A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “To them it is,” Adrian said. “People adapt. If they could not, humanity would not have survived the first rule of the Shadowspawn. But, Ellie . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “This isn’t just a personal thing between me and Adrienne, as I thought at first.”

  “It’s certainly partly a personal thing! There’s all sorts of overtones in her voice when she mentions you. And she thinks about you a lot. Even her children look like you!”

  Adrian froze, so suddenly that his hand tugged her to a halt; he was a slender man, not large and so graceful you forgot the solid density of him.

  “She has children?” he said neutrally.

  “Twins, a boy and a girl, around six or seven. Oh, God, talk about creepy! You didn’t know?”

  “No, I did not,” he said in a voice empty of all emotion, so much so that it was as notable as a shriek. “I had no idea.”

  Then he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. But there is some great matter at stake here as well, somehow tied up with me and Adrienne. The Council of Shadows is moving, contemplating . . . enormous actions. There are factions and factions within factions; that is natural to Shadowspawn, even more than to humans. Please, listen to all that you can. Adrienne likes to talk, when she thinks it safe.”

  Ellen nodded. “Does she ever!”

  He stopped and took both her hands in his. “And . . . I hate to say this, Ellie, but until you’re rescued, that advice from the renfield doctor is good. Stay alive! Whatever it takes.”

  “I’ll do my best. And you get better and get to work, hombre!”

  She leaned forward and kissed him gently. Adrian’s arms went around her, and she stiffened. He let them drop and step back.

  “Sorry—” she began.

  A shake of the head. “It’s natural. You’re sensing . . . what I am. Sleep well, Ellie, and hope.”

  He reached out and touched thumb to one side of her forehead and little finger to the other.

  “Sleep well, and don’t think of this unless you must.”

  A word, and sleep returned. She woke for a moment, grasping at the fleeting stuff of dream, turned over and hugged Mr. Wabbit against her and drifted down into the velvety blackness once more.

  “Woof !” Peter said. “You do run a lot, right?”

  “Told you,” Ellen said smugly.

  “God, you long-legged people—it isn’t fair!”

  They came down the bike path at a loping trot, then slowed to a walk.

  “So it does solve one problem,” Peter said; she’d grown used to the way he skipped mentally among topics.

  “What, another one?”

  She liked Peter, but his mania for explaining and systematizing could probably wear, after a while.

  He nodded vigorously and drank the last of the water in his bottle. “All those old legends, and the books and movies . . . none of them could explain why, if there were creatures with such power around, they didn’t rule the world.”

  “The answer being, as soon as they’re around, they do rule the world. They just don’t like publicity.”

  “Exactly. It’s horrifying, but it’s . . . intellectually satisfying as well. And the dislike of publicity is probably a holdover from the secret societies they started out with—the occultists and ninjas and whatnot.”

  “Boy, your hobby rides you hard, doesn’t it? And there’s one good thing about it all.”

  “What? That’s a first.”

  “We don’t have to blame ourselves for the way the world’s screwed up. It’s them, goofing on us.”

  Ellen mopped at her face with the towel hung around her neck as he laughed, breathing deeply but not panting; after a solid day’s rest and two good nights’ sleep her body was starting to feel right again.

  The world feels wrong, but my body is back in tune.

  The third run had been best of all so far, and the weather was cooperating—it had rained in the night, but the morning was cool sixties, with scattered clouds over the hills to the west. Sweat mixed with the smells of crushed grass and wet dust.

  “See you later,” Peter said, as they came out onto Lucy Lane. “I’ve got some remote time on the Stanford machine. I’m working on—”

  “—something I wouldn’t understand if you told me twice. Tear ’em up, tiger,” she said. “Let us know when you’ve solved the mysteries of the universe.”

  Or invented a zap gun to kill Shadowspawn. Only they’d read your mind and know about it beforehand. God, that’s depressing!

  They walked past Number One, and Monica waved to them from the doorway. Peter went by with a nod and a wave back, but Ellen stopped. Evidently the Sangre schools had a uniform policy—white shirt and blue shorts for boys, shirt and pleated navy skirt for girls—and Monica was seeing her two off. They hurried by with a polite murmur of “Hi, Ms. Tarnowski.”

  Which makes me feel ancient beyond words, she thought, as she returned the greeting.

  And . . . I wonder what they know? What do they think about the times Mom has . . . company and they have to stay with Grandma? The boy’s eleven and the girl’s nine; you do think about things at that age. What does Monica’s mother think, that it’s some sort of deeply weird kept-woman arrangement? Could you live here eight years without a clue about what’s really going on?

  Monica looked after them fondly as they ran swinging their book satchels and lunch boxes and folded Netbooks, the morning sun bright on their light brown hair.

  “How are you?” Ellen asked.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks, though.”

  “I, ummm—”

  Monica laughed. “Oh, you heard me screaming the other night, did you?”

  “Sorry. I was walking by that evening. And you were, uh, sort of laid up yesterday. I wondered what happened, especially . . .”

  “Since it’ll be happening to you too.” A smile and a shrug. “Nothing too bad. I mean, the screams were real, but when . . . I just let it rip, let the hurt flow right up the throat, you know? It helps and she likes it.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  “She came in and said, ‘Tabasco sauce in the Bloody Mary tonight, Monica,’ and right away I knew I was in for a wild time. Then she just flipped me over on the sofa, yanked off my underwear and—”

  She held up a hand with the extended fingers together, moved it sharply upward, clenched them into a fist and pumped it up and down. Then she giggled again, rolled her eyes and blew air over her upper lip.

  “Let’s just say I’m glad she doesn’t have bigger hands! You know what I mean.”

  “Ah . . . yeeeeah,” Ellen said with a wince. “Fisting.”

  “That’s what she told me it’s called; I’d never even heard of it before I came here. I don’t really like it all that much even when it’s, you know, not so abrupt.”

  I found that out in my own apartment and I’m not inclined to giggle about it. God, I hope your variety of crazy isn’t catching!

  “I think that’s harder on the guys,” Monica said thoughtfully. “But you know how guys are. They’re sort of shy, really. They don’t like to talk about things.”

  Ellen thought, in what was almost a prayer:

  God, Adrian, you’re coming to get me, aren’t you? I swear, I’ll never keep a cat again. The mice and birds would haunt me.

  And, as prayer sometimes was, it felt . . . very slightly reassuring.

  Monica went on: “But then she fed—it’s very soothing when she feeds—and then she was, umm, really nice to me.”

  She absently touched the Band-Aid at the base of her throat.

  “You play tennis, don’t you?” Monica went on.

  “Yes?” Ellen said, blinking at the non sequitur.

  “There’s a ladies’ club that meets at the community center courts; I go after I finish up at the library most days. Care to play a few games this afternoon? I’m not very sore anymore, and the Doña can reach us there if she wants you for something. She’s reasonable about that
. You only have to clear it with her if you’re out of town for more than a few hours. Besides, she was with Jamal last night.”

  “Ah . . . why not?” Ellen said.

  I do like playing tennis. Why not, indeed? They’re probably not good enough to give me much of a game, but you never know.

  Just then an ambulance came up the street and stopped in front of Number Three. Two paramedics trotted inside pulling a gurney. Both women froze, then exhaled again as they came out with a living man on it.

  Adrienne followed; she was dressed in black motorcycle leathers and boots, and made a beckoning gesture, leaning back against a massive low-slung machine with wide tires, arms crossed on her chest.

  Like something alien, Ellen thought; it took a slight mental effort to make herself walk to the driveway. Like something alien and sleek and deadly. All of which are truer than God. Much truer.

  “He’s just dazed, I think,” the mistress of Rancho Sangre said absently when they came up, looking after the emergency vehicle. “Possibly a mild concussion. Jamal is”—her voice dropped to a purr “—very strong. And very, very grumpy at breakfast sometimes. Of course, I’m not usually a morning person myself.”

  “Well, he should know better than to fight you, Doña Adrienne,” Monica said disapprovingly. “Really, some people are just plain rude.”

  Then she cleared her throat and touched the corner of her mouth for an instant.

  “Ah, thanks,” Adrienne said, and used a thumb to wipe up the red trickle that ran down to her chin.

  She licked it off, scrubbed her face with her sleeve and went on:

  “No, it’s actually entertaining, at least for a while. Now, I’m going up to San Francisco. You’re not up to it, are you, Monica?”

  “Ah . . . on the motorcycle?”

  Adrienne nodded. Monica smiled and patted the air behind herself for an instant.

  “It would hurt a lot,” she said, almost clinically. “Riding that long, I mean.”

  “You wouldn’t be very mobile when we got to town, either, which would be tiresome. We wouldn’t want to shock Jean-Charles. Ellen, sluice off, pack yourself some underwear and socks and an extra T-shirt, and your toothbrush. We can do some shopping while I’m there. Vite!”

  She jumped at the snap and hurried, flushing with annoyance at herself.

  Fear burns itself out, she thought. I can’t be afraid of her every moment of the day. Not that I don’t want to, I just can’t, the way I couldn’t run for twenty-four hours a day either. But I can be nervous a lot longer, the way you can walk farther than you can run. I do wonder why we’re making this trip. Surely she’d want to stay here behind . . . oh, defenses or something? If I’m bait for Adrian.

  When she returned Adrienne was astride the big red-black-and-yellow touring bike; it had a V-shaped logo on the front with the trident-and-black-sun inside it.

  I don’t like motorcycles. They’re insanely risky.

  “What can I say, I’m lucky,” Adrienne said, and grinned beneath the raised visor of the full-face helmet. “There’s a spare padded jacket in the touring bag—that streamlined trunk thing behind the rear seat. You’d be chilly without that, even with me to break the airflow. And a spare helmet. Put ’em on, spread your thighs over the bitch seat of this vibrator on wheels, and let’s go!”

  Just then Monica hurried up. “Some lunch!” she said, and tucked a plastic-wrapped parcel into one of the fared saddlebags beside the rear wheel. “In case you want to stop at someplace pretty and picnic!”

  “Monica, you are a wonder,” Adrienne said and stood on the kick-starter. “En avant.”

  The big V-twin engine roared into life, but then the sound faded to an oddly muted drone. The inside of the helmet seemed to adjust itself slightly, pressing more tightly against her ears.

  “Automatic selective sound-damping,” Adrienne said, tapping her ear; the voice came through faultlessly from the mike in the helmet’s chin-bar. “Customized experimental military system, filters things like engine noise. I just love modern technology!”

  Ellen mounted; the touring machine had actual if sketchy seats, enough to cradle the butt and hips at least, and her back was against a padded rest. The Shadowspawn’s torso pressed her, and she could just see over her helmet.

  “Arms around my waist,” Adrienne said. “It’s the closest you’ll get to a seat belt.”

  She obeyed hesitantly, feeling the other’s back pushing against her breasts and belly through the down jacket’s fabric, and the taut muscle beneath the leather as she gripped.

  “It’s a bit late to be shy, chérie,” Adrienne observed. “Hang on!”

  “Eeek!”

  She did, gripping convulsively as the big machine seemed to hang on its spinning, smoking rear wheel for an instant, then came down and caromed out of the little lane like a wet melon seed squeezed between two fingers.

  “Whooooop! Whooooop!” Adrienne caroled.

  The cycle leaned far over as they cut right, dodging a delivery truck. Speed built to a blur, and the wind tugged at her head. She hugged desperately, hands joining below the other’s ribs as they headed south. After a few moments that was for sheer warmth as well as safety. The air caught at her jacket and made it flutter sharply, like an awning in a high breeze, a continuous crackling sound; the vibration sank into her bones, with the deeper note of the machine beneath.

  “We’re on Highway 46 here,” Adrienne said as they turned west. “Pretty country, but it’s even nicer when we hit the coast.”

  The only parts of California Ellen had seen before had been the Bay area and LA. This was pretty, in a way different from both the forested East and the austere piñon-and-juniper high desert around Santa Fe.

  Here rolling green hills rose out of the occasional patch of flat land, like a rumpled padded quilt on an unmade bed. Tongues of oakwood and trees she couldn’t identify rose up the notches in the high ground, with sheep grazing in ridge-top meadows. Vineyards pruned and stumpy for winter made geometry across the lower slopes with the first yellow traces of wild mustard beneath, and blazing orchards of cherry and almond were slashes of color against the green. The smells were fresh and moist and the air grew a little warmer as the sun rose; now and then there was an overwhelming sweetness of blossom or a pungent waft from livestock.

  Adrienne drove the near-empty road and through the little hamlets with a hard decisive snap that was somehow never jerky, overtaking whatever came her way with a surge that pressed her back against the passenger and Ellen back against the rest. Uneasily, she remembered that Adrian handled the sports cars he loved in very much the same fearless way, as if he were pushing his own nerve and muscle down the controls into the machine.

  She peered over the other’s shoulder at the all-glass screen controls; they were doing ten miles above the speed limit, on this winding roadway.

  “Customized engine,” Adrienne said after a while. “Four-stroke fifty-degree V-Twin with 1731 cc displacement. Single overhead camshafts with four valves per cylinder, self-adjusting cam chains, hydraulic lifters. But they jiggered the compression ratio for me and the frame’s special alloy, lighter than the standard. I think I’ll give Jose one for his birthday; he loves it.”

  I don’t speak Mechanic, Ellen thought.

  Then her mind stuttered slightly. It was impossible to censor the way you talked to yourself!

  “You sound like some of my elders.” Adrienne laughed; there was a hard edge to it, but Ellen didn’t think it was directed at her. “A lot of them don’t like machinery either. At least machinery that doesn’t involve shoveling coal into a boiler.”

  “The ones who make the middle-management demonic career path hell?” she asked.

  “But yes!”

  She took one hand off the handlebars to gesture for an instant, and Ellen felt the muscles in her thighs and stomach clench in sudden terror. Was that a wobble in the front wheel?

  “Also, their attitudes. Few people change much past their twenties. In this
my breed and yours are not so different. Perhaps in the Old Stone Age this was of no consequence; one millennium was much like another. But now matters are different, and that, my sweet, is a matter which concerns you.”

  “Why? You’d all want to . . . drink my blood, wouldn’t you? Torture me and mess with me?”

  “Yes. But they rule the world, remember? And not just at dinner-time.”

  “Oh.”

  Ellen winced. That explains a number of things.

  “Imagine again; the ruling elders grew up in the time of the First World War, more or less—a little older than my parents. That was when Shadowspawn powerful enough to survive death became more than a very few. Their parents were Victorians, born before Bismarck’s men shelled Paris.”

  Ellen gave a sly chuckle. “Sexist assholes?”

  “Oh, you have no idea. Exactly two women on the Council, in this day and age!”

  “How many on the Council altogether?”

  “Thirteen, naturally! Though that is not the worst of it. They have nineteenth-century habits of thought. They do not think of interlink-ages and unintended consequences and feedback cycles. This matter of you humans overbreeding and ruining the world, for example.”

  “You’re environmentalists?” she said incredulously.

  “If you plan to live . . . well, exist . . . for ten thousand years or more, you really do not have much choice, my sweet. But les vieux, they also just hate the modern world, many of them. It is not the place in which they grew. They do not understand it; they feel alien in this century, alien to the buildings and the clothes and the music, the very fabric of life. They want the changes to stop. Hence their solution to the problem is . . . far too drastic.”

  “Drastic?”

  “They plan to destroy human civilization. Let only a few hundred million survive, as peasants.”

  Eeerk! Ellen thought; for a moment she forgot the rushing passage of the roadway.

  That’s insane, it’s got to be insane even by . . . vampire-monster-sadist-werewolf-Saruman-on-steroids standards!

  “Precisely. Quelle connerie! I like the modern world. Well, much of it. Yes, yes, there are too many humans; they must be trimmed back, faster than our pressure on governments to promote birth control can accomplish—”