and off I trotted.

The Chimera ignored me.  In a non-threatening manner
he continued to paw around in the overgrown brush where I had killed the Monster.  Almost as if he fed.

“You.  Get the fuck off my territory!”  Then I snarled at the Chimera to get
his attention, in case he no longer understood words, like the ape I met in Milwaukee.  “Now!”

“
I’m here to offer you a deal, Arm,” the Chimera said.  His deep voice sounded erudite, calm and wise, and his head brushed the lower branches of a young maple as he stood.  A lonely brown leaf came loose and drifted to the cold ground.  “I will agree to only take Monsters if you agree to never take Monsters.  If that works, perhaps we can come to further agreements.”

“I understand you can feed on anything,” I said.  “Even me.”  I leveled the two M-16s at the creature and squeezed off
a shot from each, parting his fur.  “Leave.”

“I want to negotiate, not fight,” the Chimera said.

“Coming here is an attack,” I said.  This was my territory!  “Get the hell out of my town!”

“Very well,” the Chimera said, with an exaggerated sigh.  “My Master, the
Wandering Shade, warned me that nobody could reason with you, even though you can talk.  I should have listened.  His word is the Law and he is never wrong.”  Even though you can talk?  What the hell?