“Judgment call. But we need information if we’re not going to waste time. If they’re landing in this continent, they’ll be where they’re going by now. I’ll try and grab-link as soon as she’s asleep; I can tell that easily enough.”
A Word, and his mind drifted down through layers of darkness.
“I driiiink youurrr miiiiilkshake,” Adrienne’s voice crooned in her ear.
Ellen gave an involuntary gasp of terror as the teeth touched her throat. Then Adrienne whirled her away.
“No, not yet. Not this time.”
Instead she turned and leapt, like a black-haired cat. The young Chinese man who’d played guard in the limousine went down with a startled scream; Adrienne’s face was locked into the angle of throat and shoulder. Ellen swallowed and turned her eyes away at the liquid sounds and the scrabbling. She lurched as the big Airbus CJ sped into its takeoff run. When she made herself look again the metallic coppery-iron-salt scent was strong. Adrienne raised her head, blood wet on her chin and her eyes glittering with joy.
God, this is hell. It’s absolute hell! Ellen thought.
Adrienne laughed, her teeth red and one hand on the young man’s throat.
“Yes, it is. Nor are you out of it,” she said as she rose. “Theresa, take care of David. I’m going to freshen up.”
“Well, give me a hand, lucy,” the briskly efficient middle-aged Latina said.
Ellen did. The Asian man-David, she reminded herself-was half-conscious, a limp weight as they lifted him into one of the recliners. His slack grin made her a little queasy, but he came back to himself as the older woman taped a bandage to his neck, went into the kitchenette and then came back and handed him a mug of what smelled like chicken broth.
“Tsk,” she said. “The maintenance staff will complain about the upholstery, again. Gracias, lucy. Would you like a drink? The bar is available to us.”
“You’re welcome,” Ellen said uneasily. “Yes, a Bloody Mary.” That produced a chuckle, and she flushed a little. “But… my name is Ellen, not Lucy.”
She sank into a chair, uneasily conscious of how grubby her white silk dress was becoming. That was absurd under the circumstances-there was a spray of blood droplets across the hem now too-but the crisp business suit Theresa wore had that effect. So did the ambience of the jet; there was a compartment forward that was probably a bedroom, a central lounge-dining-office area, and the galley and a shower-bathroom at the rear. It was all pale and elegant, curved lines and blond wood and slightly nubby fabrics. The noise of the engines was very faint, and if it hadn’t been for the windows and curved ceiling she wouldn’t have thought it was an aircraft at all.
Theresa reminded Ellen of the attendants who hovered around the very highest echelon of clients at the gallery. The ones who were sent back later to deliver checks with a lot of zeroes in them. She handed Ellen the drink and sank onto a sofa, sipping her own; it looked like something with tequila.
David’s laugh was a little weak still. He felt gingerly at his throat. She noticed a cuff-bracelet on his hand, and a small gold bangle, obsidian and jet, a rayed sun black-on-black with a jagged-looking trident spearing up through it.
He must have lost about a pint. No more than you give at the donor’s clinic. Even counting-her eyes skipped over his soaked T-shirt, stuck to a sculpted chest-the spillage. Christ, it was awful to watch, though. Or hear. I thought she was going to rip him right open. And she might. Or do it to me, anytime. I need this drink.
“Lucy is really a job description,” David said. “You’re a lucy. It’s not even gender-specific, in English.”
“Una lucy,” Theresa amplified. “O un lucy.”
“We’re renfields,” he finished.
“You?” Theresa said, with a half-scornful smile. She put out a hand palm-down, and waggled it back and forth. “Masumenos. Now I am a renfield for the Br?z? familia, like my parents and grandparents before me. You were a lucy to start with, and half one even now.”
“As if you’ve never been bled,” David snorted.
“Not since I was a girl, as initiation. And I did not like it as you do, putito. I endured it. A good manager who can handle IT systems as well as I is much harder to find than someone who can only scream and bleed. Or twitch and moan.”
“Lucy? Renfield?” Ellen asked, bewildered.
“An old joke,” the woman in the business suit said. “From the time of my grandfather. A joke so old it has become merely the way we speak among ourselves. We renfields are those who serve the Shadowspawn, knowing what they are. A lucy is… you are… food and amusement for them.”
Well, thank you! Ellen thought. Bitch! “Though one may become the other.”
Ellen took a sip of her drink. The vodka beneath the tomato juice added to the wine from dinner to make her feel…
Dutchly brave? But I have to learn whatever I can. My life depends on it. I’ve got to stay alive until Adrian comes for me. I can’t die like this. I can’t! “How is it, being a renfield?” she asked, trying for cool nonchalance. “As a job. I can see it might be an improvement on what I’m pulling now.”
The two laughed again, but with a little more respect.
“It’s a little like working for the Mafia,” David said. “The money’s very good, but you can’t quit.”
“And a little like selling your soul to the Devil,” Theresa amplified.
“Half and half, perhaps. There is no God, and no Devil… but there are devils, and we serve them.”
“The health package is really good,” David said; he had a neutral Californian accent.
“Full coverage?”
Theresa smiled; there was something about it that made Ellen feel a little uneasy.
“Mostly, you just do not become sick. They lay their hands upon you, as saints were said to do. My grandparents lived past a hundred years.”
Both the others snickered; Ellen had an uneasy sense that they were thinking of her life expectancy.
“So you get a long life. Unless they kill you first,” she said, testing.
That brought shrugs. “Lucy, they can kill anyone anytime,” David said. “Where do you think missing persons go? Or those faces on milk cartons? Besides, in any job, sometimes the boss goes for your throat.”
Theresa nodded. “We have only one Shadowspawn to fear, one who has a use for us. The cattle would fear them all… if they knew. Perhaps someday they will; and we their faithful servants will be masters over the herd. We know the truth.”
Us and we not including me, Ellen thought. I don’t think empathy is high on the list of renfield qualities.
“They’re very territorial about poaching on their preserves,” David amplified. “And you don’t have to worry about taxes, police, any of that. As long as you’re off the reservation, don’t piss off the boss or do the sort of big showy shit that’s difficult to make vanish, it’s pretty well anything goes.”
“Sounds like a good gig,” Ellen said.
If you’re completely fucking crazy, she added to herself. And have the morals of a rabid weasel.
“There are some things you should know,” Theresa said.
David looked at her; she shrugged. “I am household manager,” she said. To Ellen: “There is no privacy from them, not even in your thoughts. And no safety or protection from them anywhere. Once they have tasted of your blood you are linked, linked forever. They can find you if you flee to the ends of the earth and hide in the deepest cave. And whatever they do to you, even a very painful death, embrace it rather than disobey.”
David smirked and glanced at the older woman. “There’s one other downside to being a renfield,” he said. “Your colleagues are going to be the sort of people who are cool with joining the Mafia, or selling their souls to the Devil.”
He levered himself up. “Going to go hit the bunk. We’ll be home in an hour and a half. Thanks for the chicken soup. Man, I’m looking forward to my own bed!”
Adrienne came out of the bathroom a minute after he’d wobbled to the rear. Her hair was damp, slicked back in a ponytail, and she wore a long loose colorful West African m’boubou robe with wide sleeves, printed in what Ellen thought of as a dashiki pattern.
She and Adrian even walk a lot alike, allowing for the difference in the hips, Ellen thought.
That flowing dancer’s grace was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place.
Oh, God, Adrian, come get me! And I hate waiting for someone to rescue me, but what else can I do?
