Shadows of Falling Night (34 page)

So seeing Adrian Brézé again had been pure deep relief. Eric was reasonably satisfied with the way he had coped on his own; after all, he was still alive and so were those he was supposed to be looking out for. It had still been far too damned close for comfort. And he and Cheba were feeling fine physically now, thanks to that same friendly adept.

“And funerals in church?” he went on.

He remembered Rancho Sangre, the Brézé estate in California. That had a church, or what had once been a church…And lavishly built in the same neo-Spanish fashion as the rest of the place, what he privately thought of as the Zorro Revival style. It hadn’t been used as a church for a very long time, if ever. The sign outside said it was a community theater. From his brief spell undercover masquerading as a renfield button-man for an allied family of Shadowspawn…well, they certainly put on performances there. Not exactly Shakespeare in the park, though.

The Council weren’t actually Satanists anymore. On the other hand, they hadn’t forgotten their roots either. They kept a lot of the ambience and trappings.

“This is a church,” Adrian said. “But not to the Christian God, that’s merely camouflage.”

Ellen nodded, her face stark behind the net veil attached to a little round black hat. “It’s only a century or so since they started surviving
death,” she said. “Before that, they were just people—bad, murderous people with psychic powers.”

“And take a gander at some of the details,” Peter said grimly; he’d been looking closely. “This…this so-called church…Maybe it was a church once…isn’t what it looks like at first glance.”

At first glance it looked like a typically gaudy example of Counter–Reformation Baroque, Austrian-style. The exterior had a turreted dome flanked by two towers, all white and yellow stone; that looked positively restrained when you walked into the interior, a blaze of gilt stucco, porphyry columns, colored marbles in every shade from cream to Imperial purple, and contorted murals done in the style of El Greco, only plump and pink to match the carved plaster.

Then you saw what the murals and statuary actually portrayed. Eric felt an impulse to clap his hands over the children’s eyes, followed by one to squeeze his own shut.

I’ve seen a real lot of really bad shit,
he thought.
Even more as a cop than I did in the Suck. That…that’s just plain…nasty.

Beside him Cheba gave a sharp intake of breath—he suspected the sight was even worse for her, given her time at Rancho Sangre. Even though she probably wasn’t all that religious, the blasphemy would hit the small-town Mexican girl a lot harder, though the obscenity and cruelty were bad enough.

Ushers in formal pearl-gray suits with black carnations in their buttonholes showed them to their seats; thankfully Adrian had a block to himself, so his retainers didn’t have to rub elbows with those of the other Brézé lines. From the glances he was getting out of the corners of their eyes, the feeling was entirely mutual. He leaned forward to whisper in Adrian’s ear, but the other man forestalled him:

“No, we won’t have to stay for long. It is necessary that we put in
an appearance. Take the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the players.”

He did, including Dale Shadowblade, who was sitting on the other side of the aisle not far from Adrienne’s party. He kept his face impassive, but he could feel an involuntary bristling at the sight of that slab-sided, high-cheeked, hook-nosed countenance.

So is he going to deliver, or was that all some sort of elaborate set up?

The memory of that face snarling at him, the outstretched clawed hand, an impalpable blow like a ripsaw of pure malevolence made tangible…

And I blasted some silver shot into him, or at least sort of into him because he was only sorta-kinda of there. And he’s an Apache pretty much, not one of these old-school stiff upper lip Euro types. Odd that he’s not paying me more attention.

Étienne-Maurice Brézé took the lectern, dressed in a black silk robe picked out in crimson embroidery at the cuffs and hems and neck. A roll of organ music sounded through the big church, a sprightly mocking tune before he began:

“My brother Arnaud Brézé was one of us,” the master of the Council said. “A vampire, a werewolf, a malignant sorcerer, cruel and murderous…and stylish. His body of the flesh perished many years ago, and he became entirely a creature of darkness, among the first generation to survive the body’s loss since the first Empire of Shadow ten thousand years ago and more. Now his aetheric form has perished as well. Just as one might expect, his death came at the most inconvenient possible moment and has cost and will cost us all a great deal of trouble. Would he have wished it any other way?”

Laughter ran through the church, the merriment of devils, and Eric shivered slightly. The thing that had once been almost a man went on:

“Let me begin my tribute to my kinsman with an anecdote. When my brother and I were torturing our father to death—ah, the lost merry times of youth—”

Eric tuned out the speech and studied the faces instead, as closely as he could without being utterly obvious. Adrienne Brézé had a pleasant social smile on her face, but he could see her eyes flicker once or twice towards Dale Shadowblade as if puzzled. Slightly puzzled, more than a little angry.

He jolted back to awareness as the cool irony in Étienne-Maurice’s voice change to something much flatter and more matter of fact. The tiny hairs under his collar bristled a little.

“—But this leaves the matter of killing a Brézé while under my protection. This constitutes
disrespect
, and I am…annoyed.”

Those blank yellow eyes him came to rest on Adrian. There was a small quiet rustle as many more joined them. Eric made himself aware of the location of all his weapons, sat very still, and for the first time in several decades actually prayed. It was easier, somehow, in this obscenely desecrated place.

Adrian came easily to his feet, the fingers of both hands resting lightly on the back of the pew in front of him. He inclined his head slightly, then spoke:

“The matter is simple: Adrienne Brézé ordered her follower Dale Shadowblade, well known to you as a killer of our kind, to kill Arnaud. This I heard from his own lips yesterday. I will now drop my shields long enough for you to know that I speak the truth.”

The plan had been for him to do that in a flash and then get them back up again before anyone could do anything seriously manky. Adrian looked intense for a moment, staggered, then swore in some language Eric didn’t recognize and put his hand to his head. Ellen put her hand
on his arm, then turned and nodded slightly to the others with a small tight smile.

Stage one,
Eric thought.
And—

Dale Shadowblade leapt to his feet. “It’s true!” he shouted. “And she plans to kill you all!”

The not-really-a-church erupted in a chorus of screams and shouts and howls; some of them were quite literal howls or shrieks as the nightwalkers and post-corporeals reflexively changed as they scented danger and animal instinct overrode muffled intelligence. Hands—and in several cases, claws—reached for the Council’s assassin. He seized Kai, pitched her slight form at the nearest assailant and bolted out the door.

“Seize him!
Alive!
” Étienne-Maurice shouted.

Shadowspawn might not know much about discipline or organization, but they got fear and domination down like a treat. Even so, Adrian was in the first wave after the fleeing man. Something huge and furry raised a paw to smash Kai down, some sort of weird cat striped and spotted at the same time and the size of a horse, but Ellen stepped forward and swept her behind herself to tumble into the pew, then skipped backward brandishing her curved silvered knife to discourage any random violence. Cheba and Peter had their weapons drawn as well, and the Mexican girl shoved the children down as they tried to stand on the seat and crane their necks to see the action.

“What the fuck was
that
son of a whore!” Eric blurted.

“Liger,” Peter said, holding his coach gun in both hands. “Lion-tiger hybrid, biggest cats in the world, they grow over a thousand pounds—”

“Later!”

That was a God damned rhetorical question, professor!

Eric had been told what his part was, and he’d studied the ground, both maps and Google Earth. Running out into a night full of man-eating
monsters with their blood up was still one of the harder things he’d ever done, but he did it. And the renfields could kill you just as dead, which meant he had to keep an eye out for the human servants as well. It was deep dark once he was past the lights of the “church,” and the streets were narrow and twisty. It was a good thing that he had a lot of experience in making the map in his head correspond to the real terrain.

“This way!” he heard Adrian’s voice call the Wild Hunt that had boiled out of the building with fangs bared and fur bristling.

And he could
feel
the same thing, like a compass pointing in his head combined with a snarling eagerness for blood. Some part of him—one that wasn’t counting turns and jogging carefully down slippery cobblestones—was uneasily conscious that this must be the way the wolf pack had felt as they chased him and the others through the snowy woods. The bestial snarling reinforced the impression, except that this time he was running
with
the pack, more or less, even if for purposes of misdirection.

It was a profoundly disquieting sensation, and he felt sorry for any bystander who got in the way. Or even for anyone who observed it, not least because no one would ever believe them and they would probably go nuts thinking about it. Somewhere a faint hint of zither music from some busker died with a scream and a crash of splintering wood.

A manhole cover clanged down.
Cutting it close,
he thought. Something flashed down out of the night, a huge shaggy-crested white-breasted eagle of a type he’d never seen before. There was a glimmer as it dove through the iron disk, turning impalpable for a critical fraction of a second. That was apparently a bravura display of nightwalker skill; the Shadowspawn in bird form would have to turn palpable again
really quickly
to avoid a fatal plunge into the solid fabric
of the earth beneath the tunnel’s floor. Transitioning back to human form, or some favorite four-footed attack machine, in the fractional second before their momentum carried them across the height of the tunnel.

Whoever it was carried the trick off, but it didn’t seem to help much. There was a shot from below, a racking animal screech and then two more discharges echoing away underfoot. Then dead silence. He drew his own coach gun, levered up the manhole cover with his left hand and dropped through. It wasn’t much of a drop, particularly since he wasn’t overburdened with gear, and he landed with flexed knees in something wet and truly unpleasant. There was a low reddish glow from caged utility lights at inconveniently long intervals, brighter pools fading into shadow. The stench was stunning, but there was enough adrenaline in his system that it didn’t bother him.

He trotted forward. The sewer was an arched tunnel, with smaller openings feeding into it on either side, each contributing its loathsome flow. Suddenly Adrian was trotting up beside him, and farther back a yammering broke out—human shouts and whoops horribly mixed with wolf-howl, tiger-snarl and a grunting boom he’d heard only once before, on a training exercise in northern Australia.

“Saltie,” he said.

“
Crocodylus porosus,
” Adrian said, with specificity worthy of Peter Boase.

Not very long ago according to an Aussie he’d met in a bar in Darwin, a saltwater crocodile weighing about two tons had bitten an eighteen-foot section of teak decking from the side of a yacht in the Coral Sea. It was just the sort of thing you wanted to meet in the sewer.

“This is going to take careful timing,” Adrian said.

“Doesn’t it always?” Eric replied.

They weren’t exactly friends, and he didn’t know if they ever would be. Technically speaking they weren’t even of the same species, or subspecies, and he strongly suspected that he’d find some parts of Adrian’s life rather squicky. At that moment, though they were operating on exactly the same wavelength.

The sewer was sort of a flattened egg shape with the point upwards; Adrian broke left and he went right, both of them splashing through the shallower portion. Eric bared his teeth.
His
part in this would actually be more difficult than fighting. A glimpse of movement ahead, and he pushed forward at a run, waving Adrian back with his left hand. Through a dark patch, and then into another pool of dingy red light. Another flicker of movement, and this time it was a man in soiled evening dress, standing with his right foot advanced and his left arm tucked into the small of his back. The right was lowering the pistol into a formal range-style aim, and behind the muzzle broad brown face split into an exceedingly nasty smile.

It would be just like the son of several bitches to aim for his face. Best to shoot soon, before curse-wreaking bollixed even the Stone Age excuse for a weapon.

The coach gun bucked in his hand and pellets whipped the foul water to froth and scored runnels in the mold on brick and concrete. A flash and a flat elastic
bang
, and something overwhelming punched him in the gut. He made a strangled sound somewhere between pain and
ooof!