A Taint in the Blood (41 page)

Softly the older man finished: “I see their faces sometimes.”

“True.
Moi aussi.
Goodbye, then, old friend. Remember, she will be with Hajime of a certainty at the final ceremony, if there is no opportunity before.”

“You just keep her pinned long enough for the bullet to hit.” A grin. “It’s going to be what you might call a target-rich environment and I’ve got a fair amount of ammo.”

“There is only one target that really matters.”

He leaned back against the softness of the sleeping bag and the air pillow. Dimly he could see Harvey take up the sniper rifle, its outline broken up by a scrim of fabric that turned it shaggy. The other man pulled down a bulbous face-mask with passive image intensifiers built into it, and clicked off the blue light.

Adrian let the Mhabrogast form in his mind, convincing his hindbrain that it did not need his physical form:
Amss-aui-
ock!

There was an instant of wrenching, ice-and-silver pain along his nerves, and he was standing and looking down at his body.

Another, and his body
flowed
. He felt duller, more constrained; Peterson had not been as purebred as he, nor as intelligent in general. The part of him that was always
him
struggled, and thought and senses gradually grew more clear. Adjusting a form was much more difficult than simply donning it, but possible, and once done could be locked in for recall. Harvey looked at him critically.

“That’s Peterson at about twenty-one,” he said.

“I don’t have the somatic memories,” Adrian replied. “It’s not unknown for postcorporeals to de-age their aetheric forms, and God knows he had time.”

“It’ll have to do. Good luck, ol’ buddy.”

Adrian nodded and stepped towards the camouflage curtain. He concentrated, and to the aetheric eyes the complex fabric faded to invisibility. The molecules of his stolen form slipped through those of the cloth, and he was naked in the early night. Around him was a web of floating energies; curtains of them crawled across the stars, still a little hurtful in the west where the sun had vanished. He raised his arms to the night, let the syllables he whispered shape what was, and
willed
.

Form flowed. Perceptions flowed and changed with it; scent dulled, but vision grew far keener than his eyes saw by day, and hearing had an unearthly sensitivity that made the rustle of a field-mouse as loud as boots on gravel and gave direction with swift precision. The sounds of the night were a roar, but after an instant each was as distinct as lines scribed with a diamond. Thought shrank, but took on a savage directness that did not seek to question itself. Broad wings five feet from tip to tip caught at the night, and a great snowy owl ghosted upward as small things skittered in panic or more wisely froze.

Exultation filled him as feathers caressed the air and danced with it, and it took the silent command of the man-mind that lurked at the back of the narrow avian brain to keep it from plunging and sporting in sheer joy. Instead he circled for height, stroking with his wings when he must, riding currents of air he could see as billowing shapes when he caught them. Land unrolled below him, not the map-image you saw with a man’s eyes from an aircraft but a living tapestry as detailed as skin beneath a microscope, down to each clear-cut leaf and grass-blade. Fields, roads, buildings . . .

. . . and hovering above one a banner of energies, potentials sparkling into and out of existence.

That
he saw with the eyes of the Power which never left him. A simple construct, but with the mark of his sister’s savage elegance:
here
.

Ellen is there
, he thought with some part of him that still remembered words.
I can feel the base-link. She is miserable, with more than mere fear
.

It was close, but he banked widely to make sure that no other night-walker rode the air. None were nearby, though their approach tickled at his senses. He folded his wings then, and dove. Speed built, and the earth swelled; he could hear the murmur of many voices, loud and ugly to the owl’s hearing. Human voices, some carrying the freight of pain and fear. The building swelled, a long rectangular stable or barn of stucco-covered concrete with openings just under the peak of the tile roof at either end. For a form that could stoop on prey by sound alone it was simple to dive through, though the blaze of electric light was hurtful

The space within was divided by a fence of wire mesh. The larger part held prisoners, eighty or so men and women.

The others . . . guards, in the uniform of small-town policemen. His sister, her aura like a blow, a wave of rank salt blood and slinking menace. Another woman in elegant dress, radiating fear and a sick dread and an abject abandonment. And . . .

Ellen
, he thought.
Ellen. Why did she bring you here?

“E
eerrk!
”

Ellen bit off the small shriek as the slim long-fingered hand fell on her shoulder while she stared at the computer screen.

“I know you hate it. That’s why I do it.
Sadist
, remember? What’s this?”

Adrienne’s head followed the hand, looking at the arrangement of the paintings on the screen and the number-coded map of the
casa grande
.

“This is my plan for the next step in reorganization,” Ellen said. “There’s more than enough display space in the
casa
, you’re just not using it to best advantage. We’ve done the basic sectional sort-and-move; now we need to get down to fine-tuning the placement of each piece.”

“Excellent,
ma douce
.”

The office-study of Ellen’s house on Lucy Lane had had time to acquire touches of her own in the three months since she’d arrived; an orange cat that she’d half-adopted despite her resolution lounged in a corner, and a pot of coffee on a hotplate scented the air, along with the warm May flowers-and-grass scent through the open window, with a breath of coolness as the day spun down into night.

There were prints—a couple of Impressionists—and a genuine Mary Cassatt of two women drinking tea that
should
have been in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It had simply appeared on the wall one day, and she’d been caught between guilt and long periods of simply staring, transported.

“
Sadist
, remember?” Adrienne chuckled. Then she trailed a finger down Ellen’s neck. “You’re looking lovely, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“Put this on too.”

Adrienne handed her a flat case, antique tooled leather with a diamond clasp. Ellen opened it and swallowed. It was a Victorian piece, a two-tiered necklace of collar and spray in gold and rubies against black velvet.

“That’s lovely,” she said sincerely.

“I’m glad you like it. It’s been in the family for some time, as an ornament for our lucies. Note the theme of bloodred. It really needs a blond to carry it off.”

The order to
dress up for evening
hadn’t specified a time, so she’d lost herself in work despite the long sheath of shimmering silver-scalloped black with a cloth-of-gold shawl thrown over her chair. The first day of the house party would start tonight. She bent her head forward and held up her hair to let the Shadowspawn fasten the goldwork.

“Precisely. How is your Spanish?”

Decent conversational as long as it isn’t too complicated,
Ellen thought.
I understand it better than I can speak it.

“Mine’s fully fluent, but European, with a bit of an accent,” Adrienne said.

“What sort?”

“Occitan; I sound like a Catalan trying to be Castilian to someone from Madrid. Come along, then.”

“What . . . do I have to do?”

“The last shipment of refreshments has come in, and Paco—he’s a coyote by trade, but jackal would be more appropriate—didn’t listen to my instructions.”

“What . . . instructions?” Ellen mumbled, her mouth suddenly dry as she stood and plucked at the shawl.

“I
told
him I wanted young adults—young, healthy, good-looking.

The imbecile has saddled me with half a dozen mothers with children—all trying to get into the country to join their husbands, no doubt. Or convinced their husbands have conveniently forgotten them in this land of liberty. He probably thought I wouldn’t object if he brought them just before the deadline. I want you to be reassuring so we can separate the children without a screaming scene. Reassuring is something I find oddly difficult.”

“Why . . . me?” Ellen asked.

Adrienne smiled like a cat. “Because you’ll hate it, but do it anyway and feel horribly degraded and dirty afterwards, which is interesting emotionally,” she said. “Third time’s the charm;
sadist
, remember?
Vite!
”

Adrienne was dressed in riding gear in an English jodhpurs-and-tweed style, including a crop. The steel-cored leather landed across the seat of Ellen’s skirt with a hard cracking sound. That was no braided silk; it
hurt
, hard and sudden.

“Ouch!”

“
Vite
means
quickly
. It’s the imperative form of the verb, too.”

She hit the
save
button and followed the Shadowspawn out to the TARDEC utility vehicles. Adrienne swung in beside the driver of the first. A rather subdued Monica was in the rear seat, dressed in a pleated skirt and a tight low-cut crimson bodice. She helped Ellen in; it wasn’t the sort of transport designed for long evening-dresses. They went through the gate in the perimeter wall of the
casa grande
and around a roadway that looped towards the hills westward, along a well-kept gravel road that crunched under the wheels. The lights of the vehicles came on, as the sun sank in an orange glow behind the hills.

They stopped at a building she would have said was a well-kept large stable or medium-sized rectangular barn with plastered walls, set back among the lawns and live-oaks where the gardens turned into sweeping pastures with clumps of trees and white-board fences. Servants were lighting a trail of torches in iron holders along a brick-paved path that wound down to the main house. A half-dozen Gurkhas stood inconspicuously outside, or as inconspicuously as you could while wearing body-armor and carrying an assault rifle.

Inside, Chief Mendoza and four of his subordinates stood by a wire-mesh barricade that divided a long space floored in textured concrete. Garlands of flowers on the walls gave it a grotesquely festive feeling, and the lights were on under the high ceiling. Behind the wire were eighty or so people; she could smell their fear-sweat a little. All of them looked Mexican, half males and half females; most of the women were dressed in loose white tunics like short dresses, and the men in tunics and pants of the same cloth. Around a score were in ordinary clothes, dusty and travel-stained, and looking less frightened but more bewildered than the others.

“Paco,” Adrienne began crisply to another man standing free—in his thirties, and . . .

Handsome in a sleazy way
, Ellen thought.
Hairnet and all. Just what you’d think a people-smuggler would look like
.

“You are an idiot. And I am not pleased,” she went on.

“
Doña
,” he said, in rapid-fire Mexican Spanish. “Here they are, the last of them, delivered on time!”

Adrienne answered in the same language, but Ellen could hear the difference in dialect, the hard
k
and trilled
rr
sounds.

“I said young, healthy, good-looking, and
no children
, Paco. What part of that was too difficult for you to understand?”

The Shadowspawn pointed with her riding crop. “That one, she’s forty if she’s a day, five feet tall and five feet broad. And six . . . seven of the women have young!
That
one is still nursing!”

“I am very sorry—”

“No, you’re not. You’re just sorry I’m making a fuss about it. My guests will be arriving momentarily and we are
not ready!
^”

“I will take a little less for each, perhaps—”

“You’ll take nothing for the ones who don’t meet my specifications.”

She turned her head to Monica and Ellen: “You two get the children out . . . and that older woman. The transport for them should be here by now.
Vite
!”

Mendoza unlocked the gate; the people within surged forward, then back again as two of the policemen drew their automatics. Monica wet her lips and called out in understandable but clumsy Spanish:

“
Los niños
. . . the children should be brought out now. Nothing bad will happen to them.
Van los niños a la guarderia, no se preocupen
. They will stay with good families while you are . . . are busy with the
Doña
’s guests.
Please
, bring the children right now. And, you, señora. There are things . . . there are things it is not good for children to see.
^”

There was a desperate earnestness in her voice; Ellen nodded wordlessly and beckoned. The prisoners murmured among themselves for a moment; then one of the mothers decisively pushed her six-year-old forward. The others followed suit, some crying silently, and the heavy-set middle-aged woman shepherded them through the gate, carrying the nursing infant. One was a girl who looked to be somewhere between eleven and thirteen, the breasts just showing under her T-shirt. A young man who was probably her brother held her back, then shoved her forward at the last moment.