S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

“That never stopped you before,” Harvey said. “You always were an articulate little bastard. Give it a try. I’ve only heard your bitching and moaning about blood-bank surplus a couple of hundred times.”

The younger man nodded. “Like eating week-old roadkilled skunk on a hot day.”

He threw the emptied blood-bag into the waste disposal and gripped the rough edge of the granite countertop, barring his teeth as he fought against a surge of nausea. The blood burned its way down his throat like the cheapest raw bathtub hooch ever made, edged with sandpaper, and coiled in his gut like a burning snake. His breath hissed out, and then the contents of his stomach stopped trying to climb back up his gullet.

“Glad to see you’re not enjoying it,” Harvey said dryly.

“It’s dead, it’s cold, and worst of all it’s from someone who was calm and relaxed as they did their civic duty at the blood bank and listened to fucking New Age water music. But I need the oomph.”

He laughed mirthlessly and reached for the glass of red wine. It cleared his mouth, but the effect of the blood was hitting his nerves now. He could feel them like a metallic web beneath his skin, more alive but jangled with a nails-on-slate quiver from the crown of his head to the tips of fingers and toes. The warning flutter of a migraine started at the back of his brain stem, telling him what the payment for the foul blood’s sudden strength would be.

“Shadowspawn make a big thing of how we’re like wolves and tigers and whatnot, head bull-goose top predators, but you know what we’re really like? Mosquitoes.”

Adrian looked through the open well in the kitchen wall and into the dining area. The horizon was darkening in the east, but it wasn’t quite night yet. The coming of it thrilled along sharpened senses, an impulse to run through the sage and juniper, to hunt and howl and stalk. To leave the prisoning flesh behind. He snarled at the thought.

“Whoa, boy,” Harvey said, and he realized it must have been a literal snarl as well.

“She’s got Ellen,” he said grimly.

“Not proven. The girl could just be so pissed off with you she won’t return your calls. Remember, if she hasn’t met your lovely sister, what you’re saying sounds like conspiracy-theory rants.”

“I know Adrienne. It’s a taunt. She always stole my toys.”

“Let’s get ready. Sunset’s coming.”

“Hour travel time to Santa Fe. We could leave about now,” Harvey said.

“No, too chancy. I’m not going outside my protections without full dark to work with-that’ll equalize things. We should be able to get to Ellen’s place by around seven thirty, and at least pick up the trail.”

Harvey hesitated, then said: “She got you spooked?”

“Yes,” Adrian said frankly. “It’s not just the thought that I might lose. It’s the way fighting her makes me more similar to her, inside my head. She knows that, too.”

“Well, fightin’s the only alternative we got, right now.”

The older man opened his traveling case and dressed from it; boots and pants and belted high-collared tunic of loose black leather, with gloves and close-fitting hat. Adrian could feel the mesh of ultrathin silver wire within, like the sensation of having a tooth drilled when the painkiller didn’t quite work.

“Christ, I don’t know how you can stand that,” he said. “Besides looking as if you’re cruising for rough trade, or scouting for Ming the Merciless.”

“In San Francisco, I look positively restrained. You do the Power stuff. I shoot.”

He took a weapon out of the case. It was a double-barreled shotgun cut down to a massive pistol, an old-fashioned model simple as a stone ax with external hammers and all the metal parts silver-inlaid. Adrian winced and extended a hand towards it.

“Gelatin slugs?”

“Silver nitrate and a trace of radioactive waste in liquid silicone,” Harvey said. “If there were Shadowspawn elephants, this would knock ’em down. It wouldn’t do a renfield anything but harm, either.”

He slid it into the loops inside the skirt of the leather coat, and added a box of shells to one pocket.

“Nasty. I notice you’re not trying to use revolvers anymore.”

Harvey shrugged. “Failure rate got too high, like the way it did with automatics back in the forties. The more probability gets warped-”

“-the easier it is to warp,” Adrian finished.

“I’ve got the blades, too,” the older man said, tapping the insides of his forearms. “They always work.”

“Good. If I really had to do it and didn’t care how much it hurt, I think I might be able to screw the action on that monster-truck coach gun. Or possibly the charge in the shells. And if I can do it, she can.”

“Shit. We’ll be back to crossbows, next.”

“Yeah, only they will still be able to shoot you with machine-pistols. Now, what was that about them not really winning?”

Adrian was already in what he intended to wear; nearly-new hiking boots, jacket and trousers of charcoal-gray denim and roll-topped shirt, casual-smart enough for street wear but tough and nonbinding and giving reasonable protection to his skin if he had to move fast. He went to the Cassatt in the hallway and swung it back. The safe beneath the picture-frame had no handle, only a blank disk of steel in its center. He placed a palm against it, and let the rhythm of the circuits resonate. When they did, he thought a phrase in a language that had been long dead when Stonehenge was new.

Click-clunk.

The thick steel wedge swung open. The interior was bigger than you might expect. He reached in and took out a Glock, checked the magazine and snapped it home. There were bundles of various currencies inside the safe as well, passports in several different names, and a leather case that held ranked SD memory cards and small sealed vials. He took out a black nylon knapsack and checked the contents: colored chalks, artist-style markers, three steel hypodermics shaped to be used as daggers and loaded with a mixture much like the filling in the slugs of Harvey’s coach gun. And a sheathed knife, with a curved nine-inch blade and a hilt of dimpled black bone, next to a rolled-up black righthand glove of a heavy soft material. He set his hand to the knife, hissing slightly at the twinge of pain through the insulation.

“Like old times,” Harvey said with a crooked smile.

Adrian put his arms through the straps of the knapsack and tucked the blade beneath the tail of his jacket.

“No. In the old days we’d have had more backup. And so would Adrienne. It would have been official, part of the war. There’s something wrong here. She’s left me alone for years, since I retired. Why now?”

“Crazed bloodlust and twisted sexual obsession? Hate? Monstrous cruelty?”

“Oh, sure, and backatcha, standard Shadowspawn family dynamics. But there’s something happening here I can’t put my finger on. The Council may not stop her but it isn’t going to thank her for this.”

“The Brotherhood isn’t going to be all that happy with me, Adrian. They don’t really like you all that much these days and we don’t have resources to spare.”

Adrian faced him and made a gesture-what would have been a fist against the shoulder, if he hadn’t been wearing the silver-strung leather.

“I appreciate this, Harv. You always were stand-up.”

A shrug. “If we’re going to commit suicide, let’s get it over with.”

“-tzin! ”

Ellen Tarnowski stood exactly where she’d been told. She swallowed and tried to make her legs stop shaking, and fought against the fog that threatened to roll in from the corners of her sight.

I thought I was as afraid as I could be. I was wrong. This feels… bigger. It’s the way you’d be afraid of an avalanche.