She laughed. 'Besides, the people you knew can't have all been bad. Those Brotherhood types are on the side of the Good, Pure and True. Right?'
'So were the men who saturated Dresden and Tokyo with incendiary bombs until streams of melted human fat ran in the gutters,' he said. 'One becomes hardened, if you live at all.'
Then he surprised her a little by reciting:
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.'
They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities.
He shook his head and snorted a little. 'Living with you challenges me,' he said. More softly: 'And shames me. I have not dared to feel deeply, for fear of loss. That is unpardonable cowardice.'
The rental came with pilots, maintenance and cabin staff; she suspected Adrian would have done without the latter if he could, and it had meant keeping certain parts of their luggage locked and in the bedroom. Even with a private charter like this, people would talk if you carried an assortment of lethal hardware on board openly. Which reminded her…'What about going through customs?'
This time his smile was a little ironic. 'My darling, I can use both the Brotherhood's and the Council's…safe words. Codes that will tell the officials to turn a blind eye and wave us through. They undoubtedly think-'
'-that we're spooks,' she finished, and thumped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. 'I feel like I'm walking through walls all the time. The bottom dropped out of the world, but as a compensation I get to go through all these cool secret doors. I suppose I'll get used to living down the rabbit hole. Only it's not Wonderland, it's WonderHell.'
'I hope you don't have to live so,' he said. 'Not for long, at least.'
She noticed that he didn't say she wouldn't spend the rest of her life doing just that. One of the things she liked about Adrian was that he didn't overpromise.
The staff brought them dinner and retired quickly at his glare; Adrian was usually gracious in a sort of de haut en bas way, but this time he was deliberately cold, to keep them out of contact as much as possible. It was unlikely that more could endanger them, but there was no reason to take extra chances with bystanders.
Ellen looked down at the meal; steamed asparagus with herb sauce, Kasseler Rippchen -smoked, brine-cured pork chops in an egg-and-crumb crust-finger-length golden-brown potato Schupfnudeln…
She began to laugh. At Adrian's raised eyebrow she ate a bite of the pork, savoring the smoky, salty richness, and then spoke:
'I was remembering my first cattle-car-with-wings across the ocean. NYU was by-God going to expose us art history types to the original font of kultcha, even if we had to suffer for it. My seatmates on either side weighed three hundred pounds each, and…Well, I wasn't picky about food then, but…'
Adrian winced. 'I could not endure it. No, literally. My, ah, reflexes would be too likely to get the better of me. We do not adapt well to crowding, my breed.'
Thoughtfully: 'One can go into trance, of course. But that leaves you so helpless.'
They finished with kranz ring cake, sweet buttercream frosting studded with toasted hazelnuts, and a filling of cherry preserve. After a moment they were feeding each other forkfuls across the table.
'This is weird,' she said, using a napkin. 'We get honeymoon crossed with deadly peril.'
'Spice added to spice,' he said.
The dark yellow-flecked eyes burned at her, and she felt a shiver prickle over her skin. She reached into a bag and smiled.
'Recognize this?'
He blinked in puzzlement. 'No…some medical device?'
'It's made for people suffering from anemia,' she said, and stuck her finger in it. 'Frau Saracoglu had it expressed to the plane for me. God knows what she thought I needed it for.'
'Did she ask?'
'Yes. I said you were a vampire, but considerate.'
Adrian gave a shout of laughter. That gave her a spike of pleasure; he wasn't exactly gloomy, but it wasn't exactly a common thing to see him lose himself in a moment's humor, either. A little light shone green and the digital display lit up.
'Ah, red cell count normal, pressure normal, flow normal, viscosity normal…Think of it as compensation. With you having the Power, I don't have to worry about birth control. I do have to keep track of blood loss.'
He raised a brow. 'It would be advisable for me to be…fully charged. Though we have blood-bank supplies on board.'
Ellen grinned at his involuntary grimace; she knew how loathsome cold, dead blood tasted to a Shadowspawn. Adrian was the only one she'd met who would use it at all.
'C'mon. That double king-size bed is calling our name. We're going into danger. So first, let's party!'
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The reticulated python of Asia was the world's largest snake. For a flashing instant some part of Peter Boase's mind contemplated the irony that his last thought would be a totally irrelevant piece of data like that, culled from a random Wikipedia search years ago.
Then he was rolling on the floor with four turns of the thigh-thick, thirty-foot body around him. It threw a loop of its tail around a leg of the bed for leverage and the needle teeth bit into his captive shoulder. Air wheezed out of his lungs as the terrible pressure squeezed inward.
His scrabbling right hand came down on the knife, gashing his fingers. He gripped it and flailed at the snake's diamond-patterned body, cutting himself again, and then slashed at its head. But the tip penetrated the taut skin, and the long head came up with a hiss. It whipped aside and the nose struck the base of his thumb like a jackhammer; the hand spasmed open and the weapon went flying a second time. That gave him a single instant to gasp in a breath before the pressure resumed.
Cold reptile blood spattered his face. He wheezed again, and waited for the cracking of ribs and death.
Crackcrackcrackcrack.
Peter thought the stutter of harsh elastic snaps was the end, his own bones giving way like green sticks; then the intolerable constriction eased. He lay struggling to draw in air with his diaphram half-paralyzed. The python blurred as it thrust itself at the wall…
He blinked. It had gone through the wall, as if it were diving into a horizontal pool of water. Then it was gone. Hands gripped him under the arms and threw him into a chair; two dark-clad figures sandwiched him, backs towards him and pistols leveled outward in professional two-handed grips. Their sweat stank of fear.
'You get him, Jack?' the third man asked, his voice the rasping drawl of rural Texas.
Like them he was in nondescript dark outdoor clothing; his long, bony face was battered and weathered, and gray streaked his cropped brown hair. He threw several packs on the bed as he spoke.
'Clipped him,' one of the men said in reply. 'Tail, I think. He didn't have time to Wreak on the guns. And using a snake's brain probably slows your wits.'
'He will Wreak first if he comes back,' a woman's voice said.
'He'll be hurting,' the one called Jack replied.
The older man nodded. 'Even so. Blades. Guha, you do the walls. Careful about the floor join, there's no crawl space but…'
'I know, big boss,' the woman said.
Her voice was singsong, the accent of someone who grew up speaking Hindi along with English, possibly added for emphasis.
They holstered the guns beneath their jackets and took out long curved knives; they looked like they were wearing some sort of body armor under their clothes as well. The woman went to the packs, shrugged one onto her
