The Council of Shadows (35 page)

Demarcio nodded. “I suppose this means you
don't
want me to keep the job open?”

The two women shared a laugh; then the gallery owner turned to Adrian again. He could feel—and could have seen, even if he were mind-blind—her suspicions click into place once more.

“What do the police have to say about this?” she asked shrewdly, her eyes darting between them.

“Nothing,” Adrian said. “My sister is dead. And . . . Ms. Demarcio, some people cannot be controlled by the police, by the authorities. By any conventional means. They are too rich, too . . . powerful for that.”

Demarcio nodded, and he could feel her agreement; it was something like the scent of mint. Ellen had told him a good deal about her, among other things that she was a rather paranoid variety of left-winger. That didn't interest him in itself—human politics were a smoke screen, self-deluding nonsense at best, and had been throughout the century since the Council of Shadows reached its full monstrous power. But that mind-set
would
predispose her to believe an edited version of the truth.

Since the world
really is
ruled by an all-powerful evil conspiracy. Just one of werewolves and vampires and sorcerers, rather than capitalists and generals.

“But you can deal with them?” she asked him sharply.

He nodded. “I must, I find,” he said. “After what happened to Ellen. And my sister was not acting alone. She was part of a, umm, cabal. Of. . . younger members of some very old, very powerful families. Families that already wield great hidden power, you understand; shadowy influence within governments and corporations and intelligence agencies. Influence sufficient to silence or kill those they consider threats.”

“Like, for example,
your
family, the Brézés?”

“Yes. I have been something of a family black sheep, you might say.”

I actually managed to say all that without outright lying,
he thought, slightly amused.
It's even accurate to call Adrienne's followers a cabal. Shadowspawn politics work that way, like a Bronze Age monarchy's court intrigues. Or the other way 'round, since those kings probably had a great deal of our blood. As one might expect from their taste for human sacrifices.

Demarcio sat watching him for half a minute. “You're not telling me everything, are you, Mr. Brézé?”

“Adrian, I think,” he said, smiling and indicating Ellen.

The charm of the smile bounced off her like buckshot off a battleship.

“You're not, are you, Adrian?”

“No. Because you have no need to know more, as yet; and because knowing more would endanger you. Endanger your life.”

“Oh.”

A flash of apprehension, very little of which showed. “Is this a social call, then?”

He shook his head. “Not entirely, Ms.—”

“Giselle.”

A nod. “Not entirely, Giselle. I'd like to know what happened here after we all, how shall I say,
left
. It would be entirely in character for Adrienne to have . . . energetically suppressed any police investigation. Naturally they would have asked you questions; and questions sometimes reveal information as much as answers do.”

“There was a detective, two of them, SFPD. They came around, asking questions. And then .. nothing. When I called, they said the investigation had been moved to the dead-files section. That was . . .” She cleared her throat, then continued: “That was when I thought you must be dead, Ellen.”

Her beaming smile died. “Then there was the incident, a couple of months ago.”

“Incident?” Adrian said.

His voice was still calm, but there was an edge of danger to it now. He could feel the flux in her mind, the primal fear of death welling up. And a ghost wind touched the back of his neck as well, the Power hinting of risk. An effort of will fought down the instinctive rage that the presence of another Shadowspawn in
his
territory brought. His breed were still more jealous of such things than normal humans, and whatever his conscious convictions, the back of his mind still thought of this place as
his
.

“One of the detectives. . . Cesar Martinez . . . was found dead. With his girlfriend. They're calling it a murder-suicide. The details were, well, pretty gruesome. Then—”

Adrian listened through the description, and called up the newspaper reports on his tablet. His brows went up.

“Thank you very much, Giselle,” he said, after they'd made arrangements to meet for dinner. “That was, as they say, interesting. And suspicious.”

Demarcio looked as if she'd like to shiver, despite the comfortable temperature. She shook hands with him, and hugged Ellen fiercely.

On the street outside Ellen sighed. “It's going to be rough explaining to her that we're just here for a visit,” she said.

“It would be no favor to spend too much time in her presence,” he said grimly. “That double murder is a classic. Tōkairin Michiko, at a guess, now that my sister is no longer with us.”

Ellen shivered. “Michiko wanted to kill
me
, right there, that evening,” she said. “I can remember her waving a crab leg in that restaurant in San Francisco and saying how much fun it would be for the two of them to kill me together, and smiling at me as if I were supposed to chime in with, ‘Oh, that sounds hot
.
' And when Adrienne said she had other plans for me, the mad bitch pouted
at me
, as if she expected me to agree what a poopy stick-in-the-mud killjoy Adrienne was being.”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cigarette case, ignoring a brace of hostile looks as he lit up. Ellen scowled and pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket; she'd more or less given up on pressuring him to quit.

“She is not a nice person,” Adrian replied. “And her passion for little masterpiece atrocities—”

“Like a pointillist painter. Maybe she likes playing up the dragonlady thing.”

“Precisely. Or her liking for being hands-on. That weakness means that perhaps we can arrange that something not very nice happens to
her
.”

“Oh, yeah.” Something deadly flickered in Ellen's voice for a moment. Then: “You sure she came and took care of it
herself
?”

“Probably. We will have to check, of course. It might be worthwhile to contact this surviving detective; at need, I could blur his memories afterwards. I do not like doing that, both because of the effort and because it is ethically a little dubious. But one does what one must.”

“She's the big Shadowspawn honcho of the west now, she and her hubby, now that her grandfather's dead.”

“He is a retiring type. By our standards.”

“So how come she doesn't just send a goon to do it?”

Adrian shrugged. “Boredom, perhaps. Shadowspawn don't go in for large organizations, my dear; they don't even make optimum use of the human ones they control. And they act on impulse. A highly
educated
impulse. We must investigate further.”

“
W
e're well settled in and getting some results,” Peter Boase said.

“No complaints about the facilities?” Harvey Ledbetter Wasked.

“The cook, pardon me, the
chef
, is too good. Fortunately this is a great area for high-impact running and looks like it'll be great for cross-country skiing, too. Otherwise I'd look like a blond garden slug with limbs, but otherwise no complaints, nada. Anything we want appears like magic as fast as FedEx can fly.”

Harvey looked around at the pines. Peter had the wiry, tensile build of a cross-country man, and this would be the perfect ground for it. The old base had been tucked away in a remote valley in Dalarna, designed to ride out a Soviet nuclear strike and provide a center for prolonged resistance. It was blasted deep into the granite up where Sweden faded into Norway in a tangle of hills graduating into mountains. The hills were densely green with fir and birch, and he could hear the sound of trickling water, smell rock and greenery and sap, watch a squirrel run chattering up a tree like a streak of red fire. The sun was bright, though it was well after eight, and it glittered on the long narrow lake below. Snow peaks shone like white salt far to the west, floating like the ramparts of Jotunheim in a saga.

I wish I hadn't thought about that
, Harvey thought.
Man-eating Ettins. Christ. The stories are all about
them
, when you get right down to it.

“Better be a bit more explicit about that there progress, Professor,” Harvey said.

Peter smiled—he looked much better than he had the last time Harvey saw him, which said a good deal for his basic resilience and toughness.

Gotta remember that the opposite of badass is
not
weenie
, Harvey reminded himself.
That's a risky way to think, could lead to underestimating people, which can lead to a bad case of the deads.

“This isn't like any research project I've ever worked on,” Boase said. “No bureaucracy, no nonphysical constraints on equipment, only the security considerations are anything like what I'm used to.”

“Glad you're happy,” Harvey said. “The Brotherhood hasn't done much scientific research before; we didn't think in those terms.”

“I suppose you don't, when you're a
magician
,” Boase said.

“It ain't magic. We've known that for generations now.”

“But you've been
using
it as if it were magic.”

Harvey could feel a combination of fear and resentment and fascination in the other man's mind; he suspected that the existence of the Power just plain
offended
the physicist. That it had been in the hands of black-arts secret societies and their esoteric opposite numbers probably offended him even worse. It was a good thing he'd never seen a meeting of the Brotherhood's leadership, with the white robes and doves and meditation and chanting. The meditation actually served a useful purpose; the rest was pure theater, a relic of their origins as witchfinders. Though you could eat the doves, in a pinch.

Harvey shrugged. “For that matter, this operation is really sorta off the reservation, Adrian bulldozin' his own priorities through. Since he controls the financing, no reason for the leadership not to go along. Now, about the
results
?”

Boase smiled. “I actually got nearly all the theory done while I was at Rancho Sangre,” he said.

For a moment his handsome, good-natured face turned savage. “And she'd
really
be going to regret that if she were still alive.”

“If she were still alive, you'd still be there. Now, the
results
.”

“The essential thing was realizing that the Shadowspawn brain doesn't
create
the oomph that you guys call the Power. It just
modulates
it, like a transistor does electric currents; the basic force comes from the substrate of the universe. Saying that someone is ‘strong in the Power' just means they can tap more without frying their neural circuitry, the centers that step it up and direct it. But a brain is a physical object, and what one object does another can do.”

“Wait a minute, you've got some sort of computer that can use the
Power
?”

Boase shook his head. “Oh, no. Not for a long time, like two or three paradigm shifts in our ability to process information. Generations, even if the whole world were trying really hard. A computer as we know it, a Turing machine, is far too, ah, too coarse a mechanism. The brain has a subatomic, a quantum element that's essential to consciousness, and it's that part that interacts with the substrate of the universe, the holographic—”

The words stopped making sense; Harvey shook his head impatiently.

“Cut to the chase.”

“Okay, we'd need a quantum computer as sophisticated as a brain to really handle the Power. With
that
we could fry any protoplasmic adept. We'd be the next thing to God, which worries me a little, but we don't have it and we aren't going to in our lifetimes anyway. But. The way silver screws up the Power, and the transuranics, was a clue. There's one simple thing that we thought we
could
do with the electromagnetic spectrum, provided we—”

Boase lapsed into Old High Technicalese again; Harvey spoke with dangerous patience:

“Don't tell me about the dilithium crystals, boy, just tell me what they can
do
.”

Peter smiled beatifically, glanced at his phone's time display, and waved a hand behind him.

“Look,” he said. “I was stalling for this.”

Harvey turned and did. “Well, fuck me blind,” he said mildly, blinking in astonishment.

That was a particularly appropriate oath. The entrance to the complex was disguised as a farmhouse, red painted, with barns and outbuildings of the same, all looking considerably run-down; it had been mothballed most of a generation ago, and the new occupants had left as much of the patina of neglect as they could. The dirt road was more like two ruts through weeds, and only a careful observer would have noticed the wear of a great many trucks last year.

The actual entrance to the tunnels was through the “barn,” which had doors big enough for heavy vehicles; the whole thing was splendidly camouflaged, and the power source was an underground water turbine powered by a mountain stream, so there wasn't even much of a heat signature.