the middle of February. There weren’t any street-lamps along Lucy Lane, only little lights over the courtyard doors. That left the ambient level low enough that the frosting of stars and crescent moon were helpful. And a trickle came through an open window in Number One.
They were about to walk by when a shriek of raw pain stopped her in her tracks. Peter took her arm and tried to urge her along. Then she heard pleading. Monica’s voice, high-pitched and urgent: “Oh, Addi, don’t. Don’t! Please! Not there-ow! That hurts. It hurts so bad! ”
Another scream, then a delighted laugh, and a low moan broken with choked-off muffled sobs: “Ow… ow… oh, owwwww… ow… ow…”
The noise fell behind her. They stopped outside Number Five.
“I guess this wasn’t a milk-and-cookies sort of evening,” Peter said quietly. Then: “And Monica keeps forgiving!”
He was quivering; she could feel that. She touched his arm.
“This is just so totally awful, isn’t it?” she said quietly.
He nodded. She took his arm again and it felt rigid. Then he began to shake; she hesitated, then pulled his head down on her shoulder. The sobs were soundless, but the tears soaked through the fabric of the sweat suit. His arms came up to embrace her clumsily. After a moment he straightened and wiped at his eyes with the palms of his hands.
“Thank you,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Pete? Look, I’m not hitting on you either, but I don’t want to spend the evening with a pillow over my head. Come on in and have dinner and we’ll talk about something else. Maybe watch a movie. OK?”
He nodded wordless gratitude.
CHAPTER TEN
“Where-Adrian!”
Ellen was in a hospital room; greenish beige walls, linoleum floor, ceiling tracks for curtains. The air smelled of disinfectant and pain and lousy food. The smell that had been ground into her soul during her father’s long dying as the accompaniment to guilt and anger and relief. Adrian was lying in a cheap hospital gown, the sort that fastened down the back with ties. It looked shockingly incongruous on his beautifully balanced, lean-muscled body, which she’d only seen either elegantly dressed or naked.
There were bandages on his arm and another large dressing on his thigh, which was held up in a rest. A tangle of tubes dripped plasma and saline into his veins.
“Adrian!” she said again.
His eyes turned towards her and blinked. “Oh… sorry… Ellie,” he said in a slow, blurred voice. “Let… me… do something about… this.”
The world seemed to flux somehow. Before she could decide what was happening they were both standing on a beach. It was wide white sand, with a wind whipping up little gusts around their ankles and waves coming in from the east knee-high, hissing almost to their feet. A brown pelican flapped by over the water, intent on its own concerns, and gulls eyed bits of flotsam.
Adrian was in chinos and a loose shirt of beige natural cotton, barefoot, tanned darker than she remembered him last. Ellen looked down at herself; so was she, and she was in a bikini and straw hat. The air was warm and moist, blowing from the ocean and into the low scrub and occasional palm tree inland with an intense salt cleanliness.
“This is that place we went on the coast in South Texas,” she said slowly. “Last spring. Just after we got together.”
He shrugged. “I can change it if you like. It was a happy time, for me.”
His accent was a little stronger. She’d never inquired about it before; he didn’t like to talk about his past.
“For me too. You grew up in France, didn’t you?” she said now.
“Partly, some time every year as a child, and my foster-parents were French. California, for the rest, until they… died. Then all over the world. Texas, more than any single place.”
A hand went over his tousled black hair. “Where are you now? That is important.”
“I’m… asleep in my… in a place Adrienne put me. I’m alone in the bed, too.”
“Good.” He relaxed a little. “We may have enough time, then. This link is stronger than I thought.”
She blinked. “I remember now! I remember the last time you brought me to a place like this! I didn’t forget, but I didn’t think of it until now!”
Adrian nodded. “And I really am in a hospital bed,” he said. “In San Francisco. Two men with knives tried to kill me. Shadowspawn… perhaps indirectly set on me by my sister.”
“What happened?” she asked anxiously.
He looked healthy, body glowing like a fine slender racehorse, every muscle moving distinctly under the olive skin. But that meant nothing here, wherever.
“They died. I lived, due to a friend named Harvey Ledbetter who arrived most opportunely. I was badly wounded, I am afraid, but I will recover. I’m very sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“It will delay me.”
Ellen smiled at him, and got a shy answering expression. “Thanks, Adrian.”
“It’s nothing. Let’s walk up the beach, and you tell me what has happened with you.”
She did; he winced now and then. “You’re with some sort of… Resistance movement, aren’t you? The doctor called you terrorists.”
Adrian smiled crookedly. “Not entirely without justification, from a renfield’s point of view. The Brotherhood is not squeamish about collateral damage, particularly to servants of the Council of Shadows.”
“Then it’s all true, what she told me?”
“True enough, if you allow for viewpoint.”
She stopped and looked searchingly into his eyes. “You… aren’t like the other Shadowspawn?”
“I was raised to think of myself as human. It isn’t easy. That is why I have been so much alone. And… your type of human… aren’t instinct machines, and neither are we Shadowspawn. Some humans are good and some less so, according to the choices they make. I shouldn’t be able to blame everything on my genes either. Shadowspawn do blame their genes, but that’s an excuse. The fact of the matter is they were raised to evil, and they embrace it.”
She put a hand on his shoulder, and he covered it with his. “You should curse my name,” he said.
“Adrian, you just fought two men with knives for me and got cut up. You could have been an all-powerful monster. Judging from the way Adrienne acts, it’s fun. You decided to be a human being. An asshole sometimes, but who isn’t? I’m just getting my mind wrapped around this stuff but that part is pretty clear.”
They laughed. “And now you know where I am. I’m-”
She paused, frowning. Her mind felt perfectly clear; clearer than it had been for days, unhazed by fear and tension. But she couldn’t say where she was.
“I don’t think I know, exactly,” she said slowly. “Somewhere in central California…”
“You know,” Adrian said grimly. “You’ve been blocked from saying it. It’s a Wreaking on your memory and volition. Small, subtle, but it would be dangerous to break it-with me weakened, certainly. You’d only notice it if you tried to tell someone who didn’t know.”
“But that should be a clue!” she said hopefully.
They walked again, holding hands this time. The cool salt water ran over their bare feet, and the wet sand made for good footing. Curlews bobbed and probed in the shallows with their absurdly thin curved beaks, crying wheet-wheet-wheet.
“Not as much of a clue as I’d like,” Adrian said. “Ellie, it’s easy to fox records with the Power. The Brotherhood are looking in their records, and those are far more complete.”
“You’ve been fighting with the, the Brotherhood?” she asked, squeezing his hand. “Against the Shadowspawn?”
