The Council of Shadows (10 page)

Farmer took a swig of the beer and shrugged. “So long as I get to kill the bastards, I'm satisfied. And you two give me more opportunities than I'd get if I stayed on the reservation. The Brotherhood's gotten too much like a fucking rabbit in the headlights, you ask me. The Council's planning to wreck the world and all they're doing is trying to build a bolt-hole so they can survive the apocalypse.”

Guha nodded. “That's why I'm with you, Harvey. But I notice you don't tell
Adrian
about your little talks with Michiko-
san
,” she pointed out.

“I did my job too good. The boy's idealistic.”

They all chuckled. “So,” Farmer said, “what's your solution for the ones we
can't
reeducate?”

“Oh, we kill 'em all,” Harvey said cheerfully. “And Tbilisi is goin' to be one
fine
opportunity for that. A lot more than Michiko and her hubby think. I got a project going along those lines. You guys in?”

“In,” Farmer said.

Guha shuddered. “In. But it also means we'll have to walk into the biggest nest of them that's gathered for generations. With enough Power in the air to make all the molecules dance in their favor.”

“Considering the alternative, I don't think there
is
much of an alternative. At least Adrienne isn't going to be around. She was too smart for comfort and she had a lot more self-control than most of her friends.”

Guha sighed. “I said I am in, too. Deep in doo-doo.”

A
drian and Ellen crossed the Loire heading north towards Paris in the early evening; the rain had stopped and the lingering twilight of September had a liquid washed-out quality to it.

“I'm glad we didn't take the A6,” Adrian said. “It is a nightmare this time of year.”

The sun was setting westward, across a low, rolling landscape of vineyards showing red and yellow, reaped fields and autumn-tinged woods, villages and the occasional château. They both ignored the petrol stations and other modern excrescences.

On their right the sunlight caught a line of hills in the distance, turning them blue flushed with a slight tinge of pink towards their tops. Adrian handled the Ferrari F50 with his usual verve; it would do zero to a hundred in eight seconds, and he liked to do exactly that. It no longer drove Ellen to the verge of lost bladder control, and she'd finally started believing that the police wouldn't pull them over either.

Well, he's got reflexes like a leopard, when he isn't
literally
being a leopard,
she thought, as he touched the accelerator and the g-force shoved her back into the upholstery in a scent of fine leather.
Plus he can warp probability. It's still a little scary.

She chuckled as they zipped around a large truck and back into the left-hand lane, and he looked over at her.

“I was just remembering that while I was at Rancho Sangrón—”

He chuckled in turn; she'd coined the pun on the place's name, turning it from Ranch of the Holy Blood to Ranch of the Asshole.

“—Adrienne took me on that motorcycle cruise up the coast to San Francisco. Scared the shit out of me, and that was only
just
a metaphor. You Brézés have a thing for speed and risk, don't you?”

He stiffened, then shook his head. “You're right. For too many years I defined myself in opposition to her; yet we are . . . were . . . similar in many respects.”

“Your evil twin.”

“Exactly! I can afford to acknowledge things like that now.”

“Now that she's dead.”

“Since you killed her.” Adrian laughed.

Ouch
.

Ellen winced inwardly. Half the time she remembered plunging the hypo into Adrienne's foot with savage glee. The other half it made her queasy. Not so much the fact that she'd done it, as the way it had felt for her.

Which was very damned good. And yes, she deserved it—God, did she deserve it!—but should I have enjoyed it so much? Should I enjoy
remembering
it so much? Yeah, I was so scared all the time and it was
such
a fucking relief to get away from the mad, sadistic bitch, but I did
kill
her, after all. I always used to put spiders and centipedes out in the garden instead of squishing them. I totally lost it when my cat brought me a dead bird.

And now I'm killing
people
. And enjoying it. Okay, Adrienne only just qualifies as “person,” but still.

He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed for a moment. It would have been even more comforting if they weren't doing nearly two hundred kilometers per hour with only one of the driver's hands on the wheel.

“I am sorry, my sweet. I forget sometimes that you were not brought up to this war. Most of those close to me have been born into it, but you were not.”

“Yeah, I'm not a conflict junkie. Even to get out of the coal country I never seriously considered enlisting. And now I'm a supercommando fem-ninja in training.”

He laughed aloud at that. “You have natural talent,” he said. “But I would not go quite that far.”

“And I feel a little, mmm, guilty about all the people we left in that horrible place.”

Adrian shrugged expressively. “My sweet, you
are
in the war now. And you are on the side of the guerrillas. We cannot afford sentiment. If I had tried to smuggle out . . . oh, say, little Cheba . . .”

She shot him a dark glance, half-serious. He'd been impersonating one of Adrienne's guests, and he'd had to take the girl as
refreshment
.

“. . . it would have aroused suspicions.”

“Well, she's dead now too,” Ellen said. “Poor girl . . .”

There was a
quality
to his silence this time.

“She's not?”

Adrian shook his head, his eyes commendably on the roadway.

“No?”

“No,” he said aloud, reluctantly. “We have a base-link.”

She nodded; being on the receiving end of a feeding attack wasn't just a matter of the Shadowspawn drinking your blood or the euphoric drug. There was a mental joining, a feedback loop; she'd heard Adrienne use the phrase
quantum entanglement
. The feedback could get seriously disturbing, and not only for the human victim. Ellen suspected that was why Shadowspawn had evolved clinical sadism as their normal personality type; otherwise feeling their prey's emotions would put them off their food.

“Not like we have?”

“No, not nearly so close. That was a high-link, with very detailed transference that let us communicate directly. That takes long interaction. I get . . . generalized feelings from her. She is being used for feeding and—”

He shrugged his shoulders.

Yeah, a feeding attack means you usually also get the full explosion-in-the-kink-factory sex-object treatment, like someone playing with their food, World Wrestling Federation style. Fun when it's a game with Adrian, pretty horrible when it's real. Well, there was a lot of
pleasure
involved, technically, but in a sort of squiky, self-loathing, terrorized, half-crazy way. Definitely not
fun
.

“Poor girl doubled, then,” Ellen said.

Adrian frowned. “There was a toughness to her,” he said. “Resilience.”

“She'll need it,” Ellen said, feeling a rush of sympathy. “At least I can
wake up
from my nightmares now.”

“I
wish we could have rescued them all,” Ellen said. “You sent those two Brotherhood types away before the end . . . couldn't you have sent Cheba with them, at least?”

“Possibly. But
possibly
that would have aroused suspicions, and I could not take that risk. Not with your life at stake. Shadowspawn are paranoid, not least about one another; even when she believed I was another, Adrienne would have watched me carefully for the slightest sign of intrigue. You would not believe what a black brew of murder and madness, incest and sadism and depravity their lives are.”

“Oh, I got some faint tinge of an idea,” she said dryly, and she could sense he flushed a little. “What with the torture and the rape and mortal terror and mass murder for fun and so forth.”

“In any case, you must learn that the mission comes first. This is hard, yes. It is also essential.”

“Yeah, I can see that. With my head. My gut's only half convinced.”

Adrian looked eastward again. “And not far away is where it all started,” he said.

“The Brézé château?”

“Yes. My great-great-grandfather's lair. Grand adept and commander of the Order of the Black Dawn. Diabolist, murderer, genius.”

“Hey, fella, don't brood while you're driving at this speed! I think what's really bothering you is thinking about what you might have been like if Harvey hadn't rescued you. Or kidnapped you. Taken you away from your family before you really knew what they were, at least.”

“True, that thought haunts me sometimes. And he was supposed to
kill
me, by the way. That was the first time Harvey dangerously exceeded his mission brief. Not the last, of course.”

“Kill you?” She sat as upright as the reclined seat and the safety harness would let her. “Wait a minute, you never told me
that
.”

Adrian shrugged. “Harvey was playing a hunch . . . and to be sure, by then he knew me, and as he said, killing a young boy he actually knew was . . . difficult. Despite what his orders were.”

“Well, good for him, and to hell with the Brotherhood!”

“They thought . . . still largely think . . . that purebreds like me are damned.” In profile she could see his mouth take on an ironic twist. “And there's considerable evidence in favor of that hypothesis.”

“And you to disprove it. That's . . . that's
racist
!”

“There, my little cabbage, is the one sin of which neither Shadowspawn nor the Brotherhood can be accused, at least the younger generations. Not as far as fripperies like skin color are concerned.”

“You
look
like the original variety, don't you?”

“Probably, though the first Empire of Shadow is so far in the past that nobody can be sure. Only broken fragments of legends were handed down among the secret clans. When the back-breeding nears nine-tenths purity, this set of looks and build tends to crop up. But they're not closely linked to the Power, or the personality traits. It's one of the most common human phenotypes anyway; I could pass for a Provençal or a Spaniard, a Sicilian or Greek or Turk or Arab or Kurd. It's the . . . inner drives that count.”

“Adrian, I can see half my job's going to be convincing you that you're
not
a monster.”

“Oh, but I am,” he said softly, barely audible over the low, humming growl of the engine. “But I'm a humanist monster, of sorts.”

 

 

Ellen frowned several hours later. “Isn't it sort of. . . well, blatant of
us
to stay in Paris?”

“No more than anywhere else, if we're not under deep cover,” Adrian said. “Why should the local Shadowspawn, who are incidentally ruled by the European branch of the Brézés, care about us?”

“We killed Tōkairin Hajime,” she pointed out. “And Adrienne.”

He shrugged, eyes on the narrow street. “Hajime killed my parents . . . admittedly, not the Final Death. And Adrienne had tried to kill me more than once. As long as I'm not officially back with the Brotherhood, nobody will much care. It is, you might say, just normal family life. The local Brézés probably considered me only marginally more . . . unorthodox . . . than Adrienne.”

Ellen nodded. “I'm beginning to see how the Brotherhood has managed to survive all these years. The Council runs the world, but they don't do it very well.”

“They approach it more like managing a series of game parks,” he agreed. “Or game ranches. With the neighboring ranchers fighting one another most of the time, when they're not indulging in lethal sibling rivalries.”

“Back in California, Peter, the other lucy I told you about, the scientist? He said that humans were apes who'd become more like wolves. And Shadowspawn were like apes who'd decided to imitate cats instead.”

“That is quite perceptive; he seems to be a very intelligent man.”

“He produced that research I got to you,” Ellen said proudly; she'd liked Peter.

“We'll see what Professor Duquesne thinks; it's a good sign that he's agreed to meet us.” He sighed. “And that catlike nature is part of my problem.”

Ellen made an inquiring sound and he went on: “I have to fight a war and I don't know how.”

“Seems to me you've been doing a good job.”

“No. Oh, I know how to
fight
, certainly. I was very good working for the Brotherhood—but they pointed me at the targets, and I went after them. I was a, hmmm, black-ops wet-work specialist, not a strategist or even a field commander. A leader of small teams at most. The Brotherhood
should
be doing strategy, but despite what you and I found out for them they are not. They are in a defensive crouch; too many generations of defeat have demoralized them.”