A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  She gave a sideways glance and rolled a hip into a playful bump against Ellen’s.

  “Well, it’s been a long exciting day, but the night is young, and I’m naturally nocturnal. Let’s have some fun, you and I.”

  “Do you want to . . . hurt me . . . that way?”

  “Not tonight.”

  Her hand stroked Ellen’s back slowly, from the neck to the base of the spine and back, over and over.

  I mustn’t tense up. Remember what Dr. Duggan said.

  A flicker of another voice; it slipped out of her mind before she was conscious of it.

  I mustn’t. My life depends on it.

  Instead she made her back arch and tried to push everything but the mere sensation out of her mind.

  There’s nothing wrong with having your back stroked, if you just think about the thing itself.

  Adrienne stepped behind her and began massaging her taut neck and shoulders. Strong fingers worked at the long muscles along her spine.

  “Mmm,” she said aloud, and thought:

  Okay. If I’m not getting hurt, the sex doesn’t gross me out by itself. There were a couple of hookups at NYU, remember, Ellen? That was just sort of . . . bland and not worth trying again. If this were a fantasy you were having, it might even be hot. Christ, it is sort of hot, in a skanky, degrading, horrible Oh-God-please-no-no-no sort of way. You can do this.

  The velvet voice continued in her ear, a murmur: “Sometimes I will give you pain, sometimes pleasure, sometimes utter horror. Sometimes all three. Tonight it’s Option Number Two.”

  Another deep breath. “I’ll try, I’ll really try. But . . . I don’t know if I can.”

  “We’ll see.” Adrienne finished the Tokay and smiled, taking her hand and tugging her gently along. “Come, chérie, come. Let’s play.”

  An hour later she stared up at Adrienne’s face where she leaned on one elbow, their bodies touching from neck to toes. Strands of the other’s black hair stuck to her neck and breasts, tickling sweat-slick skin that felt as if it had thinned to taut foil that might burst. She tried three times to speak, gulped air and said:

  “Wha—wha—what did you do to me?”

  “Well, I would have thought that was obvious!” Adrienne chuckled. “Just now your mind was like . . . sunlight flickering through beech leaves at noon. Delightful!”

  She rested a thigh across Ellen’s; the voice was a lazy purr as she trailed damp fingers across the other’s stomach in an infinite series of tiny tight circles. Ellen felt as much anger as boneless relaxation allowed.

  “You’re doing things to my . . . my brain or something!”

  “Not unless you keep your brain here . . . Oh, you mean that special thing, as Monica puts it? No. Just feedback. I can sense every tickle of sensation, even when you’re not aware of it yourself. Especially when”—she moved—“we’re close. There’s a reason for the demon lover legend too, ma douce.”

  A memory flashed through her: a conversation with Giselle about Adrian when she was hashing out her relationship problems with her boss-slash-best-friend.

  Best sex I ever had. Like magic. Like every part of his body was reading mine, just right!

  “Just so,” Adrienne said. “It runs in the family.”

  “God, how I hate you.”

  “I know. But I’m not bland, eh?”

  “No. That was fantastic. But you’re not as good as your brother, either.”

  Ellen flinched, but the thought had been in her mind anyway. The caressing hand moved suddenly and clamped on her groin, tight enough to be just short of discomfort.

  “Let’s see if you think so when you know what that special thing is like—”

  “No! Nnnnnn! ”

  For a long instant she thought what she felt was unbearable agony. Then she made a single convulsive movement and locked in a shuddering arch, collapsed, tried to arch up again. Everything vanished except a wash of gold fire that radiated out from the contact at the center of her, out to the very ends of her being and back. She screamed as unbearable tension and its release combined in the same moment, one that stretched on and on in surging waves.

  Reality returned like a tide slowly going out. Their lips met; arms and legs intertwined.

  “I still hate you,” Ellen whispered into the curve of her neck. “I’ll always hate you.”

  “You have odd ways of showing it. You were already rosy pink, but you just went red, with spots!”

  A nuzzling at her neck. “A taste, a little sip for the flavor.”

  The sting was very slight, and her body relaxed as if she’d been plunged into a warm bath; the panting and quivering died down, which was reassuring.

  Since I thought it might be nerve damage.

  A tongue lapped up the slow trickle from the little cut, taking the drops as they welled up. Languor spread out from it, calming, a floating drifting feeling. It was less passive this time; all the sensations were distinct, and her hand tangled in the black mane, holding the other’s head to her neck.

  Oh, God, but this feels good too. Double the afterglow. It is addictive. Oh, God, if it were Adrian . . .

  “Like . . . cookies and milk?” she said when it ended.

  “No. Coconut-chocolate macaroons and eighty-year-old Tokay.”

  “God, why don’t you just do that ‘special thing’ thing to yourself, if you can?”

  Adrienne rolled over on top of her and looked down, head cocked to one side. Ellen stroked her back, rubbing hard into the muscle from beneath the shoulder blades to legs and back. The Shadowspawn wriggled and purred against her, breasts and stomach and hips touching, thigh between thighs, utterly unselfconscious in her enjoyment of the moment.

  It was disturbingly like petting a cat.

  Human-sized . . . naked . . . wet . . . musky . . . horny cat lying on top of you and licking drops of your blood off her lips. Molested by a man-eating tiger. Oh, Christ!

  “We can do that to ourselves,” Adrienne said after a moment, her eyes heavy-lidded. “But we generally don’t.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “It’s something every Shadowspawn discovers how to do around age thirteen. Then their parents put a Wreaking in their hot little minds to stop them. By the time you’re old enough to take the inhibition out, you realize that churning your own brain into puréed oatmeal with an endless feedback loop of orgasms is not a good idea.”

  “What a way to go!” Ellen said, laughing unwillingly.

  God, this is weird and awful and I do hate her passionately. On the other hand it feels great and spending the night fucking like a ferret in heat is a lot better than booze to make me forget for a while, she thought.

  Her hands and lips were moving.

  Bring it on, Princess of Darkness! Maybe I can make you scream!

  “I do like a positive attitude,” Adrienne said, and kissed her deeply.

  Her mouth tasted of salt blood and of desire. Then she knelt up and put her hands behind Ellen’s head.

  “Let’s start by trying this, then. We have a few hours until I have to spread my wings and fly. Now concentrate.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Adrian gave a gasping scream as he felt his body wake. Waken from nightmare of being caught by the sun in night-walker form, of his self peeling away in flakes and strings of fire . . .

  “Ah, you’re with us again,” Harvey said. “Give it a few minutes and maybe you’ll stop wishing you weren’t.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette, flicked it out the window and pulled over. Wet gravel pinged and crunched under the wheels as the car slowed and stopped.

  “Sorry this is cold,” he went on, sliding into the rear seat.

  He put a blood-bag from the cooler to Adrian’s mouth. It wasn’t very old, which made it a little less horrible; he must have stocked up at the hospital. Adrian gasped again, drank, retched, clapped his hands to his mouth.

  “Water,” he rasped through his fingers. “Then more.”

  He drank and swa
llowed the pills the other man shook into his hand. Then he curled around himself, hugging knees to chest. Gradually the shaking and chills and the sick pain behind his eyes and in his temples subsided, along with the missing spots and bits of glitter in his vision. He became conscious of something beside the gray misery inside his skull, took Harvey’s arm and used it to help lever himself upright; a sleeping bag he hadn’t noticed fell away from his shoulders, and he clutched it back for the warmth. The thin cotton of the hospital gown only emphasized the chill against which the car’s asthmatic heater strained.

  It was a nondescript Toyota Venza, flaking red and old enough to be unremarkable, smelling of ancient cheap stale tobacco, his own cigarettes which Harvey had presumably plundered and nameless things and children and dogs.

  Harvey probably lifted it, he thought.

  Some absent corner of his mind noted that they’d have to dump the hot vehicle; he could simply buy something from a used lot. Outside was the gray of a Central Valley wintertime tule fog, thick enough that he couldn’t see more than ten yards in any direction. The world was a bubble of cold, dark-gray nothingness, with a few bare-limbed trees along the edge of the field dripping moisture on flat black mud. The air was heavy with it, a chilly, silty smell with an undertone of manure and vegetable rot.

  “Name of a black dog, it looks and smells just precisely the way I feel!” he said.

  Inside, somewhere in the depths of his mind, there was a dull wonder that he didn’t say: I do not care. Back to Santa Fe, me, and goodbye to you, Harvey! The physical misery was enough to swamp emotion; the memory of Ellen was distant. It was a commitment of the will that kept the words unsaid.

  To love someone is not to feel loving continuously. That is impossible, for humans or Shadowspawn either. It is to always act that way.

  “Bit strenuous?” Harvey asked.

  “You might say,” he said, letting his head fall back. “What a fuckup. Adrienne was waiting for me again. After,” he added bitterly, “spending the previous four hours humping herself blind with Ellen and taking little sips of her blood in the very short inactive intervals.”

  “Bad?” Harvey said sympathetically.

  “I blocked as much as I could. She wasn’t hurting her to speak of this time, but . . . The bitch is doing it to jolt me, I know it. She doesn’t realize how close a high-link I have with Ellen, but she knows something is getting through.”

  “She is doing it to jolt you,” Harvey said. “And to score points; that I drink your milk shake thing, which she’s been doing one way or another since you two learned to walk. She’s also probably still got the hots for you, since the Calcutta thing.”

  Adrian winced. “Yes. That was a bad time.”

  “Five gets you one she doesn’t think so.”

  “And . . . to Shadowspawn that isn’t incompatible with a desire to kill me slowly. Quite the contrary.”

  “Right you are. And she was also doing it because she just likes humping herself blind and ain’t too particular about the ‘with who’ part long as they’re good-lookin’. How precisely did she wreck the meet?”

  “Preactivated Wreaking,” he said. “A bit like that one in Santa Fe, only smaller and more . . . concentrated. The trigger was complex beyond belief. It was keyed to Hajime’s state of mind; truly, the very act of deciding to listen to me. If he’d been completely hostile on his own account, nothing would have happened . . . you see the difficulty, and the cleverness of it?”

  “How was it placed? Keyed to the ground?”

  “No, dynamic. Like a floating spiderweb strung between buildings, with a seeker function. Hanging ready to exist, and when it existed there was only one place it could possibly be.”

  “Someone must have slipped her a sample of him from his mortal remains; you’d need a ground-link for something like that,” Harvey observed clinically.

  Adrian nodded: “It cascaded the probabilities of his decision negative until only the black paths were left, and he never noticed.”

  “She’s gotten better,” Harvey noted, resting his big hands on his knees and staring out the windscreen at nothing. “And she was always good.”

  Adrian nodded. “Things went downhill from there. He decided I was attacking him, went for his sword—which he really knows how to use—and I had to switch form.”

  “What to?” Harvey asked.

  “The smilodon. I wish I’d had more practice with it. The animal mind swamped me; that never would have happened with my wolf. I can think about as well with that as in man-form, now.”

  “Would the wolf have been enough muscle for the job?”

  “Well . . . no. I took out his backup men, but he’s far too good with that sword. I wanted to leave then, but the sabertooth took me over and I was just going for Hajime when she hit me.”

  “As?”

  “The biggest damned eagle I’ve ever seen, and stooping, falling out of the sky. Probably from one of the tall buildings. It must be some real species of bird to be that tangible, but . . .”

  Harvey took out his BlackBerry. “Describe? This we gotta know about, soonest.”

  “Christ, my head . . . the body was the size of a child, perhaps five feet long. Wings twice that, broad and strong, not slender like a falcon’s. Long head, strong legs and claws like a tiger, literally. Broad tail. Mostly I noticed the claws and beak.”

  He indicated his flank, and Harvey reached over to draw aside the hospital gown. The lacerations there didn’t break the skin, but they were blue and purple already, bruises that twinged savagely every time he moved, adding to the pain of his half-healed knife wounds.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the older man said when the results of his search came up, shaking his head in reluctant admiration.

  “You found something?”

  “Haast’s Eagle.”

  He showed Adrian the picture; the younger man frowned, squinted, then nodded. Harvey read, swore again.

  “New Zealand,” he said. “Went extinct about 1400, but there are skeletons and such. Guess you ain’t the only one can figure out that DNA reconstruction gets you a broader set of forms for night-walking.”

  “Most birds are too fragile to be much use in a fight against another walker,” Adrian said.

  “Right,” Harvey said. “But this little critter is pocket dynamite, ’bout the weight of a medium dog. Evolved to hunt those cow-sized flightless birds they used to have. Says here it attacked at fifty em-pee-aitch and hit about as hard as a concrete cinder block dropped on you from six stories up.”

  “That sounds very, very right, except that concrete blocks aren’t sharp.”

  Adrian rubbed his forehead. “The hell of it is that she and I do think alike. At least at the problem-solving level . . . If I hadn’t sensed the attack at the last fractional second she might have severed my spine and Hajime would have killed me before I could regenerate. When I managed to beat the bird away, she went into tiger form—Amur type, but black. I broke contact and ran; flew myself, as a peregrine.”

  He glared at Harvey. “And you kept me flying at top speed to catch this damned car with my body in it until it was nearly dawn!”

  “Better than them catching us. Somebody high-powered was looking. I’m pretty sure we lost ’em. Three gets you ten cents it’s Michiko got the tissue sample or whatever for Adrienne from her granddad that let her set that trap,” Harvey said. “You up to solid food?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll try,” he replied.

  The food was bread, butter, cheese and hard-boiled eggs. The first few mouthfuls were tentative, feeling his way around his abused stomach. Then he was ravenous, and forced himself not to gobble. When his share was finished he was able to force down more of the blood. The itching became worse in his arm and thigh, which was a good sign, and he flexed them cautiously. The bruises would heal much faster. They were only transferred tissue damage anyway, his soma-memory convincing his body that it had been attacked when he returned to the flesh.

&nbs
p; “Let’s get somewhere,” he said.

  “Son, we’re between Stockton and Bakersfield on the west side of the Central Valley. There ain’t no where to be there in, thereabouts. Specially in these days of ongoing national readjustment.”

  “I need to rest and heal. There is no alternative to that.”

  He slumped back against the door, ignoring everything until Harvey drove them into a motel and helped him into their room with an arm over his shoulder. They were the only occupants, and the mattress smelled musty with disuse, but the room was blessedly warm and dry. He lay half-comatose as Harvey stripped off the hospital gown, checked the bandages and covered him in blankets. His mind sank into the shadows.

  “Hello, Adrian,” Ellen said with a smile. “I’m almost getting used to this. Not as much of a mental shock when I . . . appear.”

  She looked around the motel room. “Ewww.”

  Adrian gestured from the bed, and the world changed. Now they were sitting; she still found that abrupt transition a little startling. There was the same sensation of doors opening in her mind, of memories three-quarters gone snapping back into place. She looked around; this was more complex than the confined landscapes she’d seen before.

  Bright sunlight shone on tiled roofs and whitewashed walls descending a steep slope beneath them to a small harbor, and a Christian cathedral in a style half-Moorish . . .

  “It’s Amalfi!” she said. “I love that town. I’ve only been once, on a package tour in university. Two days for Florence, would you believe it!”

  “It’s a favorite of mine too.” Adrian nodded, lighting himself a cigarette. “I spent some time convalescing at an alberghetto here once.”

  A striped umbrella shaded their table. Bright blue ocean stretched to the horizon, and mountains rose around the town. The air had a smell of spicy bushes and the sap of the umbrella-pine growing in the center of the little plaza, and of fruit and blossom from the rows of lemon trees to one side on the terraced hillside. Other couples and individuals chatted with lively animation and plenty of gestures, but when she tried she couldn’t quite make out words.