The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “That’s enough, Doña.”

  Adrienne growled again in protest as the doctor’s hand pressed her head back to the pillow. Cheba slumped down on the padded stool and leaned against the edge of the bed, breathing deeply, smiling with a soft, dreamy look on her face. The small cut on her neck clotted with unnatural speed; Duggan ignored it for a moment as she wiped Adrienne’s chin and lips with a cloth; the antiseptic stung a little in the cracks.

  “Merde, am I dribbling?”

  “Just a little.” The Scotswoman looked down at Cheba. “She’ll be fine. You took about a pint, I think—aye, as much as you can handle now.”

  “Good, I do not want the nausea back. Though I’d like a kill as well, when I’m fit enough. There’s nothing quite like it for setting you up.”

  She yawned; she was feeling better, but from experience she knew the torpor and discomfort would return soon. Duggan was feeling pure scientific curiosity under her impassive exterior; it was a curious emotion, tasting like mineral water or mountain ice, eerily detached. Peter had a similar mind-set when he was working on a problem.

  “Will you want Cheba for the kill? If I could dissect afterwards, there might be something interesting in the neurological changes.. . .”

  “Oh, no, that would be wasteful, for several reasons. Cheba is progressing nicely. But I’ll see if there’s anything left for you to poke and prod at of whomever I kill.”

  “Thank you, Doña.” A sigh. “Less likely to be anything noticeable . . . Shall I call the orderlies to remove her?”

  “No, not yet. In about an hour, and she’ll probably need a sedative then. I’m going into trance now and taking her with me.”

  She sank back and crossed her arms on her chest, moving slowly and cautiously. The first sensation of withdrawal was like falling into dark softness, like sleep.

  Then she was standing in the entrance to her memory palace, and for a long moment she just focused on feeling good. The fact of her illness faded to the faintest of memories at the back of her brain with a practiced effort of will. The somatic memories tried to manifest here, but she could overcome them.

  The mental construct was a pool edged in white Carrara marble, with man-tall alabaster jars standing at intervals; at one horseshoe-shaped end a colonnade of Corinthian pillars supported a roof of bronze fretwork woven with flowering wisteria to make a walkway, with a plinth in the center pouring more water through the mouth of a copper lion. Tall umbrella pines stood around it, and then oaks amid asphodel-starred meadows, fading away to rocky hills purple under a clear blue sky; the warm air was scented with sap and hot rock and arbutus, birds warbled and insects clicked and buzzed.

  Cheba staggered and stared around. Her eyes cleared quickly; now that her mind was running on Adrienne’s wetware it wasn’t saturated with MDMA analogues and serotonin boosters. When she was fully alert she looked surprised for a moment, then sullen. In here Adrienne’s senses felt as if they were functioning normally, and the waves of murderous hate tingled along her nerves.

  “I’m much prettier here,” the Shadowspawn said, looking down at herself. “This is how I’m supposed to look. Really, being sick is such a bore, tout court.”

  I wish she’d killed you! Cheba thought. Or that man did, that brujo.

  “I don’t doubt you do,” Adrienne said happily. “Though really, with dozens of Shadowspawn running around uncontrolled and upset you’d probably have died.”

  It would be worth it!

  Adrienne laughed, and the girl went on: Where . . . where is this?

  “My—” Adrienne thought for a moment; Cheba was intelligent but not very well educated. “Inside my mind. In my head. Or you could think of it as Hell. It’s where your kind got the idea for Hell, most likely.”

  It doesn’t look so bad, Cheba thought, and looked around again.

  While she did the first tentacle slid out of the water, black and glistening and as thick as her leg below the narrow questing tip. With a movement as quick as a lunging cobra it threw a loop around her ankle and jerked.

  Cheba screamed as she fell to the marble, but she wound her arms around the nearest vase and held on with frenzied strength, kicking at the tentacle. More exploded out of the water in a tower of spray and lashing flesh and spoiled-seafood stink, dozens, falling on her like whips and tearing at her clothing, squeezing, thrusting—

  “Aiiie. A Thesaurus is come. Maim, strangle, violate,” Adrienne said as she walked over and smiled down at her. “George gets so lonely here,” she explained. “He’s quite dead outside, you see, so he’s here until my own Final Death. Which will be a very long time, I think. That’s why your kind thought Hell could go on forever.”

  Then, louder: “George, what did I tell you? Not unless I say you can!”

  The mauling continued, and beneath it the choked, muffled shrieks. Adrienne sighed and looked at the water, frowning. It turned from crystal blue to a rosy pink, and steam began to rise from it. After a moment it boiled, and the tentacles withdrew with a sudden rush, as quickly as the first attack. The water smoked and roiled, and from beneath it came a bubbling shriek of agony as the creature cooked and cooked but could not die.

  Cheba was pushing herself backwards, naked, her body streaked with blood and welts, her mouth working, and white showing all around the dark irises of her eyes. Then she stopped and froze. A moment later she felt behind her.

  “It’s quite fetching,” Adrienne said, as Cheba’s fingers made contact with the fluffy white doe’s tail at the base of her spine. “And symbolically appropriate for your role in this little drama we’re about to have.”

  Cheba bolted upright, pawing frantically at the sides of her head. The ears she felt there were tall and pointed and furred, and twitched.

  “¡Dios mío, Jesucristo!”

  “I’m the only deity here,” Adrienne said, feeling the other’s control crack. “Ooooh, yes, that’s right. Panic, despair, horror, very stimulating, you saucy, sexy minx. Now you run away, sweetie. And when I catch you, I do some really awful, wonderful things to and with you.”

  Cheba turned and bolted through the trees and into the scrub. As she did a line of wasps rose from the underbrush and followed her, malignant shapes as long as a human hand, whining as they flew.

  Adrienne watched her go, then clapped her hands together thoughtfully under her chin.

  “Darkness,” she said.

  The sunlight faded, and sunset cast long shadows through air the color of burnt umber. She’d always liked that time of day; it was so full of little magics and possibilities.

  “Not quite perfect,” she mused. “Something . . . it needs just a little something.. . .”

  A delighted laugh. “I know! She’s phobic about spiders. Spiders it shall be! About the size of Chihuahuas, I think. Anything bigger would be kitsch.”

  A sobbing scream of loathing came echoing towards the pool. Adrienne laughed again, and willed. The change was easier and smoother than when she was night-walking in the real world, and here the sun was her imagination and not a deadly enemy to the aetheric form.

  The great timber wolf raised its head and sniffed the air, snarled happily, and loped through the trees with its tail wagging.

  One of the joys of a policeman’s life, Eric Salvador thought the day after the Tarnowski case opened, wishing he’d taken more Tylenol with his breakfast. You meet all kinds of people. Most of them hate you. Así es la vida. At least she’s not likely to try to blow me up with a fertilizer bomb.

  Giselle Demarcio was in her fifties, with a taut, dry, ageless appearance and a slight East Coast accent, dressed in a mildly funky Santa Fe look, silver jewelry and a blouse and flounced skirt.

  Sort of a fashionista version of what my great-grandmother wore around the house, Salvador thought cynically.

  His family, the Spanish part, at least, had been in Santa Fe since the seventeenth century.

  Everything old gets new if you wait long enough. Rich Anglos get off the bus and live in p
imped-up adobes and you end up in a double-wide on Airport Road.

  There was a dash of Irish in his background too, on his mother’s side, and the indio part of the Salvador line had probably thought, There goes the neighborhood, when the conquistadores showed up asking about those gold mines the pueblo down the river had sworn existed around here.

  She had a white mark on her finger where a wedding ring would go, and she fit in perfectly with the airy white-on-white decor of Hans & Demarcio Galleries. He was not, he noticed, being invited back to her office; this was a semipublic reception room. The art on the walls was something he could understand, at least—actual pictures of actual things. Not the cowboy-pueblo-Western art a lot of the places on Canyon Road had either, mostly older-looking stuff. There was a very faint odor of wood smoke from a piñon fire crackling in a kiva fireplace. The whole thing screamed money. It had been a very long time since Canyon Road attracted artists because the rents were low.

  Santa Fe, the town where ten thousand people can buy the state and fifty thousand can’t afford lunch, he thought.

  “Jeanette, take care of the Cliffords, would you?” Demarcio said to a sleek-looking assistant. Then: “Coffee, Detective?”

  Wait a minute, Salvador thought. She’s not really hostile. She’s scared for some reason. Not of me, but scared silly and hiding it well.

  “Thank you,” he said, and took the cup. “That’s nice.”

  It was excellent coffee, especially compared to what he drank at home or at the station, with a rich, dark, nutty taste. He enjoyed it, and waited. Most people couldn’t stand silence. It wore on their nerves and eventually they blurted out something to fill it. Salvador had learned patience and silence in a very hard school.

  “I’m worried about Ellen,” the older woman said suddenly.

  The detective made a sympathetic noise. “Ms. Tarnowski worked for you?” he said.

  “Works. She’s my assistant, even if she didn’t show up this morning, that’s understandable with the fire and all. Not a secretary, she’s an art history graduate from NYU, and I was bringing her in on our acquisitions side. I’m . . . She’s a sweet kid, but she’s gotten mixed up in something, hasn’t she?”

  “You tell me, Ms. Demarcio,” Salvador said.

  “I never liked that boyfriend of hers. She met him playing tennis at the country club about a year ago and they, well, it was a whirlwind thing. He gave me this creepy feeling. And then his sister showed up—”

  Salvador blinked. The sister . . . the woman who was with Tarnowski?

  “Boyfriend?” he asked.

  “Adrian Brézé.”

  “Ah,” Salvador said.

  As he spoke he tapped the name into his notepad’s virtual keyboard and hit the rather specialized search function. He’d long ago mastered the trick of reading a screen and paying attention to someone at the same time.

  “Now, that’s interesting. Do you have a picture of him?”

  It was interesting because Salvador didn’t have a picture; or much of anything else. Usually these days you drowned in data on anyone. There was nothing here but bare bones, a Social Security number, a passport number and an address way, way out west of town. Just out of Santa Fe County, in fact. A quick Google Earth flick showed a big house on a low mountain or big hill, right in the foothills of the Sangres, nothing else for miles and miles and miles and miles. The state real property register was a mess, but a check on that showed what seemed to be a single parcel of several thousand acres at least, a chunk of an eighteenth-century grant.

  Not even a passport picture to go with the number, and he owns ten square miles of scenery. Someone likes his privacy, he thought, looking at the address. Then: Hey, if you had enough pull, could you blank yourself out? Nah, nobody can evade the Web.

  Demarcio hesitated, then pulled a framed picture out of a drawer. The glass was cracked, as if someone had thrown it at a wall.

  “She told me she was going to break up with him. Couldn’t take the emotional distance and lies anymore. Then she didn’t show up to work yesterday.”

  “So she’s missing the day before the fire,” Salvador said, looking at the picture. “She didn’t call in? Just nothing?”

  “Nothing this morning. That’s not like her. She’s the most reliable person who’s ever worked for me.”

  Only she’s gone and the place she lived in is a scorch mark, which conveniently shit-cans all the evidence.

  The photo beneath the cracked glass showed a youngish man, though on second thought perhaps Salvador’s own age. Or maybe somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dark hair worn a little longer than was fashionable these days, a vaguely Mediterranean-looking face that could have come from anywhere. Handsome, perhaps a little too much so, though not quite enough to be called pretty.

  Androgynous, that’s the word. But there’s something dangerous-looking about him too. Like a cat, like a snake. Or a weasel, or a razor blade in an apple.

  “He’s . . .” Demarcio frowned. “You know, I met him a dozen times and I listened to her talk about him a lot and I really can’t tell you much. He’s wealthy . . . very wealthy, I think. Some sort of old money, but that’s an impression, not knowledge. He wouldn’t tell Ellen anything about that either, just some vague bullshit about ‘investments.’ American born but he has a slight accent, French, I think, which would fit with the name. I know he speaks French and Italian and Spanish . . . and yes, German too, all of them very well. I couldn’t tell you where his money comes from, or where he went to university or, well, anything.”

  Salvador looked at the photo. Unobtrusively he brought up the composite picture on the notepad. The resemblance to the reconstruction of the man the Lopez family had seen standing motionless outside their house just before the fire was unmistakable. He scanned the picture into the notepad, and the program came up with a solid positive when it did its comparison.

  “Would you say this is Adrian Brézé?” he said, and showed her the screen.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “And this is his sister?” he said, changing to the composite of the woman the Lopezes had seen with Ellen Tarnowski earlier.

  “Well . . .” The picture wasn’t quite as definite; they’d glimpsed the face only in passing and through a window. “Yes, I’d say so. It’s a striking resemblance, isn’t it? Like twins, only they’d have to be fraternal.”

  “Have you seen this man?”

  The composite this time was the older man with the gun who’d frightened the Lopezes out of their home . . . and probably saved their lives, considering how fast the building had gone up.

  “No, I can’t say I have. That is, he’s similar to any number of people I’ve seen, but he doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind.”

  Salvador grunted; it was a rather generic Anglo countenance, in fact. Offhand he’d have said Texan or Southern of some sort, there was something about the cheekbones that brought Scots-Irish hillbilly to mind, and the long face on a long skull, but even that was just an educated guess. The corps was lousy with that type.

  “Do you think Mr. Brézé is capable of, mmm, violent actions?”

  She paused for a long moment, looking down at her fingers. When she met his eyes again his alarm bells rang once more.

  “I think he’s capable of anything. Anything at all.”

  “Had a temper?”

  She shook her head. “No. He was always a perfect gentleman. But I could feel it. Sort of a, um, potential.”

  Which would be a big help in court.

  “Now, you saw Ms. Tarnowski later that evening?”

  Now Demarcio flushed. “Yes, with Ms. Brézé . . . Adrienne Brézé. At La Casa Sena, they were having dinner at a table near mine.”

  That was an expensive restaurant on Palace, just off the plaza, in an old renovated adobe that had started out as a hacendado’s town house. Not the most expensive in town by a long shot, but up there.

  “You didn’t speak with them?”


  “No. They, um, didn’t seem to want company.” Her eyes shifted upward and she blushed slightly. “They seemed sort of preoccupied.”

  Ah, Salvador thought. That sort of preoccupied. Is this an arson case or a bad movie? Sister catches her on the rebound from her brother, so brother burns the house down? Where do this sort of people come from? Do they step out of TV screens or do the screenwriters know them and use them for material?

  “You knew Adrienne Brézé socially?”

  “No. I’d never seen her before. Didn’t even know Adrian had a sister.”

  “Then how did you know the woman’s name?” he said.

  An exasperated glance. “I asked the maître d’hôtel at La Casa Sena, of course! I’m a regular there. So is Adrian.”

  He hid a smile. I think Ms. Demarcio is a nice lady. She’s concerned about Tarnowski. But I also think she’s a gossip of the first water.

  “Thank you, Ms. Demarcio—”

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me anything?”

  He sighed. Usually you didn’t, but he needed to develop this source.

  “We’re investigating the circumstances of the fire at Ms. Tarnowski’s apartment, and trying to find where she is.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly; that meant, We think it was torched, without actually saying it.

  “I talked to the Lopez family, and there was a man with a gun.”

  He sighed. Santa Fe was a small town. “True. We’ve got Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the state police all looking.”

  She hesitated, twisting her fingers together. “I . . . I got a call from Ellen today.”

  Salvador came alert without tensing.

  “You did?” he said, the sort of polite verbal placeholder you used to keep people talking.

  “She . . . she called me on a videoconference link. She said she was staying at Adrienne Brézé’s place in California. That she was . . . working for Ms. Brézé now, cataloging her family’s art collection.”

  Aha! Salvador thought. And again, aha!

  “We’ll need the address,” he said.