All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (46 page)

I turned and readied myself to jump, wondering what it would take to kill Odin.  The large Arm answered my question by hustling over to Odin and beating his noggin into headcheese with her weapon of choice, a piece of a concrete support column, holding on to the two rebar rods sticking out of it and swinging the concrete end as a mace.  Youch!

I hung there upside down, my legs wrapped around a ceiling support, stock still, and dripped rain and blood.  The room grew quiet again.  I felt naked up there as more eyes looked up to me.  No more enemies.  We had won.  Casualties galore, but relatively few on our side died, at least in the ballroom.  Not compared to my darkest fears.  A miracle, a damned miracle.  I gave silent thanks to Matt Narbanor.

I had commanded this fight from the start, arranging everything to my liking, and set up the battle strategy that had allowed Keaton to direct three Arms and three Nobles against four full Hunter packs and mostly win.  The Commander title was mine.

For the first time, the title felt good.  This time, I had truly earned the damned thing.

The other Arm smiled to the crowd and cracked her knuckles.  She had been in victory situations like this before and she loved it.  What the hell.  I dropped to the floor and limped over to her.

“Good fight, Commander,” she said, a combat-sated half grin on her face.  “Hell of a good fight.”

“So, who are you, anyway?” I said.  This was Keaton’s territory and I was Keaton’s underling.  It
still
didn’t feel right for her to be here.  Even if she did just save our bacon by being the secret weapon no one, not even our people, knew about.

“Just your friendly neighborhood Arm,” she said, with a chuckle.  “What’s it to you, short stuff?”

“Are you claiming to be my superior?”

“No claim needed.”  She gave me a look along the lines of ‘move along, little cockroach’.  “I saved your ass, Hancock.  Leave it at that.”

“How’d you get in here?  Why did you get involved?”  I was angry mad.  She had the advantage on me.  She knew my name.

I found myself held upside down, by one leg, not the broken one, thank God.  At arms length, so to speak.  I didn’t even see her move.  Annoying.  I was supposed to be the quick one.

“I go where I please,
Commander
.”  This time, she spat out my title as part insult and part praise.  I was just another baby Arm to her, unproven as an Arm from her exalted perspective.  On the other hand, she did respect my military leadership skills, the respect echoing strongly through her voice.  “I do what I choose to do.  I’m friendly with people who are friendly with me.”  She paused, while I struggled, climbed my own body, and tried to climb her arm.  Didn’t work.  Worse, she shook me ‘just so’, and three of my knives fell to the floor, out of reach.  “It just so happens that I got annoyed when Wandering Shade’s Male Monsters started to poach Transforms from
my
Focuses.  I got royally peeved when Wandering Shade made off with
my
favorite Male Monster punching bag, Tyro.”  I had dismembered Tyro in the parking lot.  I didn’t feel any remorse.  “I also took it personal when
my
Crow, Windsong, got himself killed when he started looking into the Transform poaching.  Lucky me, one of
my
Focuses had contacts with one of your Focuses, and they happened to direct me to your Focus boss over there, Polly.  The rest is, as they say, history.”

Look, an Arm with an attitude problem.  Something new and different.  This had to be Sky’s old Arm companion, ‘Arm’.  No wonder she could sneer at my Arm prowess.  To her, I was but a baby Arm.

“So, are you going to hold me up here all day?”

“Sure.”

“What am I going to have to do, pledge fealty to you to get out of…”

She laughed.  Anger boiled in me, blood red.  Nobody treated me this way.  I did my damnedest to get out of her handhold, even burned juice.  She just continued to chuckle.  “Fealty?  Hancock, this is the twentieth century.  The last thing I need on my plate is to try and boss around some goddamned twerp American Arm who’s just proven she’s the Commander.”  She gave me a real funny look, along the lines of ‘who you trying to fool, anyway’, and lowered her voice to quiet privacy levels.  “And if you try and grovel to me like you grovel to the psychotic pipsqueak, I’ll kick your face out your ass and hold you in that position until you heal up that way.”

Sigh.  “Okay.  I give.  I surrender.  Honest injun.  Thanks for saving our bacon you did a wonderful job.”

She turned to Polly, who had come by with Tonya, both with rather appalled looks on their faces.  “Where do you dig up these Arms from, anyway?” my captor said.  “Can you calm her down?  I would hate to have to kill her out of her own stupidity.”

Tonya nodded and gave me one of her ‘here comes my charisma’ looks.  “Commander, it’s time.  Time for us to acknowledge you.”

I nodded, from upside down, and my rage and annoyance ebbed.  “I’ll make you a deal,” I said to the large Arm.  “You tell me who you are, and I promise I’ll stop making your day miserable.”  She thought she held me by my leg, six feet off the ground.  No, she held me by my curiosity.

She laughed.  “Name’s Armenigar.  Think you can remember that, short stuff?”  Then she dropped me.

I landed feet first, of course.  One does need to keep up appearances.  In a fit of inspiration, I uncovered the ivory Monster carving the Nobles had presented to me last December, which I wore as a pendant.

Tonya gently took me by the shoulder, and led me over to the window ledge, and up.  “People,” she said.  “This is the Commander, the Arm Carol Hancock. 
Our
Commander.”  The ivory Monster carving began to glow in my metasense, and I faintly smelled the sandalwood and baby powder scents I associated with the Madonna of Montreal.  She was with us here, more than just in spirit, but with the juice.

Tonya didn’t have to tell them I had just won the fight and saved their lives.  They all knew.

They all cheered, even Armenigar.

Epilog

“However many holy words you read,

However many you speak,

What good will they do you

If you do not act on upon them?”

— The Buddha

Carol Hancock: May 23, 1969

“Carol, what happened to my leg?”

Ooh, this was so fun.  I thought I took a risk by assuming Hank would be able to handle Keaton if she woke up while I rested from my juice overuse, but Hank assured me he hadn’t had any problems.  I had also gambled that putting Hank on point regarding Keaton would break him out of his funk over Tina and Count Knox’s deaths, and it had.

We gathered in the Inferno kitchen, where I handled the midnight shift, cooking late night snacks for whoever wandered by, but really another dinner for Keaton and me.  We now sat at the kitchen table, consuming the fruits of my labors.  Keaton interrogated me, half because of curiosity and half because she knew I had one on her and didn’t know my price.  Heh.  It put me in a position to drop zingers on her I normally wouldn’t dare.

“Last I saw, Enkidu had your leg as a souvenir.”  The look on Keaton’s face was priceless.

“Huh.”  She was saying a lot of that.  Shucks, she didn’t appreciate being on the other end of this stick, now did she?

I had filled her in on just about everything, starting with the lurid headlines about “Transforms at War” in the newspapers, the near death experiences of Tonya, Gail, Lori and Earl Sellers, the death of the traitorous Focus Anderson, and my instant by instant description of the end of the battle, where at the end I got to blow away Rogue Crow.  Innocence.  Wandering Shade.  Officer Canon.  Whatever that psycho deemed to be his name at the end of his miserable and misbegotten life.  Damn, was I proud of myself, or what?  I ended with the discovery that someone or someones had dragged away Enkidu and Thunder’s supposed corpses, along with the remains of two other nameless lesser Hunters.  Without a Master to guide them, the senior Crows thought they were doomed.  I wasn’t so sure.

“So, Carol,” Keaton said, after a long pause.  Ooh, polite and everything.  “What am I going to owe you for your services?”  Taking care of her and keeping her from enslavement by the nasty Focuses, by Armenigar, or by the Feds.

“I had some thoughts on the subject,” I said, and took another bite.  Beef Wellington, crab legs, roasted duck and five different kinds of vegetables.  A huge bowl of fruit.  Minimal simple carbohydrates.  We were learning, us Arms, beginning to understand who we were.  I had gone now, at max, nineteen days between hunts.  Progress.

“Yes?”  If I made Keaton squirm too much, she would stop being agreeable, so I decided to get on with what I wanted.

“Two things, and an invitation.  The first is I want one of my lives back.”

“What?”

“I’m still yours, but I want one of my lives back.  I don’t want to hear any more about how you’ve saved my life
twice
and cleaned up my shit and fed me like an infant and how I haven’t done anything for you.  Now I have.  I figure this is worth one life.”

I was pleased.  Keaton hadn’t seen this one coming.  She gave my proposal some thought.  “I agree.  You’ve saved my life.  Once.”  She gave me a stern look, and surprised me by laughing.  “I’ll even throw in an extra, just to make it clear to you: you’re a hell of an Arm now.  I had doubts about you from the start, but it’s clear you’re worth the tag and the effort I’ve put into you.”

Damn.  Her compliment almost made my second request sound petty.

“Secondly, I don’t want you to send me after Bass.  She’s free, bumping off animal shelters and humane societies and making real big messes in Detroit.  You should see the newspapers.  I’m afraid she’s going to move up to nursery schools or something appalling soon.”

“Bass left my place!”  Keaton turned red, almost as red as she had turned when I had mentioned my run in with Armenigar.  Keaton didn’t like Armenigar.  I suspected her anger had something to do with who won stand-up fights between them.  “I ordered her to stay in my place and keep it ready for my return.  She’s supposed to be leaving only to get food and to hunt!”  Tap, tap, tap.  Oh, I liked this.  Bass was going to pay, oh how Bass was going to pay.  “Bass is mine.  I’m denying your second request, because she was never your responsibility.  About the future?  She’s still mine.  Come up with something else.”

Oops.  Still fallible.  “Okay.  I know the last thing you’re going to want to be doing is attending the meeting I’m chairing in a few days, but I have a bad feeling we’re going to be setting up a long term strategy for the Cause.  I think the boss Arm needs to attend.  Would your attendance serve?”

Keaton thought for a moment.  “Are you inviting the Canadian Arm?”  She wouldn’t even mention Armenigar’s name.  I would have loved to hear the stories of their interactions, but I wasn’t going to get them from Keaton.

“No way in hell!”

My response got a flicker of a smile from Keaton.  “I predict they’re going to say ‘go slow’ and ‘consolidate’.  I’m going to tell them my patience isn’t unlimited and eventually I’m going to go and do things my way, ending up with quite a few dead first Focuses and senior Crows.  They’ll nod their heads, decide I’m an uncouth barbarian, and ignore my suggestions.  You still think you’ll need me?”

I nodded.  “They love us today, but they won’t always, and they need to know the honeymoon won’t last forever.  They need to hear this bit of reality from you, not me.”  Keaton’s comment also implied we were going to be paying off Focus Fingleman’s wergild for the Bass snatch.  Keaton would likely be taking the payment out of Bass’s hide.

“Then yes, I’ll go explain the predator point of view to them.”  She spent a moment reading me.  “You’ve got another problem, don’t you?”

I nodded.  I hated to bring this up.  “Yes.  Focus Rizzari.  She’s proving, yet again, that she’s not strong enough to hold on to the Focus end of the Cause leadership.”

“This isn’t news to me.”

“I’m thinking we can do something about the problem.  Toughen her up.”  Her emotionalism got on my nerves and I didn’t like what she had done to Gilgamesh, either.  After what he had been through, he did not deserve Lori dumping him so she and Inferno could spend however many months it would take to nurse Sky back together.

“How many bodyguards did she lose in the fight?”

“Nine casualties, two dead.”

“That’s on the order of losing a territory for us,” Keaton said.  My hard case boss was willing to cut Lori more slack than I was?  Interesting.  “You’re right about toughening her up, though.  We really need someone able to stand up against Biggioni.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said, turning away from Keaton.  “I can’t come close to that woman without having her roll me. I’m getting real tired of it.”

“Join the club.  What’s the worst she’s ever done to you?”  I was surprised.  Normally, we didn’t compare notes on such things.  Keaton considered Tonya ‘her Focus’.

“During the fight, right after I healed Gail, I happened to mention I was getting low on juice.  One of Gail’s people offered the ultimate sacrifice, but I didn’t want to take him up on it, since Gail’s household had suffered enough.  Tonya ordered me to take the guy’s juice, and, well…”

“What did you learn from that lesson?”

The lesson couldn’t be as obvious as ‘be far away from Tonya when making important decisions’.  I gave the situation a bunch of thought, actually did some pacing, trying to see where in our previous conversations Tonya had rolled me.  She was clearly more effective in person than on the phone, but she could get me over the phone, at least a little bit.  Oh.  “She gave good advice.  If I’d gambled and gone into the fight without the extra juice, I would have likely died.”

“Gold star to you.  The only thing that’s kept me from whacking Tonya for her arrogant hubris is she doesn’t use her charisma frivolously, at least with me.  She only uses her bonebreaker charisma to get you to follow her nearly always intelligent suggestions.  Still, I would at least like a little choice in the matter.”

“So, ma’am, are you thinking that if we toughen Lori up, she might be able to toughen us up with regard to Focus charisma?”

Keaton nodded.  “Yes.  There’s a lot more to your midget Focus than meets the eye, and I think we need to find out what it is.”

---

My other problem was being more difficult.  If Gilgamesh wasn’t a Crow, I would say he pushed me, challenged me, avoided me when he could, dealt only with business and only perfunctorily.  I finally tracked him down in Bob’s Barn just after dawn, chased away the Inferno people with a predatory snarl, and cornered him firmly enough to fill his hands with tennis balls.

He still looked like shit, emotionally used up and reduced to a hard core of anger.  He wasn’t the Gilgamesh I once knew.

“Sit,” I said.

He didn’t sit.  “Carol.  What can I do for you?” he asked, firm.  Distant and fierce.

“
Sit.
”

He vanished, and reappeared on the other side of the room, sitting on a beaten up third-hand couch.  A stray tennis ball rolled between my legs.  Damn.  He
was
challenging me.

I pulled up a cane chair with a ripped vinyl cushion and sat down knee to knee with him, pushing his personal space.  I didn’t hold back my predator.

He didn’t sweat.  Instead, he looked sad.

“You were right when you said I wasn’t your Crow, and never had been,” he said.  “I’m nobody’s Crow.”

I read him more deeply and lost much of my ire.  This was more than his after-battle blahs, the fact I hadn’t apologized to him for being wrong about Shadow, and his likely temporary break-up with our soap opera Focus.  “You had a fight with Shadow, didn’t you?”

He sat back with his arms crossed and thought about how much to say.  “Yes,” he said.  Careful.  “I wanted the full story of what happened to him, including what’s going on with the senior Crows.  I got nothing I didn’t already know, so I told him that if he and the senior Crows didn’t change their secretive ways, they would eventually go the way of the first Focuses.  He didn’t take my comment well.”

Shit.  Challenging me, challenging Shadow, angrily threatening to become Rogue Crow II.  “What is this, some sort of half-assed attempt at suicide by Arm?”

He answered without words, simply by tossing and catching one of his tennis balls.  One handed.  He had another in his other hand.

If I tried anything, he would fight back.

Crows were fucking impossible. “So, Gilgamesh, what are your plans now?”

“I have no plans,” he said.  That he would tell me.

Why the lack of trust?  Oh.

Damned Crows and their screwy ways of thinking.  This wasn’t personal, this was a professional issue.  In some crazy Crow fashion, he thought I had fucked up professionally.  So had Shadow, in his mind, and Shadow had fucked up before Gilgamesh’s fight with him.

Gilgamesh wasn’t going to take any more of this sort of abuse.  I sympathized with his attitude.

I put some thought into what happened and what Gilgamesh wanted.  Probably an apology, at the professional level.  My Crow was utterly insane if he thought I would apologize.  Arms don’t apologize to anyone who isn’t a more dominant Arm.

My image of Gilgamesh was one of the problems, I realized.  ‘My Crow’ indeed.  I had gotten complacent with my Crow alliance, to where I had started thinking of myself as a Crow boss.

An easy mistake for an Arm to make.  Very natural.

My Arm instincts demanded I stalk out of here.  Give up on this obnoxious Crow.

As Hank would inevitably say: you don’t always have to follow your Major Transform instincts.  I decided to continue to push.

“Gilgamesh, whatever problem you’re having is too Crow for me to understand,” I said.  “You’re going to have to tell me.  Plainly.  I promise I won’t get upset.”  I could unbend at least that far.

He nodded and worded words in his head.  Trying to be careful.  He took a minute before he satisfied himself.  “I believe you should have come with me when I moved to Detroit at the end of January.”

I opened my mouth to argue impossibilities, paused, and shut it.  I could have made the move work, logistically, despite the pain associated with a temporary loss of independence.  Gilgamesh had laid out a course for us to follow before he left, and I hadn’t followed because I had gotten too stuck to Houston.  What did my Arm territoriality and resistance to following him achieve in the long run?  Nothing.  Today, Tom and Dick were organizing my people, already refugees in Austin, for the move to my emergency hide-out in Los Angeles, gained as a prize of war from Haggerty.  The City of Angels would be my new territory because the Feds had finally concluded Houston was indeed my home.  They were in Houston, in force, as we spoke.

Houston was no longer mine.

Gilgamesh was right.  I should have gone with him to Detroit, to the center of the action.  Events proved him correct in his instincts about Detroit, as well as in his trust in Shadow.

Not that I would ever say anything of the sort, aloud.

I made my decision.

“I’m going to Los Angeles and I’m going to make LA my new Territory,” I said.  “I’m formally inviting you to come with me, Gilgamesh.  Where we can start over, in all things.”  Such as in our personal relationship.  I stuck out my hand.