cold, and faintly of the wrack along the high-tide line.
Harvey joined him, bending over and resting his hands on his knees for a moment to suck in more air.
“Y’know, boy,” he said, taking the wooden blade. “If this were a movie instead of real life, we could have a great montage right now. It’d be more economical.”
“Montage of what?”
“You know, little short clips of us doin’ all these sweaty manly warrior things, and then they skip to the part where we’re all toughened up for the fighting. Saves the waste of good killing and bikini time in an action movie.”
Unwillingly, Adrian grinned at him. “Instead we have to do all the sweaty, manly warrior things.”
“You do. Ol’ buddy, you’re going in close. I’m going to be hanging back with my fancy sniper rifle. Nothin’ wrong with my trigger-finger yet, as opposed to my reflexes, my knees and my wind. I leave that personal-style stuff with knives to you youngsters.”
Adrian snorted. “I’m fifty myself.”
“Yeah, you’re fifty years old chronologically and physiologically maybe twenty-eight. You-um purebred Shadowspawn prince. Me-um lowly human ape scum. I’ve seen quite a bit more than fifty years and I feel every physio-fuckin’-logical one of ’em.”
“You have a guarantee you won’t be face-to-face with Dale Shadowblade?”
Harvey straightened and looked out over the blue-gray Pacific waters and the endless ripples of white foam that stretched eastward.
“No, but I can guarantee you I’ll be dead if I do. Couldn’t have handled him by my own self on my best day, even in a silver suit. Less I took him by complete surprise.”
“I’d like to know what he’s doing now,” Adrian said grimly.
“Well, I bet it ain’t running up a sand dune.”
“And we need to know. We need a great deal more detailed information.”
“Anything from Ellen?”
“I haven’t dared risk a high-link with her lately, not for more than a few moments. The multiple feedings and… closeness… mean that Adrienne is deeper and deeper into her mind. I have to be cautious.”
He smiled, and Harvey looked at him dubiously.
“But there’s another way, and it’ll be easier than running up and down dunes. I did manage to tell Ellen about that. She agreed.”
Softly: “I would never set a compulsion on her, unless she agreed.” Then Adrian’s smile grew into a grin. “And now, my old… old… old friend…”
He crouched and held the knife in the ready position. Harvey groaned and took his in a thumb-on-hilt dagger grip, his other hand stiffened into a blade across his chest. They began to circle.
“Age and treachery beat youth and strength,” Harvey grumbled.
Adrian lunged, his feet sending up spurts of sand. Harvey countered with a backhand slash to the face; he dodged and dove to the side with a shoulder roll that brought him back upright out of reach.
“But I have both age’s treachery and youth’s strength,” Adrian taunted genially.
Harvey said: “Just makes you want to-”
Harvey launched himself forward, pivoting on his hands and kicking out. One boot thudded painfully into Adrian’s thigh, and he fought not to topple. The edge sliced upward in a curve that whipped the edge across his abdomen.
“-cry, don’t it?”
“I’m going for a drive before I go home,” Ellen said.
“God, how can you have any energy left?” one of Monica’s tennis-club friends said. “After beating us all into the ground on the court.”
They sat around a table not far from Rancho Sangre’s civic center pool. The early-May sunshine was warm, this Sunday afternoon, another perfect golden Californian day. All had tall frosty glasses of fresh lemonade or iced tea or soda before them-or in one or two cases, something stronger. The place was more like a private spa than the usual bare-bones public facilities towns had; there was a pleasant clubhouse with a caf?, a bright well-equipped gym and a big circular swimming pool with a fountain in the center, besides tennis courts and much else. The yelling children splashing in the water made a pleasant burring background to conversation, and the smell of chlorine mingled with cut grass and lilac blooming along a wall.
“Ellen’s improving our games,” Monica said proudly. “She beat me to flinders back in February, but now it’s May and she just had me running like a mad thing!”
The other women ranged from their twenties through late middle-age, and initially hadn’t seemed much different from any other clutch of small-town, middle-class Californians. One was head of the town library; another principal of the high school; there was a pediatrician, a dentist and the town clerk, and several teachers. The housewives had an architect, a surveyor, the winery and dairy factory managers and others of like ilk for husbands. Dr. Duggan was there, along with her older daughter and several of the others’ offspring, one of whom was attending Cal Poly and had given Ellen a serious game.
Let’s see… most of them have these little black-sun-and-trident pendants or bracelets somewhere visible; maybe some keep theirs tucked away, like I do. And apart from that everything’s normal… until suddenly it isn’t.
“Monica,” one of the matrons said. “Do you know if the Do?a is going to have an initiation ceremony soon?”
Like that, Ellen thought. The simple physical well-being of hard exercise and a hot shower faded. Then it isn’t normal, like that.
“Yeah,” a honey-blond teenager named Sherry added.
She was the coed’s younger sister and about sixteen, very pretty in a wholesome way, but the type a student from India she’d known at NYU had said was called a tung admi where he came from, a tight lady. In American terms she had no more than ten years before a lifetime battle with the waistline started. Sherry went on with a note of complaint: “Like, I’m months overdue, we’ve taken all the classes and practiced and watched the videos and everything. I want my pendant before we take the SATs!”
Like that. It’s the normal adolescent lust to grow up, I can remember that pretty vividly, but…
The freckle-faced youngster looked at Monica. “I… ah, Ms. Darton, is getting bitten as cool as some people say? A really big rush?”
“Not the first time, dear,” Monica said, to her visible disappointment.
“I told you, Sherry,” the college girl said. “But you’d rather listen to junior year geeks who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Sherry looked mutinous, and Monica went on gently: “It doesn’t hurt, only a little sting, but you’re just… very calm, the first few feedings. After that, yes, it starts to feel extremely nice, but that’ll only happen if you become a lucy, and that’s not likely.”
Calm, as in, you can’t move while you watch them drink your blood, Ellen thought. Of course, before the feeding you feel scared, or in the case of my first time agonizing pain and bewilderment and terror and then afterwards you feel horrified. Or maybe not, if you grew up with the idea.
“What’s involved in this initiation?” she asked aloud. “I’ve only been here a couple of months, and I’m a lucy and a new one at that, so…”
The college girl answered: “Oh, there’s this ceremony, with your family and friends. Everyone sort of dresses up-”
“Black robes with hoods,” her mother said. “That’s traditional. It’s held up at the casa grande. There’s a big room just for initiations. Like a chapel. In a way.”
“-and there’s chanting and kneeling and stuff like that, and you pledge yourself to the Br?z?s and the Shadowspawn.”
“Our blood and souls are thine, thou who will live and rule when we are long dust,” her mother said in a reminiscent tone, obviously quoting from memory. “Take, drink. With our blood and lives and bodies we worship thee.”
“Then the candidate goes up-”
