A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “That was you?”

  “Of course. Do you think the Chinese would have given up hope of sons on their own? And our sabotage of the economy—”

  “That was you guys too?”

  “Chérie, you thought it was by accident that all over the world so many intelligent people made the same mistakes at the same time? Yes, these measures are inadequate. We must intervene more directly. But I do not want only a few peasants to survive. Peasants are boring!”

  Her voice rose. “I like fast cars, and motorcycles, and my jet! I like towns where the streets are not rivers of shit! I like movies and the Web and digital music libraries and BlackBerries and video-on-demand! I like a good selection of lucies, ones who do not have lice and who can carry on an intelligent conversation and have interesting, sensitive minds to torment and degrade! I adore the Louvre, and the Getty, and the Hermitage and the Rijksmuseum and good restaurants and fashion shows in Paris or Milan and Château Lafite Rothschild and the London theater!”

  The voice rose again. “Idiots! Izidingidwane! Baka tare! Fossilized imbeciles! Cretans! Èrbǎiwǔ! ”

  By then they were moving north on Highway 1, the narrow two-lane coastal strip. The torrent of multilingual insults melded into a sheer howl of rage, not deafening only because the headphones damped it. Acceleration rammed the Shadowspawn’s dense compact torso back into her, and the engine was loud even through the helmet as the wheel screamed against the earth. Everything blurred around them as the cycle surged forward.

  “No!” Ellen screamed herself. “You’ll kill us both, nonononono!”

  They took the curve lying over so far that her left knee nearly brushed the pavement. A minivan loomed up in front of them, and the motorcycle skimmed between it and the rocky cliff-face of the roadway, close enough that she could have reached out and touched either one, if her arms hadn’t been locked around the other’s waist. A swerve outward and another leaning turn, with asphalt rushing by so close to the right that she could see every crack from deferred maintenance. She couldn’t even close her eyes or look away as death loomed up in the form of a rust-eaten Honda Civic with three horrified faces staring through the glass.

  A screech, a skid, a rooster-tail of sparks and they were off the road and off the earth. Thud and they landed again, the gas suspension on the rear wheel clanging as the piston met the stops, then corkscrewing down a rough slope of grass and sand towards the beach and the ocean. Adrienne standing, crouched to throw her weight from side to side to keep the massive touring bike from overturning. Swerving in a sideways break that threw white plumes twice head-height from both wheels as they scrubbed off velocity.

  It came to a halt, and silence crashed in as Adrienne killed the engine, kicked down the stand and leaped to the ground. She danced around the cycle screeching exultantly, tearing off her helmet to let her black mane fly in the wind off the blue, blue Pacific, punching her fists in the air.

  “Whooop! Whooop! I am supreme! Now that is the way to burn off tensions!”

  Ellen half-fell, half-crawled, half-dragged herself off, swaying as her knees threatened to buckle, dropping the helmet at her feet as she gasped in cool salt air. It felt icy on the sweat that drenched her face.

  “I nearly peed myself! I nearly peed myself!”

  She clutched at her stomach, fighting nausea for a long moment, staggering a few steps away and back.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

  Adrienne was laughing, eyes blazing and spots of red in her cheeks. Ellen braced her hands on the seat of the motorcycle, straining to control her breathing.

  “You could have killed us ten times over!” she said, voice trembling.

  “Only five, if you count the ones where I had to use the Power to shift probabilities. The rest? Matchless skill and reflexes like a leopard, ma douce. Oh, if only you could see your face! And your mind, it’s like an eye that has stared into the sun!”

  “Stop laughing at me!”

  Adrienne did. The smile died away, and the gold-flecked brown eyes locked with hers. She sank down with her back against a rock that jutted up through the sand of the beach and patted her lap.

  “Come and lie across my knees like this,” she said, her voice husky with a growling undertone. “That was an effort. Now I’m a little hungry again.”

  Run, Ellen’s mind whispered suddenly.

  The fear of crashing into rock and metal and feeling her bones crackle like overstressed bamboo suddenly gave way to something older and more primal. A hundred thousand years of instinct spoke:

  Run. Hunter, predator, walking death, it smells your blood, runrunrunRUN!

  The Shadowspawn laughed. “I’m twice as fast as you and half again as strong,” she said, in that deadly velvet tone. “I’d chase you down in ten yards. Or I could just use the Power and make your pants fall and trip you. That would be fun, but not for you, and you wouldn’t like the mood I’d be in then. Come here, lucy.”

  Ellen felt a whimper building up in her throat, and suppressed it. A remembered sentence ran through her mind:

  Make the experience of feeding on you as satisfying for our lady demon as possible, because your life does depend on it.

  “Excellent advice.”

  She forced herself to walk towards the waiting smile and moistened lips and the fixed eyes, each step as slow and heavy as running in a dream. She sank down on the sand. Breath and heartbeat fluttered.

  “To my right, facing me, chérie. Now lean across. Lay your head on my left shoulder, arm around my waist, the other around my neck.”

  She did, and knees came up to support her back. The collar pressed against her face with a buttery-soft smell of fine leather and a slight acrid one of sweat and the scent of verbena hair wash. A hand stroked her nape, her throat, and then cupped her jaw, holding it firmly so that her neck arched. The other hand rested on her hip. Lips touched the hollow below the angle of her jaw, soft and wet, and the tongue. A breathy whisper:

  “This won’t hurt at all.”

  A hardness, teeth pressing against taut skin. The feeding bite is verra precise. Terror built to a peak; she could feel herself quivering as tears threatened to break free.

  “Just imagine I’m Adrian . . .”

  A sting, sharp and slight.

  A torrent of emotions fell through her mind, but her consciousness refused to analyze them, and they died away. Suction against the cut, steady and insistent. Coolness spread out from the incision, as if all the fear and tension were leaving her body with the blood. She relaxed with a slight tremulous sigh and felt her mind slow, spinning downward into a bright wash of no-thought. Her eyes fluttered half-shut, filtering the bright sunlight off the white sand and the glitter of water into a blur; there was no drowsiness, only a complete disinterest in moving from where she was.

  The gentle liquid sounds of the feeding were distinct; and a soft purring growl, more felt than heard where Adrienne’s throat pressed against hers, working with the swallows. The shsshshshssh of waves and gull-cries ran beneath it. At last the mouth lifted from her neck. There was another slight sting as the air struck the wound; Adrienne put a finger against it and the sting faded to a very faint itch for an instant and then was gone.

  The Shadowspawn’s head tilted back. Ellen could see her turn her face upward with eyes closed for an instant, lips parted. They were red with the blood, and beads of it trickled from the corners of her mouth. The tongue came out slowly to lick them up.

  “You know,” Ellen said in an abstracted murmur into the other’s shoulder, “I can tell I’m going to be frightened and grossed out in a little while, but right now I’m not. You look so happy.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  “Good. It makes me feel sort of nice.” She sighed. “I can see how this gets addictive. A floating drifting feeling, like the afterglow. How did I taste?”

  Adrienne smiled and kissed her lingeringly; there was a faint flavor of salt and metal to her mouth.

  “It’s a pity you can’t apprecia
te it. Two distinct layers of fear, and anger, dread, longing, resignation, courage . . . like a very, very good beef bourguignon garnished with sautéed pearl onions and mushrooms. The sort cooked with a really fine Burgundy and a bouquet garni from a farm stall. Fresh egg noodles with it, and the sort of pain Poilâne bread you get in the morning at that place on the rue de Cherche-Midi, with farm butter. Paired with a reasonable Saint-Émilion; even a Château Ausone, perhaps.”

  “I’m . . . glad I’m a gourmet meal, at least,” Ellen said.

  “Honest cuisine bourgeois, but very good of its kind.”

  She felt as if she were flying in a dream, one of the slow ones, down towards normalcy. It was in sight below, but not there yet. There was no hurry. Right now, normalcy had serious drawbacks. They rested quietly for a few minutes, listening to the gulls and the surf. Then Adrienne chuckled, rose, and pulled her up by her hand, dusting sand off them both.

  “It’s a lot more pleasant for you when you relax into the bite, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I can move now, but I feel . . . like I’m laundry just through the wash. All light. Don’t you get a charge out of stalking and pouncing, though?”

  Adrienne nodded. “This isn’t quite as . . . hot . . . for me, but it’s more nuanced, too. Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat. Yeah, now that you mention it, I am hungry. I only had some milk and fruit before I went for the run.”

  “Let’s see what Monica packed in the way of solid food. Ah, excellent! Two baguettes, butter, tapenade, thin-sliced ham, some Appenzeller style cheese, olives, dried figs, all Casa Sangre organic homemade, and two beers.”

  She stood looking out over the Pacific. “Pity I have an appointment in San Francisco. It’s a pretty spot to linger.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Adrian watched.

  This is not real, he thought. Then: No. It has not happened yet, and might not. But it is very real.

  A file of trucks and two Humvees passed down a street in San Francisco—Market, he thought. The soldiers in the utility vehicles were in the uniforms and body-armor and equipment of the US Army, often ill-fitting as if salvaged from others and worn for want of better. The trucks were civilian, dirty and battered-looking, on the edge of failure from bad maintenance. Every building was closed. Not far away a body lay half-out of a broken shop window, two bottles of liquor still resting below it with the contents mostly spilled. Flies buzzed, and the wind blew through the steel-and-glass canyons, but there was only a distant hint of engine noise. Parked cars along the edges rested on the rims of flat tires, but the center was clear except for patches of broken glass.

  A poster in red-and-black on one intact plate-glass expanse shouted: Emergency Quarantine Regulations—Please Read! Its edges were ragged, as if it had been there for some time.

  The vehicles’ exhaust was faint; stronger still was a sweetish-rank scent he knew well.

  The little convoy stopped. An officer dismounted, and then a short slim figure Adrian recognized as his sister. She was in the same uniform and wore a pistol at her hip, but without the standard insignia of rank. Instead a black patch on her shoulder held the image of an upthrust three-tined golden trident, jagged and irregular and barbed. If he’d looked closer he sensed that it would have been held within a rayed sun, black-on-black. It was the glyph that had once been the secret sigil of the Order of the Black Dawn, and for a hundred and twenty years that of the Council of Shadows.

  “Two days at least,” Adrienne said coolly, looking down at the body. “In this climate, possibly as much as a week. Have the workers load it, Colonel Hawkins, but I think this district is more or less clear.”

  The officer was a hard-faced black man in his thirties. He had the blank eyes of someone who has seen things he can neither forget nor deal with, and is running on a precarious mental slope to keep his balance. He hesitated, and she went on impatiently:

  “It’s quite safe, Colonel Hawkins. Look.”

  She stooped and touched the bloated flesh. Men and women in overalls and dirty white face-masks and heavy plastic gloves jumped down from one of the trucks and took ankles and wrists. They carried the body over to another truck and slung it in with an efficiency that spoke of long practice. It landed with a soft thud.

  “Then the plague really is over, ma’am?” the soldier asked. “Christ, I thought it would go on until nobody was left.”

  “Quite over, Colonel,” she said. “Not one person who’s received the new vaccine has developed Dalager’s Parasmallpox; and we have more doses on hand than the remaining population of the world. There are still eighty million people in this country alone. Nine-tenths have been vaccinated already, the rest will be by the end of spring, and we can end the quarantine lockdown and begin to rebuild. With the new World Council to allocate resources we can do it everywhere. Rebuild on the new basis.”

  “Thank God,” the man said; his shoulders slumped a little. “I don’t know Thing One about this Council, the way communications have been screwed up the last couple of months. We haven’t even heard from National Command HQ in weeks, just Regional in Redding. But if the Council’s ended the plague, if they can do that . . . well, they’ve got my vote. Geneva can be capital of the world and good luck to them.”

  He laughed, a rusty sound. “Though with a World Council running things now, I may be out of a job.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “The world cannot become that peaceful, truly. Not as long as human beings are human beings.”

  The man snorted and nodded. “Damn right. I’ve seen . . . enough of that lately. People will be crazy for a while yet and then they’ll be, well, people.”

  Adrienne gave a long slow smile. “I’m sure the Council will find a need for your services. There are always . . . recalcitrant elements. Keeping the peace will be your task. Keeping our peace. You’ll have . . . powerful new backup, too.”

  The Seeing cut off. He drifted in darkness; shapes rushed by him, like subway trains roaring down through a darkened station. Adrian pushed, looking for purpose in a universe of chaos. Then he could see again.

  See, he thought. I am Seeing.

  The same street showed, and on the same day and hour. But here the buildings leaned crazily, scorch marks showing where flames had burst out of windows. One had fallen across the intersection, and lay in a tangle of girders and shattered concrete still held together by the rebar. Cars littered the street, many with their doors and hoods still open, stopped where they had been stricken all at once. A group of men and women waited in the rubble, guns and clubs and knives clutched in their hands; they were skeletally thin, and wore a patchwork of rags and hair and dirt. He could smell them, the scents of madness and bodies sick and starving.

  Other men came down the street, dressed in tough nondescript uniforms and carrying assault rifles and grenade launchers. Their leader stopped, raised a hand in a gesture Adrian recognized, spoke a Word. The ragamuffins tensed; then one sprang up, screaming and slapping at himself, then gouging his own eyes into bloody holes in his face. Three more simply slumped over, dead before they hit the ground. Another leveled a pump-action shotgun at the newcomers and pulled the trigger.

  Crang!

  The shells in the magazine gang-fired, and he ran three steps waving the spouting stumps of his arms below a ruined face and then toppled to lie still. The rest broke in panic, scuttling like rats back into the tangle of ruins. The newcomers opened fire, short accurate bursts, the empty shells sparkling in the sunlight as they spun up and the flat elastic crackcrackcrack echoing off the dead buildings. The shoonk . . . boom! of grenade launchers sounded.

  Their leader stopped and removed his helmet. Pale hair showed beneath, pale eyes, a sharp-nosed Slavic face, though his followers were of half a dozen races. His eyes were faded blue, with tiny golden flecks visible only when the light struck at an angle.

  “Kakoy naverh trahaviy!” he said, with limitless disgust in his tones.

  Adrian’s observing mind translated
automatically:

  “What a fuckup! ”

  “We return,” he continued in English. “There’s obviously nothing worthwhile here.”

  The pointed nose wrinkled at the corpses, and his upper lip rose to reveal his teeth.

  “Not even any clean blood, and I am hungry. We go!”

  Adrian sat upright—or tried to. The restraints around the wounds in his forearm and thigh stopped him, and the tubes and holders rattled where lines dripped plasma and saline and carefully metered drugs into him. He sank back with a hiss at the sharp stabbing pain and looked around the room by rolling his head from side to side.

  “Hospital,” he muttered.

  The institutional smell, clean and dismal, was unmistakable; the tray of congealing food somewhere near made it even plainer with its scents of overdone green beans and reconstituted mashed potatoes. Green-beige walls, linoleum on the floors, tracks on the ceiling for privacy curtains to be drawn around the beds. This was a smallish room, set up for two patients.

  Waking up in hospitals without being sure exactly how he’d gotten there was no new experience. But . . .

  Wait. I’m retired. I haven’t done this shit for years and years.

  Memory crashed in, the killers with the silvered knives in the Japanese bathhouse. Ellen. His sister.

  Ellen woke me up. I could feel it. It’s been a while. I was deep in trance, and then the link with Ellen.

  He shivered, and continued to flog his mind back into working order. There was a drained feeling to it, as if he’d been Wreaking at high level without blood, forcing the Power to feed on himself.

  Harvey, he thought.

  The other man was lying on the next bed with his boots off, limply asleep. Adrian blinked in shock at how old he looked, silver stubble showing on his cheeks and the eyes fallen in a little.

  When did that happen?

  In his mind’s eye Harvey Ledbetter was always a vibrant thirty-five, a tireless mass of gristle and bone and lean muscle and sharp penetrating blue eyes. Adrian was alert now, however weak his body. He let his head fall back on the pillow and closed his eyes, because that weakness made them prickle with half-shed tears.