S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

Her apartment felt wrong now; somehow the whole world did, a sensation that the smell of stale sweat and blood and musk magnified.

All the furniture had been pushed back against the walls. Adrienne Br?z? stood in the center of the living-room wearing only a black lace thong, legs and arms outstretched to make a chi-cross, an outline against the faint light leaking from the nearly-closed bathroom door. It caught on her eyes in an occasional glitter of golden-brown, or on a sheen of sweat against olive skin. Her fingers moved in small, intricately precise motions and her face had the blank intensity Ellen had seen before on artists lost in their work.

Now and then she spoke. At first it had been in Latin, and then in a language Ellen didn’t even recognize much less understand, full of clicks and whines and buzzing sounds and restless sibilants. Several times she took a piece of colored chalk and marked a glyph on the floor, odd spiky shapes that made the insides of Ellen’s eyes itch until she let her gaze fall out of focus. One last word, a sound that refused to render itself into syllables at all; she made herself stop trying when it began to circle around inside her head like a wasp.

What is that? she wondered. It doesn’t really sound like speech.

The eyes swung her way, and she tried to freeze even her thoughts.

“It’s Mhabrogast,” the deadly velvet voice said. “According to legend, it’s the language spoken in Hell. The native tongue of demons. Adrian really has been keeping you in the dark, eh?”

Ellen whimpered. Adrienne smiled with a catlike turn of the lips.

I didn’t ask! Ellen cried silently. I just thought it. Can she read my mind? Oh, God, can’t I even think?

Adrienne sighed and relaxed her stance.

“There, that will do it. Read your mind? Emotions, intentions, sensations, oui, easily. But for verbal thoughts, well, telepathy’s a quantum entanglement process and it takes time.”

“Quantum entanglement?” she said, bewildered.

“Do I look like a physicist? Damp towel, dry towel, my new clothes. Quickly! Soon this won’t be a good place anymore, however happy the memories of it we share.”

She obeyed. Adrienne’s eyes remained abstracted, with none of the cat-playful malice of the past day. Somehow that was just as terrifying.

“Now, pick up the bags and walk precisely behind me until we’re out on the road.”

They went out into the cold of early evening. The moon was a thin-pared tilted sickle and Venus was bright in the east, but the dying sun still washed most of the stars out from the dark-blue arch of heaven. Ellen let the suitcases thump to the ground and hugged her fringed wrap around her shoulders, conscious of things not seen out of the corners of her eyes.

A faint gleam of light showed through the window that had been her home. Adrienne put her hands on her hips and grinned; her eyes seemed to follow patterns in the air above the two-story building.

“Damn, but I am good!” she said, the mad cheerfulness back in her voice. “Now, let’s go before my brother shows up.”

“He’ll rescue me,” Ellen said, then whimpered as she heard the words.

“He’ll certainly try,” Adrienne agreed. “It’s not that I don’t love you for yourself, ch?rie, but you make the most wonderful bait. How are you feeling?”

“Weak. Shaky. Sore all over. I don’t think I can drive now. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t. I’m afraid I’d wreck the car.”

“Well, then,” Adrienne said, putting an arm around her waist and helping her to the Prius. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

She sat curled shrimp-fashion, hugging herself in the passenger seat. The sun was declining in the implausible crimson-green-blue-gold glory that Santa Fe alone seemed to have. As Adrienne drove towards the bridge over the river she began to sing softly: “Elizabeth Bathory Draining her girls in the night so no one will hear No one comes near Look at her bathing, splashing her toes In the night when there’s nobody there What does she care?

All the bloodless bodies

Where do they all come from?

All the bloodless bodies

Where do they all belong?”

As they passed the streetlights came on and died above them, each with a slight discernible pop.

“Stop!” “At a shut-down church?” Harvey said, as he stamped on the brake.

“It isn’t. Check.”

Harvey did, and then did an almost comical double-take. “Shit,” he swore. “Never would have caught it.”

“I was always a bit stronger than Adrienne. She’s a bit better at subtlety. Wards, don’t-see-me’s, frozen alternatives, that sort of thing.”

Adrian Br?z? opened the door almost before the car had pulled up against a stuccoed adobe wall across from the building-illegal parking on a narrow one-way street originally laid out by burros carrying loads down to the Plaza market. He could feel Harvey’s tiger alertness, the solid weight of the coach gun in his hand, and a like keenness woke in him.

Part of it was instinct: No other hunter on my ground! Kill!

Part of it was an old, old hate, like the background music of his life swelling to a pounding chorus.

He walked forward, looking upward at Ellen’s second-story apartment. It was only half-past seven, but the night was nearly moonless. The darkness didn’t bother him. His breed saw much better in it than humans even with the body’s eyes. Beside him Harvey drifted forward and leaned inconspicuously against a car, his hand inside the skirt of his leather coat.

“What is it?” he asked. His head went back and forth. “I can see the building now-two-story stucco, vigas, corner balcony, flat roof. But I’m getting… I’m not sure. Something more.”

“It’s-shit! Freeze! Don’t move!”

Adrian struggled for words to describe the construct he saw as glinting planes of light, shifting in and out of existence. Possibilities interlinked, ready to fall out of might into the is.

“It’s like a house of cards as high as a skyscraper. A probability cascade. Touch any part of it and the rest falls down before you can switch the causal paths out.”

“House of cards? That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“The cards are giant Gillette razor blades. They’d tangle any mind they hit in feedback loops-cut and rewire all the connections randomly.”

“Oh. That sounds pretty fucking bad.”

He didn’t mention the taste of it, the wrenching horrible pleasure. The vivid delirious meatiness of pain-soaked blood, the exultant carnal musk of mind-and-body rape, the desolation of death seen coming while bound and helpless. The power of it.

If she’s killed Ellen, I’ll… Then the humor struck him: I’ll kill her just the same as I would anyway.

“Shit!” he said aloud, as his awareness expanded.

The flicker of ordinary human consciousness, disturbed without knowing why.

“The Lopezes are in; the family on the ground floor. Get them out, Harv; nobody’s going to stay alive underneath this stuff when it comes down. Powerless or not, it’ll slice their minds into sushi. Man, woman, three kids. Get them out now. I don’t know how long I can hold this. It’s like juggling knives with my eyes closed. She had hours to build it, and I’m out of practice.”

“Can’t you back out? Is Ellen in there?”

He shook his head, and beads of sweat flew into the chilly night, the smell rank in his nostrils. White puffs showed his breath.

“She was, Adrienne used her to source it, but I can’t tell if she’s still there. And we’ve already triggered it. I’m holding the whole thing up. It was unstable anyway. Shit, this could fry brains a hundred yards away when it goes. Worse than that. There could be energy release right out here in physical-reality land! Nobody could have done this ten years ago, the world wouldn’t have allowed it.”