S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

Maybe it was paranoia. How could you think about this stuff and not go crazy? There was even a slight impulse just to slash his own wrists with the sharpened table knife and get it over with. It wasn't the animal escape from pain that had tempted him while he was undergoing withdrawal. Now the impulse came from the knowledge that he probably was going to die anyway, and very painfully, and the sheer tension of waiting every second.

He hadn't bothered to close the window. The fresh air was worth it, when the people…things…he feared could walk through walls. He'd gotten thoroughly sick of the smells in this room, too.

But the wall-walking thing meant they could be right behind him. Right now.

He turned quickly. Was that a noise?

"Nothing. Sheesh!"

Peter straightened up with a shaky laugh and turned back towards the door.

The front six feet of the giant python were already reared up man-tall. He had just enough time to see the head flash as it struck like a triphammer into his shoulder, and the knife went skittering across the floor. Then the coils were whipping around him, like trying to fight a berserk steel cable, around his ribs and his left arm, squeezing, squeezing…

"Isn't it wonderful that Peter escaped?" Ellen smiled.

She lay back in the deeply padded recliner and fought not to sleep as the engines rose to a muted scream outside and acceleration pushed at her.

The aircraft was an Airbus A321 Elite, a two-engine wide-body that had served as the toy of an oil prince, before being sold on the rental market when he tired of it and bought something more recent; he'd probably moved up to an A380, because judging by this, the concept of restraint wasn't one of the files on his hard drive.

"Perhaps it's your Power operating without your knowing it?" she asked.

Effectively the plane was a luxury penthouse with wings, complete with gym, study, entertainment center and two huge bedrooms, with an air of jasmine and ozone. Half the cargo compartment below was extra fuel tanks, which gave it more range than a B-52. She felt a little guilty using it for the pair of them-the normal complement of passengers would be over two hundred-but it was the first thing that had been available, if money were no object.

"Yes," Adrian said. "That could well be so. The Power"-he smiled grimly-"operates in mysterious ways."

This thing reminded her a little uncomfortably of Adrienne's private jet, though it was bigger, and the decor-Birdseye marble tile in the bathroom, Persian carpets in the lounge area-was considerably less restrained. Gaudy, in fact, though extremely expensive and very well maintained.

"Particularly where many purebreds, many adepts, are involved," he went on. "Strokes of luck may happen, yes, but they may be…ultimately…lucky for someone else than the first recipient. Coil upon countercoil."

Wow, Ellen thought. It takes a bit of getting used to, strokes of luck that really happen.

He frowned a little. "Even so, it seems rather odd, since normally my parents would have killed any of Adrienne's lucies who survived her. Granted, I am more purebred than they, but they are there and the Power attenuates according to the inverse-square law, generally."

Ellen winced at the thought of the orgy of slaughter that had probably followed her escape. Poor Monica. The den mother of Lucy Lane, with her brownies and her sympathy…and Jose…

Jose might get off. He's a native, born into the service of the Brezes. God, I hope Monica's kids are okay. They don't feed on kids but that doesn't mean they wouldn't hurt them. Adrienne's parents…Adrian's too…they were always charming, and I got the distinct impression they'd watch people thrown to crocodiles and make witty repartee about it.

There was no way to tell for sure, of course. It had taken all Adrian's command of the Power and the Brotherhood's resources just to find the main estate of the California branch of the Brezes. None of them was going into that maze of traps arcane and physical again if they could help it; plus Adrian's parents were there now, which put two adepts in charge instead of just one. They were postcorporeal, but that wasn't much of a handicap.

Still, I wish I knew what had happened.

Adrian quirked a smile at her. "You are a refreshing change from the people I have associated with most of my life, my sweet."

"Honey?" she said.

"You are sweet," he said. "Empathetic. You care for people. Even people you met in a very horrible place."

"So are you a sweetie. You've just…not had much opportunity to show that side of yourself."

"The running and hiding and fear and killing and death do tend to limit opportunities for emotional expressiveness…"

"I could hit you sometimes, Adrian!"

"You see what I mean."

She laughed. "Besides, the people you knew can't have all been bad. Those Brotherhood types are on the side of the Good, Pure and True. Right?"

"So were the men who saturated Dresden and Tokyo with incendiary bombs until streams of melted human fat ran in the gutters," he said. "One becomes hardened, if you live at all."

Then he surprised her a little by reciting:

In bombers named for girls, we burned

The cities we had learned about in school Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among

The people we had killed and never seen.

When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;

When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."

They said, "Here are the maps"; we burned the cities.

He shook his head and snorted a little. "Living with you challenges me," he said. More softly: "And shames me. I have not dared to feel deeply, for fear of loss. That is unpardonable cowardice."

The rental came with pilots, maintenance and cabin staff; she suspected Adrian would have done without the latter if he could, and it had meant keeping certain parts of their luggage locked and in the bedroom. Even with a private charter like this, people would talk if you carried an assortment of lethal hardware on board openly. Which reminded her…"What about going through customs?"

This time his smile was a little ironic. "My darling, I can use both the Brotherhood's and the Council's…safe words. Codes that will tell the officials to turn a blind eye and wave us through. They undoubtedly think-"

"-that we're spooks," she finished, and thumped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. "I feel like I'm walking through walls all the time. The bottom dropped out of the world, but as a compensation I get to go through all these cool secret doors. I suppose I'll get used to living down the rabbit hole. Only it's not Wonderland, it's WonderHell."

"I hope you don't have to live so," he said. "Not for long, at least."

She noticed that he didn't say she wouldn't spend the rest of her life doing just that. One of the things she liked about Adrian was that he didn't overpromise.

The staff brought them dinner and retired quickly at his glare; Adrian was usually gracious in a sort of de haut en bas way, but this time he was deliberately cold, to keep them out of contact as much as possible. It was unlikely that more could endanger them, but there was no reason to take extra chances with bystanders.

Ellen looked down at the meal; steamed asparagus with herb sauce, Kasseler Rippchen -smoked, brine-cured pork chops in an egg-and-crumb crust-finger-length golden-brown potato Schupfnudeln…

She began to laugh. At Adrian's raised eyebrow she ate a bite of the pork, savoring the smoky, salty richness, and then spoke:

"I was remembering my first cattle-car-with-wings across the ocean. NYU was by-God going to expose us art history types to the original font of kultcha, even if we had to suffer for it. My seatmates on either side weighed three hundred pounds each, and…Well, I wasn't picky about food then, but…"