“It’s something every Shadowspawn discovers how to do around age thirteen. Then their parents put a Wreaking in their hot little minds to stop them. By the time you’re old enough to take the inhibition out, you realize that churning your own brain into pur?ed oatmeal with an endless feedback loop of orgasms is not a good idea.”
“What a way to go!” Ellen said, laughing unwillingly.
God, this is weird and awful and I do hate her passionately. On the other hand it feels great and spending the night fucking like a ferret in heat is a lot better than booze to make me forget for a while, she thought.
Her hands and lips were moving.
Bring it on, Princess of Darkness! Maybe I can make you scream! “I do like a positive attitude,” Adrienne said, and kissed her deeply.
Her mouth tasted of salt blood and of desire. Then she knelt up and put her hands behind Ellen’s head.
“Let’s start by trying this, then. We have a few hours until I have to spread my wings and fly. Now concentrate.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Adrian gave a gasping scream as he felt his body wake. Waken from nightmare of being caught by the sun in night-walker form, of his self peeling away in flakes and strings of fire…
“Ah, you’re with us again,” Harvey said. “Give it a few minutes and maybe you’ll stop wishing you weren’t.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, flicked it out the window and pulled over. Wet gravel pinged and crunched under the wheels as the car slowed and stopped.
“Sorry this is cold,” he went on, sliding into the rear seat.
He put a blood-bag from the cooler to Adrian’s mouth. It wasn’t very old, which made it a little less horrible; he must have stocked up at the hospital. Adrian gasped again, drank, retched, clapped his hands to his mouth.
“Water,” he rasped through his fingers. “Then more.”
He drank and swallowed the pills the other man shook into his hand. Then he curled around himself, hugging knees to chest. Gradually the shaking and chills and the sick pain behind his eyes and in his temples subsided, along with the missing spots and bits of glitter in his vision. He became conscious of something beside the gray misery inside his skull, took Harvey’s arm and used it to help lever himself upright; a sleeping bag he hadn’t noticed fell away from his shoulders, and he clutched it back for the warmth. The thin cotton of the hospital gown only emphasized the chill against which the car’s asthmatic heater strained.
It was a nondescript Toyota Venza, flaking red and old enough to be unremarkable, smelling of ancient cheap stale tobacco, his own cigarettes which Harvey had presumably plundered and nameless things and children and dogs.
Harvey probably lifted it, he thought.
Some absent corner of his mind noted that they’d have to dump the hot vehicle; he could simply buy something from a used lot. Outside was the gray of a Central Valley wintertime tule fog, thick enough that he couldn’t see more than ten yards in any direction. The world was a bubble of cold, dark-gray nothingness, with a few bare- limbed trees along the edge of the field dripping moisture on flat black mud. The air was heavy with it, a chilly, silty smell with an undertone of manure and vegetable rot.
“Name of a black dog, it looks and smells just precisely the way I feel!” he said.
Inside, somewhere in the depths of his mind, there was a dull wonder that he didn’t say: I do not care. Back to Santa Fe, me, and goodbye to you, Harvey! The physical misery was enough to swamp emotion; the memory of Ellen was distant. It was a commitment of the will that kept the words unsaid.
To love someone is not to feel loving continuously. That is impossible, for humans or Shadowspawn either. It is to always act that way.
“Bit strenuous?” Harvey asked.
“You might say,” he said, letting his head fall back. “What a fuckup. Adrienne was waiting for me again. After,” he added bitterly, “spending the previous four hours humping herself blind with Ellen and taking little sips of her blood in the very short inactive intervals.”
“Bad?” Harvey said sympathetically.
“I blocked as much as I could. She wasn’t hurting her to speak of this time, but… The bitch is doing it to jolt me, I know it. She doesn’t realize how close a high-link I have with Ellen, but she knows something is getting through.”
“She is doing it to jolt you,” Harvey said. “And to score points; that I drink your milk shake thing, which she’s been doing one way or another since you two learned to walk. She’s also probably still got the hots for you, since the Calcutta thing.”
Adrian winced. “Yes. That was a bad time.”
“Five gets you one she doesn’t think so.”
“And… to Shadowspawn that isn’t incompatible with a desire to kill me slowly. Quite the contrary.”
“Right you are. And she was also doing it because she just likes humping herself blind and ain’t too particular about the ‘with who’ part long as they’re good-lookin’. How precisely did she wreck the meet?”
“Preactivated Wreaking,” he said. “A bit like that one in Santa Fe, only smaller and more… concentrated. The trigger was complex beyond belief. It was keyed to Hajime’s state of mind; truly, the very act of deciding to listen to me. If he’d been completely hostile on his own account, nothing would have happened… you see the difficulty, and the cleverness of it?”
“How was it placed? Keyed to the ground?”
“No, dynamic. Like a floating spiderweb strung between buildings, with a seeker function. Hanging ready to exist, and when it existed there was only one place it could possibly be.”
“Someone must have slipped her a sample of him from his mortal remains; you’d need a ground-link for something like that,” Harvey observed clinically.
Adrian nodded: “It cascaded the probabilities of his decision negative until only the black paths were left, and he never noticed.”
“She’s gotten better,” Harvey noted, resting his big hands on his knees and staring out the windscreen at nothing. “And she was always good.”
Adrian nodded. “Things went downhill from there. He decided I was attacking him, went for his sword-which he really knows how to use-and I had to switch form.”
“What to?” Harvey asked.
“The smilodon. I wish I’d had more practice with it. The animal mind swamped me; that never would have happened with my wolf. I can think about as well with that as in man-form, now.”
“Would the wolf have been enough muscle for the job?”
“Well… no. I took out his backup men, but he’s far too good with that sword. I wanted to leave then, but the sabertooth took me over and I was just going for Hajime when she hit me.”
“As?”
“The biggest damned eagle I’ve ever seen, and stooping, falling out of the sky. Probably from one of the tall buildings. It must be some real species of bird to be that tangible, but…”
Harvey took out his BlackBerry. “Describe? This we gotta know about, soonest.”
“Christ, my head… the body was the size of a child, perhaps five feet long. Wings twice that, broad and strong, not slender like a falcon’s. Long head, strong legs and claws like a tiger, literally. Broad tail. Mostly I noticed the claws and beak.”
He indicated his flank, and Harvey reached over to draw aside the hospital gown. The lacerations there didn’t break the skin, but they were blue and purple already, bruises that twinged savagely every time he moved, adding to the pain of his half-healed knife wounds.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the older man said when the results of his search came up, shaking his head in reluctant admiration.
“You found something?”
