S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

"Hi!" Michiko's voice.

" Ca va, Michi?"

"Nothing much, you know?" she said, with an utterly Californian rising inflection. "Oh, that Santa Fe thing, a couple of the locals are poking around where they shouldn't. I had the renfields warn them off, but it looks like they're being naughty and trying to keep it secret…"

"Have them killed, then."

"I may go handle that myself. Nice to get in a little plain terrorizing and torture and butchery of unsuspecting ordinary humans now and then. The simple pleasures are the ones that last in the end, like steamed rice. I'm actually going to miss it once we're out in the open, the way their minds dissolve in fear when they realize what we are!"

"That is delicious," Adrienne conceded. "Still, one can't have everything, and there's something to be said for lifelong dread and cringing fear. Wait, Adrian hasn't been around there, has he? That would be…dangerous. The last I saw of him was too close for comfort. We don't want him suspecting anything too soon."

"Don't you think I could handle him?" Michiko bridled.

Not in a thousand years, Adrienne thought. Aloud she went on:

"Darling, I could barely handle him. He gave Dmitri all the trouble he could take just a few weeks ago. The poor boy is still sulking about Dale rescuing him."

"There is that. Well, he wouldn't be around here, would he? He killed my grandfather; Ichiro and I would be on the lookout for him, even if you were really dead. This is probably just one of those irritating things the humans do now and then."

"True. But he might drop by for his things, or the Power might prompt him; he is one of our generation, remember. Do keep alert."

"You know, this is as much my home as anywhere," Adrian said quietly.

They were sitting on a bench in Santa Fe's little central park on the plaza, eating ice-cream cones. The Palace of the Governors stretched in front of them, past the plain plinth of the Civil War memorial and the bandstand. He bit off a chunk of the cone; it was solid and smoothly rich, if not Berthillon, and there were pinon nuts in it as well.

The patch of cottonwoods and grass was drowsily peaceful on a Sunday morning, just cool enough for their Windbreakers to be comfortable on a bench in the shade. The thin mountain air seemed to impart an extra clarity to sight, as if everything were in a hyperrealist painting, sharp-edged and definite but with an unearthly glow to the colors.

"More than Paris?" Ellen said in a teasing tone.

"Much more," Adrian answered soberly.

I am a serious man, by inclination, he thought. Gloomy and brooding, in fact. Ellen…lightens me. Not that she is light minded, but she has more of a sense of proportion. Considering all that has happened to her…well, I knew she was a remarkable person.

"I was a young man in Paris, a student."

"What, Harvey didn't have you blowing things up and…Wreaking?"

"Yes. Though explosives are only occasionally useful against Shadowspawn-more often against their hirelings…but he thought I should have that experience, to make me…how did he put it…less of a fuckin' wing nut than most members of the Brotherhood. Many are born into the war, you understand, and it does strange things to the mind to be raised so. Others are recruited after an encounter with the Shadowspawn, and that is usually still worse."

"Did you like Paris, being a university student, being normal? Well, relatively normal."

"I loved it. I will always remember the city fondly…but there, even though I was estranged from the family, I could never forget that I was a Breze. The very stones of the place spoke of them."

"And you didn't feel at home when you were a kid?"

"With my foster parents in my childhood I was living a lie-that I did not know it at the time makes no difference in retrospect."

"What about Harvey? He raised you."

"Nomadically, though I loved his place in Texas, the little ranch in the Hill Country. We moved frequently even then. When I became an active fighter for the Brotherhood, we moved every week, or nearlyand that was when I was sixteen. When we were not holed up in safe houses or redoubts. In a place in the Yukon for a whole winter, once, for training, and for the Brotherhood's adepts to study me. Besides…though I tried to think of Harvey as a father, he was more like an elder brother to me. We are only a decade apart in age, after all. He was in his early twenties when he…rescued me. I was twelve."

Ellen blinked. She knew that, but it was hard to keep in mind when it looked as if Harvey were a full generation older. He could sense a slight discomfort; she'd been startled and put out when she first learned that there were twenty-five years between them, rather than the three or four his appearance suggested.

Which was one excuse I gave myself for driving her away, he thought. Stop wallowing in guilt, Adrian! It is a self-indulgence and makes for nothing but paralysis!

By the elbow she gave him in the ribs-quite hard-she was thinking the same thing. Base-link or no, she'd grown disconcertingly able to follow his train of thought. It was a little like telepathy, only shields and blocks were of no use whatsoever.

And I have been an excessively private man, as well, Adrian thought. It is hard, learning to share. But worth the effort and discomfort, a thousand times over.

"This was the first place I could be myself?" he finished.

She licked her ice-cream cone and snorted slightly.

"Alone, lonely, brooding on a mountaintop. The happiest time of your life!"

"No, the months since our marriage have been the happiest time of my life," Adrian said, and glowed at the smile that rewarded him. "But the years here, they were…calm, for the most part. The days, at least. At night I could run beneath the stars, and come to terms with my demons and my past."

"Sounds like you needed it, honey," she said.

I needed to make myself worthy of you, he thought but did not say; even a newly wedded couple had to have some sense of restraint.

"I love this place too. It was where I was first on my own, making my own living as an adult. NYU didn't really count, there I was working three jobs and studying too."

She smiled, her full, curved Cupids-bow lips were particularly charming with a little smudge of chocolate ice cream at one corner. She licked it up, which was both charming and disturbing.

"I remember the first time I came here, it was for the job interview, and I had lunch over there at the Plaza Cafe," Ellen said. "It was January."

She nodded towards the restaurant that occupied the center of the block of two-story Territorial-style adobes facing the open space. It had been there for over a century, since just after the First World War, when this square had had the only paved streets in the city…town, it had been back then. Oddly enough the food was, and always had been, rather Greek in emphasis.

"I had a gyro, and then a big piece of that heavenly coconut cream pie, and sat and sipped my coffee and watched the snow fall. Big thick fluffy flakes, you could just see the cathedral up there, and then you couldn't as it got dark, and it kept snowing; I didn't know it was unusual, but it wasn't like snow in Pennsylvania somehow, the light seemed to make it glow from within, and I remember thinking that I understood a lot of Southwestern paintings that had looked like exaggeration or kitsch. After dark I walked out and it was like being in a snow globe, perfectly silent, all the sound hushed…

"We will have a day like that together, sometime," he said.

She slid a hand into his. "You know, we should have done all this backstory stuff the first time we got involved."

"Ah…that wasn't possible…"

"It was like trying to talk to a lobster!" she said. "You were the sexiest guy I'd ever met, and the most mysterious, and I knew there was something inside, but I could get there. Click go the claws, talk to my shell, scuttle away!"