Adrian was in white linen shirt and pants and thin leather shoes on bare feet, with sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, tanned nearly brown. Ellen checked herself and found that she was in a cool pale traveling ensemble of silk blouse and cotton skirt, with elegant leather-strapped sandals fastened with wrought-gold buttons. A white woven hat with a trailing band rested on the table, and loose strands of hair sun-bleached almost as pale lay over her shoulders.
Can’t say he doesn’t have good taste! she thought.
A waiter approached.
“Un Limoncello, per favore,” Adrian said in fluent but slightly accented Italian.
“Subito, signoe. Bello gelato, naturalmente . . . Noi lo facciamo con i limoni che crescono qui davanti, è una specialità, qui lo sanno tutti. Lo prende anche la signora?”
Adrian looked over and raised a brow at her. A little dazed, she nodded. He answered the man:
“Si, certo. E dei biscotti di pasta di mandorle.”
The pale yellow liqueur came, and the plate of marzipan-like biscuits made with ground almonds, not as sweet or nutty as the American equivalent but sharper-flavored. She sipped and nibbled.
“I was going to say this is a bit dreamlike, but that’s sort of redundant, isn’t it?” she said. “Everything even tastes real. Realer than real. The people?”
“Not really people. Made from edited memories. Tangible in this state, but not . . . self-actuated.”
She nodded. “I’m asleep, I think. The last thing I remember is lying on my face and Adrienne sort of . . . slapping me on the butt and telling me I’d earned some rest.”
Adrian looked away, taking a draw on his cigarette; he held it between thumb and the first two fingers, next to his palm.
That’s why he never took me seriously when I said he should quit! Ellen realized suddenly. He wasn’t really brushing me off; he can’t get cancer or anything. That would be bad luck, and he doesn’t have that! Wait a minute, it just occurred to me, they can cure cancer and they never told anyone?
“Adrian,” she said dryly, and he looked back at her. “I like the fact that you’re concerned for me. It’s sweet and wonderful, actually. But you can spare me the pity.”
He flushed. “Sorry,” he said. Then he smiled slightly. “I seem to be saying that a lot around you, Ellie.”
She nodded. “I’m already an abuse survivor . . . well, no, I’m back to being an abuse victim, actually, since I’ve been kidnapped by an abuser. But I’m not a child anymore, and I know the coping strategies, Adrian. And I know they’re strategies, not something wrong with me. It’s a lot harder with someone who can read your mind, but at least I don’t have the sense of betrayal I did before. I’m in no danger of Stockholm syndrome. I know all about that.”
“OK,” he said. Then he touched one finger to his forehead and flicked it out, a sort of sketchy salute. “I should remember that you’re not just the damsel in distress. Sorry . . . touché.”
“I need to know how this link thing works.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s stronger when I want it to be, or when we’re physically closer, or when you’re feeling . . . any intense emotion or sensation.”
Ellen laughed involuntarily; she clapped a hand to her mouth.
“My turn to say sorry. You mean you could . . . could feel it when your sister was scaring the daylights out of me on that motorcycle or drinking my blood or when we were in bed?”
“Yes. Not all the time, and secondhand and much more faintly, but yes.”
“That sounds sort of . . . perverse.”
“It is, even by Shadowspawn standards; it’s one reason they’re so . . . jealous . . . about their, ah—”
“Lucies. Stop trying to shield my delicate sensibilities, Adrian! I hated that attitude when we were together, but you didn’t listen. Right now I am a lucy. It’s not my fault and I don’t feel disgraced about it. Angry and frightened, yes. Defiled, no.”
“Touché. I throttled back as much as I could. It’s . . . a very strong link. Much more so than I expected. More so than she understands, I think—and hope. She almost certainly doesn’t know about this, that we can communicate. But she knows I’ll be getting flashes of emotion and physical sensations.”
Ellen shivered. “I hope to God she doesn’t decide hurting me more would be the way to get back at you.”
“I also . . . Me too. This environment scrambles my linguistic reflexes!”
A thought occurred to her. “How come you all seem to be so multilingual?”
“It’s easy for us. The language center in our brains is enlarged and linked to the telepathic faculty.”
Ellen shivered, reminded of a voice saying, I’m learning Georgian.
“Time to fill you in on what’s been going on,” she said, putting briskness into her tone. “You know about the motorcycle trip? Well, when we got to San Francisco—”
“Name of a black dog! We were probably less than a mile apart, and her laughing at me all the while! If I’d known where, I could have gone after her.”
Ellen winced, and he cursed, first in French and then in a string of other languages.
“Ouch,” she said. “Hadn’t thought of that. Anyway, Adrienne took me to this restaurant and we met a friend of hers. A woman named Michiko—”
“Tōkairin Michiko?”
Ellen shivered again. “Yes. Talk about scary. She wanted to kill me, Adrian—wanted to kill me with your sister. I think she would have liked to do it right then and there.”
Adrian nodded, looking down at the table and taking a sip of the yellow drink, chilled in its small ceramic cup.
“Yes. They’re blood-siblings. It’s . . . sort of a mix of friends, fictive kinship, and lovers. And it involves joint kills. That’s a very . . . intense experience.”
“They were talking about some plan to, to wipe out half the human race with smallpox, some genetically engineered variety, they called it parasmallpox. And I got this horrible feeling that that was better than some other plan they were criticizing!”
“It was,” Adrian said grimly. “The other plan involves EMP . . . a way to burn out all the technologies the world depends on. The Council of Shadows calls it Operation Trimback, Option One. I suspect it wouldn’t work as smoothly as they think.”
Ellen nodded quickly. “Yes! That was what Adrienne’s been saying. She doesn’t want that—drastic, she called it—a plan. She’s angry with this other plan. Michiko was the same way. I think she . . . looks up to Adrienne. Admires her. But I wasn’t catching everything they said.”
Ellen frowned, concentrating. “There was something about field tests, in the Congo.”
An appalling thought occurred to her. “Adrian . . . does that mean they were testing it on people?”
“Yes.” Gently: “Ellie, Shadowspawn are the ones responsible for virtually everything monstrously bad in the past hundred years. Just before World War One, there was a great scandal in Europe because one Alsatian shopkeeper was put in jail for one weekend for offending a Prussian officer. That was before the Council secured the world.”
Ellen shivered. “She said more, about drugs and vaccines, and stockpiling them.”
“That fits,” Adrian said.
“So after we left the restaurant, we went to what she called the Brézé town house.”
Adrian’s brows rose. “That used to be on Nob Hill, but it was destroyed twenty years ago, when the Tōkairin ousted the Brézés as the foremost Shadowspawn clan on the West Coast . . . long story.”
“This was new. The building wasn’t more than ten or fifteen years old max, a big luxury hotel with . . . sort of super-condos on the upper floors. The town house was a two-story penthouse on the top of the tower, huge, glass walls, pools . . . like something out of a Modernist fantasy of Haroun al-Rashid’s bachelor pad.”
Adrian cursed again. “The St. Regis Hotel! We were within walking distance of each other. And that’s where she launched herself when she stooped on me.”
; Ellen felt her eyes growing wider and wider as he described the meeting and the fight that followed.
“You can . . . you can actually turn into animals?” she said. “Literally into fur-feathers-and-fangs actual animals?”
“Technically it’s . . . well, for all practical purposes, yes. As long as we have . . . les vieux say, taken the spirit of the beast into ourselves. In fact, it’s a DNA sample you need. Nearby. Swallowing it is best and most permanent.”
“Then . . . those Norse berserkers . . . Sigurd with the wolf-skin he wore . . .”
“Mostly just psychotics with delusions. But some, yes, they had enough of the inheritance to do it.”
This is truly weird, she thought. But hey, Ellen, weird is the new normal for you.
Then she went on: “OK, she took me back from the restaurant to the town house, we had a swim, a sort of strange philosophical chat which scared me quite a bit, she led me off to bed and we had lots of hot sweaty writhing sex and a little feeding—”
She smiled with a crooked twist of the lips at his carefully controlled expression:
“Adrian, hold the pity again, will you? Yeah, I’d much rather she couldn’t force me to do things. Being helpless is not fun, not in reality. I want it all to stop, and badly. But if she is going to make me do things, which right now can’t be avoided, forcing me to eat wonderful elaborate meals and then have hour upon hour of multiple orgasms just so totally beats ‘feeling nauseated piss-your-pants bowel-loosening terror’ and ‘screaming in agony as sensitive tissues tear.’ And . . . the high from the feeding doesn’t actually damage me, does it?”
“It’s addictive.”
“I know about that, and I’ve gone cold turkey on things before when I thought they were getting too much of a hold on me. I was even a smoker for a little while and sweated bullets stopping. That’s why I kept getting on your case about the cigarettes; and it made me crave one myself in the worst way.”
“You never told me that you’d smoked. See, I am not the only one to keep secrets!” he said, trying for lightness and just about achieving it.
Ellen leaned over and prodded him in the ribs. “That’ll teach you to ignore a lady’s complaints! And I have to watch it with alcohol too. But the . . . drug . . . isn’t physically harmful, is it?”
“No. As far as I know, there are no harmful effects apart from the feelings it causes, and the craving. It evolved to make the victim willing to be bled, not to hurt them.”
“OK. It might totally screw the head of someone who didn’t know what was happening, but I can tell the difference between the way the feeding makes me feel friendly and actually being friendly; I know that even when it’s happening. The . . . effect itself actually feels pretty good.”
His smile was broader, and he made a gesture with both hands and bowed his head slightly.
“You are a stronger person than I thought, Ellen. Many would be totally shattered in your position, but you are keeping your wits about you. Forgive me for underestimating you.”
In fact . . . she looked at him speculatively. You know, buster, if you’d approached it the right way and just told me about things instead of trying to protect me all the time . . . I might have surprised you. I might yet.
“Provisional forgiveness given. OK, I go to sleep—I was surprised how easy that was even at the time because I was feeling shivery and jazzed, the way you are when you’re tired but can’t sleep—”
“Partly a Wreaking.”
“OK, she zapped me into enchanted slumber, went out on the terrace again, turned into this big-ass eagle—”
“Her body stayed in the bed; that’s one reason she put you under a Wreaking. We’re . . . very helpless in that state.”
Ellen’s eyes narrowed, and she surprised herself with the flood of savage images that filled her mind for an instant.
“Oooooh, wouldn’t I just like to get her helpless. With a hammer and a sharp wooden stake!”
“Ellie, you don’t need a wooden—”
Ellen laughed. “It would still work if I drove it through her heart, wouldn’t it?”
“On a tranced body? Quite well.”
“And then I could hit her in the head with the hammer for a while and see how funny Countess Comic-ula thought that was!”
Adrian laughed, but looked at her seriously a moment later: “If you get the chance, take it. But don’t hesitate, strike to the heart or brain, and then strike again and again. We are . . . very hard to kill, with anything but a silver weapon.”
“Silver makes it easy?”
“About as easy as killing an ordinary person. The Power has no grip on it. We don’t know why.”
“I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never even really wanted to kill anyone, just get away from them however I could, but I’ll make an exception for you-know-who. So, she was . . . her body was lying there?”
“Yes, like this, in a sort of coma.”
He halted for a moment and crossed his forearms, each hand resting on the opposite shoulder, before he went on:
“The aetheric form went out onto the terrace in her default day-walking shape. Then it waited until it sensed the Wreaking turning Hajime against me, transformed and attacked. You have to be careful in animal form. You’re . . . still you, but you are the beast as well. It can be hard to retain purpose.”
“Thanks. And so Adrienne swooped down to rescue Michiko’s grandfather. Who she hates and despises. Who Michiko sort of hates, I think, or at least resents an awful lot.”
“We’re not a very social species and I think Tōkairin Hajime hasn’t quite realized what it means. His grandchildren are so much closer to pureblood. Seventy-five percent and up. He’s about two-thirds, and he was raised by people who were less than half. There’s more human in him, and he’s trying to run his clan as if it were made up of humans.”
“But then why did she rescue him?” Ellen puzzled. “I don’t think she’s the sort who just swoops in to save the day.”
Adrian frowned and sipped again at his drink. “That’s the question; though maybe what she stopped was him spitting me on that damned silver-plated katana. Was she trying to use me to kill him without any blame attaching to her? But then as you say . . . or was she trying to get credit with Hajime? But what for? And she didn’t try to pursue me in winged form—that eagle looked fast, and it could have twisted the head off any bird-form I have. There is some elaborate game here, one with multiple strands, multiple objectives.”
“Which right now we don’t know. How long do I have here?”
“Probably a while. It’s natural for us to sleep most of the day and wake in the afternoon.” A small smile. “Notice how many mad dictators had work patterns like that? Not a coincidence.”
“Then . . . this may sound odd, Adrian, but can we take a walk? I’d like that.”
He smiled, the charming expression with a hint of shyness she liked, and they rose and walked down the steep streets hand in hand. He bought them gelato; they fed the pigeons in front of the cathedral, and she explained the details of the frescos—his knowledge of art was broad but without system, a jackdaw’s accumulation picked up in spare moments. He seemed at first amused and then impressed as she told—showed—him the links between the High Medieval techniques in the thirteenth-century building and the Quattrocento and the Renaissance.
“We should have talked about this more,” he said at last.
“Says the man who used to derail any conversation that wasn’t commonplace!”
Adrian laughed ruefully and ran a hand over his hair, taking off his sunglasses and hanging them through the neck of his shirt.
“When you begin on a basis of lies . . . even lies of omission . . . the areas you cannot talk about grow and grow, I find.”
“We don’t have to lie now. It’s . . . almost worth it all.”
“I’m glad to be honest, but I don’t think it’s worth what you’ve gone through, Ellie.”
“I said almost.”
T
hey wandered on by the busy harbor, amid a smell of fishing-boats and yachts, tourists and locals and thin, wandering, wary cats. The sun declined into the Mediterranean, and the terraces of stone and stucco above them took on a green-blue translucence. At last she took a deep breath and asked:
“Adrian, after this is over, if—when—I’m back in, ummm, real life, do you want to try again? With the two of us.”
“If you do. I would like that very much. But—”
“Don’t tell me how I’m going to be feeling then, Adrian! I don’t know that yet!”
He laughed, a wholehearted sound. “Touché once more, Ellie!” He took her in his arms; he was just an inch taller than her, perfect height for a kiss. It grew lingering.
“Dammit, I don’t want to go back!”
“It’s time.”
“All right. Zap me back, then. And we’re going to win!”
Adrian slept, woke in darkness to stumble to the bathroom, hardly noticing that his leg would bear him once more; drank enormously from bottled water by the side of the bed, slept again and woke clearheaded, the wounds itching less fiercely.
And smiling, he thought for a moment. And it has been a while since that happened.
“You’re looking a mite more cheerful,” Harvey said.
He was sitting at the table, making sandwiches from commercial rolls and convenience-store cold cuts. His coach-gun was on the table by his hand, and Adrian was awake enough to feel the slight drifting chill of a no-see Wreaking, not powerful but enormously subtle.
“It’s calories,” the Texan said, jerking a thumb towards the pile he’d made. “That’s all that can be said for it. Except that the preservatives will keep your corpse lookin’ pretty without the expense of an embalmer.”
“It is to food as the Red Cross supply is to blood,” Adrian agreed.
He limped carefully to the table and looked at the platter with disgust. But he ate, trying not to think of the taste.
“At least it’s morally permissible to eat decent food, most of the time. It compensates for the foul blood, a little.”
“You’re still looking cheerful and you just bit into that so-called salami.”
A Taint in the Blood Page 20