Even the single glance aside as she brought the weapon up and aimed showed that the man her husband faced was different-he could have been Adrian himself, aged a decade, and dressed in an opera cape, tails, white tie, gloves, gold-headed ebony cane, shining topper and gleaming shoes with spats, a white flower in his buttonhole…the complete outfit of a boulevardier from the earlier part of La Belle Epoque.
All that as her eyes flicked across. The man with the blade who'd been about to stab Duquesne snarled.
'Hold him, Joko,' he said; he spoke in French with a British accent. 'I'll handle the bitch.'
Then he was coming at her, knife held low with the point up, fluid and sure-only three long strides away. She was slightly crouched, leaning into the weapon with her left hand under the butt…
And her finger froze. This is real! That's a human being! I can't do it!
The knife caught a glitter of distant streetlight. That made her act, and without thinking. Without thinking with the forward part of her brain, the one that was a good small-town girl with a slather of self-made junior-grade artsy-academic across it. A chunk of her hindbrain had met knives before, in the memory palace.
They hurt.
The somatic memory didn't give a damn that the experience had been imaginary; it knew exactly what it was like to die with seven inches of blade through the lungs. Her finger contracted just as the man's shoulders tensed to drive the steel home. That put the muzzle barely a yard from his chest.
Crack!
The little pistol didn't have much recoil, but it was loud. The sound slapped back and forth between the limestone facades of the buildings on either side of the narrow little street, like someone snapping an elastic right into her ear. The flash was almost blinding through her slitted eyes, flicking through the dimness like miniature lightning.
The sequence went automatically after that. Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
Six shots into the center of mass. The man turned as he fell to come down on his face, and the knife skittered away, ringing on the granite paving. The little sharp-pointed hypervelocity bullets deformed and tumbled through bone and flesh like miniature saws: six neat holes in the shirt, and a shower of bone and flesh fragments punching out his back to leave a crater the size of her paired fists.
Some distant part of Ellen's mind thought: I just shot someone! A real human being, and he's dead for real!
The rest of her was moving, a swift half skip sideways to get a clear shot at the squat man who held the professor. That part of her had shot hundreds of men-and women. Just projections of Adrian's mind, or sometimes his mental image of himself, but the sight and the feel and the very smell were the same, the acrid scent of burned nitro powder, the jerking thump of impact, the tang of blood and the boneless finality of the dead body.
My subconscious thinks I'm a mass murderer and this is all in a day's work. Jesus!
The platinum ferrule on the ebony cane in the dandy's hand poked towards her; she grunted at the impact of an impalpable force. Her mind seemed to blur, as if her brain had been invisibly shaken, and the amulet was uncomfortably hot now. Everything from a slip and a cracked skull to a stroke, epileptic seizure and heart attack trembled on the verge of realization. Adrian's hand moved, and the instant passed, but the trigger froze under her finger as something malfunctioned.
The second renfield killer had wasted a instant staring incredulously at his dead comrade, and another drawing a gun and firing at her. It jammed too. Ellen dropped her weapon, leapt backwards and drew the knife from under the tail of her jacket, where the sheath lay point-up along her spine. The steel came out and up, leading; she stood with the right foot a little advanced behind it, crouched, left arm held across her chest with the hand stiffened into a blade.
'You kill Chance, putain?' he growled at her.
He chopped Duquesne under the short ribs with the edge of his hand, paralyzing his diaphragm, then shoved him at her. She swayed aside and let the Frenchman fall; time enough to help him later. He thudded into the wall and slid down it, struggling to breathe, his eyes wild.
'If that was his name,' she said, much more calmly than she felt; any delay was welcome.
' Salope,' he snarled, which meant bitch, more or less. 'I will cut you deep for that.'
He drew a knife, a balisong that skittered through a sinister metallic chink-click-click as he flicked it open and locked it. The angry rush she half expected stopped before it began. He saw the stance, the way she held the blade and kept most of her weight on her back foot. She could see it flowing into his mind along with the way she'd shot his partner and dodged Duquesne.
All moving instantly into his fighting gestalt as: Much more dangerous than she looks. Don't take any chances.
He advanced warily, his own weapon held in a different grip, point down with his thumb on the pommel.
' Vous etes une pomme de terre avec le visage d'un cochon d'inde ,' she said.
She'd always wanted to call someone that: it meant, You are a potato with the face of a guinea pig. It was much more insulting and less funny in French.
He cut and stabbed, a horizontal slash and then a backhand punch of the knife towards her face. She leaned back, just enough to let the steel pass.
Whoa!
It was disconcertingly as if someone else were operating her body, and doing it by fits and starts. Stopping doing it when she thought about it.
Then stop thinking or you'll die! she scolded herself desperately.
The thickset man had staggered a little as the counterattack he expected didn't come, then almost ran himself onto her knife as she let the conditioned reflex thrust underarm towards his belly.
Just more practice, she told herself. You can get hurt, but the pain's all there is to fear. No real people involved.
As they circled and feinted another part of her was hoping desperately that Adrian would finish whatever he was doing and come to the rescue, fast.
'Nephew,' the Shadowspawn said, slinking a pace closer.
'Great-uncle Arnaud,' Adrian acknowledged, with a slight inclination of his head. 'Looking as vicious and depraved as ever, I see, mon tonton.'
'You always were a charmingly polite lad.'
The other man looked solid; Adrian could even smell his rosewater cologne. But there was a something, a glitter that the eyes did not quite see…
Of course, he's been postcorporeal for seventy years. But I'd know it anyway. Not really a man there, something that looks like a man because the hindbrain remembers.
'And I always did hope I'd meet you like this,' Arnaud said amiably. 'Killing you will be an intense pleasure in a life grown a trifle dull.'
His hands turned the walking stick, and nearly a meter of narrow blade slipped free. The gloves must be insulated very thoroughly; there were silver inlays on the blade as well, and there were preactivated glyphs, warping probability towards bane and ruin and sickness. Adrian could feel them buzzing through the fabric of things, drawing the paths negative. His own blade came into his hand, a Brotherhood-style tanto. He excluded all worry for Ellen from his consciousness; it would do her no good at all if he lost this fight, and it would take all he had.
'As I recall,' Adrian said, 'killing me wasn't quite what you had in mind last time we met.'
'Oh, the two are related,' Arnaud said. 'You were a beautiful boy.'
He fell into a fencer's pose-an exceedingly old-fashioned one, knees bent at right angles, like a Victorian duelist-and whipped the cloak around his left arm, keeping the sheath in that hand.
Watch that, the fighting part of his brain reminded him. Arnaud was always good at la canne too.
'And perhaps I had a killing in mind as a finale at the time, eh?' the older Shadowspawn said.
The point of the sword darted towards his eyes, fluid and swift and sure. If that sliver of graven steel went home in his brain, it would be the Final Death. And Adrian had more than his own life to save.
Ting, as the long knife beat the slender spike aside, a shivering quiver up the nerves of his right hand.
He whirled inside the thrust and struck with the knob that tipped the tanto's hilt. Arnaud parried it with the sheath portion of the sword-cane; for a moment they were locked, faces inches apart. Then Arnaud broke back, whirled in again with a looping elliptical savate kick. It was blindingly quick; Adrian took it on his crossed forearms, and it was like being kicked by a horse. He rode it in a double back somersault and came up again, breathing
