Shadows of Falling Night Read online

  He didn’t believe when I told him the truth, but it prepared him for the last, true moment of horror as the lid is yanked out from beneath his feet and the fall into Hell begins. Ooooo, this is going to be fun!

  “Holy God, how did you get here?” he asked, craning his head around to look at her. “That is the only door out of the bedroom and I was watching it all the time!”

  “I walked through the wall, Henri,” she said.

  “Your eyes…” he whispered.

  They were a blank solid yellow now, the color of molten sulphur, the way a Nightwalker’s eyes looked unless you made a special effort.

  “I really wasn’t lying, Henri,” she chuckled. “Or making it up. All true, dear little kebab, all true.”

  Then she snarled, a shrill racking squall, the hunting-call of Homo nocturnis. The man started backward and tumbled out of the lounger and fell painfully against the table. He lay on the floor in a tangle, staring as her lips peeled back from white sharp teeth in a way not quite possible for his breed. A hundred thousand years of inherited dread wrenched at Henri Desmarais, a genetic legacy of the first Empire of Shadow, something far older than the age of polished stone.

  His first ancestors had painted hints of it on the cave-walls of Chauvet, in those aeons when humans knew why they feared the dark.

  “What are you doing?” he half-screamed.

  “I promised you intense sensations, Henri,” she said, stalking smoothly nearer. “First the agonizing violation of your body and mind, then the rending and tearing and feeding. You’re going to die now, Henri, in a degradation and agony beyond conception. Now meet your fate.”

  She reached within, where the coiled helixes of knowledge were stored, the remembrance of blood taken into herself long ago. Pain more exquisite than orgasm seized her for an instant as she changed; sight grew dimmer, but a universe of scents poured into her wet nostrils as her long red tongue hung over the bone-white fangs.

  The human squealed in terror as he scrabbled away on his back, not daring to turn away and put the impossible sight behind him. The great black wolf lifted its head and howled a long sobbing note before it sprang.

  “Mmmmm,” Adrienne sighed happily, as she opened her eyes again and stirred luxuriously against the Egyptian cotton of the sheets.

  The renfield cleanup team that came with the apartment would be on its way. Blood was so intoxicating when fresh; you never tired of it, but it went off quickly and then it had a truly vile stink.

  And Adrian actually drinks it cold and dead, filched from the Red Cross. Well, at least sweet Ellen has helped him with that perversion. Though drinking happy blood all the time…it would be like living on nothing but mango juice and beignets dusted with powdered sugar!

  “Is it over?” Monica asked, lifting her tear-streaked face from under the pillow.

  Adrienne chucked lazily and touched a finger to the base of the woman’s spine, drawing it very lightly upward. “Not for you.”

  Some time later Monica bent back head and bared her throat, whimpering, then gave a long breathy moan at the sting of the feeding bite at the base of her neck and the sudden flood of ecstasy. It stopped too soon, and she cried an inarticulate protest through the moan.

  “Ah, dessert! And now, sleep,” Adrienne said lazily, licking the blood off her teeth and lips. “Tomorrow, I will destroy the world. Or make a good start, at least.”

  Monica sighed. Adrienne went on: “And you can have a Skype call with Josh and Sophia.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” Monica said. “Mom takes good care of them when I’m traveling, but we miss each other so much.”

  “I visit my children mentally now that they’re staying with their father. Skype is an analogue, I suppose.”

  Adrienne could feel a slight frown in the human’s voice as she went on.

  “Still, he’s…well, you and he haven’t always gotten along. And Mom…she’s wonderful, but…I think she has problems with my lifestyle choices.”

  “But ma chérie, you have no lifestyle choices; you are helpless in my cruel hands, a mere thrall, subject to unspeakable suffering and degradations.”

  “Well, that’s what she has trouble understanding, that I’m okay with that. She’s wonderful, but…a bit judgmental.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Paris

  Ellen Brézé blocked with a sweeping chop of her forearm as the knife stabbed for her gut. Her own silvered blade cut, but the slight figure opposite her faded back like smoke, like a ghost. Their feet rutched on the ancient concrete of the abandoned warehouse, and her breath sobbed harshly. That bothered her a lot less than it would a year ago; it wasn’t just that she was in better shape, but she’d had a lot more experience in prioritizing.

  When you were fighting for your life, physical discomfort just had a very low priority.

  Another shuffling passage, blades glinting and the ting of contact. A twist, and the keen silvered steel scored home…

  …and the other’s knife rang on a stone. The clothes collapsed to spill emptiness across what was suddenly the floor of a darkened forest. Cold moonlight shone down through pines tossing in the wind, and somewhere an owl hooted.

  Ellen controlled her panic and pushed mentally. The Nightwalker could be anywhere, invisible and impalpable to ordinary senses; and she had too few of the nocturnis genes to use the Power consciously herself. Her share of that was right in the median range that made nearly all humans métis with their ancient predator-overlords. But Wreaking by an adept could put constructs in your mind that resonated to the quantum-foam manipulations…

  Alarm thrilled along her nerves as she activated the embedded alarm. Nightwalker. Not in human form, either. She backed swiftly towards a jag of solid rock—

  Paws struck between her shoulder-blades with stunning force; the creature had leapt through the stone impalpably and then rematerialized as it emerged.

  She plowed into the roots and leaf-litter. The taste of her own blood filled her mouth, along with the rank dog-scent of the great wolf. She screamed and struck backward, but teeth closed on the wrist until her fingers spasmed open. Fangs ripped at the fabric of her jacket and belt. Weight pinned her down across the tree-trunk beneath her stomach—

  “Oh, my,” she said, panting and grinning and shivering, staring at the carved plaster of the ceiling until it came into focus. “Now that last bit with the wolf was sort of kinky. Even for me. Even for you, lover!”

  But absolutely great, if you get off on pain and fear and helplessness. In controlled doses. Which, of course, I do. I think I even appreciate how much self-control it takes for Adrian to keep things…playful.

  “Not too kinky, I hope?” Adrian said lazily, reclining on one elbow and looking down on her.

  “I didn’t use the dreaded…earwax!”

  Her husband froze—ostentatiously—at their safe word, until she tickled him in the ribs and they rolled across the bed, mingling his growls and her giggles.

  They’d been doing what was officially called soul-carrying among adepts. She’d named it inside-the-head stuff to herself. She and Adrian used it a lot for the battle training that had turned her from wimpy Ellen Tarnowski, easily kidnapped art-history graduate working in a gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, into femme-macho Ellen Brézé, Scourge of the Shadowspawn. Or at least Ellen Brézé the not entirely helpless victim.

  The directed lucid dreaming was indistinguishable from reality while you were under, except that the Shadowspawn who was doing it could always hit the reset button. You could learn from mistakes that would be fatal in reality, and great stretches of time could be experienced in what was seconds out in the notionally real world. She had years of specialized instruction by now, not to mention simple interior tourism.

  It could also be a lot of fun, like being able to step right into a full-sensory movie where you could ask the director for anything you wanted. They’d had to ration that part. You could lose yourself; it was as addictive to a human as the ecstasy-like drug in
Shadowspawn saliva, and with potentially worse side-effects. Also sex in there was like the old joke about Chinese food; wake up and an hour later you were horny again.

  “My goodness, Mr. Brézé, what do you have in mind?” she purred. Or less than an hour, sometimes, she thought. “It wouldn’t be holding down your wife and ravishing her mercilessly, would it?”

  Of course, a bad Shadowspawn, which most of them most emphatically were, could use it to torture you eternally, beyond the death of your physical body. And you couldn’t even go insane. Tradition that might or might not actually date back to the Empire of Shadow said that a post-corporeal could survive tens of thousands of years until sheer chance eventually caught up to them.

  Adrienne had promised to let Ellen spend lifetimes experiencing her own death…

  She froze in the happy tumble just before things got really interesting. Adrian’s embrace instantly turned from ardent to soothing, holding her until the shivering stopped. Her fingers dug into the hard lean muscle of his shoulders until her nails went white.

  “God damn your sister,” she whispered. “It’s worse because I thought I’d killed the bitch.”

  “She has damned herself more effectively than any deity could do,” Adrian said somberly. With a smile: “Therefore out of family feeling, perhaps we should see that she is denied eternal life.”

  Ellen took a deep breath, controlling the panting. That was not the fun type of fear, no indeed.

  “Yah think?” she said, forcing herself to relax.

  His smile grew white against the tanned olive complexion of his narrow sharp-featured face, a lock of raven hair falling over his forehead, his hand on the curve of her hip.

  “And you did make her very, very, very sick for some time. I’m still astonished that she managed to survive a hypo of silver nitrate and radioactives in the foot. We are hard to kill and even harder to bring to the Final Death, but that is a bit much.”

  “Michiko cut off her foot before the full dose got out into her system. I didn’t notice that at the time. Of course, I was blowing that particular pop-stand at high speed, riding on a sabertooth tiger doing the full-tilt boogie. You make a great tiger, by the way.”

  “And sabertooths have acute senses but are, to be frank, rather stupid even compared to wolves, so I didn’t notice it either. It is a good thing, too, that we were able to…deal…with Michiko later; she was uncomfortably acute, when she bothered to think. Her luck wasn’t as strong as Adrienne’s, at least. Or mine.”

  Luck wasn’t just a metaphor, when you dealt with the Power. Ellen bared her teeth, and for an instant looked as predatory as any Shadowspawn. Her blue eyes met Adrian’s yellow-flecked brown-black, and she knew he was seeing the scene in her mind—the view through the telescopic sight as the nocturnis woman’s head shattered, and then the aetheric form sparkling into nothingness. Also that memorable dinner a few months earlier when Michiko had tried to persuade Adrienne that it would be great fun to kill Ellen slowly and have that last mouthful of blood as her heart stopped as dessert.

  “Blowing the bitch’s head off…her aetheric head, granted…with a silver-plated .338 Lapua Magnum round was a good start,” she said.

  Adrian smiled fondly and kissed her on the tip of her small straight nose. “Less dramatic than the fight she and I were having while switching forms—her snow-leopard was very pretty—but extremely effective.”

  “You distracted her nicely. Let’s get cleaned up. And go tell your delightful great-grandparents that Adrienne has been a naughty little girl and is playing with nukes again. I just love visiting them. Not.”

  “I realize it must be nerve-wracking mingling socially with those who look on you as a canapé.”

  “It’s not just that. They’ve got a psychic smell like rotting flesh. They think they’re alive, but they’re not. They’re the walking memories of a very bad dream.”

  “I will not dispute it. But then, I have no family feelings.”

  “Yeah, you do, lover. Strong family feelings. Even obsessive. They’re just all negative.”

  The apartment on the Île Saint-Louis wasn’t big by American standards, but it shone with expert care and smelled slightly of sachets and wax, under the earthier scents of the bedroom; Adrian had lived here while he attended the Sorbonne, and off and on since as the fortunes of clandestine war brought him through Paris. The floors were polished hardwood, with a few Oriental rugs, and the furniture mostly plain in a subtle way that said expensive and old. Only the kitchen, electronics and plumbing were thoroughly 21st-century. The bathroom had a tub big enough for two, a smooth shallow curve like an abstract seashell, and a walk-in shower with multiple heads whose walls were glass etched with designs of reeds and bamboo.

  The hot water and verbena soap seemed to leach the grue out of her body.

  She leaned back against Adrian, and his arms went around her waist.

  “I may have to Wreak this evening. With your permission?” he murmured against her ear, then touched his mouth to the damp curve of her throat.

  “Bite me. But not in the metaphorical sense,” she said, with a breathy half-giggle. “And permission? Hell, that’s an order.”

  Dressing took some time; you didn’t slop over to the Brézé place in sweats to have hamburgers in the backyard, and her husband was as fastidious as a cat about appropriate appearances anyway. She had expert assistance, at least. Adrian was one of the rare straight men who took a skilled interest in women’s clothes and hair for their own sake, rather than just staring at the result like a hungry dog drooling at a pork-chop.

  He appreciates, then drools.

  Ellen did an exaggerated runway-style pirouette before Adrian’s knowledgeably critical eye as they left the bedroom.

  “You look enchanting in that, my dear,” he whispered in her ear. “Though even better in the lingerie.”

  She was in an ankle-length cap-sleeved lace gown of Valentino red belted with a double string of gold-linked Madras pearls the color of polished steel; there was a modest mandarin collar that was a hint about her carotids being off-limits to those looking for a snack. The collar was covered in a band of the same pearls as the belt, strung asymmetrically on gold chains, and there were two more in her ears.

  He poured them both a glass of white wine and handed one to her with what Europeans called a biscuit roses de Reims, meaning a crisp pink cookie. Oddly enough they had no word for what Americans called a biscuit. Adrian put his arm around her waist, and they stood for a moment looking out at the 17th-century townhouses and silent streets, and the lights glittering on the Seine.

  I really needed this, she thought as she sipped the steely dry Chitry and nibbled, careful not to let any crumbs fall on the gown. To settle my butterflies.

  He winked at her; there were advantages to being married to a telepath. Even when he wasn’t actually reading her mind he was uncannily attuned to her moods. The glimpse of herself reflected in the window looked ready to beard the rulers of the earth in social combat. And it all felt indecently comfortable, for high fashion.

  And a little plain indecent. The high-strapped sandals with their coral and tanzanite clasps alone cost more than her coal-miner grandfather had ever made in a month, or two, or four. Or her father before he’d been laid off and descended into alcoholic decay. She turned one ankle to look at them, and the way the natural silk stockings shimmered beneath the lace on her slender sinewy runner’s legs.

  “Enchanting,” he said as he helped her on with the ermine coat.

  Then he grinned. At her raised eyebrow he said: “I am old enough to remember fur protests.”

  “So am I! Well, when I was a teenager.”

  “As a matter of fact, on the way to the opera at Santa Fe once—years before we met—someone tried to spray-paint the mink of a lady I was accompanying.”

  “What happened?”

  Adrian made a dismissive gesture, smiling as if at a minor joke: “I made his trousers fall around his ankles. I was in evening d
ress and it would have been difficult to simply hit him without spoiling the occasion.”

  Ellen laughed, only slightly incredulous. There had been that supremely annoying and inconsiderate street mime here in Paris last year, and a series of unlikely accidents had ended with the seat of his pants catching fire…

  “Wreaking?”

  “Of course. Dousing him in gasoline and using a match would have been excessive, even cruel and irresponsible, and anyway would have drawn attention. So would making the can of paint explode. It wasn’t difficult; he had a very badly worn belt. The opera was the revival of Maometto Secondo, by Rossini, and very well sung.”

  Ellen laughed. “I’ve seen that one. It’s got a pants part for the hero, and you keep expecting Anna to do a number warbling: But Daddy, this Calbo you want me to marry is tooootally a chhhhhiiiick innnn draaaaag!”

  He laughed too. “Yes, I had not realized Renaissance Venetians were so enlightened. Perhaps next year, if all goes well—”

  “If the world doesn’t end in apocalyptic disaster.”

  “Exactly. If the world does not end in apocalyptic disaster, in ’22 we will take a month in Italy, touring the hill towns, and end with the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. The Villa Imperiale there is well worth a visit, too.”

  “Right, those frescos by del Colle and Genga,” she said, feeling a stab of longing for quiet days. “I’d like that, a lot.”

  And we really could do that, just because we felt like it, if it weren’t for the apocalyptic end-of-the-world thing. Now I’ve really got a reason to hate the Conspiracy of Evil!

  In some ways the fact that Adrian was quasi-human and drank her blood and could send his consciousness out in animal shapes and twist the fabric of reality with his mind was easier to deal with than being married to someone who was inconceivably, mind-bogglingly, absolutely filthy rich. The rest was true alien weirdness, but she’d always wanted wealth, yet found that world as disquieting as it was attractive. Her emotions treated it as real in a more fundamental sense than the Power.