He took a deep breath. Just having all this go away was a little tempting…until he remembered that he'd still be swimming with sharks.
Only I wouldn't know they're there. Not until they bite my ass off.
'I have got a lot of payback coming and I need to know how to get to the people who owe me. Right, I embrace the suck, it isn't the first time. Let's start with some explanations.'
There was a subdued clack-snack-snick as the blonde cleared her rifle and put it down on the stone ledge before the empty fireplace.
'No,' she said. ' You guys start by sweeping up the glass and mopping that blood. Then we go…downstairs to the dungeon, and we talk.'
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
'Jesus, this place feels weird,' Salvador muttered to himself. 'Completely Rando.'
He sipped at his latte and watched the people go by the curb-side restaurant, enjoying the mild Californian coastal warmth. He was feeling pretty good physically, too, and he looked down at his gut with considerable approval, and the definition of his arms where the biceps swelled at the T-shirt. Not as ripped as he'd been when he was humping an MG-240 through mouj country, but he wasn't in his twenties anymore, and a lot of that had been sheer nervous energy burning stuff off anyway, or just having nothing to do with his spare time but pump iron, under the no-booze, no-cooze rules of engagement in theater.
The mellow afternoon sun was like silk, and there was a scent of eucalyptus and earth and good cooking and flowers in the air. Apart from the risk of imminent death, life was good, and he was working towards revenge for Cesar and a whole lot of others.
This place feels as weird as a lot of my days as a Helmand Province tourist, and I don't like fancy coffee. Got to fit in, though. I'm not the guy with sensors on my helmet and an Apache gunship and GPS-guided artillery shells and all the good shit on call here. If the other side can find me they can squash me like a cockroach…if I'm lucky. Scuttle through the cracks, don't attract attention until you have to. And they can walk through walls. And read minds.
Adrian had warned him that the wards and blocks in his brain wouldn't stand up under close examination, and that a strong adept could break them, and him, by main force. The process of implanting them had been unpleasant, but he welcomed any protection he could get, and they were supposed to make people more likely to open up to him somehow, at least for a day or so.
Like the man said, I'm the guerrilla now, and I need every trick I can get. It sucks…so embrace the suck, Eric, embrace the suck. But it's creepy here, not just dangerous.
Rancho Sangre Sagrado was far too pretty, just for starters. Virtually all of it was built in one style, a Californian try at looking high-toned Mexican-Spanish that had been very popular back towards the beginning of the last century, and influential since. All arches and whitewashed walls or colored stucco, red barrel-tiled roofs, colored mosaic tile accents on corners or walls, glimpses through wrought-iron gates into spectacular courtyard gardens, the occasional square or round tower on a store or public building with those odd outswelling things called machicolations.
It wasn't that he didn't like the style; in fact, he thought it was rather handsome, and it certainly suited the landscape and climate; plus it was less obviously made-up than Santa Fe's flat roofs. The only reason his early Spanish ancestors had built Santa Fe the way they did and lived in flat-roofed Pueblo-style buildings was that they couldn't afford what they really wanted, which would have looked a lot more like this. New Mexico had been the ass-end Siberia of Spain's empire, isolated by poverty and deserts and Apaches, the place you sent Cousin Diego after the embarrassing thing with the nun.
But there were was nothing else here, not even on the outskirts, not a single fifties-sixties public washroom- style heap of stained concrete and buckled aluminum, nothing more recent, like a funhouse mirror twisty-fancy with mirrored glass, not even any of the usual standard suburban frame.
There wasn't even a church; and while he wasn't religious except when talking to his heavily Catholic grandmother to keep her happy, it added a note of oddness. There was a building that looked like it had been a church, white and fancifully carved like some he'd seen in Mexico, but it was apparently some sort of community theater now.
And I have my suspicions about the sort of shows they put on there, too.
The whole place felt vaguely un-American, in the strict sense; it felt like someone had settled on a way it should look and then just enforced it for better than a hundred years, with new construction strictly because there were more people, and that in the same style. It reminded him of Santa Barbara, which he'd visited on leave from Camp Pendleton years ago, but more so; or of the heavily conserved parts of Santa Fe, for another, but with more consistent application of a thick layer of folding green to tidy up the edges. As far as he could see there was no equivalent of his hometown's Cerrillos Road, a strip of ticky-tack and motels and RV parks with the best view of the Sangres in town. Everything looked like it was washed and scrubbed and repainted and the flowers given a quick swipe with a cloth every morning.
Idly, he punched New Urbanist into his tablet; he was simply waiting for evening now, and picking up a little intel by listening in on people. Ellen had used the term about the place in his briefing. A quick flick through the articles confirmed that she'd been right.
A lot like Celebration, Florida, only not built all at the same time.
Even the three-tiered fountain in the brick circle at the middle of the intersection in front of him was like the one in the picture, three terra-cotta basins of diminishing size. It made him wonder whom the architects had been getting their directions from…but then, in the month since meeting Mr. and Ms. Breze, so had a lot of things. Even the loopiest conspiracy theories looked tame compared to the truth, and now whenever he looked around it was like he could see things bulging and squirming beneath the surface-even people's faces. Who knew, who knew…
'Your pastries, sir,' the waitress said.
She set down a plate with fragrant-smelling muffins in a cute little basket.
'Thanks.'
He glanced over automatically at her cleavage, which was a pleasant sight, and chatted for a moment; she was in her late teens or early twenties, red haired and freckled and fresh faced…and dangling between those creamy jiggling-firm cheerleader titties was a tiny pendant. A jagged trident across a black-rayed sun on a chain. The Breze house badge, and the symbol of the Council of Shadows and the Order of the Black Dawn. The oldest and most senior of all the Shadowspawn houses, the ones who'd spread their genetic knowledge of the Power to the secret clans worldwide, and the lords of Rancho Sangre. Nearly everyone he'd seen here wore one, around the neck or on a bangle or a key chain or whatever.
It meant she was a renfield. That she knew who and what ran this place, and had been initiated. A collaborator.
He astonished himself with the wave of violent hatred that swept through him: a blast like stomach acid at the back of his throat, a vision of a bomb scything through the crowd around him in fragments of nails and bolts and furniture and leaving wreckage and flames.
Whoa, he thought. Watch it! The kid can't help where she was born. She might be an okay person.
'Another latte, please,' he said, and read her name badge. 'Tiffany.'
Instead of letting the images cycle through his head he ate another apricot-walnut muffin: very good indeed, and even the butter had real taste. The menu said, All local, all organic, right under the classic Art Deco Sunkist label cover from the nineteen twenties, and had a little small-print, Breze Enterprises, down in the lower left corner.
Ellen had also said the place was like a rich man's show-ranch, only with people instead of palomino horses. Everyone in it was a renfield, except for stoop labor trucked in for the day from elsewhere. And occasional travelers, not all of whom made it out alive.
When the waitress returned to fill his cup he let his wrist bangle show; it had the mon symbol of the Tokairin clan on it.
'Oh!' the waitress said. 'Hi! You're one of the faithful too! We don't get all that many outsiders here, not
