She tore through showering and pulling on the cotton dress and sandals provided, clipped the instrument to her belt and grabbed a fluffy kiwi pastry and a slice of fruit-bread from the breakfast trolley. She scarcely noticed the quiet sumptuousness of the great room and the fixtures, except the painting hung to the left of the bed, Adrienne’s side. That caught her eye, enough to make her bend close for an expert’s quick appraisal.
What a splendid reproduction! she thought, the professional taking over from the personal for a moment; she’d seen the original during her student years at NYU, on a field trip to France. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better one.
A small plaque below had a poem inlaid in gold on some dark tropical wood:
“And when I turned, no face I saw
For the shadow was my own
Death Angel’s shadow.”
That was certainly appropriate. The painting was by Schwabe, La Mort et le Fossoyeur, with the Death Angel shown as a slender dark-haired woman poised over the old gravedigger in the snowy cemetery, her wings making a beautiful curve like a scythe-blade against the willow-twigs and tilted headstones. Ellen had always liked it, as far as she liked any Symbolist work, and the reproduction was striking; it caught the cruel impersonal compassion on Azrael’s face beautifully. Then she looked more closely, reaching out to touch and then taking back her hand.
“Wait a minute,” she whispered. “Gouache, watercolor and pencil, that’s right. And it’s old, not just artificially aged. Look at the structure of the micro-cracks. And the frame is about a century old too! It isn’t a reproduction. My God, the Louvre would never willingly part with this, not for any amount of money!”
Inside her head she could hear: Oh, quite unwillingly, ch?rie. That didn’t need any spooky telepathy.
For an instant she sat on the bed, winded and gasping. After shock came a wave of anger; to have something like this hanging in your bedroom, exposed to all the possible accidents…
The BlackBerry beeped at her, a half-hour warning. She fumbled at it until it came up with a map of the route to the clinic, and ran-that was another thing she could do well, even in sandals-out into the hallway, down a service stair, out a rear entrance, down a long pathway, out through a boundary wall and gate into what looked like a smallish town or large village tucked under the hill where the casa grande sat. It wasn’t even far enough to raise much of a sweat, not in the cool springlike weather of a fine February day in the California lowlands.
The clinic wasn’t quite what Ellen would have expected; well-equipped, cheery, an efficient-looking receptionist, a waiting room with the usual magazines and a TV… Even the smell was nicer than usual, with flower-and-damp-earth scents wafting through an open window to cut the standard ozone and disinfectant. She had just enough time to stop breathing deeply before: “Dr. Duggan will see you next, Ms. Tarnowski.”
A renfield doctor willing to sell his soul to the Devil, she thought, as David Cheung passed her on his way out, with a smirk and a nod and a fresh dressing on his neck. Or maybe… he’s more like a vet?
The doctor turned out to be a her, a pleasantly plain middle-aged woman with a slight Scottish burr and a pile of faded ginger hair pulled back severely. She smiled ironically at Ellen’s relief as she ushered her into the examination room. That looked conventional too, if upscale, except for the two replica skeletons in opposite corners. One of the skeletons looked a little odd in ways she couldn’t name.
There were even family photos over the desk, a Chinese man and three striking hapa children, two girls and a boy, at various ages up to the mid-teens.
Connections, she thought. Everyone’s story has connections that spin out until they’ve got the whole world in the web. How did… they… buy or knuckle her? Why’s she working at Hacienda Literally Sucks? “Dr. Fiona Duggan,” she said, and shook hands, a brisk no-nonsense gesture.
From her expression she guessed her new patient’s thoughts.
“Everyone at this clinic is a doctor, Ms. Tarnowski, and a good one. But even if we were no professionals… lass, you’re the safest person for miles around. Think it through.”
Oh. Don’t mess with the tiger’s bone.
“Bet there’s a low crime rate here,” she said slowly. “Unauthorized crimes at least.”
“Ye’d win that wager.”
A thought struck her. “Except murder-suicides?”
A grim smile. “Here, murder or any other serious crime is a form of suicide. A slow, painful form.”
“Oh.”
“If it will make you feel better, I was recruited as a second-year medical student in Edinburgh with-I’ll say it myself-brilliant marks. And incurable pancreatic cancer; a classic rapid-onset adenocarcinoma. They offered to make the cancer cells have fatal accidents.”
“You accepted.”
“And so would you, I’d wager.”
“Why do they need a doctor, then?”
She smiled. “The Power is powerful, but it needs knowledge to apply. Imagine them trying to correct your humors… only, we don’t have humors. We have cells. And there are accidents and traumas and plenty of things too small for their attention. Let’s get started.”
The only difference between this and the last exam she’d had in Santa Fe was the state-of-the-art equipment; instant blood analysis with only a tiny pinprick sample, just for starters, and the new thinbar scanners that could do things only massive hospital units had been able to manage a few years before. She dressed and sat on the edge of the examining table as the doctor finished tapping at her keyboard.
“Well, Ms. Tarnowski, as no doubt your previous doctor has told you, you’re in excellent health. I wish all my patients showed your degree of care with diet and exercise. You might be interested to know that you’re also an eighteen-point-nine on the Alberman Scale.”
“Alberman?”
“The test for nocturnus genes-the ones linked to the Power, of which there are between seventy-five and one hundred, mostly recessives. Average is around twelve percent.”
“Ah… thanks, I guess.”
“Aye. You should be thankful. There are behavioral complications with a twenty-to-forty result that often have unfortunate consequences.”
“Unfortunate?”
“Gilles de Rais. Stalin, Hitler, King Leopold of the Congo Free State… Or Joan of Arc.”
“Joan of Arc was unfortunate?”
“Think of how she ended.”
“Oh.”
“Now, it’s your special health circumstances we’ll move on to next.”
Special health circumstances! she thought. I suppose everyone needs euphemisms.
“You’ve been subject to three feeding attacks so far, correct? Typical attack bites on the inner right elbow, the inner left knee, and the smaller one on the left hand.”
“Right. None of them seem… infected, or anything. Just slightly discolored.”
“Nor will they be. Homo sapiens nocturnus-”
“Wha’?” Ellen said.
She snorted and pointed at one of the skeletons. “Them. The Shadowspawn. Which is a ridiculously melodramatic name… Their bites heal cleanly. It’s halfway between predation and parasitism, ecologically, and I’ve done some fascinating research… Well, another time. There’s also a coagulant which acts when the wound is exposed to air, and a psychotropic element. A drug.”
“I… couldn’t move while she was, um, feeding. I didn’t feel numb or anything, just didn’t want to move.”
“Yes, standard initial reaction. That effect’s strong, but wears off quickly when the mouth is removed. There’s an addictive euphoric, too, I’m afraid, wi’ a cumulative effect after multiple exposures.”
She froze. “How addictive?”
“A bit worse than nicotine.”
Ellen relaxed, and heard her breath whoosh out. “That’s not so bad.”
“Mmm, Ms. Tarnowski, nicotine is more addictive than heroin, clinically speaking. The effect on the victim is similar to MDMA, but without the side effects.”
