S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

"Careful, careful," he muttered to himself when the plate arrived.

It was a long time since he'd had much solid food. Peter swallowed painfully, aware that he'd been nearly drooling; it was as if he were an old rusty outboard engine that had finally caught and was stuttering and letting out clouds of blue smoke but turned the propeller nonetheless. The thought made him smile a little. Despite years in the Southwest, his mind still used Land O' Lakes visual metaphors!

One bite, and he almost moaned with pleasure. Chewing, chewing, making himself go slowly and not bolt it and overburden his shrunken stomach. The burrito was Mexican-style, not surprising this close to the border, smaller and thinner than the American variety, and holding only barbacoa- style pork and onion and refried beans. A pause while he monitored his stomach; it was going to stay down. He finished and licked his fingers, and then just sat sipping at his water for twenty minutes, feeling relatively good for the first time since the symptoms started to hit.

"Okay, work," he muttered to himself. "You're supposed to be a logical thinker. At least about physics. At least, you used to be."

His hands still wobbled a bit as he slid his workpad computer out of the knapsack on the chair beside him. A gentle tap to the screen projected the virtual keyboard onto the table. He slid the foot down to put the image at the right angle and adjusted the distance. The battery had a three-quarter charge.

"I should have remembered to leave it plugged in. Hell, am I fit to do anything right now? Doc Duggan said the withdrawal was rough but there usually wasn't any permanent damage. Usually is sort of an unpleasant word. And I sort of liked Duggan, we had things in common, but she's a renfield. She works for them. How trustworthy was what she said?"

Although she hadn't been born into the Shadowspawn-worshiping cult, like most of the inhabitants of the town of Rancho Sangre Sagrado. Some of those people were all right, if you stayed away from their…well, not quite a religion, but nearly.

The Shadowspawn are creepy enough if you know that what they do isn't really supernatural. I mean, they do drink blood and they can assume other shapes and move things with their minds and affect how chances turn out…

Jose Villegas, one of his fellow lucies, had been a decent guy, what they'd called a regular Joe in his grandfather's day, though he'd been born and raised there. Others, like the household manager Theresa, were rabid weasels, as bad as Shadowspawn in their way-maybe worse, given that they didn't have all the king-predator genes pushing them. A lot of them were really screwed up in one way or another, functioning neurotics with weird forms of denial. He suspected that suicide was a major health problem there.

"Okay, Peter, think logically."

He stared at the screen as the system logged onto the Web-the area had phone reception, and that was all it needed.

"I can't be Peter Boase again."

The thought of resuming his researcher's life at Los Alamos was wonderful beyond belief, but every bit as impossible as being twelve again. Peter Boase had kept prying into anomalous phenomenon despite strong hints that he shouldn't. Peter Boase had been marked for death by the Council of Shadows, and Adrienne had come in to kill him because she was the one who happened to be closest.

Stroke, heart attack, traffic accident, slipping on the soap in the shower; they didn't have to make it look like an accident, they could produce a real accident.

If I was a tub of unwashed lard like, say, Bob Heigel or a pencil-necked geek with adult acne like Johnny Wong, I'd have died right there no matter how interesting my mind felt to her. But Adrienne was a collector and she took a fancy to me. Making me one of her lucies was as good as killing me. Probably just a slow form of killing me. Monica had been there on Lucy Lane for eight years, but that was the longest. We never talked about the others.

The changes that intrigued him had been in certain constants; now he knew it was the effect of so many Shadowspawn mucking with the quantum foam, making probabilities blur into one another. Homo sapiens nocturnus was the source of all legends in more ways than one.

The tales of leopard-men and werewolves and blood-drinking ogres and evil sorcerers came from them, from the Empire of Shadows in the dim pre-Neolithic past, or from chance recombinations of the genes in the ages since producing someone with half-understood powers and inhuman hungers. But the weird, arbitrary, anything-can-happen world of the legends was a folk memory of the way the world was when there were many powerful Shadowspawn in it, enhancing chaos just by existing .

A world where trees could speak and gingerbread houses with ovens for stray children waited in the woods and water flowed uphill…which was happening again.

Concentrate, dammit! he thought savagely. Okay, my old life's gone. And if the Brezes back at Sangre ever get their hands…or talons or claws or tentacles…on me, I'm worse than dead. I know Ellen's boyfriend, Adrian, is supposed to be a good guy, more or less, but I don't think I'll be able to contact him, he'll be hiding too hard and he's Adrienne's equal with the Power, which means he's consistently lucky. If he doesn't want to be found, a normal human would never, ever stumble on him; it's the damned luck. Now, what else did I hear…

Ah. At the party…someone had mentioned a Harvey Ledbetter. And this Brotherhood thing, some sort of resistance group.

"Oh, risky. But I can't just wander around until they find me or I run out of money."

Still, you could find almost anything on the Web, with a little patience.

He took a deep breath and poised his fingers over the keyboard.

He was screaming. The voice in his ear whispered:

"You love it, don't you, Peter. Tell me how much you love the lovely pain when I-"

Still screaming, he sat bolt upright. The clean sheets were sopping again, and tears streaked down his cheeks. After a moment he bolted for the bathroom again and vomited into the toilet. Then he spit, rinsed out his mouth and sat on the lid.

"Great," he said to himself. "I'm over the addiction to the drug in the bite. Now all I've got to worry about is the post-traumatic stress syndrome turning me into a wreck. And I thought I'd be home free, yeah, right, that's the way the world works, Peter."

He looked at his watch; it was four thirty in the morning. Not all that long to dawn, and he'd gone to bed early. It wasn't that surprising; he had enough memories to give him nightmares and shakes and attacks of depression for a long time. He looked over at the pill bottles, then shook his head violently.

No. That's all I need, another monkey on my hack, one I put there myself.

"All right to use them for physical pain," he muttered. "The rest I'm just going to have to tough out. I can't get a therapist, and if I did they'd just put me in an asylum…and something would come walking through the walls to get me there. Something with lots of teeth. There really are shoggoths in the places between."

Instead of trying to sleep he showered, then lay and watched the light grow gradually on the roof, trying to think.

"I need facilities. I'm about ready to go experimental, in a small way. I need an experimentalist to work with, too. Lots of computer time. And ideally I'd need one of them to work with, as well…Wish for the fucking moon while you're at it, Peter. Wish you smoked, it would be something to do."

At least he felt physically better than he had, although there seemed to be a weight on his mind, turning his thoughts sluggish. After a while he abandoned the attempt at serious thought and let strings of disconnected images float through his consciousness. Most of them turned out to be the bad parts of his life. Oddly, that was comforting. Nothing had really been as bad as what happened after Adrienne turned up. With that perspective, messy ends to soured relationships and not getting the grant you lusted for paled into the minor toe stubbings they were.