S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

"Ah," Peter said. "A ragtag band of heroes who'll overthrow the evil empire?"

"Nah, mainly we're a nuisance not worth the effort of squashing 'cause we're really good at hiding. A lot of us have enough of the genes to use the Power-not enough to night-walk or feed on blood, though. Think of us as ferrets up against a timber wolf."

That's comforting. Peter thought. Not.

"What about Adrian?"

"He's somethin' of an exception. And I hope he's here real soon now. 'Cause otherwise we are well and truly fucked."

"Good to see you out and about," Dmitri said, leaning on a boulder after he assumed human form once more. "And as lovely as ever."

"Flattery, my snake in the grass," Adrienne chuckled.

She leapt atop it, her own head-height, and squatted in an easy crouch next to her kit to talk to him.

"Besides, this is my etheric body."

She was justly proud that even another adept couldn't tell it from the corporeal form without probing.

"I'm still not completely back to meat-normal."

The night was on the comfortable side of chilly; the dry desert air lost heat rapidly. The stars overhead glowed in colors someone more human-less her type of hominid-could not have seen. Steel blue, red, pale green, the almost harsh-bright of the three-quarter moon; Shadowspawn had always been more nocturnal than their prey, and even in the flesh saw better in darkness. The etheric form's eyes were more sensitive still.

"The plan proceeds," she said.

"Except for the unplanned elements, such as my being shot in the arse and having my throat cut. That is a role reversal I do not relish."

"A mere detail," she said, and they both laughed.

"Though I did get a taste of your lucy. In any case, we'd better scout the place again," he said, shifting to Russian.

" Da," she said, in the same language. "Good idea, Dmitri Pavlovitch. We must make their hairbreadth escape completely convincing."

Learning new tongues was easy for their breed; the same enlarged speech centers that let the telepathic facility read the code of another brain helped the learning process.

"But cautiously," she said; Dmitri tended to be reckless.

And then she willed, reaching within for the familiar template.

" Amss-aui-ock!" she snapped, a purling, spitting sound.

Mhabrogast, the lingua demonica, the language that mapped and compelled the hidden structures of the world. Potential-being-becoming, an arrogant command directed at the stuff of reality itself. You convinced your mind that you were something, and the mind made it real…

Or close enough to real for government work, she thought whimsically. Close enough for biting, rending, tearing. Close enough for blood.

Pain thrilled along her nerves, a shivering almost-pleasure, a dissolution like sleep or orgasm or death as her very self ceased to exist for nanoseconds. Sight dimmed as her quasi body folded and stretched.

Sound exploded outward, and smells-it was much easier to tell Dmitri was night-walking when his very scent had a sharp metallic overtone, like a small thunderstorm.

A real wolf would have snarled and cowered; she let her long red tongue loll over her fangs and jerked her nose upward. The scurrying rustle of a field mouse nibbling the papery cover of a seed yards away was distinct; so was the growl of a heavy truck's diesel near the distant mountains on the western horizon. The clean scents of the desert's sparse life flowed into her nose, a tapestry even more powerful than hearing, and one that made sight almost irrelevant. The human reeks from the little hamlet a few miles upwind were harsh by contrast. But though the body was a timber wolf, the mind wrapped around the brain stem was Shadowspawn; the thin black lips skinned back from long teeth as she smelled human blood. Warm, spicy, enticing…

Business, she thought. Mere prowling terrorism must await happier times.

Da, Dmitri replied; at close range telepathy was easy and swift. Let us continue our little charade. Ah, if only Michiko- sama were here!

She's attending to something else, Adrienne said. Besides, I dont think she reciprocates your affection, Dmitri.

I'd be waiting for her to get silver in her buttocks, the male Shadowspawn gibed.

He'd been rubbing at his arse-she had to admit it was a fairly nice one, taut and muscular, though right now marked with red where the silver bullets had grazed the snake's tail. He was taller than most, nearly six feet, and his hair was long and white-blond. It tossed like hers in the grit-filled wind that coursed by. Then he threw his arms upward. Form sparkled for an instant too brief for even her senses to fathom, turned into something like a mist with eyes, and then the eight-foot wings of Aquila chrysaetos simurgh whipped at the air.

She reached down to her baggage and took out a small shape in her teeth. They closed on it, and the wolf's powerful neck muscles tossed it a dozen feet upward.

Talons closed on the metal oblong, and the extinct golden eagle of Pleistocene Crete soared upwards.

The wolf leapt down and loped to the west.

The Humvee was old but well maintained. Adrian drove it into the shadow of a tall boulder and parked. The engine ticked slightly as cooling metal contracted; even in the tail end of summer the Arizona desert could be chilly at night. Ellen swung out of her seat and looked around at the moon-silvered landscape and breathed the cool sage-scented air with its hints of caliche and dust.

Adrian's mouth tightened as he glanced around likewise. She had her night-sight goggles pushed up on her forehead, but he could pierce the darkness on his own. The lights of a very small town or medium-size hamlet glittered in the middle distance. Somehow they emphasized the loneliness of the spot the way the passing of a train did, a peculiarly American desolation-it made you think of dust blowing over the cracked concrete of a gas station and people looking out a window over their fifth cup of midnight coffee.

I really am an artsy, Ellen thought. Here I am about to fight for my life and I'm making comparisons to Hopper paintings.

"This is an abortion of a mission," Adrian said. "There is at least one night-walker out there, perhaps more. I can scent them."

Oh, thanks, honey, Ellen thought-and then hoped that Adrian wasn't listening.

He was usually scrupulous about her mental privacy, at least as far as words went: sensing her emotions was something he just couldn't help.

Its a compliment in a way, she thought. He's really treating me as a comrade-in-arms. I guess this is that soldiers bitching you hear about. Goes with the gallows humor, I expect. And I may not have thought seriously about enlisting in high school – the university money wasn't quite tempting enough – but I've been well and truly drafted.

It all made taking a permanent holiday in that flying penthouse look pretty attractive. Her instincts were telling her things about why the night was dangerous, and she knew the source of those genetic promptings better now.

Things were out there, things far more dangerous than any tiger or lion. They'd hunted her human ancestors like rabbits while the glaciers came and went and came again. She'd had personal experience with them, and only the training inside Adrian's mind was letting her control her fear. It was there, lurking in her mind as the predators did in the night.

"Let us get ready, then," he said.

She helped him get their gear out. Part of it included a high-impact oblong of composites. She knelt and unlatched it. A sniper rifle lay within, and she let her hands occupy themselves snapping it together. It was beautifully crafted and scrolled with silver inlays that would look like ornament to a casual gaze. But it was also a single-shot weapon that broke open like a shotgun, a thing of stone-ax simplicity; the fewer moving parts, the less for the probability-twisting Power to grasp.