The Council of Shadows (17 page)

Adrian suppressed his grin; Ellen was looking shaky as she wiped her knife and retrieved the automatic, and wouldn't appreciate it. He could sense the bubbling horror beneath her control, and stepped up to lay a hand gently on her shoulder.

“You did splendidly, my dear,” he said softly. “I could not have dealt with all three of them.”

She nodded jerkily, taking deep, deliberate breaths, as she'd been taught.

“What
was
that thing? The thing that ran away?”

“A giant fossa, a predator from Madagascar. Arnaud was there for a while, nearly a hundred years ago.. . . No matter. We must see to Duquesne.”

The professor was slumped against a wall, his face wet with sweat and glazed with horror as he stared at the bleeding body of the man who'd been about to kill him, and then up where the fossa had gone. He'd been looking directly at Arnaud when he transformed, too. An ordinary human wouldn't see anything but instant change.

“That . . . that
thing
. . .”

Abruptly he turned and vomited, the sharp stink cutting through the smell of blood. Adrian waited, and then offered his flask.

“This will help, monsieur,” he said.

The man accepted it with both hands after he'd wiped his mouth on a handkerchief. “My God, what
happened
?” he mumbled.

“Alas, you have become a danger,” Adrian said.

Indignation drove out some of the bewilderment. “A danger? To whom?
How?
”

“To . . . the people we were discussing. It is not necessary that they know why or how you will be a danger. The fact itself casts its shadow in their minds.”

“Then why didn't they kill me when I was a baby?” Duquesne asked skeptically.

Adrian clapped him on the shoulder; it was a good question, and a good sign that the man was thinking again.

“Because the possibility was faint, one among an almost infinite number. When you took the first steps towards investigating that data . . .
then
the fan of might-be narrowed down enough to be noticed.”

“They . . . That man, that
thing
, was going to kill me just on a
suspicion
? They can do such things? The police, the authorities—”

“Monsieur Duquesne, I cannot give you all the details of the last century and a half in this alleyway. Think of this: men who can walk through walls, read thoughts, transform themselves into the likeness of carnivorous beasts, bring ruin and death with a thought or a touch . . . are they likely to be constrained by the authorities?”

“No,” he whispered.

“It's a shock,” Ellen said sympathetically. “But you've got to get going and accept it, Monsieur Duquesne.”

“And they have noticed me,” he said.

Fortunately, you are not blaming
me
for that,
Adrian thought.
Yet.

“And if they take notice they act,” he confirmed. “Your life is less to them than a cockroach. Arnaud would have sensed it because he was close to you, like a scent drifting through time. And that closeness, it may have been the Power influencing
his
choices. Though he always did spend much of his time in Paris.”

Ellen crouched to put her face on the same level and took the man's hand in hers.

“I know it's awful to find the world isn't what you thought it was, Professor Duquesne. It was for me, too, when the curtain got raised and I saw, saw the
things
underneath. But you've got to
think
now, no matter how hard it is. Or you'll end up like. . .”

She swallowed, then visibly recovered by an effort of will.

“. . . like
him
,” she concluded, and pointed to the corpse of the man she'd shot.

It lay with limp finality in a spreading pool of blood.

“Not that he didn't deserve . . . Well, more about that later.”

She pulled him up. “Come with us if you want to live.”

“I . . . My colleagues . . .”

“Your family?” Adrian asked sharply.

“I am a widower, my parents are dead, and so is my only sister. No children . . .”

“Then you are relatively immune to pressure through your loved ones, Professor. Now
come
.”

They turned and began to walk rapidly, almost hustling the stunned academic between them, down the opposite way from the way they'd entered the narrow alley. Behind there was a rising chorus of voices; a bleeding man had staggered out into the crowds and collapsed.

That was
not
common in this part of Paris; they were far away from the
banileus
. By the time they were among people again he was walking almost normally, but Adrian could feel the stuttering tension in his mind, a sensation as of thoughts breaking off into fragments, almost like free association.

Adrian looked over his shoulder.
Was that too easy?
he thought.

“Well, now we've got a physicist, lover,” Ellen said.

Her color was better now, but her mouth looked drawn.
Pauvre petite,
he thought, not for the first time.
Caught in the contentions of demons. Poor humanity, nursing its own nemisis in its bloodstream, unawares.

“Yes,” he said. “And perhaps he can actually
do
something. The very fact that Arnaud was moved to kill him indicates that he might.”

She frowned, a single line occurring between her brows; he'd long since concluded that she was even more intelligent than she was beautiful. The Power didn't make you any smarter, and it often made its possessors intellectually lazy. Why bother to shed skull sweat when you could just
sense
the best course of action, like guessing?

“Funny that nobody else has ever thought to study the Power scientifically.”

Adrian grinned. He was beginning to feel exhilarated; Great-uncle Arnaud had tried to nip off a negative pathway . . . and he'd ended up expediting Adrian's purposes instead, swinging the course of events to favor his enemy more than if he had not acted at all. It was often so when adepts clashed; physical defeat was less than half of it.

“Not so odd,” he said. “There are so few Shadowspawn, and modern physics has existed for only a few years. Probably your Peter was the only scientist who has ever been so closely exposed to someone with the Power who was willing to tolerate curiosity.”

They turned out of the far end of the alley. Behind him he could hear the distinctive
oooo-an
,
oooo-an
of French police sirens.

“Nothing else has worked,” he said. “Perhaps this will.”

“I wish we had Peter, though,” Ellen said wistfully.

“
M
aman
's a woof!” Leila shrieked. The little girl flung herself at the great beast's neck; a hundred and twenty pounds wasn't much for a human, but it was very large indeed for a wolf.

Adrienne ducked into a crouch as the small body landed on her back and clung with hands and feet. Then she jumped and bucked and swung back and forth mock-growling; carefully, just short of throwing her off, leaving her squealing with delicious terror. Leon laughed and darted in, grabbing at her tail.

Ouch,
she thought.
Well, they are
my
children!

That would have been obvious even to someone Power-blind; they had her olive complexion, regular high-cheeked faces, straight noses, Cupid's-bow lips and hair the color of a crow's wing. They resembled their father too, of course.

A
twist
within, and she was an Arabian mare. Leila drummed heels on her ribs, and Leon pulled over a footstool and used it to scramble up behind her. They whooped as she trotted out the open French doors and into the garden courtyard of the nursery section. Then she broke into a slow, even gallop—running was
fun
when you were a horse—on the turf around the pool. The night was even dimmer to horse eyes, but she knew the terrain, and the juicy-sweet scent of the grass and the cool air were exhilarating.

At last she halted by the doors. Transforming back to your own etheric form was always easiest, and the children tumbled onto the soft carpet with more laughter. A surge of effort overrode somatic memory and made the body she wore like her normal one, not the still-healing physical frame.

“More,
Maman
!” Leon said. “Be a tiger!”

“No more, my little weasels,” she said firmly. “It's one o'clock. Go get ready for bed, and I'll tell you a story.”

Leila pouted a little, then sighed. “You don't go to sleep yet,” she pointed out hopefully. “We missed you a lot.”

“My body is still a little sick, so I sleep nearly all day, little weasel one. And I need to feed after you go to sleep; turning into animals takes a lot of Power.”

“Who will you bite?” Leon asked with interest.

“Peter,” she said. “And then perhaps Monica, for dessert.”

“Monica's nice,” Leila said. “She smells like cake. I don't think Peter likes us, though. I can feel it in his head. He feels real scared, too, even if he doesn't look that way. That makes my head . . . all prickly.”

Adrienne smiled, full of pride. Six was young to be that sensitive. She suspected Leon would have a little more raw strength when he was grown, though they'd both be very formidable. But the Power was a saber, not a club. Without subtlety, it could be dangerous to the wielder.

“What're you going to do to them to make them taste good?” Leon asked, slightly ghoulishly.

“Things that will make them have very strong feelings,” Adrienne said. “Starting with chasing them. That's how you prepare humans for feeding.”

“Like putting ketchup on
frites
?”

“Yes. It spices their blood with things we need and that taste very good, and you can . . . mmmm . . . get inside their minds and sense their feelings. That's a lot of fun too.”

“Not for the human,” Leon said, with a smirk.

“Sometimes it is, sometimes not,” Adrienne said. “But it's what they're for, after all. They're our food.”

“If we drank more blood, could we do more things with the Power?” Lelia asked hopefully. “I
like
the way using the Power feels. I can keep the feather up for a whole minute now. Maybe—”

“No,” Adrienne said again, firmly. “You have to wait for that. You have to grow up and become strong first.”

This time she used a little of the Power herself, cloaking herself for a moment in shadow and awe and a tinge of fear; the two children blinked their yellow-flecked black eyes and looked away. She could feel their minds roiling, slightly startled, instinctive childhood deference and an equally inbred defiance. More pressure, until their eyes dropped.

You had to be
careful
with purebred Shadowspawn children, and there had been none so pure as these for twelve thousand years or more. Not since the Empire of Shadow. More than one Council member had argued that they should be destroyed before they reached adulthood as too dangerous. It probably
was
going to be trying when they hit puberty, but if the world didn't like it, the world could do the other thing.

Inwardly she bared teeth at the universe; let any
try
to harm her get! And at the thought her spine bristled, the little hairs trying to come erect. She blinked at the thought, grasping with the Power for the thread of possibilities, but it spun away into infinity. Children were
made
of potentials, and these more than most.

“You're too young for more than a sip of blood now and then,” she said, bending and putting a hand behind each head, locking their gaze with hers. “It'll be years yet before you can really feed, or night-walk. You have all the time in the world to wait. Now off with you!”

The two slight raven-haired forms scampered away to don pajamas and brush their teeth. She picked up a robe and threw it over herself as she walked into the bedroom; it opened on a balcony with a chest-high balustrade of carved marble fretwork, and over that in the distance she could see the moon setting over the Coast Range hills.

The room was big, and there was a spray of toys, shelves of picture books and murals of children's stories from the manor's last rebuilding in the 1920s: Bre'r Rabbit squealing in bulging-eyed despair and agony in the jaws of Bre'r Fox, Cinderella trimming the feet of her stepsisters as they screamed and writhed, Jack stamped beneath the giant's foot, Hansel and Gretel burning in the witch's oven.. . .

All the classics,
she thought.
Tradition does have its place.

The children returned, smelling of soap and toothpaste and virtue. She gave each a hug, and then they climbed into their beds. Leila cuddled her doll, and they both rolled over to face her with the covers drawn up as she sat on the chair between them.

“Story!” Leila said, her voice carrying a hint of her mother's firm tone of command. “You promised.”

“Yeah!”

“But certainly,” Adrienne said. A moment's thought, then:

“ ‘Once there was a little girl with a red hood. She was a pretty girl, with pale skin and veins that showed, and she smelled like flowers and hamburgers and chocolate-chip cookies, just
scrumptious
. But everyone knew she'd come to a very bad end, and she did!'”

The children grinned, their eyes alight. Their mother went on:

“ ‘Well, one day she was walking to her grandmother's cottage in the woods. Her grandmother was old and useless, but a beautiful strong wolf broke down her door and chased her around and ate her right up, yum! yum! Then—'”