“Touch?. I throttled back as much as I could. It’s… a very strong link. Much more so than I expected. More so than she understands, I think-and hope. She almost certainly doesn’t know about this, that we can communicate. But she knows I’ll be getting flashes of emotion and physical sensations.”
Ellen shivered. “I hope to God she doesn’t decide hurting me more would be the way to get back at you.”
“I also… Me too. This environment scrambles my linguistic reflexes!”
A thought occurred to her. “How come you all seem to be so multilingual?”
“It’s easy for us. The language center in our brains is enlarged and linked to the telepathic faculty.”
Ellen shivered, reminded of a voice saying, I’m learning Georgian.
“Time to fill you in on what’s been going on,” she said, putting briskness into her tone. “You know about the motorcycle trip? Well, when we got to San Francisco-”
“Name of a black dog! We were probably less than a mile apart, and her laughing at me all the while! If I’d known where, I could have gone after her.”
Ellen winced, and he cursed, first in French and then in a string of other languages.
“Ouch,” she said. “Hadn’t thought of that. Anyway, Adrienne took me to this restaurant and we met a friend of hers. A woman named Michiko-”
“T?kairin Michiko?”
Ellen shivered again. “Yes. Talk about scary. She wanted to kill me, Adrian-wanted to kill me with your sister. I think she would have liked to do it right then and there.”
Adrian nodded, looking down at the table and taking a sip of the yellow drink, chilled in its small ceramic cup.
“Yes. They’re blood-siblings. It’s… sort of a mix of friends, fictive kinship, and lovers. And it involves joint kills. That’s a very… intense experience.”
“They were talking about some plan to, to wipe out half the human race with smallpox, some genetically engineered variety, they called it parasmallpox. And I got this horrible feeling that that was better than some other plan they were criticizing!”
“It was,” Adrian said grimly. “The other plan involves EMP… a way to burn out all the technologies the world depends on. The Council of Shadows calls it Operation Trimback, Option One. I suspect it wouldn’t work as smoothly as they think.”
Ellen nodded quickly. “Yes! That was what Adrienne’s been saying. She doesn’t want that-drastic, she called it-a plan. She’s angry with this other plan. Michiko was the same way. I think she… looks up to Adrienne. Admires her. But I wasn’t catching everything they said.”
Ellen frowned, concentrating. “There was something about field tests, in the Congo.”
An appalling thought occurred to her. “Adrian… does that mean they were testing it on people?”
“Yes.” Gently: “Ellie, Shadowspawn are the ones responsible for virtually everything monstrously bad in the past hundred years. Just before World War One, there was a great scandal in Europe because one Alsatian shopkeeper was put in jail for one weekend for offending a Prussian officer. That was before the Council secured the world.”
Ellen shivered. “She said more, about drugs and vaccines, and stockpiling them.”
“That fits,” Adrian said.
“So after we left the restaurant, we went to what she called the Br?z? town house.”
Adrian’s brows rose. “That used to be on Nob Hill, but it was destroyed twenty years ago, when the T?kairin ousted the Br?z?s as the foremost Shadowspawn clan on the West Coast… long story.”
“This was new. The building wasn’t more than ten or fifteen years old max, a big luxury hotel with… sort of super-condos on the upper floors. The town house was a two-story penthouse on the top of the tower, huge, glass walls, pools… like something out of a Modernist fantasy of Haroun al-Rashid’s bachelor pad.”
Adrian cursed again. “The St. Regis Hotel! We were within walking distance of each other. And that’s where she launched herself when she stooped on me.”
Ellen felt her eyes growing wider and wider as he described the meeting and the fight that followed.
“You can… you can actually turn into animals?” she said. “Literally into fur-feathers-and-fangs actual animals?”
“Technically it’s… well, for all practical purposes, yes. As long as we have… les vieux say, taken the spirit of the beast into ourselves. In fact, it’s a DNA sample you need. Nearby. Swallowing it is best and most permanent.”
“Then… those Norse berserkers… Sigurd with the wolf-skin he wore…”
“Mostly just psychotics with delusions. But some, yes, they had enough of the inheritance to do it.”
This is truly weird, she thought. But hey, Ellen, weird is the new normal for you.
Then she went on: “OK, she took me back from the restaurant to the town house, we had a swim, a sort of strange philosophical chat which scared me quite a bit, she led me off to bed and we had lots of hot sweaty writhing sex and a little feeding-”
She smiled with a crooked twist of the lips at his carefully controlled expression: “Adrian, hold the pity again, will you? Yeah, I’d much rather she couldn’t force me to do things. Being helpless is not fun, not in reality. I want it all to stop, and badly. But if she is going to make me do things, which right now can’t be avoided, forcing me to eat wonderful elaborate meals and then have hour upon hour of multiple orgasms just so totally beats ‘feeling nauseated piss-your-pants bowel-loosening terror’ and ‘screaming in agony as sensitive tissues tear.’ And… the high from the feeding doesn’t actually damage me, does it?”
“It’s addictive.”
“I know about that, and I’ve gone cold turkey on things before when I thought they were getting too much of a hold on me. I was even a smoker for a little while and sweated bullets stopping. That’s why I kept getting on your case about the cigarettes; and it made me crave one myself in the worst way.”
“You never told me that you’d smoked. See, I am not the only one to keep secrets!” he said, trying for lightness and just about achieving it.
Ellen leaned over and prodded him in the ribs. “That’ll teach you to ignore a lady’s complaints! And I have to watch it with alcohol too. But the… drug… isn’t physically harmful, is it?”
“No. As far as I know, there are no harmful effects apart from the feelings it causes, and the craving. It evolved to make the victim willing to be bled, not to hurt them.”
“OK. It might totally screw the head of someone who didn’t know what was happening, but I can tell the difference between the way the feeding makes me feel friendly and actually being friendly; I know that even when it’s happening. The… effect itself actually feels pretty good.”
His smile was broader, and he made a gesture with both hands and bowed his head slightly.
“You are a stronger person than I thought, Ellen. Many would be totally shattered in your position, but you are keeping your wits about you. Forgive me for underestimating you.”
In fact… she looked at him speculatively. You know, buster, if you’d approached it the right way and just told me about things instead of trying to protect me all the time… I might have surprised you. I might yet.
“Provisional forgiveness given. OK, I go to sleep-I was surprised how easy that was even at the time because I was feeling shivery and jazzed, the way you are when you’re tired but can’t sleep-”
“Partly a Wreaking.”
“OK, she zapped me into enchanted slumber, went out on the terrace again, turned into this big-ass eagle-”
“Her body stayed in the bed; that’s one reason she put you under a Wreaking. We’re… very helpless in that state.”
Ellen’s eyes narrowed, and she surprised herself with the flood of savage images that filled her mind for an instant.
“Oooooh, wouldn’t I just like to get her helpless. With a hammer and a sharp wooden stake!”
“Ellie, you don’t need a wooden-”
Ellen laughed. “It would still work if I drove it through her heart, wouldn’t it?”
“On a tranced body? Quite well.”
“And then I could hit her in the head with the hammer for a while and see how funny Countess Comic-ula thought that was!”
Adrian laughed, but looked at her seriously a moment later: “If you get the chance, take it. But don’t hesitate, strike to the heart or brain, and then strike again and again. We are… very hard to kill, with anything but a silver
