S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

Paris

“If you’re evil and you know it-

Give a shout!

Rape and torture, drink their blood,

Grind their hearts into the mud!

If you’re evil and you know it-

Then you really ought to show it!

Shout ‘Hurray!’

“This fascination with vampires…” the young Frenchman said as she finished the song and collapsed backward onto the sofa.

“Tsk, Henri,” Adrienne Brézé said. “Not vampires . Vampires are a myth. We Shadowspawn are the source of the myth, and of many others.”

Henri grinned. “Then my innocent and merely human self has fallen into the hands of beings out of legend, who are inflicting upon me an evening of superb food, drink and intriguingly varied sexual intercourse as a prelude to their more sinister plans?”

“Exactly! We are loup-garou , sorcerers, oni, ghūl…Nearly all of the wicked ones, in fact. We aren’t really supernatural, of course, though we thought so until a few generations ago. In practice that makes little difference.”

“Ah, merci , Monica,” the man went on. “Champagne? Excellent. And is Monica another…Shadowspawn, is that the word?”

Monica Darton was wearing a charming smile, a set of faint but fresh red whip-marks on her back and buttocks, and a sheen of sweat from her recent efforts as she handed around the flutes of champagne, a pleasant follow-up to the hot, damp jasmine-scented towels she’d distributed a moment ago. She was still panting a little too. Adrienne took her glass and cast an appreciative glance at the results.

“No, merely my enchantingly flexible minion. Does she not scream and weep and beg in the finest style?”

“Ah, good, I would hate to think ill of her.”

Henri stretched. He was a leanly muscular man with short-cropped dark hair and the build of a racing cyclist. That showed to advantage as he leaned back naked in the lounger. It was late, but the lights of Paris were a multicolored splendor beyond the window. The pale white-and-gold glories of the apartment had once been part of a palace, here in the 7th Arrondissement, and you could see the sparkle on the Seine to the north through balcony windows closed against the chill.

And my revered ancestors keep complaining about how the Eiffel Tower ruined the neighborhood, Adrienne thought. There are disadvantages to immortality, at least to immortality for others. Generational rivalries get completely out of hand.

“This quantum manipulation story is an interesting pseudo-scientific explanation,” Henri said. “It would make a good cinema or perhaps a book of the science-fictional kind. Still…this obsession you Americans have with the blood-sucking creatures, it is so…so odd .”

“ American? ” She winced.

“Were you not born in California? So you mentioned. And mostly raised there?”

“Name of a dog, Henri! Jesus Christ was born in a stable, but that doesn’t mean he was a horse.”

The Frenchman laughed. “Your French is impeccable, better than mine, but you must have learned it from Napoleon the Little,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone talk as you do outside an old movie. Or use those antique and sacerdotal swearwords. No, I lie, my grandmother did once when she dropped her teapot.”

Adrienne joined in his chuckle, as if conceding the point; ironic jokes were best when unintentional. She had learned the language from people born in the 1870s, the period when the breeding program had re-concentrated the Shadowspawn genes enough for post-corporeal survival. And from their children born in La Belle Époque. Even in their original bodies her breed aged more slowly than humans; she was twice the twenty-something she appeared. That all stretched things out, as if normal humans were unfolding in a time-lapse film.

She shrugged expressively. “It’s only to be expected that my language is so…pure. I am an old-fashioned girl.”

In a way not seen for twenty thousand years or so.

She tried to keep her idioms current, if only because there was something…disturbing…about the way so many of the post-corporeals were frozen in time. Sometimes what she’d acquired early slipped through anyway; she always used the full ne-pas double-negative unless she thought about it, plus her r was less guttural and closer to a trill. And there was a very faint trace of Auvergnat, more a matter of sounds than the actual dialect. Her great-grandparents had spent much of their childhood on the family estates there, in the tail-end of the period when it was normal for aristocratic children to soak up the local patois from servants and nannies and playmates before they learned the French of Paris from tutors and schoolmasters.

She went on: “So please, call me an inhuman monster, a depraved killer…but not une américaine! ”

Monica’s smile grew a little sad and wistful as Henri ran a hand over her hip and gave her a slap on the rump. She leaned into the caress for a moment and kissed him on the crown of his head.

“You are as American as Monica here, Adrienne,” he went on, sipping his champagne and then stopping and giving the glass a startled glance. “My God, what is this?

“Krug Clos d’Ambonnay,” she said. “Nineteen ninety-five.”

“I thought only Chinese plutocrats could afford such things these days!”

“That was a superb year, yes. And it is impossible to be as American as Monica, unless one is an Indian,” Adrienne said, sipping her own flute and savoring layers of taste without the least heaviness to the complexity. “Is that hint of black cherry somehow slightly mineralized? And Monica is as American as…as Marilyn Monroe.”

“Oh, I wish you’d stop saying that,” Monica said as she curled up next to her on the sofa. Her French was fluent but heavily accented. “I just absolutely hate it.”

“I know you hate it, my sweet,” she said.

She took a sliced quail egg with a dollop of Ossetra Reserve caviar off a white tray of nibblements and paused to savor it before she went on.

“I do it to embarrass and humiliate you. I am a murderous sadist, after all. What’s the point of having you as my lucy if I don’t abuse you mentally as well as physically? Here, have one of these.”

She popped a second caviar-and-egg concoction into the other woman’s mouth, which involved some pleasant finger-nibbling.

“Lucy?” Henri asked, smiling. “A middle name?”

“Ah, an ethnic dialect term, taken in jest from a classic of the Victorian period. It means…my bitch, basically,” Adrienne replied over her shoulder. “Blood-bitch. Though it’s a unisex term. One must not be phobic.”

Monica rolled her eyes as she chewed and swallowed. Then she pouted:

“You never brought Monroe up before Ellen started talking about it and how we both looked like the Warhol paintings of her. It makes me feel ancient , my grandfather used to go to Marilyn Monroe movies. And Warhol was dead before I was born. Euuww.”

“I didn’t realize it until it was pointed out, and Ellen wasn’t the first, she just had the artistic references. I seem to collect women of that particular type. Self-knowledge is always valuable.”

Monica did resemble the actress, the more so as a minor Wreaking had turned her brown hair pale blond; unlike merely human means it lasted indefinitely, appeared entirely natural and extended even to the finest body-down showing against her tanned skin. She looked rather younger than might have been expected of a thirty-year-old mother of two; her curving figure was full but more toned than had been fashionable two generations ago, the product of dogged Pilates and a genuine passion for tennis and swimming.