The Council of Shadows

by S. M. Stirling

  “I get the feeling you’ve changed.”

  “I had to . . . ah . . . take a couple of levels in badass, let’s say.”

  “You killed her.”

  His eyes went back to the puddle of blood; there wasn’t a body. A pretty disgusting mess, but no body.

  “Oh, yes.” Her eyes were large and turquoise blue; for a moment they held a hot satisfaction. “There’s a body, probably a long way away, but it’s empty now, and in a little while it’ll just stop breathing. Nobody home anymore. I put a bullet through that part of the bitch.”

  “That . . . that wasn’t his sister, was it?”

  “No. That was Michiko. She’s a friend of his sister’s, Adrienne. Sort of a wannabe Mistress of Ultimate Darkness. Incidentally I jammed a hypo full of very bad stuff into Adrienne’s foot, and I had a lot of very good reasons to do that. And she came down with a case of dead from it.”

  Salvador laughed; it was a bit shaky, but genuine. “I think you have changed, lady.”

  Brézé was back. Now he was dressed, in the same sort of clothes; a light jacket covered a shoulder rig with a knife worn hilt-down on one flank and a Glock on the other.

  His real body. Oooooo-kay.

  “All right,” Salvador said, taking a pull on the cigarette. “Fill me in. I know I’m really somewhere locked up, under heavy meds, howling at the moon, right? Or totally catatonic. I lost it in Kandahar and I’m in a padded cell at some VA warehouse and the whole last ten years are a whack-job dream.”

  For some reason that made Adrian Brézé smile. “I’m a Shadowspawn. . .. That’s what we call ourselves, mostly. But . . . well, I try not to be a monster. It’s complicated.”

  “Like the past year has been so simple? I want answers.”

  “Think carefully about that, Detective. You can choose to learn, or you can choose to forget. . .. I can do that, with your cooperation. If you forget, you can make yourself a new life. If you learn, it’ll probably kill you—but at least you’ll know why you’re fighting, mon ami.”

  “If you offer me a blue pill and a red pill I’ll fucking kill you!”

  The couple laughed. “It’s actually two file cards with Mhabrogast glyphs, but otherwise yes, life imitates old film. Take your pick,” the man said.

  He produced two squares of light pasteboard, sat, and began to draw on them with a black Sharpie, the movements fluid and sure. Spikylooking symbols grew on both pieces of paper; something made him look away slightly, as if seeing them produced an itch four inches behind his eyes.

  Then he held up one: “Knowledge—and you can try being the guerrilla.” The other: “Ignorance—and long life. Longer, probably, at least.”

  Salvador looked at the butt of the cigarette. Then he tossed it accurately into the blood; it hissed into extinction.

  “Like that’s really a choice?”

  “Yes, very much so,” Brézé said. “You could probably choose to forget, and be . . . not safe. Not in any more danger than the rest of the human race, at least.”

  “Okay.”

  He took a deep breath. Just having all this go away was a little tempting . . . until he remembered that he’d still be swimming with sharks.

  Only I wouldn’t know they’re there. Not until they bite my ass off.

  “I have got a lot of payback coming and I need to know how to get to the people who owe me. Right, I embrace the suck, it isn’t the first time. Let’s start with some explanations.”

  There was a subdued clack-snack-snick as the blonde cleared her rifle and put it down on the stone ledge before the empty fireplace.

  “No,” she said. “You guys start by sweeping up the glass and mopping that blood. Then we go . . . downstairs to the dungeon, and we talk.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Jesus, this place feels weird,” Salvador muttered to himself. “Completely Rando.”

  He sipped at his latte and watched the people go by the curbside restaurant, enjoying the mild Californian coastal warmth. He was feeling pretty good physically, too, and he looked down at his gut with considerable approval, and the definition of his arms where the biceps swelled at the T-shirt. Not as ripped as he’d been when he was humping an MG-240 through mouj country, but he wasn’t in his twenties anymore, and a lot of that had been sheer nervous energy burning stuff off anyway, or just having nothing to do with his spare time but pump iron, under the no-booze, no-cooze rules of engagement in theater.

  The mellow afternoon sun was like silk, and there was a scent of eucalyptus and earth and good cooking and flowers in the air. Apart from the risk of imminent death, life was good, and he was working towards revenge for Cesar and a whole lot of others.

  This place feels as weird as a lot of my days as a Helmand Province tourist, and I don’t like fancy coffee. Got to fit in, though. I’m not the guy with sensors on my helmet and an Apache gunship and GPS-guided artillery shells and all the good shit on call here. If the other side can find me they can squash me like a cockroach . . . if I’m lucky. Scuttle through the cracks, don’t attract attention until you have to. And they can walk through walls. And read minds.

  Adrian had warned him that the wards and blocks in his brain wouldn’t stand up under close examination, and that a strong adept could break them, and him, by main force. The process of implanting them had been unpleasant, but he welcomed any protection he could get, and they were supposed to make people more likely to open up to him somehow, at least for a day or so.

  Like the man said, I’m the guerrilla now, and I need every trick I can get. It sucks . . . so embrace the suck, Eric, embrace the suck. But it’s creepy here, not just dangerous.

  Rancho Sangre Sagrado was far too pretty, just for starters. Virtually all of it was built in one style, a Californian try at looking high-toned Mexican-Spanish that had been very popular back towards the beginning of the last century, and influential since. All arches and whitewashed walls or colored stucco, red barrel-tiled roofs, colored mosaic tile accents on corners or walls, glimpses through wrought-iron gates into spectacular courtyard gardens, the occasional square or round tower on a store or public building with those odd outswelling things called machicolations.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like the style; in fact, he thought it was rather handsome, and it certainly suited the landscape and climate; plus it was less obviously made-up than Santa Fe’s flat roofs. The only reason his early Spanish ancestors had built Santa Fe the way they did and lived in flat-roofed Pueblo-style buildings was that they couldn’t afford what they really wanted, which would have looked a lot more like this. New Mexico had been the ass-end Siberia of Spain’s empire, isolated by poverty and deserts and Apaches, the place you sent Cousin Diego after the embarrassing thing with the nun.

  But there were was nothing else here, not even on the outskirts, not a single fifties-sixties public washroom–style heap of stained concrete and buckled aluminum, nothing more recent, like a funhouse mirror twisty-fancy with mirrored glass, not even any of the usual standard suburban frame.

  There wasn’t even a church; and while he wasn’t religious except when talking to his heavily Catholic grandmother to keep her happy, it added a note of oddness. There was a building that looked like it had been a church, white and fancifully carved like some he’d seen in Mexico, but it was apparently some sort of community theater now.

  And I have my suspicions about the sort of shows they put on there, too.

  The whole place felt vaguely un-American, in the strict sense; it felt like someone had settled on a way it should look and then just enforced it for better than a hundred years, with new construction strictly because there were more people, and that in the same style. It reminded him of Santa Barbara, which he’d visited on leave from Camp Pendleton years ago, but more so; or of the heavily conserved parts of Santa Fe, for another, but with more consistent application of a thick layer of folding green to tidy up the edges. As far as he could see there was no equivalent of his hometown’s Cerrillos Road, a strip
of ticky-tack and motels and RV parks with the best view of the Sangres in town. Everything looked like it was washed and scrubbed and repainted and the flowers given a quick swipe with a cloth every morning.

  Idly, he punched New Urbanist into his tablet; he was simply waiting for evening now, and picking up a little intel by listening in on people. Ellen had used the term about the place in his briefing. A quick flick through the articles confirmed that she’d been right.

  A lot like Celebration, Florida, only not built all at the same time.

  Even the three-tiered fountain in the brick circle at the middle of the intersection in front of him was like the one in the picture, three terra-cotta basins of diminishing size. It made him wonder whom the architects had been getting their directions from . . . but then, in the month since meeting Mr. and Ms. Brézé, so had a lot of things. Even the loopiest conspiracy theories looked tame compared to the truth, and now whenever he looked around it was like he could see things bulging and squirming beneath the surface—even people’s faces. Who knew, who knew. . .

  “Your pastries, sir,” the waitress said.

  She set down a plate with fragrant-smelling muffins in a cute little basket.

  “Thanks.”

  He glanced over automatically at her cleavage, which was a pleasant sight, and chatted for a moment; she was in her late teens or early twenties, red haired and freckled and fresh faced . . . and dangling between those creamy jiggling-firm cheerleader titties was a tiny pendant. A jagged trident across a black-rayed sun on a chain. The Brézé house badge, and the symbol of the Council of Shadows and the Order of the Black Dawn. The oldest and most senior of all the Shadowspawn houses, the ones who’d spread their genetic knowledge of the Power to the secret clans worldwide, and the lords of Rancho Sangre. Nearly everyone he’d seen here wore one, around the neck or on a bangle or a key chain or whatever.

  It meant she was a renfield. That she knew who and what ran this place, and had been initiated. A collaborator.

  He astonished himself with the wave of violent hatred that swept through him: a blast like stomach acid at the back of his throat, a vision of a bomb scything through the crowd around him in fragments of nails and bolts and furniture and leaving wreckage and flames.

  Whoa, he thought. Watch it! The kid can’t help where she was born. She might be an okay person.

  “Another latte, please,” he said, and read her name badge. “Tiffany.”

  Instead of letting the images cycle through his head he ate another apricot-walnut muffin: very good indeed, and even the butter had real taste. The menu said, All local, all organic, right under the classic Art Deco Sunkist label cover from the nineteen twenties, and had a little small-print, Brézé Enterprises, down in the lower left corner.

  Ellen had also said the place was like a rich man’s show-ranch, only with people instead of palomino horses. Everyone in it was a renfield, except for stoop labor trucked in for the day from elsewhere. And occasional travelers, not all of whom made it out alive.

  When the waitress returned to fill his cup he let his wrist bangle show; it had the mon symbol of the Tōkairin clan on it.

  “Oh!” the waitress said. “Hi! You’re one of the faithful too! We don’t get all that many outsiders here, not faithful. Meat sacks don’t count, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He decided that making allowances for Tiffany’s upbringing was futile. These people were, for all practical purposes, devil worshipers from long lines of devil worshipers.

  Faithful and meat sacks. Well, that’s one way of looking at it, he thought. One thing about being a detective, you get used to talking to skanks like this little puta without letting your feelings show. And yeah, the briefing said it’s hard even to find this place if you’re not in the know. Brigadoon from Hell, not on the maps, the computers don’t reference it, Google Earth can’t find it.

  “Yeah,” he said easily. “Down here from the bay to do some purchase orders at the fruit co-op. I’m part of the acquisition team for the clan’s town houses. They insist on the best, and now that the Tōkairin and the Brézés are buddies again, you’re it here.”

  Rancho Sangre was surrounded by farms, mostly in orchards and vineyards; they rolled away to the varied green of the Coast Range just west of town.

  “You don’t look like a produce buyer,” she said, smiling. “You look more like you work on the muscle side, a house soldier or something. Kind of rough, not a cubicle dweeb.”

  A thrill of alarm shot through him; the problem was that he did look like that. Not just his build, but the scars on his arms and face, and the way he held himself. He hadn’t expected a waitress to pick up on it, though.

  Goddammit, I’m not a spook! I wasn’t an undercover cop, either. Everyone in Santa Fe knows who all the cops are!

  “I used to be on that side of things,” he said. “But I’m retired from ops now. We get old, eh? Even if people your age can’t believe it.”

  “Oh, you don’t look old, just scary. The Gurkhas here are too, I suppose, but they really keep to themselves and they’re too different. And there usually isn’t anything for them to do but run through the woods and train. You look like you really did stuff; I suppose up in the big city they need a lot of guys like you.”

  Well, that’s flattering.

  “You’re born here, obviously.”

  “Third generation. My dad works for the co-op,” she went on pleasantly, nodding. “Supervisor in the packing plant, that’s really hard when you don’t use any preservatives, it has to be just right. Mom’s a guidance counselor at the high school.”

  “I’m glad to be here. It’s quiet in San Francisco with all the daimyo out of town, and this makes a change of pace. Not that I’m sorry to have missed that big ruckus last year.”

  “Oh, God, yeah, that party and the fight and everything!” she said. “And it was so much fun up until then before it all got spoiled, all the new people and the celebrations. I was working up at the casa grande for the party, Theresa the manager tapped me, and it was a complete blast. Lucky I was in the infirmary and tranked out of my mind when the bad stuff came down, so I only heard about it later. Couple of people nearly got killed, and there was that horrible thing with Doña Adrienne.”

  “You were sick?” he asked. “How’d that happen?”

  She sat down to talk; business was slow, and this was a small town, only a few thousand people and no tourist trade.

  And, of course, we’re both faithful.

  “Oh, not sick, just banged up and low on blood. They had a lot of extra staff in to help with the guests, you know, Theresa had the sheriff go around and pick us out at school. Mainly I was sort of a temporary lucy, you know, ’cause I’m pretty, which sure beat cleaning the rooms or the kitchen. Even if it was more twenty-four/seven.”

  “You certainly are pretty enough for anyone, even the Masters,” he said gallantly.

  “Thanks.” Another giggle. “There were two of the Tōkairin Shadowspawn tag-teaming me, some sort of security guys from things they said. . .. God, I was sore all over for a week, I didn’t know there were that many ways to get screwed! They had those funny tattoos all over, too, and I mean all over.”

  “Ah . . . not too scary, I hope.”

  “No. Well, yes, but usually hot-scary, not just plain scary. I knew they probably wouldn’t really kill or cripple me, you know how it is with us, and they had the refreshments the Brézés brought in for that. I saw them go at a couple of those meat sacks and it reeeeeally got gross, I nearly barfed. But they’re just meat sacks, after all.”

  “Nothing too bad, eh?”

  “Not once I got into it. It just got sort of blurry for me when they were turning into animals and stuff and fucking with my head with the Power, so I can’t be sure what they actually did to me after that, except I’m not pregnant, of course, and all the bite marks and bruises and stuff healed up. I mean, I thought they’d bitten parts of me off and eaten them while I watched, but obvi
ously they didn’t. Wild!”

  “They wouldn’t want to insult the Brézés by killing a renfield without permission,” Salvador observed.

  “Right. And I got bled enough to get a bit of the addiction, which made coming down a complete bummer, like a mixed-drink hangover for days, even with the transfusions. But fun while it lasted, I was really starting to enjoy them feeding on me, it’s better than grass any day after the first couple of times. My sister Jill was too young, and boy, did she get sniffy and whine about missing the party. You know how sixteenyear-olds are about acting like adults.”

  “I’ve got a couple of younger brothers and sisters too,” Salvador said sympathetically.

  And she’s what, nineteen? Christ.

  “Yeah.” A malicious smile came over the perky face, a moment’s leer. “Then her initiation came up a couple of months later, and with Doña Adrienne gone and Don Jules and Doña Julia back here they handled it, really old-school.”

  “Old-school?”

  “Yeah, at mine Doña Adrienne just bit me on the neck and gave me a kiss; the bite didn’t even sting much, and that was it, ‘Here’s a Band-Aid for the hickey, here’s your funky black robe, here’s your pendant, worship the Shadowspawn faithfully and you’ll be one of the masters over the cattle, the meat sacks, yada, yada; now go back to studying for the SATs like a good girl.’ But Jilly, they went at her the way my mom says they did with her and my dad back forever ago. It was sort of fun to watch her wiggling and hear her yell. First Don Jules stuck his—”

  Salvador didn’t consider himself a particularly squeamish man; he hadn’t been as a marine, and years as a cop gave you a plumber’s-helper view from society’s toilet bowl. He still blinked a little at the blow-byblow description of what had happened to this Jilly on an altar in front of a crowd of family and neighbors chanting the equivalent of amen while swaying back and forth, holding candles and clad in black robes.

  “So she howled herself hoarse and got all weepy about it afterwards for a couple of weeks, even when we told her to shut up about it, which tells you how well she’d have done up at the casa grande, and Dr. Duggan had to trank her for a while, which was a relief, ’cause my room’s right next to hers and she kept waking me up with the nightmares. But she’s been a lot less of an annoying little snot since she stopped that, which means she’s growing up, I suppose.”