A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “God, that tastes like absolute shit,” Adrian said, and spat into the sink to clear his mouth. “Merde. Scheisse. Mierda. Shĭ dàn. There are no words.”

  “That never stopped you before,” Harvey said. “You always were an articulate little bastard. Give it a try. I’ve only heard your bitching and moaning about blood-bank surplus a couple of hundred times.”

  The younger man nodded. “Like eating week-old roadkilled skunk on a hot day.”

  He threw the emptied blood-bag into the waste disposal and gripped the rough edge of the granite countertop, barring his teeth as he fought against a surge of nausea. The blood burned its way down his throat like the cheapest raw bathtub hooch ever made, edged with sandpaper, and coiled in his gut like a burning snake. His breath hissed out, and then the contents of his stomach stopped trying to climb back up his gullet.

  “Glad to see you’re not enjoying it,” Harvey said dryly.

  “It’s dead, it’s cold, and worst of all it’s from someone who was calm and relaxed as they did their civic duty at the blood bank and listened to fucking New Age water music. But I need the oomph.”

  He laughed mirthlessly and reached for the glass of red wine. It cleared his mouth, but the effect of the blood was hitting his nerves now. He could feel them like a metallic web beneath his skin, more alive but jangled with a nails-on-slate quiver from the crown of his head to the tips of fingers and toes. The warning flutter of a migraine started at the back of his brain stem, telling him what the payment for the foul blood’s sudden strength would be.

  “Shadowspawn make a big thing of how we’re like wolves and tigers and whatnot, head bull-goose top predators, but you know what we’re really like? Mosquitoes.”

  Adrian looked through the open well in the kitchen wall and into the dining area. The horizon was darkening in the east, but it wasn’t quite night yet. The coming of it thrilled along sharpened senses, an impulse to run through the sage and juniper, to hunt and howl and stalk. To leave the prisoning flesh behind. He snarled at the thought.

  “Whoa, boy,” Harvey said, and he realized it must have been a literal snarl as well.

  “She’s got Ellen,” he said grimly.

  “Not proven. The girl could just be so pissed off with you she won’t return your calls. Remember, if she hasn’t met your lovely sister, what you’re saying sounds like conspiracy-theory rants.”

  “I know Adrienne. It’s a taunt. She always stole my toys.”

  “Let’s get ready. Sunset’s coming.”

  “Hour travel time to Santa Fe. We could leave about now,” Harvey said.

  “No, too chancy. I’m not going outside my protections without full dark to work with—that’ll equalize things. We should be able to get to Ellen’s place by around seven thirty, and at least pick up the trail.”

  Harvey hesitated, then said: “She got you spooked?”

  “Yes,” Adrian said frankly. “It’s not just the thought that I might lose. It’s the way fighting her makes me more similar to her, inside my head. She knows that, too.”

  “Well, fightin’s the only alternative we got, right now.”

  The older man opened his traveling case and dressed from it; boots and pants and belted high-collared tunic of loose black leather, with gloves and close-fitting hat. Adrian could feel the mesh of ultrathin silver wire within, like the sensation of having a tooth drilled when the painkiller didn’t quite work.

  “Christ, I don’t know how you can stand that,” he said. “Besides looking as if you’re cruising for rough trade, or scouting for Ming the Merciless.”

  “In San Francisco, I look positively restrained. You do the Power stuff. I shoot.”

  He took a weapon out of the case. It was a double-barreled shotgun cut down to a massive pistol, an old-fashioned model simple as a stone ax with external hammers and all the metal parts silver-inlaid. Adrian winced and extended a hand towards it.

  “Gelatin slugs?”

  “Silver nitrate and a trace of radioactive waste in liquid silicone,” Harvey said. “If there were Shadowspawn elephants, this would knock ’em down. It wouldn’t do a renfield anything but harm, either.”

  He slid it into the loops inside the skirt of the leather coat, and added a box of shells to one pocket.

  “Nasty. I notice you’re not trying to use revolvers anymore.”

  Harvey shrugged. “Failure rate got too high, like the way it did with automatics back in the forties. The more probability gets warped—”

  “—the easier it is to warp,” Adrian finished.

  “I’ve got the blades, too,” the older man said, tapping the insides of his forearms. “They always work.”

  “Good. If I really had to do it and didn’t care how much it hurt, I think I might be able to screw the action on that monster-truck coach gun. Or possibly the charge in the shells. And if I can do it, she can.”

  “Shit. We’ll be back to crossbows, next.”

  “Yeah, only they will still be able to shoot you with machine-pistols. Now, what was that about them not really winning?”

  Adrian was already in what he intended to wear; nearly-new hiking boots, jacket and trousers of charcoal-gray denim and roll-topped shirt, casual-smart enough for street wear but tough and nonbinding and giving reasonable protection to his skin if he had to move fast. He went to the Cassatt in the hallway and swung it back. The safe beneath the picture-frame had no handle, only a blank disk of steel in its center. He placed a palm against it, and let the rhythm of the circuits resonate. When they did, he thought a phrase in a language that had been long dead when Stonehenge was new.

  Click-clunk.

  The thick steel wedge swung open. The interior was bigger than you might expect. He reached in and took out a Glock, checked the magazine and snapped it home. There were bundles of various currencies inside the safe as well, passports in several different names, and a leather case that held ranked SD memory cards and small sealed vials. He took out a black nylon knapsack and checked the contents: colored chalks, artist-style markers, three steel hypodermics shaped to be used as daggers and loaded with a mixture much like the filling in the slugs of Harvey’s coach gun. And a sheathed knife, with a curved nine-inch blade and a hilt of dimpled black bone, next to a rolled-up black righthand glove of a heavy soft material. He set his hand to the knife, hissing slightly at the twinge of pain through the insulation.

  “Like old times,” Harvey said with a crooked smile.

  Adrian put his arms through the straps of the knapsack and tucked the blade beneath the tail of his jacket.

  “No. In the old days we’d have had more backup. And so would Adrienne. It would have been official, part of the war. There’s something wrong here. She’s left me alone for years, since I retired. Why now?”

  “Crazed bloodlust and twisted sexual obsession? Hate? Monstrous cruelty?”

  “Oh, sure, and backatcha, standard Shadowspawn family dynamics. But there’s something happening here I can’t put my finger on. The Council may not stop her but it isn’t going to thank her for this.”

  “The Brotherhood isn’t going to be all that happy with me, Adrian. They don’t really like you all that much these days and we don’t have resources to spare.”

  Adrian faced him and made a gesture—what would have been a fist against the shoulder, if he hadn’t been wearing the silver-strung leather.

  “I appreciate this, Harv. You always were stand-up.”

  A shrug. “If we’re going to commit suicide, let’s get it over with.”

  “—tzin! ”

  Ellen Tarnowski stood exactly where she’d been told. She swallowed and tried to make her legs stop shaking, and fought against the fog that threatened to roll in from the corners of her sight.

  I thought I was as afraid as I could be. I was wrong. This feels . . . bigger. It’s the way you’d be afraid of an avalanche.

  Her apartment felt wrong now; somehow the whole world did, a sensation that the smell of stale sweat and blood
and musk magnified.

  All the furniture had been pushed back against the walls. Adrienne Brézé stood in the center of the living-room wearing only a black lace thong, legs and arms outstretched to make a chi-cross, an outline against the faint light leaking from the nearly-closed bathroom door. It caught on her eyes in an occasional glitter of golden-brown, or on a sheen of sweat against olive skin. Her fingers moved in small, intricately precise motions and her face had the blank intensity Ellen had seen before on artists lost in their work.

  Now and then she spoke. At first it had been in Latin, and then in a language Ellen didn’t even recognize much less understand, full of clicks and whines and buzzing sounds and restless sibilants. Several times she took a piece of colored chalk and marked a glyph on the floor, odd spiky shapes that made the insides of Ellen’s eyes itch until she let her gaze fall out of focus. One last word, a sound that refused to render itself into syllables at all; she made herself stop trying when it began to circle around inside her head like a wasp.

  What is that? she wondered. It doesn’t really sound like speech.

  The eyes swung her way, and she tried to freeze even her thoughts.

  “It’s Mhabrogast,” the deadly velvet voice said. “According to legend, it’s the language spoken in Hell. The native tongue of demons. Adrian really has been keeping you in the dark, eh?”

  Ellen whimpered. Adrienne smiled with a catlike turn of the lips.

  I didn’t ask! Ellen cried silently. I just thought it. Can she read my mind? Oh, God, can’t I even think?

  Adrienne sighed and relaxed her stance.

  “There, that will do it. Read your mind? Emotions, intentions, sensations, oui, easily. But for verbal thoughts, well, telepathy’s a quantum entanglement process and it takes time.”

  “Quantum entanglement?” she said, bewildered.

  “Do I look like a physicist? Damp towel, dry towel, my new clothes. Quickly! Soon this won’t be a good place anymore, however happy the memories of it we share.”

  She obeyed. Adrienne’s eyes remained abstracted, with none of the cat-playful malice of the past day. Somehow that was just as terrifying.

  “Now, pick up the bags and walk precisely behind me until we’re out on the road.”

  They went out into the cold of early evening. The moon was a thin-pared tilted sickle and Venus was bright in the east, but the dying sun still washed most of the stars out from the dark-blue arch of heaven. Ellen let the suitcases thump to the ground and hugged her fringed wrap around her shoulders, conscious of things not seen out of the corners of her eyes.

  A faint gleam of light showed through the window that had been her home. Adrienne put her hands on her hips and grinned; her eyes seemed to follow patterns in the air above the two-story building.

  “Damn, but I am good!” she said, the mad cheerfulness back in her voice. “Now, let’s go before my brother shows up.”

  “He’ll rescue me,” Ellen said, then whimpered as she heard the words.

  “He’ll certainly try,” Adrienne agreed. “It’s not that I don’t love you for yourself, chérie, but you make the most wonderful bait. How are you feeling?”

  “Weak. Shaky. Sore all over. I don’t think I can drive now. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t. I’m afraid I’d wreck the car.”

  “Well, then,” Adrienne said, putting an arm around her waist and helping her to the Prius. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

  She sat curled shrimp-fashion, hugging herself in the passenger seat. The sun was declining in the implausible crimson-green-blue-gold glory that Santa Fe alone seemed to have. As Adrienne drove towards the bridge over the river she began to sing softly:“Elizabeth Bathory

  Draining her girls in the night so no one will hear

  No one comes near

  Look at her bathing, splashing her toes

  In the night when there’s nobody there

  What does she care?

  All the bloodless bodies

  Where do they all come from?

  All the bloodless bodies

  Where do they all belong?”

  As they passed the streetlights came on and died above them, each with a slight discernible pop.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Stop!” “At a shut-down church?” Harvey said, as he stamped on the brake.

  “It isn’t. Check.”

  Harvey did, and then did an almost comical double-take. “Shit,” he swore. “Never would have caught it.”

  “I was always a bit stronger than Adrienne. She’s a bit better at subtlety. Wards, don’t-see-me’s, frozen alternatives, that sort of thing.”

  Adrian Brézé opened the door almost before the car had pulled up against a stuccoed adobe wall across from the building—illegal parking on a narrow one-way street originally laid out by burros carrying loads down to the Plaza market. He could feel Harvey’s tiger alertness, the solid weight of the coach gun in his hand, and a like keenness woke in him.

  Part of it was instinct: No other hunter on my ground! Kill!

  Part of it was an old, old hate, like the background music of his life swelling to a pounding chorus.

  He walked forward, looking upward at Ellen’s second-story apartment. It was only half-past seven, but the night was nearly moonless. The darkness didn’t bother him. His breed saw much better in it than humans even with the body’s eyes. Beside him Harvey drifted forward and leaned inconspicuously against a car, his hand inside the skirt of his leather coat.

  “What is it?” he asked. His head went back and forth. “I can see the building now—two-story stucco, vigas, corner balcony, flat roof. But I’m getting . . . I’m not sure. Something more.”

  “It’s—shit! Freeze! Don’t move!”

  Adrian struggled for words to describe the construct he saw as glinting planes of light, shifting in and out of existence. Possibilities interlinked, ready to fall out of might into the is.

  “It’s like a house of cards as high as a skyscraper. A probability cascade. Touch any part of it and the rest falls down before you can switch the causal paths out.”

  “House of cards? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “The cards are giant Gillette razor blades. They’d tangle any mind they hit in feedback loops—cut and rewire all the connections randomly.”

  “Oh. That sounds pretty fucking bad.”

  He didn’t mention the taste of it, the wrenching horrible pleasure. The vivid delirious meatiness of pain-soaked blood, the exultant carnal musk of mind-and-body rape, the desolation of death seen coming while bound and helpless. The power of it.

  If she’s killed Ellen, I’ll . . . Then the humor struck him: I’ll kill her just the same as I would anyway.

  “Shit!” he said aloud, as his awareness expanded.

  The flicker of ordinary human consciousness, disturbed without knowing why.

  “The Lopezes are in; the family on the ground floor. Get them out, Harv; nobody’s going to stay alive underneath this stuff when it comes down. Powerless or not, it’ll slice their minds into sushi. Man, woman, three kids. Get them out now. I don’t know how long I can hold this. It’s like juggling knives with my eyes closed. She had hours to build it, and I’m out of practice.”

  “Can’t you back out? Is Ellen in there?”

  He shook his head, and beads of sweat flew into the chilly night, the smell rank in his nostrils. White puffs showed his breath.

  “She was, Adrienne used her to source it, but I can’t tell if she’s still there. And we’ve already triggered it. I’m holding the whole thing up. It was unstable anyway. Shit, this could fry brains a hundred yards away when it goes. Worse than that. There could be energy release right out here in physical-reality land! Nobody could have done this ten years ago, the world wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  He took stance, feet and arms spread, and began to move his fingers. Luckily the lights were out and there wasn’t any through traffic on this street as he shouted:

  “Shz-tzee! Ak-tzee! T
zin-Mo’gh—”

  The blood’s borrowed strength poured out of him, but the ancient tongue built his rage, made it fimbul-cold, a living presence in his skull like a fanged smile of bone. Lights crawled across his vision, patterns that repeated inside themselves, spinning away into the heart of a universe of ice and ash and winds like swords.

  Beside him Harvey muttered:

  “Oh, how I love it when you talk Mhabrogast to me, darling . . . This is gonna hurt inside a silver suit. Here, ol’ buddy?”

  “That’s it, that’s the fracture line of the square we’re in. Hurry!”

  The older man holstered his pistol, stripped off his gloves and held the thumbs and forefingers of both hands together above his head. Then he whipped them downward and punched clenched fists forward, as if drawing a line down the joining of two panels and smashing them apart, speaking:

  “I am the Opener of Doors. I am the Watcher at the Crossroads. A-iatzin! ” Then, hissed: “Fuck me that hurts.”

  And he was running towards the door, drawing the coach gun again. Yells, crashing; figures flying past in terror. Push here. Command there. Convince his hindbrain that this could happen, then make the universe know it could—

  Harvey was pulling at him; he realized he’d fallen to his knees without knowing.

  “Get me out,” he wheezed.

  “Oh, yeah. Pretty soon the local heat are going to be looking for a crazy old Anglo in black leather who chases people out of the house waving a big badass gun.”

  He was half-conscious of his arm pulled across strong shoulders, and the smell of tobacco and Old Spice; even the burn of silver-pain beneath his armpit was faint. Harvey pitched him into the backseat, where he lay in a shaking fetal ball. The Toyota jeep roared and skidded away, tossing him back and forth. Onto Paseo de Peralta, onto Cerillos Road, into the narrow entrance to the Whole Foods parking lot, then behind the store. Shoppers with their recyclable-paper bags of ultra-expensive organic shiitake mushrooms and handmade bratwurst and garlic-cured artisanal olives stopped to stare; one jumped out of the way with a yell.