S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

He took stance, feet and arms spread, and began to move his fingers. Luckily the lights were out and there wasn’t any through traffic on this street as he shouted: “Shz-tzee! Ak-tzee! Tzin-Mo’gh-”

The blood’s borrowed strength poured out of him, but the ancient tongue built his rage, made it fimbul-cold, a living presence in his skull like a fanged smile of bone. Lights crawled across his vision, patterns that repeated inside themselves, spinning away into the heart of a universe of ice and ash and winds like swords.

Beside him Harvey muttered: “Oh, how I love it when you talk Mhabrogast to me, darling… This is gonna hurt inside a silver suit. Here, ol’ buddy?”

“That’s it, that’s the fracture line of the square we’re in. Hurry!”

The older man holstered his pistol, stripped off his gloves and held the thumbs and forefingers of both hands together above his head. Then he whipped them downward and punched clenched fists forward, as if drawing a line down the joining of two panels and smashing them apart, speaking: “I am the Opener of Doors. I am the Watcher at the Crossroads. A-iatzin! ” Then, hissed: “Fuck me that hurts.”

And he was running towards the door, drawing the coach gun again. Yells, crashing; figures flying past in terror. Push here. Command there. Convince his hindbrain that this could happen, then make the universe know it couldHarvey was pulling at him; he realized he’d fallen to his knees without knowing.

“Get me out,” he wheezed.

“Oh, yeah. Pretty soon the local heat are going to be looking for a crazy old Anglo in black leather who chases people out of the house waving a big badass gun.”

He was half-conscious of his arm pulled across strong shoulders, and the smell of tobacco and Old Spice; even the burn of silver-pain beneath his armpit was faint. Harvey pitched him into the backseat, where he lay in a shaking fetal ball. The Toyota jeep roared and skidded away, tossing him back and forth. Onto Paseo de Peralta, onto Cerillos Road, into the narrow entrance to the Whole Foods parking lot, then behind the store. Shoppers with their recyclable-paper bags of ultra-expensive organic shiitake mushrooms and handmade bratwurst and garlic-cured artisanal olives stopped to stare; one jumped out of the way with a yell.

Adrian scrabbled at the Styrofoam cooler on the floor behind the passenger seat and pulled out another plastic blood-bag. The cold sticky contents poured down his throat. It was even worse than the last time; he had barely swallowed the last of it before he shoved open the door and vomited it onto the pavement in a rush of red and the yellow liquid remnants of his afternoon breakfast. Another, more slowly; this time he managed to keep it down, like a stomachful of hydrochloric acid. But the strength seeped into him, making the shaking stop and taking the fog away from his senses.

“Oh, hell. Shield, Harvey. Shield for all you’re worth. I think I persuaded it to fall in on itself but there’s going to be a backwash.”

His own arms went around his head, in a gesture as instinctive as it was futile. An impact like an impalpable thud struck him, as if padded clubs were beating from head to toe, and a wash of heat that wasn’t really there.

“Oh, the bitch. She primed the whole place like a match, too,” he said. “But there wasn’t anyone alive in the building.”

He couldn’t see it from here; there wasn’t any smoke yet, either. But there would be. He could feel the energy release, like a blowtorch pointed at the sky.

Harvey grunted, hunched over the wheel. “Yeah. Mr. Organic Carbon Molecule, meet Ms. Free Oxygen; on the word of command, screw like bunnies!” Then: “Incoming. From somewhere close.”

Reality faded. Ellen! he thought.

In her best white evening-dress, with a silvery fringed alpaca shawl over her shoulders. Standing in some no-where, with Adrienne behind her, arms around her, head resting on shoulder. The brown-gold eyes glinted at him beside her fixed blue gaze.

“I driiiink youurrr miiiiilk shake,” the hot-velvet voice of his sister crooned.

Her lips peeled back from her teeth, and her head darted aside for Ellen’s throat.

“You can’t-”

That was a security guard, and reality was back. Adrian came upright, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his denim jacket and reached into a pocket. The man tensed, then relaxed a little as his hand came out and fanned four crisp fifty-dollar notes.

They vanished, as neatly as the Power could have managed it.

“It might be a good idea for your friend to take you home, sir,” the man said. “I’ll clean this mess up, but you may have had a little too much. Maybe you should see a doctor too. There’s blood in it.”

“Or maybe I haven’t had enough,” Adrian said as he sank back and closed the door.

The next container of cold blood went down a little less harshly; he only had to struggle against nausea for a half-dozen breaths, and was never in serious danger of losing the battle. Harvey clenched the wheel as if it was a life-buoy on the deck of the Titanic as he navigated the awkward entrance, waited for his moment and drove across the divider to head south past the Deaf School.

“Where are we going?” Adrian asked after a gray pause.

“Albuquerque. It’s the closest place with a real airport. One we can use. I just figured something out.”

“Tell. I’ve decided I don’t know shit about anything, me.”

“You tell me something. Do you fly standard commercial flights when you have to travel?”

Adrian blinked. His mind was functioning again; he was in command of his body. He just wished he was unconscious.

“Not if I can avoid it. Shadowspawn-”

“-don’t like crowding, yeah,” Harvey said. “So what do you do, now that the Brotherhood isn’t making you account for all the receipts?”

“I usually charter a small executive jet if one’s available. If not, I buy first-class and get sozzled. I drive whenever possible. Trains, in Europe.”

The streetlights flickered over Harvey’s rugged features as they crossed Rodeo; I-25 was just past there.

“Now, does Adrienne Princess of Darkness Br?z? need to buy tickets and take off her shoes and walk through the scanner like the rest of us common sweaty human-cattle peons?”

Something went click behind Adrian’s eyes. “She’ll have her own plane. She travels more than I do, of course, and she’s got a lot more money. It’s meaningless to her, she can spend like a government. Name of a black dog, of course she’ll have her own jet! Which could fly out of Santa Fe Airport-the runway’s long enough for medium-sized ones. It would be waiting for her all day, ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”

“Yeah. She wanted us to catch her on the Sunport surveillance cameras and assume she’d come in that way.”

“This is all some sort of long-term game,” Adrian said.

“We could just refuse to play,” Harvey said.

“Ellen,” Adrian replied, as if that was a comprehensive answer.

Which it is, he thought.

“She’s alive. We know that now. And Adrienne doesn’t kill her lucies all that often. At least not right away.”

“Yeah. Thanks to me, Ellen’s been kidnapped, tortured, raped, bled, and that and worse is going to go right on happening to her until I bust her loose. And if I stop trying, Adrienne will have no reason not to kill her.”

“You didn’t do any of that, Adrian. She did.”

“I put Ellen at risk. Anyone close to me is at risk.”

“She the only girl you’ve been involved with since you told the Council and the Brotherhood you were off active duty and they could both go fuck each other?”

Harvey’s voice was sharp. Reluctantly, Adrian answered: “Well… no.”