The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  A twist within, and she was an Arabian mare. Leila drummed heels on her ribs, and Leon pulled over a footstool and used it to scramble up behind her. They whooped as she trotted out the open French doors and into the garden courtyard of the nursery section. Then she broke into a slow, even gallop—running was fun when you were a horse—on the turf around the pool. The night was even dimmer to horse eyes, but she knew the terrain, and the juicy-sweet scent of the grass and the cool air were exhilarating.

  At last she halted by the doors. Transforming back to your own etheric form was always easiest, and the children tumbled onto the soft carpet with more laughter. A surge of effort overrode somatic memory and made the body she wore like her normal one, not the still-healing physical frame.

  “More, Maman!” Leon said. “Be a tiger!”

  “No more, my little weasels,” she said firmly. “It’s one o’clock. Go get ready for bed, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  Leila pouted a little, then sighed. “You don’t go to sleep yet,” she pointed out hopefully. “We missed you a lot.”

  “My body is still a little sick, so I sleep nearly all day, little weasel one. And I need to feed after you go to sleep; turning into animals takes a lot of Power.”

  “Who will you bite?” Leon asked with interest.

  “Peter,” she said. “And then perhaps Monica, for dessert.”

  “Monica’s nice,” Leila said. “She smells like cake. I don’t think Peter likes us, though. I can feel it in his head. He feels real scared, too, even if he doesn’t look that way. That makes my head . . . all prickly.”

  Adrienne smiled, full of pride. Six was young to be that sensitive. She suspected Leon would have a little more raw strength when he was grown, though they’d both be very formidable. But the Power was a saber, not a club. Without subtlety, it could be dangerous to the wielder.

  “What’re you going to do to them to make them taste good?” Leon asked, slightly ghoulishly.

  “Things that will make them have very strong feelings,” Adrienne said. “Starting with chasing them. That’s how you prepare humans for feeding.”

  “Like putting ketchup on frites?”

  “Yes. It spices their blood with things we need and that taste very good, and you can . . . mmmm . . . get inside their minds and sense their feelings. That’s a lot of fun too.”

  “Not for the human,” Leon said, with a smirk.

  “Sometimes it is, sometimes not,” Adrienne said. “But it’s what they’re for, after all. They’re our food.”

  “If we drank more blood, could we do more things with the Power?” Lelia asked hopefully. “I like the way using the Power feels. I can keep the feather up for a whole minute now. Maybe—”

  “No,” Adrienne said again, firmly. “You have to wait for that. You have to grow up and become strong first.”

  This time she used a little of the Power herself, cloaking herself for a moment in shadow and awe and a tinge of fear; the two children blinked their yellow-flecked black eyes and looked away. She could feel their minds roiling, slightly startled, instinctive childhood deference and an equally inbred defiance. More pressure, until their eyes dropped.

  You had to be careful with purebred Shadowspawn children, and there had been none so pure as these for twelve thousand years or more. Not since the Empire of Shadow. More than one Council member had argued that they should be destroyed before they reached adulthood as too dangerous. It probably was going to be trying when they hit puberty, but if the world didn’t like it, the world could do the other thing.

  Inwardly she bared teeth at the universe; let any try to harm her get! And at the thought her spine bristled, the little hairs trying to come erect. She blinked at the thought, grasping with the Power for the thread of possibilities, but it spun away into infinity. Children were made of potentials, and these more than most.

  “You’re too young for more than a sip of blood now and then,” she said, bending and putting a hand behind each head, locking their gaze with hers. “It’ll be years yet before you can really feed, or night-walk. You have all the time in the world to wait. Now off with you!”

  The two slight raven-haired forms scampered away to don pajamas and brush their teeth. She picked up a robe and threw it over herself as she walked into the bedroom; it opened on a balcony with a chest-high balustrade of carved marble fretwork, and over that in the distance she could see the moon setting over the Coast Range hills.

  The room was big, and there was a spray of toys, shelves of picture books and murals of children’s stories from the manor’s last rebuilding in the 1920s: Bre’r Rabbit squealing in bulging-eyed despair and agony in the jaws of Bre’r Fox, Cinderella trimming the feet of her stepsisters as they screamed and writhed, Jack stamped beneath the giant’s foot, Hansel and Gretel burning in the witch’s oven.. . .

  All the classics, she thought. Tradition does have its place.

  The children returned, smelling of soap and toothpaste and virtue. She gave each a hug, and then they climbed into their beds. Leila cuddled her doll, and they both rolled over to face her with the covers drawn up as she sat on the chair between them.

  “Story!” Leila said, her voice carrying a hint of her mother’s firm tone of command. “You promised.”

  “Yeah!”

  “But certainly,” Adrienne said. A moment’s thought, then:

  “ ‘Once there was a little girl with a red hood. She was a pretty girl, with pale skin and veins that showed, and she smelled like flowers and hamburgers and chocolate-chip cookies, just scrumptious. But everyone knew she’d come to a very bad end, and she did!’”

  The children grinned, their eyes alight. Their mother went on:

  “ ‘Well, one day she was walking to her grandmother’s cottage in the woods. Her grandmother was old and useless, but a beautiful strong wolf broke down her door and chased her around and ate her right up, yum! yum! Then—’”

  Eyes drooped as an active day took its toll. She put the book down and began to rise. Leila was snoring, but Leon blinked at her.

  “Maman?” he said, his voice slurred.

  “Yes, my darling?”

  “What’s Papa like?”

  Ah, she thought.

  “Well, he looks a lot like you,” she said. “And a lot like me. And he’s very, very powerful. His name is Adrian.”

  “Will Papa ever come and live with us?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. I hope so, someday.”

  “I would like that,” Leon said. “I dream about him, sometimes.”

  Leila murmured drowsy assent, and Adrienne felt the Power prickle at her nerves again, a message too faint to read, like a sound not quite heard in a nighted forest.

  When she felt the minds of both children spiral down into deep sleep she walked to her own chambers—through the walls for practice’s sake, pausing a moment before each to will them open. It was really more a matter of making yourself impalpable, but that was the way she’d always visualized it and you didn’t alter what worked. A glitter, the solid plaster and stone fading, and the slightest tug as she walked through—the probability matrix that made up an etheric body interpenetrating with the gross material atoms of the structure.

  When her corporeal form opened its eyes she stretched.

  “Now I’m hungry,” she said.

  “How do I look?” Adrienne Brézé said a few hours later, glancing over her shoulder at her nude image in the mirror. “Sort of a butch thing, perhaps, with the hair still short?”

  Hmmm. I’m still too thin; it’s the Case of the Amazing Disappearing Tits. And I do not like my hair only an inch long. If I want to look like a man, I’ll night-walk and turn into a man.

  That was easy enough; all you needed was an individual’s DNA to copy him or her in etheric form, and it was slightly easier with a human than a wolf or a tiger. It could also be a lot of fun, though if she had had to choose one or the other she’d have picked female without hesitation.

  We’re m
ore flexible, literally and metaphorically, she thought. Fortunately, I can take my pick.

  She had a remarkably wide selection of templates. Biting someone did nicely, and semen was even easier than blood as a source sample. Any body fluid would do in a pinch.

  And my new foot is still a little smaller than the other and disgustingly pink and gets sore easily. Still, I look much better than I did a few weeks ago. And my appetites are coming back, I feel almost normal as long as I don’t overexert.

  Peter Boase mumbled from the bed, three-quarters unconscious. The room smelled of sweat and blood and musky sex, and strong, sweet lady-of-the-night jasmine in great terra-cotta jars outside the glass doors. This was his own house on Lucy Lane, not her chambers in the casa grande above; logically enough, it was where her lucys lived. The houses were comfortable, middle-class buildings in the same Spanish Revival style as the whole of the town, about twenty-five hundred square feet, with rooms grouped around an interior courtyard patio; those backed on the outer wall of the estate gardens.

  She walked back to the bed and climbed onto it, onto the man there, and straddled him, resting her chin on her palms and looking down at him. He was short, only a few inches taller than she, perhaps five-six, blond and fine-featured and slim. His skin felt warm, almost flushed, compared to the cool linen on her knees and shins.

  “Peter,” she whispered. And, within: Peter.

  He was deeply asleep, wandering through evil dreams. She touched the surface of his interior dialogue delicately, her eyelids drooping as she let the rhythms of consciousness synchronize. You couldn’t talk to someone’s mind like this—not if they weren’t Shadowspawn of fairly pure blood—but you could suggest things. The thoughts were one. You could persuade.. . .

  Adrienne is dead.

  A startling leap of joy, life, freedom—the sort of pleasure that came when a long-existing agony was relieved. Then crashing despair.

  No. She’s alive. Sick, but alive.

  Adrienne is dead.

  Make it his own thought; not a wish, the ring of conviction.

  I saw her die. Overtones, joy . . . not too much, not the savage exultation she’d feel herself watching an enemy perish, add a little revulsion.

  Now guide, gently, gently. The mind wanted to believe, and they were deep-linked, by pleasure, by pain, by the bond of blood.

  The heavy bullet ripped Hajime’s head open, and the Shadowspawn lord disappeared, a fucking sabertooth leaping at him as he died.

  All that was real, that had happened.

  Gone, gone, Hajime just gone, Monica down and Jose protecting her with his body, get between her and the danger too, another bullet going by with an astonishing crack sound, not a bang at all, not like anything he’d ever heard in a movie, and a peeeenngggg sound as it hammered off stone. Shadowspawn running riot, the night-walking or postcorporeal guests transforming into a nightmare collection of beasts and birds.

  The thoughts/memories/images/sensations ran faster and faster, with the iron taste of truth.

  Ellen’s face contorted with rage and smashing the foil-sheathed hypo down on Adrienne’s foot, the great silverback gorilla standing roaring with the bench in its hands, Ellen riding the sabertooth as it leapt for the roof of the pavilion—

  Adrienne jerking, screaming, slumping in death—

  No.

  Yes. That happened—

  An image of Michiko leaping forward with the wakizashi raised—

  To fight the sabertooth, holding it out two-handed, looking around in terror. Adrienne just lay there, and she breathed a few more times, then her chest jerked and there was a sound in her throat and it stopped. Her eyes, the pupils didn’t dilate anymore. Dead, dead. . .

  Yes.

  Yes. Saw that. Saw that. Fear since, fear of her parents, they’re dead but somehow they’re alive. . . .

  His mind trailed off into a matrix of equations, trying to understand how a neural net could float free of the flesh that had given rise to it, wrap a synthetic body around itself to go forth and feed. Curiosity burned almost as strong as the need to live, somehow tied into reproduction and the life-death cycle down in the base of his hindbrain.

  His mind was almost as unusual as Ellen’s, in its way.

  Withdraw, withdraw, let the pattern repeat, repeat. Memories uncoiled as they were recalled, reknit as they were stored, again and again. Memory wasn’t a recording, it was a song, a story the mind told itself, very slightly different every time. Croon it into the shape of desire . . .

  Got to get out, got to get out. GottoGETOUT!

  Pushing on an open door. She drew herself back and he turned on his side, drawing into a fetal position, his arms wrapped around his chest.

  Chuckling, she let thoughts trickle through their linked minds, tumbled images of her mother baring her teeth—it would be easy enough to mistake one for another, and he’d been appropriately frightened when introduced to her postcorporeal but very much alive and hungry parents. Thoughts of pain, fear, the terrible unwanted ecstasy of feeding. Then the car in the garage, the money in the drawer. Decision firming.

  Backwards inch by inch, letting his mind flutter down deeper into sleep, breaking physical and mental contact. His eyes were flickering here and there in rapid eye movement, real dreams, but she’d seen how they would be shaped. Humans had such odd dreams, so . . . so uncontrolled.

  It could be enormous fun to ride their nightmares, in a subtler way than taking their personalities into your own memory palace, but Peter had had enough. This was business.

  Soon she was standing at the foot of his bed. “Poor Peter, I’m going to miss you,” she murmured. “But perhaps we’ll meet again, eh? Bon chance, little physicist.”

  She turned and walked out into the dark courtyard, stretching with her arms over her head, blinking and yawning and favoring her tender new foot a little. The night was fairly young: around three o’clock, which was halfway through her waking cycle in normal times. There was more than enough light to see by, the glow from the town’s streetlights and a few on the casa’s grounds; even a human could have made his way, and it was enough for a Shadowspawn pureblood to read by, if the print wasn’t too small. She took a long breath of the air.

  Now I’ll pay Monica a visit . . . no, I’ll have her up to the casa and play a little while I’m night-walking. Then a nice light meal, an omelette perhaps, maybe look in on the children, then some sweet, restorative sleep. And first a shower. Ah, the bourgeois pleasures!

  She let herself through the gate and walked upwards on a sweeping stone staircase between rows of cypresses.

  More night-walking, now that I can safely leave my body to take care of itself. The scents are lovely this time of year, with a nose that really works.

  And there was always the details of her plots. Plots and plans and intrigues, and so many crossed threads that even she had trouble keeping track of them. Nudging them through the web and warp of probabilities, towards. . .

  “The part where I get to be God,” she mused. “Not just a God as I am now, but the God, with my face carved upon the moon.”

  In the meantime, it was extremely convenient that everyone thought she was dead—including Peter, now, ready to walk out like a ticking bomb that her enemies would hug to their hearts.

  And Peter gets to be very, very brave and suffer a great deal. What a tragedy!

  “Fix us a drink, chérie,” Adrienne said.

  Muffled sounds; she concentrated, and things that might have happened did, even if they wouldn’t have by themselves before the sun expanded and then collapsed into a red dwarf.

  The effort moved her hunger into the sharp, demanding phase; she’d drawn on her inner reserves for that. Adrienne suspected that metabolizing some sort of trace element was involved, but nobody had ever done much research on the biochemical pathways.

  Buckles unfastened and snaps clicked free. Monica lay for a moment panting around the gag before she pulled it free, wiped her face on a towel and rose from the
great bed and walked stiffly towards the sideboard. This was Adrienne’s own chambers in the casa grande, pale arched Fragonard-esque elegance and space, which she’d missed so badly while she was sick and crowded by machines and people.

  Monica’s step swayed more as she stretched, and she glanced aside at herself in one of the eighteenth-century mirrors in its ormolu frame.

  “And to think I once thought ‘spank me rosy’ was a figure of speech,” she said playfully.

  Adrienne laughed. “It’s your fault for having such a delectably elegant posterior.”

  Michiko was right, she thought. She does look remarkably like Ellen apart from the hair color, and they both do look like Monroe, and I’d never thought of that before she mentioned it; Michiko can be disturbingly acute sometimes, when she bothers to make the effort.

  “Anything in particular?” Monica said. “Your word is my command.”

  “Use your imagination, chérie. You’re good at that.”

  Monica laughed and struck a thoughtful pose, like Rodin’s Thinker but standing up and female.

  Or Monica looks like Norma Jean before she became Monroe and went blond, whereas Ellen was a natural platinum. But the figure is very similar, allowing for Monica being a few years older than Ellen. Odd. But then, it’s logical that Adrian and I should have similar tastes, no? I don’t think I have any particular type when it comes to males, except of course that they be pretty in one way or another. And their minds are almost as important.

  Adrienne put her hands behind her head and looked down at her toes; the left set was only a little paler than the right now, and no longer sore. She wiggled them with some satisfaction; it wasn’t worth the trouble to override somatic memory when the waking form was so nearly back to normal.

  “Cocktail?” Monica asked. “One of those antique styles your parents like?”

  “Splendid idea. Retro can be amusing.”

  She went to work with bottles and shakers, making a little dance of it, which was entertaining.

  Next to the bed was a painting; French Symbolist, showing the death angel bending over an old grave digger in a snowy cemetery, a soul-light in one cupped hand and her black wings making a counterpoint to the leafless branches; he’d dug his last grave, and it would be his own. Schwabe’s La Mort et le Fossoyeur had always been a favorite of Adrienne’s. For the obvious reasons, and for another: the model the artist used for Azrael’s face had been her great-aunt Zoé. Who had long since died the Final Death, a matter of a little family disagreement, but Adrienne remembered her fondly from her own childhood.