Shadows of Falling Night (27 page)

“Pigs,” Adrian murmured into her ear; they’d agreed he could read her thoughts when open conversation was unsafe. “Humans are more like pigs—and I mean that as a compliment; pigs are much smarter and more formidable and adaptable than sheep. The comparison would be leopards hunting wild boar in the Old Stone Age, and leopards dumped into a confinement facility in Iowa now.”

Ellen winced, and came back to the present when Adrian’s great-grandfather spoke again:

“Though I do not like
this part
of it,” Étienne-Maurice went on, aristocratic nostrils flaring.

The Westbahnhoff’s original Victorian layout had been forcibly rearranged by Soviet artillery in 1945, and rebuilt and re-rebuilt since, with only a few preserved segments. It looked very slightly run-down now—most of the Eurosphere didn’t have that burnished look that it had had on her first teenage visit as a student—but it was still cheerful and bustling, bright and
large
.

Which was why the Emperor of Evil doesn’t like it, of course.

She imagined giving him an elevated finger as he stalked away, cane and robe and all with Seraphine in his wake, wearing a tall hawk-faced Somali beauty this time. Better still a load of silvered buckshot, the shocked scream of pain and then…At that she stopped and shook her head. Fighting when she had to was one thing; entertaining murderous fantasies for the pleasure they gave was another, and she didn’t want to go down that road.

“I will be seeing you over the next few nights,” he said to Adrian. “It would be…unfortunate for your ambiguous standing with the Council…if you were to disappear in the interim.”

“I will be present, sire. I expect my children to join me here, in any case.”

“Or join their mother, your sister,” Seraphine said with casual malice. “Until then, descendant.” She looked around. “Come, let us leave this vulgar excrescence, Étienne.”

The post-corporeals were mostly like that, conservatives in a way that made small-town Alabama look like Upper West Side. Which produced a disturbing thought; would she still love Adrian the same way when
he
didn’t have a physical body any more? She’d gotten used to his shape-shifting into other people and things, which besides being useful lent
itself to some really interesting perversions, and you really couldn’t tell when he was nightwalking in his own form, but…

It’s sort of an abstract question now,
she thought.
And I’ll probably be dead of old age before he transitions, he could make a hundred easy in his original bod, and that’s okay because with a thirty-year start we’ll look about the same age…except that his
body
might be killed tomorrow and then I’d be married to a post-corporeal. That’s…disturbing. Well, I could get used to a strictly nighttime schedule, I guess. We mostly live that way anyway…no tanning time at the beach together, though.

“Let us walk to the hotel,” he said quietly, when they were alone except for the staff. “I am a little tired of the…company.”

“I know what you mean!” she said fervently. Then, as she took his arm: “Adrian, what would you do if I was killed?”

“Mourn,” he said. And flatly: “After I had avenged you.”

“Okay, good with the mourning and vengeance, but I meant…with my persona, my soul, whatever. If you had the opportunity.”

Shadowspawn could sort of snap you up, especially if you were base-linked; the essential
you
would run on their wetware, and it would go on after your physical body died if they wanted it to, like a post-corporeal but inside the Shadowspawn’s mind, in whatever environment they imagined. That had kept her sane while she was a prisoner at Rancho Sangre, and they’d used it frequently since…

“I would carry you, of course,” Adrian said.

“I’m…I’m not sure I’d want that,” she said. “Going on without a body.”

“I face that prospect myself,” he said.

“Yeah, I was thinking of that. But you’d still be…
real
. In a sense. For me it wouldn’t really…I mean, even if you still loved me, I’d be part of
you
, more like a memory that you could revise—might revise
even without being aware you did it. I don’t think I’d want to just…go on like that. I mean, yeah, we’re the dyadic unit, and yeah, you’re the top and I’m the bottom, but that would be pushing things too far in the loss-of-control thing. Don’t. If I’m dying, let me go and move on.”

His eyebrows went up, then down in a frown. “What brought this on?”

“What, thoughts of violent death being on my mind? Recent experience, much? But…I don’t think I’d want to be a figment of your imagination.”

He smiled ruefully. “I see your point, my darling.”

It was rainy and cold outside, and they put up their umbrellas; the baggage was being whisked unseen to their destination, which was a relief. Locals were out in force; early sunsets and this sort of miserable weather were nothing much to them. The air had a peculiar scent of damp stone and brick and something indefinable that she associated with European cities underneath all their local peculiarities; for some reason even with identical weather New York or Chicago
smelled
different. Though come to think of it, Boston was a
little
similar.

“I’ve been spoiled by the Southwest,” she said. “My hardy Polish-German-Pennsylvanian blood got thinned and I became addicted to blue skies.”

“Oh, your blood has no problems at all, my darling!” he said, and they both chuckled.

The splendors of nineteenth-century Vienna soothed her eyes, only occasionally interrupted by some more recent construction; they walked over the tree-lined Europaplatz, passed what looked like a big glasshouse and was probably a subway station, and down the Marianhilferstrasse to the eastward; literally downhill, since it sloped towards the Danube. The pre-Christmas crowds were dense and lively; this was the best of downtown
Vienna’s shopping streets, less tourist-haunted than the ones in the First District and attracting more natives and younger people. There were a few big department stores, but most were hole-in-the-wall size, the sort of idiosyncratic place that had been hollowed out by big-box competition in most of her native land.

“My God, they’ve got Cop.Copine,” she said, looking into one of the windows.

“Not limited to Paris any more,” Adrian said. “That silvered leather coat is quite fetching; the detail work on the back, particularly.”

“Nice, but it would make me look like the Attack of the Forty-Foot Lamé Woman,” Ellen said. “I’ve actually got tits, unlike that mannequin or the anorexic stork-waifs on the walkways. But those black leather pants with the zippers up the sides…possible.”

“You should have them,” Adrian said with a grin. “Now that you are Ellen Brézé, Scourge of the Shadowspawn. Are they not what a female supercommando would wear?”

“In a graphic novel, one doing serious fanservice,” she retorted. “Those are the sort of pants you put on so you can take them off again.”

“Or someone else can.”

“Yeah, or
want
to take them off you. Still…tempting…they look flexible enough to actually move in and they’d go with those boots I got…”

They dodged in, though she felt slightly scandalized with herself. There was a moment of confusion because the salespeople assumed she was Austrian herself, but their English was fine. One thing led to another, shorts led to pants led to blouses, and time passed…

“Still, otherwise I’d just be worrying back at the hotel,” she said. “Catholic guilt hitting, I suppose.”

“It is a good thing you are not a
Hindu
Catholic,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because then you could be guilty in front of
hundreds
of gods…”

“Okay, we’ve been touristing this shop and now I’ve got to try those pants.”

They felt like suede gloves for the legs. The staff made admiring noises when she came out of the changing room, adding a little sashay to her walk—sincerely, probably, from the envious looks some of them were shooting Adrian—as she examined herself in the mirror. They were tight, but also not confining; you really could move quickly in them, though it would be a sin to expose this butter-soft kidskin to rough usage.

Or some of them are just envying me,
she thought.

The staff were showing a tendency to flutter around Adrian too, where he leaned against a wall with his arms crossed, long black cashmere overcoat hanging from his shoulders to show the trim outline of his waist and black shirt just open enough to hint at the hard swell of his pectorals.

Not to mention the truly tight butt and the dangerous, smoldering yellow-flecked eyes with their hint of menace and the way that lock of hair falls over his forehead. It’s amazing a man can look so
pretty
and so…so
…so
at the same time. Look all you want, boys and girls, but he’s
mine.

She thought she lost a little of the status bank they’d built up when they gave the address for delivery—the Sabatier tunic and vest were irresistible too, but she didn’t want to wear them out the door. The Hotel Imperial was definitely high-end, but…

“You two are so…so
young
to be staying there,” one of the salesgirls said. “I mean, that’s where they put elderly oil sheiks and Chinese politicians and…and people like that. Though their torte is amazing.”

“I am older than I look,” Adrian assured her in Viennese German; Ellen could just catch the gist.

She grinned. He was: about a generation older than he looked, in fact. Not quite a Bella-and-you-know-who situation, but it was there.

Then he shifted into something else; still German, but with an affected braying accent and ending with
Gnädige Frau,
which even she knew was pretty obsolete. That seemed to be a real knee-slapper, and had one of the girls hooting:

“I didn’t think
anyone
our age could speak Schönbrunner Deutsch so well anymore! Just like my great-grandfather!
Just
like!”

Outside Ellen added: “Whereas you aren’t at all like
your
great-grandfather, except your accent a little, thank God.”

“Thank Harvey,” Adrian said, his smile turning sad.

“You had something to do with it too,” she insisted.

They went on past a small church, with an odd-looking assortment of derelicts around its side-entrance.

“I wonder what’s going on there?” she said.

Adrian frowned for a second. “Homeless shelter in the basement,” he said. A grimace: “I wish I had not done that. It’s like licking a sick rat.”

She winced; there were drawbacks to telepathy-empathy. Then she pointed out an imposing Neo-Renaissance pile to their left where the street opened out, all tall arched windows flanking a tall green dome, a little spoiled since this side was probably a lot less impressive than the front.

“Sorry…now, this
I
can tell you about. It’s the Kunsthistorische Museum/Art History museum. We learned about it, and I’ve met people who work there. They’ve got some really nice Classical stuff, there’s this vase by the Brygos Painter, sixth-century red-figure kylix, it’s the Ransom of Hector and you could look at it for
hours
, I only saw it once when it was on tour to the Met in ’16, but…”

“Ah, I will drop in and take it, and we can have it shipped home; just
the thing for the table by the vestibule, perhaps we could put mints in it—”

“
Adrian!
” she began, then saw his grin. “Oh, you, you—”

She made to kick him; he pounced and pinned her wrists behind her back to immobilize her for a long breathless kiss.

“Thanks. I needed that,” she said as they went on hand-in-hand.

They saw relics more recent—a flak tower from the 1940s, now housing an aquarium—and past an enormous 18th-century barracks built when barracks could be a work of art, four stories of restrained Palladian giganticism.

“Beats a prefab,” she said. “Why do our equivalents all look ugly?”

Adrian was startled out of his brown study. “In an imperial capital they could afford aesthetics,” he said.

Ellen rolled her eyes a little. “Not going to get guilty about the oppressed Carpathian peasants who paid for it, are you? And you think
I
am a Catholic Hindu!”

“I will have you know my conscience is a delicate work of art requiring frequent lubrication and careful watering, wench. Besides, when that was put up the peasants of the Carpathians were still being oppressed by the Ottomans and were paying for the Sublime Porte’s harem, not the Habsburgs’ architectural fantasies.”

“What do you think that Adrienne has in mind next?” she said abruptly.

“She plays a waiting game,” Adrian said. “Partly because things unfold as she wishes.”

“Well, that’s
our
take on it. I’ll give you any odds it doesn’t look as reassuring to
her
.”

“Reassuring, and probably true. And it is partly because of the children. If she had them…then she would act more decisively. I think our
raid on Rancho Sangre was not totally unanticipated or totally unwelcome to her—she saw it as a distraction while Harvey went rogue. But it returns to bite her…”

“On her skinny androgynous ass.”

He chuckled. “I have been told that mine is, as well.”

“Nope, manly-type narrow muscular butt. Good luck to Eric and Peter and Cheba, then.”

“Good luck indeed. I do not like acting so through others, but…”

“General now, sweetie. Not supercommando.”

His mouth quirked. “I must keep a watching brief. The thought inspires me to poetry.”

“It does?” she said, surprised, as they came onto the Ringstrasse with its busy one-way traffic and two-way trams.

“Something that Eric told me.”

“He knows poetry?”

“Of a sort,” Adrian said.

“This I
have
to hear.”

Her husband nodded, cleared his throat and declaimed: