Oh, God! They’re talking about destroying the world!
Michiko sighed. “I just hope we can convince enough of the others. And on a personal note, things turned out fine with Adrian; you got the note?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “That was a little close to the mark.” Michiko shrugged. “It’s a high-stakes game with a lot of powerful Wreakers involved. Nothing lost except two of my least favorite cousins. And all’s well-”
“-that ends well.”
“I’m going out clubbing now. Want to come along?”
“Not tonight, Michi. I know how that ends up. We wake up together with blood-soaked sheets, headaches, and an empty going into rigor mortis between us.”
“You didn’t have any complaints last time,” she said with a wink and a pout.
“He was just a pickup,” Adrienne said with a smile.
She looked over, and Ellen felt a slow flush traveling up her throat.
“As I said, I have plans for this one.”
Michiko laughed as she rose. “I can imagine.”
They repeated the fingertip-touching gesture. “Thank you, Michiko. You’ve been une vrai amie. We can do this!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
At four hours past midnight, Adrian Br?z? shook off dreams of dread and fear, of savage pleasures taken and bestowed. Of rapturous abandonment of self.
Ellen’s asleep now, at last, he knew as he woke. Yes, that’s a minor Wreaking on her, a sedative.
He could tell that, though not the precise location; simply that she was near, and slept in a mix of exhaustion and Power-driven unconsciousness that turned aside the chances of waking.
Pauvre petite. Caught in the contentions of demons. Poor girl.
Then a wry correction to himself:
Unfortunate young woman? It doesn’t feel right to say it that way, but she always disliked being called a girl unless she did it herself. I was too much around oldsters as I grew, and too little around ordinary folk. I was born in the sixth decade of the twentieth century, but I’m not really a child of my own time. Or of any year. Or I am part of many? Of the age of chipped flint and the Empire of Shadow whose memory haunted all the ages after? Of the nineteenth century that saw its rebirth, of the twentieth that lived beneath it and thought its evil dreams their own, the twenty-first that may see its final triumph? Adrian Br?z? is home no-where and no-when. Forever out of time, out of place.
He let a Mhabrogast phrase run through his head: Amss-aui-ock!
That was being-becoming-now. The sensation was like thinking in syllables of razor-edged glass. They cut him away from his flesh. A brief flash of pain, and he rose and looked down at his own birth-body lying in the hospital bed, shivering as the slight shock of the separation died away.
Out of body, too, now. And Harv was right. I do look like shit. It’s been a long while since I went night-walking. You don’t see yourself in a mirror as you do with a stranger’s eye.
He was thinner than he should be, and looked older, and with lines of pain in his face even asleep. They smoothed out a little as the empty body sank into the coma that would sustain it, heart beating once or twice a minute, breath imperceptibly slow. He flicked his mind at the monitors to keep them reporting all was well, and passed his hands from head to toe of his physical form. The wounds felt full of flickers of light to his senses, a tingling on the hands as the cells lived their accelerated lives.
Healing well, he thought. Yes, I can leave tomorrow.
Then he looked down at the body he was wearing. It was the default, his hindbrain’s picture of his physical self, partly read from the paired helixes of his heredity and partly through his somatic memory of his life. He tried to see himself as another might. He was naked, of course; what most would have called a slender man a few years short of thirty, a little below medium height, with the muscles of a runner or gymnast or dancer. The scars showed, those graven on the memory of his cells and mind. The four long parallels across the right thigh were still vivid; he’d never been able to shed those.
Adrienne’s parting gift in Calcutta. My mind doesn’t want to let that go, on some level.
The other marks of blades and bullets were long-faded and nearly gone, just as they were on his birth-self. New red lines on his left forearm and thigh stood out, anticipation of healing, freed of all pain.
“Stop admiring yourself and get going,” Harvey said. “I don’t like the idea of a meet with Hajime anyway. Yeah, and I know it was my idea.”
He could see the night-walker’s shape, even when Adrian wasn’t trying hard to manifest. The rifle he cradled in his arms was a shrilling note of wrongness in the darkened hospital room; night-sight goggles were pushed up on his forehead.
“You ought to have me in closer overwatch,” Harvey grumbled.
“The old bastard said he’d give me an hour’s start if he decided to kill me,” Adrian said reasonably. “He has an antique sense of the proprieties. I certainly wouldn’t trust Michiko with a safe-conduct like that. But if he or his men detected you… you’ve killed too many Shadowspawn, Harvey. There would be no mercy for either of us.”
“Not as many as you’ve killed, personal-like.”
“They make allowances for me because of my blood.”
Harvey sighed. “Well, I’ll be listening. I may not project all that well, but I can hear at these ranges. If things go south, I’ll head east.”
Adrian nodded wordlessly. He dressed from the suitcase in dark slacks and a black long-sleeved cotton knit shirt and slipped on moccasin-like shoes; it was possible to imagine clothes for the aetheric body, but easier not.
A moment’s concentration showed nobody alert outside; a sleepy duty nurse at the station near the stairs, and minds tossing in the restless sleep of the ill in the other rooms. Their dreams grew evil as he walked past, endless ones of flight and fear and pain and fangs lurking in the dark. The nurse shivered and turned up the space heater beneath the desk and rubbed her hands together.
And that fear I cannot help, not without wasting time and energy I cannot spare.
He couldn’t help the impulses that made his lips want to curl back from his teeth, either, or make the meaty appetizing scent of their blood less appealing. The lust was even stronger in this form. The dim night-lights were bright as daylight to his eyes, though everything had a slightly silvery sheen. Detail leapt out at him without shadow.
They have reason to fear. Nightmare walks here.
Even a great city was quiet at this hour, and not many lived in this district save in hotels. A few stray dogs and cats sensed him; one brindled tabby stared with unwinking green eyes and carefully circled around him. Webs of energy spanned the night, though, flowing in wires, humming through the air. Particles sleeted into the atmosphere above, leaving rippling curtains of fire along the edge of the atmosphere that shielded him.
At last he was in South Park, an oval of trees and grass in a district where the mathematical complexities of computers laid a sparkling shimmer to his eyes when he let them see. A long dark limousine was parked at one end of the park. He walked towards it and bowed his head.
“Master T?kairin Hajime,” he said, in Japanese. “I humbly greet you.”
Even to Adrian’s senses the Master was barely distinguishable from a living man; his form would be as tangible as he wished. He wore a black and dark-beige hakama kimono, the practical garment warriors had used, with the two swords thrust through the obi-sash. He didn’t bother with the complex antique hairdo, though; it was cropped close in a silvery-gray cap. His long lined face was that of a man in his sixties-probably because someone born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1890 simply assumed core-deep that the face of authority had wrinkles.
Only the eyes were visibly different from those of a corporeal; they were unmixed gold. The swords were real, and silver-threaded; the warning pain of the metal that the Power shunned radiated through the lead-lined scabbards. Adrian bowed again, in unspoken respect at the strength of will and Power needed to carry them. Hajime hadn’t been as close to purebred as Adrian, not that far back. But anyone who survived the birth-body’s
