Shadows of Falling Night (8 page)

“Both are endangered species which survive on human sufferance. Mosquitoes, on the other hand…”

Adrienne laughed, though the comparison was far too supine for her taste. “And there is no element of resentment towards my great-grandfather your brother there, eh?” she said, giving him a very slight wink. “Since he is the secret ruler of whom you speak.”

They shared a laugh. Arnaud contemplated the end of his cigarette: “Though of course your plan to…How shall I put this…trim the dead wood from our species as well…is somewhat drastic. And I
hope
you were not thinking of including me in that category once we are all in Tbilisi.”

“Ah,” she said noncommittally, hiding her fury behind a slight smile. “No, of course not, my old, that goes without saying. Your assistance aside, you are notably unambitious politically, a rare and precious quality. We are overequipped with would-be leaders and deplorably short of followers, we lords of Shadow.”

“Nevertheless, on reflection I heartily approve of the basic idea. Not least because Étienne-Maurice would meet a suitably fiery end in your little scenario of Hell brought to Earth.” He chuckled. “My brother takes you a little less seriously than he might, because you are female. An error, and hopefully a
fatal
error.”

She laid her own cigarette down, took a sip of her black coffee and
another of brandy. There was no point in pretending ignorance. He knew about the bomb. There really wasn’t any point in asking him when he’d found out, either; it was enough that he had. Though she certainly intended to find out
how
he’d penetrated that secret.

“Indeed, I think that was why I tried to kill your brother last year, he being so set on preventing your charming little joke.”

“You think, rather than know?”

He shrugged expressively. “Often prescience produces no concrete reason for action, especially when other adepts are muddying the waters.”

Adrienne nodded. That was true; it was also a splendid excuse for simply acting on a whim, something for which Arnaud was notorious. The way he phrased it implied that he hadn’t learned about the bomb until well after that. Which in itself proved nothing, since he might be lying, but might well be indicative. It was as naïve to imagine someone
always
lied as to think they
never
did, one of those facts you had to fight your natural instincts to keep in mind.

“I’m sure your talents will be extremely useful in Tbilisi,” Adrienne said graciously.

“Perhaps. Although I have already done most of what I can. Still, let us contemplate a few contingencies.”

Outside the restaurant a half hour later Adrienne pushed her hands into the ermine-lined pockets of her Astrakhan wool coat. The Place Vendôme was thronged, the crowds thick beneath the triple lights in their cast-iron stands, around the Austerlitz pillar with its bronze bas-reliefs cast from the metal of captured cannon. It was a close replica of the Column of Trajan in Rome, down to the enemies shown suffering defeat being mostly Germans and other Central Europeans. Unable to improve on his Classical model, Napoleon had simply
made his bigger and more expensive and put a statue of himself on the top.

“I think dear Arnaud was right; he has done most of what he can. And, to quote a classic line, he knows too much,” she said thoughtfully.

“Whatever you say,
Doña
,” Monica said. She smiled as she looked around. “I do love Paris at night. There’s always a certain magic in the air, even at this time of year.”

“Have you forgotten what I said about punishment?” Adrienne asked archly.

The night air had that particularly Parisian damp winter chill that made you wish for a crackling fire in the hearth and some sort of hot drink involving cocoa and rum. Not to mention…She looked around herself. A classically chic woman of indeterminate age was walking a very large poodle whose coat shone like a silvered confection carved from whipped cream, its collar rich turquoise edged with sparkling diamanté. Adrienne stepped over.

“Give me that,” she said, and twitched it out of her hand. “I need it for
my
bitch.”

The Frenchwoman started to protest, looked into the yellow-flecked black eyes and backed up, her mouth quivering. The dog half snarled and half whined, crouching and urinating on the pavement as Adrienne unbuckled.

“Bend, my Golden Retriever Barbie,” she said, and cinched it around Monica’s neck.

The blue eyes were wide. “Uh, that’s sort of…tight,” she said hoarsely.

She stumbled on her high-heeled shoes as Adrienne turned and tugged sharply with the lead over her shoulder; the Shadowspawn could feel the flush of humiliation and fear and dreadful excitement.

“Be glad you’re not doing this naked,” she said sharply.

Then she smiled and turned. “In fact, that’s a brilliant idea. Who knows what might happen? To you, that is. To the skin,
chérie
, right now. Just the shoes and the garter-belt.”

Heads were turning in their direction, and Adrienne laughed merrily.

CHAPTER FIVE

Paris

T
wenty-four hours later, Ellen Brézé whistled softly as Adrian handed her out of the cab in the chill dampness of the Paris night and she looked up at the palace. “Well, that’s quite something. Rococo, Louis XV, and well done. Very impressive.”

“In more senses than one,” Adrian answered grimly. “Particularly if you know the history. The history of my family, near enough.”

The great house—or small palace—was shaped like an elongated H in form, the front court enclosed by the outer arms and more courtyards within down the length of it. The frontage was pale stone, three stories high with engaged columns. Light streamed out of the tall windows, but outside, the illumination was from iron crescents of burning wood, shedding highly illegal sparks along with a yellow-red light that flickered
across the wet stone. Footmen in eighteenth-century liveries and white powdered wigs were bowing the guests up the sweeping stairs to the gates. They were just as politely attentive to the pair of Siberian tigers padding by as they were to the ones in top-hat and frock coat, or Jazz Age beaded dresses, classical kimonos, Chinese
cheongsan
or Zulu outfits of cow’s-tails and leopard skins.

A frieze of running low-relief wolves gamboled above the entranceway amid lambs and babies.

“That’s a joke, right?” Ellen said.

“The center of the ancestral estates was known as Beauloup, from the thirteenth century and possibly earlier,” Adrian said. “Domain of the Beautiful Wolf. A very ancient family joke. Individuals strong enough to nightwalk came along every few generations back then. They did not understand genetics, but they did marry their cousins, or worse. And the genes…reach back along the lines of descent, from future to past, protecting their own potential existence. They
want
to find each other.”

“Jesus, them and the One Ring. Ah, and the little symbol too.”

That
was a motif set into the wrought iron of the gates, a jagged gilt trident across a broken black circle representing a shattered sun. The sigil of the Order of the Black Dawn, and the Council of Shadows.

“And they say you’re stuck with your in-laws. How true,” Ellen said, tucking her hand into Adrian’s arm as he offered it with a classic crooked elbow.

The Hôtel de Brézé had been built when the French nobility abandoned the more central, medieval Marais district for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, then a greenfield suburb made newly fashionable by Louis XIV. The Revolution had come and gone; young Henri de Beauloup had reopened the townhouse when he emerged from the family’s
discreet retirement to fight for Napoleon; indeed, that emperor had referred to his exploits in Spain as showing that at least one of his cavalry commanders
knew how to deal with rebels without false sentiment.
Goya himself had painted several of those episodes, then kept the work secret for forty years.

Eventually, a Brézé with the Victorian taste for science and statistics had made the acquaintance of an obscure monk by the name of Gregor Mendel, and suppressed his findings while he applied the cleric’s work to a breeding program that had previously relied on mere superstition and on incest practiced mainly for its own sake. Combined with the new science, even his limited command of the Power had produced startling results. His far more adept son Étienne-Maurice Brézé had celebrated his own twenty-first birthday by torturing and butchering his father, in the waning days of the nineteenth century.

Inside the main doors the host was waiting, smiling, chatting with each guest as they entered and handed hats and cloaks to the servants…or in a few cases transformed back into human form and accepted robes. One had arrived as a golden eagle, flown into a window, and was now rubbing at his forehead and cursing in some language Ellen didn’t even recognize, a brown-skinned man with heavy bold features. Behind him a great silverpoint gorilla knuckled by, deep in soundless conversation with a blade-nosed man in a black burnouse and
gutrah
headdress, who fingered a curved knife thrust through his sash as if that was his hand’s natural resting-place.

The Duc de Beauloup had been post-corporeal for over a century. The form he wore was his own, in what his own era considered the prime of life, so that he looked like a slim, swarthy, vital man of around forty. His height was average for the twenty-first century, which made him tall for a Frenchman of the nineteenth. The face was eerily similar to Adrian’s,
though blunter and somehow a little coarser. His black hair fell down his back nearly to his waist, the top layer gathered in a horse-tail by a jet clasp above the loose torrent below; he wore a full robe of thick black silk that swept the floor, embroidered with black yli-silk thread down the front panel and around the neck and cuffs.

The Shadowspawn’s eyes were hot yellow pools, blank glowing fire. An attendant carried a sheathed sword, carefully keeping the hilt within reach, a gray shadow against the gilt and convolutions and worked plaster of the interior.

“Great-grandfather,” Adrian said politely, bowing to kiss the extended hand and the golden ring with the Council’s sigil.

“We have met twice in a year now, my descendant,” the head of the Council said. “There is hope for you yet. And many of your earlier attempts to kill me for the Brotherhood terrorists were truly ingenious, worthy of a Brézé, if a trifle childish and impulsive.”

And I thought
I
had a dysfunctional family!
ran through Ellen’s mind as she sank into a curtsey.

“One attempts to maintain some traditions, sire, even as a rebel,” Adrian said coolly. “You have met Ellen.”

The molten-sulfur eyes turned on her. For an instant Ellen felt a sensation roughly like the mental equivalent of having your skin plucked off with tweezers. Constructs Adrian had planted within her mind came alert with a clanging of internal barriers, and the Shadowspawn lord smiled.

“And your lovely and now very well-guarded wife,” he said. “Enchanted, my dear.” To Adrian: “There is even something to be said for it from a eugenic point of view. I have come to think that reconcentrating our heritage beyond a certain point is…problematic, is that the word currently used for
possibly unwise
?”

She could tell Adrian was actually interested now. “Why, Sire?” he said.

Étienne-Maurice smiled thinly. “Have you ever tried to compel a cat to obedience by inflicting pain upon it?” he said.

“No, I cannot say that I have,” Adrian said carefully.

“An interesting but ultimately futile pursuit, producing only a thoroughly uncooperative cat. The most you can do is drive it away. Whereas with dogs, and of course humans, that approach often works well. I suspect that our remote ancestors were too much like cats for comfort; at least, for the comfort of those who seek to impose discipline and rule upon them.”

Adrian nodded. “You were perhaps thinking of me, Sire?”

“And your sister. You are as near pureblood as we have achieved to date. And while your command of the Power is admirable, formidable…”

Adrian bowed wordless, polite thanks at the compliment.

“…post-corporeally the command of the Power increases little by little anyway. I have more raw strength now than you, for example, however much you surpass what I had at your age and in the body. Given that there are certain drawbacks to excessive purity of blood…Perhaps it would be better to stop after we achieve consistent survival past the body’s death, which would require a much lower score on the Albermann than you have, for example. Between fifty and sixty percent would do.”

“Oh, you are always so
serious
, Étienne,” a woman’s voice said. “Wasting this splendid golden creature on mere breeding when she is obviously meant for pleasure!”

Seraphine Brézé’s natural appearance—insofar as the term had any meaning with a post-corporeal—would have been very much like Adrian
or his sister. Today she was wearing one of her victims, a petite Asian woman in a tight sheath crimson
áo dài
, slit nearly to the waist at the sides over some sort of hose and jeweled slippers. She had acquired it during the French conquest of Indochina, an after-dinner story of which she was fond. Her piled hair was secured by long golden pins whose ends were wrought into Art Nouveau butterflies by Lalique. She took her spouse’s arm and smiled at them: