No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read Free Page B

could.
    So far, he found himself quite impressed with the Skinner.  At least as long as he kept from thinking about what happened every night to her torture victims.  And the fact he helped her hunt down her prey to keep her juiced up and safer to him.
    On the way into his apartment Gilgamesh collected four days of mail.  He dropped the stack on the kitchen counter and dealt with other issues, such as the smelly kitchen garbage he needed to toss.  He showered, changed clothes, and finally went through his mail, separating out the bills into one pile and the Crow letters into another.
    Two caught his eye: one from Sky with no return address, written in a shaky version of Sky’s normally exquisite cursive, and another from of all people Shadow, Thomas the Dreamer and Innocence.
    He winced at the latter letter and opened it first.  The letter was short and direct.
     
    Dearest Gilgamesh,
     
    You recently accrued a significant debt of obligation toward several Crows who aided you in the shepherding of the rescue of the Arm known to you as Tiamat.  Your current proximity to her and one other Arm is well known to us.  We three, acting in legitimate concert, and speaking for all Crows, have purchased this debt of obligation.  We now formally reclaim it, by assigning you, Gilgamesh, the task of informing us the identity of the entity or entities who are hunting down Crows, colloquially termed Crow Killer.  Good luck.
     
    Gilgamesh looked at the letter, and at what the letter said and didn’t say.  The artfully crafted letter wasn’t in Shadow’s style.  They knew he was an Arm pet.  Several other terms stood out as noteworthy, none in his normal vocabulary, all of which shivered his juice: ‘shepherding’, ‘legitimate concert’, ‘formally reclaim’, ‘informing us’ and, of course, ‘debt of obligation’.  They were well used terms these others knew well, even if he didn’t, as potent as the more common Transform terms of pheromone flow, stripping, pumping, dross, Arm and Housebound.
    Someone was having a party and hadn’t invited him.  The party likely started around 1952 or so and had been going ever since.  The hundred and fifty to two hundred Crows in the United States were enough to form a strong society, save for the fact the upper end of this society must have decided not to include the young Crows in the real deal and kept the good stuff for themselves.  There must be a large number of real old Crows.  Shadow was one of them, and the question remained on Gilgamesh’s tongue: how old was Shadow, anyway?  What could the older Crows do?  How limited were Crow capabilities?
    Or: how unlimited?
    Gilgamesh wished he understood more about Focus society.  If he did, he might be able to extrapolate and compare.  He needed another Crow, to bounce ideas back and forth with.  The assigned task was, at least at first glance, a death sentence.  As a young Crow, he possessed none of the physical benefits or dross manipulation talents of an older Crow.  This should be a job for an older, more active, more talented Crow, like Sky.  Selecting him made no sense.  He wondered if the job was nothing more than a fancy death sentence, an attempt to properly and politely rid the continent of one particular too-troublesome Crow.
    Perhaps his pseudo-Guru Sky could help.  He opened Sky’s letter and read.
     
    Gilgamesh:
     
    I’m barely able to write and I’ll have more to write later, probably much later.  I did help Kali rescue your Tiamat, but I’m not sure if Tiamat can recover.  I’m sorry.  I’m in a bad way, not from what the Walking Nightmare did to me, but from the nearly living evil gristle dross suffusing the place.  If I can trust what I experienced, I got attacked inside the Detention Center by Focus Pissed Tuber, and she’s powerful, evil, nasty, understands far too much about us and our fine feathered compatriots, and is out to get us.  Oh, she wasn’t physically there.