S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

“Helping him?”

“Helping him with his identity confusions. You and I are going to help him… get down with his bad self.”

Softly: “I want my brother back. My brother, my lover, my other self.”

“Still nothing definite?” Harvey Ledbetter said.

“No,” Adrian said.

He worked his shoulders; all that tension there would get him would be a headache.

Cold. I must be cold. Do not think of what Ellen is suffering. My feelings will not rescue her, only my strengths, my abilities, my wits. Think only of chances, strategies.

They rode the escalator nearly alone; Albuquerque’s airport was a hub, but not a big one, and air travel hadn’t picked up fully again anyway with the economy still limping. There were more people arriving than catching departing flights at nine in the evening, as well.

“No,” he went on. “I can’t just guess. Not with someone like Adrienne involved.”

“Yeah, that screws the probabilities well and good. Just west, eh?”

“Just west.”

“Hell of a lot of territory in that direction. You want to do the honors at Security, or shall I?” Harvey said, as they walked past the shuttered bookstores and by-generous-definition restaurants. 9:45 San Francisco blinked at them from the Departures screen. On time.

“Oh, I’ll do it,” Adrian said. “I’m bored, anyway.”

Harvey put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “She’s counting on you getting frazzled,” he said gently.

“Yes. So I won’t. I shall not be comfortable or easy, either.”

Not as easy as you, my friend, he thought; he could feel the other’s cool hunter’s patience.

You do not know Ellen. It is not that you do not care, but this is one more encounter in a long war. And you have gotten that which you wished; you have forced me back into this doomed fight.

He didn’t resent that-not much. If you could read the truth of men’s emotions without effort, you learned to make allowances that those who could take comfort from illusion and ignorance did not. Or else you had no friends.

But Adrienne must also have desired this. And that is very much a concern.

They heaved their carry-on luggage onto the conveyor belt as they came to the head of the airport security line, amid the smell and feel of tension and boredom and throttled anger. Harvey walked jauntily into the glass enclosure.

Adrian put the knuckles of his fists together and let the simple electronic nervous system of the machines vibrate in his consciousness. That was hardly a Wreaking at all, no need for glyphs or the diamond-shard syllables of Mhabrogast that cut your mind bloody from the inside. He didn’t have to touch anything but electrons in semiconductors, and when your brain held a decryption center intended to break the unique codes inside a human skull, computers were child’s play.

The metallic taste put his teeth on edge for a moment, but the scanner showed nothing except the simple form of a man, and harmless underwear and magazines in their carry-ons. The same for him…

They collected their gear, stepped into their shoes and walked out through the slowly revolving door into the main concourse; behind him someone’s mind muttered:

Kill them all, kill them all- With a vivid image of a nuclear fireball cracking above a city, the blast-wave throwing aside buildings like confetti and turning bodies to shadows against walls…

“Whoa!” Harvey said. “Someone really doesn’t like goin’ through the mill!”

The Sunport had a great bronze statue where the concourse met the two wings of gates; a shaman twice man-height running full tilt, with an eagle headdress and a live eagle or an eagle spirit just at the edge of his outstretched fingers. Two decades of travelers had known it as Chief Trips and Falls or Shaman Destroys Endangered Species. Adrian smiled grimly at it; there was less charm to legends when you knew their sources. Or to religions, come to that.

“Do you know why I really hate drinking human blood?” Adrian said.

He forced himself not to snarl and turn his mind into a lethal razor as a man bumped into him, walking with his head in a copy of the New York Times.

Election Will Be Close; Democrats Confident, read the headline. Knowing who was really in charge also took the interest out of politics, for the most part.

“Moral qualms?” Harvey asked.

“No. It is no crime to abstract a little from the Red Cross; people donate it to help others, and they are helping me, and I give them a lot of money. What I hate is the way it makes everyone smell more appetizing. I really should not be around people.”

They turned into one of the washrooms on the B concourse, went into adjacent stalls for privacy and opened their carry-ons across the toilet seats. Adrian checked the magazine, snapped it back into his Glock and holstered it. The knife he slipped into loops on the other side of his jacket; wearing it across the small of the back wasn’t comfortable in an aircraft seat, even a first-class one.

The hypodermics with their solution of silver and radioactive waste went cautiously into steel-and-lead-lined tubes sewn into a pocket. A load of that would kill him just as permanently and irrevocably as the wickedest member of the Council of Shadows. The chalks and markers were, ironically, the most dangerous part of his equipment and the ones he could let the authorities see.

Or perhaps it is my mind that is dangerous. Yes, without doubt, for the glyphs only focus it. Perhaps the Mhabrogast too, though there I am less certain.

“Ol’ buddy,” Harvey said meditatively-there was a chunk sound as he checked and closed his massive coach gun. “How many people do you figure could mind-fuck the scanner the way you did?”

“Oh, anyone the Council would recognize as Shadowspawn,” he said absently. “Half the sworn members of the Brotherhood; you could, it would just be harder, eh? Plenty of independents who think they are magicians or witches or psychics or whatever.”

Harvey chuckled as they exited the washroom; Adrian wrinkled his nose as the smells of urine and disinfectant fell away. A hypersensitive sense of smell was another of the disadvantages of his heritage. Not as bad as the cravings, but it added its mite of discomfort.

Of course, dogs and wolves and leopards are more sensitive still, but they seem to mind it less. I wonder why? “Makes you confident about how Homeland Security’s got your ass, don’t it?” Harvey went on.

Adrian laughed as well. “Harvey, what do you think would happen to a hijacker who tried to take over an aircraft with one of us onboard?”

“It happened. I looked it up last year, had the same thought when we were pulling our team out of Bucharest after we turned Gheorghe Br?ncu?i’s hideaway into a tanning salon. It was in 1972, flight out of Beirut. A Shadowspawn enforcer working for Ibrahim al-Larnaki. That was before he took over Abdul the Damned’s Council seat.”

“What happened?”

“They hushed up the bodies, the usual. Tell you the truth, I think they got what they deserved. And it isn’t often I think people deserve what a bored Shadowspawn mook does when he’s turned loose with time to be inventive.”

Adrian gave a sour snort. “Have you ever tallied the arguments against… what’s the current term? Intelligent Design?”

“Can’t say as I’ve bothered since I got over a Baptist upbringing. And I was about fifteen when that happened-decided that anything that said I shouldn’t get into Julie-May McBell’s pants behind the bleachers after the football game was bound to be wrong about everything else, too. Lost my faith with her legs wrapped around me and a bare tit in my hand. But tell me.”

“Here’s the Power, OK? With enough of it, you can work wonders.”