and Monica were chatting easily.
“Bad?” she said. “Bad doesn’t begin to describe it. It was so bad my mind couldn’t really take it in, though my bowels certainly believed it. But right now I know how bad without feeling it.”
He nodded, and gave her a handkerchief. She touched it to her neck; there was only a small spot of blood, and she knew the feeding cut would be invisible except to a close look.
“That does make it feel better,” he agreed, and sipped at his own drink, which looked to have vodka and a twist of lemon peel in it. “Rather like this, only much more effectively.”
“It doesn’t actually make it better,” Ellen said, closing her eyes for a moment and swaying to the music. “But for the moment, feeling better will do. I wonder if you could dance to this?”
She began to turn, and then she was moving, black and silver and flying gold hair and shawl, skirts filling and flaring.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Adrian Br?z? wore the shape of Wilbur Peterson easily. It was close to his own; a little taller, a little more thickly built, eyes yellow in the way most postcorporeals preferred them, hair light brown with bronze highlights. His grip carried the girl along effortlessly, despite her attempts to pull free, though she was young and strong for her size. The screams faded as they walked.
Servants showed them to the suite of rooms; it was set up for a postcorporeal. Only one room had an exterior window, and it could be closed by a light-tight steel shutter and bolted fast; there was a hidden shaft that led to the basements and sub-basements below. For that matter, in night-walker form he could simply go impalpable and drop through the floors-though that was hideously dangerous, unless you were very careful. Dropping into solid earth while impalpable left you with no way to get back up.
Adrian shoved the girl through and caught her arm again when the outer door shut. She was under twenty, he judged, but she’d lived someplace where hard labor started early. Despite that she was slender in the waist and long-limbed but full-breasted, rare for a villager. Her skin was the exact color of a latte, and the face framed by loosely curled black hair showed a pleasant mix: mostly Indian, probably a little Iberian and a dash of African as well in bluntly regular features and full lips. Her dark eyes flickered around the elegant entrance-chamber, with its cool white-and-gray marble floors and rugs and spindly antique furniture.
“What is your name?” he asked: “?Como se llama?”
“Eusebia Cortines.”
“?Como le dicen?” he asked. How are you called?
He caught her eyes with his and held her at arm’s length, making an effort to give his speech a Mexican cast; he’d traveled there often enough to do that, though he’d first learned Spanish in Europe.
“Cheba,” she said, stammering a little but keeping her chin up.
“?Me permite?” he said, asking permission to use the diminutive.
That ought to reassure her a little. She nodded, and he went on: “Where are you from? Veracruz?”
“Coetzala,” she said, naming a village in that coastal state he’d passed through once long ago on Brotherhood business. “Then… Tlacotalpan.” Which was a city of some size. “Then to el Norte. With that bastard son of a whore Paco.”
“Paco is dead, and he died very hard. Waste no regrets. He knew what he was selling you into here, or at least that there was no returning.?Habla Ingl?s?”
“Poquito.”
Which meant a little; then she spoke in limping English: “I say, yes, no, how much, can work, cook, clean, tend ni?os, kids.”
Back into Spanish: “My mother sold baskets to tourists. I talked with them sometimes, a little, to practice.”
He could sense her roiling fear, and defiance as well; her scent was healthy, clean beneath the dust and dirt of days of travel without an opportunity to wash. And her blood smelled so tempting, so tempting, even with the memory of Ellen’s tormenting flower-fragrance in his nostrils. Meaty and sweet at the same time, like a skewer of honey-glazed chicken.
“You know what I am, Cheba?” he said.
“Brujo. Vampiro,” she said The corner of his mouth quirked up. She’s brave, he thought; the emotional balance was plain, even if he couldn’t yet read the surface thoughts that glinted away in a mumble of firing neurons.
And she only half-believes it, despite the fact that she saw me transform from a bird to a man. Quick-witted too, when she’s not stupefied with fear.
“Yes. Shadowspawn is the true name. In your language-Hijos de la noche. Los indios say it better: Nagualli.”
“Nagualli,” she repeated, in a way that confirmed his suspicion that she’d spent at least her early childhood speaking Nahuatl, the old Aztec language.
“What… what is happening to them?” she asked, her voice small. “The people I traveled with.”
“Blood drinking. Torture, rape, death also, for many,” he said; there was no point in sugar-coating it. “Control yourself, and listen to me, and you may live.”
She nodded, waited until his grip on her arm slackened… then jerked free, turned and bolted for the door. Adrian sighed, made a movement with his left hand, called up a glyph and pushed with his will.
A snap behind his eyes, and a rucked-up piece of Persian carpet slithered. Her foot turned under her and she fell with a jolt of pain that made his lips curl back for an instant. When she tried to scramble to her feet one leg tripped another. After the third time she lay panting, eyes wide. She was sweating with terror, and he could smell it as well as feel it sparkling like red fire through her mind. The effort not to snarl in eagerness shook him.
“You know that there is nobody outside who will not push you right back through that door? That I can keep this up as long as you try to escape? That doing this makes me”-he let the snarl show a little-“hungry? ”
Gradually she won a degree of mastery, enough to give him a quick nod.
“This is a… place of los brujos,” he said. “I’m a guest here. You’ve been given to me for… food. For blood. That’s why you and your friends were brought here. You are entirely in my power. You understand?”
Another nod.
“I won’t kill or torture or violate you. You must be quiet and obedient and after three days when we all leave… they will probably find… work for you. Other work than being… food. Until then I will protect you from the others. That is all I promise, but what I promise I will do. Get up.”
She did, cautiously after the previous three attempts. “You… you want to drink my blood?”
“Yes,” he said. “Some. Not enough to harm you.”
But I wouldn’t unless I had to. I need the strength and it would ring any number of alarm bells here if I didn’t. This is part of why I told Harvey I was reluctant. To be accepted, I must act as one of them in this way at least.
“I will not harm you otherwise. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”
She was looking skeptical, and at his crotch. He did himself, and smiled wryly: that was a reaction he couldn’t help.
“I’m a man with a penis, not a penis with a man attached. I don’t take unwilling women.”
Which makes me, if not unique among Shadowspawn, at least highly unusual.
“The blood, for protection. Quickly!”
She nodded. He reached for her… and then she swung a shin up towards his groin in a hard vicious kick combined with an earnest thumb towards his eye. That showed rough-and-tumble experience; he was glad she didn’t have a knife. Adrian ducked under the gouge, grabbed the ankle effortlessly-her mind had telegraphed her intention half a second in advance-and used it to fling her around, staggering as she fought not to fall. Then he had her pinned, his right arm holding both of hers against her body, his left under her jaw.
“Hold… still,” he snarled, as she bucked and heaved and shrieked and tried to claw, kick and bite at the same time. “Oh, nom d’un chien noir! ”
The body writhing against his was far too stimulating. He clamped her jaw upward and struck. The incisors
