The Council of Shadows (23 page)

The children ran off, laughing, all except for one girl about seven. She stood looking at him solemnly from under the brim of a floppy hat, her hair in two glinting blue-black braids over her shoulders, dressed in a loose pinafore-style dress the worse for wear.

“What was that about?” he said again.

Her face was narrow, weasel-like, and her eyes were large and dark.

“Yor a stranger,” she said, in a strong accent like a West Texan rasp. “You otter move 'long.”

“Hey, I'm staying here.”

“Strangers don't stay here,” she said, and walked away.

He shrugged off an unease and headed for the restaurant. Fortunately he had his personal library with him on his machine, and he could use a lot of time to get his strength back.

Peter looked around. The momentary enchantment of the desert dawn was fading, heading towards another baking white day.

There probably wouldn't be much else to do here. . . and even his sleep was likely to be unpleasant.

Bad dreams are bad enough,
he thought.
It's when the nightmares spill over into the waking time that things get really unpleasant.

“A
re you sure we should accept the invitation?” Ellen said. Adrian shook his head. “No,” he replied frankly. “But when my great-grandfather issues it, I am sure that the consequences of refusal would be worse. If he simply intended to kill us, we'd probably be dead already.”

He left unspoken the knowledge that there
were
worse things than death, and that his technically dead ancestor might simply be toying with them.

“Ah . . . honey . . .”

He turned and looked at her, concern in his dark gold-flecked eyes.

She took a deep breath. He wasn't in the least a bully, not even unintentionally, but his strength of personality could make you feel uncertain about arguing with him just by existing.

“Honey, I don't think you realize just how much I
don't
want to meet any other Shadowspawn but you. You're the only one I've met who doesn't make me want to kill them, or run screaming, or. . . And I'm afraid of flashbacks. This great-grandfather of yours, he's the Big Bad, right?”

He nodded. “Grand master of the Order of the Black Dawn and the Council of Shadows,” he said. “He has been for over a century.”

She closed her eyes. “Okay, this is the guy behind World War One and Two, the Holocaust, the killing fields, the Congolese wars, the Seoul thing, the . . . the just about
everything
. And we're supposed to go have
dinner
with him?” Almost pleadingly: “Look, couldn't I stay here and watch over Professor Duquesne or something? Rather than having dinner with werewolf Hitler and his vampire bride?”

He took her hands. “My dove, for one thing I want you to be safe. Or as safe as possible.”

“Safe?”
she said.

“This place. . . the Pavillon Ledoyen . . . opened in 1791,” he replied. “Great-grandfather has been coming here all his. . . well, life. And postlife. He brought me there on a visit when I was ten, during our annual summer trip to Europe.”

Which was forty years ago,
Ellen thought.
That keeps tripping me up.

Adrian went on: “It's one of the favored spots for Shadowspawn in Paris because of the continuity; there's a truce for the restaurant and grounds. That's one of the main reasons I agreed to this, instead of running immediately. I do not want you anywhere else without me.

“More, I feel stronger with you beside me, also,” he said. “We are comrades-in-arms now, as well as lovers. And. . . you are my link to normalcy, to sanity, to all that is good. Merely being
around
my great-grandparents is to fall into an alien dimension, ethically.”

She hugged him. “Okay, when you put it like that. Sorry for the collywobbles.”

“It is nothing.”

“Odd to get a dinner invitation from the emperor of the Earth,” she mused.

“First among rivals, rather,” Adrian said. “And by aspiration, more of a living god. Or unliving god.”

“You're frightened, aren't you?” Ellen asked.

He glanced at her quickly. “Anyone who is not afraid of Étienne-Maurice Brézé is an idiot,” he said quietly. “And Seraphine is only marginally less dangerous, if at all.”

Then he smiled a crooked smile. “Yet at least you look lovely.”

Even with the tension, that could make her feel a flush of pleasure, and she turned slowly; she was wearing a turquoise sheath, shoulderless, tight above and with a slightly flared skirt three fashionable inches below the knee that showed off her hourglass figure. Her antique shawl shimmered with silver paillettes, and the choker silver necklace held aquamarines laid out in Mhabrogast glyphs, bringing out the deep blue of her eyes.

It was all rather fetching, and the choice of precious metal was
not
an accident, either. It wasn't precisely that silver was toxic to Shadowspawn; they certainly didn't sizzle at its touch. But the Power couldn't affect it, or could only by massive and painful effort, and silver weapons affected them as ordinary ones did her type of human. That went doubly for night-walkers and postcorporeals, who could make themselves impalpable to ordinary matter with a little warning.

Her fair brows drew together a little, and she paused to adjust Adrian's bow tie—he was in formal evening dress, and looking very fetching in an archaic, rakish James Bond sort of way, especially with the deep red cummerbund.

“Honey, there's something that sort of puzzles me. You can walk through walls, right?”

“Yes, when out of the body, with a little effort.”

“Then how come you don't drop right into the ground when you do?”

To her surprise he looked a little alarmed; rather the way a claustrophobic would if confronted with the thought of being buried alive in a small coffin.

“You can, if you're careless, though there's an . . . instinctual reluctance to let the soles of your feet go impalpable while they're in contact with the earth. And you can go palpable very quickly if you fall over. It's usually a fatal mistake if you don't.”

“Why?”

“Because when you're
in
solid matter you have to
stay
impalpable. You're sliding through matter and can't affect it, there's nothing to
push
with. Total darkness, no air . . . the night-walking body needs to breathe eventually too, remember, even if not as often as the corporeal one.”

He took a long breath. “It's an instinctual fear, with us. Those who didn't have it didn't live long enough to breed.”

She thought about it for a moment, then shuddered herself. “What happens?”

“Nobody knows. Presumably you slide down until you lose consciousness and your energy matrix disperses in death; it has mass, and gravity affects it. Or until you reach the center of the earth, though the heat would randomize you first.”

“Ow. Well, at least there're
some
disadvantages to the package!”

She took a deep breath and looked around the apartment. They'd been there only a few days, but already it seemed like a home, a welcome refuge against a world larger and colder, stranger and crueler than it was easy to comprehend.

“Will the professor be okay?”

“Probably. I've warded this place as much as I can. He's certainly safer than he would be anywhere else. Safer than he would be if we brought him to my great-grandfather's attention! You, they know about. Him, they do not, as yet.”

They rode the elevator down in silence, holding hands. The hired limo's driver held an umbrella over them as they walked out to the curb; a light pattering of cold rain fell on it, and a few drops that evaded it raised gooseflesh on the bare skin of her shoulders. The silk shawl was draped elegantly but uselessly over her elbows; she pulled it up with a gentle chime from the paillettes.

Mentally, she ran through the etiquette of meeting the grand master of the Order of the Black Dawn and the Council of Shadows.

Honey, here's my great-granddad, the emperor of evil,
she thought.
Oh, well, you know what they say—you fall in love with your fiancé but you're stuck with his family!

She shivered slightly, and had no impulse at all to repeat the thought aloud. As attempted jokes went, that cut far too close to the bone.

 

 

Pavillon Ledoyen was just off the Champs-Élysées, fronted by a strip of lawn and gardens, surrounded by huge old chestnuts, and then by flowers in pots. It was not far from the Petit Palais; her training immediately classified it as late-eighteenth-century neoclassical in origin with a lot of Victorian work. The side facing the street had a high pediment supported by caryatids in the form of white-robed women, a sculpted architrave above and LEDOYEN in white on blue. The arched glass awning over the main entrance looked a little more like art nouveau work, the ribs cast as elongated silver maidens. Their limousine swung into the circular driveway, past a fountain with a central statue.

“It's been here awhile, eh?” she said to Adrian, clutching at her purse. “Seventeen ninety-one?”

“With a major renovation in eighteen forty-two,” he said.

The blade within the purse was a slight comfort. Her fringed shawl was welcome in the cool autumnal evening air, though the rain had stopped. Streetlights glistened on the pavements, and there was a musty smell of damp fallen leaves from the gardens.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing calm as the doorman bowed them through, and an attendant in a dress almost as elegant as hers escorted them up a grand curved staircase. The main dining room walls were about half floor-to-ceiling windows draped in carnelian curtains with beige blinds; there were oxblood marble pillars against the walls between, and some fairly good period paintings, including what she thought from a brief glance was an actual Watteau.

There was a very low murmur of conversation from the widely spaced tables; arrangements of striking hibiscus flowers rested between the place settings, and the cloths were white damask over burgundy. She caught more than a few discreetly admiring glances. And a few yellow-flecked eyes lingered on her as well, with a different hunger added.

Two figures sat at a table set for four, watching her and Adrian approach : a man and a woman with their faces underlit by the candlelight. That wasn't all that made them appear rather sinister, but it didn't hurt the effect, either. Nor did the fact that their eyes weren't
flecked
with gold. They were the burning hot-sulfur yellow she'd noticed with Adrian's parents at Rancho Sangre, like windows into a pit full of lava; evidently that was a mark of the postcorporeal, unless they deliberately controlled it.

“Great-grandfather,” Adrian said.

Étienne-Maurice Brézé, also born heir to the Duc de Beauloup, looked. . .

A lot like Adrian,
Ellen thought, dazed.
That family has to be
seriously
inbred.

He rose for a moment, and inclined his head slightly, with a lordly insouciance.

Oooof! Talk about
presence
. It's like getting punched in the gut, psychically speaking. You can't look away, and it's not just those fires-of-Hell eyes.

The little hairs tried to stand up on her arms and down her back. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through barely parted lips, struggling for control.

He was certainly
dressed
differently from his descendant, in a full ankle-length wide-sleeved robe of some rich black velvet, a color that swallowed light, embroidered with black YLI silk thread in sinuous vine patterns around the hems, neck, cuffs and down the front panel. It caught subdued flickers as he moved, looking at Adrian with his head tilted slightly to one side. His long raven hair was pulled back at either side and pinned by a gold-and-ruby clasp at the rear of his skull, with the rest flowing loose beneath it down his back.

The robe was slit halfway down, and fastened with black-and-gray catches of Brazilian onyx. Beneath the black velvet was a high-collared shirt of white silk showing at cuffs and neck. The only other touch of color was a golden ring, set with the jagged trident and black sun.

As the mouse put it: Say what you like about cats, but they've got
style
.

“Great-grandmother.”

This time Ellen blinked a little in surprise, the interrupted thought registering.

Seraphine Brézé was
black
. Specifically she was that dark chocolate color combined with a tall, slim build and sculpted aquiline thin-nosed face that was common in the Horn of Africa, Somalia and Ethiopia and Eritrea. Against it the yellow eyes were like windows into a world of chaotic fire.

She was dressed in a halter-top gown of an old-gold color that showed off the long slim neck and body, slit from ankle to thigh to give a glimpse of a leg like a gazelle's. A broad belt of platinum and blazing blue tanzanite cinched her narrow waist, and more of the blue jewels shone in her mane of sculpted, curled hair.