S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

A slight frown of concentration, and Ellen’s eyes went wider as she flipped and revealed.

“Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.”

Adrian’s sister took the coin back. “Each time, there is a chance of one or the other. Below the muscles of your fingers, below the weight of the coin, below even the decisions you make about how hard to move your thumb… down far enough… there is a… churning. And-”

She flipped the coin into the air herself and moved her hands aside. It struck the candleholder, a butter dish, teetered… and came to a stop upright on its edge. Ellen’s eyes grew wide. The coin teetered again, and fell.

“-there was a slight chance of that happening. The stuff of your mind”-she tapped her temples with her forefingers-“operates on that level, as well. Some scientists have begun to suspect it, though we discredit them.”

“And… you’re not supernatural?”

Adrienne shrugged, in a palms-up way Ellen thought made it as certain as her accent that she hadn’t been raised entirely in the United States. She filled her wineglass and Ellen’s again, sipped, ate a piece of the reddish-pink lamb and some of the whipped potato, went on: “Let me tell you a story. Perhaps it is literally true, perhaps only poetically. A long time ago, when humans first spread out from Africa-which was far longer ago than the archaeologists think-a small band of hunters was trapped in the mountains of High Asia, a few families, perhaps twenty or thirty in all. Each year the glaciers rose around their plateau, and the food was less, and the cold was more. It was most likely that they would merely eat each other and die. But one was born who was lucky…”

Ellen shivered as the other finished: “And then the world became warm and the ice melted, and we were freed and set loose, and for a hundred thousand years we ruled the earth with your breed as our playthings and our prey.”

“Legends,” Ellen whispered.

Adrienne nodded, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her knuckles, smiling happily.

“Yes. In those days we believed them ourselves. We were the cruel gods who demanded the blood of men, and carried off their children and tormented their nights. We were Lamashtu and Sekhmet and Smoking Mirror; we were the evil sorcerers and the ogres and the goblins, the lamia and vetalas, incubi and succubae, impundulu and nagual, vampire and werewolf and leopard men. We were why your kind still fears the dark. We call ourselves the Shadowspawn, and for the last century we have ruled the world once more in secret.”

“Then you’re doing a pretty damn poor job of running it!” Ellen blurted, then clamped her lips shut.

Adrienne laughed. “Ch?rie, has anything I’ve said or done given you the impression that we care about the greatest good of the greatest number? And as for running the world-I said we rule it.”

She uncurled her fingers for a moment, and held her hands as if framing her face like a picture with the thumbs beneath the chin.

“Do I look like a bureaucrat? To run the world would be to spend all our time at meetings, or reading reports, or standing in ridiculous costumes in front of faux-Egyptian temples bellowing platitudes to crowds of groveling worshippers, like a bad science-fiction film. And while you beg and plead and grovel charmingly, my sweet, it’s much more enjoyable on a personal one-to-one level. No, no, we rule by ruling the men who run the world. Run it for us.”

She turned both hands palm-up to her left, in a gesture like a visual behold.

“They do all the work.”

The same gesture to the right.

“We have all the fun. It’s the natural order.”

Silence fell as the waiter returned with their desserts.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” Ellen said when he’d gone.

“That’s why you’re telling me all this. You don’t care what I know, because nobody will hear.”

Another laugh. “Oh, I may kill you someday, slowly and beautifully and cruelly. Or not, if you continue to amuse. But if you were to escape, per impossible, who would you tell?”

“I’d tell everybody! These days you can’t keep things secret.”

“Would you start a Web site? www.MutantVampiresDrinkOurBlood. com? Why, seventy years ago a writer here in New Mexico stumbled on some of the truth, and wrote a book around it… and we let him live to an implausibly old age. Though we made sure the publisher wouldn’t buy a sequel.”

“Adrian would believe me,” Ellen said.

“Yes, and you two could sit and tell each other about it. But I have no intention of losing you, ch?rie, not when our relationship is just blooming.”

“Why do you do that?” Ellen said.

“Do what?”

“Talk as if we were lovers. Talk as if you loved me. Talk about our relationship.”

“Ah, but we do have a relationship. Granted, it’s a predator-prey relationship, but those are very important ecologically.”

She took a spoonful of the dessert, ate it with slow relish, then tapped the spoon on the edge of the dish.

“And I do love you. It’s a very much more complex form of the way that I love this cr?me br?l?e. But nonetheless sincere. And the more often I taste of you, the more I love. You might call it a devouring passion. Have you never wondered why human beings sometimes feel that way? It’s because you all have a trace-sometimes more than a trace, like poor Jeffrey Dahmer-of our heredity. As if deer were part wolf, or antelope part tiger.”

She reached into her handbag and took out a cigarette case, tapped a pale ivory-colored cylinder into a holder and bent over to light it from the candle. An off-white tendril rose, scented with rum and something else added to the tobacco. Even then, Ellen was shocked enough to blurt: “You can’t smoke here!”

Heads were turning at nearby tables, but not towards them. A man sniffed and coughed, then shrugged and went back to his souffl?. Ellen had the sudden feeling that she was invisible, that if she stood and shouted and threw dishes nothing would happen.

“Delicious one, I can do anything I want. Anywhere, at any time, to or with anyone. I could rip out the chef ’s throat if I wanted to… though that would be a criminal waste. You’d better get used to the concept.”

She looked at her watch, then tucked seven hundred-dollar bills under a wineglass for the tip.

“Time to go. Adrian should be charging in to your rescue about now. Let me see… yes, good shielding, but there’s that don’t-notice-this feeling.”

“Adrian really loves me,” Ellen said stubbornly as they rose; she draped the shawl casually around her hips.

“Which is why you were running away from him in tears when we met?” Adrienne laughed. “Ch?rie, remember that he has my instincts. He just won’t admit it.”

“What did you do to my apartment?”

“I set a trap. The equivalent of wiring a grenade to the door.” She shrugged. “He won’t be killed, I think, not if he deserves to be my brother. It’s not my plan that he die. Not yet, possibly never. Now, allons-y!”

A limousine was waiting outside. Beside the door was a young Asian man, dressed in dark windbreaker, black T-shirt and baggy pants and trainers. There was a button microphone in his ear with the slender thread of the pickup alongside his jaw, and one hand rested inside the coat. Ellen hesitated as he opened the door; the interior loomed dark, as if this was some threshold across which she could never return. A hand pushed firmly at her back, and the man said something in Chinese. Adrienne replied in the same language, her tone sharp.

Then her head came up just as she put one foot inside the door; her eyes pointed eastward past the Cathedral, towards the apartment.

“Oh. The clever boy has brought a friend with him. Yes, we’d better get going. After all, helping Adrian is going to take us quite a while.”