A Taint in the Blood Read online

  Adrienne hissed a little between her teeth. “We really have to do more about this, Dmitri. We are . . . vulnerable.”

  “Tell me. In my opinion we should never have closed down the Communists, at least their security around closed sites was competent and we only had to control a few key men to control all. That there are so many to deal with now is why I’ve been trapped here, like some exile in the days of Stalin or the Czars.”

  His face darkened a little. “As if I were responsible for Gheorghe’s final death! Have you seen my report on his security? A farce! Tzigani with knives and shotguns and bandanas around their heads. All that they needed was violins and balalaikas. Maybe their grandfathers were at least formidable savages, but these were merely drunken louts putting on a show, as if for tourists! You expected to see the movie cameras and fog made from dry ice at any moment!”

  “Yes, one must move with the times,” she said.

  There was a short significant pause; they met each other’s eyes and then looked away.

  I missed something there, Ellen thought.

  “I use Gurkhas, as you know,” Adrienne said into the brief silence. “They stay bought, too.”

  “And how was your visit to Santa Fe?” Dmitri went on, taking the mouthpiece of the hookah and drawing a deep bubbling lungful. “You spoke hopefully of it last week.”

  “Rather productive.” Another short pause. “In more ways than one.”

  “Ah, ochen’ horosho,” he said. Then he looked at Ellen.

  “Either you are developing a sense of style, Adrienne, or this is some sort of subtle mockery of mine.”

  “I? Mock? Impossible, Dmitri. Oh, well, possibly a little of both. I acquired her in Santa Fe, yes. Previously my brother’s. Perhaps that explains my desire to show off a little, although he got surprisingly little use out of her. Guilty, I suppose. Such a grubby human emotion, guilt.”

  “Not just human. Petit bourgeois, which is worse,” Dmitri said. Then to Ellen: “You are some sort of Slav, girl?”

  “I . . . Polish, German, some Scots-Irish, a little Cherokee, sir,” Ellen replied.

  “And she has the most intriguingly complex psyche, too,” Adrienne said. “Childhood trauma, I think. Odd pleasure-pain links.”

  He replied in Russian, and probably to her. Ellen searched her memory and managed to produce what she thought was a polite disclaimer of ability to speak the language, learned when they had some clients from St. Petersburg:

  “Ya poka ne govoryu po russki, Gospodin.”

  “I said, You have nice tits, too, to go with the psyche,” he replied with a smile.

  What the hell am I supposed to say to that? she wondered, feeling her throat lock on the words. Fuck off, you posturing moron? Oh, Christ! I can’t even think it! Or bite me, maybe?

  Adrienne sighed. “Dmitri, your lucies have tits. Or even boobs. Mine have breasts. Or at least the females do.”

  “What happened to the Chinese boy with the delectable arse, then?”

  “Still delectable, useful in several ways, and currently resting after—”

  Adrienne turned her head and snapped aside just short of Ellen’s thigh, a biting gesture with an audible click of white sharp teeth.

  Dmitri snorted. “What a collector you are! Don’t you ever just kill them, Adrienne? It’s like endless foreplay with no fucking!”

  Ellen swallowed. She thought the boy holding the tray did too, with an almost imperceptible quiver in his hands.

  Adrienne sighed again. “Dmitri, Dmitri, what a . . . gourmand you are. I suppose you even like béchamel sauce.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “That it makes everything taste the same, Escoffier’s original sin? There’s nothing wrong with agony and death, but you miss out on so much if you hurry, experiencing the direct mental overtones as well as the actual blood. Emotional degradation, despair, self-loathing, transference . . .”

  He snorted. “Girlie stuff.”

  “Dmitri, I am a girl! When I’m corporeal, at least, and most of the time night-walking too.”

  “Quantity can have a quality all its own, even for drinking emotions. In mass, they can be overwhelmingly potent. Ah, if you had only been at Srebrenica when the massacre began—”

  “Dmitri, I was a child. Besides, my old, do you realize how many times you’ve told your Srebrenica story?”

  “Oh.” He winced. “Tell me I’m not as bad as von Horst with the Hindenberg.”

  “Nearly as bad as McFadden with the Titanic! And he’s transitioned successfully to postcorporeal so he’ll never shut up. You’d think with a potentially infinite span ahead of him he’d focus on the future sometimes.”

  They laughed again. Adrienne touched the controls.

  “I’ll do what I can with Tōkairin Hajime,” Adrienne said. “He has not any dog in this fight, so he may be reasonable. Michiko listens to me, and she has his ear. She’s of our generation. You’ve earned release, Dmitri. There’s definitely going to be a meeting in Tiflis next year, the full Council and all candidate-qualified purebloods. They have to elect a successor to Gheorghe, after all.”

  “I shall be forever in your debt. And the more so if I can get to Tiflis and a decent climate. We will have to remind Putin of who he really works for, so there are no disturbances.”

  “Good. There’s talk that they may select a corporeal this time, which would be the first since . . . when? 1932, I think.”

  “Ah. A younger voice on the Council. That would be . . . progressive.”

  “Yes, it would. Possibilities, eh?”

  The screen died and hummed upward. Adrienne smiled like a lynx. “That went smoothly, very smoothly. Theresa, you’ve earned a visit to Jean-Charles.”

  Ellen cleared her throat.

  “Yes, yes, chérie,” Adrienne said. “Get dressed, and let Theresa have her pendant back. You did very well, putting Dmitri in a good mood. Yes, dangled in front of him like a piece of steak is one way to put it, and no doubt you’ll feel better with . . . what’s that thought there? Without my ass bare to the breeze? We’ll be landing soon, anyway.”

  She smiled and linked her hands behind her head.

  “Life is good.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Where am I? Ellen Tarnowski looked around. She was sitting in . . . It’s Adrian’s living-room!

  The great windows showing an endless tumbled stretch of moonlit high desert and mountain, the lights dim, a fire of piñon logs crackling on the fieldstone hearth and scenting the air. Even the faint smell of tobacco she’d found so irritating was comforting enough to make her almost sob with gratitude.

  And Adrian, standing gravely by the mantelpiece, taut and elegant as a cat.

  “Oh, thank God!” she burst out. “Adrian, I had the most horrible—”

  Full wakefulness crashed back. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

  He shook his head, the silky hair sliding around his lobeless ears.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said softly, his face stark with misery. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I am so very sorry.”

  “Then—”

  She looked down; she was in a long denim skirt and Indian blouse outfit she remembered. She pinched herself, hard. It hurt, but her surroundings stayed just the same. She had never had a dream like this, not complete with every detail of all five senses.

  “Where am I?” she said slowly.

  “Your . . . mind is here.”

  “Where’s here, Adrian?”

  He hesitated. “This is my memory palace. We’re inside . . . ummm, my mind. I’m on a flight to San Francisco, trying to find you.”

  Ellen put a hand to her forehead and clenched it until the fingers dug painfully into the skin.

  “And you never thought to tell me any of this before?” she said, keeping her voice from rising dangerously. “We were sleeping together for six months and it just never seemed the right fucking time? No wonder I knew you were lying to me!”

  He crossed and knelt before he
r, taking her hands. “Ellie, I wanted to tell you. But this is dangerous, dangerous stuff, and I was trying to keep you as safe as I could.”

  “Keeping me ignorant is not protective! From now on, you will tell me things or I will not . . . not speak to you at all!”

  “I feel guilty as hell that I let us get involved at all, but it had been years, I was supposed to be left alone—Ellie, we don’t have time for me to tell you two hundred years of history. Multi-millennia, some of it. I need you to help me, and I promise I’ll make it as right as I can. Whatever it takes.”

  She took a long deep breath and forced a degree of calm on herself. Her fingers closed around his with a strength bred from years of tennis.

  “My mind is here? Where’s the rest of me?”

  “Where . . . you were before you went to sleep.”

  “I’m still in bed with your crazy vampire sister?” she half-screamed. “Get me out, get me out, get me out, Oh, God, the things she did to me—”

  Air gasped into her lungs and she forced control on herself and choked down sobs.

  “My mind is here? Literally?”

  He nodded. “I’ve got your genetic template already loaded. I’m . . . running you on my hardware. Wetware. Your body is in trance state, like mine—but it’s, ummm, empty.”

  She stared at him. “You drank my blood? Without telling me?”

  He winced and looked aside. “No. But, ah, it’s really anything with DNA in it, you see, which pretty much all body fluids have. So it doesn’t have to be blood, strictly speaking, for a link.”

  “Oh.” Then a thought. “But what she said was true? You wanted to drink my blood? To really hurt me?”

  “I didn’t, did I?” he said. “I love you, Ellen. It’s just . . . hard for me to show that the way normal people can. But I didn’t hurt you.”

  The lonely pride in it moved her suddenly; the hot anger she’d felt less than two days ago felt as distant as her childhood.

  “You’re not like her. I said that and she laughed, but I think it made her angry.”

  “I try not to be like that. I try very hard. Now immediately, darling, you have to tell me where she took you. We might get cut off at any moment.”

  “I’m . . . not sure. California—”

  He gave a small hiss of relief and nodded. She continued:

  “South of the Bay, I think. North of LA for sure, and near the coast.

  Someone mentioned Passo something. We landed, there was a car, but I couldn’t see out the windows much. A big place in the country, I think, and everyone was really tired, even Adrienne, we all just went to bed and sacked out. I’m . . . in her room.”

  “Paso Robles? It might be. The Central Coast. That’s very good, that helps a lot. I can put a . . . block in to conceal your memory of this. You’ll still be able to remember it, but not unless you’ve got reason to. Be cautious about that, be very careful. She’s extremely good at subtle Wreakings . . . mind-stuff.”

  “Oh, there aren’t any words for how careful I’ll be!”

  Then another thought. “Wait a minute. What happens if I just stay here? She can’t force me back, can she?”

  “No. Only I can send you back. If you stay you’d be like this as long as I lived.”

  Ellen freed her hands and placed them on her knees.

  “But if I stayed here I’d be safe . . . well, as safe as you . . . and I could live forever? God, Adrian, that is so tempting. She told me I had all sorts of interesting new sensations and experiences to look forward to! I’m so scared all the time.”

  He nodded. “Yes. And that’ll be just as bad as you can imagine. More than you can imagine. But there’s a chance of getting you away from her, and there are drawbacks to staying here.”

  The room began to fade. Sunlight appeared overhead, grew bright, reflected off marble columns around a pool. Prussian-blue mountains rose in the distance, against a cloudless sky. Scents of thyme and arbutus drifted on warm dry air under the rustling shadows cast by the leaves of live-oaks arching overhead. Cicadas buzzed as many-colored birds flew among great alabaster pots, and flamboyant bougainvillea spilled down their sides in purple and gold.

  “This is Maxfield Parrish!” she exclaimed, distracted into delight. “But real! It’s so beautiful . . . This is heaven!”

  The clear cruel laughter of a young girl came from the bushes. Then the water in the pool rippled. Something passed beneath it in a smooth curve. She could see a glimpse of . . . tentacles? She stumbled back from the edge of the water with a sudden sick dread.

  “This is my mind, Ellen, and it’s not anything like Heaven. It’s a Shadowspawn mind, and I’m no more completely in control of it than you are of yours.”

  Ellen looked at him and spoke slowly: “Could . . . she do this to me too? Swallow me?”

  Adrian winced and nodded. “We call it . . . Carrying. Any strong Shadowspawn can.”

  She fought not to scream as he nodded again. Bitterly:

  “There’s no God, no Heaven, we don’t have souls, but we can still go to Hell forever?”

  “That’s . . . probably where the idea of Hell came from in the first place.”

  Her hands went over her face. “This just gets worse and worse. All right, Adrian. I’ll go back. But you get me out!”

  A deep breath, and she stood and faced him. “She had a videoconference with a man named Dmitri on the flight from Santa Fe. He scared me nearly as much as she did, even on a flat-screen and eight thousand miles away.”

  “Dmitri Pavlovitch Usov?”

  “Yes. He was in Seversk, in Siberia. There was something about plutonium smuggling, and a man, a very old Shadowspawn, who was assassinated with it.”

  “Gheorghe Brâncuşi?”

  “Yes. There was something going on I couldn’t tell, some sort of political thing, I think, an intrigue, a conspiracy. And they mentioned a Council that was going to meet in Tiflis, in Georgia, to elect new members next year. They were saying things without saying them, by indirection. And—”

  “No time!” Adrian said; she could see fear on his face. “You’ve got to go back now; she’s stirring out of REM sleep. You stay alive, you hear me, Ellie? You stay alive. Do not die! No matter what happens, you stay alive.”

  He held up a hand before her face, and clenched it into a fist as he spat a word that spun into her ears like buzz-saws. The universe shattered and dissolved.

  “This town used to be a lot more charming before it realized how charming it was,” Harvey said.

  They’d spent the night in a hotel Adrian favored when he had to come here, a 1920s late-Beaux Arts one on Nob Hill, brick and marble with an attached spa. Adrian paused under the awning; there was a little square of park uphill, and a big church. The sky was bright with a few fluffy clouds, and the temperature just a little brisk. It could have been June as easily as February, in San Francisco. They turned and headed downslope, towards the Mission District.

  “I’m not an urban person. Still, I hate it less than most,” Adrian replied.

  The streets were busy. More homeless than there had been a few years before, more empty buildings and shops, a little less traffic, but the crowds were still dense and lively on the sidewalks. Adrian detested cities, as a general rule; the sheer crowding grated on his nerves, the smells were bad, and the necessity for pulling in his senses made him feel muffled and thick and half-blind. This was . . . less bad than most.

  He’d even been able to enjoy breakfast: buttermilk pancakes and local berries. Mostly he lost appetite for anything but blood quickly in places this dense, which was another reason to avoid them. Then he had spent the rest of the morning standing on the observation deck of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill watching the Bay and the gulls over Alcatraz, and pulling the smells of salt water into his lungs.

  Nothing like as bad as Cairo. Or Calcutta, where he’d once been trapped for an entire memorable month.

  Harvey looked aside at him. “Got a jolt there right through my shields.”
>
  Adrian smiled. “I remembered the Black Hole, Operation Kali. Convinced me I had to get out or go mad.”

  Harvey grinned. “That made me feel like going over to the Dark Side of the Force too, ol’ buddy. Of course, the Council wouldn’t have me, these days. Not close enough to pureblood.”

  Adrian nodded. “I still think it might be faster to just go down to Paso Robles and look around ourselves.”

  Harvey snorted. “Yeah, right. Charge into Adrienne’s security and generations of protections with Wreakings soaked into the bedrock . . . it’s not as if we could just look things up on Google Earth, you know.”

  Adrian sighed in acknowledgment. I am just venting, he thought.

  Nothing, not even human memory, was as easy to nudge with a little Wreaking as digital systems. Even hard copy tended to be burned in fires, or eaten by rats, or mildew . . . or anything else where luck mattered.

  Harvey went on: “When your parents took you for your visits as a kid they didn’t go there, did they?”

  Adrian smiled grimly. “No, to Europe.”

  “You’ve turned to confiding since Calcutta. Getting you to mention this stuff at all was always like extracting teeth with a loop of spaghetti.”

  “I’ve been trying not to suppress the memories anymore. They are part of me. Yes, we went to the castle in the Auvergne, to . . . get us in touch with our roots, they’d say today. We thought they were our aunt and uncle, of course, come to give us a holiday. Christ, what a pile that place was! Is, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, the European branch of the Brézés are a bit conservative.”

  “Everything but hanging head-down to sleep,” Adrian said. “And the place was infested with bats, at that. The attics and the caves, at least.”

  Then, softly: “We loved it, of course.”

  “Bet it was in the summer,” Harvey observed, dodging a pushcart vendor.

  “Of course; every summer, longer as we grew older. Green hills, dusty lanes, mountain forests, ponies for us to ride . . . our aunt and uncle who denied us nothing, and hinted that we were as an exiled prince and princess. Oh, is there a child on Earth who won’t listen to that? The delicious sense of being different, different and better. Great canopied beds, fireplaces ten feet high, Egyptian gods on the walls of crypts below—”