Diabolist, murderer, genius.'
'Hey, fella, don't brood while you're driving at this speed! I think what's really bothering you is thinking about what you might have been like if Harvey hadn't rescued you. Or kidnapped you. Taken you away from your family before you really knew what they were, at least.'
'True, that thought haunts me sometimes. And he was supposed to kill me, by the way. That was the first time Harvey dangerously exceeded his mission brief. Not the last, of course.'
'Kill you?' She sat as upright as the reclined seat and the safety harness would let her. 'Wait a minute, you never told me that.'
Adrian shrugged. 'Harvey was playing a hunch…and to be sure, by then he knew me, and as he said, killing a young boy he actually knew was…difficult. Despite what his orders were.'
'Well, good for him, and to hell with the Brotherhood!'
'They thought…still largely think…that purebreds like me are damned.' In profile she could see his mouth take on an ironic twist. 'And there's considerable evidence in favor of that hypothesis.'
'And you to disprove it. That's…that's racist!'
'There, my little cabbage, is the one sin of which neither Shadowspawn nor the Brotherhood can be accused, at least the younger generations. Not as far as fripperies like skin color are concerned.'
'You look like the original variety, don't you?'
'Probably, though the first Empire of Shadow is so far in the past that nobody can be sure. Only broken fragments of legends were handed down among the secret clans. When the back-breeding nears nine-tenths purity, this set of looks and build tends to crop up. But they're not closely linked to the Power, or the personality traits. It's one of the most common human phenotypes anyway; I could pass for a Provencal or a Spaniard, a Sicilian or Greek or Turk or Arab or Kurd. It's the…inner drives that count.'
'Adrian, I can see half my job's going to be convincing you that you're not a monster.'
'Oh, but I am,' he said softly, barely audible over the low, humming growl of the engine. 'But I'm a humanist monster, of sorts.'
Ellen frowned several hours later. 'Isn't it sort of…well, blatant of us to stay in Paris?'
'No more than anywhere else, if we're not under deep cover,' Adrian said. 'Why should the local Shadowspawn, who are incidentally ruled by the European branch of the Brezes, care about us?'
'We killed Tokairin Hajime,' she pointed out. 'And Adrienne.'
He shrugged, eyes on the narrow street. 'Hajime killed my parents…admittedly, not the Final Death. And Adrienne had tried to kill me more than once. As long as I'm not officially back with the Brotherhood, nobody will much care. It is, you might say, just normal family life. The local Brezes probably considered me only marginally more…unorthodox…than Adrienne.'
Ellen nodded. 'I'm beginning to see how the Brotherhood has managed to survive all these years. The Council runs the world, but they don't do it very well.'
'They approach it more like managing a series of game parks,' he agreed. 'Or game ranches. With the neighboring ranchers fighting one another most of the time, when they're not indulging in lethal sibling rivalries.'
'Back in California, Peter, the other lucy I told you about, the scientist? He said that humans were apes who'd become more like wolves. And Shadowspawn were like apes who'd decided to imitate cats instead.'
'That is quite perceptive; he seems to be a very intelligent man.'
'He produced that research I got to you,' Ellen said proudly; she'd liked Peter.
'We'll see what Professor Duquesne thinks; it's a good sign that he's agreed to meet us.' He sighed. 'And that catlike nature is part of my problem.'
Ellen made an inquiring sound and he went on: 'I have to fight a war and I don't know how.'
'Seems to me you've been doing a good job.'
'No. Oh, I know how to fight, certainly. I was very good working for the Brotherhood-but they pointed me at the targets, and I went after them. I was a, hmmm, black-ops wet-work specialist, not a strategist or even a field commander. A leader of small teams at most. The Brotherhood should be doing strategy, but despite what you and I found out for them they are not. They are in a defensive crouch; too many generations of defeat have demoralized them.'
Ellen had been impressed beyond words with the way Adrian had rescued her from his sister.
But come to think about it, that was all fairly small-scale.
'It's not your genes,' she said slowly. 'Really. Adrienne, well, except for the XY thing she was you, genetically speaking, given how inbred the Shadowspawn lines are. And I got the distinct impression that she did operate on a big scale, with big plans. That horrible synthetic smallpox thing she was working on with Michiko and those other friends of hers! But you stuck a stiletto into the plans.'
'Harvey and I did,' Adrian said. 'Harvey is an excellent general, or at least he's been a colonel in this war of shadows. There's only one problem there.'
'What's that?'
'Harvey is a bit drastic at times.'
Ellen blinked; she liked the big grizzled Texan, and thought he was extremely shrewd behind the Hill Country-boy persona. But to have someone who could be as pellucidly ruthless as Adrian say he was too drastic made her think.
'I think,' she said very carefully, 'that you've been too much in Harvey's shadow, Adrian.'
' Merde,' he muttered. 'I'll concentrate on tactical problems for now. And first let's get onto this ridiculous island.'
'I like the idea of staying on an island in the Seine,' she said.
'So do I. Unless we have to get off it quickly.'
The Ile Saint-Louis was mostly inhabited by very reclusive rich people who liked having a front window facing the Seine. The buildings were all seventeenth-century and immaculately kept, stone and brick and mansard slate roofs glistening in the last of the sunlight, with poplars lining the waterfront paths. She half expected to see Porthos and Aramis stroll out from an alleyway with ruff and rapier, with a link-boy trotting in front of them.
Adrian laughed when she mentioned it. 'The period is right,' he said. 'And this was a dueling ground before it was completely built up, too. But it undoubtedly smells much better now.'
He dropped into French, and quoted: ''If you walk along the streets of the Ile Saint-Louis, do not ask why you feel gripped by a sort of nervous sadness. For its cause you have only to look at the solitude of the place, at the gloomy aspect of its houses and its large empty mansions.''
'Ah…Adrian, you didn't lock the car,' she said, as they left it by the curb. 'And I don't think that's a parking spot.'
His teeth glinted white in the semidarkness. 'It's my car, darling.'
'Oh. And I don't think these mansions look empty anyway. Painfully well kept and fully booked, from the looks of things.'
'The Ile has effectively become a cruise ship permanently anchored in the Seine, for some time. The Rothschilds have a pied-a-terre here. Besides which, Balzac just liked portentous gloom. I enjoyed his work much more as a young man; adolescent weltschmerz, I presume. Baudelaire lived here for a time as well, rooming with Gautier and smoking hashish.'
'I remember about Baudelaire,' Ellen said. ' Et je vois tour a tour reflechis sur ton teint / la folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes,' she quoted with relish. 'Either that, or you've got gas.'
''And I see in turn reflected on your face / Horror and madness, cold and silent.'' He laughed. 'Am I that bad?'
'No, just grumpy sometimes.'
His hand squeezed hers. 'You are stronger than I, my Ellen.'
'Oh, I dunno. You rescued me just in time, I think.'
The streets were moderately full, too; a footbridge led to the Ile de la Cite northwards, and the towers of Notre Dame beyond. Besides the tourists there were…
'Is that a Captain Ahab look-alike with an accordion and a harpoon?' she asked. 'Beside the fire-eater.'
'Indeed. And mimes, those street lice of Paris.'
She privately agreed with that, though she supposed her brief visits made them seem more tolerable; he'd
