CHAPTER ELEVEN
'Are you sure we should accept the invitation?' Ellen said.
Adrian shook his head. 'No,' he replied frankly. 'But when my great-grandfather issues it, I am sure that the consequences of refusal would be worse. If he simply intended to kill us, we'd probably be dead already.'
He left unspoken the knowledge that there were worse things than death, and that his technically dead ancestor might simply be toying with them.
'Ah…honey…'
He turned and looked at her, concern in his dark gold-flecked eyes.
She took a deep breath. He wasn't in the least a bully, not even unintentionally, but his strength of personality could make you feel uncertain about arguing with him just by existing.
'Honey, I don't think you realize just how much I don't want to meet any other Shadowspawn but you. You're the only one I've met who doesn't make me want to kill them, or run screaming, or…And I'm afraid of flashbacks. This great-grandfather of yours, he's the Big Bad, right?'
He nodded. 'Grand master of the Order of the Black Dawn and the Council of Shadows,' he said. 'He has been for over a century.'
She closed her eyes. 'Okay, this is the guy behind World War One and Two, the Holocaust, the killing fields, the Congolese wars, the Seoul thing, the…the just about everything. And we're supposed to go have dinner with him?' Almost pleadingly: 'Look, couldn't I stay here and watch over Professor Duquesne or something? Rather than having dinner with werewolf Hitler and his vampire bride?'
He took her hands. 'My dove, for one thing I want you to be safe. Or as safe as possible.'
' Safe?' she said.
'This place…the Pavillion Ledoyen…opened in 1791,' he replied. 'Great-grandfather has been coming here all his…well, life. And postlife. He brought me there on a visit when I was ten, during our annual summer trip to Europe.'
Which was forty years ago, Ellen thought. That keeps tripping me up.
Adrian went on: 'It's one of the favored spots for Shadowspawn in Paris because of the continuity; there's a truce for the restaurant and grounds. That's one of the main reasons I agreed to this, instead of running immediately. I do not want you anywhere else without me.'
'More, I feel stronger with you beside me, also,' he said. 'We are comrades-in-arms now, as well as lovers. And…you are my link to normalcy, to sanity, to all that is good. Merely being around my great-grandparents is to fall into an alien dimension, ethically.'
She hugged him. 'Okay, when you put it like that. Sorry for the collywobbles.'
'It is nothing.'
'Odd to get a dinner invitation from the emperor of the Earth,' she mused.
'First among rivals, rather,' Adrian said. 'And by aspiration, more of a living god. Or unliving god.'
'You're frightened, aren't you?' Ellen asked.
He glanced at her quickly. 'Anyone who is not afraid of Etienne-Maurice Breze is an idiot,' he said quietly. 'And Seraphine is only marginally less dangerous, if at all.'
Then he smiled a crooked smile. 'Yet at least you look lovely.'
Even with the tension, that could make her feel a flush of pleasure, and she turned slowly; she was wearing a turquoise sheath, shoulderless, tight above and with a slightly flared skirt three fashionable inches below the knee that showed off her hourglass figure. Her antique shawl shimmered with silver paillettes, and the choker silver necklace held aquamarines laid out in Mhabrogast glyphs, bringing out the deep blue of her eyes.
It was all rather fetching, and the choice of precious metal was not an accident, either. It wasn't precisely that silver was toxic to Shadowspawn; they certainly didn't sizzle at its touch. But the Power couldn't affect it, or could only by massive and painful effort, and silver weapons affected them as ordinary ones did her type of human. That went doubly for night-walkers and postcorporeals, who could make themselves impalpable to ordinary matter with a little warning.
Her fair brows drew together a little, and she paused to adjust Adrian's bow tie-he was in formal evening dress, and looking very fetching in an archaic, rakish James Bond sort of way, especially with the deep red cummerbund.
'Honey, there's something that sort of puzzles me. You can walk through walls, right?'
'Yes, when out of the body, with a little effort.'
'Then how come you don't drop right into the ground when you do?'
To her surprise he looked a little alarmed; rather the way a claustrophobic would if confronted with the thought of being buried alive in a small coffin.
'You can, if you're careless, though there's an…instinctual reluctance to let the soles of your feet go impalpable while they're in contact with the earth. And you can go palpable very quickly if you fall over. It's usually a fatal mistake if you don't.'
'Why?'
'Because when you're in solid matter you have to stay impalpable. You're sliding through matter and can't affect it, there's nothing to push with. Total darkness, no air…the night-walking body needs to breathe eventually too, remember, even if not as often as the corporeal one.'
He took a long breath. 'It's an instinctual fear, with us. Those who didn't have it didn't live long enough to breed.'
She thought about it for a moment, then shuddered herself. 'What happens?'
'Nobody knows. Presumably you slide down until you lose consciousness and your energy matrix disperses in death; it has mass, and gravity affects it. Or until you reach the center of the earth, though the heat would randomize you first.'
'Ow. Well, at least there're some disadvantages to the package!'
She took a deep breath and looked around the apartment. They'd been there only a few days, but already it seemed like a home, a welcome refuge against a world larger and colder, stranger and cruder than it was easy to comprehend.
'Will the professor be okay?'
'Probably. I've warded this place as much as I can. He's certainly safer than he would be anywhere else. Safer than he would be if we brought him to my great-grandfather's attention! You, they know about. Him, they do not, as yet.'
They rode the elevator down in silence, holding hands. The hired limo's driver held an umbrella over them as they walked out to the curb; a light pattering of cold rain fell on it, and a few drops that evaded it raised gooseflesh on the bare skin of her shoulders. The silk shawl was draped elegantly but uselessly over her elbows; she pulled it up with a gentle chime from the paillettes.
Mentally, she ran through the etiquette of meeting the grand master of the Order of the Black Dawn and the Council of Shadows.
Honey, here's my great-granddad, the emperor of evil, she thought. Oh, well, you know what they say – you fall in love with your fiance but you're stuck with his family!
She shivered slightly, and had no impulse at all to repeat the thought aloud. As attempted jokes went, that cut far too close to the bone.
Pavillon Ledoyen was just off the Champs-Elysees, fronted by a strip of lawn and gardens, surrounded by huge old chestnuts, and then by flowers in pots. It was not far from the Petit Palais; her training immediately classified it as late-eighteenth-century neoclassical in origin with a lot of Victorian work. The side facing the street had a high pediment supported by caryatids in the form of white-robed women, a sculpted architrave above and ledoyen in white on blue. The arched glass awning over the main entrance looked a little more like art nouveau work, the ribs cast as elongated silver maidens. Their limousine swung into the circular driveway, past a fountain with a central statue.
'It's been here awhile, eh?' she said to Adrian, clutching at her purse. 'Seventeen ninety-one?'
'With a major renovation in eighteen forty-two,' he said.
The blade within the purse was a slight comfort. Her fringed shawl was welcome in the cool autumnal
