A Taint in the Blood (5 page)

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 could—

Harvey 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 Brézé 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.”

“And nothing happened to any of
them
, right?”

“Apart from them deciding I was an asshole even if I was rich, and dumping me? No.”

“You
are
an asshole, ol’ buddy,” Harvey said, and Adrian felt his mouth quirk. “But then, every woman I was ever involved with dumped me, too, so I suppose you learned it at my knee. At least you didn’t marry three of them.”

The older man went on: “Adrienne decided to come after you for her own reasons in her own time. Ellen just got in the way. And at least she has someone
trying
to rescue her. What do you think Adrienne has been doing for kicks and food all these years you’ve been sitting brooding on a mountaintop? Playing video games and eating tofu?”

“I . . . try not to think about that.”

“I’m sure that’s a
big
help to the victims.”

Adrian flushed, started to speak, then barked harsh laughter. “Getting me angry to get me back on my feet, eh?”

A shrug. “Worked, didn’t it?”

“
Mais oui, mon vieux.
”

More gently, Harvey said: “Look, I’m sorry it’s your girl. But it’s always someone’s girl, or guy, or child or mother or brother.”

“She’s not my girl. I wish she was, but it’s nobody’s fault except mine she stomped out last night. Ellen has . . . issues. I thought we could . . . be together. And I really like her. But I didn’t think it through well enough, and I never told her the truth. I
couldn’t
.”

“Then let’s get our asses in gear. We rescue the girl, we kill the evil witch.
And
we find out what the hell she’s playing at.”

He turned onto the freeway, the hum of the tires growing as he pushed the Land Cruiser up to the speed limit and change. It was dense dark out here, as Santa Fe faded behind them; the traffic was light even for a weekday evening. The red lights of a Rail Runner passenger train came down the tracks that ran between the strips of highway, swelling and then flashing past.

“You got a cigarette?” Harvey asked.

“Sure,” Adrian said, lit two, and drew on one himself as he handed the other over. “You know, Harv, you should stop smoking. I can’t get cancer or emphysema or heart disease. Or get addicted. You can.”

“Oh, hell, I can probably cure any of that—my Wreakings are good enough for little shit. Or if I can’t, I’d just get you to do it.”

“Now I’m your enabler?”

“This has just now occurred to you?”

After that, silence fell until Adrian flicked his butt out the window.

“She was waiting for the cascade to fall,” he said, his voice coldly rational. “Somewhere fairly close, close enough that she could monitor it. She felt me trigger it, went off to her Gulfstream or whatever it is, and up, up and away. Taking Ellen with her.
Nyah, nyah, can’t catch me.
She actually used to say that when we were six and playing hide-and-seek. It made me crazy.”

Harvey nodded. “That’s the advantage she’s had so far, being a couple of steps ahead. Let’s not let that happen again, shall we? We’re living in a world run by monsters. You don’t give them anything if you can help it. We’re far enough behind to start with.”

“I wish I knew what she’d been doing while we charged into her trap, though. I don’t think she was lying on a rooftop, somehow. Not her style.”

“Yeah. What was
she
doing at five thirty, when we were setting out to charge her electrified windmill?”

“
Á
tahsaia!”
The old Pueblo woman who’d been offering the tray of silver knickknacksstared at Adrienne and backed away, slowly. There was naked terror in her eyes, pouched in the wrinkled brown face. The dying sunlight brought the folds out in stark relief, like desert canyons, as it cast the pair’s shadows over her.

Adrienne spoke in something that wasn’t English or Spanish; Ellen thought it was an Indian language, and she could see the street-vendor understood it. She turned and ran in a lumbering shuffle with her long bulky skirts swaying, shouting:

“
Átahsaia!
”

“I’d have to be
really
hungry,” Adrienne said dryly. “Though in the end blood is blood.”

Ellen blinked. “What’s
Átahsaia
?” she said.

There was no point in not asking, not when even her mind’s privacy wasn’t her own. It was less disturbing than having unasked questions answered.

Adrienne chuckled. “A cannibal demon.
Everyone
has legends about us.”

“Are all the legends true?”

“Only the bad ones. The others . . . wishful thinking on the part of you humans, I’m afraid.” A grin, and: “I
love
explaining things to you.”

“Why?”

“To feel the way your mind leaps when you realize just how
bad
things are, and then the squirming as you run through the implications and they sink through layers of your consciousness. Stupid people are
boring
that way. Anyone can feel agony when you violate their bodies, but only the intelligent can know true mental torment.”

They walked through the tunnel-like entrance and into the courtyard; Ellen felt her stomach growl at the smells, despite the taste of acid at the back of her throat. The body went on functioning, even when the world dropped out from beneath your feet.

La Casa Sena was only a little way up the street from the Palace of the Governors
.
It had started out as the town place of a wealthy
hacendado
more than a quarter of a millennium ago, the blank outer walls a sign of times when a rich man’s house on the remote New Mexican frontier had to be a fortress and a workshop and a barracks as well as a dwelling. Inside two tall stories of adobe made a courtyard around a flagged garden. The planters were bare with winter and the stone bowl of the fountain was dry, but huge cottonwoods laced with lights towered above the roof level.

The maître d’hotel greeted them at the door, beside a little glassed-in cover that showed the deep original household well.