Shadows of Falling Night (23 page)

They landed gently and taxied for a while; this aircraft was too small for the regular Jetways, but bigger than most of the other private aviation stuff it ended up among. A little electric cart pushed the gangway up, and the copilot opened the door to let in the wet chill and the rumbling whine of an airport.

“In a way this is even weirder,” Peter said, extending the handle of his suitcase, while Leon and Leila solemnly donned their backpacks. “Weirder than the openly weird stuff.”

“Weirder than what?” Eric said, shrugging into his coat and helping Cheba into hers. “My weird-o-meter started shooting blue sparks and making gurgling noises a while ago.”

He also checked on his knives and coach gun, and discreetly made sure the others were doing the same with their weapons. In his experience a long spell in the air had a sort of stunning effect; the monotony, the noise and vibration, or whatever. He could feel something of the same effect now even though the business jet had been more comfortable than anything he’d flown in before. It took an effort of will to get up to speed again right away, and it was when you were logy that you most needed to be alert.

The copilot noticed the assorted instruments of destruction, and her high-cheeked Slavic face was absolutely impersonal as they walked past.

The time was only three in the afternoon in Brussels, but as they went down the ramp to the tarmac and trundled their luggage into the airport building the gray dankness was all-pervasive. It gave you a vague feeling that somehow it was bedtime already; even the twins were yawning, though they had slept most of the way across the Atlantic. The air outside was full of what might have been light rain or a heavy mist, and as they walked to the terminal, ridges of slush squelched beneath their shoes with a feeling that was halfway between a crunch and a splash. Getting miniature droplets of cold water flicked in your face at least had the advantage of being a little invigorating; Eric felt torpid and badly in need of some brisk exercise at the same time.

Peter seemed to be thinking hard as he hunted for phrases. “Before that—”

He visibly reconsidered using Adrienne’s name in front of her children.

“—evil bitch came into my life…at Los Alamos…things were
real,
if you know what I mean. Well, someone who wasn’t a scientist might have thought they were a bit strange, but they were what I was used to, going to work, hanging out with people I knew, and catching the odd movie…Then the evil witch carried me off to her lair at Rancho Sangre, and that was a complete nightmare.”

Cheba nodded. “Worse because it was pretty, you know? Pretty town, pretty clean houses, pretty farms and the beautiful
Casa Grande.
And
her,
pretty like a snake.”

The two former lucies shared a glance; Eric supposed that was something you had to go through to really understand, but he was perfectly contented to be on the outside looking in as far as
that
was concerned.
Helping Cheba get through withdrawal from the feeding addiction had been bad enough. It was worse than coming off heroin or meth cold turkey, though apparently while you were on it didn’t do any particular harm. And the thought of detoxing alone, the way Peter had…

Peter made a gesture of agreement that turned into a wave at their surroundings.

“But Rancho Sangre was at least honestly beyond belief, like dropping into a movie. This…I’ve flown into Brussels before. Going to scientific conferences, mostly. Now I’m back here, in what should be a familiar place, but I’m not part of that old life anymore. It’s as if I’m dragging a bubble of alien weirdness around with me, or I can see and everyone else around me is blind. And I can’t go back, because I can’t stop knowing what I know now about what’s going on below the surface.”

Eric chuckled. “Welcome to the club,
compadre
. When you’re in the Suck you know it’s a different world and that nobody can understand who isn’t in there with you, but it’s sort of obvious because everybody’s wearing camouflage and carrying a gun and it separates you. This is more like being a cop, and especially a homicide detective—we used to say homicide roach, ’cause it gave you a roach’s-eye-view of things. It’s a different world in the middle of what everyone else thinks is the real world. It looks the same, but you know things other people don’t, like adding a colored filter. Or taking one away.”

Peter smiled a crooked smile. “Well, we’re all in that situation now!”

“No,” Cheba said vigorously, shaking her head until the black curls tossed. “For me, it is all strange. Everything is differently strange, the things you think are familiar are strange to me too. Some is just different; other things are twisted. It started when I left
Coetzala
for Mexico City. I don’t understand how people live in a world of only buildings, like they don’t eat beans and use the toilet…The twisted part…it’s
all different in sizes and sounds and colors. Nothing looks
real
to me, everything is like the pictures on a TV only it is my town that is like a little picture on TV in my head…and then I feel that it isn’t real or this isn’t real and I end up not knowing what real actually is. And
then
I met the
brujos
!”

She took a deep breath. “So I don’t think about how strange things are too much, or it would make me crazy.”

Looking around: “Why do we want to come to this place, Brussels, anyway? Big! Too big!”

The three adults and two children were a little lost in the sleek vastness of Brussel Nationaal/Bruxelles-National Airport once they made their way into the general concourse. Over twenty thousand people worked here full time, and hundreds of thousands passed through every day. Much of it, Eric reflected, might have been any major airport anywhere—shiny tile, shiny metal, shiny glass, overpriced goods and rows of metal and plastic seats carefully calculated not to be too comfortable, all amid a slight smell of burned kerosene.

All that was deeply reassuring. With Peter’s little gadgets on their persons they wouldn’t stand out to the eye of the Power, and there was plenty of crowd to lose themselves in. He let his detective sense fan out, that subliminal reading that flagged anyone who was looking for somebody in particular rather than just going with the flow. So far, nothing but his making a bunch of people who were obviously cops or security agents of some sort, like the creepy-looking plump little dude over there with the waxed mustache.

Of course there
was
one local feature you wouldn’t see most places—

“And why is everything spelled out twice?” she asked. “One way that looks a little like Spanish, but isn’t, and another way that looks a little like English, but isn’t either.”

Peter grinned; Cheba had spent a lot of time on their flight with a set of headphones and a textbook, doggedly polishing her spoken and written English. Both the men were hard workers, and they both found her a little intimidating that way.

“Because they speak two languages here, Dutch and French, and the Flemings speak Dutch and the Walloons speak French and they can never agree on anything. Starting with which language to disagree in, and mostly they never get past that part,” he said.

“Sounds familiar,” Eric said, thinking of New Mexico. “I haven’t been to Brussels before when I transited through Europe.”

“Isn’t NATO HQ here?” Peter said.

“
Sí
, but it’s administrative, not operational. We staged through Ramstein-Frankfurt. Doesn’t matter much, when they let us off the transports it was usually only for an hour or so and we spent it lying down on the hangar floor with our packs for pillows or grabbing a smoke. You could be anywhere in the Suck Archipelago, except for the weather.”

Peter said: “A lot of scientific stuff gets channeled through here too. So just about all
I’ve
seen of it is hotels and some excellent universities, which I admit beats an airport hangar. Even if the universities aren’t as old as they look, despite the attitude Europeans put on. All that medieval and Renaissance stuff pretending to have been there for centuries.”

“Hasn’t that been here?” Cheba said curiously. “In Mexico City—that was the only big city I saw before this—there were ancient things from the time of the old
indios
, the pyramid, and old Spanish things, and buildings from the time of the Porfiriato, and the modern ones of glass, all mixed together and all looking as they are.”

“This part of the world has been burned down or blown up or both so often that you can’t tell what’s original and what isn’t. They try to
make it look the same afterwards, but the same isn’t the same, if you know what I mean. The first part of this airport was built by the Nazis during World War Two, for example. A lot of things around here were nothing but broken rock covered in the marks of tank-tracks at one time or another, mostly in 1945. Sometimes 1918
and
1945.”

“They have really,
really
good chocolate here,” Leon said, bringing the conversation back to practicalities.

His sister nodded vigorously. “I love the ones that are shaped like little seashells,” she said with an air of heavy hinting.

Peter nodded solemn agreement. “Come to think of it, I remember those too, and they’re completely authentic. C’mon, you guys, let’s get some! There’s bound be a shop selling them around here.”

As the slight blond man led the two raven-haired children away, Cheba leaned closer to Eric.

She nodded. “Peter is like a brother,” she said, which he found rather comforting. “Or the way they should be. Back in
mi tierra,
they were, well, focused on going to the city. And in the city, all the boys, they were
hijos de su tal por cual
…How do you say in English, ah! So short a word—assholes.”

Then, seriously: “What do we do now?”

“I’ve got a list of inconspicuous hotels and we’ll take a taxi,” Eric said. “We’ll start for Vienna in the morning as soon as we organize the transportation; I don’t want to spend more time on the road at night than we have to. We should get there before these Council asswipes get their act together, they can’t decide whether to have breakfast without fighting about it for a day or two. Easier to hide in a car than it is in a plane.”

“Why are we taking the twins towards their parents at all?” she said quietly. “Isn’t that where the fighting will be? The danger, at least, no? Why would Adrian want that?”

Eric had been looking at the children, smiling a little wistfully. They made them
feel
a little wistful—he’d always wanted some of his own, and being an uncle had confirmed the feeling, and he’d never see thirty again so the clock was ticking if he didn’t want to be trying to ride herd on teenagers in his sixties. Although…

“Maybe not. I talked this over with Adrian. He doesn’t want to use the children as shields…But it’s possible they could be safer near their mother, or their mother and him, than anywhere else in the world. That’s where she’d have more control over the other Shadowspawn. It’s not like they’ve got any real discipline, and a lot of them tend to act on impulse. If they’re right under her eye, they’ll be more cautious.”

“They may not have this discipline, but they certainly fear her.”

“Yeah, but believe me when you’re trying to get people to do anything, at least to do it effectively, discipline is a lot better. People act crazy when they’re afraid. Anyway, we tried hiding them somewhere far away from the action, and look how that worked! Whoever came after us probably got reamed out by Her Supreme Evilness, but that wouldn’t have been much consolation to us if he’d won. Or to her for that matter, if he’d ended up killing the kids as well as us.”

Cheba frowned. “That is all true. But I have grown to care for them, and I worry that they might come to harm.”

“Me too.” He hesitated. “Though…Something I’ve been thinking about…Have you noticed how
much
you like them and how quickly it happened?”

She blinked, then her eyes narrowed.
Living proof that lack of education has nothing to do with lack of smarts,
he thought.

“Why shouldn’t I like them? I have always liked
los niños
, and they are good children. Even when I was their mother’s prisoner they did not
behave badly. No more badly than other children. Well, other rich people’s children.”

Eric nodded. “I like them too, but I remember something that Adrian said. That Shadowspawn often leave their children to be brought up by others.”

“You mean like, what is that bird that puts its eggs in other birds’ nests, the cuckoo?”

“Yeah, and it would make sense for Shadowspawn children to evolve, to develop, in ways that made them real likable to the human adults—cute, appealing.”

“
All
children
are
like that! If they weren’t we would not feed them and clean up their messes.”

“Right, if they weren’t we’d strangle them instead. But maybe Shadowspawn kids are more like kids than kids are. To push our buttons, you know?”

Cheba shook her head. “I like them anyway. Even if that is true, they are not
pretending
to be good children. They are doing it by
really
being that way.”

Leon and Leila came back, holding up a box in triumph. “Here, you should have some too!” Leila said; Leon nodded emphatically while he chewed.

Thing is, Adrian also told me that the human foster parents…A lot of the time, they’re the first ones kids kill when they hit puberty. Because that’s when they stop being naturally inclined to get along with anybody.

He took one of the candies from the box the girl offered. The shell was a dark, slightly bitter chocolate, while the interior had a creamy filling of hazelnut praline.

“Thanks,” he said; it really was good chocolate.

Damn,
he thought.
And they really
are
cute kids.

“And Adrian wants me in Vienna,” he said to Cheba. “You too, and Peter.”

“Why? Me to look after the children and guard them, and Peter because he understands these machines…You because you were a soldier, and he needs you to fight?”