A Taint in the Blood (10 page)

Ellen freed her hands and placed them on her knees.

“But if I stayed here I’d be safe . . . well, as safe as you . . . and I could live forever? God, Adrian, that is
so
tempting. She told me I had
all sorts of interesting new sensations and experiences
to look forward to! I’m so
scared
all the time.”

He nodded. “Yes. And that’ll be just as bad as you can imagine. More than you can imagine. But there’s a chance of getting you away from her, and there are drawbacks to staying here.”

The room began to fade. Sunlight appeared overhead, grew bright, reflected off marble columns around a pool. Prussian-blue mountains rose in the distance, against a cloudless sky. Scents of thyme and arbutus drifted on warm dry air under the rustling shadows cast by the leaves of live-oaks arching overhead. Cicadas buzzed as many-colored birds flew among great alabaster pots, and flamboyant bougainvillea spilled down their sides in purple and gold.

“This is Maxfield Parrish!” she exclaimed, distracted into delight. “But real! It’s so beautiful . . . This is
heaven
!”

The clear cruel laughter of a young girl came from the bushes. Then the water in the pool rippled. Something passed beneath it in a smooth curve. She could see a glimpse of . . . tentacles? She stumbled back from the edge of the water with a sudden sick dread.

“This is my mind, Ellen, and it’s not anything like Heaven. It’s a Shadowspawn mind, and I’m no more completely in control of it than you are of yours.”

Ellen looked at him and spoke slowly: “Could . . .
she
do this to me too? Swallow me?”

Adrian winced and nodded. “We call it . . . Carrying. Any strong Shadowspawn can.”

She fought not to scream as he nodded again. Bitterly:

“There’s no God, no Heaven, we don’t have souls, but we can still
go to Hell forever
?”

“That’s . . . probably where the idea of Hell came from in the first place.”

Her hands went over her face. “This just gets worse and worse. All right, Adrian. I’ll go back. But you get me out!”

A deep breath, and she stood and faced him. “She had a videoconference with a man named Dmitri on the flight from Santa Fe. He scared me nearly as much as she did, even on a flat-screen and eight thousand miles away.”

“Dmitri Pavlovitch Usov?”

“Yes. He was in Seversk, in Siberia. There was something about plutonium smuggling, and a man, a very old Shadowspawn, who was assassinated with it.”

“Gheorghe Brâncuşi?”

“Yes. There was something going on I couldn’t tell, some sort of political thing, I think, an intrigue, a conspiracy. And they mentioned a Council that was going to meet in Tiflis, in Georgia, to elect new members next year. They were saying things without saying them, by indirection. And—”

“No time!” Adrian said; she could see fear on his face. “You’ve got to go back
now
; she’s stirring out of REM sleep. You stay alive, you hear me, Ellie? You stay alive. Do not die! No matter what happens, you stay alive.”

He held up a hand before her face, and clenched it into a fist as he spat a
word
that spun into her ears like buzz-saws. The universe shattered and dissolved.

 

 

“This town used to be a lot more charming before it realized how charming it was,” Harvey said.

They’d spent the night in a hotel Adrian favored when he had to come here, a 1920s late-Beaux Arts one on Nob Hill, brick and marble with an attached spa. Adrian paused under the awning; there was a little square of park uphill, and a big church. The sky was bright with a few fluffy clouds, and the temperature just a little brisk. It could have been June as easily as February, in San Francisco. They turned and headed downslope, towards the Mission District.

“I’m not an urban person. Still, I hate it less than most,” Adrian replied.

The streets were busy. More homeless than there had been a few years before, more empty buildings and shops, a little less traffic, but the crowds were still dense and lively on the sidewalks. Adrian detested cities, as a general rule; the sheer crowding grated on his nerves, the smells were bad, and the necessity for pulling in his senses made him feel muffled and thick and half-blind. This was . . . less bad than most.

He’d even been able to enjoy breakfast: buttermilk pancakes and local berries. Mostly he lost appetite for anything but blood quickly in places this dense, which was another reason to avoid them. Then he had spent the rest of the morning standing on the observation deck of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill watching the Bay and the gulls over Alcatraz, and pulling the smells of salt water into his lungs.

Nothing like as bad as Cairo. Or Calcutta, where he’d once been trapped for an entire memorable month.

Harvey looked aside at him. “Got a jolt there right through my shields.”

Adrian smiled. “I remembered the Black Hole, Operation Kali. Convinced me I had to get out or go mad.”

Harvey grinned. “That made
me
feel like going over to the Dark Side of the Force too, ol’ buddy. Of course, the Council wouldn’t have me, these days. Not close enough to pureblood.”

Adrian nodded. “I still think it might be faster to just go down to Paso Robles and look around ourselves.”

Harvey snorted. “Yeah,
right
. Charge into Adrienne’s security and generations of protections with Wreakings soaked into the bedrock . . . it’s not as if we could just look things up on Google Earth, you know.”

Adrian sighed in acknowledgment.
I am just venting
, he thought.

Nothing, not even human memory, was as easy to nudge with a little Wreaking as digital systems. Even hard copy tended to be burned in fires, or eaten by rats, or mildew . . . or anything else where
luck
mattered.

Harvey went on: “When your parents took you for your
visits
as a kid they didn’t go there, did they?”

Adrian smiled grimly. “No, to Europe.”

“You’ve turned to confiding since Calcutta. Getting you to mention this stuff at all was always like extracting teeth with a loop of spaghetti.”

“I’ve been trying not to suppress the memories anymore. They are part of me. Yes, we went to the castle in the Auvergne, to . . . get us in touch with our roots, they’d say today. We thought they were our aunt and uncle, of course, come to give us a holiday. Christ, what a pile that place was! Is, I suppose.”

“Yeah, the European branch of the Brézés are a bit conservative.”

“Everything but hanging head-down to sleep,” Adrian said. “And the place was infested with bats, at that. The attics and the caves, at least.”

Then, softly: “We loved it, of course.”

“Bet it was in the summer,” Harvey observed, dodging a pushcart vendor.

“Of course; every summer, longer as we grew older. Green hills, dusty lanes, mountain forests, ponies for us to ride . . . our
aunt
and
uncle
who denied us nothing, and hinted that we were as an exiled prince and princess. Oh, is there a child on Earth who won’t listen to
that?
The delicious sense of being
different
, different and better. Great canopied beds, fireplaces ten feet high, Egyptian gods on the walls of crypts below—”

“Egyptian?” Harvey said incredulously. “You never mentioned
that
before, either.”

“Yes, Egyptian, painted in the 1830s, when it was the headquarters of the Order of the Black Dawn, before they discovered Darwin and Mendel. When they thought they were sorcerers and
loup-garou
.”

“Yeah, but they
were
. Nobody allowed in who couldn’t actually Wreak with the Power.
And
they married each other’s sisters. Unscientific, but it worked, sorta-kinda.”

Adrian nodded; that had been what kept traces of the ancient, horrible truth alive, there and elsewhere.

His voice went soft: “Then as we grew older, the ceremonies, the first Words in Mhabrogast . . . little sips of blood from the prisoners, mostly wretched
beurs
, like letting a child have a tiny glass of wine with his meal to make him feel grown-up. Staring into pools of ink, and . . . other things. At last one night we saw
les vieux
arise. My great-grandparents, after a gap of fourteen thousand years, the first to survive death. I can remember them
en miá chambra
, beside our beds, like pillars of mist with bright golden eyes, and then people smiling down at us—”

“Whoa, ol’ buddy. You realize you’re not only talking in French, which is OK, you’re talking
Auvernhat
patois thick enough to chisel into building blocks for one of those fucking châteaux?”

Adrian shook himself and smiled. “Sorry,” he said, shifting back into General American English. “They put Wreakings on us, of course, to keep us from revealing the truth when we were at ‘home.’ Some of them still linger down there, twined around the root of my mind. It all seems like a dream, now.”

“Nightmare. OK, we’re here.”

The restaurant was so discreet that it didn’t even have a sign; just a big Victorian gingerbread, like so many others that had survived the earthquake and the fire. And generations of vandalism in the dangerous period between being
new and fashionable
and
old and venerable
, when a building was just
out of date and shabby
. The maître d’ was just as polished, fitting into the darkly rich interior like a piece of the mahogany furniture or one of the old Persian rugs.

“Ms. Polson is waiting for you and your friend, Mr. Brézé. This way.”

Sheila Polson was scowling at the menu as they were ushered into their private nook. She glanced up sharply as Adrian extended his senses; no electronic ears tickled at his consciousness. Just because you
had
the Power didn’t mean you had to
use
it rather than some technological equivalent.

Adrian inclined his head slightly. He hadn’t met the chief of the Brotherhood’s California section before; he’d mostly operated in Europe and Asia when he and Harvey were a team, and the organization was tightly compartmentalized.

She was a medium woman—medium height, medium build, medium unmemorable navy business suit, dark-brown skin and wiry hair cropped short. Only the eyes struck in the mind, and that was because of something in them; otherwise she might have been a paralegal or middling bureaucrat. Though most of those would not have the weapons he sensed, a spring-loaded gun with silver darts in the attaché case leaning against her chair and an inlaid blade in a scabbard sewn into her jacket. And her shoes were made for fast movement, not style.

Her looks said mid-thirties. From what he felt, she could have been that, or possibly a decade or more older.
He
looked to be in his mid-twenties, after all, and she smelled of the Power too. Not nearly as much as he, but considerably more than Harvey. Her mind was tightly warded under a wash of patterned no-thought, so tightly that he couldn’t even feel the dislike he was certain was there.

“Hello, Ms. Polson,” Adrian said. “A pleasure to meet you.”

She looked at his hand as if it were a cobra, or decayed, or both, and then shook.

“This place is a waste of money,” she said as they sat. “There isn’t a
lunch
entrée under thirty dollars!”

“It’s Adrian’s money, Sheila,” Harvey pointed out. “And since he gives a couple of million of it a year to us, you really can’t complain about how he spends the rest of it.”

The rangy, graying man glanced at the menu. “No BBQ or hamburgers? Damn. Had my mouth set for a double bacon cheeseburger. Guess I’ll have to settle for the
Lapin á la Moutarde Et Au Romarin
.”

Adrian hid a smile; Harvey’s French was much less accented than his Texan-flavored English. He could have passed for someone from Tours on the telephone, in fact, as opposed to Adrian. Any Frenchman listening to
him
would have heard some village in Puy-de-Dôme under the overlay of Paris and Sorbonne. With a very old-fashioned tinge at that.

“
Magret De Canard Au Porto
,” Adrian said; he was partial to duck breast anyway, and the port sauce, celery root and apple puree sounded interesting.

“I’ll have the sliced lamb on mixed greens,” Polson said with malice aforethought.

Adrian gave the order to the waiter, and added: “A glass of the Ronceray for me, thank you. Anyone else? No?”

She waited in tight silence until privacy returned. Then:

“You resigned from the Brotherhood, Brézé,” she said. “Nobody resigns from the Brotherhood. Why should we help you?”

“Sheila,” Harvey put in. “Remember those millions? As in millions of
bucks
? As in, weapons, transportation, living stipends, bribes, special equipment, safe houses, research? Hell, the organization runs on silver and it ain’t cheap.”

“Stolen money,” she said. “Blood money.”

Adrian hid his annoyance with a raised brow he knew was intensely annoying in itself.

Fanatic,
he thought.
Then again, who else would wage a failing struggle all their lives long?

Aloud he went on: “No. Directing money to investments that
will
increase in value harms nobody. And before I resigned from the Brotherhood—which, despite your statement, I
did
successfully do—”

Polson’s frown said all any of them needed to know:
Because you had no way to punish me except at a cost you weren’t prepared to pay.

“I carried out many missions. But most of all, you should help me because I propose to kill a powerful Shadowspawn who ranks high beneath the Council of Shadows. Specifically, my sister, Adrienne Brézé.”

“Ah, there we get to it,” she said. “You’ve left each other alone ever since the last time you locked horns. Why should she come for you? We
know
the Council didn’t send her.”