attics and the caves, at least.”
Then, softly: “We loved it, of course.”
“Bet it was in the summer,” Harvey observed, dodging a pushcart vendor.
“Of course; every summer, longer as we grew older. Green hills, dusty lanes, mountain forests, ponies for us to ride… our aunt and uncle who denied us nothing, and hinted that we were as an exiled prince and princess. Oh, is there a child on Earth who won’t listen to that? The delicious sense of being different, different and better. Great canopied beds, fireplaces ten feet high, Egyptian gods on the walls of crypts below-”
“Egyptian?” Harvey said incredulously. “You never mentioned that before, either.”
“Yes, Egyptian, painted in the 1830s, when it was the headquarters of the Order of the Black Dawn, before they discovered Darwin and Mendel. When they thought they were sorcerers and loup-garou.”
“Yeah, but they were. Nobody allowed in who couldn’t actually Wreak with the Power. And they married each other’s sisters. Unscientific, but it worked, sorta-kinda.”
Adrian nodded; that had been what kept traces of the ancient, horrible truth alive, there and elsewhere.
His voice went soft: “Then as we grew older, the ceremonies, the first Words in Mhabrogast… little sips of blood from the prisoners, mostly wretched beurs, like letting a child have a tiny glass of wine with his meal to make him feel grown-up. Staring into pools of ink, and… other things. At last one night we saw les vieux arise. My great- grandparents, after a gap of fourteen thousand years, the first to survive death. I can remember them en mi? chambra, beside our beds, like pillars of mist with bright golden eyes, and then people smiling down at us-”
“Whoa, ol’ buddy. You realize you’re not only talking in French, which is OK, you’re talking Auvernhat patois thick enough to chisel into building blocks for one of those fucking ch?teaux?”
Adrian shook himself and smiled. “Sorry,” he said, shifting back into General American English. “They put Wreakings on us, of course, to keep us from revealing the truth when we were at ‘home.’ Some of them still linger down there, twined around the root of my mind. It all seems like a dream, now.”
“Nightmare. OK, we’re here.”
The restaurant was so discreet that it didn’t even have a sign; just a big Victorian gingerbread, like so many others that had survived the earthquake and the fire. And generations of vandalism in the dangerous period between being new and fashionable and old and venerable, when a building was just out of date and shabby. The ma?tre d’ was just as polished, fitting into the darkly rich interior like a piece of the mahogany furniture or one of the old Persian rugs.
“Ms. Polson is waiting for you and your friend, Mr. Br?z?. This way.”
Sheila Polson was scowling at the menu as they were ushered into their private nook. She glanced up sharply as Adrian extended his senses; no electronic ears tickled at his consciousness. Just because you had the Power didn’t mean you had to use it rather than some technological equivalent.
Adrian inclined his head slightly. He hadn’t met the chief of the Brotherhood’s California section before; he’d mostly operated in Europe and Asia when he and Harvey were a team, and the organization was tightly compartmentalized.
She was a medium woman-medium height, medium build, medium unmemorable navy business suit, dark- brown skin and wiry hair cropped short. Only the eyes struck in the mind, and that was because of something in them; otherwise she might have been a paralegal or middling bureaucrat. Though most of those would not have the weapons he sensed, a spring-loaded gun with silver darts in the attach? case leaning against her chair and an inlaid blade in a scabbard sewn into her jacket. And her shoes were made for fast movement, not style.
Her looks said mid-thirties. From what he felt, she could have been that, or possibly a decade or more older. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, after all, and she smelled of the Power too. Not nearly as much as he, but considerably more than Harvey. Her mind was tightly warded under a wash of patterned no-thought, so tightly that he couldn’t even feel the dislike he was certain was there.
“Hello, Ms. Polson,” Adrian said. “A pleasure to meet you.”
She looked at his hand as if it were a cobra, or decayed, or both, and then shook.
“This place is a waste of money,” she said as they sat. “There isn’t a lunch entr?e under thirty dollars!”
“It’s Adrian’s money, Sheila,” Harvey pointed out. “And since he gives a couple of million of it a year to us, you really can’t complain about how he spends the rest of it.”
The rangy, graying man glanced at the menu. “No BBQ or hamburgers? Damn. Had my mouth set for a double bacon cheeseburger. Guess I’ll have to settle for the Lapin? la Moutarde Et Au Romarin.”
Adrian hid a smile; Harvey’s French was much less accented than his Texan-flavored English. He could have passed for someone from Tours on the telephone, in fact, as opposed to Adrian. Any Frenchman listening to him would have heard some village in Puy-de-D?me under the overlay of Paris and Sorbonne. With a very old-fashioned tinge at that.
Of course, I spent much time in my childhood with Auvergnats born in the nineteenth century. Granted, they were dead, but they were quite talkative.
“Magret De Canard Au Porto,” Adrian said; he was partial to duck breast anyway, and the port sauce, celery root and apple puree sounded interesting.
“I’ll have the sliced lamb on mixed greens,” Polson said with malice aforethought.
Adrian gave the order to the waiter, and added: “A glass of the Ronceray for me, thank you. Anyone else? No?”
She waited in tight silence until privacy returned. Then: “You resigned from the Brotherhood, Br?z?,” she said. “Nobody resigns from the Brotherhood. Why should we help you?”
“Sheila,” Harvey put in. “Remember those millions? As in millions of bucks? As in, weapons, transportation, living stipends, bribes, special equipment, safe houses, research? Hell, the organization runs on silver and it ain’t cheap.”
“Stolen money,” she said. “Blood money.”
Adrian hid his annoyance with a raised brow he knew was intensely annoying in itself.
Fanatic, he thought. Then again, who else would wage a failing struggle all their lives long?
Aloud he went on: “No. Directing money to investments that will increase in value harms nobody. And before I resigned from the Brotherhood-which, despite your statement, I did successfully do-”
Polson’s frown said all any of them needed to know: Because you had no way to punish me except at a cost you weren’t prepared to pay.
“I carried out many missions. But most of all, you should help me because I propose to kill a powerful Shadowspawn who ranks high beneath the Council of Shadows. Specifically, my sister, Adrienne Br?z?.”
“Ah, there we get to it,” she said. “You’ve left each other alone ever since the last time you locked horns. Why should she come for you? We know the Council didn’t send her.”
Their meal came. Adrian thanked the man, threw his card onto the tray and added a fifty-dollar bill; these were hard times, and a lot of restaurants had taken to raking back a share of tips. Then he took a sip of his wine; the cabernet-merlot-petite Verdot combination had just enough acidity to go with the fatty richness of the duck.
“Why is abstract at this point. She… there are personal reasons. In any case, she abducted a young lady I’m very fond of. We know she’s taken her somewhere in California, probably the central coast. I need information; all the Brotherhood files on the Br?z? properties there, their defenses, layout, everything.”
“Specialized weapons, too,” Harvey put in.
Adrian nodded. “And since this was a personal vendetta on Adrienne’s part, aiding me won’t bring the Council down on you any more than usual.”
“We should help you get your lucy back?” Polson asked.
The air went still. Harvey’s hand made a slight gesture towards his coat before his conscious mind controlled it, prompted by decades of experience with the bubbling edge of violence. Adrian carefully finished chewing and swallowing, laid down his knife and fork, and leaned forward. His gold-flecked eyes met Sheila Polson’s, and locked. After a long moment she looked aside, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead.
“Ms. Polson, I will say this only once. Ellen Tarnowski was my friend-yes, we were lovers. She was not my lucy. I don’t force blood from living humans, and I don’t compel their minds except at urgent need. My sister does. I resigned from your war but I didn’t resign from the personal obligations of a human being. I’d be a pretty poor specimen of a man if I didn’t do what I could for her. Living with myself is… hard enough as it is.”
She looked away for an instant, nodded as if to herself, then turned back to him: “I apologize, Mr. Br?z?.” At his surprise, she smiled very slightly. “I actually am sorry. You… must know how disturbing a pureblood is to someone
