S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

He made a gesture with his left hand. “Hail to the Dread Empire of Shadows and the Secret Reign that is to come!”

Adrienne raised her right hand, divided the first and second fingers from the fourth and fifth to form a V, and solemnly intoned: “Live long and prosper!”

Ellen bit back a startled snort. Then they both stuck their index fingers in their ears, waggled the little fingers and chanted: “Uga-Chuga… Uga-Chuga… Bow! Wow! Wow!”

With both fists in the air: “Goooooo TEAM!”

Both dissolved in laughter. “Ah, Adrienne, it does me good to speak with you again, after dealing with the Gheorghe Br?ncu?i matter for so long. If you knew how many times I had to actually go through those pseudo-medieval rituals, as if I was some legend-besotted Victorian secret-society occultist like our ancestors…”

“You haven’t had to deal with the Demon Daimyo of the West Coast as long as I have, Dmitri. Any real progress?”

“Yes,” he said. “Progress that can be laid before the Council. Let us toast success!”

He made another gesture, one that seemed natural; forefinger to thumb, like the sign for OK, and a finger tapped to the neck. Then he reached for the tray, dipping a strip of the dark toast into the caviar, and taking one of the small glasses.

Ellen almost missed Adrienne’s signal. She turned and took the service from Theresa and bent to put it on the sideboard and pour; it had a dark rich aroma, different from anything she’d smelled before. Her flush grew deeper as her full breasts swayed with the gesture; the whole thing made her feel horribly like an extra glimpsed in some obtrusive pop-up ad for an Internet porn site.

“Za vashe zdorovye!”

He downed the whole glass, Russian-style.

“? votre sant?,” she answered and sipped the cognac, following it with black coffee.

“The plutonium was definitely from here,” the man in the screen went on. “The cattle who sold it to the Brotherhood agents thought they were selling it to the Iranians; I suspect a small, subtle Wreaking on their memories. They have all been dealt with, but the successors… I do not know if they will be any better.”

Adrienne hissed a little between her teeth. “We really have to do more about this, Dmitri. We are… vulnerable.”

“Tell me. In my opinion we should never have closed down the Communists, at least their security around closed sites was competent and we only had to control a few key men to control all. That there are so many to deal with now is why I’ve been trapped here, like some exile in the days of Stalin or the Czars.”

His face darkened a little. “As if I were responsible for Gheorghe’s final death! Have you seen my report on his security? A farce! Tzigani with knives and shotguns and bandanas around their heads. All that they needed was violins and balalaikas. Maybe their grandfathers were at least formidable savages, but these were merely drunken louts putting on a show, as if for tourists! You expected to see the movie cameras and fog made from dry ice at any moment!”

“Yes, one must move with the times,” she said.

There was a short significant pause; they met each other’s eyes and then looked away.

I missed something there, Ellen thought.

“I use Gurkhas, as you know,” Adrienne said into the brief silence. “They stay bought, too.”

“And how was your visit to Santa Fe?” Dmitri went on, taking the mouthpiece of the hookah and drawing a deep bubbling lungful. “You spoke hopefully of it last week.”

“Rather productive.” Another short pause. “In more ways than one.”

“Ah, ochen’ horosho,” he said. Then he looked at Ellen.

“Either you are developing a sense of style, Adrienne, or this is some sort of subtle mockery of mine.”

“I? Mock? Impossible, Dmitri. Oh, well, possibly a little of both. I acquired her in Santa Fe, yes. Previously my brother’s. Perhaps that explains my desire to show off a little, although he got surprisingly little use out of her. Guilty, I suppose. Such a grubby human emotion, guilt.”

“Not just human. Petit bourgeois, which is worse,” Dmitri said. Then to Ellen: “You are some sort of Slav, girl?”

“I… Polish, German, some Scots-Irish, a little Cherokee, sir,” Ellen replied.

“And she has the most intriguingly complex psyche, too,” Adrienne said. “Childhood trauma, I think. Odd pleasure-pain links.”

He replied in Russian, and probably to her. Ellen searched her memory and managed to produce what she thought was a polite disclaimer of ability to speak the language, learned when they had some clients from St. Petersburg: “Ya poka ne govoryu po russki, Gospodin.”

“I said, You have nice tits, too, to go with the psyche,” he replied with a smile.

What the hell am I supposed to say to that? she wondered, feeling her throat lock on the words. Fuck off, you posturing moron? Oh, Christ! I can’t even think it! Or bite me, maybe?

Adrienne sighed. “Dmitri, your lucies have tits. Or even boobs. Mine have breasts. Or at least the females do.”

“What happened to the Chinese boy with the delectable arse, then?”

“Still delectable, useful in several ways, and currently resting after-”

Adrienne turned her head and snapped aside just short of Ellen’s thigh, a biting gesture with an audible click of white sharp teeth.

Dmitri snorted. “What a collector you are! Don’t you ever just kill them, Adrienne? It’s like endless foreplay with no fucking!”

Ellen swallowed. She thought the boy holding the tray did too, with an almost imperceptible quiver in his hands.

Adrienne sighed again. “Dmitri, Dmitri, what a… gourmand you are. I suppose you even like b?chamel sauce.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“That it makes everything taste the same, Escoffier’s original sin? There’s nothing wrong with agony and death, but you miss out on so much if you hurry, experiencing the direct mental overtones as well as the actual blood. Emotional degradation, despair, self-loathing, transference…”

He snorted. “Girlie stuff.”

“Dmitri, I am a girl! When I’m corporeal, at least, and most of the time night-walking too.”

“Quantity can have a quality all its own, even for drinking emotions. In mass, they can be overwhelmingly potent. Ah, if you had only been at Srebrenica when the massacre began-”

“Dmitri, I was a child. Besides, my old, do you realize how many times you’ve told your Srebrenica story?”

“Oh.” He winced. “Tell me I’m not as bad as von Horst with the Hindenberg.”

“Nearly as bad as McFadden with the Titanic! And he’s transitioned successfully to postcorporeal so he’ll never shut up. You’d think with a potentially infinite span ahead of him he’d focus on the future sometimes.”

They laughed again. Adrienne touched the controls.

“I’ll do what I can with T?kairin Hajime,” Adrienne said. “He has not any dog in this fight, so he may be reasonable. Michiko listens to me, and she has his ear. She’s of our generation. You’ve earned release, Dmitri. There’s definitely going to be a meeting in Tiflis next year, the full Council and all candidate-qualified purebloods. They have to elect a successor to Gheorghe, after all.”

“I shall be forever in your debt. And the more so if I can get to Tiflis and a decent climate. We will have to remind Putin of who he really works for, so there are no disturbances.”

“Good. There’s talk that they may select a corporeal this time, which would be the first since… when? 1932, I think.”

“Ah. A younger voice on the Council. That would be… progressive.”

“Yes, it would. Possibilities, eh?”

The screen died and hummed upward. Adrienne smiled like a lynx. “That went smoothly, very smoothly. Theresa, you’ve earned a visit to Jean-Charles.”