He looked down into his coffee cup. Kai snorted again and ate another chocolate-and-cream pastry.
“How did you… meet Dale?” Ellen asked her.
“Picked me up at a concert in Tucson. He totally started feeding right while he was boning me that first time and I still thought he was just this awesome Indian dude, and it was like, totally great. You had the feeding and sex at the same time thing yet?”
“Ah… no,” Ellen said. A bit late to be shy, as Adrienne said. “Close together, though.”
“That’s good too, but with the timing just exactly right, wow! I’m the only regular lucy he’s got right now. We travel a lot-that’s cool too. He does things for the Council. Killings mostly, you know, people who find out stuff they shouldn’t or get out of line, sometimes even a Shadowspawn. They call him the Shadowblade. Is that awesome or what?”
“Aren’t you worried that-”
Kai shrugged and washed a mouthful down with her coffee. “Nah. Dale says he’s going to Carry me when he finally offs me-you know that soul-eating thing they can do?”
Ellen’s mind went blank for an instant.
Did I hear that? There’s so much… I am never going to get used to this. I don’t want to get used to any of this. Help!
Kai nodded. “He’s already done the temp version a bunch of times so he can do the extreme stuff to me without killing me. Well, killing my body; he’s killed me in there about… oh, thirty-six times. All sorts of ways, and it feels just like the real thing. The first time I didn’t know what was happening and thought it was the real thing. Shit, talk about a crazy ride!”
Wayne blinked at her. “What’s that like?” he blurted. “Dying, I mean.”
“Kinda interesting. Like, there’s this complete rush. Especially when you learn to ride the pain and fear. I figure it won’t be much different when he does me for real. Pretty weird in there, yeah, but I’m not your vanilla sort of girl and I get to live forever. Or as long as he does. And when he lets me I can see and feel what he’s doing, which is just bitchin’. And when you think about this destroy-the-world gig they’re gonna do, it all gives me a lot better chances than most people.”
“You want to live forever… in there?” Ellen said.
That being my own particular nightmare right now. Even with Adrian it would be terrifying. In the mind of a monster forever… and you couldn’t die, or even go mad…
“Why not? Lots of company. Meantime it’s all fun. Especially the feeding part; there just isn’t any shit you can buy that gives you a high like that. I haven’t wanted a hit of anything else since Tucson except cigarettes and I’ve cut way back on those. And the sex is just fucking extreme. How’d you end up with Adrienne? Those Br?z?s are seriously big mojo with the Shadowspawn.”
“I… was her brother Adrian’s girlfriend. She… took me away from him.”
“No!” Kai said. “Kinky! I heard about her brother, too. Those two got this feud thing going. He’s like, a boogeyman to a lot of the Shadowspawn. Even Dale gives him respect.”
She subsided, looking up the table at her Shadowspawn; the conversation had shifted into English, more or less.
“Ga no iwai,” Michiko was saying thoughtfully.
“Prayer for Long Life,” Adrienne said. “I like it. It’s been ten years since his last?”
“Exactly ten come May, and fifty since his Second Birth. I think it would be a… good gesture… to invite him to Rancho Sangre for the celebration.”
“Which is where we’d need your unique talents… Dale Shadowblade,” Adrienne said. “I have to admit, you do no-see better than I do… and that’s something I rarely say.”
The Indian looked into the distance. “OK. You make a lot of sense, Adrienne. Option One would be fun for a while, but that devastated wasteland thing, no.”
He grinned. “My father would have loved it; he was deeply into that old-time Swallowing Monster and Bear-man on Nab?anye mountain stuff, wanted the world to be like the old stories. Michiko’s right too, though. We’ve got to get free of all that human leftover shit, tribes, countries. It’s just not relevant to us.”
Michiko nodded; she had a sleek modern look to her today, hair parted in the center, sunglasses, a sleeveless white silk blouse, dark trousers tucked into high-heeled boots and a coat hanging off the back of her chair, like an up-and-coming lawyer on her day off.
“Wayne,” she said, and snapped her fingers. “Come here and talk to us.”
He did, fumbling up a laptop from a case at his feet and taking the spot between Adrienne and his Shadowspawn as they moved their chairs aside for him.
“Tell us about those spread patterns you were working on,” Michiko went on, playfully running her fingers over the back of his neck. “With the aerosol release of the initial pathogen.”
To Adrienne: “Wayne’s got me talking like an intellectual when I’m with him. You know, he even screams with an impressive vocabulary?”
Wayne stammered for a moment, closed his eyes, then opened them. Adrienne spoke, her voice warm: “Michi, we all have our individual needs, but we-collectively speaking-need him coherent right now.”
Well, there’s a first. The Yonsei Horror actually looks abashed! Ellen thought. Take one spoiled rich girl sorority bitch and add murdering sociopathic sadist, and put it all in one awful package with superpowers. And she’s not even as scary as the Apache Devil there. God!
The scientist took a deep breath, let it out, and began to speak in a voice that was almost calm: “With a fourteen-day contagious latency period, what you’d need would be aerosol release at a limited number of major transport hubs… I’ve got graph projections here.”
“Pictures are good,” Adrienne said. “A lot of our relatives are not intellectuals. Not given to complex verbalizations, shall we say.”
“As in, some of ’em are stone stupid,” Dale said, and laughed. “One thing the Power doesn’t guarantee is that you’ll be smart. We don’t average dumber than humans, but when there are only a few thousand you sure notice the dumb ones more.”
Adrienne had been studying the graphs. “You’re assuming a very high average number of contacts.”
“They’d be the most highly mobile individuals, too,” Wayne said. “Ideal vectors.”
“What cities?” Adrienne asked. “The fewer the better. Complex plans have a tendency to go wrong, even with the Power.”
“This list.”
“Twenty-seven?”
“If you want to be absolutely certain.”
“Thank you. You’ve made a definite contribution to our plans.”
Ellen could see his face twitch. The Shadowspawn all laughed, a wicked snickering.
“Then we’re agreed?” Adrienne said. The others nodded, and she raised her coffee cup.
“To Option Two! And the Dread Empire of Shadow, with decent plumbing and high-speed Internet!”
“Oh, thank God!” Ellen said.
She was in the great high-ceilinged glass-walled living-room of the mountaintop house again. Standing near enough to the fireplace to feel the warmth on her skin, dressed in a long soft robe of dark cloth.
“Ellie!”
The embrace and kiss were wordless for a long time.
“Where are you?” Adrian said into her ear.
“In bed, alone. She told me to go to sleep quite early. I think-”
She could feel his lips move in her hair, and there was sound, but it slipped out of her consciousness.
“Yes, you’re under that sleep-now.”
“I thought so.”
Ellen dropped her head into the hollow of his shoulder, her breath almost a shudder of sheer relief; it wasn’t until the deadly tension was gone that she realized how tightly it had drawn skin and muscle and tendon. He felt it, and began to knead her shoulders.
“Bad?” he said.
She raised her head with a sigh. The living-room was lit only by the low crackle of a pi?on and juniper fire,
