Shapechanger's Progress Read online

  Shapechanger's Progress

  by

  Laer Carroll

  Copyright © 2012 by L. E. Carroll

  Summary : In this sequel to Shapechanger's Birth, immortal shapechanger Mary McCarthy faces many responsibilities: to her criminal organization, Barbara and Bridget and her other friends, to Ireland and even to England.

  And she discovers that not all shapechangers are benign.

  Disclaimer : Historical people, places, and events are used fictitiously and should not be taken as historically accurate.

  Credits : Cover background is photo taken by L. E. Carroll of the Great Hall of what once was the Queen's College Cork, now University College Cork. Maps are from Wikipedia.org, reproduced under the Creative Commons license.

  Chapter 1 – Cork City & Limerick

  November, 1861

  south and west coasts of Ireland

  In early November of 1861 the most feared crime boss in Ireland was sitting in her office in her mansion on Cork City's North Hill. She looked barely twenty, a tall beautiful redhead, as celebrated for her mind as her looks. At least she was in her daily guise of Dr. Mary McCarthy, aide to reclusive and rich Dame Edith de la Roche, the famous philanthropist.

  That worthy came gliding into the office with a silver tray on which sat carafes of tea and of coffee and condiments and such. She carefully set it down on the desk, poured herself a cup of coffee, sweetened and creamed it, and arranged herself carelessly in a comfortable armed chair across from Mary.

  Mary looked up and (as she did nearly every morning) scowled across the desk at the barbaric beverage and the lithe grey-haired woman. Edith's face was naked of the veil she wore in public to maintain the mystery and the fact that she looked younger than her purported age.

  Grimacing, Mary poured a cup of tea and sipped it. Her mood lightened as she took a lightly sweetened biscuit and crunched it.

  "You're grumpier than usual," said Edith.

  Mary nodded at the newspaper she had set down.

  "The American Civil War is picking up momentum. Likely the reports are alarmist, but they say more than 100,000 people will die before it's done."

  "Tragic. But that effects us how?"

  Mary picked up and waved a sheaf of papers and set them down.

  "Dublin tells me the Irish Republican Brotherhood is taking the Americans as a model for them. To free us of the British. "

  Dame Edith looked sympathetic but said nothing, taking more coffee.

  The immortal shapechanger scowled again. "I won't have it. Ireland is in bad enough shape without us killing each other."

  "What are we going to do?" Mary, as the dreaded cat lady, was the nominal head and protector of The Organization, the cadre of prostitutes all over Ireland who had organized in the last few years as a single far-flung entity. But Edith was high in the Org despite having assumed the identity of Dame Edith. She would have a say in what Mary decided, and often in how her decisions were carried out.

  "I'm thinking about it. I have some ideas. But first I need more information."

  She crammed a handful of cookies into her mouth, the skin around it deforming inhumanly wide to make that easier. Then she picked up the carafe of tea, began gulping it down. The near-boiling liquid bothered her not at all. Then she picked up a pen and some paper and began writing with near-superhuman speed.

  Two weeks later Mary was thinking about magic. She had plenty of time to think, because she was on a Great Western & Southern Railway train going north from CorkCity on the south coast of Ireland. It was raining so heavily outside that, even though it was a little past 8:00 in the morning, the view outside the windows of the first-class railway carriage looked like night in contrast to the warm glow of the kerosene lamps in the carriage.

  The train swayed and rumbled as it climbed the steep hill to the north of the city. Past the top of the hill the CLACK-clack CLACK-clack of the wheels picked up tempo as the roadway leveled off then tilted downward. The slope beyond was so much gentler than the upward slope that they had left behind that the ground seemed level. But it was not, and the train picked up speed so that, Mary estimated, it must be going 35 or perhaps even 40 miles per hour. The ride became smooth, leaving few distractions from thought.

  As always at this point of the trip, which she made three or four times a year, those thoughts turned to the two men whom she had killed years ago. This spot was close to where the men's gang had attacked the stage that she and her friends had been traveling in from the Kilrush orphanage. Her ruminations were brief. The men had deserved to die and she had killed too many men since then to bother with thoughts of those two. She returned to the matter of magic.

  She was not happy with that word, but nothing that she had read about science—and she had read much about it in the last few years—even hinted at the existence of the powers that she had gotten when she had died the first time.

  After the first time that she'd returned from death, in 1854, she'd thought of her ability to heal her body of any illness or injury, including death, as magical. She also thought it magic that she could sense inside of anything in a strange amalgam of taste, touch, and scent, which her imagination could also interpret as sight. And her other esoteric abilities seemed equally magical.

  But in the last few years she had done an enormous amount of reading. Being rich and needing only half as much sleep as most people gave her plenty of opportunities, and she had always been curious and loved to read. She had read much of science and technology and come to believe that the universe was one huge machine, with everything happening within it strictly obeying natural law. This meant that anything appearing supernatural and failing to obey natural law, was not. It was simply obeying laws that she did not yet understand. Yet she still had no better word for what she did than magic.

  The door at one end of the railway carriage opened briefly then shut, bringing with it a whiff of cold air and drops of rain and the train conductor. Mary watched him curiously without seeming to as he paced the length of the car. He was a tall thin black man with grey hair, dressed in a black uniform with a black billed cap. There were not many black men in Ireland, mostly former slaves from America. Few of them were literate and so most could only do menial or servile jobs. This man was unusual in his profession.

  As he passed her she extended her esoteric senses from the hand nearest him. Their maximum reach was almost two feet, so her senses probed his body as he passed her. She detected nothing much different from that of any human. Of course, since she was not touching his skin, she could not give him a more comprehensive probe that would detect subtler qualities.

  Unaware of being intimately touched the conductor went to the pot-bellied stove at the other end of the carriage and opened a door in the stove-top long enough to insert two sticks of wood into it. Then he continued to the next car, leaving behind him a second short whiff of cold and wet.

  Mary shifted her position and settled her dark-green traveling dress better about her. For this trip she had invented a persona of a forty-something grey-haired woman of pleasant but not memorable appearance. She had given this persona the name Athena Porter. The name would come in handy the next time she adopted this identity. The first time she created a persona she had to think about a lot of details large and small to change into the new identity. The next time she need only think of the name and her body would automatically change to match.

  Mary's "magic" obeyed a number of physical laws that she had discovered in her reading. For instance, the law of conservation of mass. No matter whether Mary assumed a skinny or fat body when she changed her shape she always weighed exactly the same.

  She knew this, but not because she weighed herself before and after changing. Inst
ead the soles of her feet told her to the milligram exactly what force was operating on them, and hence what her weight was.

  Not that she spent much conscious attention on such matters, any more than most people consciously paid attention to their heart beating or their liver working. The difference with Mary is that she could pay incredibly detailed attention to such matters, and control them in ways no ordinary human could.

  And she could do this with any other human as well if she touched them.

  At that moment she became aware of a little boy in the seat in front of her. He was standing up on his seat bottom and looking curiously at her over the backrest of his seat. He was adorable and she smiled at him. He smiled back and reached a hand out to her and said something. This alerted his mother, who ordered him back to his sitting position.

  "I'm so sorry, Lady. Please forgive him. He's too young to know better."

  "That's quite all right. He's adorable."

  The woman smiled at her but turned back to her original position.

  The ability to control other people's bodies in ways seemingly magical was one of the reasons why the Cork City Whores were so successful. Mary had fixed each whore, and all the other people who worked for her, so that they were very resistant to most diseases, and totally unable to catch venereal diseases. She had also fixed the women so that they could not get pregnant for five years, and the men so that they could not get any woman pregnant for five years .

  This trip was one of the consequences of that fact. Only she could intervene in the bodies of the people in her organization, and she had to physically touch them to do that. So a few times each year she had to find time to do this for each new member of the Organization, which she did during a formal ceremony that inducted them into the Org ranks.

  This had not been much of a problem as long as the Whores only existed in CorkCity. But three years ago Mary had established the Whores in Dublin on the east coast of Ireland. First this was on a small scale. Then two years ago she made a major push to expand in that city that was quickly successful, though not without some violence.

  Shortly afterward she had established them in Belfast in northern Ireland, where they were growing slowly but steadily and with no violence. The word had gotten around Ireland that the cat lady was not a myth, and that under no circumstances did you mess with her. More importantly, perhaps, was that Mary was establishing the Whores in Belfast more gradually than in Dublin. This was helped by the fact that Belfast was more widely spaced geographically than in Dublin or Cork. Each of those two cities had a compact circular shape; Belfast had a widely dispersed Y shape. This made it easier to treat Belfast as a number of smaller cities.

  More disturbing to Mary was expansion of the Whores without Mary or any of the top Org managers ordering it, or even wanting it. First it had been into LimerickCity sixty-something miles north of CorkCity, and shortly thereafter into GalwayCity the same distance beyond Limerick and to the northwest. And a few months ago the Whores had jumped the sixty-mile gap of the Irish Sea to Liverpool on the west coast of England.

  This meant that Mary now had to travel to five other cities every few months to work her "magic" on new members of the Organization. Occasionally she also had to show herself, as the cat lady, to recalcitrant criminal competitors or police. Usually that was enough to warn them off interfering with the Whores. Rarely did she have to actually hurt someone, much less kill them.

  But now Mary had come up with a solution to her need to administer esoteric medicine to her subordinates. And despite her rational thought she could only think of it as a magical spell....

  In front of her the little boy's head again popped up above his seat. And this time he was joined by a little girl a couple of years older than he and no less adorable. Mary laughed and leaned forward to talk to their mother and cut short the woman's apologies. Soon one of the most feared people in all Ireland had squeezed into the seat beside the woman and had the little boy in her lap and a chattering little girl beside her.

  An hour after its departure from Cork the train entered a roundabout halfway to Limerick and changed tracks, then continued its journey to Limerick. A little after 11:00 they entered the Limerick train station and Mary said goodbye to her new friends and disembarked. She took a hansom cab to her hotel, the Hotel Victoria, a few blocks away.

  Settling her luggage into her room Mary thought with amusement that every city seemed to have a hotel named after Queen Victoria. How funny it would be if they were all the same hotel! Exactly alike, confusing its guests as to which city they were in!

  Or would it be more comforting than confusing? She could imagine some provincial English family happily settling into their hotel rooms in Paris or Hamburg or Rome, feeling at home despite the alien city surrounding their hotel.

  Mary changed into the lime-green walk-around clothing which was her Maggie-persona's trademark but kept her grey-haired lady appearance. Then she ordered up a huge lunch, continuing to expand the idea while she ate.

  Every smart industrialist nowadays knew the advantages of standard parts and wholesale purchase of those parts. She saw no reason why the principles could not be applied to buying bed clothes and kitchen cutlery, indeed to most everything a hotel needed.

  There were other industrial principles that could be applied. For instance, if there was a central reservation office tied to each hotel via telegraph, a traveling businessman could be shepherded from city to city, captured as a customer....

  By the time Mary was ready to leave the Hotel Victoria she had a complete plan worked out and set down on paper to be mailed back to CorkCity. She acquired an envelope and the proper stamps at the hotel and sent the letter on its way to the business firm that managed or assisted, unknowingly to them, many of the businesses of the Organization.

  She still had not chosen a name that she liked. Ambassador sounded perhaps too dignified, Imperial sounded good to Englishmen but not to foreign customers who she hoped to attract as well, and Quality sounded a little too self-aggrandizing. Maybe Hotel Royale, which would be familiar to the French but also had a nice Frenchy sound to the English, who both hated and revered the French as sophisticated....

  A little before 2:00 Mary left the hotel. As she walked she gradually changed her face to that of her Maggie persona. This included changing her hair from smooth grey to kinky and bright orange red. Though her "hair" was no longer really hair, which was dead and unchangeable by esoteric means. Each strand of her hair nowadays was alive along its entire length. Thus she could change it, in color, texture, length, and shape, within a few seconds .

  Shortly she arrived at 30 Cecil Upper Street. This was in downtown Limerick about a dozen blocks south of the ShannonRiver, now narrowed from several miles wide to the west where it spilled into the Atlantic, to about a hundred yards wide as it looped through the city. This was the address of a large theatre, the Athenaeum. She had not been here before.

  She greeted the two men guarding the door to the theatre, one by name, and went inside. There were seats for about 600 people on the main floor and a balcony with about 200 more seats.

  Only a fraction of the space available was being used now. A large stage held a dozen or so people standing or sitting. In the audience near the stage were more than a hundred people.

  That was about right. There were 133 prostitutes in the Limerick City Whores, half of all regularly working whores in the city, and 25 pimps and enforcers and brothel managers. Mary had ordered all members of the Org in Limerick to meet her today, because of the magical spells that she had recently figured out how to do. The few who were not here now Mary would have to seek out today or tomorrow.

  She walked down the aisle nearest the door. She had removed her scarf and her red curls bounced around her shoulders and framed her "Maggie" face. As faces turned toward her she greeted several of them by name and others by waves. Ascending the stair to the stage she greeted the people there, the chief of them being boss of the Whores of this city, Nora
Glass, and her enforcer, Daniel Roberts.

  She hugged Nora, who at six feet was even taller than Mary. She was a big-boned woman, somewhat fleshy, who was very strong. She had a broken nose that she had refused to let the cat lady reshape, saying that her appearance added to her authority. This appearance was belied most of the time because Nora was a naturally cheerful woman who was usually smiling. Mary had noticed, however, that when Nora ceased smiling and let a touch of anger show that she did indeed look quite usefully menacing.

  "How's Joshua?" Mary asked.

  "Fine. Off on a trip to America again. And the kids are a handful, like always, but getting along. Missy's quite the actress now. She actually played on this very stage a month agone. Juliet she was, you know, that Shakespeare play."

  "That's wonderful. And you, Daniel. You get hitched to a lady yet?"

  Daniel shook his head, giving a grin that could only look sinister on his narrow sallow face, dark eyes and brown ringlets making him look more Italian than Irish. Small and thin, he had an amazing wiry strength and was expert with both knife and gun. He was also intelligent and unambitious.

  "Now, why would I be so foolish, Mistress Maggie, when I've so many beautiful women after my body?"

  Nora snorted, "After your body! They just like being in the good with the boss muscle."

  "Well, whatever works. After all," he said to Mary, "I'm no fool for love like Nora here."

  Which was not quite true, Mary knew. Daniel loved Nora, though like a brother rather than a lover. He was also smart enough not to touch any of the Limerick City Whores, satisfying himself with prostitutes not aligned with the Organization or enemies of it. After all these years experienced Irish practitioners of the flesh trade knew that Org workers were safe in bed, so the workers like Daniel were popular outside the Org.

  Mary turned away from them and greeted the rest of the people on the stage. Three of them were crucial for her plan to use the "magic" spells that she had devised.

  She turned back to Nora. "Are we all here? "