S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

Cheba was pushing herself backwards, naked, her body streaked with blood and welts, her mouth working, and white showing all around the dark irises of her eyes. Then she stopped and froze. A moment later she felt behind her.

"It's quite fetching," Adrienne said, as Cheba's fingers made contact with the fluffy white doe's tail at the base of her spine. "And symbolically appropriate for your role in this little drama we're about to have."

Cheba bolted upright, pawing frantically at the sides of her head. The ears she felt there were tall and pointed and furred, and twitched.

"?Dios mio, Jesucristo!"

"I'm the only deity here," Adrienne said, feeling the other's control crack. "Ooooh, yes, that's right. Panic, despair, horror, very stimulating, you saucy, sexy minx. Now you run away, sweetie. And when I catch you, I do some really awful, wonderful things to and with you."

Cheba turned and bolted through the trees and into the scrub. As she did a line of wasps rose from the underbrush and followed her, malignant shapes as long as a human hand, whining as they flew.

Adrienne watched her go, then clapped her hands together thoughtfully under her chin.

"Darkness," she said.

The sunlight faded, and sunset cast long shadows through air the color of burnt umber. She'd always liked that time of day; it was so full of little magics and possibilities.

"Not quite perfect," she mused. "Something…it needs just a little something…"

A delighted laugh. "I know! She's phobic about spiders. Spiders it shall be! About the size of Chihuahuas, I think. Anything bigger would be kitsch."

A sobbing scream of loathing came echoing towards the pool. Adrienne laughed again, and willed. The change was easier and smoother than when she was night-walking in the real world, and here the sun was her imagination and not a deadly enemy to the aetheric form.

The great timber wolf raised its head and sniffed the air, snarled happily, and loped through the trees with its tail wagging.

One of the joys of a policeman's life, Eric Salvador thought the day after the Tarnowski case opened, wishing he'd taken more Tylenol with his breakfast. You meet all kinds of people. Most of them hate you. Asi es la vida. At least she's not likely to try to blow me up with a fertilizer bomb.

Giselle Demarcio was in her fifties, with a taut, dry, ageless appearance and a slight East Coast accent, dressed in a mildly funky Santa Fe look, silver jewelry and a blouse and flounced skirt.

Sort of a fashionista version of what my great-grandmother wore around the house, Salvador thought cynically.

His family, the Spanish part, at least, had been in Santa Fe since the seventeenth century.

Everything old gets new if you wait long enough. Rich Anglos get off the bus and live in pimped-up adobes and you end up in a double-wide on Airport Road.

There was a dash of Irish in his background too, on his mother's side, and the indio part of the Salvador line had probably thought, There goes the neighborhood, when the conquistadores showed up asking about those gold mines the pueblo down the river had sworn existed around here.

She had a white mark on her finger where a wedding ring would go, and she fit in perfectly with the airy white-on-white decor of Hans amp; Demarcio Galleries. He was not, he noticed, being invited back to her office; this was a semipublic reception room. The art on the walls was something he could understand, at least-actual pictures of actual things. Not the cowboy-pueblo-Western art a lot of the places on Canyon Road had either, mostly older-looking stuff. There was a very faint odor of wood smoke from a pinon fire crackling in a kiva fireplace. The whole thing screamed money. It had been a very long time since Canyon Road attracted artists because the rents were low.

Santa Fe, the town where ten thousand people can buy the state and fifty thousand can't afford lunch, he thought.

"Jeanette, take care of the Cliffords, would you?" Demarcio said to a sleek-looking assistant. Then: "Coffee, Detective?"

Wait a minute, Salvador thought. She's not really hostile. She's scared for some reason. Not of me, but scared silly and hiding it well .

"Thank you," he said, and took the cup. "That's nice."

It was excellent coffee, especially compared to what he drank at home or at the station, with a rich, dark, nutty taste. He enjoyed it, and waited. Most people couldn't stand silence. It wore on their nerves and eventually they blurted out something to fill it. Salvador had learned patience and silence in a very hard school.

"I'm worried about Ellen," the older woman said suddenly.

The detective made a sympathetic noise. "Ms. Tarnowski worked for you?" he said.

"Works. She's my assistant, even if she didn't show up this morning, that's understandable with the fire and all. Not a secretary, she's an art history graduate from NYU, and I was bringing her in on our acquisitions side. I'm…She's a sweet kid, but she's gotten mixed up in something, hasn't she?"

"You tell me, Ms. Demarcio," Salvador said.

"I never liked that boyfriend of hers. She met him playing tennis at the country club about a year ago and they, well, it was a whirlwind thing. He gave me this creepy feeling. And then his sister showed up-"

Salvador blinked. The sister…the woman who was with Tarnowski?

"Boyfriend?" he asked.

"Adrian Breze."

"Ah," Salvador said.

As he spoke he tapped the name into his notepad's virtual keyboard and hit the rather specialized search function. He'd long ago mastered the trick of reading a screen and paying attention to someone at the same time.

"Now, that's interesting. Do you have a picture of him?"

It was interesting because Salvador didn't have a picture; or much of anything else. Usually these days you drowned in data on anyone. There was nothing here but bare bones, a Social Security number, a passport number and an address way, way out west of town. Just out of Santa Fe County, in fact. A quick Google Earth flick showed a big house on a low mountain or big hill, right in the foothills of the Sangres, nothing else for miles and miles and miles and miles. The state real property register was a mess, but a check on that showed what seemed to be a single parcel of several thousand acres at least, a chunk of an eighteenth-century grant.

Not even a passport picture to go with the number, and he owns ten square miles of scenery. Someone likes his privacy, he thought, looking at the address. Then: Hey, if you had enough pull, could you blank yourself out? Nah, nobody can evade the Web.

Demarcio hesitated, then pulled a framed picture out of a drawer. The glass was cracked, as if someone had thrown it at a wall.

"She told me she was going to break up with him. Couldn't take the emotional distance and lies anymore. Then she didn't show up to work yesterday."

"So she's missing the day before the fire," Salvador said, looking at the picture. "She didn't call in? Just nothing?"

"Nothing this morning. That's not like her. She's the most reliable person who's ever worked for me."

Only she's gone and the place she lived in is a scorch mark, which conveniently shit-cans all the evidence.

The photo beneath the cracked glass showed a youngish man, though on second thought perhaps Salvador's own age. Or maybe somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dark hair worn a little longer than was fashionable these days, a vaguely Mediterranean-looking face that could have come from anywhere. Handsome, perhaps a little too much so, though not quite enough to be called pretty.

Androgynous, that's the word. But there's something dangerous-looking about him too. Like a cat, like a snake. Or a weasel, or a razor blade in an apple.

"He's…" Demarcio frowned. "You know, I met him a dozen times and I listened to her talk about him a lot and I really can't tell you much. He's wealthy…very wealthy, I think. Some sort of old money, but that's an impression, not knowledge. He wouldn't tell Ellen anything about that either, just some vague bullshit about 'investments.' American born but he has a slight accent, French, I think, which would fit with the name. I know he speaks French and Italian and Spanish…and yes, German too, all of them very well. I couldn't tell you where his money comes from, or where he went to university or, well, anything."