back, and unclipped something that looked like a spray-paint attachment. That turned out to be exactly what it was. She started on the door and worked her way steadily and swiftly around the walls; there was a sharp creosotelike odor in the air, and everything turned a dull silver-gray beneath the nozzle.
Silver, he thought, and croaked it aloud.
'Yup,' the older man said. 'Harvey Ledbetter, Mr. Boase. My friends here are Jack Farmer and Anjali Guha.'
The Indian woman…or more probably Indian-American, from the way she moved…finished her task. The whole inside of the little room was covered in the silver paint now, and the sharp chemical stink filled the air; the three strangers seemed to relax fractionally.
'We're safe?' he said hoarsely.
Guha handed him a glass of water; he drank it while she checked him over with impersonal skill. He winced and bit back a moan a couple of times. He'd been hurt worse whitewater rafting once, and another time while he was rock climbing, but not lately. Plus he was in generally lousy shape, weak and vulnerable.
'No broken bones, no serious sprains or tears,' she said. 'I will fix this bite.'
He stifled another yelp when she ripped back the T-shirt over the red stain and applied antiseptic and a bandage from a kit in one of the knapsacks.
'This…this isn't enough to readdict me, is it?'
Harvey looked at him with what he thought was considering respect.
'You went cold turkey? No wonder you look like shit. You don't have to worry about that. Reestablishing the dependency would take a lot more.' A grin. 'And since Shadowspawn ain't infectious, like in the stories, you don't need to worry 'bout the next full moon either.'
Peter let out a long breath. Right now, he was more afraid of the addiction than death; that would be preferable to going through withdrawal again.
'So we're safe?' he asked again.
'Safe? Yeah, you might say so. Unless our snaky friend has an
RPG-'
At his puzzled look, the man clarified: 'Rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Or somethin' of that order. Not likely. They mostly don't think that way.'
'Adrienne liked technology.'
'She was unusual, and thank God she's dead. So we're safe until he figures out what he feels like doin' next. But that's one heap powerful adept out there. A lot of them don't study on how to use the Power, they just wing it by instinct, but this one does have the full postgraduate course. I could sense it. He's likely to have all the luck- literally.'
'You're the, um, Brotherhood?' he asked, as Farmer and Guha started spray-painting again.
This time it was in black paints, spiky symbols around the edges of the room that seemed to twist and hurt his eyes, until he had to blink and look away. They murmured as they did, in whining, throat-catching syllables.
A thought occurred to him: Wait a minute, that's Mhabrogast! These guys are using the Power too!
Harvey seemed to sense it. 'Yeah, we're the Brotherhood, more or less. La Resistance.'
'Ah,' Peter said. 'A ragtag band of heroes who'll overthrow the evil empire?'
'Nah, mainly we're a nuisance not worth the effort of squashing 'cause we're really good at hiding. A lot of us have enough of the genes to use the Power-not enough to night-walk or feed on blood, though. Think of us as ferrets up against a timber wolf.'
That's comforting. Peter thought. Not.
'What about Adrian?'
'He's somethin' of an exception. And I hope he's here real soon now. 'Cause otherwise we are well and truly fucked.'
'Good to see you out and about,' Dmitri said, leaning on a boulder after he assumed human form once more. 'And as lovely as ever.'
'Flattery, my snake in the grass,' Adrienne chuckled.
She leapt atop it, her own head-height, and squatted in an easy crouch next to her kit to talk to him.
'Besides, this is my etheric body.'
She was justly proud that even another adept couldn't tell it from the corporeal form without probing.
'I'm still not completely back to meat-normal.'
The night was on the comfortable side of chilly; the dry desert air lost heat rapidly. The stars overhead glowed in colors someone more human-less her type of hominid-could not have seen. Steel blue, red, pale green, the almost harsh-bright of the three-quarter moon; Shadowspawn had always been more nocturnal than their prey, and even in the flesh saw better in darkness. The etheric form's eyes were more sensitive still.
'The plan proceeds,' she said.
'Except for the unplanned elements, such as my being shot in the arse and having my throat cut. That is a role reversal I do not relish.'
'A mere detail,' she said, and they both laughed.
'Though I did get a taste of your lucy. In any case, we'd better scout the place again,' he said, shifting to Russian.
' Da,' she said, in the same language. 'Good idea, Dmitri Pavlovitch. We must make their hairbreadth escape completely convincing.'
Learning new tongues was easy for their breed; the same enlarged speech centers that let the telepathic facility read the code of another brain helped the learning process.
'But cautiously,' she said; Dmitri tended to be reckless.
And then she willed, reaching within for the familiar template.
' Amss-aui-ock!' she snapped, a purling, spitting sound.
Mhabrogast, the lingua demonica, the language that mapped and compelled the hidden structures of the world. Potential-being-becoming, an arrogant command directed at the stuff of reality itself. You convinced your mind that you were something, and the mind made it real…
Or close enough to real for government work, she thought whimsically. Close enough for biting, rending, tearing. Close enough for blood.
Pain thrilled along her nerves, a shivering almost-pleasure, a dissolution like sleep or orgasm or death as her very self ceased to exist for nanoseconds. Sight dimmed as her quasi body folded and stretched.
Sound exploded outward, and smells-it was much easier to tell Dmitri was night-walking when his very scent had a sharp metallic overtone, like a small thunderstorm.
A real wolf would have snarled and cowered; she let her long red tongue loll over her fangs and jerked her nose upward. The scurrying rustle of a field mouse nibbling the papery cover of a seed yards away was distinct; so was the growl of a heavy truck's diesel near the distant mountains on the western horizon. The clean scents of the desert's sparse life flowed into her nose, a tapestry even more powerful than hearing, and one that made sight almost irrelevant. The human reeks from the little hamlet a few miles upwind were harsh by contrast. But though the body was a timber wolf, the mind wrapped around the brain stem was Shadowspawn; the thin black lips skinned back from long teeth as she smelled human blood. Warm, spicy, enticing…
Business, she thought. Mere prowling terrorism must await happier times.
Da, Dmitri replied; at close range telepathy was easy and swift. Let us continue our little charade. Ah, if only Michiko- sama were here!
She's attending to something else, Adrienne said. Besides, I dont think she reciprocates your affection, Dmitri.
I'd be waiting for her to get silver in her buttocks, the male Shadowspawn gibed.
He'd been rubbing at his arse-she had to admit it was a fairly nice one, taut and muscular, though right now marked with red where the silver bullets had grazed the snake's tail. He was taller than most, nearly six feet, and his hair was long and white-blond. It tossed like hers in the grit-filled wind that coursed by. Then he threw his arms
