All Beasts Together (The Commander) (49 page)

“I know,” I said.  She wanted to give me a hug, but I signaled ‘no’.
  She was crestfallen.  “If you want to help me, I need information – on Chimeras and on any research involving Transform Sickness.  I’m months away from making a lair safe enough for Zielinski, so I need for you to protect him, keep him doing his damned research, and pass along the results to me.”

“Done!” Lori said
, relieved to be able to help me, if only in a small way.  “If you give me a PO Box I can send you the information you need.”

“You don’t trust Focus Warren?”

“Not for the real research Zielinski and I do.”

I nodded and rattled off a PO Box I kept in Lake Geneva.  “Don’t use it for time-sensitive stuff; I don’t check it often.”

“I can do that,” Lori said.  She looked me in the eye, still supremely embarrassed.  “I’m sorry again about the earlier.  This isn’t the first time I’ve messed up with other forms of Major Transforms…and, I dare say it, this was nowhere near my worst.  I don’t think any of us knows what we’re doing with inter-Major Transform diplomacy.”

I thought back on my first conversation with Odin, where
the chance to make peace with the Hunters had been lost because Odin had made the mistake of not meeting with me in a neutral location.  “I can vouch for that,” I said.

Now I let Lori hug me
and wish me good luck.  Despite her betrayal, her attempt to control me with her charisma, she had earned herself a fair amount of slack.  I hadn’t asked her to help me with the Chimera problem.  She had volunteered, not just personally, but her and her household.  That couldn’t be easy for a Focus.

I metasensed her like a hawk
watching a mouse during that hug, though.  I owed her and loved her, but, no, I didn’t trust her.  All of this gave me a much better understanding for why Gilgamesh didn’t want to meet me in person.  We Major Transforms really were too powerful and too clumsy for our own good.  We had a long and hard road to walk before we found a way to civilize ourselves and find real ways to cooperate.

I drove back to town in a good mood.  I was making progress on my relationships with Lori and Gilgamesh, my Chimera-trap plan had worked to perfection and I had added three more Chimera corpses to my count.  I was good at this shit, and I knew it.  It was time to clean up the mess…and have a party.

Sky: March 2, 1969

“Okay, you’re here,” Lori said

Sky nearly jumped, coming out of his un-panic meditation.  Lori was sitting near him, but not next to him, company in her glorious attic.

Great.  His instincts now
told him Lori was safe, allowing her to sneak up on him with impunity.  He might as well give her a knife and invite her to stab him in the back.

This was his first visit to Inferno since he
had stalked out on Lori last month, this time a business trip, to escort the two recently freed Canadian Sports back home.  After he finished the business of the hand-over, which included a panic-inducing meeting with Focuses Biggioni and Ackermann, he had retreated to the attic until the time came for him and the two Sports to fly back to Toronto.

A flight he
didn’t look forward to.  Flying was the most panic-inducing thing he had done in the last two years.  Crows were not meant to fly on airplanes!

“Lori!  What a surprise.  Have I ever told you how beautiful you are when dressed in your formal attire?  Ah, you are a sight to behold, my gracious lady.”

Lori was beautiful today, so beautiful he couldn’t keep his eyes off of her, one of the reasons he had been attempting to meditate his panic away.  She sat on an old cushioned chair Sky had moved next to his nest of blankets, a diamond in the rough setting of her attic and its worn contents.  She wore a calf-length aqua strapless dress with a white sequined shawl.  She had her hair professionally styled and the barest hints of makeup she wore made her almost superhumanly attractive, a starlet on Oscar night.  In comparison to Lori’s quite different American Focus peers she was a wonder of calm sanity.  Add in her knockout glow and Sky couldn’t keep from goggling in wonder.

He
was embarrassed at his sartorial inelegance.  His clothes looked like the clothes of a bum, rag-picked from the Salvation Army or the town dump.  Because they were.

“Sky, it doesn’t have to be this way,” Lori said. 
Her hands waved gracefully at his nest.

“What way?  I’m out of here, tomorrow.  Best for both of us if you don’t…”

“Shut up, Sky.”

Lori’s voice of command was unstoppable.  Sky shut up.

“I’m sorry about the mess I’ve made of things,” Lori said.  She stared down and twisted her right foot in nervous circles, abashed; the mess with him wasn’t the only mess she had made recently.  She took a deep breath.  “Connie, Ann and Tim all want you to know they want you to stay with us.”

“Why?”

She glanced up again, intent.  “They’ve seen the same thing I’ve seen, Sky.  You’re wasting yourself, your potential, up in Canada.  You know it, too.  That’s why you’re so restless.”

He met Lori’s eyes, saw she was serious, and turned away.  “I know.  I want to help, help all the Transforms, but I don’t know
how
.”

“Inferno wants to help you find out how, Sky. 
They want you to help us save the world.”

Sky shivered as he thought of all the wonderful ideas he
had come up with through the years, nearly all of which he discarded as impractical for a Crow.  “That’s an impossible project for anyone to think about rationally, Lori.”

“Not
impossible for a group of people, though.  The entire Inferno household is behind the Cause.  Others outside of Inferno are as well.  Focus Cathy Elspeth, who’s working on Transform rights.  Crow Occum, who’s trying to find a way to save Chimeras from turning into inhuman beasts.  If you can keep a secret, even the new Arm, Carol Hancock.  She’s got it, bad.  Even as a brand new Arm she’s trying to find a way to contribute to the Cause, with practical results, and she’s even found herself a Crow to work with.”  Lori’s eyes spoke fire.  “Let me tell you about how Inferno just helped her.”

Sky leaned against the backside of an old dresser which formed the rear of his nest and listened to
Lori tell him a nearly unbelievable tale of a Monster hunt in Wisconsin that turned into a fight with a Chimera and his pack.  Her tale was too pat, he wasn’t catching something.  He did catch one of the undertones of her tale: Inferno had missed him and his input on this adventure.

“You’ll help me find a way to contribute?  You and Inferno?” Sky asked, after she finished her story.  Even Annie hadn’t been able to
provide such help.

“Yes,” Lori said.  “All of us.”

“Thank you.  Thank them for thinking of me.”  He had won over the leaders of Inferno, save for Sadie.  After the inauspicious start at the tourney, he would never have believed it possible.  The allure of the Cause was irresistible, save for one issue.  “What about the two of us, though?  We won’t help the Inferno Cause if the two of us can’t find a way to get along.”

“I know.  I messed
up our relationship as bad as I feared I would,” Lori said, voice quiet, demure and unwilling to meet his gaze.  The foot made slow circles again.  “I want us to start over.  Please?  Perhaps we can get things right the second time.  I’ve had some hard lessons recently about the difficulty of interacting with other forms of Major Transforms, and I’m sure I can do better.”

Sky had been afraid Lori would say something like that.  He wouldn’t be able to refuse her.  He loved her;
he couldn’t escape it.  He had a strong suspicion he hated her guts, too.

“Lori dearest, I love you,” Sky said.  Lori turned to him, startled, open.  He
had never so boldly spoken to her from his heart.  “I love you with all my being.  When I’m in Toronto, I think of you every minute, afraid you will never deign to let me see you again.  I miss your presence, your laugh, your wit and your wisdom.  I miss your household, your greatest creation – it’s a wonder to behold.  Yet I can’t afford to stand too close.  All I ask is for you to accept me as I am, accept me as a Crow.  I can’t be anything else.”

Lori sighed, both touched and exasperated with him.  “What ever happened to stepping into the whirlwind and testing your resilience?”  She wagged a finger at him and tilted her head to the side.

Sky let his guard down.  He stood up from where he was meditating and stretched, fingers touching the low sloping ceiling.  Let her see me as I am, Sky decided.  An old Crow who spent his time writing letters, meditating, watching the Maple Leafs on television, scratching his belly and drinking beer.  Well, the latter was only for show, of course, since as a Major Transform the vices of the world no longer touched him.

He didn’t feel worthy of either Lori’s interest or Inferno’s interest.  “I failed the test.”

“I told you I was inexperienced.”

“You are very experienced, Lori, at being a Focus.”  Sky spread his hands wide
and stepped from his nest of blankets down to the wooden floor.  “You think you protect your household by forbidding me to sleep with them, that my insignificant charisma could ever be a threat to either them or you.  You think far too much of me, my dear.  Not a single Crow follows my ways or examples.  They laugh at me behind my back, calling me the adventurous Crow, simply because I’ll talk to Focuses and Transforms.  I’m nothing, except for one small thing: by accident or design, I’ve discovered that a Crow may defeat one of the most heinous byproducts of Transform Sickness, the loss of fertility.  I’m not very fertile.  Still, this tiny discovery and the three children I’ve fathered as a Crow are the only things holding me in the world when I grow depressed.  Yet they are not even my children in a mundane sense, for their mothers can’t acknowledge my presence or existence to the authorities as the father of their children, and in one case, even to their Focus!

“Yet this trifle, in your world of
high politics and great causes, is something you will deny your own women Transforms, what few of your own who may actually desire me for such a reason.  You know full well that by doing so you are depriving them of the only source of fertility available.  You protect them by destroying their future.  Didn’t we rescue a bunch of Sports from a Focus who followed a similar philosophy?”

“Bad analogies and rationalizations, Sky,” Lori said.  “We’re people, not walking reproductive desires.  I
simply don’t want to share you.”

“I don’t think that’s how
relationships work for Major Transforms,” Sky said.  This part drove him to clench his teeth, made him want to flee to Toronto and never look back.  Her attitude made him want to go on a low juice binge and destroy his memories of the recent events and the allure of Inferno.

“It had better,” Lori said, leaning forward and wagging an index finger under his nose.  “Love like this is too difficult to share.”

“
What
love?”

“
My love for you, Sky,” she said, shifting back and crossing her arms.

“What, wrap-me-up-like-a-mummy-and-throw-me-in-the-closet love?”  He snorted.  “That’s not love.  That’s ownership.  If I’d wanted
ownership, I would have kept doing the Crow and Arm routine.”

Her hands flew wide with exasperation.  “Don’t you
understand?  I don’t care!”

“That why I have to leave.”

“No, no, no!” Lori said.  She clenched her hands into fists, closed her eyes tight and shook her head.  The wave of her hair around her head almost broke Sky’s heart all by itself.  Lori’s voice lowered dramatically, now husky and intense.  “I don’t care if you sleep with other Transform women who want to have babies, even if it takes years and years.  That’s not what’s important.”

Sky tried to steady himself, taking several deep breaths.  Perhaps there was something positive to be said about being owned, he muttered in his own mind.  Then he wouldn’t have to deal with tangles like this.

Lori struggled so hard to express what she held in her heart.  She couldn’t come out and say whatever she wanted to say.  What she tried and failed to say in her letters and phone calls to him over the past month.  Circling and circling but never reaching the words. “I don’t understand what you’re objecting to, then.  What are you saying?”

“I want your love, Sky, not…”
Lori stopped, took a deep breath, and readied herself.  “Not just your body.”  Eh?  Just?  If Sky remembered correctly, this was the first time Lori ever admitted to physically desiring him, at least when thinking rationally.  “I don’t want to be replaceable.  I need to be more than merely the first stop you make when you visit Boston.  I want more.”

“What you propose isn’t good for your household.”

“That’s my household, Sky.  Not yours.  Not your decision.”

His heart sank.  No matter what,
everything revolved around Lori’s protection of her household.  “Your decision?  Shall I ask the leaders of your household what they think?  Tell them what I’m offering?”

“That’s dirty, Sky.”

“Yes.  However, your household overwhelms me.  Unless I’m in some way part of your household, I can’t stay here.”