A Taint in the Blood (30 page)

“How did you . . . meet Dale?” Ellen asked her.

“Picked me up at a concert in Tucson. He
totally
started feeding right while he was boning me that first time and I still thought he was just this awesome Indian dude, and it was like, totally great. You had the feeding and sex at the same time thing yet?”

“Ah . . . no,” Ellen said.
A bit late to be shy, as Adrienne said.
“Close together, though.”

“That’s good too, but with the timing just exactly right,
wow!
I’m the only regular lucy he’s got right now. We travel a lot—that’s cool too. He does things for the Council. Killings mostly, you know, people who find out stuff they shouldn’t or get out of line, sometimes even a Shadowspawn. They call him the Shadowblade. Is that awesome or what?”

“Aren’t you worried that—”

Kai shrugged and washed a mouthful down with her coffee. “Nah. Dale says he’s going to Carry me when he finally offs me—you know that soul-eating thing they can do?”

Ellen’s mind went blank for an instant.

Did I hear that? There’s so much . . . I am never going to get used to this. I don’t
want
to get used to any of this. Help!

Kai nodded. “He’s already done the temp version a bunch of times so he can do the extreme stuff to me without killing me. Well, killing my body; he’s killed
me
in there about . . . oh, thirty-six times. All sorts of ways, and it feels just like the real thing. The first time I didn’t know what was happening and thought it
was
the real thing. Shit, talk about a crazy ride!”

Wayne blinked at her. “What’s that like?” he blurted. “Dying, I mean.
^”

“Kinda interesting. Like, there’s this complete rush. Especially when you learn to ride the pain and fear. I figure it won’t be much different when he does me for real. Pretty weird in there, yeah, but I’m not your vanilla sort of girl and I get to live forever. Or as long as
he
does. And when he lets me I can see and feel what he’s doing, which is just
bitchin
’. And when you think about this destroy-the-world gig they’re gonna do, it all gives me a lot better chances than most people.”

“You want to live forever . . . in there?” Ellen said.

“Why not? Lots of company. Meantime it’s all fun. Especially the feeding part; there just
isn’t
any shit you can buy that gives you a high like that. I haven’t wanted a hit of anything else since Tucson except cigarettes and I’ve cut way back on those. And the sex is just fucking
extreme
. How’d you end up with Adrienne? Those Brézés are seriously big mojo with the Shadowspawn.”

“I . . . was her brother Adrian’s girlfriend. She . . . took me away from him.”

“No!” Kai said. “Kinky! I heard about her brother, too. Those two got this feud thing going. He’s like, a boogeyman to a lot of the Shadowspawn. Even Dale gives him respect.”

She subsided, looking up the table at
her
Shadowspawn; the conversation had shifted into English, more or less.

“
Ga no iwai
,” Michiko was saying thoughtfully.

“Prayer for Long Life,” Adrienne said. “I like it. It’s been ten years since his last?”

“Exactly ten come May, and fifty since his Second Birth. I think it would be a . . .
good gesture
. . . to invite him to Rancho Sangre for the celebration.”

“Which is where we’d need
your
unique talents . . . Dale Shadowblade,” Adrienne said. “I have to admit, you do no-see better than I do . . . and that’s something I rarely say.”

The Indian looked into the distance. “OK. You make a lot of sense, Adrienne. Option One would be fun for a while, but that devastated wasteland thing, no.”

He grinned. “My father would have loved it; he was deeply into that old-time Swallowing Monster and Bear-man on Nabîanye mountain stuff, wanted the world to be like the old stories. Michiko’s right too, though. We’ve got to get free of all that human leftover shit, tribes, countries. It’s just not relevant to us.”

Michiko nodded; she had a sleek modern look to her today, hair parted in the center, sunglasses, a sleeveless white silk blouse, dark trousers tucked into high-heeled boots and a coat hanging off the back of her chair, like an up-and-coming lawyer on her day off.

“Wayne,” she said, and snapped her fingers. “Come here and talk to us.”

He did, fumbling up a laptop from a case at his feet and taking the spot between Adrienne and his Shadowspawn as they moved their chairs aside for him.

“Tell us about those spread patterns you were working on,” Michiko went on, playfully running her fingers over the back of his neck. “With the aerosol release of the initial pathogen.”

To Adrienne: “Wayne’s got me talking like an intellectual when I’m with him. You know, he even
screams
with an impressive vocabulary?”

Wayne stammered for a moment, closed his eyes, then opened them. Adrienne spoke, her voice warm:

“Michi, we all have our individual needs, but we—collectively speaking—need him coherent right now.”

Well, there’s a first. The Yonsei Horror actually looks abashed!
Ellen thought.
Take one spoiled rich girl sorority bitch and add
murdering sociopathic sadist
, and put it all in one awful package with superpowers. And she’s not even as scary as the Apache Devil there. God!

The scientist took a deep breath, let it out, and began to speak in a voice that was almost calm:

“With a fourteen-day contagious latency period, what you’d need would be aerosol release at a limited number of major transport hubs . . . I’ve got graph projections here.”

“Pictures are good,” Adrienne said. “A lot of our relatives are
not
intellectuals. Not given to complex verbalizations, shall we say.”

“As in, some of ’em are stone stupid,” Dale said, and laughed. “One thing the Power doesn’t guarantee is that you’ll be
smart
. We don’t average dumber than humans, but when there are only a few thousand you sure
notice
the dumb ones more.”

Adrienne had been studying the graphs. “You’re assuming a very high average number of contacts.”

“They’d be the most highly mobile individuals, too,” Wayne said. “Ideal vectors.”

“What cities?” Adrienne asked. “The fewer the better. Complex plans have a tendency to go wrong, even with the Power.”

“This list.”

“Twenty-seven?”

“If you want to be absolutely certain.”

“Thank you. You’ve made a definite contribution to our plans.”

Ellen could see his face twitch. The Shadowspawn all laughed, a wicked snickering.

“Then we’re agreed?” Adrienne said. The others nodded, and she raised her coffee cup.

“To Option Two! And the Dread Empire of Shadow, with decent plumbing and high-speed Internet!”

 

 

“Oh, thank God!” Ellen said.

She was in the great high-ceilinged glass-walled living-room of the mountaintop house again. Standing near enough to the fireplace to feel the warmth on her skin, dressed in a long soft robe of dark cloth.

“Ellie!”

The embrace and kiss were wordless for a long time.

“Where are you?” Adrian said into her ear.

“In bed, alone. She told me to go to sleep quite early. I think—”

She could feel his lips move in her hair, and there was sound, but it slipped out of her consciousness.

“Yes, you’re under that
sleep-now
.”

“I thought so.”

Ellen dropped her head into the hollow of his shoulder, her breath almost a shudder of sheer
relief
; it wasn’t until the deadly tension was gone that she realized how tightly it had drawn skin and muscle and tendon. He felt it, and began to knead her shoulders.

“Bad?” he said.

She raised her head with a sigh. The living-room was lit only by the low crackle of a piñon and juniper fire, scenting the air and casting a pool of ruddy flickers around the hearth. The full moon washed the crags outside with silver and darkness, its light falling on the sofas and settees and bookcases.

Ellen sank down cross-legged on the sheepskins that were heaped before the fire; Adrian joined her, and they leaned against each other in companionable silence.

This is like how it was when things were good with us,
she thought.
Only better. How to Save Your Relationship: Get Abducted by His Monster Relatives.

After minutes he asked again: “Where are you?”

“Still in San Francisco,” she said.

“Adrienne?”

“Mostly she’s been . . .
shopping
today. Shopping with me, of all things. Clothes and accessories and lingerie and perfume and jewelry and getting my hair done. Even books and some pictures, all bundled up and sent back to the ranch, to the place she put me in on Lucy Lane. It’s . . . weird; she
knows
I hate her, and she even
likes
that, she doesn’t expect to change it. It’s all like I was a room she was decorating, or a
doll
or something.”

Adrian sighed into her hair. “She had quite a few dolls, as a little girl. She’d dress them and talk with them and have parties . . . sometimes I’d help her. She liked my hobbies too, the piano, watercolors. We were both passionate about horses, and swimming.”

“But sometimes a doll would disappear?” Ellen said.

She hugged him closer; the solid lean muscularity was infinitely comforting, and the familiar clean but slightly acrid smell of his body. Even the fact that it was like his sister’s didn’t make it less so. It wasn’t
exactly
the same; deeper and heavier somehow. It must be the scent of Shadowspawn, subtly different from her kind.

“She’d say
Francine was
bad
,
or
Isabelle wouldn’t do what she was told.
”

“Eerrrk!”

He nodded. “And that would be the last of that one. Once she cried because a doll was gone, and our mother—we thought she was our aunt—said,
Let that be a lesson to you. They don’t grow back.
”

“It’s hard to imagine you as kids. Either of you.”

“Oh, we were,” he said softly. “It gives you a . . . different perspective. There was always a rivalry, but sometimes . . . yes, there was love. Love as puppies or kittens love, straightforward, there like sunlight or rain. It is easier for love to curdle into hate than become indifference. Both link you tightly. We have become utterly different, but we both started out on the same road. What else?”

“And we had lunch with Michiko and . . . this other Shadowspawn. An Indian—he looked like an Indian, maybe a Hopi, maybe Apache or Navaho—named Dale.”

She could feel him stiffen for an instant. “Dale Shadowblade?” he said.

“That’s what they called him. You know him?”

“Know of him. We’ve only . . . briefly been in proximity. Otherwise one of us would be dead, the true death.”

“He’s bad?”

“An enforcer who works for the Council as a whole, freelance. Mostly he’s famous for being unseeable.”

Ellen nodded. “That must be what Adrienne meant when she said
your special talents
to him. She’s planning this get-together—”

“Now what could that be?” he asked when she’d finished. “An assassination? But she
saved
Hajime yesterday. Or could she really want a reconciliation, hoping to persuade him to change his stance on Operation Trimback?”

He shook his head and then looked down at her where she rested one cheek on his shoulder.

“You have kept your head about you, my darling Ellie. This is the break we need.”

“You’re sure?” Ellen said; she fought to keep her hands from turning into claws and digging painfully.

“There will be many, many Shadowspawn there, crowded together. And their guards. Frictions, jockeying for position, cross-purposes. Not a one-on-one duel between defender and attacker. Everything will be . . .
confused
.”

“It will? Adrienne . . . is smart.”

“We don’t do organization well, not on a large scale. Yes! This
will
be the opportunity we need! And I
will
get you out of there!”

The kiss turned heated. After a moment, she took his hand and slid it onto her breast.

“You are sure?” he said, looking down into her eyes.

The hand moved, sliding up over the curve, touching the stiffened nipple through the cloth of her robe. She gasped slightly at the jolt of sensation, and the way her skin seemed to glow all over. The golden flecks in his irises glittered like mica seen in the depths of a cave, catching the firelight.

The Power
, she thought.
That’s what they’re a sign of. This is the man the Shadowspawn themselves fear.

“Adrian, when a woman does that, she’s generally
sure
!” Softly: “I want to do this because
I
want to, with someone I really like. Someone I love.”

The hand turned insistent, and his mouth came down on hers. She scrabbled at the buttons on his shirt . . .

Minutes later she linked her fingers behind his neck.

“Adrian?” she said breathlessly.

“Yes?”

“I haven’t suddenly become made of porcelain. I like to feel how strong you are. Come
on!
^”

He snarled then; she felt a brief surge of fear, and then it turned to a savage excitement. Her long legs wrapped around him as he drove forward, lifting her in an arch off the sheepskins until only her neck and shoulders touched . . .

 

 

“So,” she said much later.

He lay against her; one hard arm was across her stomach, and his breath tickled on her collarbone, like butterflies in the golden glow. There was still a little tension in him; she could feel it in the muscles of his back as she stroked it, like hard living rubber under the sweat-slick skin.