A Taint in the Blood (25 page)

“You’re a little drunk,” Adrienne said.

She was naked and evidently perfectly comfortable that way despite the chilly wind that had dried her long black hair. She brushed feather-tufts of it back from her face as she turned her head.

“I’m terrified, is what I am,” Ellen said.

It had been surprisingly easy to learn there was no point in
not
talking to someone who could riffle through your mind like a search program through a computer.

Through Ellen dot doc
, she thought.
Talk about being an open book!
Aloud she went on:

“So frightened I’d do anything to just make it
stop
. The booze helps a little,” she finished and took another small swallow.

“Tsk, tsk, using
that
to drink just for effect . . . So what are you frightened of? Me?”

“Always.”

“Sensible girl. Frightened of Michiko?”

“Fucking
right
I am! She wanted to
kill
me, didn’t she? That was what she was talking about. She’d be killing me right now if you’d let her. Killing me slowly and I’d know it every second of the way and she’d
drink
it. Oh, Christ.”

She gripped the stone until the wave of hot-cold fear finished surging up from her abdomen, then washed across her face and receded.

“Probably,” Adrienne said calmly as she sipped from her own glass. “In fact, she’s probably picking up someone as much like you as she can find to kill that way right now.”

Ellen closed her eyes for an instant, struck with a sudden stab of unbearable pity for someone she’d never see or know. A girl who was just meeting dark gold-flecked eyes and a sharp white smile, whose story would end in a scream before the sun rose.

“I think you gave her an itch she couldn’t scratch,” Adrienne said. “You have the most
interesting
mind.”

“And I’m frightened of the
world
now. It isn’t the world I thought I was living in! As if suddenly I’d wandered onto another planet or another dimension or something.”

“Like having the lid of the Abyss whipped out from under your feet?”

Ellen nodded. “Finding out about
you
was bad enough. But tonight I really realized there’s a whole
world
of . . . of Shadowspawn out there. There always was, just a step or a thought or a chance away.”

^“
You met Adrian on a tennis court. Which led to meeting
me
, of course.
^”

She nodded again. “So one of you might have killed me anytime, like something walking out of a nightmare. One of the nightmares where you scream and scream and it doesn’t make any sound, and the
thing
drags you back to the basement to
do
stuff to you and everyone ignores you as if you weren’t there . . . and worst of all is that I know I can’t ever go back to the way things were on Wednesday. Because they weren’t actually that way, I just thought they were.”

Adrienne chuckled. “A Greek philosopher once said that knowledge was the treasure nobody could take away from you. That’s not even literally true. I can make humans forget things. So can vodka or a ball-peen hammer! But it’s stupid even on its face. A wiser one said that no man can step twice into the same river, which translates as:
You can’t get a lost illusion back
.”

Ellen nodded, finished the sweet wine, and took a deep shuddering breath.

“What do you want?” she made herself say.

“Everything, forever,” Adrienne said. “But you mean right now?”

She gave a sideways glance and rolled a hip into a playful bump against Ellen’s.

“Well, it’s been a long exciting day, but the night is young, and I’m naturally nocturnal. Let’s have some fun, you and I.”

“Do you want to . . . hurt me . . . that way?”

“Not tonight.”

Her hand stroked Ellen’s back slowly, from the neck to the base of the spine and back, over and over.

A flicker of another voice; it slipped out of her mind before she was conscious of it.

Instead she made her back arch and tried to push everything but the mere sensation out of her mind.

Adrienne stepped behind her and began massaging her taut neck and shoulders. Strong fingers worked at the long muscles along her spine.

“Mmm,” she said aloud, and thought:

Okay. If I’m not getting hurt, the sex doesn’t gross me out by itself. There were a couple of hookups at NYU, remember, Ellen? That was just sort of . . . bland and not worth trying again. If this were a fantasy you were having, it might even be hot. Christ, it
is
sort of hot, in a skanky, degrading, horrible Oh-God-please-no-no-no sort of way. You can do this.

The velvet voice continued in her ear, a murmur: “Sometimes I will give you pain, sometimes pleasure, sometimes utter horror. Sometimes all three. Tonight it’s Option Number Two.”

Another deep breath. “I’ll try, I’ll really try. But . . . I don’t know if I can.”

“We’ll see.” Adrienne finished the Tokay and smiled, taking her hand and tugging her gently along. “Come,
chérie
, come. Let’s play.”

 

 

An hour later she stared up at Adrienne’s face where she leaned on one elbow, their bodies touching from neck to toes. Strands of the other’s black hair stuck to her neck and breasts, tickling sweat-slick skin that felt as if it had thinned to taut foil that might burst. She tried three times to speak, gulped air and said:

“Wha—wha—what did you
do
to me?”

“Well, I would have thought
that
was obvious!” Adrienne chuckled. “Just now your mind was like . . . sunlight flickering through beech leaves at noon. Delightful!”

She rested a thigh across Ellen’s; the voice was a lazy purr as she trailed damp fingers across the other’s stomach in an infinite series of tiny tight circles. Ellen felt as much anger as boneless relaxation allowed.

“You’re doing things to my . . . my brain or something!”

“Not unless you keep your brain
here
. . . Oh, you mean
that special thing
, as Monica puts it? No. Just feedback. I can sense every tickle of sensation, even when you’re not aware of it yourself. Especially when”—she moved—“we’re close. There’s a reason for the
demon lover
legend too,
ma douce.
”

A memory flashed through her: a conversation with Giselle about Adrian when she was hashing out her relationship problems with her boss-slash-best-friend.

“Just so,” Adrienne said. “It runs in the family.”

“God, how I hate you.”

“I know. But I’m not
bland
, eh?”

“No. That was fantastic. But you’re not as good as your brother, either.”

Ellen flinched, but the thought had been in her mind anyway. The caressing hand moved suddenly and clamped on her groin, tight enough to be just short of discomfort.

“Let’s see if you think so when you know what that
special thing
is like—”

“No! N
nnnnn!
”

For a long instant she thought what she felt was unbearable agony. Then she made a single convulsive movement and locked in a shuddering arch, collapsed, tried to arch up again. Everything vanished except a wash of gold fire that radiated out from the contact at the center of her, out to the very ends of her being and back. She screamed as unbearable tension and its release combined in the same moment, one that stretched on and on in surging waves.

Reality returned like a tide slowly going out. Their lips met; arms and legs intertwined.

“I still hate you,” Ellen whispered into the curve of her neck. “I’ll always hate you.”

“You have odd ways of showing it. You were already rosy pink, but you just went red, with spots!”

A nuzzling at her neck. “A taste, a little sip for the flavor.”

The sting was very slight, and her body relaxed as if she’d been plunged into a warm bath; the panting and quivering died down, which was reassuring.

A tongue lapped up the slow trickle from the little cut, taking the drops as they welled up. Languor spread out from it, calming, a floating drifting feeling. It was less passive this time; all the sensations were distinct, and her hand tangled in the black mane, holding the other’s head to her neck.

Oh, God, but this feels good too. Double the afterglow. It
is
addictive. Oh, God, if it were Adrian . . .

“Like . . . cookies and milk?” she said when it ended.

“No. Coconut-chocolate macaroons and eighty-year-old Tokay.”

“God, why don’t you just do that ‘special thing’ thing to
yourself
, if you can?”

Adrienne rolled over on top of her and looked down, head cocked to one side. Ellen stroked her back, rubbing hard into the muscle from beneath the shoulder blades to legs and back. The Shadowspawn wriggled and purred against her, breasts and stomach and hips touching, thigh between thighs, utterly unselfconscious in her enjoyment of the moment.

It was disturbingly like petting a cat.

“We
can
do that to ourselves,” Adrienne said after a moment, her eyes heavy-lidded. “But we generally don’t.”

“Why don’t you?”

“It’s something every Shadowspawn discovers how to do around age thirteen. Then their parents put a Wreaking in their hot little minds to stop them. By the time you’re old enough to take the inhibition out, you realize that churning your own brain into puréed oatmeal with an endless feedback loop of orgasms is not a good idea.”

“What a way to go!” Ellen said, laughing unwillingly.

God, this is weird and awful and I do hate her passionately. On the other hand it feels
great
and spending the night fucking like a ferret in heat is a lot better than booze to make me forget for a while,
she thought.

Her hands and lips were moving.

Bring it on, Princess of Darkness! Maybe
I
can make
you
scream!

“I do like a positive attitude,” Adrienne said, and kissed her deeply.

Her mouth tasted of salt blood and of desire. Then she knelt up and put her hands behind Ellen’s head.

“Let’s start by trying this, then. We have a few hours until I have to spread my wings and fly. Now
concentrate
.”

A
drian gave a gasping scream as he felt his body wake. Waken from nightmare of being caught by the sun in night-walker form, of his self peeling away in flakes and strings of fire . . .

“Ah, you’re with us again,” Harvey said. “Give it a few minutes and maybe you’ll stop wishing you weren’t.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, flicked it out the window and pulled over. Wet gravel pinged and crunched under the wheels as the car slowed and stopped.

“Sorry this is cold,” he went on, sliding into the rear seat.

He put a blood-bag from the cooler to Adrian’s mouth. It wasn’t
very
old, which made it a little less horrible; he must have stocked up at the hospital. Adrian gasped again, drank, retched, clapped his hands to his mouth.

“Water,” he rasped through his fingers. “Then more.”

He drank and swallowed the pills the other man shook into his hand. Then he curled around himself, hugging knees to chest. Gradually the shaking and chills and the sick pain behind his eyes and in his temples subsided, along with the missing spots and bits of glitter in his vision. He became conscious of something beside the gray misery inside his skull, took Harvey’s arm and used it to help lever himself upright; a sleeping bag he hadn’t noticed fell away from his shoulders, and he clutched it back for the warmth. The thin cotton of the hospital gown only emphasized the chill against which the car’s asthmatic heater strained.

It was a nondescript Toyota Venza, flaking red and old enough to be unremarkable, smelling of ancient cheap stale tobacco, his own cigarettes which Harvey had presumably plundered and nameless things and children and dogs.

Harvey probably lifted it,
he thought.

Some absent corner of his mind noted that they’d have to dump the hot vehicle; he could simply buy something from a used lot. Outside was the gray of a Central Valley wintertime tule fog, thick enough that he couldn’t see more than ten yards in any direction. The world was a bubble of cold, dark-gray nothingness, with a few bare-limbed trees along the edge of the field dripping moisture on flat black mud. The air was heavy with it, a chilly, silty smell with an undertone of manure and vegetable rot.

“Name of a black dog, it looks and smells just precisely the way I feel!” he said.

Inside, somewhere in the depths of his mind, there was a dull wonder that he didn’t say:
I do not care. Back to Santa Fe, me, and goodbye to you, Harvey!
The physical misery was enough to swamp emotion; the memory of Ellen was distant. It was a commitment of the will that kept the words unsaid.

To love someone is not to feel loving continuously. That is impossible, for humans or Shadowspawn either. It is to always
act
that way.

“Bit strenuous?” Harvey asked.

“You might say,” he said, letting his head fall back. “What a fuckup. Adrienne was waiting for me again. After,” he added bitterly, “spending the previous four hours humping herself blind with Ellen and taking little sips of her blood in the very short inactive intervals.”