Shadows of Falling Night (12 page)

He’d grown up around here, albeit in far more modest circumstances, and he’d never tired of looking at it. Why leave the best part of it all for the tourists? Outsiders thought the paintings of Santa Fe sunsets were garish kitsch; you had to live here a while to realize that no paint palette could rival the real thing, or the clarity of the air. You had to go away and come back to really appreciate it if you’d been born here.

They went through the big copper-plated doors; the copper had silver sheathing within and the walls had silver thread. The central block of the house was open-plan with eighteen-foot ceilings of exposed viga beams; the southeast-facing wall was mostly tall windows, a narrow tile-paved terrace and planters outside it dropping off several thousand feet in a jagged steepness of cliff and arroyo. The view was spectacular, and there was nothing human in it except the lights of a tiny hamlet twinkling in
the middle distance and a freight-train drawing away. Off to the left was a large kitchen full of European equipment separated by a stone island from a dining area centered on a massive cast-glass table. It was a big house, not a mansion that couldn’t function without a huge staff of servants, though it was also certainly not like anything he’d lived in before.

“
¡Dios! ¡Huele ’re sabroso, niña!
” he said, sniffing with appreciation at the cooking odors. “God, that smells good!”

He cleared the chambers of the double-barrel as he sniffed and hung it and the bandolier on a wall rack. It still seemed odd to carry a weapon so primitive, but even the five moving parts in this relic needed to be protected with glyphs if they were to function at all when an adept was around and trying to screw things up. They made his palms buzz a little. He’d always had a nose for danger, which was why he hadn’t come back from the rockpile in a plastic bag—it had been close even so.

The Albermann test the Brotherhood used said that he was just barely capable of doing simple Wreaking, though it still seemed a lot like magic to him. The down-side of that capacity was that without training it made you
even more
vulnerable to Shadowspawn thinkery-fuckery than ordinary people. He was absorbing the techniques as fast as he could.

“
¡Inglés!”
Cheba said. “I need the practice. And this country is
freezing
. Freezing, dry, rocky. Why did anyone from Mexico ever come here?”

He carefully didn’t say: You’re beautiful when you’re angry, though it was true. Though you spend a lot of time being angry. Understandable, I suppose.

She was a dime and some younger than him, with more
indio
and less Spanish, plus a dash of African, originally from a little corn-and-beans ejido called Coetzala in the hills of upcountry Veracruz, a place so backward every third inhabitant still spoke Nahuatl. She had a full-lipped heart-shaped face, curly black hair, skin the color of cinnamon
and a figure closer to the hourglass type than was common where she came from. She had very little formal education, but he’d come to respect her almost fanatical pursuit of self-improvement and focus on the main chance.

Instead of the compliment that sprang to mind he answered the question:

“Why come here? Chasing rumors of gold. Back then a Spaniard would crawl naked over cactus for that. And later because this was where you sent relatives who embarrassed you, cousin Diego who couldn’t keep it in his pants with the alcalde’s daughter—”

She gave a snort of laughter as she wielded a spoon in a dish of something bubbling and brown.

“—the backside of nowhere with Apaches behind every rock, knives in their teeth. There was one caravan from Sonora or Chihuahua every year, sometimes every two years. My people here used to hunt buffalo with lances, and trade the hides to the wild Commanche for guns
they
got from the French, that was how poor they were.”

He helped her set the table as he spoke. He was pretty sure she thought that was a bit odd; she’d probably have considered him something of a sissy if she hadn’t seen him in action when they’d busted her out of
Rancho Sangre
and got Adrian’s kids. That was the estate of the California branch of the Brézé family.

There was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in the Suck, and you could spend only so much time pumping iron. He’d had a fair amount of time to read, and it gave him the vocabulary to describe that little bit of quiet, picturesque isn’t-this-pretty New Urbanist hell-on-earth.

First it’s like Norman Rockwell. Then you realize it’s more like Stephen King.

“Then why did the gringos want this country?”

“Because it was between Texas and California and too big to jump over even with a running start.”

She laughed again. He thought she
also
thought it a bit odd he hadn’t hit on her to speak of. She’d ended up in Rancho Sangre as part of a job-lot of illegals Adrienne Brézé had bought from a coyote, a people-smuggler, quite literally as snacks for a party. Except that Shadowspawn liked to play with their food. He’d been a cop in the Southwest for years; he knew what was likely to happen to a girl in the pipeline for illegals, and then she’d caught Adrienne’s eye as a blood-donor-cum-toy, which was worse because an adept could seriously fuck with your head. Though that was better than what had happened to her companions.

Eric was surprised she was as together as she was, and at how fast she’d bounced back; they made them tough down there.

“And the people are all soft, like
mozitas
,” she grumbled as she set out bowls of a rich
menudo
.

“You were a little girl once,” he pointed out.

“Not like that.”

“Like Peter?” he said.

“No,” Cheba said. “He’s a man, that one, even if he
looks
like a girl. I got to know him at the hacienda.”

Actually Peter Boase wasn’t particularly girly-looking, just blond, fine-featured and small; he’d escaped and gone cold turkey from the feeding addiction, all alone in a little rundown motel room in southern Arizona. Cheba had done it with experienced Brotherhood medics to help, and it had still hurt like hell, like coming off mainlining black tar. She gave the tribute grudgingly, though.

“Let’s eat, then,” he said instead.

Dinner was
menudo
thick with the hominy used south of the border. The tortillas to sop up the rich broth and tripe with chiles and tomatoes
were made fresh from the hominy as well.
Café con leche
warmed little bodies that had chilled in the suddenly falling night.

And when I said kids shouldn’t have coffee, she just looked at me like I was crazy, told me that La Doña had had no objection and her people always had it before sleeping, for
cena,
mostly with sweet breads or cookies.

The children shoveled it all away with gusto and apparently with four hollow legs between them, though their table manners were excellent and they were slender-fit. Then they settled down to watch the third installment of the
Hobbit
trilogy on a 3-D screen that scrolled down over the big picture window while doing some serious damage to bowls of mint chocolate ice cream from the Aztec Café downtown. Eric pulled two beers out of the refrigerator and started to chuckle.

“What?” Cheba said.

“This,” he said, turning it so she could see the label. “It’s called Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale.”

When she looked puzzled, he translated it:

“
Más o menos, El Cabron más Presumido
.”

He had to hunt for the equivalent of
Bastard
because the dialect of
ladino
Spanish he’d grown up with as his second language had a lot of English loanwords in it including that one as well as being archaic even by Mexican standards.

And bastard is too common a condition south of the border to be an insult the way it is in the North, and arrogant? They’re all arrogant under the right circumstances.

“That is…what’s the English word…” Cheba said, flashing a smile. “Like him? The right word, the…”

“Appropriate?”

“
Sí
, the a-prro-priate word for the man who owns this house.”

“Adrian’s not a bad guy.”

“He has good manners and he is a man of honor. He has balls, too. He is also, yes,
a stone arrogant bastard.
Like a cat, you know? Or a don in the old days.”

“Yeah, but he’s
our
stone arrogant bastard. He killed…well, he and Ellen killed…that Shadowspawn bitch who murdered my partner and his girlfriend. Right over there where the kids are now, after I pumped the whole magazine from a Glock into her and she laughed at me and told me I looked delicious. I owe him.”

“Me also too. And I don’t like owing things to people. I pay the debt as soon as I can, so I guard his children.” She sipped, and looked around. “Good beer. And someday I will have a house like this.”

He’d grown up on Bud from cans, and at first this stuff hadn’t tasted like
beer
at all. It was caramel and coffee and chocolate and a smooth richness with a kick like a ball-peen hammer upside the head, and he’d come to like it. He’d been a little surprised by
Casa Grande
Adrian Brézé’s house and everything in it; it was simpler than he’d expected, certainly a lot plainer than what the bad branch of the Brézés had in that creepy place in California. Then he’d realized it was the simplicity of someone who did exactly what he wanted and didn’t give a damn for either expense or what anyone else thought of his choices.

“I could get used to all this,” he said. “It’s not exactly what I’d have if I could have whatever I wanted, but it’s fun. And honest.”

“So, your family, what did they do? Mine were
campesinos
, farmers. From always, and then when my father died my mother and I sold baskets to tourists in Tlacotalpan.”

He leaned back in the chair and looked out at the moon-washed mountainscape, tilting the beer back again. The conversation required a little backing and filling and dropping in and out of Spanish and English:

“My grandfathers both had little ranchos and a few sheep, sometimes my mother’s father worked in the mines and my father’s father on the railroads, and they were soldiers in the time of Vietnam. My grandmothers worked in the gardens and around the house, the chickens, that sort of thing.”

Cheba nodded; it was all obviously fairly familiar to her, the outline if not the details.

“My father had a garage…fixed cars, did fancy work on them sometimes, restored old cars, classics, for rich people. Before then he was in the Suck, the Marine Corps, in the first war in Iraq. He died years ago, cancer, when I was still young.”

“You were a soldier too, no? Before you were a policeman?”

“Soldier, hell. Marine! I enlisted out of high school and stayed in until I made sergeant and got a correspondence degree from UNM in Criminal Justice, then came back here. My sister is married to a dentist named Anderson—pretty decent guy but we don’t have much in common.”

“Because he is a gringo?”

“Nah, because he’s a civilian who thinks the world is a nice place; sort of like a big Labrador retriever puppy with glasses, you don’t get to think that way if you’re in a war. Or working as a cop, sometimes that’s harder ’cause you don’t expect it to end. But he’s good to Alvara and the kids and I get a cut on my dental work. The police work was why Julia…my wife…took off. Said she couldn’t stand being married to my job.”

“No children?” she said.

It was a bit of an interrogation, but he found he didn’t mind. “Nah, Julia said she wanted to wait.”

They sat in silence for a while the movie murmured from the arched entrance to the living room. Both of them watched the cold moonlight
move on the slopes. He grinned, then laughed like a coyote, the furry kind.

“What is funny? I would like to hear something funny.”

“New Mexico looks a lot like Afghanistan, the parts I was mostly in. Other sections are more like Arizona, but this is a dead ringer for some places along the Paki border. Dry, scrubby, rocky, cold in winter, like you said. Even the houses look a lot alike, at least like the old ones. Even the people, except for the clothes and stuff. More like me than you.”

He blinked, blinked again, his hand tightening on the fading coolness of the beer bottle.

Helicopter blades beat through the night in his mind, thupthupthupthup.

Puffs of white dust over the ridge just before the Apaches topped it and banked against the full moon and slid down smooth and hard and low, their black skins tight as sharks with malign intent. Rockets trailing incandescent light and smoke like dirty cotton candy from the pods under their stub wings. Lines of fire snapping down and broken adobe flying back up in black gouts with red blinks in their centers.

Whatever-it-was creeping under his body armor stopped driving him crazy as everything turned to crystal ice and he pushed himself up a little on his elbows. He reached up with one hand and snapped down his PVS-9 and the world went from dark night to pale green overcast day with blooms of light where fire billowed as he snuggled the butt into his shoulder. Noise in the dry rustling corn across the irrigation ditch as the explosions died away, feet pounding the hard clay. Stalks waving like banners despite no wind. Baylor’s voice rasping in his earbud from the other wing of the L-shaped ambush, that burring Louisiana coonass accent:

“Top, we got movement on your twelve!
Mouj, mouj!
”

Figures, glowing a little through the cornstalks as the thermal sensors in the goggles caught them against the colder background. Dozens, maybe thirty. Running fast away from the tunnels and spider holes in the village, no idea at all they’d been drone-tracked for days and were being herded into the killing ground, just trying to get out from the lash of the rockets and the chain-guns that swiveled under the gunships’ bellies like the stingers of great malignant wasps sparkling the night with muzzle flashes.

“Smoke ’em, bitches!” he snapped through the throat mike.

And brought the M-4 up and brought the laser on target and started to squeeze off crisp three-round bursts, the bullets hitting the baggy tunics, dust flying up as the men danced like jointed puppets on strings and the shattered cornstalks fell on their bodies,
choonk…choonk
as one of his squad cut loose with his grenade launcher, the mouj screaming
Allahu Akbar
and spraying the night with AK rounds, or just screaming in fear and pain, everything would be darkness and chaos and strobing lights to them, green tracer going wild far overhead, swap out the magazine…