“With French fingerling potato salad, micro beet greens, and sauce verte.”
Another flourish. “And for you, Ms. Br?z?, artichoke-stuffed local calamari, with Iacopi Farms white bean puree, mizuna, and preserved Meyer lemon bagna cauda.”
Another plate was deftly twitched from a server and set in front of Ellen: “And for the pretty blond lady who looks so hungry, seared hand-line-caught Ahi tuna, accompanied by yellow foot chanterelles, braised salsify, and wild mushroom consomm?. Now with these, I recommend the Paul Hobbs Russian River Valley Chardonnay.”
Ellen took a forkful; the tuna was almost as much like rare steak as fish.
Oh, my, this is good! But why are these Shadowspawn all such foodies? Adrian was too. I had to add an extra mile to my run to keep from inflating like a blimp, and he never gained an ounce.
“Because we have much sharper senses of taste and smell than you do, ma douce,” Adrienne said. “And very active metabolisms. When we’re not in trance, it cranks right up. Our bodies are treating it as a brief hunting season, but we don’t have to wait out glacial winters anymore.”
“You’ve got her verbalized thoughts already?” Michiko asked, raising a thin black brow. “It takes me a couple of days at least.”
“Our acquaintance has been brief, but intense,” Adrienne said. “And even though he didn’t feed on her, there was a ground-link between her and Adrian. I could taste it the first time her blood hit my tongue.”
“Kinky,” Michiko laughed.
“Delightfully so. I’m disappointed to hear about your grandfather. I had hopes he’d be reasonable.”
“He wavered, but the al-Lanarkis talked him around. Convinced him we could handle things like the reactors melting down after the EMP.”
“Oh, now we’re going to rely on our administrative abilities to pull things through? Name of a black dog!”
Adrian used that same odd curse, Ellen thought. For a moment her throat squeezed shut; then she took a deep breath and doggedly kept eating.
“Adrienne, you’re preaching to the converted here. The Lanarkis don’t have to worry so much; it’s mostly camels and goats out in their bailiwick anyway.”
“And then there would be the burning cities, and the refineries… Oh, what’s the use? You’re right, Michi; I don’t have to convince you. We’ll just have to hope we can convince a quorum at the Council meeting, or at least block hasty action.”
“I’m getting ready for Tiflis,” Michiko agreed, sipping at her wine. “My, this does go well with the cured sardines.”
“I hope you’ll have all the East Asian data so we can circulate it-and nothing too technical. PowerPoint, with lots of pictures. You’ve got better access there than I do. My cousins will have Europe more or less sewn up-the downside to Trimback One is fairly obvious there, enough so that even a lot of the postcorporeals are en courant.”
“My people are working on it,” Michiko said. “We’ll have it in good time. And I’ve got just the expert for calculating the spread on the initial exposures.”
I suspect that my people here means something like my horses, Ellen thought.
“And I’m learning Georgian,” she went on. “Me minda ts’avide tbilisshi. It’s so much better when you can understand them, and I expect to do a little hunting there.”
“Who are you learning it from?” Adrienne inquired.
“An adjunct professor down at Stanford named Vakhtang Choloqashvili. Darkly handsome and-”
She giggled and put a hand to her mouth; when she went on it was with a fake-guttural accent: “In Georgia, are real men! Are like wild”-with a crook-fingered grabbing gesture-“bull of ze mountains!”
She went on in her normal mid-Californian voice: “He’s just beginning to suspect that the nightmares aren’t really nightmares. He gave me this look the last time I drove down for a tutorial, and his hands were shaking.”
“I could teach you a few words,” Adrienne said, and they snapped at each other with a sideways flick of the head and a mutual click of pearly teeth.
Literally snapped, Ellen thought, and turned her eyes down to her plate.
The gesture had looked absolutely natural, and playfully flirtatious.
God. Oh, God.
“I should be fully fluent by the time things are concluded,” Michiko said. “Then I could console his grieving widow. She’d need someone who really understood her, all alone in a strange country.”
She glanced at Ellen. “Aren’t we awful?”
They both laughed at her involuntary mental wave of agreement. Platters of Maine lobster claws and Dungeness crabs and Kona Blue sashimi came in and were enthusiastically devoured amid gossip about people and places and politics Ellen had never heard of; what she did grasp would have killed her appetite a few days ago if she’d believed it. Now she found she could push it all out of her mind and concentrate on each bite; it might be her last meal.
At least if it is, I can console myself that I didn’t die with the taste of KFC on my tongue. Adrian managed to turn me into a bit of a foodie too.
It helped that the conversation shifted unpredictably among at least five languages, two of which she didn’t even recognize. Jason returned to consult about the desserts; or dictate them, as far as Michiko was concerned: “Chocolate blackout cream cake, dulce de leche, raspberry sorbet, and sweet and salty peanuts,” he said, setting the plate before her. “I’d suggest the Late Harvest Sauvignon Black-Semillon, Rancho de Oro Puro. And coffee? Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, perhaps: a slight cherry fruitiness but also the bitterness to balance the unctuous sweet here.”
“This Rogue Creamery cheese from Oregon looks very interesting,” Adrienne said; she was perusing the menu.
“It is, it is,” Jason replied. “Cold smoked over hazelnut shells, sharp and sweet together. To die for, ma’am.”
“I’ll go French for the wine. Loire Valley?”
“Excellent! We have a very nice Vouvray Moelleux…”
“I’ll have that. You pick for my friend here. She needs corrupting and I suspect you’re good at that, Jason.”
“We’ll soon get rid of that wholesome schoolgirl innocence!” Jason said. “Depravity is the way to go.”
He probably thinks I’m some sort of cheap hookup! Ellen thought. Some student putting out for glamour and a taste of the high life.
When you were in terror of death it was absurd to be concerned about social embarrassment. She found that perfect fear did not drive out shame.
They just synergize.
“Then the quince-apple turnovers for you, miss, with brown sugar pecan ice cream, and cinnamon caramel sauce. A white Riesling, I think. The Anderson Valley Navarro Cluster Select.”
It appeared, and tasted as good as it sounded. She was distracted enough that something almost escaped her: “-parasmallpox.”
Her ears pricked up at that.
“Well, at least something went right,” Michiko said, chasing the last crumb of the cake around her plate.
“The Congo field tests were just what we’d hoped.”
Michiko clapped her hands together. “Stopping things just where we want. My family would be perfectly happy with ten million on the West Coast.”
Adrienne nodded. “And the humans would offer their necks to us out of sheer gratitude to the savior gods.”
“Mmmm,” Michiko said dreamily. “I can see establishing this ceremony, somewhere, where they offer a youth and a maiden to me every year. Like a kami, you know? Something beautiful and sad, with music and dancing.”
“Exactly. And then we could have all the modern conveniences and still be absolutely sure they’d never, ever be dangerous again, or learn anything we don’t want them to know. Now that’s what I call a Dread Empire of Shadow!”
“Wonderful,” Michiko breathed.
She bowed her head for an instant. When she raised it again her eyes were moist.
“Adrienne, it’s a beautiful vision!”
