S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

Plus I don't think the local police are much into the Miranda rights thing, somehow.

The outside light came on at number five, and four people came out.

Right, Monica's kids. Boy eleven, girl ten. Older woman – probably their grandmother. And Eusebia Conines, formerly of Coetzala and Tlacotalpan.

His professional instincts stuttered a little when she hit his eye. She was about seventeen, and not your typical girl from a little ejido village. For one thing she looked to have a strong dash of African in there with the predominant india and some Spaniard, to judge from the cinnamon-coffee color of her skin and the way her blue-black hair was loosely curled, as well as her full lips. Slim, straight figure, but a high, full bust-also not typical, peasant girls tended to stocky builds and breasts at best of the perky persuasion.

Okay, stop snorting and pawing the ground, let's hope she's not as mentally fucked-up as the last pretty girl you saw.

She hadn't been, from what the others said, but she'd also been here a year as a lucy. A pretty traumatic situation to begin with, and Shadowspawn could do things to your head. He'd experienced a little of that with Adrian putting in the blocks and wards; his cover identity would account for that, if he'd been a Tokairin soldato once. They used their renfield mercenaries against one another in their squabbles and didn't want them to be too utterly vulnerable. But that had been clinical, not whatever the local monsters had been doing with her on a whim in this theme park for demons.

These village girls are tough, though. He'd had enough experience with wetbacks to know that. And Adrian said she looked mentally resilient to him. Now for the risky part.

If she yelled for the cops he was dead, or much much worse. Shadowspawn had ways of torturing you that didn't have to end with death. Just plain didn't have to end.

He waited until the older woman and the kids had driven off, then walked through the gate and up the brick pathway. The risers of the steps leading to the arched front door were mosaic tile, and there was a colorful surround in the arch above. It was a nice house, carefully maintained but Lived-in; number one was the only other that did, and it had a couple of bicycles out front in racks, kids' models.

It wasn't the first time he'd knocked on a door that might have someone unhappy to see him behind it. Policemen saw a lot of that. He drew a breath and rapped; it was more personal than ringing the bell.

"Yes?" she said, when the door opened; Salvador had been pretty sure that she spent an instant looking at him through the peephole.

"My name is Eric Salvador, Senorita Cortines. I come from a certain man you met, who was not as he seemed."

"Oh, fuck," said Salvador; he'd never met Adrienne Breze, and from the impact she'd had on other people he had no desire to do so. "She's alive?"

"Yes. Everyone else is not to know, you understand? So I can't say so, the witch makes sure of that. Only to you I can, I don't know why, my head doesn't start buzzing."

That must be the Wreakings that Adrian had implanted.

No wonder they're sloppy about security! They can just reach into peoples minds directly!

Salvador stared at her. The Mexican girl seemed extremely self-possessed, if a little pale and moving carefully. She was leaning back on a pale, elegant sofa, her hands busy with some sort of lacework, dressed in a silk blouse, braided belt, elegant slacks and tooled leather sandals, an orange cat curled up beside her. There were a few paintings on the wall; those would have been Ellen's while she was here.

But the bookcase held a slew of school primers and language guides and some illustrated books on crafts; and he suspected the color scheme, heavy reds and navy blues with highlights of orange and crimson and green, was the current tenant's idea. A plate of sugar cookies had been put out, and a pot of strong black coffee.

"You're…sure?" he said. "Sure she's not dead?"

She rolled her eyes; he had to acknowledge that it was a stupid question.

"?Ai! The things the evil bitch does to me every couple of days, I'm very sure, me."

Well, here's some crucial information. Christ! Well, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

"But she's gone?"

"Yes. She, her parents, Monica. Only the children left. They've all gone to get ready for this big meeting."

She grimaced and took a small case out of a pocket and tossed a little white pill into her mouth and swallowed.

"She drank a lot of my blood just before she left, but already it hurts; and she made me help with Jose, so I'd know what was coming to me. This medicine from the doctor helps a little. She laughed about how I would beg her to beat me and take me in the worst ways when she came back. Damn her to hell!"

They were speaking in Spanish; it wasn't Salvador's first language, hadn't been in his family since his grandmother's time, but he was fully fluent and had been as long as he could remember. Though the dialect he'd learned from his grandmother's generation was quite a bit different from hers; there had already been more English words mixed in, for starters. Her English was reasonably good, but still heavily accented, and sometimes a little too much like a literal word-for-word translation for fine detail to come through to anyone who wasn't bilingual already.

He suspected she'd spoken a lot of Nahuatl before moving to the big-city ambience of Tlacotalpan. Coetzala must really be in the boonies.

"She nearly died, she was very sick," Cheba added. Clinically: "That would have been bad. I would have been killed myself, sacrificed. They do that, I hear, like the days of the old gods, sending the servants along with the master. Also-"

There was a disturbing glint in her big dark eyes, a flicker like a kiss of flame.

"-also I want to kill her myself. See her die. See her die! If that blond gringa can nearly kill her I can finish the job."

Okay, no Stockholm syndrome here.

"Then you will help us?"

Cheba put her lacework down. "Maybe."

"Maybe," she said again. "?El brujo quiere mi ayuda??Le costard! If the sorcerer wants my help, it will cost him!"

"Well…he's offering a way to escape."

"Like he did last time? And so I escape, what am I going to do? I have no papers, no money, I don't speak the language really well yet."

"This is a bad place."

She shrugged, her eyes hard. "I grew up selling baskets on the streets in Tlacotalpan. What do you think that's like for an India with no money? It's a bad place! I'm getting ready here, me, learning things. What happens to me-" Another shrug. "That bastard son of a whore Paco, the coyote who smuggled us across the border and sold us to the witch as snacks, he and his friends did things to me too. I saw him die, I'll see her die. Meanwhile I have a nice house and enough to eat, and I learn and I prepare. Revenge is like mole, you have to cook it slow for the best taste."

Salvador hid an admiring grin, but he thought she caught a bit of it. She was smarter than most, but otherwise she reminded him of others he'd met, the ones not simply beaten down and numbed by misery. She had a lynx-eyed grasp of the main chance, and wasn't going to let anything get in the way. It was annoying, but she had never had enough to indulge in luxuries like sentimentality.

"Okay, what do you want?" he said.

"What do you want, you and your boss?"

"He wants the witch's children."

"He's the father, right? She boasted to me about that, once. That she tricked him or something." A sniff. "As if men needed to be tricked into that.

Ah…yes.

"I have helped look after them a little. They are not bad children, but very strange. Now, here is what I want. I will help this man you work for to fight the brujos. I want a chance to kill Adrienne. Also I want papers, not a green card but citizen's papers, and I want enough money to open my own shop."