The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  Ellen blinked. She knew that, but it was hard to keep in mind when it looked as if Harvey were a full generation older. He could sense a slight discomfort; she’d been startled and put out when she first learned that there were twenty-five years between them, rather than the three or four his appearance suggested.

  Which was one excuse I gave myself for driving her away, he thought. Stop wallowing in guilt, Adrian! It is a self-indulgence and makes for nothing but paralysis!

  By the elbow she gave him in the ribs—quite hard—she was thinking the same thing. Base-link or no, she’d grown disconcertingly able to follow his train of thought. It was a little like telepathy, only shields and blocks were of no use whatsoever.

  And I have been an excessively private man, as well, Adrian thought. It is hard, learning to share. But worth the effort and discomfort, a thousand times over.

  “This was the first place I could be myself,” he finished.

  She licked her ice-cream cone and snorted slightly.

  “Alone, lonely, brooding on a mountaintop. The happiest time of your life!”

  “No, the months since our marriage have been the happiest time of my life,” Adrian said, and glowed at the smile that rewarded him. “But the years here, they were . . . calm, for the most part. The days, at least. At night I could run beneath the stars, and come to terms with my demons and my past.”

  “Sounds like you needed it, honey,” she said.

  I needed to make myself worthy of you, he thought but did not say; even a newly wedded couple had to have some sense of restraint.

  “I love this place too. It was where I was first on my own, making my own living as an adult. NYU didn’t really count, there I was working three jobs and studying too.”

  She smiled, her full, curved Cupid’s-bow lips were particularly charming with a little smudge of chocolate ice cream at one corner. She licked it up, which was both charming and disturbing.

  “I remember the first time I came here, it was for the job interview, and I had lunch over there at the Plaza Café,” Ellen said. “It was January.”

  She nodded towards the restaurant that occupied the center of the block of two-story Territorial-style adobes facing the open space. It had been there for over a century, since just after the First World War, when this square had had the only paved streets in the city . . . town, it had been back then. Oddly enough the food was, and always had been, rather Greek in emphasis.

  “I had a gyro, and then a big piece of that heavenly coconut cream pie, and sat and sipped my coffee and watched the snow fall. Big thick fluffy flakes, you could just see the cathedral up there, and then you couldn’t as it got dark, and it kept snowing; I didn’t know it was unusual, but it wasn’t like snow in Pennsylvania somehow, the light seemed to make it glow from within, and I remember thinking that I understood a lot of Southwestern paintings that had looked like exaggeration or kitsch. After dark I walked out and it was like being in a snow globe, perfectly silent, all the sound hushed.. . .”

  “We will have a day like that together, sometime,” he said.

  She slid a hand into his. “You know, we should have done all this backstory stuff the first time we got involved.”

  “Ah . . . that wasn’t possible.. . .”

  “It was like trying to talk to a lobster!” she said. “You were the sexiest guy I’d ever met, and the most mysterious, and I knew there was something inside, but I could get there. Click go the claws, talk to my shell, scuttle away!”

  The tone was mock angry, but he could sense a flicker of real grief behind it, and he squeezed her hand in apology; it was all he could do.

  “No wonder I threw a bottle of brandy at your head and stomped out. Women like to communicate, you know. It’s a foible we have.”

  “Men prefer to grunt, belch and scratch themselves,” he said, his tone solemn. “It’s a foible—”

  She freed her hand for a moment and thumped him on the back of the head.

  “So, let’s go talk to Giselle,” she said.

  “It may be useful.”

  “It’s certainly necessary. She’s my Harvey, Adrian. She gave me my first real job and she mentored and mother-henned me and listened to me cry. She did a lot more for me than any therapist ever hatched.”

  “Born.”

  “Therapists are hatched, like other reptiles. Anyway, I owe Gis a lot.”

  And she advised you I was too creepy for words and that you should leave me, Adrian thought. I should not resent that; it was quite true and simply showed she was perceptive and had Ellen’s best interests at heart. Nevertheless I do resent it. I must simply do my best to control that.

  They held hands as they walked over to La Fonda, the Harvey hotel on the road that ran up to the cathedral; it was built in the classic fauxadobe-Hopi-Hispanic style of the reconstructionist nineteen twenties, which made it of respectable antiquity itself now. Then right across the bed of the Santa Fe River. Adrian smiled to himself as he felt the little flares of envy from others who saw him with Ellen. It was perhaps not the noblest of pleasures, but still definitely a pleasure.

  She chuckled as they crossed the bridge and she looked down at the dry creek bed. Adrian raised a brow, and she spoke:

  “I was remembering a comic I heard once, a local, doing an act with a fake Blues song:And I was so goldurn sad that night

  If there’d been any water in the Santa Fe River

  I’da jumped right in and drowned.

  Adrian chuckled too. “I wish I could have gone with you,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand. “I noticed that when we were dating . . . the first time, before it all came out . . . you always took me lonely places. That time we went to your beach place down on the gulf near Corpus Christi, all the other stuff.”

  “Habit. You have made me less solitary. Not that I will ever be gregarious.”

  “I’d die of shock to see you become a people person, honey. You’re not cut out to be a glad-hander.”

  They turned left, uphill this time, along the winding course of Canyon Road. Originally it had been a stretch of little farms, ranchos where Spanish-Mexican settlers and their retainers had used water from the river and the Acequia Madre, the Mother Ditch, to grow patches of grain and fruit and raise pigs and chickens, goats and sheep and burros. Many of the trees were still there, and the rambling adobe-and-stone houses they’d built to house their extended families, long since converted to other uses as the city grew around them.

  Some a little farther back from the road along narrow alley were high-priced residences; over a hundred art galleries and studios stretched along this mile of winding street. The new construction blended in, being low-slung and stuccoed in brown with vigas, wooden beams with their ends exposed, supporting flat roofs. Many of the gardens were lovely, though those were mostly in the courtyards at the back, glimpsed through gateways. The art, though. . .

  Adrian grinned at one modernist interpretation of a Hopi or Navajo medicine man, a stick-thin figure with a bulbous mask and antlers reaching for the sky.

  “Bullwinkle the shaman!” he laughed.

  Ellen joined him for a moment; then he could feel a wave of confusion and fear.

  “My darling?” he said gently.

  “Adrienne made the same joke. When she had me tied up in my own apartment up there, that day after I ran into her on the road. She’d be doing things to me with a sock stuffed in my mouth or duct tape across it so nobody could hear the screams, and then it was this chatty, witty conversation and then back to the screams.. . . God, but I’m glad she’s dead.”

  “I too,” Adrian said, forcing down his rage.

  You cannot take revenge on the dead, he thought. It is one of the few real disadvantages to killing your enemies. But some of them are too dangerous to let live an instant more than it takes to kill them.

  Ellen took deep breaths and her mind calmed.

  “Okay, she’s your evil twin, it’s only natural you’d see the same joke sometimes.�
�

  Hans & Demarcio Galleries wasn’t open, but as Ellen had predicted, Giselle was there, working in her office at the back. A little pounding brought her to the front door. She opened the door with her mouth sagging, then turned gray and began to topple backwards towards a plinth that held a vase. It rocked as Ellen threw her arms around the older woman; Adrian felt the Power flow automatically as he lunged forward leopard-smooth to grab the dark feather-patterned piece of pottery out of the air. Not even Shadowspawn reflexes could have caught it before it shattered on the tile floor without his pushing the probability curve.

  “Here,” he said. “I would not want to destroy an original Maria Martinez.”

  Ellen gave him a quelling glance and took Giselle’s arm. The older woman was still pasty with the shock, and making little gasping sounds. Her former assistant steered her into the office at the rear of the gallery’s long rectangle, pushed her into the office chair and hunted up a glass and a bottle of sherry from a cabinet.

  Quite passable sherry, too, Adrian thought; it was a Barbadillo San Rafael with tart, leathery scents and the taste of crushed toffee. A little sweet, a woman’s sherry, but very good short of the V.S.O.P. level.

  The gallery owner gulped the first glass as if it were water or a shot of bad bourbon; even then Adrian couldn’t help wincing slightly. He occupied the moment and gave the two friends a little privacy by examining the shelves. The room had the orderly chaos of someone who knew where everything was, but probably couldn’t have told someone else how to find anything to save her life. There were a couple of very good local pieces in spots where the skylight gave adequate light, though; one seemed like pure Abstract Expressionist when he first saw it, but the closer he came the more it looked like a local sunset seen from a tall dropoff.

  Giselle Demarcio cleared her throat. Adrian turned around; she was dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex, and then gave a honking blow.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said to Ellen; her voice held a slight trace of East Coast big city. “Or off somewhere with his creepy sister.”

  Adrian sat; the chair was comfortable despite the local rustic make. Ellen sat beside him and took his hand again. She held the paired grip up, so that Giselle could see the wedding ring, and Adrian showed his own.

  “You’re married?”

  “Quite happily, Ms. Demarcio,” Adrian said.

  “And to each other, at that, Gis,” Ellen added dryly.

  Demarcio was getting her composure back; Adrian could feel the roil in her mind subsiding, the random flicker steadying into the wavelike patterns of coherent thought. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, apart from the emotional overtones—that would require days of close association—but he could tell that she was thinking, which was impressive.

  “After you went off with his. . . with Adrian’s sister. . .”

  “I didn’t,” Ellen said, with almost clinical detachment. “She kidnapped me. And burned down my house, nearly killing the Lopez family in the process. Would have killed them, except for Adrian and a friend of his. And she . . . did some very unpleasant things to me. Quiet a lot of unpleasant things for several months. Mmmm, drugs and brainwashing, you might say, besides the chew-toy stuff. Adrian rescued me.”

  “Oh,” Demarcio said again. “Oh, the bitch!” Her thoughts spiked, settled into a mixture of sympathy and rage.. . . “Oh, you poor thing!”

  Ellen shook her head and smiled. “I’m a survivor, Gis,” she said. “You know that.”

  Demarcio nodded. “I suppose this means you don’t want me to keep the job open?”

  The two women shared a laugh; then the gallery owner turned to Adrian again. He could feel—and could have seen, even if he were mind-blind—her suspicions click into place once more.

  “What do the police have to say about this?” she asked shrewdly, her eyes darting between them.

  “Nothing,” Adrian said. “My sister is dead. And . . . Ms. Demarcio, some people cannot be controlled by the police, by the authorities. By any conventional means. They are too rich, too . . . powerful for that.”

  Demarcio nodded, and he could feel her agreement; it was something like the scent of mint. Ellen had told him a good deal about her, among other things that she was a rather paranoid variety of left-winger. That didn’t interest him in itself—human politics were a smoke screen, self-deluding nonsense at best, and had been throughout the century since the Council of Shadows reached its full monstrous power. But that mind-set would predispose her to believe an edited version of the truth.

  Since the world really is ruled by an all-powerful evil conspiracy. Just one of werewolves and vampires and sorcerers, rather than capitalists and generals.

  “But you can deal with them?” she asked him sharply.

  He nodded. “I must, I find,” he said. “After what happened to Ellen. And my sister was not acting alone. She was part of a, umm, cabal. Of. . . younger members of some very old, very powerful families. Families that already wield great hidden power, you understand; shadowy influence within governments and corporations and intelligence agencies. Influence sufficient to silence or kill those they consider threats.”

  “Like, for example, your family, the Brézés?”

  “Yes. I have been something of a family black sheep, you might say.”

  I actually managed to say all that without outright lying, he thought, slightly amused. It’s even accurate to call Adrienne’s followers a cabal. Shadowspawn politics work that way, like a Bronze Age monarchy’s court intrigues. Or the other way ’round, since those kings probably had a great deal of our blood. As one might expect from their taste for human sacrifices.

  Demarcio sat watching him for half a minute. “You’re not telling me everything, are you, Mr. Brézé?”

  “Adrian, I think,” he said, smiling and indicating Ellen.

  The charm of the smile bounced off her like buckshot off a battleship.

  “You’re not, are you, Adrian?”

  “No. Because you have no need to know more, as yet; and because knowing more would endanger you. Endanger your life.”

  “Oh.”

  A flash of apprehension, very little of which showed. “Is this a social call, then?”

  He shook his head. “Not entirely, Ms.—”

  “Giselle.”

  A nod. “Not entirely, Giselle. I’d like to know what happened here after we all, how shall I say, left. It would be entirely in character for Adrienne to have . . . energetically suppressed any police investigation. Naturally they would have asked you questions; and questions sometimes reveal information as much as answers do.”

  And naturally you would have found out as much more as you could: out of concern for Ellen, and because according to her you are the biggest gossip in Santa Fe and possessed of an insatiable curiosity.

  “There was a detective, two of them, SFPD. They came around, asking questions. And then .. nothing. When I called, they said the investigation had been moved to the dead-files section. That was . . .” She cleared her throat, then continued: “That was when I thought you must be dead, Ellen.”

  Her beaming smile died. “Then there was the incident, a couple of months ago.”

  “Incident?” Adrian said.

  His voice was still calm, but there was an edge of danger to it now. He could feel the flux in her mind, the primal fear of death welling up. And a ghost wind touched the back of his neck as well, the Power hinting of risk. An effort of will fought down the instinctive rage that the presence of another Shadowspawn in his territory brought. His breed were still more jealous of such things than normal humans, and whatever his conscious convictions, the back of his mind still thought of this place as his.

  “One of the detectives. . . Cesar Martinez . . . was found dead. With his girlfriend. They’re calling it a murder-suicide. The details were, well, pretty gruesome. Then—”

  Adrian listened through the description, and called up the newspaper reports on his tablet. His brows went up. />
  “Thank you very much, Giselle,” he said, after they’d made arrangements to meet for dinner. “That was, as they say, interesting. And suspicious.”

  Demarcio looked as if she’d like to shiver, despite the comfortable temperature. She shook hands with him, and hugged Ellen fiercely.

  On the street outside Ellen sighed. “It’s going to be rough explaining to her that we’re just here for a visit,” she said.

  “It would be no favor to spend too much time in her presence,” he said grimly. “That double murder is a classic. Tōkairin Michiko, at a guess, now that my sister is no longer with us.”

  Ellen shivered. “Michiko wanted to kill me, right there, that evening,” she said. “I can remember her waving a crab leg in that restaurant in San Francisco and saying how much fun it would be for the two of them to kill me together, and smiling at me as if I were supposed to chime in with, ‘Oh, that sounds hot.’ And when Adrienne said she had other plans for me, the mad bitch pouted at me, as if she expected me to agree what a poopy stick-in-the-mud killjoy Adrienne was being.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cigarette case, ignoring a brace of hostile looks as he lit up. Ellen scowled and pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket; she’d more or less given up on pressuring him to quit.

  “She is not a nice person,” Adrian replied. “And her passion for little masterpiece atrocities—”

  “Like a pointillist painter. Maybe she likes playing up the dragonlady thing.”

  “Precisely. Or her liking for being hands-on. That weakness means that perhaps we can arrange that something not very nice happens to her.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Something deadly flickered in Ellen’s voice for a moment. Then: “You sure she came and took care of it herself?”

  “Probably. We will have to check, of course. It might be worthwhile to contact this surviving detective; at need, I could blur his memories afterwards. I do not like doing that, both because of the effort and because it is ethically a little dubious. But one does what one must.”