glistening ointments and the fact that every hair on her head and body had dropped out.
Like a famine victim, only not so funny, she thought.
She ached. Her digestive system felt as if it were packed with mud from the back of her throat to her lower intestine. She itched. Not just the amputated foot where the regeneration was starting far too slowly, but all over. Having several dozen milligrams of silver solution and radioactive waste pumped into you would be bad enough for a human, but the Shadowspawn metabolism was more vulnerable to both. If she'd gotten the full dose…
'You do look pretty awful,' Michiko said. 'It's a good thing I cut your foot off in one swell foop.'
Then she giggled. 'I only beat Dale to it by a second or two because I had a wakizashi on me. Dale was going to use his bowie, and Dmitri just went around roaring and waving a chair in the air.'
'He was a silverback gorilla at the time. It's easy to get lost in the beast when it's that close to your own form.'
' Especially with Dmitri and gorillas. But one advantage of all that old Japan stuff grandfather liked is that I had the short sword on me.'
'That was quick work,' Adrienne acknowledged. 'I'd have died if you had not cut the foot off before much of that Hell-brew got into my circulatory system-and I might have been too distracted to go postcorporeal in time, too. Even the best plans and probability fluxes are…irritatingly uncontrollable at times.'
'Well, your darling brother was involved, which screws the Power. Why don't you just spend more time inside while you're healing?'
'Because it's boring playing games in my head after a while, Michi,' Adrienne replied. 'So I ration myself, that way it's a relief when I do it. Besides, I have to keep track of what's going on and make decisions.'
'You could night-walk and then sleep away the days,' she pointed out. 'Your night-walking manifestation is so good even I can't tell you're out-of-body unless I really concentrate.'
'Night-walking…my body's still too weak to have the personality gone for long, it needs me in here concentrating on healing. Unless I want to go postcorporeal for good, and I don't, not yet. It would be inconvenient. I'm going to stay corporeal until I get old.'
Michiko wasn't being very considerate-but then, they were both Shadowspawn, and empathy simply wasn't their breed's strong point; Michiko was nearly as purebred as the Brezes.
There's always Monica or Jose if I feel like sympathy.
The other Shadowspawn was also looking disgustingly sleek and contented, dressed in a pale silk summer dress and strapped sandals; she'd turned her hair blond again-a minor Wreaking-and it fell in silky waves past her high-cheeked Asian face.
'Now, to business,' Adrienne said. 'My father and mother say things are going smoothly.'
Michiko nodded. 'The Tokairin clan's accepted me…and Ichiro…without much trouble. Only had to kill a few, and no Final Deaths,' she said. 'I can't be too friendly to the Breze interests yet, of course. I'm supposed to be here talking to your parents, warning them not to try anything while we settle down under the new management. Nobody suspects you're not gone, as far as we can tell.'
'Good cover. And after all, you didn't kill my parents, your grandfather did, so it would be easier for you to negotiate with them now that he's dead all the way.'
Under Michiko's grandfather the Tokairin had ousted the Californian Brezes as the primary Shadowspawn group on the West Coast in a neat little coup over a generation ago. Most of the Tokairin liked it just fine that way. Fortunately Michiko accepted that Adrienne had her mind on larger things, and besides that, they were on the same side of the great Shadowspawn generational divide. As her now thoroughly deceased grandfather had learned, far too late and very briefly.
Michiko went on: 'We're gearing up for the Council meeting, and we won a lot of support for the way we acted when the Brotherhood terrorists killed Grandfather.'
A mental communication passed between them: not words, more like a snigger.
'That's good…I'm a little tired now, Michi.'
'Get better soon. I'm not up to heading the Progressives on my own! Besides, we could go clubbing.'
'Better I remain dead-dead for a while, to the rest of the world.'
The sickroom was part of the casa grande of Rancho Sangre Sagrado, the mansion in the little California town that had been the first Breze property on the West Coast, back in the eighteen sixties, when they brought the message of the Order of the Black Dawn to this part of the New World.
'Oh,' Michiko said. 'And the police in Santa Fe are sniffing around about that lucy of yours…the blond one whose blood smelled so edible…those marvelous tits and the way her brain fired when you hurt her…'
'Ellen. Who did this to me, don't forget. Take care of it for me, would you?'
' De nada. I'll set our renfields in the government on it. Do them good. I can look in if it's more than they can handle quietly, we do want to keep people-'
By which she meant their kind of people, of course.
'-from thinking too much about Adrian. Since I'm the head of the ruling clan in the area, nobody can object.'
Adrienne shut her eyes and sighed as her friend-ally-rival left. One of the advantages of being sick was that nobody expected her to take care of business. Whatever was happening in Santa Fe, for example, where Ellen and Adrian and Adrienne between them had been fairly…
Blatant, she thought.
It was still important not to be too conspicuous. Not for much longer, though. Not after the Empire of Shadow returned in force.
Then it'll be just one long party. Except for the ones on the buffet.
The various monitors and the tubes and catheters gave a tang of ozone to the medicine scents, overriding the greenery from outside. A doctor came in, middle-aged and ginger-haired, with a stethoscope looped around her neck and the head tucked into a pocket of her green scrubs.
'It's time for your feeding, Dona,' she said briskly, a slight Scots burr still roughening her voice.
The hunger was there, but curiously muffled. I never thought I'd get bored with blood, she thought. I want to hunt now and then. Or maybe it's just that I crave some solid food as well for variety.
A postcorporeal could survive on human blood alone, but even they didn't want to, usually, except for a few superstitious antique types. Corporeals needed ordinary nourishment at least every now and then.
'I wish I could eat something more tangible as well, Dr. Duggan,' she said, a little fretfully. 'I'm starting to have dreams about steak, or some crab claws, or sweet-and-sour pork. Or even vegetables ?
'Intravenous will have to do. You're not ready, though you should be able to take broth soon,' the renfield doctor said. 'I'm still amazed you survived, even with the whole-body transfusions we did. Entire organs kept… nearly…shutting down. But once the corner was turned the recovery has been very rapid, and it seems to be accelerating. Astonishingly rapid, in fact, as if your body is chelating the poisons somehow.'
'The Power was helping, but on an unconscious level,' Adrienne said. 'I can direct it now, and that'll speed things up, and the more I get rid of the toxins the more my command of the Power will return. It's a positive feedback cycle.'
Duggan nodded, obviously taking mental notes. She had been the primary physician at Rancho Sangre for two decades now, and she'd always been intrigued by the Shadowspawn.
'I am feeling a little blood-hungry,' Adrienne went on. 'Now that you mention it.'
Plus, of course, you needed blood to do more than the most basic Wreaking with the Power. Otherwise you risked draining your own reserves dangerously.
I wonder why that is, she thought.
One of her lucies, Peter, had been-still was-a physicist. He had some interesting ideas about how the Power functioned. What had he said…
The Shadowspawn mind is like a transistor. It modulates the forces it draws from the quantum foam, it doesn't create it. But the modulation itself draws from the energy matrix of the personality.
He wasn't a biologist, of course, so he hadn't been any help with the physical mechanisms, or why human blood was essential. And she was using the Power to heal. She should take as much blood as her stomach could handle.
'Who's on the schedule?' she asked. 'I've sort of lost track.'
'We were using pickups at first. You weren't really conscious and there was some incidental damage while
