The Council of Shadows (32 page)

Adrian looked up at the Texan. “Harvey, I made the choices I did because of
you
. You took me out. Adrienne stayed behind and became . . . what she is. It was a close thing for me even so, sometimes, Harvey. Being good is
hard
for us. It's so easy for you humans—I've known a lot of bitterness, a lot of envy over that.”

Ellen laid her hand on her husband's shoulder, beside that of his friend.

“You did manage it, darling.”

“But . . . I had the opportunity. Adrienne never did; and the little girl I loved is dead, murdered by the thing she became. How can I leave the flesh of my flesh there, to lose them the same way?”

Ellen nodded. “You can't. And no child should be treated the way they will be.”

Adrian sighed and looked down at his elegant, slender hands. “My parents will . . . love them, in their way.”

“That makes things worse, not better. You can turn against an outright abuser. Someone who really loves you can lead you into the pit.”

“And the children are Shadowspawn, Ellen. Purebreds, even more than I. Perhaps the purest-bred in twenty thousand years. Very powerful, hideously dangerous.”

Ellen snorted. “Now, that's, well, racist.
You
aren't a bad man, Adrian. And
you're
extremely powerful and dangerous. There's no reason they have to be bad, no matter what they can do. You're vacillating. It isn't like you.” More quietly. “They look so much like you. The boy was like seeing you at that age.”

“Oh,
Jesus
,” Harvey said wearily. “Do you two do this we-are-thedyadic-unit thing
all the time
?”

Ellen flushed; she'd become very used to being alone with Adrian. Adrian's face firmed and lost the slightly wistful expression it had worn for an instant.

“And there is a nexus here, Harvey.”

The Texan's face altered, going very still. A probability nexus was nothing to take lightly. The fact that they could seldom be pinned down in detail simply made that more essential. Nobody who had enough of the Power to Wreak at all doubted the existence of the precognitive ability, and Adrian had an awesome degree of it.

“What sort?” he said cautiously.

“I am not altogether sure, but a powerful one. Extremely powerful, and growing very rapidly; I can feel it looming out of the spray of futures, cutting across one path after another. And I am increasingly convinced that
not
doing this is black-pathed. When I try to invoke common sense and convince myself not to do it, cold winds blow. Both for me personally and for the world. It has been troubling me for some time; I think that was why I avoided thinking of the children as much as I could. Since Ellen mentioned them it has been forcing its way into my conscious mind.”

One of the grizzled eyebrows went up. “You sure your feelings aren't pushin' you there?”

Adrian spread his hands. “No, I'm not sure of that at all,” he said frankly. “But one can
never
be sure. Even with an overt Seeing, rather than just an intimation like this. It is enough to convince me, my old. And my subconscious has a lively sense of self-preservation. If the Power is prompting me to do this thing, despite the obvious risks, then there is some hideous danger involved in
not
doing it. We cannot know what the danger is, but it is there. And if we ignore the warning, we will find out the danger far too late.”

“
Or
someone stronger than you is tweakin' it.”

Harvey held up a hand as Ellen began to speak; she felt a little relief. Even now, parts of her brain screamed,
This is crazy!
at logic like that.

And that's
after
I've seen people turn into . . . well, not bats, but things with wings, and walk through walls.

“All right,” Harvey said slowly. “I've got a powerful respect for your precog, Adrian. Plus we
do
have some downtime in a few months, and it
is
the best opportunity. . . which don't make it good. It's an unjustified risk before the Tbilisi thing. Though I can probably even sell it to Sheila Polson.”

Adrian raised a brow and said to Ellen: “Did I mention her? The Brotherhood's executive for western North America?”

“Yes.
Bigoted bitch
was the term you used.”

Adrian grinned. “I didn't think she altogether liked me,” he said. “And I thought that she disliked me for my genes, which I can't help, rather than my actions, which I usually can. Doubly ironic because she has considerably more of the Shadowspawn inheritance than Harvey here. Projected self-loathing is one of the occupational hazards of the Brotherhood. Also a reason I, ah, resigned.”

Harvey snorted. “She didn't like you, until you pulled off the Rancho Sangre thing. Hajime
and
the late unlamented Adrienne, that's quite a bit of counting coup. You got real chops with her now, son.”

“
We
pulled that off.”

“Yeah, it ain't hurt
my
chops with the organization either. There's not a person in the Brotherhood didn't cheer, which makes up for bein' a loose cannon, sorta. A little.”

Ellen murmured. “Harvey Ledbetter, organization man?”

“Not so much. More like the Brotherhood's indispensible skunk,” Harvey said. “But I think I can sell it to her. Say rescuin' a pureblood and raisin' him right worked with
you
, and there's no reason we couldn't do it again; and we should strike fast, because the younger we get 'em, the more likely it is to work out right. It'd make a powerful difference if we had more major mojo like yours on our side. I can bring her'round . . .
if
I work at it for a while.”

“Ah,” Adrian said. “That is good!”

“And I'll go on the op, too, of course.”

“No,” Adrian said, shaking his head. “You were definitely made as the shooter during the fracas. Not the first time you'd killed them. . . remember how Hajime tried to make me give you up, by name? It takes a great hatred for them to
notice
a specific human that way.”

Harvey grinned with happy ferocity. “I don't mind havin' that sort of rep. Still, I know the ground. . . .”

“And it knows you, by now: Wreakings aimed at you specifically. I am fairly sure that the Tōkairin would do so, and my parents. Farmer and Guha would do; they were covered by my penumbra and got out before anyone paid attention to them. Or any reliable Brotherhood muscle. And technical and logistic support, of course.”

“That I think I can do, ol' buddy. Properly motivated, that is.”

Ellen felt her skin prickle at something in Harvey's smile. “You want something for it,” she said.

Harvey leaned back and put a toothpick between his lips. “Tryin' to quit,” he said in explanation. “And yeah, I do want something.”

“What?” Adrian said.

“A promise. I'm goin' along with this against my better judgment. I want a blank check for some operation sometime
you
think stinks. Solemn oath, Adrian, ol' buddy. I call in the favor and you go along with it, no questions, beginning to end.”

Adrian hesitated, his eyes narrowing. Ellen remembered something he'd said once: that Harvey could be
drastic
sometimes.

You know, these guys really
are
terrorists in a way. I mean, they don't go out of their way to kill bystanders, but they don't seem to give much of a damn about it either, except for Adrian . . . and Adrian can play really rough too, I think. And they'll step on renfields like bugs. Which is fine in one way, but on the other hand that includes guys like Jose and his family, whom I mostly liked. Fighting the Bad Guys is more complicated than I thought, even when they
are
really-for-true evil.

“You really mean it,” Adrian said.

“
Oh
, yeah,” Harvey said, relaxed, one arm hooked around the rear of the chair. “That's my price. Take it or leave it.”

Adrian glanced at Ellen. “I can deny you nothing,” he said, and the words were for her. “My oath, old friend. And I am glad of it, too. Once more Ellen is
making
me do something I very much wanted to do. . . but I doubted my own wanting.”

“Okay, first installment on the payback,” Harvey said promptly. He pulled out his phone and selected a number. “I can recognize when my talent's prompting me, even if it isn't in your league. Just tell her Operation Defarge is a go. Nothin' else.”

Adrian shot him a look, shrugged, and took the phone.

“You have reached Polson Consulting. All of our operatives are serving other customers at the moment; please leave a name and number and we'll get back to you.”

“Mowgli here. Lefarge is a go,” Adrian said, and snapped off the phone.

“Mowgli?” Ellen said; it had been a
long
time since she read Kipling.

“My code name,” Adrian said. “One of them.”

“Oh . . . the human boy raised by wolves . . . Bit of an ironic inversion. . .”

He sighed. “We should go back to Santa Fe for a stop. I need to pick up a few things there. Then we'll head to California. It's some time before the Council meets, and . . . I was hoping our physicists would come up with something that might help us there.”

“So was I,” Harvey said. “When you're ready, I'll come a-runnin' to earn the rest of my favor. Meantime, business calls and it's a far, far better thing.”

Ellen turned and looked at Adrian as the Texan nodded and left.

“What was that?”

Adrian frowned slightly. “Harvey isn't any great adept, but he has mental shields like machined tungsten carbide,” he said. “There was just a
flicker.
. . .”

Ellen snorted. “You get too dependent on reading people's minds, darling.
My
take is that he was improvising, but he has something in mind you're
not
going to like. At all. Whatever this Defarge thing is, it's going to be a bone in your throat.”

Adrian shrugged; then went abstracted for a moment. “The world-lines are tangled, too many Wreaking along them . . . but you are right. Let's get on the road, then. Perhaps we can rest a little in Santa Fe.”

“Maybe I can see Giselle? She'll have worried herself sick, and I didn't dare write.”

“Perhaps.”

Ellen smiled. Then something teased at her memory. It wasn't all that long since her graduation, and she'd had to take English literature courses as well.

Defarge,
she thought.
That Dickens book. She's the one who sat knitting by the guillotine during the Terror, while the heads of the aristos fell into the basket.

Adrian shrugged again. “One of the reasons I liked living in Santa Fe for so long was how
quiet
it is. Little happens there.”

 

 

“Well, that's unique,” the Santa Fe chief of police said.

The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe's police force didn't run to elaborate hierarchies.

Eric Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn't help . . . and he'd said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.

Cecile was on the bed. Usually dead bodies didn't have much expression, but usually they weren't arched in a galvanic spasm. They'd have to break her bones to get her into a bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he'd ever seen, and his experience was broader than he liked. Now he'd have to have this in his head for the rest of his life. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.

Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, but some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man's hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.

“This is a murder-suicide,” the chief said quietly.

Salvador stirred. The older man didn't look at him as he continued.

“That's exactly what it is, Eric.”

He doesn't call me by my first name very often
.

“Probably that's what the evidence will show. Sir,” Salvador added.

He hadn't been this angry then, either. He'd killed every mouj he could while he was doing tours on the rock pile, and it had been a lot of tours and a good round number of kills, but he hadn't usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn't thought of them as
personal
enough to hate, really.

“Chief.”

That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. “We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?”

“Three thirty. Half an hour after . . . Cesar called me.”

The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.

Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he'd recorded on the ledge turned into a print as he ran the enhancement. A paw print.

“You notice a dog? Or something else like that?”

“No,” he said dully. “Just a cat.”