Stop,Adrianthought/projected.
Harvey did, and sank down with a slow smooth motion, soundless despite the twigs and last year’s leaves.
So much for too old for this shit, Adrian thought.
He was as quiet himself. The night buzzed and crickled with insects; it was a little rank with the scents of new spring growth. Ahead and miles downslope to the northeast the lights of Rancho Sangre were a glow through the darkness of early evening.
The patrol he’d detected came into sight in a little clearing a hundred yards below, all going to one knee at the edge of the open space. The grass there was tall, still a little green with May; it was starred with rose and owl’s clover, columbine, lily of the valley and forget-menots, purple and yellow bush lupine and drifts of golden California poppies. The breeze blew from them to him, carrying the harsh scents of male sweat and gun-oil from the Gurkha mercenaries amid the sweet lingering fragrance of the flowers. Their rifles had argent rounds, the silver alloy a slight gritty-tingling sensation in the night.
I’m glad I am not too proud to wear body-armor! Adrian thought.
Two more were T?kairin retainers in close-fitting black, including masks across their lower faces, with swords slung over their backs. The trickling menace of inlaid, glyph-wrought blades hummed past the sheaths. The black-clad men’s eyes needed no technology to see through the light spring night; they had the distinctive sharper, ranker body-scents of Shadowspawn.
He could feel their attention fanning out. Automatically his mind pushed. Slightly, subtly, switching pathways to the ones where they missed/ignored/didn’t notice any evidence that something was amiss, which was the highest probability anyway.
With them was a huge gray wolf. It blurred for an instant, sparkling with energies to Shadowspawn sight, then became a naked man on one knee, dark and lean and scarred, his beak-nosed brown face still raised to sample the air.
I’m impressed, Adrian thought. I couldn’t tell he was night-walking except by deduction. And the way the soldiers are afraid of him. I can smell that. The other two are in-the-body.
“Jir?, Kenta?” Dale Shadowblade asked softly, in the quiet conversational tones that carried least. “You catch anything?”
The narrow gold-flecked dark eyes of Hajime’s clansmen scanned carefully. One hesitated for an instant, his hand going towards the sword-hilt that jutted over his left shoulder, then shook his head.
“No. Though there are so many Wreakings soaked into the earth and rocks here I jump at my own shadow! Like kami, only real.”
“Yeah, the Br?z?s have been busy. Let’s get the circuit complete. I gotta get back to town to meet Michiko and… a friend.”
Another silent blur, and the wolf turned its long muzzle. Adrian let his own eyelids drift down as the yellow gaze seemed to meet his. Then it turned and bounded away. The men followed, scarcely less silent or less swift. After a long moment there was a quiet whoosh of breath from behind him.
“Now, that was just a mite nerve-racking,” Harvey said quietly.
“You could say so. Or that my luck is very strong,” Adrian grinned, with an expression halfway between relief and sheer exhilaration.
Danger too can be addictive. I had forgotten…
They waited another half-hour. Patience was a hunter’s virtue… or a sniper’s, if there was a difference. Then they began their step-at-a-time progress. Adrian paused with his foot in the air.
“Wait,” he said. “Wreaking.”
Old, old and strong. Keyed into the volcanic rock, like the structure of its atoms, but at a far finer level.
Trace the linkages. If-this-then…
“Step on that and you break your leg,” he murmured. “And trap it in that crack, so that any attempt to free yourself causes more damage. If you are sentient at all. Unless it recognizes the Br?z? blood.”
“DNA.”
“Whatever. Let me convince it…”
He drew a small sharp knife and nicked one finger with the tip. The scent filled his nose, but it would fade quickly; he willed the tiny wound to dry. A drop fell, and soaked into the porous stones beneath. He felt a response, and a glyph showed for a moment where the blood had struck.
“Ai-siiii.”
Congruence/recognition/fitness. With it came a ghost of the mind that had set the trap, many years ago, a snicker of gloating anticipation of pain and the long dying of someone crippled and helpless.
“My grandfather’s idea of a joke,” Adrian said, letting out a shaky breath.
“This is like walkin’ through a garden of carnivorous plants,” Harvey grumbled slightly.
He was in the same splotched dark charcoal-gray outdoors clothes-better than black at night. A heavy case on his back carried the knocked-down rifle and more than half their gear, but there was only a light coat of moisture on the older man’s face.
“Tired of the sweaty manly stuff yet, old friend?” Adrian asked under his breath.
“Before we began,” Harvey said, as they moved slowly on, stopping every few yards.
He had a small electronic device in his hand, and a thin wire leading to an earpiece. A grunt from him froze them both.
“OK, got a blip. Your sister ain’t relyin’ on hex-marks only.”
“How progressive of her,” Adrian observed dryly.
“There. Lemme… cracking the code… Sheila comes through again…”
Harvey indicated a live-oak, its roots writhing into the fractured stone of the hillside like a slow-motion strangling.
“Visual and audio pickup. Now foxed, you can relax. Sorta. A little.”
Beyond the rock grew steeper. A rattlesnake stirred at his passing; its dim reptile brain obeyed the prompting of instinct and probability, threading away deeper into its hole. Then a deep cleft appeared.
“Bingo. Here’s that observation post. Good ol’ Brotherhood, thinking ahead.”
“To opportunities that never occur,” Adrian said dryly. “Let’s get set up.”
“And have ourselves an MRE,” Harvey said, as they ducked into the sheltering cave. “Yum!”
His face was darkened with camouflage paint, but his grin was white at Adrian’s expression.
“We made it.”
“For now,” Adrian said sourly. “There are three days yet until the… festivities. My sister may order another sweep.”
“Or come ’round herself.”
Adrian sighed as he set down his heavy pack. “I doubt it. She has much to occupy her, besides her usual… diversions.”
“My parents were quite taken with you,” Adrienne told her.
Then she pivoted and struck.
Crack.
“Uh! ” Ellen gasped.
Crack.
The nine tight-braided thongs of the silk whip hissed through the air and slapped against her lower back. It melded into the aching glow that stretched from her shoulders to her thighs after the slow, deliberate lashing. The pain was much more than a sting, considerably less than agony. That lurked, though, if the damage didn’t stop. Already her sweat stung like fire in one place where the skin had been broken a little.
And I can’t make it stop.
Some corner of her mind thought that, as she slumped against the padded cuffs that held her arms spread above her head. Vision blurred with tears and sweat; the smell of her own was heavy in her nostrils, and the subtly ranker scent of Adrienne’s, under the flowers and clean linen of the casa grande’s main bedroom. The chain-rack was suspended a few yards from the foot of the great bed, running up through a pulley on a rafter.
There’s no safe word here.
“That’s because I’m not a tame tiger, Ellen,” Adrienne’s voice laughed in her ear. “I don’t jump through hoops when the whip cracks. You do. That’s the way this circus works.”
A hand traveled down her back, cool and delicate, fingers lingering at the base of the spine.
“Have you ever thought of a tattoo here, ch?rie? A phoenix, perhaps, or a monarch butterfly, or some Celtic knotwork to emphasize these little dimples and the curve…”
“A tramp stamp?” she said incredulously, shocked half out of her daze.
“Well, you are such a pain-slut, Ellen. Yes, I definitely think it would work. We’ll do it tomorrow.”
The hand clenched hard on one buttock. Ellen arched again with a strangled grunt.
“Hurts good, doesn’t it?” the taunting voice said.
“Yes.”
Which is true. God, how I hate you! That’s true too. What are you doing- “Unhh! No! ”
“Delightfully dual-purpose.”
“No, please! ”
“No, what?” she laughed. “Is that: No, stop! Or: No! Don’t stop!”
Ellen let everything but the flood of sensation drop out of her mind. When it receded she forced her legs to lift her again. Adrienne stood before her, and looped the whip around her neck to draw her close. The gold-flecked eyes stared into hers after the kiss, and her skin twitched at the sensation of her mind being riffled through like a collection of pages. The silk slid free and was tossed aside.
“Shall I feed?”
“Yes,” Ellen said, bending her head back to bare her neck. “Oh, please, yes.”
Lips and tongue touched her throat, caressed the vein. Then: “As the sadist-which I am-said to the masochist-which you are-no. Not yet.”
“Oh, God, how I hate you,” she whimpered The thought resounded in her head with the iron ring of certainty, beneath the burning need.
Adrienne walked over to a table-eighteenth-century French, stone on cast-bronze legs-and wiped her hands on a hot damp towel scented with lemon and tossed it into a hamper. Then she poured herself a glass of a pale yellow wine and turned, leaning with a bare buttock braced against the smooth stone, eyes sparkling and taut nude body sheening with sweat. Her gaze fixed for a second, and the tumblers inside the cuffs opened with a click as the dance of stress and molecules aligned precisely. Ellen fell to the linen cloth that covered the carpet and tried to make her limbs work under her own command again.
“I’m going to feed later, so don’t worry. Crawl on over. Start with the toes,” Adrienne said, extending a foot.
Perfectly nice toes, Ellen thought, as she did. Nothing wrong with kissing clean pretty toes, in the abstract. Nice high-arched feet. Nice ankles, for that matter. Very trim calves. Muscles like a ballerina. Thighs, OK, skin like satin, a little salty with sweat…
“You’re stronger than you seem, Ellen,” Adrienne said thoughtfully, some time later, stroking her hair, her voice slowing as her breath did. “You’re enjoying parts of this a great deal, aren’t you?”
You know I am. Though I’d much rather it was Adrian and it was my idea. Sort of odd to be talking mentally with your nose pressed into someone’s navel and your arms around their ass, but what the hell.
“It’s not that you don’t really hurt,” Adrienne said. “You do, but the reactions to it go off in all sorts of intriguing tangents inside your head. I wouldn’t have thought that a masochist would be so much fun for a real sadist, but it’s actually quite a delightful romp in a wholesome Girl Scout sort of way.”
Well, it isn’t as if it was consensual, Ellen pointed out. I’d bolt in a minute if I had a chance and have nightmares about you for years. You must be enjoying my fear and sense of boundary violation and the emotional contortions I have to go through to keep from getting really incoherently angry at being treated like a toy. I’m not enjoying any of those one little bit. I just… suspend them.
“Yes, that’s all extremely nice. And the deeply buried feelings that you deserve to be treated like this, which you continually deny; that’s exquisite. Like a hint of red chili in a creamy sauce. We can build on that together as our relationship deepens.”
Ellen gritted her teeth as the other laughed with delighted cruelty at the uncontrollable surge of anger/guilt/pain.
Though there’s actually a sort of erotic frisson from being completely honest with someone I hate so much, too, she thought. It’s a bit like talking dirty but more so. And knowing you’re reading my mind and sensations is like being naked twice. Naked inside, not just skin. I’m starting to see what you meant about devouring me and it’s scarier than anything else.
“And there are the images you keep having of driving a stake through my heart. I’ve seen that one quite often and it’s very entertaining. How did Adrian like this sort of thing? The ritual, so to speak.”
He was… conflicted. Afraid to let himself go. I understand that better now.
Adrienne laughed again and sipped. “Long-denied desires are hard to contain, which is one reason I don’t deny them in the first place. Stand up.”
She put the glass to the other’s lips; it was sweet and cold and had a fugitive taste of flowers in Ellen’s mouth, clearing the salt and musk. Then a quick flick poured the last of the wine in a cold stream along Ellen’s collarbones. Adrienne began to lick up the droplets; Ellen shivered at the slight gentle contacts, running a hand up the back of the other’s neck.
“Mmmm,” she sighed, hugged the Shadowspawn’s head against her breasts and thought:
That’s nice, but oh, God, stop dicking around and bite me, will you! It’s been a week! But not there! Please! “In due time. Your blood would be too sweet right now; a savory-some garlic butter, so to say-will make it taste better. Perhaps it’s time to move on to a little horror? Ah, now that sent some real fear through the system!”
She stood back and gestured to the huge bed. Ellen got into it and lay back, the cool cotton grateful against the heated glow of her skin. Adrienne lay down too, arranged her head on the pillow and then crossed her arms on her breast so that each hand rested on the opposite shoulder. Her eyes closed and she let out a long breath.
That’s the horror? Ellen thought, holding back a flood of relief. We go to sleep? I need the feeding, but maybe I could sleep first…
“Over heeeeere! ” Adrienne’s voice called.
“Shit! ”
Ellen leapt convulsively and scrabbled backward against the carved African ebony of the headboard. Adrienne was back by the table, arms folded and grinning. And she was lying beside Ellen…
Oh, shit. She’s hardly breathing. That’s not sleep. It’s trance. She’s night-walking. That’s her aeth-something over there.
“My aetheric body. Exactly, ma douce. And that little shriek and the way your heart went pit-a-pat and the emergency clench of those superb buttocks was worth the effort in itself.”
She looked at her tranced physical self, and made a little punching gesture upward with both fists along with a mmmmph of wordless satisfaction: “I am such a hottie! You’re a lucky lucy, Ellen, truly.”
Ellen swallowed and swallowed again, edging backward until as much as possible of her was crammed against the wood.
“Of course, I admit that sometimes I can be a complete bitch, too…”
This time Ellen followed the instant of transformation; a wavering glittering flow more sensed than seen through the eyes, like a prickle… and a bitch-wolf was sitting and watching her, yellow eyes gleaming, gray-black fur, tail curled around its front paws. She shrieked again and wrapped her arms around her shins, trying to cram herself into an invisible ball, but she couldn’t make her own eyes shut as the wolf came to its feet.
It’s huge, it’s huge, she thought.
Big and elegant, dark fading to brownish-cream on the belly, eyes golden. The teeth were very white as it snarled, the sound low and guttural. It stalked forward, insolently slow, head down and ears laid back, the fur bristling. Then another step, faster, faster, crouching, the long smooth leapEllen did shut her eyes then, screaming wild and high as she waited for the fangs to close in her flesh. There was a thump as weight struck the bed… and then nothing. Terror made Ellen will her mind to stop operating at all, but terror also made her force her eyes open.
Adrienne was lying on her side, head up on one hand, like an impossible double vision with her slumbering physical form beyond. She winked.
“Now admit it. That was scary. Woof-woof-woofity-woof!”
“You vicious shit! I hate dogs. They scare me, since I was a little girl!”
“Technically that was a hundred-and-forty-pound Canadian timber wolf, not a dog.” Adrienne laughed. “Consider it a literalized metaphor. Didn’t they cover that in your English Lit courses?”
Then she sat up and stretched, looking down at her own body and stroking the slumbering form’s cheek. “I learned how to do this when I was about thirteen-young to be night-walking. Think of the auto-erotic possibilities.”
Ellen forced her breath to slow. Was that the faintest rank dog-scent still in the air?
Could scent molecules come off a body that’s made out of random energies? Oh, shit! “Ah…” she said, collecting herself.
Get into the conversation or she’ll think of something else to make your mind leap and quiver.
“Not real practical for a girl, I’d think.”
Oh, eww! she thought, at images that sprang unbidden. Autonecrophilia? “Oh, there are ways. But, of course, if you can turn into a wolf or a tiger, human beings are easy, provided you’ve got the template. That’s probably how the legend about turning into a vampire or a werewolf if you were bitten by one started, but it’s really the other way ’round. For example…”
Ellen blinked. Then she was looking at a woman taller than Adrienne, blond, full-figured…
That’s me! “In the pseudoflesh,” Adrienne/Ellen said, wiggling closer and giving her a lingering kiss. The lips were fuller and softer, the taste of the mouth subtly different.
“Have you never wanted to make love with yourself? I can assure you that you’re very good in bed. Ah, Monica warned you, I see. Still, there’s some interesting fear and horror there.”
Oh, God, now I’ve got to fuck my own ghost? “It’s more like making it with me wearing a you suit, but let’s give it a try, eh?”
She took one of Ellen’s hands and placed it on a breast; the firm-soft fullness was eerily familiar/not…
Half an hour later Ellen whimpered: “Well, don’t stop…”
Then she opened her eyes and screamed again. Adrian was kneeling between her legs… Adrian to the last detail, except for the wicked slyness of the smile, her/his hands busy again.
“I could be this form when I was thirteen too. Just think of the possibilities. Autonecrophilia indeed!”
“Oh, God!”
“Let’s play a game, ch?rie. You pretend I’m Adrian, and I’ll pretend I’m you pretending I’m Adrian. I warned you this was going to be a carnival of the perverse.”
It’s not going to hurt. I know what’s really happening. Get a grip, Ellen, she thought, repeating it like a mantra. Get a grip. Don’t lose it. Get a grip. Pretend it is Adrian. You’d be going berserk with joy if it was. Get a grip.
“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” she/he said, grabbing Ellen’s ankles and levering them back and up.
Weight pushed her down, shoving the sensitive bruised skin of her back and shoulders against the cloth until a flash of fire ran across them. Adrienne looked down at him/herself for an instant, poised above Ellen.
“This is easier because it’s a Shadowspawn body and one so similar to mine except for the XY thing, but there are the most intriguing differences. On the downside, the sensations are all so much more localized; the rest of your body might as well not exist. On the up, there’s this tremendous focus. As if everything in all the world was reduced to the need to… thrust.”
“Uhhn!”
“Like that. Now move with me… and grip…”
Later, a panting whisper in her ear amid the hard mutual effort: “Your mind is opening like an orchid of glittering light… not quite yet… Pleasure and pain and horror… are you listening?”
“O… kay… yeah… mmm… please… bite me after… please… oh, please…”
“Soon. Soon.”
“God… can’t… oh, God…”
“I could turn into Adrian’s wolf, right now. Woof, woof, woofity-”
Ellen felt her control vanish. She began to scream from the bottom of her lungs, over and over again as the scarlet mouth closed on her throat and teeth sliced.
“Right, we’ve got it all ready,” Harvey said.
Adrian took a long breath and looked around. It wasn’t precisely a cave, but the overhang was steep where seepage had eaten the limestone away to leave a pocket of cream-colored rock. A couple of gnarled red pines clung to the surface above; a trickle of water ran out and down the slope, still living with the last of the spring rains. The evening was warm on this south-facing slope covered in dense maquis, but the growing evening shadows hinted at a cool night.
There was an intense smell of sage and spice and pine-sap, of cool rock and cold spring water. He dipped a hand into it and drank to wet his dry mouth, tasting an intense mineral cleanness. He felt empty and light; he’d been fasting for two days with only water to drink, good preparation for prolonged night-walking. A healthy body could go without food for a week or so anyway, and in deep trance for far longer.
“It is time and past time,” Adrian said grimly. “I can feel my base-link with Ellen. She is being hit… very hard. Particularly the last few nights since we met in Paso Robles.”
“Pain?” Harvey said.
“Not so much that. My sister likes to rend and break minds more than bodies, to sculpt the self until it is as she desires, and she is extremely good at it. Ellen is very strong, very resilient… but consciously she is without hope while her memories are blocked. Much longer, and there will be permanent damage.”
“Now’s as good a time as any. Lucky for Ellen, Adrienne’s gonna be distracted with her social obligations.”
He ducked under the camouflage tarpaulin that he and Harvey had rigged. When they fastened it behind them the darkness was intense even to Shadowspawn eyes, and the older man clicked on a dim blue light. Adrian lay down on the air-mattress, and Harvey zipped up the thinfoil sleeping bag. With his body heat, that would keep him from losing too much to the earth. Then he held out his arm, and the other man arranged the saline drip.
The slight sting of the needle as Harvey taped it to the inside of his left elbow awakened him from the seductive voice of the trance. He smiled as his arm was arranged.
“Tucking me into bed again, Harv?”
The Texan chuckled. “Hell, you weren’t that young when I pulled you out of the Br?z? stable. Just into your obnoxious teenaged years as I remember. Remember real well.”
The older man held a small tube of liquid to his lips. “Puree of Wilbur Peterson,” he said. “Probably they got the DNA for replication from strands of hair or the bone marrow, considerin’ how old the body was.”
Adrian drank the neutral-tasting liquid. “Thank you for that thought,” he said, and concentrated.
Within him mechanisms that had evolved long before the age of polished stone assimilated the paired helixes of a man who had decided that immortality was too much to bear.
“Since we’re probably going to die in the next thirty-six hours…” he said, when he was ready.
Harvey grinned like a gargoyle. “Shit, you don’t have to pay me back that twenty bucks you borrowed for beer. Forget it.”
“Then just let me say that if we make it, I’m back in the war full-time. After my honeymoon.”
Harvey froze for an instant, a blue-lit troll. “You are? Any particular reason?”
“For one thing, I don’t think Ellen will stay with me if I don’t, or anyway, I find I can’t stand the thought of her bad opinion of me. For another, I have been infected with the delusion called hope. It is more comfortable than sanity, in the long run.”
“Glad to hear you’re back in.”
“On my own terms.”
A chuckle. “I always sorta liked approaching it that way myself. You ready?”
Adrian sighed. “I am reluctant. It is not the danger, you understand…”
“The danger of possibly eternal torment? Hell, that makes me reluctant, ol’ buddy. I do it anyway, but I’m reluctant as shit.”
“It is pretending to be a Shadowspawn predator. The things I must do to avoid suspicion are too hard to forget.”
“Adrian, I don’t wish to do anything much but go back to Pecan Creek, retire, go fishing and watch football and drink beer, and amble down to the crossroads for some BBQ now and then. With an occasional trip to Arles. I certainly never became much attached to blowin’ people’s heads off.”
Softly the older man finished: “I see their faces sometimes.”
“True. Moi aussi. Goodbye, then, old friend. Remember, she will be with Hajime of a certainty at the final ceremony, if there is no opportunity before.”
“You just keep her pinned long enough for the bullet to hit.” A grin. “It’s going to be what you might call a target-rich environment and I’ve got a fair amount of ammo.”
“There is only one target that really matters.”
He leaned back against the softness of the sleeping bag and the air pillow. Dimly he could see Harvey take up the sniper rifle, its outline broken up by a scrim of fabric that turned it shaggy. The other man pulled down a bulbous face-mask with passive image intensifiers built into it, and clicked off the blue light.
Adrian let the Mhabrogast form in his mind, convincing his hindbrain that it did not need his physical form: Amss-aui-ock!
There was an instant of wrenching, ice-and-silver pain along his nerves, and he was standing and looking down at his body.
I am better, this time. Balanced and strong. Win or lose, I will not fail myself. Let’s make sure I don’t fail Ellie, either.
Another, and his body flowed. He felt duller, more constrained; Peterson had not been as purebred as he, nor as intelligent in general. The part of him that was always him struggled, and thought and senses gradually grew more clear. Adjusting a form was much more difficult than simply donning it, but possible, and once done could be locked in for recall. Harvey looked at him critically.
“That’s Peterson at about twenty-one,” he said.
“I don’t have the somatic memories,” Adrian replied. “It’s not unknown for postcorporeals to de-age their aetheric forms, and God knows he had time.”
“It’ll have to do. Good luck, ol’ buddy.”
Adrian nodded and stepped towards the camouflage curtain. He concentrated, and to the aetheric eyes the complex fabric faded to invisibility. The molecules of his stolen form slipped through those of the cloth, and he was naked in the early night. Around him was a web of floating energies; curtains of them crawled across the stars, still a little hurtful in the west where the sun had vanished. He raised his arms to the night, let the syllables he whispered shape what was, and willed.
Form flowed. Perceptions flowed and changed with it; scent dulled, but vision grew far keener than his eyes saw by day, and hearing had an unearthly sensitivity that made the rustle of a field-mouse as loud as boots on gravel and gave direction with swift precision. The sounds of the night were a roar, but after an instant each was as distinct as lines scribed with a diamond. Thought shrank, but took on a savage directness that did not seek to question itself. Broad wings five feet from tip to tip caught at the night, and a great snowy owl ghosted upward as small things skittered in panic or more wisely froze.
Exultation filled him as feathers caressed the air and danced with it, and it took the silent command of the man-mind that lurked at the back of the narrow avian brain to keep it from plunging and sporting in sheer joy. Instead he circled for height, stroking with his wings when he must, riding currents of air he could see as billowing shapes when he caught them. Land unrolled below him, not the map-image you saw with a man’s eyes from an aircraft but a living tapestry as detailed as skin beneath a microscope, down to each clear-cut leaf and grass-blade. Fields, roads, buildings… … and hovering above one a banner of energies, potentials sparkling into and out of existence.
That he saw with the eyes of the Power which never left him. A simple construct, but with the mark of his sister’s savage elegance: here.
Ellen is there, he thought with some part of him that still remembered words. I can feel the base-link. She is miserable, with more than mere fear.
It was close, but he banked widely to make sure that no other night-walker rode the air. None were nearby, though their approach tickled at his senses. He folded his wings then, and dove. Speed built, and the earth swelled; he could hear the murmur of many voices, loud and ugly to the owl’s hearing. Human voices, some carrying the freight of pain and fear. The building swelled, a long rectangular stable or barn of stucco-covered concrete with openings just under the peak of the tile roof at either end. For a form that could stoop on prey by sound alone it was simple to dive through, though the blaze of electric light was hurtful The space within was divided by a fence of wire mesh. The larger part held prisoners, eighty or so men and women.
The others… guards, in the uniform of small-town policemen. His sister, her aura like a blow, a wave of rank salt blood and slinking menace. Another woman in elegant dress, radiating fear and a sick dread and an abject abandonment. And…
Ellen, he thought. Ellen. Why did she bring you here?