"Ol' buddy, this is crazy."
Ellen crossed her arms and glared at Harvey. "No, it isn't," she snapped.
"Harvey-" Adrian began.
All three of them fell silent as the waitress brought their food. Harvey beamed at her.
"Now that's a taco," he said, taking a happy bite. "My compliments to the chef, darlin'."
Unexpectedly, the heavyset woman smiled at him as she plopped down a basket of sopapillas and covered it with a cloth to keep them warm.
"We don't have no chef," she said. "All we got here at Teresa's is a cook."
Ellen's nose twitched, and saliva spurted into her mouth; her stomach twisted with a need so intense it was almost nausea. She'd been too keyed up to realize just how hungry she was. Still was, despite the energy drinks and nut bars she'd devoured as they drove into town.
What with waiting to be attacked by monsters, shooting monsters…well, shooting at monsters…donating blood and coupling like mad stoats, she thought. God, what a movie this would make! Rated R, of course.
With an effort, she restrained herself from gobbling, the spiced barbacoa beef and onions tingling on her tongue. The puffed bread with honey tasted even better.
"Mighty strange how sometimes the best tacos are in these little places you'd swear probably cooked up roof rabbit. I recall this time near Abilene-" Harvey began reminiscently.
"Shut up with the funny, rustic good-ol'-boy thing, Harvey," she said. "I'm a small-town girl myself and it doesn't fool me. And I'm not going to forget those kids because I'm stuffing my face."
She took a bite of her taco and glared. Harvey shrugged; he was about the most imperturbable man she'd ever met. At least he couldn't sense her emotions anymore, not with his limited talent and the protections Adrian had installed.
At last she pushed the plate away and drank the last of her Diet Coke. Adrian looked at it and raised a brow, chuckling.
"What?"
"It just seems a little…"
He indicated the plates, now mostly clear of their tacos, burritos, refried beans and much else.
"I just prefer the taste of aspartame. And you're not going to distract me either, Adrian. Tell me honestly-will there ever be a better time?"
He sighed and rested his face in his hands for a moment, elbows on the table.
"I am so tired," he said softly. "No. There will not. But answer me honestly, cherie. Why do you care? Why are you ready to take risks for children who are not yours? Did you fall in love with them on brief acquaintance?"
"No. I only saw them a couple of times, and…" She hesitated. "Frankly, I thought they were…"
"Creepy, you said. Then why?"
"Because they're yours, and I love you. Tell me you haven't been thinking about this since I first told you about them. You froze then and it's been eating at you ever since. So I think this is something you need to do."
"Yes, I have been thinking about them." Adrian sighed. "It…has been obsessing me. I thought I hid it better."
"Honey, we're sorta linked. It isn't all one-way, you know."
Softly he went on: "I try to suppress it because it isn't really concern for them in any immediate sense. I think of them, but what the, the eye of my mind sees is myself, as a little boy. Myself and Adrienne, when we were like kittens playing together in the sun. Before we ate of the tree of knowledge and had to choose between good and evil."
Harvey touched Adrian on the shoulder. Ellen fought down a slight pang; they'd been together for a long time before she met Adrian at all. It was illogical, but…
What was that old saying? The heart has its reasons that the mind knows not?
"Son, you should let that go," Harvey said, his voice quiet but compelling. "You can't help those two kids you remember, even if one of them was you. They're both dead. They became you, you and your sister. You both made your choices."
Adrian looked up at the Texan. "Harvey, I made the choices I did because of you. You took me out. Adrienne stayed behind and became…what she is. It was a close thing for me even so, sometimes, Harvey. Being good is hard for us. It's so easy for you humans-I've known a lot of bitterness, a lot of envy over that."
Ellen laid her hand on her husband's shoulder, beside that of his friend.
"You did manage it, darling."
"But…I had the opportunity. Adrienne never did; and the little girl I loved is dead, murdered by the thing she became. How can I leave the flesh of my flesh there, to lose them the same way?"
Ellen nodded. "You can't. And no child should be treated the way they will be."
Adrian sighed and looked down at his elegant, slender hands. "My parents will…love them, in their way."
"That makes things worse, not better. You can turn against an outright abuser. Someone who really loves you can lead you into the pit."
"And the children are Shadowspawn, Ellen. Purebreds, even more than I. Perhaps the purest-bred in twenty thousand years. Very powerful, hideously dangerous."
Ellen snorted. "Now, that's, well, racist. You aren't a bad man, Adrian. And you're extremely powerful and dangerous. There's no reason they have to be bad, no matter what they can do. You're vacillating. It isn't like you." More quietly. "They look so much like you. The boy was like seeing you at that age."
"Oh, Jesus," Harvey said wearily. "Do you two do this we-are-the-dyadic-unit thing all the time! "
Ellen flushed; she'd become very used to being alone with Adrian. Adrian's face firmed and lost the slightly wistful expression it had worn for an instant.
"And there is a nexus here, Harvey."
The Texan's face altered, going very still. A probability nexus was nothing to take lightly. The fact that they could seldom be pinned down in detail simply made that more essential. Nobody who had enough of the Power to Wreak at all doubted the existence of the precognitive ability, and Adrian had an awesome degree of it.
"What sort?" he said cautiously.
"I am not altogether sure, but a powerful one. Extremely powerful, and growing very rapidly; I can feel it looming out of the spray of futures, cutting across one path after another. And I am increasingly convinced that not doing this is black-pathed. When I try to invoke common sense and convince myself not to do it, cold winds blow. Both for me personally and for the world. It has been troubling me for some time; I think that was why I avoided thinking of the children as much as I could. Since Ellen mentioned them it has been forcing its way into my conscious mind."
One of the grizzled eyebrows went up. "You sure your feelings aren't pushin' you there?"
Adrian spread his hands. "No, I'm not sure of that at all," he said frankly. "But one can never be sure. Even with an overt Seeing, rather than just an intimation like this. It is enough to convince me, my old. And my subconscious has a lively sense of self-preservation. If the Power is prompting me to do this thing, despite the obvious risks, then there is some hideous danger involved in not doing it. We cannot know what the danger is, but it is there. And if we ignore the warning, we will find out the danger far too late."
" Or someone stronger than you is tweakin' it."
Harvey held up a hand as Ellen began to speak; she felt a little relief. Even now, parts of her brain screamed, This is crazy! at logic like that.
And that's after I've seen people turn into… well, not bats, but things with wings, and walk through walls.
"All right," Harvey said slowly. "I've got a powerful respect for your precog, Adrian. Plus we do have some downtime in a few months, and it is the best opportunity…which don't make it good. It's an unjustified risk before the Tbilisi thing. Though I can probably even sell it to Sheila Poison."
Adrian raised a brow and said to Ellen: "Did I mention her? The Brotherhood's executive for western North America?"
"Yes. Bigoted bitch was the term you used."
Adrian grinned. "I didn't think she altogether liked me," he said. "And I thought that she disliked me for my genes, which I can't help, rather than my actions, which I usually can. Doubly ironic because she has considerably more of the Shadowspawn inheritance than Harvey here. Projected self-loathing is one of the occupational hazards of the Brotherhood. Also a reason I, ah, resigned."
Harvey snorted. "She didn't like you, until you pulled off the Rancho Sangre thing. Hajime and the late unlamented Adrienne, that's quite a bit of counting coup. You got real chops with her now, son."
" We pulled that off."
"Yeah, it ain't hurt my chops with the organization either. There's not a person in the Brotherhood didn't cheer, which makes up for bein' a loose cannon, sorta. A little."
Ellen murmured. "Harvey Ledbetter, organization man?"
"Not so much. More like the Brotherhood's indispensible skunk," Harvey said. "But I think I can sell it to her. Say rescuin' a pureblood and raisin' him right worked with you, and there's no reason we couldn't do it again; and we should strike fast, because the younger we get 'em, the more likely it is to work out right. It'd make a powerful difference if we had more major mojo like yours on our side. I can bring her 'round…if I work at it for a while."
"Ah," Adrian said. "That is good!"
"And I'll go on the op, too, of course."
"No," Adrian said, shaking his head. "You were definitely made as the shooter during the fracas. Not the first time you'd killed them…remember how Hajime tried to make me give you up, by name? It takes a great hatred for them to notice a specific human that way."
Harvey grinned with happy ferocity. "I don't mind havin' that sort of rep. Still, I know the ground…"
"And it knows you, by now: Wreakings aimed at you specifically. I am fairly sure that the Tokairin would do so, and my parents. Farmer and Guha would do; they were covered by my penumbra and got out before anyone paid attention to them. Or any reliable Brotherhood muscle. And technical and logistic support, of course."
"That I think I can do, ol' buddy. Properly motivated, that is."
Ellen felt her skin prickle at something in Harvey's smile. "You want something for it," she said.
I didn't watch all that bargaining at the gallery for nothing.
Harvey leaned back and put a toothpick between his lips. "Tryin to quit," he said in explanation. "And yeah, I do want something."
"What?" Adrian said.
"A promise. I'm goin' along with this against my better judgment. I want a blank check for some operation sometime you think stinks. Solemn oath, Adrian, ol' buddy. I call in the favor and you go along with it, no questions, beginning to end."
Adrian hesitated, his eyes narrowing. Ellen remembered something he'd said once: that Harvey could be drastic sometimes.
You know, these guys really are terrorists in a way. I mean, they don't go out of their way to kill bystanders, but they don't seem to give much of a damn about it either, except for Adrian…and Adrian can play really rough too, I think. And they'll step on renfields like bugs. Which is fine in one way, but on the other hand that includes guys like Jose and his family, whom I mostly liked. Fighting the Bad Guys is more complicated than I thought, even when they are really-for-true evil
"You really mean it," Adrian said.
" Oh, yeah," Harvey said, relaxed, one arm hooked around the rear of the chair. "That's my price. Take it or leave it."
Adrian glanced at Ellen. "I can deny you nothing," he said, and the words were for her. "My oath, old friend. And I am glad of it, too. Once more Ellen is making me do something I very much wanted to do…but I doubted my own wanting."
"Okay, first installment on the payback," Harvey said promptly. He pulled out his phone and selected a number. "I can recognize when my talent's prompting me, even if it isn't in your league. Just tell her Operation Defarge is a go. Nothin' else."
Adrian shot him a look, shrugged, and took the phone.
"You have reached Poison Consulting. All of our operatives are serving other customers at the moment; please leave a name and number and we'll get back to you."
"Mowgli here. Lefarge is a go," Adrian said, and snapped off the phone.
"Mowgli?" Ellen said; it had been a long time since she read Kipling.
"My code name," Adrian said. "One of them."
"Oh…the human boy raised by wolves…Bit of an ironic inversion…"
He sighed. "We should go back to Santa Fe for a stop. I need to pick up a few things there. Then we'll head to California. It's some time before the Council meets, and…I was hoping our physicists would come up with something that might help us there."
"So was I," Harvey said. "When you're ready, I'll come a-runnin to earn the rest of my favor. Meantime, business calls and it's a far, far better thing."
Ellen turned and looked at Adrian as the Texan nodded and left.
"What was that?"
Adrian frowned slightly. "Harvey isn't any great adept, but he has mental shields like machined tungsten carbide," he said. "There was just a flicker…"
Ellen snorted. "You get too dependent on reading people's minds, darling. My take is that he was improvising, but he has something in mind you're not going to like. At all. Whatever this Defarge thing is, it's going to be a bone in your throat."
Adrian shrugged; then went abstracted for a moment. "The world-lines are tangled, too many Wreaking along them…but you are right. Let's get on the road, then. Perhaps we can rest a little in Santa Fe."
"Maybe I can see Giselle? She'll have worried herself sick, and I didn't dare write."
"Perhaps."
Ellen smiled. Then something teased at her memory. It wasn't all that long since her graduation, and she'd had to take English literature courses as well.
Defarge, she thought. That Dickens book. She's the one who sat knitting by the guillotine during the Terror, while the heads of the aristos fell into the basket.
Adrian shrugged again. "One of the reasons I liked living in Santa Fe for so long was how quiet it is. Little happens there."
"Well, that's unique," the Santa Fe chief of police said.
The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe's police force didn't run to elaborate hierarchies.
Eric Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn't help…and he'd said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.
Cecile was on the bed. Usually dead bodies didn't have much expression, but usually they weren't arched in a galvanic spasm. They'd have to break her bones to get her into a bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he'd ever seen, and his experience was broader than he liked. Now he'd have to have this in his head for the rest of his life. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.
Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, but some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man's hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.
"This is a murder-suicide," the chief said quietly.
Salvador stirred. The older man didn't look at him as he continued.
"That's exactly what it is, Eric."
He doesn't call me by my first name very often.
"Probably that's what the evidence will show. Sir," Salvador added.
I've seen friends die before. I didn't sit down and cry. I did my job. I can do it now.
He hadn't been this angry then, either. He'd killed every mouj he could while he was doing tours on the rock pile, and it had been a lot of tours and a good round number of kills, but he hadn't usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn't thought of them as personal enough to hate, really.
This is extremely personal. Now I hate.
"Chief."
That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. "We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?"
"Three thirty. Half an hour after…Cesar called me."
The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.
Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he'd recorded on the ledge turned into a print as he ran the enhancement. A paw print.
"You notice a dog? Or something else like that?"
"No," he said dully. "Just a cat."
"Well, that's not it." The print was too large for a house cat. "Probably just something drawn by the smell. Big coyote maybe, the things are all over town."
"Time of death?"
"Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything's fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in."
The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
"You know you can't be on this investigation, Eric," the older man said. "Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle of tequila like a worm to get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off and as many bottles as it takes."
"That doesn't last," he said.
"It works for a while, and the pain afterwards distracts you too," the chief said.
Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to Saint Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.
"Okay, Cesar, talk to me," he said aloud, and slid the data card he'd palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he'd left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. "This had better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabron."
The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.
Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home office-cum-TV room, lit only by one small lamp.
"I'm recording this before you get here, jefe, 'cause I've got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the Net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when before we were told to back off, you know? They said there were some 'interesting anomalies' and did I want any more information on the Breze guy, they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough."
Cesar's image licked its lips; he could see that, but Salvador's mind superimposed how he'd looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.
"Okay, it was a trap and I was stupid. I should have asked them, 'Who dat, never heard of no Breze, me,' or just hit the spam blocker. But we weren't getting anywhere, creeping into Adrian Breze's house like we planned would be desperation stuff, so I downloaded. Here's what I got, repeated a whole lot of times."
Letters appeared, a paragraph of boldface:
– youaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouareso I " Cesar!" A scream in a woman's voice from another room, high and desperate. Then: "Don't-don't- please, don't -"
Then just screaming. Cesar snatched up the pistol and ran. Salvador heard himself screaming too, as the shots began. Then more sounds, for a long time. Then another face in the screen.
It was the woman he'd seen in the dream; he could tell, even though her face was one liquid sheet of dull red. Only the golden flecks in her eyes showed bright, and then her teeth were very white when she licked them clean.
"You are so fucked," she crooned, and the screen went black.
Eric Salvador choked as the tears ran down his face. His hand twitched towards his pistol and he forced it to lie still.
There were far too many people who had to die before he did. People he had to talk to. Adrian Breze, for starters.
Adrienne Breze lay back in the big hot tub, watching the high cold stars slip by in the skylights overhead and enjoying the gentle eddies of the hot lavender-scented water. Her toes floated slightly above the surface with wisps of mist half veiling them, but the regenerated foot was now just as large as the other and only slightly pink; for that matter, her hair was shoulder-length again. No trace of the famine-gauntness remained on the rest of her.
"I'm back to my full, magnificent form," she said.
There were three other people in the room with her, besides Monica. Theresa Villegas was a thin, dark woman in her forties and the household manager, which to a Shadowspawn meant considerably more than overseeing the maids, or even scaring up the human refreshments for parties. The household was the instinctive unit of organization for her breed, the way clans were for Homo sapiens. Harold Bates was recorded somewhere as head of security for Breze Enterprises; that meant he ran her human mercenaries, mostly Gurkhas. David Cheung was young, extraordinarily fit, with the sort of build you saw on gymnasts or martial artists, and sleekly handsome. She used him as a guard and enforcer, among other things; it was a rather unusual arrangement.
But the whole point of being a Progressive is not to be overly bound by tradition, hein?
By her elbow there was a dish of smoked salmon and little spiced shrimp on toothpicks and a glass of slightly chilled New Zealand gewurztraminer-quite extraordinarily good; she made a note to acquire the vineyard as she nibbled and sipped.
"The arrangements?" she said.
"Your great-grandfather agreed to the meeting," Theresa said efficiently, her eyes flicking down to her tablet for an instant. "His personal reply…I quote: ' Quelle surprise, we Brezes are infernally hard to kill.'"
"I think he used infernal with malice aforethought," she said, chuckling. "Alas, he retains a sentimental attachment to the satanist part of the family heritage. Emotionally if not literally. Captain Bates?"
The mercenary nodded. "The security plan is ready for implementation, Ms. Breze," he said in upper-class British tones.
"Good, it would be tiresome if there were interference. I need to consult closely with Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother, without distractions."
"I understand your brother consulted with them first," the Englishman said. "Is that likely to create difficulties?"
"No, no. I wanted him to make his appearance first. It will confirm certain assumptions he has made about my plans. Because, at the time he saw them, Etienne and Seraphine shared those assumptions, you see? I did not want to illuminate them for fear he would sense something. He is astonishingly sensitive at times, my dear sibling."
She looked at David. "And we'll need you active when we arrive, so go wait for me. You can sleep afterwards."
The young man grinned, bowed, and left through the door that led into her private chambers. She caught a flicker of verbalization from Bates; they'd been in close enough proximity for long enough that her mind had begun to decode the symbol structure of his.
"I don't think you think much of David, Captain Bates." She laughed.
His mind jerked in alarm; then he tried to focus on a mathematical formula. As a shield, it was pathetic.
"He's very useful as an instructor in hand-to-hand combat," he said neutrally. "Surprisingly so, for someone so…academic."
"I've given him the opportunity to fight for real quite a few times," she said. "That means he's not just a dojo ballerina anymore. And, Captain Bates?"
"Ma'am?"
"You're really not in a position to indulge a feeling of moral superiority, you know."
"I, ah, have no such opinion of Mr. Cheung, ma'am."
"Oh, yes, you do. Really, you should have realized by now that you can't lie to me. Gigolo was among your unkind thoughts. You're a very able man, Captain Bates; you're also quite satisfyingly venal and sadistically murderous, which is why despite the drawbacks you find my employ so satisfying."
She held up a hand. "Not a criticism! Just an observation! And you work for a monster; you can't trust me, but you can't keep secrets from me, either."
"Your service has been…educational, ma'am."
"What was that? 'Peeled back the lid'? Yes, I suppose so. And you're helping upend that can and spread a nice thick layer of what's inside all over the world. Do keep that in mind, my little toenail of Satan."
"Yes, ma'am. I'd better get to work on the details if we're traveling overland from Paris."
"By train," Adrienne amplified. "Call it the Orient Express. Then by ship from Istanbul."
Theresa smiled thinly and followed him, her tablet tucked under her arm. The Villegases had been renfields for a long time; one knew where one stood with them.
"But how much more authentic it would be if I were sailing across the Atlantic," she said sourly. "Mthunzi would just love that. Or if I had a log and a couple of humans to paddle it for me. Or I could try being a werealbatross and fry like an egg when the sunlight caught me. And then we could travel by coach to Tbilisi, through oceans of mud and streets running with shit."
" Dona?" Monica asked. "Mthunzi?"
"Oh, did I ever tell you about him? He's head of the Council eugenics program. He has been for most of the last century."
Monica shivered a little; she preferred not to think about other Shadowspawn. As far as possible she preferred not to remember that they existed.
"He's…not a friend of yours?"
"He's a reactionary fossil," Adrienne said. "Compared to him, my great-grandfather is a Progressive."
"What sort of name is that, Mthunzi?"
"Zulu. He wears this absurd costume at gatherings, with cow horns and beads and bells, a veritable witch doctor's outfit. Well, Great-grandfather dresses up in that Robe of the Dark Magus, like some Parisian version of Aleister Crowley…or Saruman…actually it was the other way 'round; Crowley was imitating him, with much poorer taste…but at least it looks striking and not just silly, and he doesn't wear a pointed hat."
"He'll be coming to Tbilisi too?"
"Yes. He wants us back in the caves. Caves are boring. I think he's just as aware of how Trimback One would probably be much worse than the projections as I am. He simply wants that."
The phone function sounded a quiet chime. "Here," Adrienne said; not many people had her private number, and she'd gone to a great deal of trouble to encrypt the link.
Or rather, others went to a great deal of trouble. They work, I enjoy the results; it's the natural order.
"Hi!" Michiko's voice.
" Ca va, Michi?"
"Nothing much, you know?" she said, with an utterly Californian rising inflection. "Oh, that Santa Fe thing, a couple of the locals are poking around where they shouldn't. I had the renfields warn them off, but it looks like they're being naughty and trying to keep it secret…"
"Have them killed, then."
"I may go handle that myself. Nice to get in a little plain terrorizing and torture and butchery of unsuspecting ordinary humans now and then. The simple pleasures are the ones that last in the end, like steamed rice. I'm actually going to miss it once we're out in the open, the way their minds dissolve in fear when they realize what we are!"
"That is delicious," Adrienne conceded. "Still, one can't have everything, and there's something to be said for lifelong dread and cringing fear. Wait, Adrian hasn't been around there, has he? That would be…dangerous. The last I saw of him was too close for comfort. We don't want him suspecting anything too soon."
"Don't you think I could handle him?" Michiko bridled.
Not in a thousand years, Adrienne thought. Aloud she went on:
"Darling, I could barely handle him. He gave Dmitri all the trouble he could take just a few weeks ago. The poor boy is still sulking about Dale rescuing him."
"There is that. Well, he wouldn't be around here, would he? He killed my grandfather; Ichiro and I would be on the lookout for him, even if you were really dead. This is probably just one of those irritating things the humans do now and then."
"True. But he might drop by for his things, or the Power might prompt him; he is one of our generation, remember. Do keep alert."
"You know, this is as much my home as anywhere," Adrian said quietly.
They were sitting on a bench in Santa Fe's little central park on the plaza, eating ice-cream cones. The Palace of the Governors stretched in front of them, past the plain plinth of the Civil War memorial and the bandstand. He bit off a chunk of the cone; it was solid and smoothly rich, if not Berthillon, and there were pinon nuts in it as well.
The patch of cottonwoods and grass was drowsily peaceful on a Sunday morning, just cool enough for their Windbreakers to be comfortable on a bench in the shade. The thin mountain air seemed to impart an extra clarity to sight, as if everything were in a hyperrealist painting, sharp-edged and definite but with an unearthly glow to the colors.
"More than Paris?" Ellen said in a teasing tone.
"Much more," Adrian answered soberly.
I am a serious man, by inclination, he thought. Gloomy and brooding, in fact. Ellen…lightens me. Not that she is light minded, but she has more of a sense of proportion. Considering all that has happened to her…well, I knew she was a remarkable person.
"I was a young man in Paris, a student."
"What, Harvey didn't have you blowing things up and…Wreaking?"
"Yes. Though explosives are only occasionally useful against Shadowspawn-more often against their hirelings…but he thought I should have that experience, to make me…how did he put it…less of a fuckin' wing nut than most members of the Brotherhood. Many are born into the war, you understand, and it does strange things to the mind to be raised so. Others are recruited after an encounter with the Shadowspawn, and that is usually still worse."
"Did you like Paris, being a university student, being normal? Well, relatively normal."
"I loved it. I will always remember the city fondly…but there, even though I was estranged from the family, I could never forget that I was a Breze. The very stones of the place spoke of them."
"And you didn't feel at home when you were a kid?"
"With my foster parents in my childhood I was living a lie-that I did not know it at the time makes no difference in retrospect."
"What about Harvey? He raised you."
"Nomadically, though I loved his place in Texas, the little ranch in the Hill Country. We moved frequently even then. When I became an active fighter for the Brotherhood, we moved every week, or nearlyand that was when I was sixteen. When we were not holed up in safe houses or redoubts. In a place in the Yukon for a whole winter, once, for training, and for the Brotherhood's adepts to study me. Besides…though I tried to think of Harvey as a father, he was more like an elder brother to me. We are only a decade apart in age, after all. He was in his early twenties when he…rescued me. I was twelve."
Ellen blinked. She knew that, but it was hard to keep in mind when it looked as if Harvey were a full generation older. He could sense a slight discomfort; she'd been startled and put out when she first learned that there were twenty-five years between them, rather than the three or four his appearance suggested.
Which was one excuse I gave myself for driving her away, he thought. Stop wallowing in guilt, Adrian! It is a self-indulgence and makes for nothing but paralysis!
By the elbow she gave him in the ribs-quite hard-she was thinking the same thing. Base-link or no, she'd grown disconcertingly able to follow his train of thought. It was a little like telepathy, only shields and blocks were of no use whatsoever.
And I have been an excessively private man, as well, Adrian thought. It is hard, learning to share. But worth the effort and discomfort, a thousand times over.
"This was the first place I could be myself?" he finished.
She licked her ice-cream cone and snorted slightly.
"Alone, lonely, brooding on a mountaintop. The happiest time of your life!"
"No, the months since our marriage have been the happiest time of my life," Adrian said, and glowed at the smile that rewarded him. "But the years here, they were…calm, for the most part. The days, at least. At night I could run beneath the stars, and come to terms with my demons and my past."
"Sounds like you needed it, honey," she said.
I needed to make myself worthy of you, he thought but did not say; even a newly wedded couple had to have some sense of restraint.
"I love this place too. It was where I was first on my own, making my own living as an adult. NYU didn't really count, there I was working three jobs and studying too."
She smiled, her full, curved Cupids-bow lips were particularly charming with a little smudge of chocolate ice cream at one corner. She licked it up, which was both charming and disturbing.
"I remember the first time I came here, it was for the job interview, and I had lunch over there at the Plaza Cafe," Ellen said. "It was January."
She nodded towards the restaurant that occupied the center of the block of two-story Territorial-style adobes facing the open space. It had been there for over a century, since just after the First World War, when this square had had the only paved streets in the city…town, it had been back then. Oddly enough the food was, and always had been, rather Greek in emphasis.
"I had a gyro, and then a big piece of that heavenly coconut cream pie, and sat and sipped my coffee and watched the snow fall. Big thick fluffy flakes, you could just see the cathedral up there, and then you couldn't as it got dark, and it kept snowing; I didn't know it was unusual, but it wasn't like snow in Pennsylvania somehow, the light seemed to make it glow from within, and I remember thinking that I understood a lot of Southwestern paintings that had looked like exaggeration or kitsch. After dark I walked out and it was like being in a snow globe, perfectly silent, all the sound hushed…
"We will have a day like that together, sometime," he said.
She slid a hand into his. "You know, we should have done all this backstory stuff the first time we got involved."
"Ah…that wasn't possible…"
"It was like trying to talk to a lobster!" she said. "You were the sexiest guy I'd ever met, and the most mysterious, and I knew there was something inside, but I could get there. Click go the claws, talk to my shell, scuttle away!"
The tone was mock angry, but he could sense a flicker of real grief behind it, and he squeezed her hand in apology; it was all he could do.
"No wonder I threw a bottle of brandy at your head and stomped out. Women like to communicate, you know. It's a foible we have."
"Men prefer to grunt, belch and scratch themselves," he said, his tone solemn. "It's a foible-"
She freed her hand for a moment and thumped him on the back of the head.
"So, let's go talk to Giselle," she said.
"It may be useful."
"It's certainly necessary. She's my Harvey, Adrian. She gave me my first real job and she mentored and mother-henned me and listened to me cry. She did a lot more for me than any therapist ever hatched."
"Born."
"Therapists are hatched, like other reptiles. Anyway, I owe Gis a lot."
And she advised you I was too creepy for words and that you should leave me, Adrian thought. I should not resent that; it was quite true and simply showed she was perceptive and had Ellen's best interests at heart. Nevertheless I do resent it. I must simply do my best to control that.
They held hands as they walked over to La Fonda, the Harvey hotel on the road that ran up to the cathedral; it was built in the classic faux-adobe-Hopi-Hispanic style of the reconstructionist nineteen twenties, which made it of respectable antiquity itself now. Then right across the bed of the Santa Fe River. Adrian smiled to himself as he felt the little flares of envy from others who saw him with Ellen. It was perhaps not the noblest of pleasures, but still definitely a pleasure.
She chuckled as they crossed the bridge and she looked down at the dry creek bed. Adrian raised a brow, and she spoke:
"I was remembering a comic I heard once, a local, doing an act with a fake Blues song:
And I was so goldurn sad that night
If there'd been any water in the Santa Fe River
I'da jumped right in and drowned.
Adrian chuckled too. "I wish I could have gone with you," he said.
She squeezed his hand. "I noticed that when we were dating…the first time, before it all came out…you always took me lonely places. That time we went to your beach place down on the gulf near Corpus Christi, all the other stuff."
"Habit. You have made me less solitary. Not that I will ever be gregarious."
"I'd die of shock to see you become a people person, honey. You're not cut out to be a glad-hander."
They turned left, uphill this time, along the winding course of Canyon Road. Originally it had been a stretch of little farms, ranchos where Spanish-Mexican settlers and their retainers had used water from the river and the Acequia Madre, the Mother Ditch, to grow patches of grain and fruit and raise pigs and chickens, goats and sheep and burros.
Many of the trees were still there, and the rambling adobe-and-stone houses they'd built to house their extended families, long since converted to other uses as the city grew around them.
Some a little farther back from the road along narrow alley were high-priced residences; over a hundred art galleries and studios stretched along this mile of winding street. The new construction blended in, being low-slung and stuccoed in brown with vigas, wooden beams with their ends exposed, supporting flat roofs. Many of the gardens were lovely, though those were mostly in the courtyards at the back, glimpsed through gateways. The art, though…
Adrian grinned at one modernist interpretation of a Hopi or Navajo medicine man, a stick-thin figure with a bulbous mask and antlers reaching for the sky.
"Bullwinkle the shaman!" he laughed.
Ellen joined him for a moment; then he could feel a wave of confusion and fear.
"My darling?" he said gently.
"Adrienne made the same joke. When she had me tied up in my own apartment up there, that day after I ran into her on the road. She'd be doing things to me with a sock stuffed in my mouth or duct tape across it so nobody could hear the screams, and then it was this chatty, witty conversation and then back to the screams… God, but I'm glad she's dead."
"I too," Adrian said, forcing down his rage.
You cannot take revenge on the dead, he thought. It is one of the few real disadvantages to killing your enemies. But some of them are too dangerous to let live an instant more than it takes to kill them.
Ellen took deep breaths and her mind calmed.
"Okay, she's your evil twin, it's only natural you'd see the same joke sometimes."
Hans amp; Demarcio Galleries wasn't open, but as Ellen had predicted, Giselle was there, working in her office at the back. A little pounding brought her to the front door. She opened the door with her mouth sagging, then turned gray and began to topple backwards towards a plinth that held a vase. It rocked as Ellen threw her arms around the older woman; Adrian felt the Power flow automatically as he lunged forward leopard-smooth to grab the dark feather-patterned piece of pottery out of the air. Not even Shadowspawn reflexes could have caught it before it shattered on the tile floor without his pushing the probability curve.
"Here," he said. "I would not want to destroy an original Maria Martinez."
Ellen gave him a quelling glance and took Giselle's arm. The older woman was still pasty with the shock, and making little gasping sounds. Her former assistant steered her into the office at the rear of the gallery's long rectangle, pushed her into the office chair and hunted up a glass and a bottle of sherry from a cabinet.
Quite passable sherry, too, Adrian thought; it was a Barbadillo San Rafael with tart, leathery scents and the taste of crushed toffee. A little sweet, a woman's sherry, but very good short of the V.S.O.P. level.
The gallery owner gulped the first glass as if it were water or a shot of bad bourbon; even then Adrian couldn't help wincing slightly. He occupied the moment and gave the two friends a little privacy by examining the shelves. The room had the orderly chaos of someone who knew where everything was, but probably couldn't have told someone else how to find anything to save her life. There were a couple of very good local pieces in spots where the skylight gave adequate light, though; one seemed like pure Abstract Expressionist when he first saw it, but the closer he came the more it looked like a local sunset seen from a tall dropoff.
Giselle Demarcio cleared her throat. Adrian turned around; she was dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex, and then gave a honking blow.
"I thought you were dead," she said to Ellen; her voice held a slight trace of East Coast big city. " Or off somewhere with his creepy sister."
Adrian sat; the chair was comfortable despite the local rustic make. Ellen sat beside him and took his hand again. She held the paired grip up, so that Giselle could see the wedding ring, and Adrian showed his own.
"You're married?"
"Quite happily, Ms. Demarcio," Adrian said.
"And to each other, at that, Gis," Ellen added dryly.
Demarcio was getting her composure back; Adrian could feel the roil in her mind subsiding, the random flicker steadying into the wave-like patterns of coherent thought. He couldn't tell what she was thinking, apart from the emotional overtones-that would require days of close association-but he could tell that she was thinking, which was impressive.
"After you went off with his…with Adrian's sister…"
"I didn't," Ellen said, with almost clinical detachment. "She kidnapped me. And burned down my house, nearly killing the Lopez family in the process. Would have killed them, except for Adrian and a friend of his. And she…did some very unpleasant things to me. Quiet a lot of unpleasant things for several months. Mmmm, drugs and brainwashing, you might say, besides the chew-toy stuff. Adrian rescued me."
"Oh," Demarcio said again. "Oh, the bitch!" Her thoughts spiked, settled into a mixture of sympathy and rage…"Oh, you poor thing!"
Ellen shook her head and smiled. "I'm a survivor, Gis," she said. "You know that."
Demarcio nodded. "I suppose this means you don't want me to keep the job open?"
The two women shared a laugh; then the gallery owner turned to Adrian again. He could feel-and could have seen, even if he were mind-blind-her suspicions click into place once more.
"What do the police have to say about this?" she asked shrewdly, her eyes darting between them.
"Nothing," Adrian said. "My sister is dead. And…Ms. Demarcio, some people cannot be controlled by the police, by the authorities. By any conventional means. They are too rich, too…powerful for that."
Demarcio nodded, and he could feel her agreement; it was something like the scent of mint. Ellen had told him a good deal about her, among other things that she was a rather paranoid variety of left-winger. That didn't interest him in itself-human politics were a smoke screen, self-deluding nonsense at best, and had been throughout the century since the Council of Shadows reached its full monstrous power. But that mind-set would predispose her to believe an edited version of the truth.
Since the world really is ruled by an all-powerful evil conspiracy. Just one of werewolves and vampires and sorcerers, rather than capitalists and generals.
"But you can deal with them?" she asked him sharply.
He nodded. "I must, I find," he said. "After what happened to Ellen. And my sister was not acting alone. She was part of a, umm, cabal. Of…younger members of some very old, very powerful families. Families that already wield great hidden power, you understand; shadowy influence within governments and corporations and intelligence agencies. Influence sufficient to silence or kill those they consider threats."
"Like, for example, your family, the Brezes?"
"Yes. I have been something of a family black sheep, you might say."
I actually managed to say all that without outright lying, he thought, slightly amused. It's even accurate to call Adrienne's followers a cabal. Shadowspawn politics work that way, like a Bronze Age monarchy's court intrigues. Or the other way 'round, since those kings probably had a great deal of our blood. As one might expect from their taste for human sacrifices.
Demarcio sat watching him for half a minute. "You're not telling me everything, are you, Mr. Breze?"
"Adrian, I think," he said, smiling and indicating Ellen.
The charm of the smile bounced off her like buckshot off a battleship.
"You're not, are you, Adrian?"
"No. Because you have no need to know more, as yet; and because knowing more would endanger you. Endanger your life."
"Oh."
A flash of apprehension, very little of which showed. "Is this a social call, then?"
He shook his head. "Not entirely, Ms.-"
"Giselle."
A nod. "Not entirely, Giselle. I'd like to know what happened here after we all, how shall I say, left. It would be entirely in character for Adrienne to have…energetically suppressed any police investigation. Naturally they would have asked you questions; and questions sometimes reveal information as much as answers do."
And naturally you would have found out as much more as you could: out of concern for Ellen, and because according to her you are the biggest gossip in Santa Fe and possessed of an insatiable curiosity.
"There was a detective, two of them, SFPD. They came around, asking questions. And then…nothing. When I called, they said the investigation had been moved to the dead-files section. That was…" She cleared her throat, then continued: "That was when I thought you must be dead, Ellen."
Her beaming smile died. "Then there was the incident, a couple of months ago."
"Incident?" Adrian said.
His voice was still calm, but there was an edge of danger to it now. He could feel the flux in her mind, the primal fear of death welling up. And a ghost wind touched the back of his neck as well, the Power hinting of risk. An effort of will fought down the instinctive rage that the presence of another Shadowspawn in his territory brought. His breed were still more jealous of such things than normal humans, and whatever his conscious convictions, the back of his mind still thought of this place as his.
"One of the detectives…Cesar Martinez…was found dead. With his girlfriend. They're calling it a murder-suicide. The details were, well, pretty gruesome. Then-"
Adrian listened through the description, and called up the newspaper reports on his tablet. His brows went up.
"Thank you very much, Giselle," he said, after they'd made arrangements to meet for dinner. "That was, as they say, interesting. And suspicious."
Demarcio looked as if she'd like to shiver, despite the comfortable temperature. She shook hands with him, and hugged Ellen fiercely.
On the street outside Ellen sighed. "It's going to be rough explaining to her that we're just here for a visit," she said.
"It would be no favor to spend too much time in her presence," he said grimly. "That double murder is a classic. Tokairin Michiko, at a guess, now that my sister is no longer with us."
Ellen shivered. "Michiko wanted to kill me, right there, that evening," she said. "I can remember her waving a crab leg in that restaurant in San Francisco and saying how much fun it would be for the two of them to kill me together, and smiling at me as if I were supposed to chime in with, 'Oh, that sounds hot.' And when Adrienne said she had other plans for me, the mad bitch pouted at me, as if she expected me to agree what a poopy stick-in-the-mud killjoy Adrienne was being."
He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cigarette case, ignoring a brace of hostile looks as he lit up. Ellen scowled and pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket; she'd more or less given up on pressuring him to quit.
"She is not a nice person," Adrian replied. "And her passion for little masterpiece atrocities-"
"Like a pointillist painter. Maybe she likes playing up the dragon-lady thing."
"Precisely. Or her liking for being hands-on. That weakness means that perhaps we can arrange that something not very nice happens to her!"
"Oh, yeah." Something deadly flickered in Ellen's voice for a moment. Then: "You sure she came and took care of it herself?"
"Probably. We will have to check, of course. It might be worthwhile to contact this surviving detective; at need, I could blur his memories afterwards. I do not like doing that, both because of the effort and because it is ethically a little dubious. But one does what one must."
"She's the big Shadowspawn honcho of the west now, she and her hubby, now that her grandfather's dead."
"He is a retiring type. By our standards."
"So how come she doesn't just send a goon to do it?" Adrian shrugged. "Boredom, perhaps. Shadowspawn don't go in for large organizations, my dear; they don't even make optimum use of the human ones they control. And they act on impulse. A highly educated impulse. We must investigate further."