All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (42 page)

Gunfire!  Within the reception hall.

Sky flattened and moaned.

Sellers metasensed chaos inside the reception hall.  “We should hit them now,” Sellers said, keeping his eyes on the still climbing first wave of attackers.  They had failed to breach the first floor service doors, which the Commander had ordered welded shut from the inside at the first sign of trouble.

“No,” the Duke said.  “We follow orders.  We’re here to stop the Hunters, not the chafe.”

“I’ve got them now,” Sky said.  “They’re a half mile out, and they’re charging.”  The Crow paused.  “Dammit, one small group just popped out of metasense protections inside the hotel.  It’s Odin.”

A flank attack, what everyone had feared, and far away from them.

“Stay put.  Wait for the main charge,” Duke Hoskins said.

It wouldn’t be long now.  The real non-illusory Hunters and their more Monsterish pack women began their Terror roars from well behind the illusions.

Tonya Biggioni

“No, that’s Shad…”  Gail grabbed her, interrupting her words.  For a second, Tonya fought back, until the first bullet hit her, across her right breast and into her right shoulder.  Then the second hit, a punch through her right biceps.  By then, she stopped fighting Gail and let Gail’s momentum carry her down.

To her horror, over a dozen bullets ripped into and through Gail, automatic weapons fire.  Most hit Tonya as well, but the enemy used small caliber low-power weaponry, some of the bullets so spent by the time they reached Tonya that they bounced off her.  As the two Focuses fell to the ground, Tonya felt a plea for help through Gail’s eyes, then nothing.

Gail collapsed on Tonya, gone gone gone, rolled up eyeballs, slack dead weight, spurting blood in viscous blobs far too familiar to her.  Tonya’s thoughts filled with panic and nonsense, a surprise to even her: How am I going to pay Gail back for saving my life if she dies!  A connection to Gail built at the juice level, small and obscure, unlike anything…  No, not unlike.  This was the same link she had with Keaton.

Did I kill us both by not allowing Gail to take me down immediately?

Tonya’s thoughts turned to other subjects as her body switched over to juice metabolism.  One of the spent bullets had clipped a branch of Tonya’s aorta, and all of a sudden, Tonya had her own problem to worry about.

Tonya closed her eyes to create a juice pattern to focus her immense and well-practiced self-healing capabilities on one tiny blood-gushing aneurysm that threatened to leave her flat on her back for the next week, if not longer.  She rammed her iron will through the pain of her dead, dying and wounded Transforms so she could still function without screaming.

This was a fight, and she needed to be up and fighting.

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh screamed and ran toward Focus Anderson and her bodyguards, readying his rotten eggs.  He was too far from them to stop them before they gunned down their first targets, Tonya, Lori and Polly.  As they turned to their next targets, which included him and Stalin, he tossed his rotten eggs at them and made for the ground, ending up between Focus Anderson’s people and Lori.  Illusions of Monsters and Hunters popped up to distract Focus Anderson’s people from noticing the small-area metasense scramblers and juice pattern disruptors he rolled into their midst.  Whatever panic he felt before fled.

Lori, hit, fell, her glow starting to fray.  She loosed, on the way to the floor, a hellacious juice pattern at Focus Anderson, unlike anything Gilgamesh had ever metasensed before, so potent it hurt to metasense.  It flash-fried his juice pattern disruptor as if it wasn’t there and hit the traitorous Focus Anderson dead on, and spread in an instant to her Transforms.  A mere instant later the Focuses and her Transforms’ juice destabilized and spewed from their bodies in a flood, like the élan draw of a Beast Man.  They died, technically Monsters deep in withdrawal, before they hit the floor.  Anderson’s normal bodyguards were unaffected.

Polly’s Major Transform bodyguard had sensed enough of the attack coming to pull Polly behind him or her before the barrage.  The only one in Polly’s entourage hit was the bodyguard, whose movements appeared human-normal, meaning this was an Arm or much more unlikely one of Rogue Crow’s Patriarchs.  The bodyguard shrugged off the effects of the half dozen gunshot wounds as if they never happened, pulled out two firearms, and finished off Focus Anderson’s last two normal bodyguards with impossible single gunshots to the head of the by then moving targets.

The bodyguard had to be an Arm.

Outside the windows, the helicopter tumbled into the far reaches of the parking lot and burst into flame, but not before clearing the parking lot and revealing the ten-plus Hunter packs Gilgamesh had metasensed earlier to be nothing more than metasense illusions.  Sooty smoke spread out across the parking lot, obscuring the next wave of real attackers from Gilgamesh’s sight.  Kali dove out before impact and rolled free, then ran into this set of attackers.  She vanished into the miasma of Rogue Crow’s antisense.  Kali fought the main body of the attackers all by herself.

Gilgamesh yanked his metasense back inside the ballroom.  Lori, his warm, passionate lover, had killed a Focus and four Transforms…from halfway across a ballroom.  In his wildest dreams, he never imagined any Transforms could do such things.  She had reduced them to corpses and Arm-hot spicy dross in a fast second.  Gilgamesh fought his growing panic as his metasense picked things out he would have rather never seen.

Lori was dying!

The hell with it.  He took dross as he passed, too fast for safety.  Gilgamesh hadn’t known that he could take dross so quickly.  The panic.  It had to be the panic.  Lori was down, as were her bodyguards of the moment, Tina Williams and Bill Fentress.  Blood everywhere.  Brains everywhere – Tina’s, who had taken a head shot and more as she stood between Lori and the attackers.  Gilgamesh reached Lori, grabbed her and howled.  A full burst from a machine pistol had hit her, despite Tina’s protection, and nearly cut her in half.  Her entire upper torso was a mass of bullet wounds.  He had no idea what to do.  He had seen Tonya survive Tiamat’s enraged attack, but this was much worse.

“Don’t hate me for what I did,” Lori said, speaking without breathing.

“I love you,” Gilgamesh said.  First stupid thing that came to his mind.  It had taken him long enough to realize.  He owed Lori so much.  She had saved his sanity back when he couldn’t even find enough nerve in himself to talk to Focuses, taught him the strength to deal with Major Transforms without panicking at the least provocation, and showed him the path he needed to follow to solve his Detroit mystery.  He had made love to her, but that wasn’t love itself.  Just fondness, a growing sense of partnership.  Now, he finally recognized it as love.  Now, when it was too late.

“I was bad.  No Crow will ever be able to talk to me again.  I butchered them,” Lori said.  Her face grew pale from blood loss, and her eyes didn’t track.

“Hush.  Save your strength.”

“For what?” Lori said.  Her voice grew fainter with every word, and bubbles of blood burst from her mouth as she spoke.  “I can’t survive this.  I snuffed out a Focus.  So easy.  Just made her juice mine, turned it into Monster juice and ripped it out of her body.  A Focus!”  She coughed, and a river of blood spilled from her lips.  “I’m a Monster.  Too evil to live.  Let me die, Gilgamesh.  I love you so…”

Lori’s juice destabilized.

Gilgamesh howled.

Chapter 12

“There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.” – The Buddha

Carol Hancock

“You have traitors in your midst!  I’m trying to protect Tonya!  She knows I’m here, Arm Hancock.  Ask her!”

I had the Crow’s neck in one hand, and the other hand on his shoulder.  He wouldn’t become visible.  I heard his words and made ready to rip his head off his body if Tonya didn’t back the Crow up, when machine pistol fire ripped past, far too close, and from the wrong direction.

I burned juice to think faster.  I burned juice to move faster.  To me, the world moved in slow motion.

The fight inside the reception hall was going to hell.  Traitors.  My metasense identified the attackers as Focus Anderson of Cincinnati and her bodyguards.  I had been deeked.  Mr. Invisible Crow had to be Shadow; his body size and form matched Gilgamesh’s description of him.  If Shadow was Rogue Crow, he shouldn’t be
here
, not without his Hunters, not in the fucking
line of fire
.  No Crow, insane or not, would do this.  Rogue Crow’s first wave had been a stupid attack, enough to get us to look the wrong way for a moment so Rogue Crow’s traitors among us would be able to fire into our backs.

I wondered if Hargrove was among them.  Much to Hargrove’s chagrin, I had made her bodyguards hand over all their ammo.  They could have arranged to get more.  My metasense caught only one Focus and household shooting the wrong way, though.

Outside, Keaton’s chopper went down and burst into flame.  Predictable.  Keaton and her damned toys.  At least I convinced her to leave her howitzer at home and not put it on the reception hall roof.

Decoyed, dammit.  I made a decision.  Shadow hadn’t skunked me yet, but if I sensed anything funky, he would be a headless Crow.  I lifted him one handed and dragged him with me as I moved over to the shot up Focuses’ mess.  Which proved to be a bad mess.

The fucking bride had played bodyguard and saved Tonya’s life.  What was with Focus bitch Tonya, anyway, to get so lucky?  Although Gail had gotten herself perforated quite nicely, Tonya took only one dead-on bullet, and that one right through a tit and a shoulder.  The rest of the low-powered ammo hit Gail first.  Tonya would not only live, but likely had already recovered.  Some people live charmed lives, I guess.

Tonya’s bodyguard, Pete the normal, was a goner.  My old traveling companion Delia, a Transform, would recover if she got hospitalized.  I wouldn’t even have to use my magic healing tongue this time. Marty, Tonya’s third bodyguard, had taken two bullets and still stood.  He too was a Transform, so too would recover without my help.  The fucking bride’s normal bodyguard might die, but I saw how to save him, and it would only cost me my hold on Shadow.  What the hell.  My instincts told me Gilgamesh had been right all along and Shadow was on our side.  I let Shadow go and yanked the cummerbund off the bride’s bodyguard, using it as a tourniquet on his plinked right arm.  That would keep him from bleeding to death.  Damned normals.

“Where’s Hank?” Tonya said, in my ear, at speed.

“Down,” I said.  Hank, caught with Focus Hargrove and her people, had been doing a good job shooting, using a Monster rifle from one of our hidden ballroom weapon stashes, until one of the giant turkey Monsters had leapt the table and stepped on his right leg, breaking it.  Hargrove had killed the Monster, hand to hand, but Hank was out of the fight, dammit.

“You save her,” Tonya said.  She grabbed Shadow, who still kept himself hidden from my metasense and night vision.  Holding on to Mr. Invisible looked strange. How had Gail managed to spot him when I couldn’t?  Was she that talented a Focus?

Tonya edged farther into the Focus juice metabolism state.  Something roared Terror, too far away to raise my hackles.  Seconds crawled.  Focus Anderson and her crew were dead.  The ballroom was momentarily safe.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said, still at speed.

Gail’s wounds were worse than what I suffered when the FBI took me down in Chicago.  Even I wouldn’t be able to live through what had happened to Gail.  Was Tonya right, though?  Although Gail hadn’t taken any bullets in the brain, the one through the neck looked like it had taken out some spine.

“Try.  Heal her enough to let her healing trance take over.”

I dropped the burn, knelt and grabbed Gail.  Took a deep breath.  What in the hell was I turning into, anyway?  Florence Nightingale the Arm?  Keaton would laugh for months.

Dammit, I couldn’t resist.  Some Focuses were just too beautiful to ignore, and I liked all Focuses to begin with.  Gail was another one, not as irresistible as Lori, but real damn close.  A metapresence to die for.

I healed soft tissue in her neck until my tongue went limp.  Quickly.  Progress.  Gail didn’t die as fast as before.  I still guessed I would run myself out of juice before Gail’s self-healing kicked in enough to save her, though it turned out she hadn’t taken one in the spine.  The problem was obvious: she was too young a Focus and she had never healed significant damage before.  She did all the wrong things.  I metasensed her heal this, heal that, heal this, heal that, and nothing she healed was at all critical.  Her juice metabolism didn’t even kick in correctly.  This was a waste of time.

“Take it,” Gail said, a breathless whisper.  Her voice grabbed my attention; she shouldn’t be conscious enough to talk.  I was dealing with a baby super-Focus, no doubt about it.

Her face was close to mine, her body bleeding all over me, and we had about as close a contact as possible.  She tried something with the juice, but all she succeeded in doing was starting up the screwy juice cycling thing that Lori and I had experienced.

“Stop trying to heal yourself, Gail.  You’re just wasting juice.”

“Use mine, then.”

I did.  “Not enough.  All you gave me was your supplemental juice.”  The juice from her juice buffer slowly cycled through me, but I couldn’t touch the juice buffer, the Arms’ Holy Grail.  In theory, a Focus should be able to give us Arms juice from her juice buffer, and support us directly, the same way she supported male Transforms.  We wouldn’t have to kill for every fucking last drop of juice.  We would able to be human again.  Well, no.  We would be able to be civilized again.

“I’m dying.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“No one does.”  Hell.  Now I was her father confessor.  I mean, here she is, going to heaven, and she wanted to confess her sins to an Arm who was Satan’s handmaiden in spades.

“You’re beautiful.  Are you an angel?”

“I’m Carol Hancock, Gail.  An Arm.  Spree killer.  Mass murderer.”

“You’re the Commander, the Angel with a sword.”  Fuck.  Not this again!  My reputation would never recover.  Nope.  Never.

“There’s this bright light calling me, Carol.  I think I’m going.”

“Hang on, hang on, keep feeding me juice and I can get this healed.”  Right.  No fucking way.  I wasn’t sure she had anything left of her aorta.  How could I heal body parts splattered all over fucking Biggioni, anyway?

Worse, her localized juice metabolism started to fail.

“It’s so beautiful.  My body…”

All of a sudden, she grabbed me with her juice in some weird-ass fashion I didn’t understand, as if I was a tagged household Transform.  However, if this was a tag, it wasn’t like anything I had ever metasensed or experienced before.  Insanely big.  Shit!  This I didn’t need.  Then I saw the juice buffer, huge, far larger than I had expected, so large I couldn’t accurately get a read on its size.  Could I use it?  Yes, dammit.  Whatever Gail had done, she opened me up to it.  It wasn’t reversing the juice cycling flow.  I didn’t know what had happened to me.  How in the hell did I walk myself into this one?  The juice pattern she used wasn’t simple, either.  It was as complex as some of the things Lori had shown me, perhaps more so.  The trick was Gail’s, all the way.  Arms just didn’t have the metasense and fineness of juice control necessary to set something like this up.

However, I didn’t need to understand it to use it.  I got right to work.  Quickly.  I had a battle to lead.

Gilgamesh

“Let me at her,” the voice said. Gilgamesh stopped his howling and looked up to the figures standing over him.  Focus Keistermann, the Arm, the gaudily decorated Larson Focus who was supposedly from Canada and two of Larson’s bodyguards.

“She’s gone,” Gilgamesh said, still holding Lori’s limp blood-soaked body in his arms.  The ballroom was a madhouse of screaming and shooting and blood.  Emergency lights cast uneven shadows on the upturned tables, scattered chairs, and crouching people.  The din was so loud it almost hurt.

“Not by a long shot.”  Polly did something with the juice and restabilized Lori’s glow.  Gilgamesh leaned back, the panic building to where he wanted to run and hide.  No Focus should be so powerful.  Lori was in withdrawal-death.  “You can save a Major Transform in withdrawal if you can get to her within ten minutes or so,” the Focus said.  “She won’t even have any major side effects afterwards.”

“Focus Scar uses that capability as a weapon,” Gilgamesh said.  Intimating more than he could say.  Panic running his mouth.  Lori moaned and twitched in his arms, dousing him with another gusher of fresh blood.

“I learned this from
her
, but the day I stoop to the level of doing that to my people is the day I untag them all and blow my brains out, sonny.”  Bah.  Another Major Transform who read him like a book.  He was going to have to do something about that, someday.

“Can you heal her, either of you?” Gilgamesh said.

Larson shook her head, causing the glowing metallic gold highlights in her snow white hair to sinuously wave, as if she was underwater.  “Gilgamesh, healing someone else is beyond the capabilities of any Focus,” Polly said.  She even knew who he was!  “When we reach out beyond ourselves, the only thing we can touch besides the juice is a person’s mind.”

Gilgamesh turned to the large Arm.  “You can heal.  Do so!”

“There are those of my kind who can heal others?” she said, her eyebrows up to where her hairline would be if she wasn’t shaved bald.  Then her brows came down again.  “You’ve met one who can.  Hancock?  So she is who they say she is?”  Gilgamesh nodded.  “I’m sorry.  My talents lie in other areas.”

“What may I call you, ma’am?”

“Call me Arm,” she said, a hint of a smile on her face, then turned toward the shattered window.  Shit.  Sky’s Arm!  As terrifying as he had ever imagined.  “They’re coming.  Twelve Male Monsters, the masked Crow, and eight intelligent full Monsters.  A mass of Male Monster-stabilized household Transforms, at least a hundred.  The psychotic Arm, the Arm-Focus and a small group of allied Male Monsters are fighting them, with their army of normals, but they’re about to be overwhelmed and then the fight will roll in the ballroom.  The first wave was just a distraction.  You’re bleeding.  Can you cope, Crow?”

“Probably not, Arm.”  He didn’t think he was bleeding, but in his current state, he wasn’t sure if he would even notice.

“Can you help defend Gwen, Polly and this Focus?”

“Yes, Arm.”

“Then I need to go defend the ballroom.”  With that, the Arm ran off.  She no longer bled.

“Where’s Sky?” Polly said.  Except for a few spots of blood on her dress, she still looked civilized.  Every hair in place, and calm as a boulder in a thunderstorm, even while people ran by on whatever mad business they had found, or shot out through the window at the attackers outside.

“He’s out there,” he said, then waved. Outside.  Focus Larson’s two bodyguards crouched in front of Focus Larson, and Focus Larson knelt, hands over her knees, overwhelmed by the violence and spewing charisma in more varieties than Gilgamesh recognized, trying to regain her self-control.  Gilgamesh would have given anything to be able to curl into a fetal ball himself.

“Can you make agreements for Focus Rizzari?” Polly said.

“I don’t understand.”  The emergency light directly above them went out, for no reason, and threw them all into the shadow of the upturned table beside him.  Lori moaned again, but didn’t regain consciousness.  Gilgamesh shivered as a distant Terror rang out, a wolf’s howl.  Enkidu.

Polly squatted down across from him.  Incongruous to see someone so civilized squatting, even in a firefight. “I can save her by teaching her how to save herself.  There’s a cost, though.”

Shit.  “Lori would rather die than be forced to join the cause of the first Focuses, Focus Keistermann,” he said, quieter now, their negotiations private.

“That’s not what I’m asking.  Would she be willing to join
me
?  I’ve been watching Focus Rizzari for years, even before she found a way to save Tonya from
Her
.  There are few who have the talents I need, and Focus Rizzari is one.  There are even fewer I’d be willing to trust, and Focus Rizzari is one of those, too.”

His mind spun in juice panic.  Too young, too much stress.  Battles.  Insane Focus politics.  “I don’t even know the questions to ask, Focus Keistermann.  You’re the Council president, ma’am.  The Council sits at the pleasure of the first Focuses, ma’am.”

“Crow adventurer, the Council is
mine
.  If the first Focuses remove me, Biggioni, Webb, or Bentlow from their Council, we’ll start up a rival Council and prevail.”