A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “A lot of Shadowspawn hate Modernist stuff.”

  “That’s the old Mustache Petes. Some of them still wear opera cloaks all the time. For God’s sake, Brâncuşi sleeps in a coffin!”

  “You’re not keeping up with the war news,” Harvey grinned.

  “No, I’m not. I told the Brotherhood I was resigning after that monumental cluster-fuck in Calcutta and made it stick when they threatened me.”

  “As I recall, I backed you up on that.”

  “You did. I thank you again. You’re still not going to talk me into coming back. What part of retired don’t you understand, Harv? We’ve had this argument before.”

  “Thought you might want to know about Brâncuşi. He’s dead.”

  Adrian raised an eyebrow. “He’s been dead since 1942, and it hasn’t slowed him down much.”

  “No, I mean really dead, not just his birth-body. I took a team in there and we got some plutonium wedges into his coffin. That’ll teach him to use a mausoleum without an escape tunnel just because it’s authentic.”

  Adrian froze for an instant. The ghost of a pain worse than silver shivered along his nerves.

  “Christ. Now I’m impressed,” he said. “It’s been . . . a long time since the Brotherhood got one of the masters.”

  “Since we got one, Brézé and Ledbetter, best team in the business. Remember Zhuge Jin? Good times, right?”

  Adrian remembered naked terror, the pain of knives slashing at his body, the rage that could not be contained and the face of a killer beast staring at him from his own mirror.

  “Not exactly,” he said dryly. “And it didn’t accomplish anything. The bad guys won a long time ago. If you don’t believe me, I can turn on CNN.”

  “You’re even more optimistic than usual, Adrian. What happened, a truck run over your puppy?”

  Adrian went to stand before the window, looking over the hills and letting smoke curl out of his nostrils as the sight soothed him.

  “Well, my girlfriend left me last night.”

  “She throw a bottle of brandy at your head, or did you just crawl into one?” Harvey said, his nostrils dilating. “Smells like good stuff.”

  “Both.”

  “She’s OK?” Harvey’s voice was careful.

  Adrian’s mouth quirked up. “As far as I know, unless she went off a curve driving back to town. And the police would have contacted me if that happened. Call it a learning experience.”

  The other man relaxed. “And what did you learn?”

  “That masochists don’t really want to be treated badly. They just want to play at being treated badly. And that the more I knew Ellen, the more I liked her; and the more I liked her, the more I knew I was bad for her. It’s . . . not a problem with any solution that’s good for me. I hope she can be happy, but that meant letting her go. Driving her away.”

  The banter dropped out of the other man’s voice. “You’re part human, Adrian. Never forget it. You’re not a bad person. You’ve got problems, but you try hard to work around them. Dammit, I raised you for ten years. I know.”

  “I killed my foster-parents, Harvey. My egg hatched and I know what came out.”

  Harvey shook his head. “I don’t think you did kill them, Adrian. I think that was your sister. And . . . she’s back in town. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  Adrian whirled. His cigarette fell from his fingers to the rough flagstone of the floor.

  “You’re sure?” he whispered. “Adrienne?”

  “Pretty sure. We’ve got a hack on the face-recognition program Homeland Security is running on the surveillance cameras at Albuquerque Sunport. I can’t think of anywhere else in New Mexico she’d be interested in. She’s not one of their watchers at Los Alamos and they don’t have anyone that high-powered working the State government. Their renfields handle that.”

  “Christ! I thought the Council were going to leave me alone if I stayed out of things!”

  Harvey stared at him, his faded blue eyes steady. “Like, you trust them?”

  “Well . . . no. More like trusted their self-interest in keeping me retired.”

  “The Brotherhood don’t think she’s here on an official errand for them, anyway. She still has a major jones for you.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He picked up the cigarette, crushed it out, tried to light another. That fell from his hands onto the floor. He forced himself to breathe, in and out, in and out.

  Fear is natural. Let it pass without feeding on itself.

  “And she might not give a damn what the masters thought. Shadowspawn . . .”

  “Aren’t team players, yeah,” Adrian said, keeping the raw terror out of his voice by main strength. “Especially not us concentrated pure-strain types.”

  He scrubbed his hands across his face, feeling his brains begin to work again.

  I hate that deer-in-the-headlights feeling. Fuck, she hasn’t killed or turned me yet, and it’s not because she didn’t try! The honors were about even in Calcutta.

  A little voice whispered at the back of his mind:

  But since then she’s been practicing, growing stronger, and you’ve been trying to deny what you are. You both have the genes for the Power, but that only means so much. You were a warrior then. What are you now?

  “I can’t very well appeal to the Council to call her off, either,” Adrian said. “Not if it’s a family matter—and they’d think it was.”

  “She is your twin sister, biologically speaking,” Harvey pointed out.

  Adrian turned and shook his head slowly. “No. She’s my anima. My own personal nightmare. She’s the mirror I can’t break. How long has she been here?”

  “A little less than two days. Probably sniffing out the lay of the land.”

  Then Adrian’s face went fluid; he could feel the blood draining from it, with a shock greater than fear for himself.

  “Ellen! ”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Adrienne Brézé liked the sun. Her Second Birth would come in less than a century, and then she wouldn’t be seeing sunlight ever again, not if she outlived the planet. Now she sat relaxed with her face to the sky on the park bench, legs crossed at the ankle and hands in the pockets of her long duster-style astrakhan coat. Pigeons cooed; there was a slight murmur of traffic, but the narrow streets around Santa Fe’s central plaza mostly held a pleasant smell of spicy local cooking from the restaurants.

  People bustled around the little stretch of grass and cottonwoods centered on the Civil War memorial, parcels in their hands. More wandered down the long portico of the Palace of the Governors behind the pine-log pillars, looking at the jewelry the Indians in from the pueblos sold, or prowled the expensive shops on the other three sides; their emotions were almost as predatory as hers. Northward reared the towers of Bishop Lamy’s cathedral, tall Norman Romanesque-Gothic in a low-slung and obsessively Southwestern town, and beyond that the snow-capped peaks of the Sangres.

  What . . . do . . . you . . . seek . . . Daughter . . . of . . . the . . . Night?

  She stiffened at the mental touch, then relaxed, closing her eyes and letting the world fade. The feel was unmistakable; like the smell of rock and dust, like watching sunset fading on a wall and eyes glittering in the gathering dusk. One of the Old Ones, a master.

  An effort like a push behind the eyes.

  I . . . hunt . . . our . . . enemies . . . Father . . . of . . . Darkness.

  If . . . the . . . traitor . . . slays . . . you . . . we . . . will . . . not . . . aid . . . or . . . punish. He . . . knows . . . this. We . . . would . . . not . . . lose . . . the . . . children . . . of . . . your . . . children . . . or . . . his. Much . . . effort . . . many . . . years . . . and . . . much . . . magic . . . went . . . into . . . your . . . breeding. You . . . are . . . Shadowspawn . . . as . . . of . . . the . . . great . . . days . . . and . . . there . . . is . . . Power . . . in . . . your . . . very . . . blood.

  This form of speech conveyed your true emotions unles
s you were very careful. She was, and kept it neutral as flowing water:

  I . . . have . . . children.

  Only . . . two . . . and . . . you . . . cannot . . . bear . . . after . . . your . . . body’s . . . death. Their . . . blood . . . is . . . questionable . . . also.

  I have deposited . . . many . . . ova . . . with . . . NewGen . . . Reproductive . . . Services . . . master.

  Now he let emotion show: confusion. Oh. Very . . . well. Slay . . . or . . . be . . . slain.

  Her eyes opened; she let out a breath of exasperation that flapped her lips and startled a pigeon at her feet.

  “Nice to know I’m valued for more than my womb, you antique sexist pig!” she muttered.

  A homeless man was approaching, ready to ask for a handout; leathery skin and rank scent and layers of tattered cloth. She glared at him and found the weakness—a blood-vessel in the brain ready to rupture, weakened by drugs, bad feeding, alcohol and stress from the untreated chemical imbalances that rode him more savagely than even her kind could do. She pushed. The world shifted slightly as might-be switched to is, like a breath of cold air up the spine and a tightness that went click and released around the brows. The man collapsed.

  Adrienne rose and stepped by him; it would probably be minutes before someone noticed it was more than the usual unconsciousness. She’d planned on spending the afternoon at the O’Keeffe Museum, or possibly shopping for jewelry, but . . .

  But I had to expend energy talking to Mthunzi, damn it! And now I should get back.

  A little prickle urged her; now was the time, and no later. Now.

  Ah, well, there goes the afternoon anyway.

  She bought a burrito and ate it as she walked eastward, enjoying the whimsical wooden statues along the Santa Fe River—what they’d call a creek somewhere wetter. The tangy carne adovada was warm and bit at her tongue as she wandered up Canyon Road. Perhaps the earth-colored adobe and faux-adobe of the galleries could become monotonous in time, but for the present she liked it; it reminded her somehow of the uniformity of Umbrian hill towns in Italy. The sculpture ranged from cowboy-kitsch to weird. One attracted her eye, done in the pseudo-Hopi style; a stick-thin figure with antlers and a long blunt muzzle or mask, raising its arms to the sky.

  A memory tugged at her; a recollection of early childhood, sitting on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon and watching—

  “It’s Bullwinkle!” she chuckled to herself. “Or close enough for government work. Bullwinkle the Shaman!”

  That made her feel a little better as she reached the two-story apartment building and let herself in. Her nostrils expanded as she sprang up the stairs, taking in scents of blood and sweat and fluids; that triggered a delicious trickle of awareness as she opened the door. Pain, throttled rage, endless uncomprehending fear . . .

  And is that a thread of desperate hope? Can’t have that disturbing the harmonies.

  “Sweetie! I’m back!” she called cheerfully, and gave a little skip at the shock of despair.

  The apartment was small, but so was the building, and it occupied the whole of the second story; a kitchenette, a living-dining room, bedroom, bath and tiny balcony with a decorative string of chili peppers. Even so, it had probably been fairly expensive this close to the plaza and the gallery strip on Canyon Road, and there were a couple of excellent local landscapes on the walls. The telephone was on the divider between the kitchen counter and the living-room couch, and it was ringing as she came in. The bruised, naked form of the human was out of the closet where she’d left her and three-quarters of the way across the floor, wriggling desperately towards the telephone despite the gag and the wrist-to-ankle padded cuffs and chains.

  Conveniently located in that remarkably naughty collection of bits and pieces under her bed.

  The third ring, and then—

  Click.

  “I can’t come to the phone right now—”

  Adrian’s voice broke in: “Ellen, pick up. I’m not playing head-games. You’re in danger, your life is in danger. Remember I told you I have enemies? They’re in town and they’ll try to get me through you. If you won’t call me, just get out of town. I’ll square it with Giselle at the gallery and cover the tab, no strings, don’t even tell me where you’re going, just pick somewhere far away and go. Call me when you’re across an ocean.”

  Click.

  Ellen stopped her rolling wiggle and slumped. Tears tracked silently down her oval straight-nosed face, joining the marks of others. She snuffled again and again, struggling to breathe.

  “Now the telephone,” Adrienne said. “That is a civilized means of communication.”

  She checked; three messages from Adrian, the alarm increasing with each one. More left on the cell, and a quick check on the PC showed e-mail as well.

  “And you would have gotten to it on the next call if I’d been any later. Impressive determination.”

  She threw her coat over a chair, grabbed the other by the slack in the chain and dragged her to the edge of the sofa. The haunted blue eyes stared at her as she sat and pulled her loose gray blouse over her head.

  “You can never get blood out of silk, and this outfit is a Dominique Sirop original. Are you listening to me? I get upset when people don’t. It’s a weakness of mine.”

  A frantic nod, and she went on: “You know what I was doing, when I could have been in the O’Keeffe or shopping or back here torturing you? I was talking to Master Mthunzi, head of the Council’s breeding program. He’s in that ridiculous Zulu witch-doctor’s shack he keeps in the Drakensberg. And how did we have our little intercontinental chat? Did he—”

  She pulled an oblong object out of a clip on her belt and held it up before she tossed it onto the chair with the coat and blouse.

  “—phone me or instant-message me or text me or send an e-mail on my very expensive fifth-generation everything-but-a-vibrator BlackBerry? No, he did not.”

  She unclipped the small holster and automatic from the small of her back, threw it on the chair and waggled a finger in the bound woman’s face.

  “Nooooo. We had our little conversation by long-distance telepathy . And . . . you . . . end . . . up . . . talking . . . like . . . this . . . and . . . do . . . you . . . know . . . why?”

  Her voice rose. “Because . . . at . . . that . . . range . . . telepathy has shit bandwidth! So much for the lost Golden Age of the Dread Empire of Shadows.”

  She sighed. “Why, why, why do we have these relics, these fossils, these Pleistocene cave-painting wannabes running the Council of Shadows?”

  Then she put a hand to her forehead and let her eyes widen in mock surprise.

  “Oh. We’re immortal. That’s why. You would not believe what the low turnover does to middle-management career paths.”

  Ellen began sobbing again, low and quiet and desolate. Adrienne shut her eyes and shivered with a delight that made the tiny hairs down her spine stand as the skin crept and her breath came faster. Her tongue came out and touched her lower lip.

  “Oh, now you’re making me hungry, you flirt, you. Well, enough about politics and my working day. Time to have a snack.”

  The human began to squeal like a trapped rabbit as she was heaved effortlessly onto the sofa, shrill even through the rubber-ball gag. Adrienne knelt on the floor and slapped her face back and forth. When she was quiet again:

  “Now, if you promise to scream quietly, I’ll take that gag out and let you blow your nose before I feed on you. All right, chérie?”

  A nod.

  “You promise?”

  Another. She unbuckled the leather strap and tossed it aside, ignoring the lung-stretching breath the other was taking.

  “HEL—”

  Only one syllable broke free before her hand clamped on the throat. Just a touch of thumb and little finger, but she could feel the nerve impulses running beneath the sweat-damp skin. So and so.

  Ellen bucked and heaved. Her face turned dark with blood as the throat clenched, and her eyes began to bu
lge. Her heart hammered louder and louder as the awareness of death surged up from the hindbrain. Adrienne bent over her, lips parted.

  Yes, oh God, yes . . . no, no, not yet. Was that Help or Hell? But later, later. You can only kill them once.

  A whooping gasp as the muscles around the trachea relaxed. Adrienne waited until awareness returned, and then dabbed at the blond woman’s face with a Kleenex from the end-table.

  “Ellen! You promised!” she said. “Mutual trust and reciprocity are very important to a successful relationship! Now, you’re not going to break any promises again, are you?”

  “No.”

  A breathy whisper, but there was sincerity behind it.

  “Then let’s get these ridiculous chains off you. There, that’s better, isn’t it? Here. Blow. Your tears and blood are delicious, but I draw the line at snot.”

  She held out her hands over the human’s body and wiggled her fingers, running them through the air from knees to chin and back.

  “Where, where, where shall I bite? Yes, the neck is traditional but the marks might draw attention. I thought we’d go out to La Casa Sena on Palace afterwards, the Insight Guide recommends the food there highly. Fiber and bulk are important for me too and you should get plenty of protein to keep up your red-cell count. No, hands above your head. Stretch, that’s it. My, you are in good condition. I do hate the way the obesity epidemic produces deeply buried veins and over-sweetened blood. It’s like drinking secondhand McDonald’s toadburgers. And you have such delicate skin. I can see your pulse all over.”

  “Please, please don’t hurt me anymore. I’ll be good, I promise, I’ll do anything. Just don’t hurt me, please.”

  “Oh, are you going to beg and plead? Why, you saucy minx! I absolutely love that! You know, we’re not in a hurry . . . but there are those who argue that it’s immature to play with your food. You don’t think that, do you?”

  A whisper: “No.”

  “Good.”

  She reached out a finger and touched the other’s navel, tickling.

  “Because to them I say . . . well, actually, I don’t say anything to them. I just make their heads explode.”