The Council of Shadows (34 page)

“I was a young man in Paris, a student.”

“What, Harvey didn't have you blowing things up and. . . Wreaking?”

“Yes. Though explosives are only occasionally useful against Shadowspawn—more often against their hirelings . . . but he thought I should have that experience, to make me . . . how did he put it. . . less of a
fuckin' wing nut
than most members of the Brotherhood. Many are born into the war, you understand, and it does strange things to the mind to be raised so. Others are recruited after an encounter with the Shadowspawn, and that is usually still worse.”

“Did you like Paris, being a university student, being normal? Well, relatively normal.”

“I loved it. I will always remember the city fondly . . . but there, even though I was estranged from the family, I could never forget that I was a Brézé. The very stones of the place spoke of them.”

“And you didn't feel at home when you were a kid?”

“With my foster parents in my childhood I was living a lie—that I did not know it at the time makes no difference in retrospect.”

“What about Harvey? He raised you.”

“Nomadically, though I loved his place in Texas, the little ranch in the Hill Country. We moved frequently even then. When I became an active fighter for the Brotherhood, we moved every week, or nearly—and that was when I was sixteen. When we were not holed up in safe houses or redoubts. In a place in the Yukon for a whole winter, once, for training, and for the Brotherhood's adepts to study me. Besides. . . though I tried to think of Harvey as a father, he was more like an elder brother to me. We are only a decade apart in age, after all. He was in his early twenties when he . . . rescued me. I was twelve.”

Ellen blinked. She knew that, but it was hard to keep in mind when it looked as if Harvey were a full generation older. He could sense a slight discomfort; she'd been startled and put out when she first learned that there were twenty-five years between them, rather than the three or four his appearance suggested.

Which was one excuse I gave myself for driving her away,
he thought.
Stop wallowing in guilt, Adrian! It is a self-indulgence and makes for nothing but paralysis!

By the elbow she gave him in the ribs—quite hard—she was thinking the same thing. Base-link or no, she'd grown disconcertingly able to follow his train of thought. It was a little like telepathy, only shields and blocks were of no use whatsoever.

And I have been an excessively private man, as well,
Adrian thought.
It is hard, learning to share. But worth the effort and discomfort, a thousand times over.

“This was the first place I could be
myself
,” he finished.

She licked her ice-cream cone and snorted slightly.

“Alone, lonely, brooding on a mountaintop. The happiest time of your life!”

“No, the months since our marriage have been the happiest time of my life,” Adrian said, and glowed at the smile that rewarded him. “But the years here, they were . . . calm, for the most part. The days, at least. At night I could run beneath the stars, and come to terms with my demons and my past.”

“Sounds like you needed it, honey,” she said.

I needed to make myself worthy of you,
he thought but did not say; even a newly wedded couple had to have
some
sense of restraint.

“I love this place too. It was where
I
was first on my own, making my own living as an adult. NYU didn't really count, there I was working
three
jobs and studying too.”

She smiled, her full, curved Cupid's-bow lips were particularly charming with a little smudge of chocolate ice cream at one corner. She licked it up, which was both charming and disturbing.

“I remember the first time I came here, it was for the job interview, and I had lunch over there at the Plaza Café,” Ellen said. “It was January.”

She nodded towards the restaurant that occupied the center of the block of two-story Territorial-style adobes facing the open space. It had been there for over a century, since just after the First World War, when this square had had the only paved streets in the city . . . town, it had been back then. Oddly enough the food was, and always had been, rather Greek in emphasis.

“I had a gyro, and then a big piece of that heavenly coconut cream pie, and sat and sipped my coffee and watched the snow fall. Big thick fluffy flakes, you could just see the cathedral up there, and then you couldn't as it got dark, and it kept snowing; I didn't know it was unusual, but it wasn't
like
snow in Pennsylvania somehow, the light seemed to make it glow from within, and I remember thinking that I understood a lot of Southwestern paintings that had looked like exaggeration or kitsch. After dark I walked out and it was like being in a snow globe, perfectly silent, all the sound hushed.. . .”

“We will have a day like that together, sometime,” he said.

She slid a hand into his. “You know, we should have done all this backstory stuff the
first
time we got involved.”

“Ah . . . that wasn't possible.. . .”

“It was like trying to talk to a
lobster
!” she said. “You were the sexiest guy I'd ever met, and the most mysterious, and I
knew
there was something inside, but I could
get
there. Click go the claws, talk to my shell, scuttle away!”

The tone was mock angry, but he could sense a flicker of real grief behind it, and he squeezed her hand in apology; it was all he could do.

“No
wonder
I threw a bottle of brandy at your head and stomped out. Women like to
communicate
, you know. It's a foible we have.”

“Men prefer to grunt, belch and scratch themselves,” he said, his tone solemn. “It's a foible—”

She freed her hand for a moment and thumped him on the back of the head.

“So, let's go talk to Giselle,” she said.

“It may be useful.”

“It's
certainly
necessary. She's my Harvey, Adrian. She gave me my first real job and she mentored and mother-henned me and listened to me cry. She did a lot more for me than any therapist ever hatched.”

“Born.”

“Therapists are hatched, like other reptiles. Anyway, I owe Gis a lot.”

And she advised you I was too creepy for words and that you should leave me,
Adrian thought.
I should not resent that; it was quite true and simply showed she was perceptive and had Ellen's best interests at heart. Nevertheless I
do
resent it. I must simply do my best to control that.

They held hands as they walked over to La Fonda, the Harvey hotel on the road that ran up to the cathedral; it was built in the classic fauxadobe-Hopi-Hispanic style of the reconstructionist nineteen twenties, which made it of respectable antiquity itself now. Then right across the bed of the Santa Fe River. Adrian smiled to himself as he felt the little flares of envy from others who saw him with Ellen. It was perhaps not the noblest of pleasures, but still definitely a pleasure.

She chuckled as they crossed the bridge and she looked down at the dry creek bed. Adrian raised a brow, and she spoke:

“I was remembering a comic I heard once, a local, doing an act with a fake Blues song:

Adrian chuckled too. “I wish I could have gone with you,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. “I noticed that when we were dating . . . the first time, before it all came out . . . you always took me
lonely
places. That time we went to your beach place down on the gulf near Corpus Christi, all the other stuff.”

“Habit. You have made me less solitary. Not that I will ever be gregarious.”

“I'd die of shock to see you become a people person, honey. You're not cut out to be a glad-hander.”

They turned left, uphill this time, along the winding course of Canyon Road. Originally it had been a stretch of little farms, ranchos where Spanish-Mexican settlers and their retainers had used water from the river and the Acequia Madre, the Mother Ditch, to grow patches of grain and fruit and raise pigs and chickens, goats and sheep and burros. Many of the trees were still there, and the rambling adobe-and-stone houses they'd built to house their extended families, long since converted to other uses as the city grew around them.

Some a little farther back from the road along narrow alley were high-priced residences; over a hundred art galleries and studios stretched along this mile of winding street. The new construction blended in, being low-slung and stuccoed in brown with vigas, wooden beams with their ends exposed, supporting flat roofs. Many of the gardens were lovely, though those were mostly in the courtyards at the back, glimpsed through gateways. The art, though. . .

Adrian grinned at one modernist interpretation of a Hopi or Navajo medicine man, a stick-thin figure with a bulbous mask and antlers reaching for the sky.

“Bullwinkle the shaman!” he laughed.

Ellen joined him for a moment; then he could feel a wave of confusion and fear.

“My darling?” he said gently.

“Adrienne made the same joke. When she had me tied up in my own apartment up there, that day after I ran into her on the road. She'd be
doing
things to me with a sock stuffed in my mouth or duct tape across it so nobody could hear the screams, and then it was this chatty, witty conversation and then back to the screams.. . .
God
, but I'm glad she's dead.”

“I too,” Adrian said, forcing down his rage.

You cannot take revenge on the dead,
he thought.
It is one of the few real disadvantages to killing your enemies. But some of them are too dangerous to let live an instant more than it takes to kill them.

Ellen took deep breaths and her mind calmed.

“Okay, she's your evil twin, it's only natural you'd see the same joke sometimes.”

Hans & Demarcio Galleries wasn't open, but as Ellen had predicted, Giselle was there, working in her office at the back. A little pounding brought her to the front door. She opened the door with her mouth sagging, then turned gray and began to topple backwards towards a plinth that held a vase. It rocked as Ellen threw her arms around the older woman; Adrian felt the Power flow automatically as he lunged forward leopard-smooth to grab the dark feather-patterned piece of pottery out of the air. Not even Shadowspawn reflexes could have caught it before it shattered on the tile floor without his pushing the probability curve.

“Here,” he said. “I would not want to destroy an original Maria Martinez.”

Ellen gave him a quelling glance and took Giselle's arm. The older woman was still pasty with the shock, and making little gasping sounds. Her former assistant steered her into the office at the rear of the gallery's long rectangle, pushed her into the office chair and hunted up a glass and a bottle of sherry from a cabinet.

Quite passable sherry, too,
Adrian thought; it was a Barbadillo San Rafael with tart, leathery scents and the taste of crushed toffee.
A little sweet, a woman's sherry, but very good short of the V.S.O.P. level.

The gallery owner gulped the first glass as if it were water or a shot of bad bourbon; even then Adrian couldn't help wincing slightly. He occupied the moment and gave the two friends a little privacy by examining the shelves. The room had the orderly chaos of someone who knew where everything was, but probably couldn't have told someone
else
how to find anything to save her life. There were a couple of very good local pieces in spots where the skylight gave adequate light, though; one seemed like pure Abstract Expressionist when he first saw it, but the closer he came the more it looked like a local sunset seen from a tall dropoff.

Giselle Demarcio cleared her throat. Adrian turned around; she was dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex, and then gave a honking blow.

“I thought you were
dead
,” she said to Ellen; her voice held a slight trace of East Coast big city. “
Or
off somewhere with his
creepy
sister.”

Adrian sat; the chair was comfortable despite the local rustic make. Ellen sat beside him and took his hand again. She held the paired grip up, so that Giselle could see the wedding ring, and Adrian showed his own.

“You're
married
?”

“Quite happily, Ms. Demarcio,” Adrian said.

“And to each other, at that, Gis,” Ellen added dryly.

Demarcio was getting her composure back; Adrian could feel the roil in her mind subsiding, the random flicker steadying into the wavelike patterns of coherent thought. He couldn't tell
what
she was thinking, apart from the emotional overtones—that would require days of close association—but he could tell that she
was
thinking, which was impressive.

“After you went off with his. . . with Adrian's sister. . .”

“I didn't,” Ellen said, with almost clinical detachment. “She kidnapped me. And burned down my house, nearly killing the Lopez family in the process. Would have killed them, except for Adrian and a friend of his. And she . . . did some very unpleasant things to me. Quiet a lot of unpleasant things for several months. Mmmm, drugs and brainwashing, you might say, besides the chew-toy stuff. Adrian rescued me.”

“Oh,” Demarcio said again. “Oh, the
bitch
!” Her thoughts spiked, settled into a mixture of sympathy and rage.. . . “Oh, you poor thing!”

Ellen shook her head and smiled. “I'm a survivor, Gis,” she said. “You know that.”