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disquieting.”
    “That’s a nasty trick,” Ann said.  “No wonder you Crows don’t trust each other.”
    Gilgamesh nodded.  “Rogue Crow’s been working on getting the Crows to distrust each other for over two years,” he said.
    “His plan is working, too,” Sinclair said.  “This is why it’s actually less stressful to have a Crow moot inside a Focus household, rather than outside.”
    Crow moot?  Crazy Crows.  Each of them had his own internal language.
    Lori came in from the hall, without Hank.  She looked lost in her own mind, but she headed over to me and did her cute charisma thing to get me to scoot over so she could cuddle up next to me.  I didn’t mind.  Upstairs, I metasensed my boss and Tina starting to get it on.  Their reaction to the tagging was quite intense.  I wondered if this was what was bothering Lori, or whether it was something else.
    I lost myself in the cuddle for a moment.  Not juice cycling, thank you very much.  I had things to think about and pay attention to.  Tim left us and joined the crew around Ann and the Crows.
    “Super-skunk?” Ann said, referring to a secret Sinclair dropped that I had missed.
    “Crows, after a year or two, have a one shot attack capable of taking down a Beast Man, dearest one,” Sky said.  Right.  Sky and Ann were lovers, or had been in the recent past.  Pick Sky to be making love with the woman who terrified the other Crows.  Palpable tension existed between them now, though.  “The trick should work, emphasizing the ‘should’, as I have no idea how a super-skunking will work on a Hunter with years of training under Rogue Crow.  It’s only for direst emergencies, because afterwards, we’re essentially depleted.”
    “Neither of you can control Chimeras like Occum can?” Ann said.
    “No,” Sky said.  “Critter control requires a different set of skills, starting with domestic animal control, then non-carnivorous wild animals, carnivores, Monsters and then Beast Men.  This takes years to master, and involves tricks and techniques I’d need to learn from scratch.”
    “A skill set I’ve found I’m mildly talented with,” Sinclair said.  “I can handle animals, but I haven’t had a chance to work on Monsters yet.  I’m a long way from being able to control a non-wounded Beast Man.”  I had provided him a wounded Beast Man, not too long ago, the aforementioned Sir Dowling, who according to rumor appeared to be as much of an outlier as Haggerty was for us Arms.  Sinclair had done fine with a half-dead Beast.
    “If I may interject,” Sky said, turning to me.  “Something Arm Hancock mentioned a few minutes ago got me thinking.  May I be so bold as to ask, Arm Hancock, when did you witness the vanish-from-sight trick?”
    “You are bold indeed, Crow Sky,” I said.  I could speak ‘Crow’ just fine.  “A Major Transform, who might have been Rogue Crow or might have been a Focus under his control, used the trick on me when he or she tried to recruit me back when I was in Philadelphia.”  I told the story, and the room listened, rapt.  The Inferno people knew in theory about my Armness and how I gathered juice, but it was a different thing to hear me tell my graduation exercise story in person, which involved hunting down an unwanted Transform and giving him to Keaton to be juice-sucked.
    “You instinctively backed away from Officer Canon at the end?” Gilgamesh said, after I finished the story.  I nodded.  He had figured out something new from the way I told the story this time.  “You’ve done that before with a Crow, Carol, if you remember.  Me.”
    Shit.  Gilgamesh was right.  I had been about to be skunked and had backed out of Officer Canon’s range without thinking, just as I had when I first met Gilgamesh.  “Officer Canon was a Crow, beyond the shadow of a doubt.”  All this time, to have, finally, an answer to the Officer Canon mystery, was a huge relief.
    “If you wouldn’t