hard.
'Bah, an apache weapon, that knife,' said Arnaud as he came back on guard. 'Could you at least not use a decent stiletto?'
They circled. The steel whipped down towards Adrian's foot; he danced over it, and felt his mind automatically snarling through Mhabrogast phrases as he did. Their psyches grappled, slid, retreated, baffled. Nature reasserted itself as the Power canceled out.
I am more purebred, but he has been beyond the flesh for long and long. They grow stronger as they age.
'Why kill the human?' he asked.
'Why not?' Arnaud shrugged. 'It seemed a lucky thing to do, and I was here in Paris and had no pressing engagements.'
Which made perfect sense, in Shadowspawn terms. He could even sense lack of will to deceive in the words, though with an adept you never knew.
Another lunge, and then a whistling blow with the sheath. Adrian threw the knife, and as Arnaud blocked it he threw himself forward and down, heels to buttocks and head to knees with his arms wrapped around his shins. Rolling like a ball, the pavement battering at him, and then into the other man's legs. Arnaud managed to catch himself on his hands, but the younger man was already turning, leaping his own height in the air, driving one heel down between the shoulder blades…
…of an empty dinner jacket.
'Merde!'
He hissed the curse in pain, as his foot slammed into the pavement, only slightly cushioned by the empty clothes, and nearly pitched over backwards. The impact jolted all the way into his pelvis and up his lower back, pain just short of tearing gristle and cartilage. A wrenching effort let him regain his feet and stance. Something like a cross between a seven-foot weasel and a great cat ran up the wall and paused to hiss at him before it disappeared over the roofs.
Ellen, he thought, spinning away.
That gave him just enough time to see the second renfield turn and run four paces away from her, then spring up into the angle two walls made. He scaled it in an acrobatic zigzagging rush, looking as if he were walking up the vertical surface by vaulting from one wall to the next, then twisted backwards over her head in a somersault.
Le parkour, Adrian thought. Very impressive if -
Ellen did not let herself be hypnotized by the seemingly impossible arc. Instead she turned calmly beneath it, and was waiting as the man fell out of the sky. There was a strangled shriek as her tanto flashed, and then the man staggered away out the mouth of the alley. Screams of alarm came from the crowd outside.
Adrian suppressed his grin; Ellen was looking shaky as she wiped her knife and retrieved the automatic, and wouldn't appreciate it. He could sense the bubbling horror beneath her control, and stepped up to lay a hand gently on her shoulder.
'You did splendidly, my dear,' he said softly. 'I could not have dealt with all three of them.'
She nodded jerkily, taking deep, deliberate breaths, as she'd been taught.
'What was that thing? The thing that ran away?'
'A giant fossa, a predator from Madagascar. Arnaud was there for a while, nearly a hundred years ago…No matter. We must see to Duquesne.'
The professor was slumped against a wall, his face wet with sweat and glazed with horror as he stared at the bleeding body of the man who'd been about to kill him, and then up where the fossa had gone. He'd been looking directly at Arnaud when he transformed, too. An ordinary human wouldn't see anything but instant change.
'That…that thing…'
Abruptly he turned and vomited, the sharp stink cutting through the smell of blood. Adrian waited, and then offered his flask.
'This will help, monsieur,' he said.
The man accepted it with both hands after he'd wiped his mouth on a handkerchief. 'My God, what happened?' he mumbled.
'Alas, you have become a danger,' Adrian said.
Indignation drove out some of the bewilderment. 'A danger? To whom? How?'
'To…the people we were discussing. It is not necessary that they know why or how you will be a danger. The fact itself casts its shadow in their minds.'
'Then why didn't they kill me when I was a baby?' Duquesne asked skeptically.
Adrian clapped him on the shoulder; it was a good question, and a good sign that the man was thinking again.
'Because the possibility was faint, one among an almost infinite number. When you took the first steps towards investigating that data… then the fan of might-be narrowed down enough to be noticed.'
'They…That man, that thing, was going to kill me just on a suspicion? They can do such things? The police, the authorities-'
'Monsieur Duquesne, I cannot give you all the details of the last century and a half in this alleyway. Think of this: men who can walk through walls, read thoughts, transform themselves into the likeness of carnivorous beasts, bring ruin and death with a thought or a touch…are they likely to be constrained by the authorities?'
'No,' he whispered.
'It's a shock,' Ellen said sympathetically. 'But you've got to get going and accept it, Monsieur Duquesne.'
'And they have noticed me,' he said.
Fortunately, you are not blaming me for that, Adrian thought. Yet .
'And if they take notice they act,' he confirmed. 'Your life is less to them than a cockroach. Arnaud would have sensed it because he was close to you, like a scent drifting through time. And that closeness, it may have been the Power influencing his choices. Though he always did spend much of his time in Paris.'
Ellen crouched to put her face on the same level and took the man's hand in hers.
'I know it's awful to find the world isn't what you thought it was, Professor Duquesne. It was for me, too, when the curtain got raised and I saw, saw the things underneath. But you've got to think now, no matter how hard it is. Or you'll end up like…'
She swallowed, then visibly recovered by an effort of will.
'…like him' she concluded, and pointed to the corpse of the man she'd shot.
It lay with limp finality in a spreading pool of blood.
'Not that he didn't deserve…Well, more about that later.'
She pulled him up. 'Come with us if you want to live.'
'I…My colleagues…'
'Your family?' Adrian asked sharply.
'I am a widower, my parents are dead, and so is my only sister. No children…'
'Then you are relatively immune to pressure through your loved ones, Professor. Now come.'
They turned and began to walk rapidly, almost hustling the stunned academic between them, down the opposite way from the way they'd entered the narrow alley. Behind there was a rising chorus of voices; a bleeding man had staggered out into the crowds and collapsed.
That was not common in this part of Paris; they were far away from the banileus. By the time they were among people again he was walking almost normally, but Adrian could feel the stuttering tension in his mind, a sensation as of thoughts breaking off into fragments, almost like free association.
Adrian looked over his shoulder. Was that too easy? he thought.
'Well, now we've got a physicist, lover,' Ellen said.
Her color was better now, but her mouth looked drawn. Pauvre petite, he thought, not for the first time. Caught in the contentions of demons. Poor humanity, nursing its own nemisis in its bloodstream, unawares.
'Yes,' he said. 'And perhaps he can actually do something. The very fact that Arnaud was moved to kill him indicates that he might.'
She frowned, a single line occurring between her brows; he'd long since concluded that she was even more
