S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

Adrienne swept forward and sank in a deep curtsy-the antique form combined with a bow, but the Western gesture nonetheless. Her parents followed suit.

Ah, Ellen thought, watching his nod in return; everyone else just bowed. That’s more respectful, not less. I wonder what she’s thinking?

“T?kairin-sama, yoku irasshaimashita,” Adrienne said, in formal greeting. “Lord T?kairin! Welcome to my home.”

“Sorry to be a bother,” Hajime said-which made more sense in Japanese. Then he switched to English for a moment: “Thank you for going to all this trouble.”

“It was the least I could do,” Adrienne half-purred.

“Tsumaranai mono desu ga…” he went on; this is a mere trifle, or words to that effect.

The gift was a sword in a superb black-lacquered sheath, an elegant plainness. She made a small, quite genuine exclamation of pleasure as she took the silk-cord grip in her hand and drew it just enough for a sliver of the silver-worked layered steel to show, then clicked it home to keep the chill menace of the activated glyphs warded. Someone who really knew what they were doing had worked over this one. Hajime was powerful enough, but not so subtle a Wreaker.

They went through the usual oh-I-couldn’t-possibly/please-accept-this dance that Hajime’s background required.

Then Adrienne indicated a pair from those her renfields had picked from potential quarry at San Simeon over the past few months-a statuesque redheaded girl with milk-pale skin and a sandy-haired youth with a beautiful dancer’s body. Both showed to advantage in the short white feeding tunics, and they had been carefully primed, mostly by a detailed and honest description of what was likely to happen to them. They had sensitive, intelligent minds, now nearly paralytic with terror but unable to stop imagining their fates in flashes of vivid imagery that came through beautifully.

It was enough to make her hungry, and she’d fed well today. There was nothing quite like picking out the worst from someone’s mind and then actually doing it to them.

“Nani mo gozaimasen ga, dozo meshiagatte kudasai,” she said: “It’s nothing, but please go ahead and have some.”

Hajime’s wife had been decorously quiet except for a murmured exchange of greetings; now her teeth clicked together slightly.

“Oishisou,” she said softly: looks delicious.

The clan-head smiled and gave Adrienne a shrewd glance, and she could feel Michiko’s bubble of quickly-suppressed mirth even through her shields.

“You are courteous to a fault,” he said. “Later, certainly.”

Theresa and her assistants hustled the pair out; they’d be ready in the guest-suite when dawn made postcorporeals seek shelter. The formal greeting array broke down as Hajime and his retinue began to mingle.

“My only worry is that my mad brother may somehow manage to spoil things,” Adrienne said to him.

The Shadowspawn overlord of the West Coast snorted. “I doubt that very much.”

Michiko bowed. “I have had our best men checking carefully, Grandfather,” she said. “The precautions certainly seem more than adequate.”

Dale had been doing his best impassive-Indian impression, even crossing his arms over his chest. Now he smiled thinly.

“I think so too, sir,” he said.

Hajime’s nod was wary this time. “Ms. Br?z? requested that you do so?”

“Yes. I’m not active on any Council missions right now, so I gave it a thorough going-over, and I’ll be here for the full three days. It’s within my remit, since you are a Council member, sir.”

Dmitri nodded: “I have also reviewed the arrangements. It was the least I could do, after your patronage released me from Seversk!”

One of Hajime’s brows rose with his nod this time. “You certainly seem to have taken every possible precaution,” he said to Adrienne.

She spread her hands and smiled charmingly. Hajime’s other brow went up; her father and mother were stepping up from behind her.

“Jules,” he said. “Julianne.”

The elder Br?z?s bowed slightly. “Haven’t seen you since you killed us, Hajime-san,” Jules said cheerfully.

“You’re moving back here?” their murderer said with a trace of iron in his tone.

“Oh, no, just visiting with our grandchildren.”

Hajime’s face relaxed slightly. “One of life’s great pleasures, exceeded only by great-grandchildren.”

Adrienne backed out of the conversation graciously, keeping her smile to herself until she was safely facing away. Her shields were impenetrable, but Hajime hadn’t survived over a century of Shadowspawn politics, and generations past his body’s death, by being unable to read faces as well as minds.

Perfect, she thought. Perfect!

Adrian rose from the bed; he’d left the party early, by his nocturnal breed’s standards. The casa grande was finally quiet, though some Shadowspawn lingered in the public areas, and most were still awake in their rooms. He could sense them, a prickle of the Power. Sliding through the fabric of the world, like the smooth onrush of sharks that makes the water curve just below the surface of an ocean.

And Ellen is alone.

A grimace. Close by the girl Cheba was tossing and fighting her sheets and whimpering in her sleep; the two Brotherhood agents were nearly as restless. In their line of work-his too, again-post-traumatic stress was more of a permanent condition of life than a problem to recover from.

For them this is part of the business they have chosen. Or were born into, as I was. I pity Cheba, though. All she wanted was a better way to earn her bread than selling baskets on the streets.

Those were not his only base-links, links of blood and seed. Somewhere in the great pile two children were sleeping as well; he caught a brief image of a girl curled around a flaxen-haired doll and a boy lying in the utter abandonment of childhood slumber. Adrienne was awake, but happily oblivious to everything but her own building pleasure and hunger, lost in sensation and in the mind of her partner-victim as it opened to a helpless combination of pain and orgasmic release.

He grimaced again, and clamped down on the contact until it was merely a vague consciousness of direction.

Then he walked to the outer window. The air in the rest of the suite was fresh-the system of concealed ducts was old, but well designed-yet he welcomed the cool night breeze on his naked flesh. The moon hung over the Santa Lucia Range where it divided this interior valley from the sea. It was nearly full, and the silvery light was a prickle on the skin of his aetheric form. It seemed to call to him…

“And I’m going to answer,” he said softly. “Amss-aui-ock!”

The oldest Shadowspawn talent of all took him. A moment of silvery darts along his nerves, and his body flowed-to another shape as borrowed as that of Wilbur Peterson, but much more familiar. Vision grew less, color absent or muted, shades of black and white and gray predominant, though the moonlight was more than adequate. He could see movement-the twitch of a leaf, the motion of a cat leaping to a wall in the gardens below-with utter sharpness, but anything motionless blurred like the world of a short-sighted man.

Ah, but the sounds!

Nearly as keen as those of the owl, and in a different range. He could hear breathing, voices half a mile away, a frightened dog that suddenly scented an ancient enemy; the quiet night was a babble of noise now, and the wolf ’s mind sorted it with effortless ease.

And the smells! There are no words!

He snarled slightly, eager to run and hunt. It took an effort for the man-mind that lurked within to command the beast, though the wolf was his favorite. The hundred-and-eighty-pound beast sprang easily up to the sill of the window, then down a dozen feet to the ground below, landing on legs like powerful springs. He trotted through the garden, past the plashing of a fountain-wet, wet, weeds, cool tempting flesh of a frog-and down through steps that led through beds of azaleas-thick-sweet-strong-and lawns. A squeak and a snap and his jaws went clomp on a field-mouse, with a sweet gush of almost flowery blood. He tossed it up… … and let it fall.