A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “I am such a hottie! You’re a lucky lucy, Ellen, truly.”

  Ellen swallowed and swallowed again, edging backward until as much as possible of her was crammed against the wood.

  “Of course, I admit that sometimes I can be a complete bitch, too . . .”

  This time Ellen followed the instant of transformation; a wavering glittering flow more sensed than seen through the eyes, like a prickle . . . and a bitch-wolf was sitting and watching her, yellow eyes gleaming, gray-black fur, tail curled around its front paws. She shrieked again and wrapped her arms around her shins, trying to cram herself into an invisible ball, but she couldn’t make her own eyes shut as the wolf came to its feet.

  It’s huge, it’s huge, she thought.

  Big and elegant, dark fading to brownish-cream on the belly, eyes golden. The teeth were very white as it snarled, the sound low and guttural. It stalked forward, insolently slow, head down and ears laid back, the fur bristling. Then another step, faster, faster, crouching, the long smooth leap—

  Ellen did shut her eyes then, screaming wild and high as she waited for the fangs to close in her flesh. There was a thump as weight struck the bed . . . and then nothing. Terror made Ellen will her mind to stop operating at all, but terror also made her force her eyes open.

  Adrienne was lying on her side, head up on one hand, like an impossible double vision with her slumbering physical form beyond. She winked.

  “Now admit it. That was scary. Woof-woof-woofity-woof !”

  “You vicious shit! I hate dogs. They scare me, since I was a little girl!”

  “Technically that was a hundred-and-forty-pound Canadian timber wolf, not a dog.” Adrienne laughed. “Consider it a literalized metaphor. Didn’t they cover that in your English Lit courses?”

  Then she sat up and stretched, looking down at her own body and stroking the slumbering form’s cheek. “I learned how to do this when I was about thirteen—young to be night-walking. Think of the auto-erotic possibilities.”

  Ellen forced her breath to slow. Was that the faintest rank dog-scent still in the air?

  Could scent molecules come off a body that’s made out of random energies? Oh, shit!

  “Ah . . .” she said, collecting herself.

  Get into the conversation or she’ll think of something else to make your mind leap and quiver.

  “Not real practical for a girl, I’d think.”

  Oh, eww! she thought, at images that sprang unbidden. Autonecrophilia?

  “Oh, there are ways. But, of course, if you can turn into a wolf or a tiger, human beings are easy, provided you’ve got the template. That’s probably how the legend about turning into a vampire or a werewolf if you were bitten by one started, but it’s really the other way ’round. For example . . .”

  Ellen blinked. Then she was looking at a woman taller than Adrienne, blond, full-figured . . .

  That’s me!

  “In the pseudoflesh,” Adrienne/Ellen said, wiggling closer and giving her a lingering kiss. The lips were fuller and softer, the taste of the mouth subtly different.

  “Have you never wanted to make love with yourself? I can assure you that you’re very good in bed. Ah, Monica warned you, I see. Still, there’s some interesting fear and horror there.”

  Oh, God, now I’ve got to fuck my own ghost?

  “It’s more like making it with me wearing a you suit, but let’s give it a try, eh?”

  She took one of Ellen’s hands and placed it on a breast; the firm-soft fullness was eerily familiar/not . . .

  Half an hour later Ellen whimpered: “Well, don’t stop . . .”

  Then she opened her eyes and screamed again. Adrian was kneeling between her legs . . . Adrian to the last detail, except for the wicked slyness of the smile, her/his hands busy again.

  “I could be this form when I was thirteen too. Just think of the possibilities. Autonecrophilia indeed!”

  “Oh, God !”

  “Let’s play a game, chérie. You pretend I’m Adrian, and I’ll pretend I’m you pretending I’m Adrian. I warned you this was going to be a carnival of the perverse.”

  It’s not going to hurt. I know what’s really happening. Get a grip, Ellen, she thought, repeating it like a mantra. Get a grip. Don’t lose it. Get a grip. Pretend it is Adrian. You’d be going berserk with joy if it was. Get a grip.

  “That’s exactly what I had in mind,” she/he said, grabbing Ellen’s ankles and levering them back and up.

  Weight pushed her down, shoving the sensitive bruised skin of her back and shoulders against the cloth until a flash of fire ran across them. Adrienne looked down at him/herself for an instant, poised above Ellen.

  “This is easier because it’s a Shadowspawn body and one so similar to mine except for the XY thing, but there are the most intriguing differences. On the downside, the sensations are all so much more localized; the rest of your body might as well not exist. On the up, there’s this tremendous focus. As if everything in all the world was reduced to the need to . . . thrust.”

  “Uhhn!”

  “Like that. Now move with me . . . and grip . . .”

  Later, a panting whisper in her ear amid the hard mutual effort: “Your mind is opening like an orchid of glittering light . . . not quite yet . . . Pleasure and pain and horror . . . are you listening?”

  “O . . . kay . . . yeah . . . mmm . . . please . . . bite me after . . . please . . . oh, please . . .”

  “Soon. Soon.”

  “God . . . can’t . . . oh, God . . .”

  “I could turn into Adrian’s wolf, right now. Woof, woof, woofity—”

  Ellen felt her control vanish. She began to scream from the bottom of her lungs, over and over again as the scarlet mouth closed on her throat and teeth sliced.

  “Right, we’ve got it all ready,” Harvey said.

  Adrian took a long breath and looked around. It wasn’t precisely a cave, but the overhang was steep where seepage had eaten the limestone away to leave a pocket of cream-colored rock. A couple of gnarled red pines clung to the surface above; a trickle of water ran out and down the slope, still living with the last of the spring rains. The evening was warm on this south-facing slope covered in dense maquis, but the growing evening shadows hinted at a cool night.

  There was an intense smell of sage and spice and pine-sap, of cool rock and cold spring water. He dipped a hand into it and drank to wet his dry mouth, tasting an intense mineral cleanness. He felt empty and light; he’d been fasting for two days with only water to drink, good preparation for prolonged night-walking. A healthy body could go without food for a week or so anyway, and in deep trance for far longer.

  “It is time and past time,” Adrian said grimly. “I can feel my base-link with Ellen. She is being hit . . . very hard. Particularly the last few nights since we met in Paso Robles.”

  “Pain?” Harvey said.

  “Not so much that. My sister likes to rend and break minds more than bodies, to sculpt the self until it is as she desires, and she is extremely good at it. Ellen is very strong, very resilient . . . but consciously she is without hope while her memories are blocked. Much longer, and there will be permanent damage.”

  “Now’s as good a time as any. Lucky for Ellen, Adrienne’s gonna be distracted with her social obligations.”

  He ducked under the camouflage tarpaulin that he and Harvey had rigged. When they fastened it behind them the darkness was intense even to Shadowspawn eyes, and the older man clicked on a dim blue light. Adrian lay down on the air-mattress, and Harvey zipped up the thinfoil sleeping bag. With his body heat, that would keep him from losing too much to the earth. Then he held out his arm, and the other man arranged the saline drip.

  The slight sting of the needle as Harvey taped it to the inside of his left elbow awakened him from the seductive voice of the trance. He smiled as his arm was arranged.

  “Tucking me into bed again, Harv?”

  The Texan chuckled. “Hell, you weren’t that young when I pul
led you out of the Brézé stable. Just into your obnoxious teenaged years as I remember. Remember real well.”

  The older man held a small tube of liquid to his lips. “Puree of Wilbur Peterson,” he said. “Probably they got the DNA for replication from strands of hair or the bone marrow, considerin’ how old the body was.”

  Adrian drank the neutral-tasting liquid. “Thank you for that thought,” he said, and concentrated.

  Within him mechanisms that had evolved long before the age of polished stone assimilated the paired helixes of a man who had decided that immortality was too much to bear.

  “Since we’re probably going to die in the next thirty-six hours . . .” he said, when he was ready.

  Harvey grinned like a gargoyle. “Shit, you don’t have to pay me back that twenty bucks you borrowed for beer. Forget it.”

  “Then just let me say that if we make it, I’m back in the war full-time. After my honeymoon.”

  Harvey froze for an instant, a blue-lit troll. “You are? Any particular reason?”

  “For one thing, I don’t think Ellen will stay with me if I don’t, or anyway, I find I can’t stand the thought of her bad opinion of me. For another, I have been infected with the delusion called hope. It is more comfortable than sanity, in the long run.”

  “Glad to hear you’re back in.”

  “On my own terms.”

  A chuckle. “I always sorta liked approaching it that way myself. You ready?”

  Adrian sighed. “I am reluctant. It is not the danger, you understand . . .”

  “The danger of possibly eternal torment? Hell, that makes me reluctant, ol’ buddy. I do it anyway, but I’m reluctant as shit.”

  “It is pretending to be a Shadowspawn predator. The things I must do to avoid suspicion are too hard to forget.”

  “Adrian, I don’t wish to do anything much but go back to Pecan Creek, retire, go fishing and watch football and drink beer, and amble down to the crossroads for some BBQ now and then. With an occasional trip to Arles. I certainly never became much attached to blowin’ people’s heads off.”

  Softly the older man finished: “I see their faces sometimes.”

  “True. Moi aussi. Goodbye, then, old friend. Remember, she will be with Hajime of a certainty at the final ceremony, if there is no opportunity before.”

  “You just keep her pinned long enough for the bullet to hit.” A grin. “It’s going to be what you might call a target-rich environment and I’ve got a fair amount of ammo.”

  “There is only one target that really matters.”

  He leaned back against the softness of the sleeping bag and the air pillow. Dimly he could see Harvey take up the sniper rifle, its outline broken up by a scrim of fabric that turned it shaggy. The other man pulled down a bulbous face-mask with passive image intensifiers built into it, and clicked off the blue light.

  Adrian let the Mhabrogast form in his mind, convincing his hindbrain that it did not need his physical form: Amss-aui-ock!

  There was an instant of wrenching, ice-and-silver pain along his nerves, and he was standing and looking down at his body.

  I am better, this time. Balanced and strong. Win or lose, I will not fail myself. Let’s make sure I don’t fail Ellie, either.

  Another, and his body flowed. He felt duller, more constrained; Peterson had not been as purebred as he, nor as intelligent in general. The part of him that was always him struggled, and thought and senses gradually grew more clear. Adjusting a form was much more difficult than simply donning it, but possible, and once done could be locked in for recall. Harvey looked at him critically.

  “That’s Peterson at about twenty-one,” he said.

  “I don’t have the somatic memories,” Adrian replied. “It’s not unknown for postcorporeals to de-age their aetheric forms, and God knows he had time.”

  “It’ll have to do. Good luck, ol’ buddy.”

  Adrian nodded and stepped towards the camouflage curtain. He concentrated, and to the aetheric eyes the complex fabric faded to invisibility. The molecules of his stolen form slipped through those of the cloth, and he was naked in the early night. Around him was a web of floating energies; curtains of them crawled across the stars, still a little hurtful in the west where the sun had vanished. He raised his arms to the night, let the syllables he whispered shape what was, and willed.

  Form flowed. Perceptions flowed and changed with it; scent dulled, but vision grew far keener than his eyes saw by day, and hearing had an unearthly sensitivity that made the rustle of a field-mouse as loud as boots on gravel and gave direction with swift precision. The sounds of the night were a roar, but after an instant each was as distinct as lines scribed with a diamond. Thought shrank, but took on a savage directness that did not seek to question itself. Broad wings five feet from tip to tip caught at the night, and a great snowy owl ghosted upward as small things skittered in panic or more wisely froze.

  Exultation filled him as feathers caressed the air and danced with it, and it took the silent command of the man-mind that lurked at the back of the narrow avian brain to keep it from plunging and sporting in sheer joy. Instead he circled for height, stroking with his wings when he must, riding currents of air he could see as billowing shapes when he caught them. Land unrolled below him, not the map-image you saw with a man’s eyes from an aircraft but a living tapestry as detailed as skin beneath a microscope, down to each clear-cut leaf and grass-blade. Fields, roads, buildings . . .

  . . . and hovering above one a banner of energies, potentials sparkling into and out of existence.

  That he saw with the eyes of the Power which never left him. A simple construct, but with the mark of his sister’s savage elegance: here.

  Ellen is there, he thought with some part of him that still remembered words. I can feel the base-link. She is miserable, with more than mere fear.

  It was close, but he banked widely to make sure that no other night-walker rode the air. None were nearby, though their approach tickled at his senses. He folded his wings then, and dove. Speed built, and the earth swelled; he could hear the murmur of many voices, loud and ugly to the owl’s hearing. Human voices, some carrying the freight of pain and fear. The building swelled, a long rectangular stable or barn of stucco-covered concrete with openings just under the peak of the tile roof at either end. For a form that could stoop on prey by sound alone it was simple to dive through, though the blaze of electric light was hurtful

  The space within was divided by a fence of wire mesh. The larger part held prisoners, eighty or so men and women.

  The others . . . guards, in the uniform of small-town policemen. His sister, her aura like a blow, a wave of rank salt blood and slinking menace. Another woman in elegant dress, radiating fear and a sick dread and an abject abandonment. And . . .

  Ellen, he thought. Ellen. Why did she bring you here?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Eeerrk!”

  Ellen bit off the small shriek as the slim long-fingered hand fell on her shoulder while she stared at the computer screen.

  God, but I hate it when she sneaks up on me like that!

  “I know you hate it. That’s why I do it. Sadist, remember? What’s this?”

  Adrienne’s head followed the hand, looking at the arrangement of the paintings on the screen and the number-coded map of the casa grande.

  “This is my plan for the next step in reorganization,” Ellen said. “There’s more than enough display space in the casa, you’re just not using it to best advantage. We’ve done the basic sectional sort-and-move; now we need to get down to fine-tuning the placement of each piece.”

  “Excellent, ma douce.”

  The office-study of Ellen’s house on Lucy Lane had had time to acquire touches of her own in the three months since she’d arrived; an orange cat that she’d half-adopted despite her resolution lounged in a corner, and a pot of coffee on a hotplate scented the air, along with the warm May flowers-and-grass scent through the open window, with a breath of c
oolness as the day spun down into night.

  There were prints—a couple of Impressionists—and a genuine Mary Cassatt of two women drinking tea that should have been in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It had simply appeared on the wall one day, and she’d been caught between guilt and long periods of simply staring, transported.

  “Sadist, remember?” Adrienne chuckled. Then she trailed a finger down Ellen’s neck. “You’re looking lovely, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Put this on too.”

  Adrienne handed her a flat case, antique tooled leather with a diamond clasp. Ellen opened it and swallowed. It was a Victorian piece, a two-tiered necklace of collar and spray in gold and rubies against black velvet.

  “That’s lovely,” she said sincerely.

  “I’m glad you like it. It’s been in the family for some time, as an ornament for our lucies. Note the theme of bloodred. It really needs a blond to carry it off.”

  The order to dress up for evening hadn’t specified a time, so she’d lost herself in work despite the long sheath of shimmering silver-scalloped black with a cloth-of-gold shawl thrown over her chair. The first day of the house party would start tonight. She bent her head forward and held up her hair to let the Shadowspawn fasten the goldwork.

  And I’m on display as the beautiful golden peach nobody else can taste. The one Adrian couldn’t keep out of her hands.

  “Precisely. How is your Spanish?”

  Decent conversational as long as it isn’t too complicated, Ellen thought. I understand it better than I can speak it.

  “Mine’s fully fluent, but European, with a bit of an accent,” Adrienne said.

  “What sort?”

  “Occitan; I sound like a Catalan trying to be Castilian to someone from Madrid. Come along, then.”

  “What . . . do I have to do?”

  “The last shipment of refreshments has come in, and Paco—he’s a coyote by trade, but jackal would be more appropriate—didn’t listen to my instructions.”

  “What . . . instructions?” Ellen mumbled, her mouth suddenly dry as she stood and plucked at the shawl.