The Council of Shadows (41 page)

“That . . . that wasn't his sister, was it?”

“No. That was Michiko. She's a friend of his sister's, Adrienne. Sort of a wannabe Mistress of Ultimate Darkness. Incidentally I jammed a hypo full of very bad stuff into Adrienne's foot, and I had a
lot
of very good reasons to do that. And she came down with a case of dead from it.”

Salvador laughed; it was a bit shaky, but genuine. “I think you
have
changed, lady.”

Brézé was back. Now he was dressed, in the same sort of clothes; a light jacket covered a shoulder rig with a knife worn hilt-down on one flank and a Glock on the other.

“All right,” Salvador said, taking a pull on the cigarette. “Fill me in. I know I'm really somewhere locked up, under heavy meds, howling at the moon, right? Or totally catatonic. I lost it in Kandahar and I'm in a padded cell at some VA warehouse and the whole last ten years are a whack-job dream.”

For some reason that made Adrian Brézé smile. “I'm a Shadowspawn. . .. That's what we call ourselves, mostly. But . . . well, I
try
not to be a monster. It's complicated.”

“Like the past year has been so simple? I want answers.”

“Think carefully about that, Detective. You can choose to learn, or you can choose to forget. . .. I can do that, with your cooperation. If you forget, you can make yourself a new life. If you learn, it'll probably kill you—but at least you'll know why you're fighting,
mon ami
.”

“If you offer me a blue pill and a red pill I'll fucking kill
you
!”

The couple laughed. “It's actually two file cards with Mhabrogast glyphs, but otherwise yes, life imitates old film. Take your pick,” the man said.

He produced two squares of light pasteboard, sat, and began to draw on them with a black Sharpie, the movements fluid and sure. Spikylooking symbols grew on both pieces of paper; something made him look away slightly, as if seeing them produced an itch four inches behind his eyes.

Then he held up one: “Knowledge—and you can try being the guerrilla.” The other: “Ignorance—and long life. Longer, probably, at least.”

Salvador looked at the butt of the cigarette. Then he tossed it accurately into the blood; it hissed into extinction.

“Like that's really a
choice
?”

“Yes, very much so,” Brézé said. “You could probably choose to forget, and be . . . not safe. Not in any more danger than the rest of the human race, at least.”

“Okay.”

He took a deep breath. Just having all this go away was a little tempting . . . until he remembered that he'd still be swimming with sharks.

“I have got a
lot
of payback coming and I need to know how to get to the people who owe me. Right, I embrace the suck, it isn't the first time. Let's start with some explanations.”

There was a subdued
clack-snack-snick
as the blonde cleared her rifle and put it down on the stone ledge before the empty fireplace.

“No,” she said. “
You
guys start by sweeping up the glass and mopping that blood. Then we go . . . downstairs to the dungeon, and we talk.”

“
J
esus, this place feels weird,” Salvador muttered to himself. “Completely Rando.”

He sipped at his latte and watched the people go by the curbside restaurant, enjoying the mild Californian coastal warmth. He was feeling pretty good physically, too, and he looked down at his gut with considerable approval, and the definition of his arms where the biceps swelled at the T-shirt. Not as ripped as he'd been when he was humping an MG-240 through mouj country, but he wasn't in his twenties anymore, and a lot of that had been sheer nervous energy burning stuff off anyway, or just having nothing to do with his spare time but pump iron, under the no-booze, no-cooze rules of engagement in theater.

The mellow afternoon sun was like silk, and there was a scent of eucalyptus and earth and good cooking and flowers in the air. Apart from the risk of imminent death, life was good, and he was working towards revenge for Cesar and a whole lot of others.

This place feels as weird as a lot of my days as a Helmand Province tourist, and I don't like fancy coffee. Got to fit in, though. I'm not the guy with sensors on my helmet and an Apache gunship and GPS-guided artillery shells and all the good shit on call here. If the other side can
find
me they can squash me like a cockroach . . . if I'm lucky. Scuttle through the cracks, don't attract attention until you have to. And they can walk through walls. And read minds.

Adrian had warned him that the wards and blocks in his brain wouldn't stand up under close examination, and that a strong adept could break them, and him, by main force. The process of implanting them had been unpleasant, but he welcomed any protection he could get, and they were supposed to make people more likely to open up to him somehow, at least for a day or so.

Rancho Sangre Sagrado was far too
pretty
, just for starters. Virtually all of it was built in one style, a Californian try at looking high-toned Mexican-Spanish that had been very popular back towards the beginning of the last century, and influential since. All arches and whitewashed walls or colored stucco, red barrel-tiled roofs, colored mosaic tile accents on corners or walls, glimpses through wrought-iron gates into spectacular courtyard gardens, the occasional square or round tower on a store or public building with those odd outswelling things called machicolations.

It wasn't that he didn't
like
the style; in fact, he thought it was rather handsome, and it certainly suited the landscape and climate; plus it was less obviously made-up than Santa Fe's flat roofs. The only reason his early Spanish ancestors had built Santa Fe the way they did and lived in flat-roofed Pueblo-style buildings was that they couldn't afford what they really wanted, which would have looked a lot more like
this
. New Mexico had been the ass-end Siberia of Spain's empire, isolated by poverty and deserts and Apaches, the place you sent Cousin Diego after the embarrassing thing with the nun.

But there were was nothing else here, not even on the outskirts, not a single fifties-sixties public washroom–style heap of stained concrete and buckled aluminum, nothing more recent, like a funhouse mirror twisty-fancy with mirrored glass, not even any of the usual standard suburban frame.

There wasn't even a church; and while he wasn't religious except when talking to his heavily Catholic grandmother to keep her happy, it added a note of oddness. There was a building that looked like it
had
been a church, white and fancifully carved like some he'd seen in Mexico, but it was apparently some sort of community theater now.

The whole place felt vaguely un-American, in the strict sense; it felt like someone had settled on a way it should look and then just enforced it for better than a hundred years, with new construction strictly because there were more people, and that in the same style. It reminded him of Santa Barbara, which he'd visited on leave from Camp Pendleton years ago, but more so; or of the heavily conserved parts of Santa Fe, for another, but with more consistent application of a thick layer of folding green to tidy up the edges. As far as he could see there was no equivalent of his hometown's Cerrillos Road, a strip of ticky-tack and motels and RV parks with the best view of the Sangres in town. Everything looked like it was washed and scrubbed and repainted and the flowers given a quick swipe with a cloth every morning.

Idly, he punched
New Urbanist
into his tablet; he was simply waiting for evening now, and picking up a little intel by listening in on people. Ellen had used the term about the place in his briefing. A quick flick through the articles confirmed that she'd been right.

Even the three-tiered fountain in the brick circle at the middle of the intersection in front of him was like the one in the picture, three terra-cotta basins of diminishing size. It made him wonder whom the architects had been getting their directions from . . . but then, in the month since meeting Mr. and Ms. Brézé, so had a lot of things. Even the loopiest conspiracy theories looked tame compared to the truth, and now whenever he looked around it was like he could see things bulging and squirming beneath the surface—even people's faces. Who knew, who knew. . .

“Your pastries, sir,” the waitress said.

She set down a plate with fragrant-smelling muffins in a cute little basket.

“Thanks.”

He glanced over automatically at her cleavage, which was a pleasant sight, and chatted for a moment; she was in her late teens or early twenties, red haired and freckled and fresh faced . . . and dangling between those creamy jiggling-firm cheerleader titties was a tiny pendant. A jagged trident across a black-rayed sun on a chain. The Brézé house badge, and the symbol of the Council of Shadows and the Order of the Black Dawn. The oldest and most senior of all the Shadowspawn houses, the ones who'd spread their genetic knowledge of the Power to the secret clans worldwide, and the lords of Rancho Sangre. Nearly everyone he'd seen here wore one, around the neck or on a bangle or a key chain or whatever.

It meant she was a renfield. That she knew who and what ran this place, and had been
initiated
. A collaborator.

He astonished himself with the wave of violent hatred that swept through him: a blast like stomach acid at the back of his throat, a vision of a bomb scything through the crowd around him in fragments of nails and bolts and furniture and leaving wreckage and flames.

Whoa
, he thought.
Watch it! The kid can't help where she was born. She might be an okay person.

“Another latte, please,” he said, and read her name badge. “Tiffany.”

Instead of letting the images cycle through his head he ate another apricot-walnut muffin: very good indeed, and even the butter had real taste. The menu said,
All local, all organic,
right under the classic Art Deco Sunkist label cover from the nineteen twenties, and had a little small-print,
Brézé Enterprises
, down in the lower left corner.

Ellen had also said the place was like a rich man's show-ranch, only with people instead of palomino horses. Everyone in it was a renfield, except for stoop labor trucked in for the day from elsewhere. And occasional travelers, not all of whom made it out alive.

When the waitress returned to fill his cup he let his wrist bangle show; it had the
mon
symbol of the Tōkairin clan on it.

“Oh!” the waitress said. “Hi! You're one of the faithful too! We don't get all that many outsiders here, not faithful. Meat sacks don't count, of course.”

“Of course.”

He decided that making allowances for Tiffany's upbringing was futile. These people were, for all practical purposes, devil worshipers from long lines of devil worshipers.

Faithful and meat sacks. Well, that's one way of looking at it,
he thought.
One thing about being a detective, you get used to talking to skanks like this little
puta
without letting your feelings show. And yeah, the briefing said it's hard even to
find
this place if you're not in the know. Brigadoon from Hell, not on the maps, the computers don't reference it, Google Earth can't find it.

“Yeah,” he said easily. “Down here from the bay to do some purchase orders at the fruit co-op. I'm part of the acquisition team for the clan's town houses. They insist on the best, and now that the Tōkairin and the Brézés are buddies again, you're it here.”

Rancho Sangre was surrounded by farms, mostly in orchards and vineyards; they rolled away to the varied green of the Coast Range just west of town.

“You don't look like a produce buyer,” she said, smiling. “You look more like you work on the muscle side, a house soldier or something. Kind of rough, not a cubicle dweeb.”

A thrill of alarm shot through him; the problem was that he
did
look like that. Not just his build, but the scars on his arms and face, and the way he held himself. He hadn't expected a waitress to pick up on it, though.

“I used to be on that side of things,” he said. “But I'm retired from ops now. We get old, eh? Even if people your age can't believe it.”

“Oh, you don't look
old
, just
scary
. The Gurkhas here are too, I suppose, but they really keep to themselves and they're too different. And there usually isn't anything for them to do but run through the woods and train. You look like you really did stuff; I suppose up in the big city they need a lot of guys like you.”

“You're born here, obviously.”

“Third generation. My dad works for the co-op,” she went on pleasantly, nodding. “Supervisor in the packing plant, that's really hard when you don't use any preservatives, it has to be just right. Mom's a guidance counselor at the high school.”

“I'm glad to be here. It's quiet in San Francisco with all the daimyo out of town, and this makes a change of pace. Not that I'm sorry to have missed that big ruckus last year.”