A Taint in the Blood (46 page)

It might have been a cocktail party or reception anywhere, except for the odd touch—Jules disappearing into an alcove with his lucy, Mark . . . reappearing with blood on his lips and Mark looking flushed and rumpled, for example. Then Adrienne’s head came up; she nodded and made an inconspicuous signal.

The Shadowspawn present moved to either side of the doors. Ellen shared a glance with Peter, and got a nod from him too; the movement was slow and ragged and Adrienne was obviously restraining a shout of
Hurry up, you idiots!
with difficulty. Theresa had the favored renfields and lucies lined up behind them much more quickly.

The great doors swung open; the air outside was a little cooler, scented with flowers and warm dust. A file of the Gurkha mercenaries marched in wearing green dress uniforms with silver buttons and little pillbox hats; they split and wheeled into two lines on either side, and brought their rifles up to
present arms
with a smart stamp and crash of boots and smack of hands on metal.

Tōkairin Hajime walked through, in a black sha-silk kimono and gray
hakama
—wide trousers like a split skirt. The
haori
jacket over it all was open at the front, and bore five
kamon
, House badges with the
mon
of his clan. His wife was behind him, in a rustling splendor of white and rose and crimson and intricate headdress; an attendant carried his swords, leaving his hands empty except for a fan, and there were several others behind him. He and his party stepped out of their sandals and a servant knelt to help them on with slippers.

Adrienne swept forward and sank in a deep curtsy—the antique form combined with a bow, but the Western gesture nonetheless. Her parents followed suit.

Ah,
Ellen thought, watching his nod in return; everyone else just bowed.
That’s
more
respectful, not less. I wonder what
she’s
thinking?

 

 

“
Tōkairin-sama, yoku irasshaimashita
,” Adrienne said, in formal greeting. “Lord Tōkairin! Welcome to my home.”

“Sorry to be a bother,” Hajime said—which made more sense in Japanese. Then he switched to English for a moment: “Thank you for going to all this trouble.”

“It was the least I could do,” Adrienne half-purred.

“
Tsumaranai mono desu ga . . .”
he went on;
this is a mere trifle
, or words to that effect.

The gift was a sword in a superb black-lacquered sheath, an elegant plainness. She made a small, quite genuine exclamation of pleasure as she took the silk-cord grip in her hand and drew it just enough for a sliver of the silver-worked layered steel to show, then clicked it home to keep the chill menace of the activated glyphs warded. Someone who really knew what they were doing had worked over this one. Hajime was powerful enough, but not so subtle a Wreaker.

They went through the usual
oh-I-couldn’t-possibly/please-accept-this
dance that Hajime’s background required.

Then Adrienne indicated a pair from those her renfields had picked from potential quarry at San Simeon over the past few months—a statuesque redheaded girl with milk-pale skin and a sandy-haired youth with a beautiful dancer’s body. Both showed to advantage in the short white feeding tunics, and they had been carefully primed, mostly by a detailed and honest description of what was likely to happen to them. They had sensitive, intelligent minds, now nearly paralytic with terror but unable to stop imagining their fates in flashes of vivid imagery that came through beautifully.

It was enough to make
her
hungry, and she’d fed well today. There was nothing quite like picking out
the worst
from someone’s mind and then actually
doing
it to them.

“
Nani mo gozaimasen ga, dozo meshiagatte kudasai
,” she said: “It’s nothing, but please go ahead and have some.”

Hajime’s wife had been decorously quiet except for a murmured exchange of greetings; now her teeth clicked together slightly.

“
Oishisou
,” she said softly:
looks delicious
.

The clan-head smiled and gave Adrienne a shrewd glance, and she could feel Michiko’s bubble of quickly-suppressed mirth even through her shields.

“You are courteous to a fault,” he said. “Later, certainly.”

Theresa and her assistants hustled the pair out; they’d be ready in the guest-suite when dawn made postcorporeals seek shelter. The formal greeting array broke down as Hajime and his retinue began to mingle.

“My only worry is that my mad brother may somehow manage to spoil things,” Adrienne said to him.

The Shadowspawn overlord of the West Coast snorted. “I doubt that very much.”

Michiko bowed. “I have had our best men checking carefully, Grandfather,” she said. “The precautions certainly seem more than adequate.”

Dale had been doing his best impassive-Indian impression, even crossing his arms over his chest. Now he smiled thinly.

“I think so too, sir,” he said.

Hajime’s nod was wary this time. “Ms. Brézé requested that you do so?”

“Yes. I’m not active on any Council missions right now, so I gave it a thorough going-over, and I’ll be here for the full three days. It’s within my remit, since you are a Council member, sir.”

Dmitri nodded: “I have also reviewed the arrangements. It was the least I could do, after your patronage released me from Seversk!”

One of Hajime’s brows rose with his nod this time. “You certainly seem to have taken every possible precaution,” he said to Adrienne.

She spread her hands and smiled charmingly. Hajime’s other brow went up; her father and mother were stepping up from behind her.

“Jules,” he said. “Julianne.”

The elder Brézés bowed slightly. “Haven’t seen you since you killed us, Hajime-san,” Jules said cheerfully.

“You’re moving back here?” their murderer said with a trace of iron in his tone.

“Oh, no, just visiting with our grandchildren.”

Hajime’s face relaxed slightly. “One of life’s great pleasures, exceeded only by great-grandchildren.”

Adrienne backed out of the conversation graciously, keeping her smile to herself until she was safely facing away. Her shields were impenetrable, but Hajime hadn’t survived over a century of Shadowspawn politics, and generations past his body’s death, by being unable to read faces as well as minds.

Perfect
, she thought.
Perfect!

A
drian rose from the bed; he’d left the party early, by his nocturnal breed’s standards. The
casa grande
was finally quiet, though some Shadowspawn lingered in the public areas, and most were still awake in their rooms. He could sense them, a prickle of the Power. Sliding through the fabric of the world, like the smooth onrush of sharks that makes the water curve just below the surface of an ocean.

A grimace. Close by the girl Cheba was tossing and fighting her sheets and whimpering in her sleep; the two Brotherhood agents were nearly as restless. In their line of work—his too, again—post-traumatic stress was more of a permanent condition of life than a problem to recover from.

For them this is part of the business they have chosen. Or were born into, as I was. I pity Cheba, though. All
she
wanted was a better way to earn her bread than selling baskets on the streets.

Those were not his only base-links, links of blood and seed. Somewhere in the great pile two children were sleeping as well; he caught a brief image of a girl curled around a flaxen-haired doll and a boy lying in the utter abandonment of childhood slumber. Adrienne was awake, but happily oblivious to everything but her own building pleasure and hunger, lost in sensation and in the mind of her partner-victim as it opened to a helpless combination of pain and orgasmic release.

He grimaced again, and clamped down on the contact until it was merely a vague consciousness of direction.

Then he walked to the outer window. The air in the rest of the suite was fresh—the system of concealed ducts was old, but well designed—yet he welcomed the cool night breeze on his naked flesh. The moon hung over the Santa Lucia Range where it divided this interior valley from the sea. It was nearly full, and the silvery light was a prickle on the skin of his aetheric form. It seemed to call to him . . .

“And I’m going to answer,” he said softly. “
Amss-aui-
ock!”

The oldest Shadowspawn talent of all took him. A moment of silvery darts along his nerves, and his body flowed—to another shape as borrowed as that of Wilbur Peterson, but much more familiar. Vision grew less, color absent or muted, shades of black and white and gray predominant, though the moonlight was more than adequate. He could see movement—the twitch of a leaf, the motion of a cat leaping to a wall in the gardens below—with utter sharpness, but anything motionless blurred like the world of a short-sighted man.

Nearly as keen as those of the owl, and in a different range. He could hear breathing, voices half a mile away, a frightened dog that suddenly scented an ancient enemy; the quiet night was a babble of noise now, and the wolf ’s mind sorted it with effortless ease.

He snarled slightly, eager to run and hunt. It took an effort for the man-mind that lurked within to command the beast, though the wolf was his favorite. The hundred-and-eighty-pound beast sprang easily up to the sill of the window, then down a dozen feet to the ground below, landing on legs like powerful springs. He trotted through the garden, past the plashing of a fountain—
wet, wet, weeds, cool tempting flesh of a frog
—and down through steps that led through beds of azaleas—
thick-sweet-strong
—and lawns. A squeak and a snap and his jaws went
clomp
on a field-mouse, with a sweet gush of almost flowery blood. He tossed it up . . .

. . . and let it fall.

And the flush of salt savor was not really satisfying. This body was built around the DNA of a timber-wolf, but within it was Shadowspawn still. Only human blood would do. He kept on until he reached the perimeter wall of the estate; a dash for a man was an easy trot in this shape.

Ellen’s scent was strong, many trails over many days overlain on each other. He whined slightly, mixed with a growl. Part of what his nose caught said
prey
, and raised visions of rending and tearing and the hot tang of blood. The other message it carried was of an overwhelming femaleness, that arched his tail and made his gait stiff-legged.
Kill
and
mount her
warred in the sharp limited consciousness of the wolf mind, amid images that mingled pink-and-golden nakedness with something furry and four-legged.

There was another scent mixed with Ellen’s; his sister’s.
That
raised the fur along the beast’s spine, and lips curled back to show long white fangs. His ears flattened to the massive wedge-shaped skull of the wolf in challenge-response, and he had to suppress a growl that rose from the animal’s deep chest.

The man-mind within prompted, and the Mhabrogast prickled and twisted in his head. When he rose on two feet he was Adrian Brézé again. A stare, and the iron of the gate set in the estate wall turned translucent. He stepped through it, and a cold grating sensation ran along his nerves for an instant. Here he was in a courtyard garden, a tiled expanse amid raised flowerbeds and small trees, with a brick fire pit barbecue in one corner. Trellised roses gave the night a sweet-musky scent, strong to his Shadowspawn nose, dull by comparison with the wolf’s but much sharper than a human’s. A small trickle of water flowed from a ceramic lion’s mask into a bowl, and an owl flapped through the night above.

He stiffened at that for an instant, but the Power told him it was a natural bird, off about its business.

There were two lights through the windows of the house, a pleasant Spanish-revival building with a red-tile roof that might have housed a doctor or accountant in a hundred older Californian suburbs. The glass doors showed a living-room that had a lived-in look, with bookcases and art prints on the walls, and a thick scatter of volumes on the coffee-table; those were more reproductions, from the large format. Ellen was seated on the sofa, dressed in a long peignoir of sheer white silk, with a drink by her elbow. As he watched she leaned back and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

His night-walking form was imperceptible to humans, unless he wished it. Now he did, bringing it into solidity, and tapped gently on the door. Ellen started, and then shot to her feet when she saw him.

“Adrienne?” she said, when she’d slid the door open and he stepped through; the golden hibiscus-scent of her filled his nostrils. “I . . . um, I thought you were with Monica tonight.”

Adrian’s brows went up. He looked down at himself; unequivocally male, and
interested
male at that. Then he mentally cursed.

“Of course. She has used my aetheric form with you.”
Damn her presumption!
“Remember Amalfi, Ellie . . . someday we will honeymoon there in reality.”

The joy in her face and mind blazed; it warmed him even as she dulled it with the glyph he’d taught her and threw herself into his arms. Long moments later she drew back, took several deep breaths and nodded in a businesslike fashion.

“You have an extremely self-disciplined mind,” he said.

“Oh, right now I’m not feeling very . . . well, yes, I wouldn’t mind a little
discipline . . .”

He groaned. “I
can’t
.”

Her blue eyes sparkled. “I know, but teasing you is so much fun. When we’re together again, well, if you felt like punishing me for it . . . maybe in
her
form . . .”