amid the smell and feel of tension and boredom and throttled anger. Harvey walked jauntily into the glass enclosure.
Adrian put the knuckles of his fists together and let the simple electronic nervous system of the machines vibrate in his consciousness. That was hardly a Wreaking at all, no need for glyphs or the diamond-shard syllables of Mhabrogast that cut your mind bloody from the inside. He didn’t have to touch anything but electrons in semiconductors, and when your brain held a decryption center intended to break the unique codes inside a human skull, computers were child’s play.
The metallic taste put his teeth on edge for a moment, but the scanner showed nothing except the simple form of a man, and harmless underwear and magazines in their carry-ons. The same for him…
They collected their gear, stepped into their shoes and walked out through the slowly revolving door into the main concourse; behind him someone’s mind muttered:
Kill them all, kill them all- With a vivid image of a nuclear fireball cracking above a city, the blast-wave throwing aside buildings like confetti and turning bodies to shadows against walls…
“Whoa!” Harvey said. “Someone really doesn’t like goin’ through the mill!”
The Sunport had a great bronze statue where the concourse met the two wings of gates; a shaman twice man-height running full tilt, with an eagle headdress and a live eagle or an eagle spirit just at the edge of his outstretched fingers. Two decades of travelers had known it as Chief Trips and Falls or Shaman Destroys Endangered Species. Adrian smiled grimly at it; there was less charm to legends when you knew their sources. Or to religions, come to that.
“Do you know why I really hate drinking human blood?” Adrian said.
He forced himself not to snarl and turn his mind into a lethal razor as a man bumped into him, walking with his head in a copy of the New York Times.
Election Will Be Close; Democrats Confident, read the headline. Knowing who was really in charge also took the interest out of politics, for the most part.
“Moral qualms?” Harvey asked.
“No. It is no crime to abstract a little from the Red Cross; people donate it to help others, and they are helping me, and I give them a lot of money. What I hate is the way it makes everyone smell more appetizing. I really should not be around people.”
They turned into one of the washrooms on the B concourse, went into adjacent stalls for privacy and opened their carry-ons across the toilet seats. Adrian checked the magazine, snapped it back into his Glock and holstered it. The knife he slipped into loops on the other side of his jacket; wearing it across the small of the back wasn’t comfortable in an aircraft seat, even a first-class one.
The hypodermics with their solution of silver and radioactive waste went cautiously into steel-and-lead-lined tubes sewn into a pocket. A load of that would kill him just as permanently and irrevocably as the wickedest member of the Council of Shadows. The chalks and markers were, ironically, the most dangerous part of his equipment and the ones he could let the authorities see.
Or perhaps it is my mind that is dangerous. Yes, without doubt, for the glyphs only focus it. Perhaps the Mhabrogast too, though there I am less certain.
“Ol’ buddy,” Harvey said meditatively-there was a chunk sound as he checked and closed his massive coach gun. “How many people do you figure could mind-fuck the scanner the way you did?”
“Oh, anyone the Council would recognize as Shadowspawn,” he said absently. “Half the sworn members of the Brotherhood; you could, it would just be harder, eh? Plenty of independents who think they are magicians or witches or psychics or whatever.”
Harvey chuckled as they exited the washroom; Adrian wrinkled his nose as the smells of urine and disinfectant fell away. A hypersensitive sense of smell was another of the disadvantages of his heritage. Not as bad as the cravings, but it added its mite of discomfort.
Of course, dogs and wolves and leopards are more sensitive still, but they seem to mind it less. I wonder why? “Makes you confident about how Homeland Security’s got your ass, don’t it?” Harvey went on.
Adrian laughed as well. “Harvey, what do you think would happen to a hijacker who tried to take over an aircraft with one of us onboard?”
“It happened. I looked it up last year, had the same thought when we were pulling our team out of Bucharest after we turned Gheorghe Br?ncu?i’s hideaway into a tanning salon. It was in 1972, flight out of Beirut. A Shadowspawn enforcer working for Ibrahim al-Larnaki. That was before he took over Abdul the Damned’s Council seat.”
“What happened?”
“They hushed up the bodies, the usual. Tell you the truth, I think they got what they deserved. And it isn’t often I think people deserve what a bored Shadowspawn mook does when he’s turned loose with time to be inventive.”
Adrian gave a sour snort. “Have you ever tallied the arguments against… what’s the current term? Intelligent Design?”
“Can’t say as I’ve bothered since I got over a Baptist upbringing. And I was about fifteen when that happened- decided that anything that said I shouldn’t get into Julie-May McBell’s pants behind the bleachers after the football game was bound to be wrong about everything else, too. Lost my faith with her legs wrapped around me and a bare tit in my hand. But tell me.”
“Here’s the Power, OK? With enough of it, you can work wonders.”
“Yeah. How’s that show it wasn’t intelligently designed?”
“Because-by sheer accident, by a fucking evolutionary kludge-the genes which let you use the Power are tightly linked to traits which make you into a solitary megalomaniac serial-killing monster who has to drink human blood and finds the taste of pain addictive. If that isn’t proof of the randomness of evolution, what is?”
Harvey chuckled. “But it could be evidence for Malevolent Design on the part of the Big Fellah, right? Monsters with the powers of gods?”
Adrian opened his mouth, then closed it. After a moment he said: “And most of the time I think I’m a cynic and a pessimist!”
They came to the desk at B5. Adrian put on his charming smile; he also let his accent thicken until it was as strong as his sister’s. For some reason most people in this country found a bit of Parisian soothing and impressive from a handsome young man, unless you met a chauvinist at a time of international tension.
“Mademoiselle, you have two vacant first-class seats to San Francisco, is it not? For standby passengers Adrian Br?z? and Harvey Ledbetter.”
The harried woman had dark circles under her eyes; he could pick up a little of her weary resentment at the cascade of demands that were always more than she could meet, a life spent trying to do three people’s work. She glanced down at the computer: “I don’t think-why, I do! Here’s your boarding passes. We’re boarding first class and Gold Pass customers right now.”
“And we aren’t the droids you’re looking for anyway,” Harvey muttered as they went into the boarding tunnel. “So move along, now.”
“Shut up, Harv. It’s easier-”
“-if nobody notices anything’s screwy, yeah.”
As they settled into their seats he went on: “Damn, I wish I could always travel this easy. Brotherhood makes us fly coach these days, would you believe it? And no jumping the queue.”
Adrian looked out the window at the moonlit slopes of the Sandias, still with a tiny dusting of snow on their gullied peaks. They wheeled as the engines of the Boeing whined and the plane began to roll, the night-lights of the airport a galaxy of colors.
“It’s cheating,” he said. “I can’t afford to give in to temptations.
I know what’s at the bottom of the slippery slope. Yes, a vodka sour, miss, s’il vous pla?t.”
“Buddy, you are too good for this wicked world.”
“No. Ellen is, and now she’s in a world a lot worse.”
Decision firmed. “Watch my back, Harv.”
He let the seat back and arranged himself in as close to the hands-crossed-on-shoulders trance position as he could inconspicuously.
“You sure about that?”
