She stared at him. “You drank my blood? Without telling me?”
He winced and looked aside. “No. But, ah, it’s really anything with DNA in it, you see, which pretty much all body fluids have. So it doesn’t have to be blood, strictly speaking, for a link.”
“Oh.” Then a thought. “But what she said was true? You wanted to drink my blood? To really hurt me?”
“I didn’t, did I?” he said. “I love you, Ellen. It’s just… hard for me to show that the way normal people can. But I didn’t hurt you.”
The lonely pride in it moved her suddenly; the hot anger she’d felt less than two days ago felt as distant as her childhood.
“You’re not like her. I said that and she laughed, but I think it made her angry.”
“I try not to be like that. I try very hard. Now immediately, darling, you have to tell me where she took you. We might get cut off at any moment.”
“I’m… not sure. California-”
He gave a small hiss of relief and nodded. She continued: “South of the Bay, I think. North of LA for sure, and near the coast.
Someone mentioned Passo something. We landed, there was a car, but I couldn’t see out the windows much. A big place in the country, I think, and everyone was really tired, even Adrienne, we all just went to bed and sacked out. I’m… in her room.”
“Paso Robles? It might be. The Central Coast. That’s very good, that helps a lot. I can put a… block in to conceal your memory of this. You’ll still be able to remember it, but not unless you’ve got reason to. Be cautious about that, be very careful. She’s extremely good at subtle Wreakings… mind-stuff.”
“Oh, there aren’t any words for how careful I’ll be!”
Then another thought. “Wait a minute. What happens if I just stay here? She can’t force me back, can she?”
“No. Only I can send you back. If you stay you’d be like this as long as I lived.”
Ellen freed her hands and placed them on her knees.
“But if I stayed here I’d be safe… well, as safe as you… and I could live forever? God, Adrian, that is so tempting. She told me I had all sorts of interesting new sensations and experiences to look forward to! I’m so scared all the time.”
He nodded. “Yes. And that’ll be just as bad as you can imagine. More than you can imagine. But there’s a chance of getting you away from her, and there are drawbacks to staying here.”
The room began to fade. Sunlight appeared overhead, grew bright, reflected off marble columns around a pool. Prussian-blue mountains rose in the distance, against a cloudless sky. Scents of thyme and arbutus drifted on warm dry air under the rustling shadows cast by the leaves of live-oaks arching overhead. Cicadas buzzed as many- colored birds flew among great alabaster pots, and flamboyant bougainvillea spilled down their sides in purple and gold.
“This is Maxfield Parrish!” she exclaimed, distracted into delight. “But real! It’s so beautiful… This is heaven!”
The clear cruel laughter of a young girl came from the bushes. Then the water in the pool rippled. Something passed beneath it in a smooth curve. She could see a glimpse of… tentacles? She stumbled back from the edge of the water with a sudden sick dread.
“This is my mind, Ellen, and it’s not anything like Heaven. It’s a Shadowspawn mind, and I’m no more completely in control of it than you are of yours.”
Ellen looked at him and spoke slowly: “Could… she do this to me too? Swallow me?”
Adrian winced and nodded. “We call it… Carrying. Any strong Shadowspawn can.”
She fought not to scream as he nodded again. Bitterly: “There’s no God, no Heaven, we don’t have souls, but we can still go to Hell forever?”
“That’s… probably where the idea of Hell came from in the first place.”
Her hands went over her face. “This just gets worse and worse. All right, Adrian. I’ll go back. But you get me out!”
A deep breath, and she stood and faced him. “She had a videoconference with a man named Dmitri on the flight from Santa Fe. He scared me nearly as much as she did, even on a flat-screen and eight thousand miles away.”
“Dmitri Pavlovitch Usov?”
“Yes. He was in Seversk, in Siberia. There was something about plutonium smuggling, and a man, a very old Shadowspawn, who was assassinated with it.”
“Gheorghe Br?ncu?i?”
“Yes. There was something going on I couldn’t tell, some sort of political thing, I think, an intrigue, a conspiracy. And they mentioned a Council that was going to meet in Tiflis, in Georgia, to elect new members next year. They were saying things without saying them, by indirection. And-”
“No time!” Adrian said; she could see fear on his face. “You’ve got to go back now; she’s stirring out of REM sleep. You stay alive, you hear me, Ellie? You stay alive. Do not die! No matter what happens, you stay alive.”
He held up a hand before her face, and clenched it into a fist as he spat a word that spun into her ears like buzz-saws. The universe shattered and dissolved.
“This town used to be a lot more charming before it realized how charming it was,” Harvey said.
They’d spent the night in a hotel Adrian favored when he had to come here, a 1920s late-Beaux Arts one on Nob Hill, brick and marble with an attached spa. Adrian paused under the awning; there was a little square of park uphill, and a big church. The sky was bright with a few fluffy clouds, and the temperature just a little brisk. It could have been June as easily as February, in San Francisco. They turned and headed downslope, towards the Mission District.
“I’m not an urban person. Still, I hate it less than most,” Adrian replied.
The streets were busy. More homeless than there had been a few years before, more empty buildings and shops, a little less traffic, but the crowds were still dense and lively on the sidewalks. Adrian detested cities, as a general rule; the sheer crowding grated on his nerves, the smells were bad, and the necessity for pulling in his senses made him feel muffled and thick and half-blind. This was… less bad than most.
He’d even been able to enjoy breakfast: buttermilk pancakes and local berries. Mostly he lost appetite for anything but blood quickly in places this dense, which was another reason to avoid them. Then he had spent the rest of the morning standing on the observation deck of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill watching the Bay and the gulls over Alcatraz, and pulling the smells of salt water into his lungs.
Nothing like as bad as Cairo. Or Calcutta, where he’d once been trapped for an entire memorable month.
Harvey looked aside at him. “Got a jolt there right through my shields.”
Adrian smiled. “I remembered the Black Hole, Operation Kali. Convinced me I had to get out or go mad.”
Harvey grinned. “That made me feel like going over to the Dark Side of the Force too, ol’ buddy. Of course, the Council wouldn’t have me, these days. Not close enough to pureblood.”
Adrian nodded. “I still think it might be faster to just go down to Paso Robles and look around ourselves.”
Harvey snorted. “Yeah, right. Charge into Adrienne’s security and generations of protections with Wreakings soaked into the bedrock… it’s not as if we could just look things up on Google Earth, you know.”
Adrian sighed in acknowledgment. I am just venting, he thought.
Nothing, not even human memory, was as easy to nudge with a little Wreaking as digital systems. Even hard copy tended to be burned in fires, or eaten by rats, or mildew… or anything else where luck mattered.
Harvey went on: “When your parents took you for your visits as a kid they didn’t go there, did they?”
Adrian smiled grimly. “No, to Europe.”
“You’ve turned to confiding since Calcutta. Getting you to mention this stuff at all was always like extracting teeth with a loop of spaghetti.”
“I’ve been trying not to suppress the memories anymore. They are part of me. Yes, we went to the castle in the Auvergne, to… get us in touch with our roots, they’d say today. We thought they were our aunt and uncle, of course, come to give us a holiday. Christ, what a pile that place was! Is, I suppose.”
“Yeah, the European branch of the Br?z?s are a bit conservative.”
“Everything but hanging head-down to sleep,” Adrian said. “And the place was infested with bats, at that. The
