S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

The tone was mock angry, but he could sense a flicker of real grief behind it, and he squeezed her hand in apology; it was all he could do.

"No wonder I threw a bottle of brandy at your head and stomped out. Women like to communicate, you know. It's a foible we have."

"Men prefer to grunt, belch and scratch themselves," he said, his tone solemn. "It's a foible-"

She freed her hand for a moment and thumped him on the back of the head.

"So, let's go talk to Giselle," she said.

"It may be useful."

"It's certainly necessary. She's my Harvey, Adrian. She gave me my first real job and she mentored and mother-henned me and listened to me cry. She did a lot more for me than any therapist ever hatched."

"Born."

"Therapists are hatched, like other reptiles. Anyway, I owe Gis a lot."

And she advised you I was too creepy for words and that you should leave me, Adrian thought. I should not resent that; it was quite true and simply showed she was perceptive and had Ellen's best interests at heart. Nevertheless I do resent it. I must simply do my best to control that.

They held hands as they walked over to La Fonda, the Harvey hotel on the road that ran up to the cathedral; it was built in the classic faux-adobe-Hopi-Hispanic style of the reconstructionist nineteen twenties, which made it of respectable antiquity itself now. Then right across the bed of the Santa Fe River. Adrian smiled to himself as he felt the little flares of envy from others who saw him with Ellen. It was perhaps not the noblest of pleasures, but still definitely a pleasure.

She chuckled as they crossed the bridge and she looked down at the dry creek bed. Adrian raised a brow, and she spoke:

"I was remembering a comic I heard once, a local, doing an act with a fake Blues song:

And I was so goldurn sad that night

If there'd been any water in the Santa Fe River

I'da jumped right in and drowned.

Adrian chuckled too. "I wish I could have gone with you," he said.

She squeezed his hand. "I noticed that when we were dating…the first time, before it all came out…you always took me lonely places. That time we went to your beach place down on the gulf near Corpus Christi, all the other stuff."

"Habit. You have made me less solitary. Not that I will ever be gregarious."

"I'd die of shock to see you become a people person, honey. You're not cut out to be a glad-hander."

They turned left, uphill this time, along the winding course of Canyon Road. Originally it had been a stretch of little farms, ranchos where Spanish-Mexican settlers and their retainers had used water from the river and the Acequia Madre, the Mother Ditch, to grow patches of grain and fruit and raise pigs and chickens, goats and sheep and burros.

Many of the trees were still there, and the rambling adobe-and-stone houses they'd built to house their extended families, long since converted to other uses as the city grew around them.

Some a little farther back from the road along narrow alley were high-priced residences; over a hundred art galleries and studios stretched along this mile of winding street. The new construction blended in, being low-slung and stuccoed in brown with vigas, wooden beams with their ends exposed, supporting flat roofs. Many of the gardens were lovely, though those were mostly in the courtyards at the back, glimpsed through gateways. The art, though…

Adrian grinned at one modernist interpretation of a Hopi or Navajo medicine man, a stick-thin figure with a bulbous mask and antlers reaching for the sky.

"Bullwinkle the shaman!" he laughed.

Ellen joined him for a moment; then he could feel a wave of confusion and fear.

"My darling?" he said gently.

"Adrienne made the same joke. When she had me tied up in my own apartment up there, that day after I ran into her on the road. She'd be doing things to me with a sock stuffed in my mouth or duct tape across it so nobody could hear the screams, and then it was this chatty, witty conversation and then back to the screams… God, but I'm glad she's dead."

"I too," Adrian said, forcing down his rage.

You cannot take revenge on the dead, he thought. It is one of the few real disadvantages to killing your enemies. But some of them are too dangerous to let live an instant more than it takes to kill them.

Ellen took deep breaths and her mind calmed.

"Okay, she's your evil twin, it's only natural you'd see the same joke sometimes."

Hans amp; Demarcio Galleries wasn't open, but as Ellen had predicted, Giselle was there, working in her office at the back. A little pounding brought her to the front door. She opened the door with her mouth sagging, then turned gray and began to topple backwards towards a plinth that held a vase. It rocked as Ellen threw her arms around the older woman; Adrian felt the Power flow automatically as he lunged forward leopard-smooth to grab the dark feather-patterned piece of pottery out of the air. Not even Shadowspawn reflexes could have caught it before it shattered on the tile floor without his pushing the probability curve.

"Here," he said. "I would not want to destroy an original Maria Martinez."

Ellen gave him a quelling glance and took Giselle's arm. The older woman was still pasty with the shock, and making little gasping sounds. Her former assistant steered her into the office at the rear of the gallery's long rectangle, pushed her into the office chair and hunted up a glass and a bottle of sherry from a cabinet.

Quite passable sherry, too, Adrian thought; it was a Barbadillo San Rafael with tart, leathery scents and the taste of crushed toffee. A little sweet, a woman's sherry, but very good short of the V.S.O.P. level.

The gallery owner gulped the first glass as if it were water or a shot of bad bourbon; even then Adrian couldn't help wincing slightly. He occupied the moment and gave the two friends a little privacy by examining the shelves. The room had the orderly chaos of someone who knew where everything was, but probably couldn't have told someone else how to find anything to save her life. There were a couple of very good local pieces in spots where the skylight gave adequate light, though; one seemed like pure Abstract Expressionist when he first saw it, but the closer he came the more it looked like a local sunset seen from a tall dropoff.

Giselle Demarcio cleared her throat. Adrian turned around; she was dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex, and then gave a honking blow.

"I thought you were dead," she said to Ellen; her voice held a slight trace of East Coast big city. " Or off somewhere with his creepy sister."

Adrian sat; the chair was comfortable despite the local rustic make. Ellen sat beside him and took his hand again. She held the paired grip up, so that Giselle could see the wedding ring, and Adrian showed his own.

"You're married?"

"Quite happily, Ms. Demarcio," Adrian said.

"And to each other, at that, Gis," Ellen added dryly.

Demarcio was getting her composure back; Adrian could feel the roil in her mind subsiding, the random flicker steadying into the wave-like patterns of coherent thought. He couldn't tell what she was thinking, apart from the emotional overtones-that would require days of close association-but he could tell that she was thinking, which was impressive.

"After you went off with his…with Adrian's sister…"

"I didn't," Ellen said, with almost clinical detachment. "She kidnapped me. And burned down my house, nearly killing the Lopez family in the process. Would have killed them, except for Adrian and a friend of his. And she…did some very unpleasant things to me. Quiet a lot of unpleasant things for several months. Mmmm, drugs and brainwashing, you might say, besides the chew-toy stuff. Adrian rescued me."

"Oh," Demarcio said again. "Oh, the bitch!" Her thoughts spiked, settled into a mixture of sympathy and rage…"Oh, you poor thing!"