A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  “And now we should depart, my sweet ones,” Adrienne said as the three predators stalked forward, dividing to cut the chosen victim out of the mass. “The next few will be arriving corporeally, or at least by ground.”

  Adrienne walked out; Ellen followed as best she could, feeling her knees buckling and helping Monica along as she staggered, gulping at the cleaner air. Theresa Villegas was outside, and nodded to Adrienne as they passed. One of the policemen began to swing the door shut behind them, and then something cannoned into it.

  Ellen jerked back involuntarily. It was a woman, naked but for the panties still snagged around one ankle, red lines scored across her back. She fell forward half-out of the door, her eyes wide with agony and disbelief. Her fingers clawed into the concrete, bleeding as well where the nails tore. She shrieked and twisted to clutch at the doorframe as something grabbed her from behind; Theresa stepped forward and used the toe of her polished shoe to pry the hands loose. A savage jerk pulled her back into the room, and the policeman closed the door, standing for a moment blank-eyed with his hand on the latch.

  “I will direct the guests when they are ready to come up to the casa, Doña,” Theresa said with a prim smile. “Enjoy your evening.”

  “Thank you, Theresa. You’ve been invaluable.”

  The rhythmic pulsing screams of agony and bestial snarling and silvery laughter died away as they walked down the brick pathway between the crackling torches.

  “It’s natural,” Monica started mumbling to herself. “We’re mice. It’s natural. That’s what we’re for. It’s always been what we’re for.”

  No it is fucking well not what we are for! Ellen screamed mentally. No, no, no!

  “Oh, yes it is,” Adrienne said, and put a hand on the small of her back.

  Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!

  “But I will touch you,” she purred. “Oh, yes, I will.”

  She stopped, took Ellen’s chin between thumb and forefinger.

  “Your mind is like a raw wound right now,” she said. “Shall I feed, and make you feel better?”

  “Yes, please,” Ellen said tightly.

  No! You made me feel this way, you keep it!

  “Now there’s a contradiction. Yes-yes on your lips, no-no in part of your mind. But you smell right for feeding, very right indeed.”

  An arm went around her bare shoulders under the shawl. Adrienne’s head nuzzled her jaw up, and teeth touched her throat above the jeweled collar.

  Ellen whimpered again. I want the bite. But I’m . . . somehow I’m betraying them . . .

  “If it’s any consolation, you have no say in this whatsoever,” Adrienne said, the breath warm against her skin. “I’d have bitten you anyway after you were primed like that. Irresistible!”

  The sting was slight, but it made her skin ripple all the way to her feet and back. The clamminess left her, and the twisting knot in her stomach. The horror faded; the sights and sounds and smells were still there in the eye of her mind, but now they turned to an immense soft sadness like the memory of a great tragedy long ago. That faded in turn to a feeling like reading melancholy poetry. She sighed and let her head rest against the Shadowspawn’s, putting a hand to the other’s throat. Feeling the burring vibration of the growl, and the pulse of the swallows as they took her blood.

  A tear leaked down her face, and she seemed to be fading into a soft and welcoming darkness and yet be feeling clearheaded and more alert at the same time. The night around her turned sharp, with the rustle of wind in the oaks and jacarandas overhead and the yap-yap of a fox somewhere.

  “Utterly marvelous.” Adrienne laughed as she lifted her mouth from Ellen’s neck.

  Then she touched up the teardrop with a finger and put it to her crimson-coated lips.

  “The mixture of flavors in your blood right now is indescribable . . . You don’t mind if I touch you, hein?”

  “No,” Ellen murmured dreamily, releasing her. “But you should bite Monica too. It’s been a while for her, and besides that, she’s feeling bad.”

  “Oh, please, Adri, please, please make it better.”

  Poor Monica, Ellen thought; she felt immensely close to the other lucy, as if to the sister she had never had. She sounds so wretched.

  Ellen stood and watched calmly as Adrienne bent her head to the other’s inner arm.

  I wonder if I looked that happy, she thought; the rigid tension of Monica’s face relaxed in the flickering flame-light, seeming to shed ten years as she smiled.

  I certainly feel that way right now. I know it won’t last and the memories will give me the screaming horrors, but that’s . . . so far away. The feeding does look so right now. It makes you feel so complete, so needed.

  She could walk normally again when they went on. At the archway that gave onto the rear terrace and pools, Jose and Peter were waiting for them, in formal dinner jackets and white ties. Jose’s shirt had ruffles, and there was a scarlet cummerbund around his waist, a combination that usually made Anglos look ridiculous but simply gave him a dashing air. He offered Monica his arm, and Peter gave her his.

  “I’ll go change now,” Adrienne said, smiling at the four of them. “Paco paid the appropriate penalty and we got him out of the gene pool, but he did throw me off schedule a little. Why don’t you all drift on through to the main entranceway receiving hall, and I’ll join you in a minute.”

  “Bad?” Peter asked softly when she’d gone.

  The main entrance had a musician’s balcony over the doorway, as well as the curling grand stair. The group there was playing something soft and ancient—Baroque, she thought. Ellen took a flute of champagne from a passing tray and drank; the great marble space was still mostly empty, glowing softly in the light of the chandeliers. Jose and Monica were chatting easily.

  “Bad?” she said. “Bad doesn’t begin to describe it. It was so bad my mind couldn’t really take it in, though my bowels certainly believed it. But right now I know how bad without feeling it.”

  He nodded, and gave her a handkerchief. She touched it to her neck; there was only a small spot of blood, and she knew the feeding cut would be invisible except to a close look.

  “That does make it feel better,” he agreed, and sipped at his own drink, which looked to have vodka and a twist of lemon peel in it. “Rather like this, only much more effectively.”

  “It doesn’t actually make it better,” Ellen said, closing her eyes for a moment and swaying to the music. “But for the moment, feeling better will do. I wonder if you could dance to this?”

  She began to turn, and then she was moving, black and silver and flying gold hair and shawl, skirts filling and flaring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Adrian Brézé wore the shape of Wilbur Peterson easily. It was close to his own; a little taller, a little more thickly built, eyes yellow in the way most postcorporeals preferred them, hair light brown with bronze highlights. His grip carried the girl along effortlessly, despite her attempts to pull free, though she was young and strong for her size. The screams faded as they walked.

  Servants showed them to the suite of rooms; it was set up for a postcorporeal. Only one room had an exterior window, and it could be closed by a light-tight steel shutter and bolted fast; there was a hidden shaft that led to the basements and sub-basements below. For that matter, in night-walker form he could simply go impalpable and drop through the floors—though that was hideously dangerous, unless you were very careful. Dropping into solid earth while impalpable left you with no way to get back up.

  Adrian shoved the girl through and caught her arm again when the outer door shut. She was under twenty, he judged, but she’d lived someplace where hard labor started early. Despite that she was slender in the waist and long-limbed but full-breasted, rare for a villager. Her skin was the exact color of a latte, and the face framed by loosely curled black hair showed a pleasant mix: mostly Indian, probably a little Iberian and a dash of African as well in bluntly regular features and full lips. Her da
rk eyes flickered around the elegant entrance-chamber, with its cool white-and-gray marble floors and rugs and spindly antique furniture.

  “What is your name?” he asked: “¿Como se llama?”

  “Eusebia Cortines.”

  “¿Como le dicen?” he asked. How are you called?

  He caught her eyes with his and held her at arm’s length, making an effort to give his speech a Mexican cast; he’d traveled there often enough to do that, though he’d first learned Spanish in Europe.

  “Cheba,” she said, stammering a little but keeping her chin up.

  “¿Me permite?” he said, asking permission to use the diminutive.

  That ought to reassure her a little. She nodded, and he went on:

  “Where are you from? Veracruz?”

  “Coetzala,” she said, naming a village in that coastal state he’d passed through once long ago on Brotherhood business. “Then . . . Tlacotalpan.” Which was a city of some size. “Then to el Norte. With that bastard son of a whore Paco.”

  “Paco is dead, and he died very hard. Waste no regrets. He knew what he was selling you into here, or at least that there was no returning. ¿Habla Inglés?”

  “Poquito.”

  Which meant a little; then she spoke in limping English:

  “I say, yes, no, how much, can work, cook, clean, tend niños, kids.”

  Back into Spanish: “My mother sold baskets to tourists. I talked with them sometimes, a little, to practice.”

  He could sense her roiling fear, and defiance as well; her scent was healthy, clean beneath the dust and dirt of days of travel without an opportunity to wash. And her blood smelled so tempting, so tempting, even with the memory of Ellen’s tormenting flower-fragrance in his nostrils. Meaty and sweet at the same time, like a skewer of honey-glazed chicken.

  “You know what I am, Cheba?” he said.

  “Brujo. Vampiro,” she said

  The corner of his mouth quirked up. She’s brave, he thought; the emotional balance was plain, even if he couldn’t yet read the surface thoughts that glinted away in a mumble of firing neurons.

  And she only half-believes it, despite the fact that she saw me transform from a bird to a man. Quick-witted too, when she’s not stupefied with fear.

  “Yes. Shadowspawn is the true name. In your language—Hijos de la noche. Los indios say it better: Nagualli.”

  “Nagualli,” she repeated, in a way that confirmed his suspicion that she’d spent at least her early childhood speaking Nahuatl, the old Aztec language.

  “What . . . what is happening to them?” she asked, her voice small. “The people I traveled with.”

  “Blood drinking. Torture, rape, death also, for many,” he said; there was no point in sugar-coating it. “Control yourself, and listen to me, and you may live.”

  She nodded, waited until his grip on her arm slackened . . . then jerked free, turned and bolted for the door. Adrian sighed, made a movement with his left hand, called up a glyph and pushed with his will.

  A snap behind his eyes, and a rucked-up piece of Persian carpet slithered. Her foot turned under her and she fell with a jolt of pain that made his lips curl back for an instant. When she tried to scramble to her feet one leg tripped another. After the third time she lay panting, eyes wide. She was sweating with terror, and he could smell it as well as feel it sparkling like red fire through her mind. The effort not to snarl in eagerness shook him.

  “You know that there is nobody outside who will not push you right back through that door? That I can keep this up as long as you try to escape? That doing this makes me”—he let the snarl show a little—“hungry? ”

  Gradually she won a degree of mastery, enough to give him a quick nod.

  “This is a . . . place of los brujos,” he said. “I’m a guest here. You’ve been given to me for . . . food. For blood. That’s why you and your friends were brought here. You are entirely in my power. You understand?”

  Another nod.

  “I won’t kill or torture or violate you. You must be quiet and obedient and after three days when we all leave . . . they will probably find . . . work for you. Other work than being . . . food. Until then I will protect you from the others. That is all I promise, but what I promise I will do. Get up.”

  She did, cautiously after the previous three attempts. “You . . . you want to drink my blood?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Some. Not enough to harm you.”

  But I wouldn’t unless I had to. I need the strength and it would ring any number of alarm bells here if I didn’t. This is part of why I told Harvey I was reluctant. To be accepted, I must act as one of them in this way at least.

  “I will not harm you otherwise. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”

  She was looking skeptical, and at his crotch. He did himself, and smiled wryly: that was a reaction he couldn’t help.

  “I’m a man with a penis, not a penis with a man attached. I don’t take unwilling women.”

  Which makes me, if not unique among Shadowspawn, at least highly unusual.

  “The blood, for protection. Quickly!”

  She nodded. He reached for her . . . and then she swung a shin up towards his groin in a hard vicious kick combined with an earnest thumb towards his eye. That showed rough-and-tumble experience; he was glad she didn’t have a knife. Adrian ducked under the gouge, grabbed the ankle effortlessly—her mind had telegraphed her intention half a second in advance—and used it to fling her around, staggering as she fought not to fall. Then he had her pinned, his right arm holding both of hers against her body, his left under her jaw.

  “Hold . . . still,” he snarled, as she bucked and heaved and shrieked and tried to claw, kick and bite at the same time. “Oh, nom d’un chien noir! ”

  The body writhing against his was far too stimulating. He clamped her jaw upward and struck. The incisors sliced across taut skin, and the blood boiled into his mouth. She froze with the paralysis of an initial bite; not limp or stiff, simply unresisting as he held her off the ground and drank.

  Oh, God, that is good, was the first thought.

  Like eating a fine rare Chateaubriand when you’d been skiing all day . . .

  . . . and add Madeira jus with sautéed mushrooms and a really good Côtes du Rhône . . .

  . . . or like the floating feeling after sex, like the first stage of drunkenness in good company, like triumph. Power flowed into him; he could feel his mind uncoiling like a thing of steel and smoothly meshing gears.

  Then shame. Then: But I wish I were with Ellie. This is good, but not enough to drive me mad as I feared. I can stop . . . now.

  He did, and stepped back, licking his lips and wiping his chin, and forcing himself not to grin; the poor girl wouldn’t know it was relief at his own self-control. The impulse to strip off her clothes and throw her down on the floor and take her savagely was there too . . .

  But no harder to resist than the instinct to kill if I am jostled. I am not my instincts; I am a man, and my mind rules them. Feeding does not turn me into a beast. That is a choice, and I choose “no.”

  Cheba wobbled off and collapsed into a chair, hand to her neck.

  “You . . . bit me,” she said wonderingly. “You are so strong, so quick . . . you . . .”

  Her voice was quiet with the artificial calm that came with a feeding attack. She took the hand away and looked at the red smudge on it.

  “You bit me. I could feel you drinking.”

  “Yes, I bit you and drank some of your blood. I will again several times over the next few days. It will not hurt and you will be none the worse for it after a little while. What I am is not catching; you must be born so. Now don’t cause me problems!”

  There was a discreet knock at the door. He opened it, and his pseudo-renfields came through, with a house servant pushing a dolly with the last of the trunks on it. The servant was blankly incurious, probably a survival trait; Guha and Farmer simply carried it through to the suite’s bedroom. When they cam
e back Farmer gave him a smoldering look after his eyes flicked to Cheba. There was hate in it, though they’d discussed this necessity when they were briefing each other on the mission.

  He wishes he could feed, Adrian thought. He has enough of the genes to want, but not enough to be satisfied if he does. Poor bastard; that’s the combination that makes for a Jeffrey Dahmer, if it’s not spotted early, if you don’t know what’s happening. But he must not let it interfere with our work!

  Guha hacked him on the ankle with the toe of her boot. He screeched, cut it short as she grabbed him by the ear:

  “Stay in character, Jack! Last warning! Think in character! Or I’ll kill you myself.”

  He nodded, took a deep breath and bowed slightly to Adrian along with his partner.

  “Lay out my dinner jacket, Farmer,” he said quietly. “White tie. Guha, get the girl cleaned up. Order her a meal from the kitchens and show her where she’ll sleep—there will be bedchambers for my personal attendants.”

  It would create a little gossip when the maids changed the sheets and realized he was sleeping alone, but not too much—Shadowspawn considered their private lives private.

  “Find her some clothes, too. She doesn’t speak much English, but I suspect she understands more, so be cautious. And she’s pretty good at trying to kick you in the crotch while gouging out your eyes, so be cautious about that, too. Get her settled in and then dress for dinner yourselves—I’ll need you to lend me countenance later. Let’s get going.”

  A couple of presentable attendants were the minimum he could sport and not be the Shadowspawn equivalent of a homeless beggar.

  “Cheba,” he said, switching back to Spanish.

  She was coming to life again, and looked up warily.

  “This is Anjali Guha, and this man is Jack Farmer. They both speak your language”—tolerably, at least—“and they are my trusted servants. They will not harm you, but you must do as they say when I am not here.”

  It was time to put in his appearance at the party.