Eyes drooped as an active day took its toll. She put the book down and began to rise. Leila was snoring, but Leon blinked at her.
' Maman?' he said, his voice slurred.
'Yes, my darling?'
'What's Papa like?'
Ah, she thought.
'Well, he looks a lot like you,' she said. 'And a lot like me. And he's very, very powerful. His name is Adrian.'
'Will Papa ever come and live with us?'
'I don't know, sweetie. I hope so, someday.'
'I would like that,' Leon said. 'I dream about him, sometimes.'
Leila murmured drowsy assent, and Adrienne felt the Power prickle at her nerves again, a message too faint to read, like a sound not quite heard in a nighted forest.
When she felt the minds of both children spiral down into deep sleep she walked to her own chambers- through the walls for practice's sake, pausing a moment before each to will them open. It was really more a matter of making yourself impalpable, but that was the way she'd always visualized it and you didn't alter what worked. A glitter, the solid plaster and stone fading, and the slightest tug as she walked through- the probability matrix that made up an etheric body interpenetrating with the gross material atoms of the structure.
When her corporeal form opened its eyes she stretched.
'Now I'm hungry,' she said.
'How do I look?' Adrienne Breze said a few hours later, glancing over her shoulder at her nude image in the mirror. 'Sort of a butch thing, perhaps, with the hair still short?'
Hmmm. I'm still too thin; it's the Case of the Amazing Disappearing Tits. And I do not like my hair only an inch long. If I want to look like a man, I'll night-walk and turn into a man.
That was easy enough; all you needed was an individual's DNA to copy him or her in etheric form, and it was slightly easier with a human than a wolf or a tiger. It could also be a lot of fun, though if she had had to choose one or the other she'd have picked female without hesitation.
We're more flexible, literally and metaphorically, she thought. Fortunately, I can take my pick.
She had a remarkably wide selection of templates. Biting someone did nicely, and semen was even easier than blood as a source sample. Any body fluid would do in a pinch.
And my new foot is still a little smaller than the other and disgustingly pink and gets sore easily. Still, I look much better than I did a few weeks ago. And my appetites are coming back, I feel almost normal as long as I don't overexert.
Peter Boase mumbled from the bed, three-quarters unconscious. The room smelled of sweat and blood and musky sex, and strong, sweet lady-of-the-night jasmine in great terra-cotta jars outside the glass doors. This was his own house on Lucy Lane, not her chambers in the casa grande above; logically enough, it was where her lucys lived. The houses were comfortable, middle-class buildings in the same Spanish Revival style as the whole of the town, about twenty-five hundred square feet, with rooms grouped around an interior courtyard patio; those backed on the outer wall of the estate gardens.
She walked back to the bed and climbed onto it, onto the man there, and straddled him, resting her chin on her palms and looking down at him. He was short, only a few inches taller than she, perhaps five-six, blond and fine-featured and slim. His skin felt warm, almost flushed, compared to the cool linen on her knees and shins.
'Peter,' she whispered. And, within: Peter.
He was deeply asleep, wandering through evil dreams. She touched the surface of his interior dialogue delicately, her eyelids drooping as she let the rhythms of consciousness synchronize. You couldn't talk to someone's mind like this-not if they weren't Shadowspawn of fairly pure blood-but you could suggest things. The thoughts were one. You could persuade…
Adrienne is dead.
A startling leap of joy, life, freedom-the sort of pleasure that came when a long-existing agony was relieved. Then crashing despair.
No. She's alive. Sick, but alive.
Adrienne is dead.
Make it his own thought; not a wish, the ring of conviction.
I saw her die. Overtones, joy…not too much, not the savage exultation she'd feel herself watching an enemy perish, add a little revulsion.
Now guide, gently, gently. The mind wanted to believe, and they were deep-linked, by pleasure, by pain, by the bond of blood.
The heavy bullet ripped Hajime's head open, and the Shadowspawn lord disappeared, a fucking sabertooth leaping at him as he died.
All that was real, that had happened.
Gone, gone, Hajime just gone, Monica down and Jose protecting her with his body, get between her and the danger too, another bullet going by with an astonishing crack sound, not a bang at all, not like anything he'd ever heard in a movie, and a peeeenngggg sound as it hammered off stone. Shadowspawn running riot, the night-walking or postcorporeal guests transforming into a nightmare collection of beasts and birds.
The thoughts/memories/images/sensations ran faster and faster, with the iron taste of truth.
Ellens face contorted with rage and smashing the foil-sheathed hypo down on Adriennes foot, the great silverback gorilla standing roaring with the bench in its hands, Ellen riding the sabertooth as it leapt for the roof of the pavilion -
Adrienne jerking, screaming, slumping in death No.
Yes. That happened -
An image of Michiko leaping forward with the wakizashi raised To fight the sabertooth, holding it out two- handed, looking around in terror. Adrienne just lay there, and she breathed a few more times, then her chest jerked and there was a sound in her throat and it stopped. Her eyes, the pupils didn't dilate anymore. Dead, dead…
Yes.
Yes. Saw that. Saw that. Fear since, fear of her parents, they're dead but somehow they're alive…
His mind trailed off into a matrix of equations, trying to understand how a neural net could float free of the flesh that had given rise to it, wrap a synthetic body around itself to go forth and feed. Curiosity burned almost as strong as the need to live, somehow tied into reproduction and the life-death cycle down in the base of his hindbrain.
His mind was almost as unusual as Ellen's, in its way.
Withdraw, withdraw, let the pattern repeat, repeat. Memories uncoiled as they were recalled, reknit as they were stored, again and again. Memory wasn't a recording, it was a song, a story the mind told itself, very slightly different every time. Croon it into the shape of desire…
Got to get out, got to get out. GottoGETOUT!
Pushing on an open door. She drew herself back and he turned on his side, drawing into a fetal position, his arms wrapped around his chest.
Chuckling, she let thoughts trickle through their linked minds, tumbled images of her mother baring her teeth-it would be easy enough to mistake one for another, and he'd been appropriately frightened when introduced to her postcorporeal but very much alive and hungry parents. Thoughts of pain, fear, the terrible unwanted ecstasy of feeding. Then the car in the garage, the money in the drawer. Decision firming.
Backwards inch by inch, letting his mind flutter down deeper into sleep, breaking physical and mental contact. His eyes were flickering here and there in rapid eye movement, real dreams, but she'd seen how they would be shaped. Humans had such odd dreams, so…so uncontrolled.
It could be enormous fun to ride their nightmares, in a subtler way than taking their personalities into your own memory palace, but Peter had had enough. This was business.
Soon she was standing at the foot of his bed. 'Poor Peter, I'm going to miss you,' she murmured. 'But perhaps we'll meet again, eh? Bon chance, little physicist.'
She turned and walked out into the dark courtyard, stretching with her arms over her head, blinking and yawning and favoring her tender new foot a little. The night was fairly young: around three o'clock, which was
