S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

His first ancestors had painted hints of it on the cave-walls of Chauvet, in those aeons when humans knew why they feared the dark.

“What are you doing? ” he half-screamed.

“I promised you intense sensations, Henri,” she said, stalking smoothly nearer. “First the agonizing violation of your body and mind, then the rending and tearing and feeding. You’re going to die now, Henri, in a degradation and agony beyond conception. Now meet your fate.”

She reached within, where the coiled helixes of knowledge were stored, the remembrance of blood taken into herself long ago. Pain more exquisite than orgasm seized her for an instant as she changed; sight grew dimmer, but a universe of scents poured into her wet nostrils as her long red tongue hung over the bone-white fangs.

The human squealed in terror as he scrabbled away on his back, not daring to turn away and put the impossible sight behind him. The great black wolf lifted its head and howled a long sobbing note before it sprang.

“Mmmmm,” Adrienne sighed happily, as she opened her eyes again and stirred luxuriously against the Egyptian cotton of the sheets.

The renfield cleanup team that came with the apartment would be on its way. Blood was so intoxicating when fresh; you never tired of it, but it went off quickly and then it had a truly vile stink.

And Adrian actually drinks it cold and dead, filched from the Red Cross. Well, at least sweet Ellen has helped him with that perversion. Though drinking happy blood all the time…it would be like living on nothing but mango juice and beignets dusted with powdered sugar!

“Is it over?” Monica asked, lifting her tear-streaked face from under the pillow.

Adrienne chucked lazily and touched a finger to the base of the woman’s spine, drawing it very lightly upward. “Not for you.”

Some time later Monica bent back head and bared her throat, whimpering, then gave a long breathy moan at the sting of the feeding bite at the base of her neck and the sudden flood of ecstasy. It stopped too soon, and she cried an inarticulate protest through the moan.

“Ah, dessert! And now, sleep,” Adrienne said lazily, licking the blood off her teeth and lips. “Tomorrow, I will destroy the world. Or make a good start, at least.”

Monica sighed. Adrienne went on: “And you can have a Skype call with Josh and Sophia.”

“Oh, wonderful!” Monica said. “Mom takes good care of them when I’m traveling, but we miss each other so much.”

“I visit my children mentally now that they’re staying with their father. Skype is an analogue, I suppose.”

Adrienne could feel a slight frown in the human’s voice as she went on.

“Still, he’s…well, you and he haven’t always gotten along. And Mom…she’s wonderful, but…I think she has problems with my lifestyle choices.”

“But ma chérie , you have no lifestyle choices; you are helpless in my cruel hands, a mere thrall, subject to unspeakable suffering and degradations.”

“Well, that’s what she has trouble understanding, that I’m okay with that. She’s wonderful, but…a bit judgmental.”

Paris

Ellen Brézé blocked with a sweeping chop of her forearm as the knife stabbed for her gut. Her own silvered blade cut, but the slight figure opposite her faded back like smoke, like a ghost. Their feet rutched on the ancient concrete of the abandoned warehouse, and her breath sobbed harshly. That bothered her a lot less than it would a year ago; it wasn’t just that she was in better shape, but she’d had a lot more experience in prioritizing.

When you were fighting for your life, physical discomfort just had a very low priority.

Another shuffling passage, blades glinting and the ting of contact. A twist, and the keen silvered steel scored home…

…and the other’s knife rang on a stone. The clothes collapsed to spill emptiness across what was suddenly the floor of a darkened forest. Cold moonlight shone down through pines tossing in the wind, and somewhere an owl hooted.

Ellen controlled her panic and pushed mentally. The Nightwalker could be anywhere, invisible and impalpable to ordinary senses; and she had too few of the nocturnis genes to use the Power consciously herself. Her share of that was right in the median range that made nearly all humans métis with their ancient predator-overlords. But Wreaking by an adept could put constructs in your mind that resonated to the quantum-foam manipulations…

Alarm thrilled along her nerves as she activated the embedded alarm. Nightwalker . Not in human form, either. She backed swiftly towards a jag of solid rock-

Paws struck between her shoulder-blades with stunning force; the creature had leapt through the stone impalpably and then rematerialized as it emerged.

She plowed into the roots and leaf-litter. The taste of her own blood filled her mouth, along with the rank dog-scent of the great wolf. She screamed and struck backward, but teeth closed on the wrist until her fingers spasmed open. Fangs ripped at the fabric of her jacket and belt. Weight pinned her down across the tree-trunk beneath her stomach-

“Oh, my,” she said, panting and grinning and shivering, staring at the carved plaster of the ceiling until it came into focus. “Now that last bit with the wolf was sort of kinky. Even for me. Even for you , lover!”

But absolutely great, if you get off on pain and fear and helplessness. In controlled doses. Which, of course, I do. I think I even appreciate how much self-control it takes for Adrian to keep things…playful.

“Not too kinky, I hope?” Adrian said lazily, reclining on one elbow and looking down on her.

“I didn’t use the dreaded… earwax! ”

Her husband froze-ostentatiously-at their safe word, until she tickled him in the ribs and they rolled across the bed, mingling his growls and her giggles.

They’d been doing what was officially called soul-carrying among adepts. She’d named it inside-the-head stuff to herself. She and Adrian used it a lot for the battle training that had turned her from wimpy Ellen Tarnowski, easily kidnapped art-history graduate working in a gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, into femme-macho Ellen Brézé, Scourge of the Shadowspawn. Or at least Ellen Brézé the not entirely helpless victim.

The directed lucid dreaming was indistinguishable from reality while you were under, except that the Shadowspawn who was doing it could always hit the reset button. You could learn from mistakes that would be fatal in reality, and great stretches of time could be experienced in what was seconds out in the notionally real world. She had years of specialized instruction by now, not to mention simple interior tourism.

It could also be a lot of fun, like being able to step right into a full-sensory movie where you could ask the director for anything you wanted. They’d had to ration that part. You could lose yourself; it was as addictive to a human as the ecstasy-like drug in Shadowspawn saliva, and with potentially worse side-effects. Also sex in there was like the old joke about Chinese food; wake up and an hour later you were horny again.

“My goodness, Mr. Brézé, what do you have in mind?” she purred. Or less than an hour, sometimes, she thought. “It wouldn’t be holding down your wife and ravishing her mercilessly, would it?”

Of course, a bad Shadowspawn, which most of them most emphatically were, could use it to torture you eternally, beyond the death of your physical body. And you couldn’t even go insane. Tradition that might or might not actually date back to the Empire of Shadow said that a post-corporeal could survive tens of thousands of years until sheer chance eventually caught up to them.