Adrian gave a gasping scream as he felt his body wake. Waken from nightmare of being caught by the sun in night-walker form, of his self peeling away in flakes and strings of fire…
“Ah, you’re with us again,” Harvey said. “Give it a few minutes and maybe you’ll stop wishing you weren’t.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, flicked it out the window and pulled over. Wet gravel pinged and crunched under the wheels as the car slowed and stopped.
“Sorry this is cold,” he went on, sliding into the rear seat.
He put a blood-bag from the cooler to Adrian’s mouth. It wasn’t very old, which made it a little less horrible; he must have stocked up at the hospital. Adrian gasped again, drank, retched, clapped his hands to his mouth.
“Water,” he rasped through his fingers. “Then more.”
He drank and swallowed the pills the other man shook into his hand. Then he curled around himself, hugging knees to chest. Gradually the shaking and chills and the sick pain behind his eyes and in his temples subsided, along with the missing spots and bits of glitter in his vision. He became conscious of something beside the gray misery inside his skull, took Harvey’s arm and used it to help lever himself upright; a sleeping bag he hadn’t noticed fell away from his shoulders, and he clutched it back for the warmth. The thin cotton of the hospital gown only emphasized the chill against which the car’s asthmatic heater strained.
It was a nondescript Toyota Venza, flaking red and old enough to be unremarkable, smelling of ancient cheap stale tobacco, his own cigarettes which Harvey had presumably plundered and nameless things and children and dogs.
Harvey probably lifted it, he thought.
Some absent corner of his mind noted that they’d have to dump the hot vehicle; he could simply buy something from a used lot. Outside was the gray of a Central Valley wintertime tule fog, thick enough that he couldn’t see more than ten yards in any direction. The world was a bubble of cold, dark-gray nothingness, with a few bare-limbed trees along the edge of the field dripping moisture on flat black mud. The air was heavy with it, a chilly, silty smell with an undertone of manure and vegetable rot.
“Name of a black dog, it looks and smells just precisely the way I feel!” he said.
Inside, somewhere in the depths of his mind, there was a dull wonder that he didn’t say: I do not care. Back to Santa Fe, me, and goodbye to you, Harvey! The physical misery was enough to swamp emotion; the memory of Ellen was distant. It was a commitment of the will that kept the words unsaid.
To love someone is not to feel loving continuously. That is impossible, for humans or Shadowspawn either. It is to always act that way.
“Bit strenuous?” Harvey asked.
“You might say,” he said, letting his head fall back. “What a fuckup. Adrienne was waiting for me again. After,” he added bitterly, “spending the previous four hours humping herself blind with Ellen and taking little sips of her blood in the very short inactive intervals.”
“Bad?” Harvey said sympathetically.
“I blocked as much as I could. She wasn’t hurting her to speak of this time, but… The bitch is doing it to jolt me, I know it. She doesn’t realize how close a high-link I have with Ellen, but she knows something is getting through.”
“She is doing it to jolt you,” Harvey said. “And to score points; that I drink your milk shake thing, which she’s been doing one way or another since you two learned to walk. She’s also probably still got the hots for you, since the Calcutta thing.”
Adrian winced. “Yes. That was a bad time.”
“Five gets you one she doesn’t think so.”
“And… to Shadowspawn that isn’t incompatible with a desire to kill me slowly. Quite the contrary.”
“Right you are. And she was also doing it because she just likes humping herself blind and ain’t too particular about the ‘with who’ part long as they’re good-lookin’. How precisely did she wreck the meet?”
“Preactivated Wreaking,” he said. “A bit like that one in Santa Fe, only smaller and more… concentrated. The trigger was complex beyond belief. It was keyed to Hajime’s state of mind; truly, the very act of deciding to listen to me. If he’d been completely hostile on his own account, nothing would have happened… you see the difficulty, and the cleverness of it?”
“How was it placed? Keyed to the ground?”
“No, dynamic. Like a floating spiderweb strung between buildings, with a seeker function. Hanging ready to exist, and when it existed there was only one place it could possibly be.”
“Someone must have slipped her a sample of him from his mortal remains; you’d need a ground-link for something like that,” Harvey observed clinically.
Adrian nodded: “It cascaded the probabilities of his decision negative until only the black paths were left, and he never noticed.”
“She’s gotten better,” Harvey noted, resting his big hands on his knees and staring out the windscreen at nothing. “And she was always good.”
Adrian nodded. “Things went downhill from there. He decided I was attacking him, went for his sword-which he really knows how to use-and I had to switch form.”
“What to?” Harvey asked.
“The smilodon. I wish I’d had more practice with it. The animal mind swamped me; that never would have happened with my wolf. I can think about as well with that as in man-form, now.”
“Would the wolf have been enough muscle for the job?”
“Well… no. I took out his backup men, but he’s far too good with that sword. I wanted to leave then, but the sabertooth took me over and I was just going for Hajime when she hit me.”
“As?”
“The biggest damned eagle I’ve ever seen, and stooping, falling out of the sky. Probably from one of the tall buildings. It must be some real species of bird to be that tangible, but…”
Harvey took out his BlackBerry. “Describe? This we gotta know about, soonest.”
“Christ, my head… the body was the size of a child, perhaps five feet long. Wings twice that, broad and strong, not slender like a falcon’s. Long head, strong legs and claws like a tiger, literally. Broad tail. Mostly I noticed the claws and beak.”
He indicated his flank, and Harvey reached over to draw aside the hospital gown. The lacerations there didn’t break the skin, but they were blue and purple already, bruises that twinged savagely every time he moved, adding to the pain of his half-healed knife wounds.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the older man said when the results of his search came up, shaking his head in reluctant admiration.
“You found something?”
“Haast’s Eagle.”
He showed Adrian the picture; the younger man frowned, squinted, then nodded. Harvey read, swore again.
“New Zealand,” he said. “Went extinct about 1400, but there are skeletons and such. Guess you ain’t the only one can figure out that DNA reconstruction gets you a broader set of forms for night-walking.”
“Most birds are too fragile to be much use in a fight against another walker,” Adrian said.
“Right,” Harvey said. “But this little critter is pocket dynamite, ’bout the weight of a medium dog. Evolved to hunt those cow-sized flightless birds they used to have. Says here it attacked at fifty em-pee-aitch and hit about as hard as a concrete cinder block dropped on you from six stories up.”
“That sounds very, very right, except that concrete blocks aren’t sharp.”
Adrian rubbed his forehead. “The hell of it is that she and I do think alike. At least at the problem-solving level… If I hadn’t sensed the attack at the last fractional second she might have severed my spine and Hajime would have killed me before I could regenerate. When I managed to beat the bird away, she went into tiger form-Amur type, but black. I broke contact and ran; flew myself, as a peregrine.”
He glared at Harvey. “And you kept me flying at top speed to catch this damned car with my body in it until it was nearly dawn!”
“Better than them catching us. Somebody high-powered was looking. I’m pretty sure we lost ’em. Three gets you ten cents it’s Michiko got the tissue sample or whatever for Adrienne from her granddad that let her set that trap,” Harvey said. “You up to solid food?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll try,” he replied.
The food was bread, butter, cheese and hard-boiled eggs. The first few mouthfuls were tentative, feeling his way around his abused stomach. Then he was ravenous, and forced himself not to gobble. When his share was finished he was able to force down more of the blood. The itching became worse in his arm and thigh, which was a good sign, and he flexed them cautiously. The bruises would heal much faster. They were only transferred tissue damage anyway, his soma-memory convincing his body that it had been attacked when he returned to the flesh.
“Let’s get somewhere,” he said.
“Son, we’re between Stockton and Bakersfield on the west side of the Central Valley. There ain’t no where to be there in, thereabouts. Specially in these days of ongoing national readjustment.”
“I need to rest and heal. There is no alternative to that.”
He slumped back against the door, ignoring everything until Harvey drove them into a motel and helped him into their room with an arm over his shoulder. They were the only occupants, and the mattress smelled musty with disuse, but the room was blessedly warm and dry. He lay half-comatose as Harvey stripped off the hospital gown, checked the bandages and covered him in blankets. His mind sank into the shadows.
“Hello, Adrian,” Ellen said with a smile. “I’m almost getting used to this. Not as much of a mental shock when I… appear.”
She looked around the motel room. “Ewww.”
Adrian gestured from the bed, and the world changed. Now they were sitting; she still found that abrupt transition a little startling. There was the same sensation of doors opening in her mind, of memories three-quarters gone snapping back into place. She looked around; this was more complex than the confined landscapes she’d seen before.
Bright sunlight shone on tiled roofs and whitewashed walls descending a steep slope beneath them to a small harbor, and a Christian cathedral in a style half-Moorish…
“It’s Amalfi!” she said. “I love that town. I’ve only been once, on a package tour in university. Two days for Florence, would you believe it!”
“It’s a favorite of mine too.” Adrian nodded, lighting himself a cigarette. “I spent some time convalescing at an alberghetto here once.”
A striped umbrella shaded their table. Bright blue ocean stretched to the horizon, and mountains rose around the town. The air had a smell of spicy bushes and the sap of the umbrella-pine growing in the center of the little plaza, and of fruit and blossom from the rows of lemon trees to one side on the terraced hillside. Other couples and individuals chatted with lively animation and plenty of gestures, but when she tried she couldn’t quite make out words.
Adrian was in white linen shirt and pants and thin leather shoes on bare feet, with sunglasses pushed up on his forehead, tanned nearly brown. Ellen checked herself and found that she was in a cool pale traveling ensemble of silk blouse and cotton skirt, with elegant leather-strapped sandals fastened with wrought-gold buttons. A white woven hat with a trailing band rested on the table, and loose strands of hair sun-bleached almost as pale lay over her shoulders.
Can’t say he doesn’t have good taste! she thought.
A waiter approached.
“Un Limoncello, per favore,” Adrian said in fluent but slightly accented Italian.
“Subito, signoe. Bello gelato, naturalmente… Noi lo facciamo con i limoni che crescono qui davanti,? una specialit?, qui lo sanno tutti. Lo prende anche la signora?”
Adrian looked over and raised a brow at her. A little dazed, she nodded. He answered the man: “Si, certo. E dei biscotti di pasta di mandorle.”
The pale yellow liqueur came, and the plate of marzipan-like biscuits made with ground almonds, not as sweet or nutty as the American equivalent but sharper-flavored. She sipped and nibbled.
“I was going to say this is a bit dreamlike, but that’s sort of redundant, isn’t it?” she said. “Everything even tastes real. Realer than real. The people?”
“Not really people. Made from edited memories. Tangible in this state, but not… self-actuated.”
She nodded. “I’m asleep, I think. The last thing I remember is lying on my face and Adrienne sort of… slapping me on the butt and telling me I’d earned some rest.”
Adrian looked away, taking a draw on his cigarette; he held it between thumb and the first two fingers, next to his palm.
That’s why he never took me seriously when I said he should quit! Ellen realized suddenly. He wasn’t really brushing me off; he can’t get cancer or anything. That would be bad luck, and he doesn’t have that! Wait a minute, it just occurred to me, they can cure cancer and they never told anyone? “Adrian,” she said dryly, and he looked back at her. “I like the fact that you’re concerned for me. It’s sweet and wonderful, actually. But you can spare me the pity.”
He flushed. “Sorry,” he said. Then he smiled slightly. “I seem to be saying that a lot around you, Ellie.”
She nodded. “I’m already an abuse survivor… well, no, I’m back to being an abuse victim, actually, since I’ve been kidnapped by an abuser. But I’m not a child anymore, and I know the coping strategies, Adrian. And I know they’re strategies, not something wrong with me. It’s a lot harder with someone who can read your mind, but at least I don’t have the sense of betrayal I did before. I’m in no danger of Stockholm syndrome. I know all about that.”
“OK,” he said. Then he touched one finger to his forehead and flicked it out, a sort of sketchy salute. “I should remember that you’re not just the damsel in distress. Sorry… touch?.”
“I need to know how this link thing works.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s stronger when I want it to be, or when we’re physically closer, or when you’re feeling… any intense emotion or sensation.”
Ellen laughed involuntarily; she clapped a hand to her mouth.
“My turn to say sorry. You mean you could… could feel it when your sister was scaring the daylights out of me on that motorcycle or drinking my blood or when we were in bed?”
“Yes. Not all the time, and secondhand and much more faintly, but yes.”
“That sounds sort of… perverse.”
“It is, even by Shadowspawn standards; it’s one reason they’re so… jealous… about their, ah-”
“Lucies. Stop trying to shield my delicate sensibilities, Adrian! I hated that attitude when we were together, but you didn’t listen. Right now I am a lucy. It’s not my fault and I don’t feel disgraced about it. Angry and frightened, yes. Defiled, no.”
“Touch?. I throttled back as much as I could. It’s… a very strong link. Much more so than I expected. More so than she understands, I think-and hope. She almost certainly doesn’t know about this, that we can communicate. But she knows I’ll be getting flashes of emotion and physical sensations.”
Ellen shivered. “I hope to God she doesn’t decide hurting me more would be the way to get back at you.”
“I also… Me too. This environment scrambles my linguistic reflexes!”
A thought occurred to her. “How come you all seem to be so multilingual?”
“It’s easy for us. The language center in our brains is enlarged and linked to the telepathic faculty.”
Ellen shivered, reminded of a voice saying, I’m learning Georgian.
“Time to fill you in on what’s been going on,” she said, putting briskness into her tone. “You know about the motorcycle trip? Well, when we got to San Francisco-”
“Name of a black dog! We were probably less than a mile apart, and her laughing at me all the while! If I’d known where, I could have gone after her.”
Ellen winced, and he cursed, first in French and then in a string of other languages.
“Ouch,” she said. “Hadn’t thought of that. Anyway, Adrienne took me to this restaurant and we met a friend of hers. A woman named Michiko-”
“T?kairin Michiko?”
Ellen shivered again. “Yes. Talk about scary. She wanted to kill me, Adrian-wanted to kill me with your sister. I think she would have liked to do it right then and there.”
Adrian nodded, looking down at the table and taking a sip of the yellow drink, chilled in its small ceramic cup.
“Yes. They’re blood-siblings. It’s… sort of a mix of friends, fictive kinship, and lovers. And it involves joint kills. That’s a very… intense experience.”
“They were talking about some plan to, to wipe out half the human race with smallpox, some genetically engineered variety, they called it parasmallpox. And I got this horrible feeling that that was better than some other plan they were criticizing!”
“It was,” Adrian said grimly. “The other plan involves EMP… a way to burn out all the technologies the world depends on. The Council of Shadows calls it Operation Trimback, Option One. I suspect it wouldn’t work as smoothly as they think.”
Ellen nodded quickly. “Yes! That was what Adrienne’s been saying. She doesn’t want that-drastic, she called it-a plan. She’s angry with this other plan. Michiko was the same way. I think she… looks up to Adrienne. Admires her. But I wasn’t catching everything they said.”
Ellen frowned, concentrating. “There was something about field tests, in the Congo.”
An appalling thought occurred to her. “Adrian… does that mean they were testing it on people?”
“Yes.” Gently: “Ellie, Shadowspawn are the ones responsible for virtually everything monstrously bad in the past hundred years. Just before World War One, there was a great scandal in Europe because one Alsatian shopkeeper was put in jail for one weekend for offending a Prussian officer. That was before the Council secured the world.”
Ellen shivered. “She said more, about drugs and vaccines, and stockpiling them.”
“That fits,” Adrian said.
“So after we left the restaurant, we went to what she called the Br?z? town house.”
Adrian’s brows rose. “That used to be on Nob Hill, but it was destroyed twenty years ago, when the T?kairin ousted the Br?z?s as the foremost Shadowspawn clan on the West Coast… long story.”
“This was new. The building wasn’t more than ten or fifteen years old max, a big luxury hotel with… sort of super-condos on the upper floors. The town house was a two-story penthouse on the top of the tower, huge, glass walls, pools… like something out of a Modernist fantasy of Haroun al-Rashid’s bachelor pad.”
Adrian cursed again. “The St. Regis Hotel! We were within walking distance of each other. And that’s where she launched herself when she stooped on me.”
Ellen felt her eyes growing wider and wider as he described the meeting and the fight that followed.
“You can… you can actually turn into animals?” she said. “Literally into fur-feathers-and-fangs actual animals?”
“Technically it’s… well, for all practical purposes, yes. As long as we have… les vieux say, taken the spirit of the beast into ourselves. In fact, it’s a DNA sample you need. Nearby. Swallowing it is best and most permanent.”
“Then… those Norse berserkers… Sigurd with the wolf-skin he wore…”
“Mostly just psychotics with delusions. But some, yes, they had enough of the inheritance to do it.”
This is truly weird, she thought. But hey, Ellen, weird is the new normal for you.
Then she went on: “OK, she took me back from the restaurant to the town house, we had a swim, a sort of strange philosophical chat which scared me quite a bit, she led me off to bed and we had lots of hot sweaty writhing sex and a little feeding-”
She smiled with a crooked twist of the lips at his carefully controlled expression: “Adrian, hold the pity again, will you? Yeah, I’d much rather she couldn’t force me to do things. Being helpless is not fun, not in reality. I want it all to stop, and badly. But if she is going to make me do things, which right now can’t be avoided, forcing me to eat wonderful elaborate meals and then have hour upon hour of multiple orgasms just so totally beats ‘feeling nauseated piss-your-pants bowel-loosening terror’ and ‘screaming in agony as sensitive tissues tear.’ And… the high from the feeding doesn’t actually damage me, does it?”
“It’s addictive.”
“I know about that, and I’ve gone cold turkey on things before when I thought they were getting too much of a hold on me. I was even a smoker for a little while and sweated bullets stopping. That’s why I kept getting on your case about the cigarettes; and it made me crave one myself in the worst way.”
“You never told me that you’d smoked. See, I am not the only one to keep secrets!” he said, trying for lightness and just about achieving it.
Ellen leaned over and prodded him in the ribs. “That’ll teach you to ignore a lady’s complaints! And I have to watch it with alcohol too. But the… drug… isn’t physically harmful, is it?”
“No. As far as I know, there are no harmful effects apart from the feelings it causes, and the craving. It evolved to make the victim willing to be bled, not to hurt them.”
“OK. It might totally screw the head of someone who didn’t know what was happening, but I can tell the difference between the way the feeding makes me feel friendly and actually being friendly; I know that even when it’s happening. The… effect itself actually feels pretty good.”
His smile was broader, and he made a gesture with both hands and bowed his head slightly.
“You are a stronger person than I thought, Ellen. Many would be totally shattered in your position, but you are keeping your wits about you. Forgive me for underestimating you.”
In fact… she looked at him speculatively. You know, buster, if you’d approached it the right way and just told me about things instead of trying to protect me all the time… I might have surprised you. I might yet.
“Provisional forgiveness given. OK, I go to sleep-I was surprised how easy that was even at the time because I was feeling shivery and jazzed, the way you are when you’re tired but can’t sleep-”
“Partly a Wreaking.”
“OK, she zapped me into enchanted slumber, went out on the terrace again, turned into this big-ass eagle-”
“Her body stayed in the bed; that’s one reason she put you under a Wreaking. We’re… very helpless in that state.”
Ellen’s eyes narrowed, and she surprised herself with the flood of savage images that filled her mind for an instant.
“Oooooh, wouldn’t I just like to get her helpless. With a hammer and a sharp wooden stake!”
“Ellie, you don’t need a wooden-”
Ellen laughed. “It would still work if I drove it through her heart, wouldn’t it?”
“On a tranced body? Quite well.”
“And then I could hit her in the head with the hammer for a while and see how funny Countess Comic-ula thought that was!”
Adrian laughed, but looked at her seriously a moment later: “If you get the chance, take it. But don’t hesitate, strike to the heart or brain, and then strike again and again. We are… very hard to kill, with anything but a silver weapon.”
“Silver makes it easy?”
“About as easy as killing an ordinary person. The Power has no grip on it. We don’t know why.”
“I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never even really wanted to kill anyone, just get away from them however I could, but I’ll make an exception for you-know-who. So, she was… her body was lying there?”
“Yes, like this, in a sort of coma.”
He halted for a moment and crossed his forearms, each hand resting on the opposite shoulder, before he went on: “The aetheric form went out onto the terrace in her default day-walking shape. Then it waited until it sensed the Wreaking turning Hajime against me, transformed and attacked. You have to be careful in animal form. You’re… still you, but you are the beast as well. It can be hard to retain purpose.”
“Thanks. And so Adrienne swooped down to rescue Michiko’s grandfather. Who she hates and despises. Who Michiko sort of hates, I think, or at least resents an awful lot.”
“We’re not a very social species and I think T?kairin Hajime hasn’t quite realized what it means. His grandchildren are so much closer to pureblood. Seventy-five percent and up. He’s about two-thirds, and he was raised by people who were less than half. There’s more human in him, and he’s trying to run his clan as if it were made up of humans.”
“But then why did she rescue him?” Ellen puzzled. “I don’t think she’s the sort who just swoops in to save the day.”
Adrian frowned and sipped again at his drink. “That’s the question; though maybe what she stopped was him spitting me on that damned silver-plated katana. Was she trying to use me to kill him without any blame attaching to her? But then as you say… or was she trying to get credit with Hajime? But what for? And she didn’t try to pursue me in winged form-that eagle looked fast, and it could have twisted the head off any bird-form I have. There is some elaborate game here, one with multiple strands, multiple objectives.”
“Which right now we don’t know. How long do I have here?”
“Probably a while. It’s natural for us to sleep most of the day and wake in the afternoon.” A small smile. “Notice how many mad dictators had work patterns like that? Not a coincidence.”
“Then… this may sound odd, Adrian, but can we take a walk? I’d like that.”
He smiled, the charming expression with a hint of shyness she liked, and they rose and walked down the steep streets hand in hand. He bought them gelato; they fed the pigeons in front of the cathedral, and she explained the details of the frescos-his knowledge of art was broad but without system, a jackdaw’s accumulation picked up in spare moments. He seemed at first amused and then impressed as she told-showed-him the links between the High Medieval techniques in the thirteenth-century building and the Quattrocento and the Renaissance.
“We should have talked about this more,” he said at last.
“Says the man who used to derail any conversation that wasn’t commonplace!”
Adrian laughed ruefully and ran a hand over his hair, taking off his sunglasses and hanging them through the neck of his shirt.
“When you begin on a basis of lies… even lies of omission… the areas you cannot talk about grow and grow, I find.”
“We don’t have to lie now. It’s… almost worth it all.”
“I’m glad to be honest, but I don’t think it’s worth what you’ve gone through, Ellie.”
“I said almost.”
They wandered on by the busy harbor, amid a smell of fishing-boats and yachts, tourists and locals and thin, wandering, wary cats. The sun declined into the Mediterranean, and the terraces of stone and stucco above them took on a green-blue translucence. At last she took a deep breath and asked: “Adrian, after this is over, if-when-I’m back in, ummm, real life, do you want to try again? With the two of us.”
“If you do. I would like that very much. But-”
“Don’t tell me how I’m going to be feeling then, Adrian! I don’t know that yet!”
He laughed, a wholehearted sound. “Touch? once more, Ellie!” He took her in his arms; he was just an inch taller than her, perfect height for a kiss. It grew lingering.
“Dammit, I don’t want to go back!”
“It’s time.”
“All right. Zap me back, then. And we’re going to win!”
Adrian slept, woke in darkness to stumble to the bathroom, hardly noticing that his leg would bear him once more; drank enormously from bottled water by the side of the bed, slept again and woke clearheaded, the wounds itching less fiercely.
And smiling, he thought for a moment. And it has been a while since that happened.
“You’re looking a mite more cheerful,” Harvey said.
He was sitting at the table, making sandwiches from commercial rolls and convenience-store cold cuts. His coach-gun was on the table by his hand, and Adrian was awake enough to feel the slight drifting chill of a no-see Wreaking, not powerful but enormously subtle.
“It’s calories,” the Texan said, jerking a thumb towards the pile he’d made. “That’s all that can be said for it. Except that the preservatives will keep your corpse lookin’ pretty without the expense of an embalmer.”
“It is to food as the Red Cross supply is to blood,” Adrian agreed.
He limped carefully to the table and looked at the platter with disgust. But he ate, trying not to think of the taste.
“At least it’s morally permissible to eat decent food, most of the time. It compensates for the foul blood, a little.”
“You’re still looking cheerful and you just bit into that so-called salami.”
“I high-linked with Ellen. She’s… much better than I expected. And she had some information for me. We have an agent in the enemy’s camp.”
He filled the older man in on the relevant details.
“That might be useful. If there were a lot of bodies around this Congo site, we could maybe isolate the virus strain; their lab, now, that’ll be somewhere else. Somewhere with reliable electricity, which the Congo doesn’t have.”
“Neither does California, compared to the old days.”
“It sure does compared to the fucking Congo, ol’ buddy.”
“A point.”
“You know,” Harvey said after a moment, “I’m startin’ to feel a mite guilty about this.”
Adrian looked. “How so?”
“Now don’t misunderstand me. Ellen’s your obligation, and you’re mine. OK, that’s giri, as our buddy Hajime would put it. We go through with this, and Adrienne most certainly needs killing. But the fact of the matter is we’ve got information on something damn big the Council has planned for the world, and we’re not doin’ dick about that. What good’s rescuing Ellen if she dies of… whatever it was?”
“Dalager’s Parasmallpox,” Adrian said. “Although, in fact, I could cure a virus.”
On a limited scale, went unspoken.
“And if they’re planning that, or some faction of ’em is, from your Seeing it’s not too far in the future. That means they’re already gettin’ it ready. If we knew the rest of ‘where’-where the labs and storage shit are-there might be something that we could do about it.”
Adrian snorted. “Except that would mean the other option I Saw. I’m fairly sure that my sister is the nexus point between the probabilities, with us important mostly as we affect her.”
“Yeah,” Harvey said. He leaned back meditatively, staring at the ceiling. “That other un definitely sounds to me like an EMP attack. That would account for the stalled cars and such.”
“Could that be done to the whole world?” Adrian asked; his mentor had always liked keeping up with weapons technology.
Harvey bit into one of the sandwiches himself. “Oh, sure. Most of the big powers got specialized high-altitude nukes for EMP work; mebbe the Council’s behind that. And the Council could set ’em off; squeeze on the leaders, mind-Wreaking, or just send in teams to Power-fuck the control systems, then launch enough to blanket the planet, minus the poles and oceans. Instant Ay-poc-al-ypse without much blast damage or fallout. ’Cept when all the reactors in the world slag down and suchlike. So you see why this has to be stopped.”
Adrian’s mouth quirked. “Harvey, how often have the Brotherhood been able to stop one of the Council’s larger schemes?”
“Well…” The older man looked out the window.
It was raining, a dark persistent mist falling out of the sky onto the parking lot and the little strip of dead or half-alive stores and fast-food eateries beyond. His voice was reluctant: “Not too often.”
“Ah, that is how you say never in Texan?”
Stung, Harvey frowned in concentration. “We got Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, back in 1919. They were going to make him Dragon Emperor of the East. He was a bad one.”
Adrian began ticking off points on his fingers. “But the Brotherhood never even realized the Council was behind the Black Hand and Prinzip. That’s World War One. They’d been grooming Hitler for years even then-”
Harvey nodded reluctantly. “Little bastard was a battalion runner on the Western Front for four years, most dangerous job in the TOE. And he lived. Now, that’s not right or natural. Must have taken some special Wreaking to beat the odds that way.”
“And Lenin’s stroke, so perfectly timed to put Stalin in power. And the Great Depression. And-”
“OK, OK, you’re right. We still got to do some serious thinkin’ about these schemes.”
“We have to rescue Ellen and kill Adrienne, Harvey; that’s why I’m here and not in Santa Fe, looking out over the arroyos and moving more supplies into the sub-basement. When Ellen is free and Adrienne dead, you and Sheila and the Brotherhood can concoct whatever futile schemes you wish, and I will take her back to New Mexico and guard her, if she will let me. In the meantime, send Sheila a memo.”
The blue eyes grew somehow distant and savage at the same time.
“You know, I’d off your sister in a moment and it’d be a right good deed. But I’d like to get me Hajime, I’d like that very much.”
Adrian looked at him. “The only difference is that Adrienne has not yet had the time to commit so many crimes.”
He sighed. “And now I will keep watch while you sleep.”
“I can-”
“Drop dead from exhaustion, Harv? Believe me, I will wake you as soon as possible.”