A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  In fact she was ravenous, more so than she could remember being in all her life, enough that she had to make herself not gobble the entire contents of the bread basket. The appetizers arrived, and she gave another small involuntary sound—much quieter—at the rich complex taste of the seared foie gras, with its toasted pistachios and saffron oil. The forty-year-old d’Yquem was a shock; sweet, but with an underlying acidity and tastes of vanilla, mango, pineapples, honeyed peaches and grilled almonds. The feeling that the inside of her body was quivering with cold died away slowly. In a way that made things worse; the more grounded she felt, the less dreamlike the predicament became and the more real the fear. But . . .

  If I’m going to die horribly or be tortured by a monster, I might as well enjoy dinner and get my blood sugar level back up first. I can’t do anything but collapse into a jelly if I’m in shock. The physical affects the mental as well as the other way ’round.

  “A most sensible way of looking at things. I knew Adrian must have good taste. After all, he is my twin.”

  The entrees arrived, and the Burgundy. The waiter made a small production of pouring the sample glass. Adrienne swirled it, sniffed, held the glass tilted so that the candle flame shone through it, then tasted in a breathy sip.

  “Perfect. Nine years, and perfect. Ah, the check.”

  She dropped her debit card on the tray and the waiter left again. Ellen swallowed a mouthful of the boar sausage and sampled the wine with defiant slowness, then stopped and looked down for a second as the ghosts of cherries and lilac and spices flooded her mouth.

  “You’re nothing like Adrian,” she said quietly, and bit into a piece of bread.

  The smooth shoulders shrugged. “Adrian would agree with you, or at least hope you were right. But I suspect from that interesting array of paraphernalia at your apartment—”

  “That’s just a game! It’s the one who’s tied up that’s in charge.”

  A chuckle. “Not when it’s my game. Ah, Adrian, though . . . did he never go . . . a little far? Did things never become . . . strange? The poor boy is a mass of inhibitions, but he has the same genes, the same needs, the same abilities, as I do.”

  I think I’ll change the subject.

  “How do you do . . . what you do?”

  Adrienne reached into her handbag and pulled out a coin. “Flip this. Keep your hand over it each time until I call the toss, then reveal it.”

  She did. The other spoke every time the coin came down and was covered by her other palm:

  “Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails.”

  Ellen stared down at the coin. “Adrian . . . said he made investments by flipping a coin. I was angry because he wouldn’t talk seriously with me about his work. I thought he was joking, flipping me off, pushing me away.”

  “Not in the least. He was avoiding lying by telling you a truth you wouldn’t believe. Now, again.”

  A slight frown of concentration, and Ellen’s eyes went wider as she flipped and revealed.

  “Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.”

  Adrian’s sister took the coin back. “Each time, there is a chance of one or the other. Below the muscles of your fingers, below the weight of the coin, below even the decisions you make about how hard to move your thumb . . . down far enough . . . there is a . . . churning. And—”

  She flipped the coin into the air herself and moved her hands aside. It struck the candleholder, a butter dish, teetered . . . and came to a stop upright on its edge. Ellen’s eyes grew wide. The coin teetered again, and fell.

  “—there was a slight chance of that happening. The stuff of your mind”—she tapped her temples with her forefingers—“operates on that level, as well. Some scientists have begun to suspect it, though we discredit them.”

  “And . . . you’re not supernatural?”

  Adrienne shrugged, in a palms-up way Ellen thought made it as certain as her accent that she hadn’t been raised entirely in the United States. She filled her wineglass and Ellen’s again, sipped, ate a piece of the reddish-pink lamb and some of the whipped potato, went on:

  “Let me tell you a story. Perhaps it is literally true, perhaps only poetically. A long time ago, when humans first spread out from Africa—which was far longer ago than the archaeologists think—a small band of hunters was trapped in the mountains of High Asia, a few families, perhaps twenty or thirty in all. Each year the glaciers rose around their plateau, and the food was less, and the cold was more. It was most likely that they would merely eat each other and die. But one was born who was lucky . . .”

  Ellen shivered as the other finished: “And then the world became warm and the ice melted, and we were freed and set loose, and for a hundred thousand years we ruled the earth with your breed as our playthings and our prey.”

  “Legends,” Ellen whispered.

  Adrienne nodded, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her knuckles, smiling happily.

  “Yes. In those days we believed them ourselves. We were the cruel gods who demanded the blood of men, and carried off their children and tormented their nights. We were Lamashtu and Sekhmet and Smoking Mirror; we were the evil sorcerers and the ogres and the goblins, the lamia and vetalas, incubi and succubae, impundulu and nagual, vampire and werewolf and leopard men. We were why your kind still fears the dark. We call ourselves the Shadowspawn, and for the last century we have ruled the world once more in secret.”

  “Then you’re doing a pretty damn poor job of running it!” Ellen blurted, then clamped her lips shut.

  Adrienne laughed. “Chérie, has anything I’ve said or done given you the impression that we care about the greatest good of the greatest number? And as for running the world—I said we rule it.”

  She uncurled her fingers for a moment, and held her hands as if framing her face like a picture with the thumbs beneath the chin.

  “Do I look like a bureaucrat? To run the world would be to spend all our time at meetings, or reading reports, or standing in ridiculous costumes in front of faux-Egyptian temples bellowing platitudes to crowds of groveling worshippers, like a bad science-fiction film. And while you beg and plead and grovel charmingly, my sweet, it’s much more enjoyable on a personal one-to-one level. No, no, we rule by ruling the men who run the world. Run it for us.”

  She turned both hands palm-up to her left, in a gesture like a visual behold.

  “They do all the work.”

  The same gesture to the right.

  “We have all the fun. It’s the natural order.”

  Silence fell as the waiter returned with their desserts.

  “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” Ellen said when he’d gone.

  “That’s why you’re telling me all this. You don’t care what I know, because nobody will hear.”

  Another laugh. “Oh, I may kill you someday, slowly and beautifully and cruelly. Or not, if you continue to amuse. But if you were to escape, per impossible, who would you tell?”

  “I’d tell everybody! These days you can’t keep things secret.”

  “Would you start a Web site? www.MutantVampiresDrinkOurBlood. com? Why, seventy years ago a writer here in New Mexico stumbled on some of the truth, and wrote a book around it . . . and we let him live to an implausibly old age. Though we made sure the publisher wouldn’t buy a sequel.”

  “Adrian would believe me,” Ellen said.

  “Yes, and you two could sit and tell each other about it. But I have no intention of losing you, chérie, not when our relationship is just blooming.”

  “Why do you do that?” Ellen said.

  “Do what?”

  “Talk as if we were lovers. Talk as if you loved me. Talk about our relationship.”

  “Ah, but we do have a relationship. Granted, it’s a predator-prey relationship, but those are very important ecologically.”

  She took a spoonful of the dessert, ate it with slow relish, then tapped the spoon on the edge of the dish.

  “And I do love you. It’s a very muc
h more complex form of the way that I love this crème brûlée. But nonetheless sincere. And the more often I taste of you, the more I love. You might call it a devouring passion. Have you never wondered why human beings sometimes feel that way? It’s because you all have a trace—sometimes more than a trace, like poor Jeffrey Dahmer—of our heredity. As if deer were part wolf, or antelope part tiger.”

  She reached into her handbag and took out a cigarette case, tapped a pale ivory-colored cylinder into a holder and bent over to light it from the candle. An off-white tendril rose, scented with rum and something else added to the tobacco. Even then, Ellen was shocked enough to blurt:

  “You can’t smoke here!”

  Heads were turning at nearby tables, but not towards them. A man sniffed and coughed, then shrugged and went back to his soufflé. Ellen had the sudden feeling that she was invisible, that if she stood and shouted and threw dishes nothing would happen.

  “Delicious one, I can do anything I want. Anywhere, at any time, to or with anyone. I could rip out the chef ’s throat if I wanted to . . . though that would be a criminal waste. You’d better get used to the concept.”

  She looked at her watch, then tucked seven hundred-dollar bills under a wineglass for the tip.

  “Time to go. Adrian should be charging in to your rescue about now. Let me see . . . yes, good shielding, but there’s that don’t-notice-this feeling.”

  “Adrian really loves me,” Ellen said stubbornly as they rose; she draped the shawl casually around her hips.

  “Which is why you were running away from him in tears when we met?” Adrienne laughed. “Chérie, remember that he has my instincts. He just won’t admit it.”

  “What did you do to my apartment?”

  “I set a trap. The equivalent of wiring a grenade to the door.” She shrugged. “He won’t be killed, I think, not if he deserves to be my brother. It’s not my plan that he die. Not yet, possibly never. Now, allons-y!”

  A limousine was waiting outside. Beside the door was a young Asian man, dressed in dark windbreaker, black T-shirt and baggy pants and trainers. There was a button microphone in his ear with the slender thread of the pickup alongside his jaw, and one hand rested inside the coat. Ellen hesitated as he opened the door; the interior loomed dark, as if this was some threshold across which she could never return. A hand pushed firmly at her back, and the man said something in Chinese. Adrienne replied in the same language, her tone sharp.

  Then her head came up just as she put one foot inside the door; her eyes pointed eastward past the Cathedral, towards the apartment.

  “Oh. The clever boy has brought a friend with him. Yes, we’d better get going. After all, helping Adrian is going to take us quite a while.”

  “Helping him?”

  “Helping him with his identity confusions. You and I are going to help him . . . get down with his bad self.”

  Softly: “I want my brother back. My brother, my lover, my other self.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Still nothing definite?” Harvey Ledbetter said.

  “No,” Adrian said.

  He worked his shoulders; all that tension there would get him would be a headache.

  Cold. I must be cold. Do not think of what Ellen is suffering. My feelings will not rescue her, only my strengths, my abilities, my wits. Think only of chances, strategies.

  They rode the escalator nearly alone; Albuquerque’s airport was a hub, but not a big one, and air travel hadn’t picked up fully again anyway with the economy still limping. There were more people arriving than catching departing flights at nine in the evening, as well.

  “No,” he went on. “I can’t just guess. Not with someone like Adrienne involved.”

  “Yeah, that screws the probabilities well and good. Just west, eh?”

  “Just west.”

  “Hell of a lot of territory in that direction. You want to do the honors at Security, or shall I?” Harvey said, as they walked past the shuttered bookstores and by-generous-definition restaurants.

  9:45 San Francisco blinked at them from the Departures screen. On time.

  “Oh, I’ll do it,” Adrian said. “I’m bored, anyway.”

  Harvey put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “She’s counting on you getting frazzled,” he said gently.

  “Yes. So I won’t. I shall not be comfortable or easy, either.”

  Not as easy as you, my friend, he thought; he could feel the other’s cool hunter’s patience.

  You do not know Ellen. It is not that you do not care, but this is one more encounter in a long war. And you have gotten that which you wished; you have forced me back into this doomed fight.

  He didn’t resent that—not much. If you could read the truth of men’s emotions without effort, you learned to make allowances that those who could take comfort from illusion and ignorance did not. Or else you had no friends.

  But Adrienne must also have desired this. And that is very much a concern.

  They heaved their carry-on luggage onto the conveyor belt as they came to the head of the airport security line, amid the smell and feel of tension and boredom and throttled anger. Harvey walked jauntily into the glass enclosure.

  Adrian put the knuckles of his fists together and let the simple electronic nervous system of the machines vibrate in his consciousness. That was hardly a Wreaking at all, no need for glyphs or the diamond-shard syllables of Mhabrogast that cut your mind bloody from the inside. He didn’t have to touch anything but electrons in semiconductors, and when your brain held a decryption center intended to break the unique codes inside a human skull, computers were child’s play.

  The metallic taste put his teeth on edge for a moment, but the scanner showed nothing except the simple form of a man, and harmless underwear and magazines in their carry-ons. The same for him . . .

  They collected their gear, stepped into their shoes and walked out through the slowly revolving door into the main concourse; behind him someone’s mind muttered:

  Kill them all, kill them all—

  With a vivid image of a nuclear fireball cracking above a city, the blast-wave throwing aside buildings like confetti and turning bodies to shadows against walls . . .

  “Whoa!” Harvey said. “Someone really doesn’t like goin’ through the mill!”

  The Sunport had a great bronze statue where the concourse met the two wings of gates; a shaman twice man-height running full tilt, with an eagle headdress and a live eagle or an eagle spirit just at the edge of his outstretched fingers. Two decades of travelers had known it as Chief Trips and Falls or Shaman Destroys Endangered Species. Adrian smiled grimly at it; there was less charm to legends when you knew their sources. Or to religions, come to that.

  “Do you know why I really hate drinking human blood?” Adrian said.

  He forced himself not to snarl and turn his mind into a lethal razor as a man bumped into him, walking with his head in a copy of the New York Times.

  Election Will Be Close; Democrats Confident, read the headline. Knowing who was really in charge also took the interest out of politics, for the most part.

  “Moral qualms?” Harvey asked.

  “No. It is no crime to abstract a little from the Red Cross; people donate it to help others, and they are helping me, and I give them a lot of money. What I hate is the way it makes everyone smell more appetizing . I really should not be around people.”

  They turned into one of the washrooms on the B concourse, went into adjacent stalls for privacy and opened their carry-ons across the toilet seats. Adrian checked the magazine, snapped it back into his Glock and holstered it. The knife he slipped into loops on the other side of his jacket; wearing it across the small of the back wasn’t comfortable in an aircraft seat, even a first-class one.

  The hypodermics with their solution of silver and radioactive waste went cautiously into steel-and-lead-lined tubes sewn into a pocket. A load of that would kill him just as permanently and irrevocably as the wickedest member of the
Council of Shadows. The chalks and markers were, ironically, the most dangerous part of his equipment and the ones he could let the authorities see.

  Or perhaps it is my mind that is dangerous. Yes, without doubt, for the glyphs only focus it. Perhaps the Mhabrogast too, though there I am less certain.

  “Ol’ buddy,” Harvey said meditatively—there was a chunk sound as he checked and closed his massive coach gun. “How many people do you figure could mind-fuck the scanner the way you did?”

  “Oh, anyone the Council would recognize as Shadowspawn,” he said absently. “Half the sworn members of the Brotherhood; you could, it would just be harder, eh? Plenty of independents who think they are magicians or witches or psychics or whatever.”

  Harvey chuckled as they exited the washroom; Adrian wrinkled his nose as the smells of urine and disinfectant fell away. A hypersensitive sense of smell was another of the disadvantages of his heritage. Not as bad as the cravings, but it added its mite of discomfort.

  Of course, dogs and wolves and leopards are more sensitive still, but they seem to mind it less. I wonder why?

  “Makes you confident about how Homeland Security’s got your ass, don’t it?” Harvey went on.

  Adrian laughed as well. “Harvey, what do you think would happen to a hijacker who tried to take over an aircraft with one of us onboard?”

  “It happened. I looked it up last year, had the same thought when we were pulling our team out of Bucharest after we turned Gheorghe Brâncuşi’s hideaway into a tanning salon. It was in 1972, flight out of Beirut. A Shadowspawn enforcer working for Ibrahim al-Larnaki. That was before he took over Abdul the Damned’s Council seat.”

  “What happened?”

  “They hushed up the bodies, the usual. Tell you the truth, I think they got what they deserved. And it isn’t often I think people deserve what a bored Shadowspawn mook does when he’s turned loose with time to be inventive.”

  Adrian gave a sour snort. “Have you ever tallied the arguments against . . . what’s the current term? Intelligent Design?”

  “Can’t say as I’ve bothered since I got over a Baptist upbringing. And I was about fifteen when that happened—decided that anything that said I shouldn’t get into Julie-May McBell’s pants behind the bleachers after the football game was bound to be wrong about everything else, too. Lost my faith with her legs wrapped around me and a bare tit in my hand. But tell me.”