A Taint in the Blood

by S. M. Stirling

  I tried so hard not to think about this.

  “I told him I wanted young adults—young, healthy, good-looking.

  The imbecile has saddled me with half a dozen mothers with children—all trying to get into the country to join their husbands, no doubt. Or convinced their husbands have conveniently forgotten them in this land of liberty. He probably thought I wouldn’t object if he brought them just before the deadline. I want you to be reassuring so we can separate the children without a screaming scene. Reassuring is something I find oddly difficult.”

  “Why . . . me?” Ellen asked.

  Please, God, those poor people . . .

  Adrienne smiled like a cat. “Because you’ll hate it, but do it anyway and feel horribly degraded and dirty afterwards, which is interesting emotionally,” she said. “Third time’s the charm; sadist, remember? Vite! ”

  God, I hate you!

  Adrienne was dressed in riding gear in an English jodhpurs-and-tweed style, including a crop. The steel-cored leather landed across the seat of Ellen’s skirt with a hard cracking sound. That was no braided silk; it hurt, hard and sudden.

  “Ouch!”

  “Vite means quickly. It’s the imperative form of the verb, too.”

  She hit the save button and followed the Shadowspawn out to the TARDEC utility vehicles. Adrienne swung in beside the driver of the first. A rather subdued Monica was in the rear seat, dressed in a pleated skirt and a tight low-cut crimson bodice. She helped Ellen in; it wasn’t the sort of transport designed for long evening-dresses. They went through the gate in the perimeter wall of the casa grande and around a roadway that looped towards the hills westward, along a well-kept gravel road that crunched under the wheels. The lights of the vehicles came on, as the sun sank in an orange glow behind the hills.

  They stopped at a building she would have said was a well-kept large stable or medium-sized rectangular barn with plastered walls, set back among the lawns and live-oaks where the gardens turned into sweeping pastures with clumps of trees and white-board fences. Servants were lighting a trail of torches in iron holders along a brick-paved path that wound down to the main house. A half-dozen Gurkhas stood inconspicuously outside, or as inconspicuously as you could while wearing body-armor and carrying an assault rifle.

  Inside, Chief Mendoza and four of his subordinates stood by a wire-mesh barricade that divided a long space floored in textured concrete. Garlands of flowers on the walls gave it a grotesquely festive feeling, and the lights were on under the high ceiling. Behind the wire were eighty or so people; she could smell their fear-sweat a little. All of them looked Mexican, half males and half females; most of the women were dressed in loose white tunics like short dresses, and the men in tunics and pants of the same cloth. Around a score were in ordinary clothes, dusty and travel-stained, and looking less frightened but more bewildered than the others.

  “Paco,” Adrienne began crisply to another man standing free—in his thirties, and . . .

  Handsome in a sleazy way, Ellen thought. Hairnet and all. Just what you’d think a people-smuggler would look like.

  “You are an idiot. And I am not pleased,” she went on.

  “Doña,” he said, in rapid-fire Mexican Spanish. “Here they are, the last of them, delivered on time!”

  Adrienne answered in the same language, but Ellen could hear the difference in dialect, the hard k and trilled rr sounds.

  “I said young, healthy, good-looking, and no children, Paco. What part of that was too difficult for you to understand?”

  The Shadowspawn pointed with her riding crop. “That one, she’s forty if she’s a day, five feet tall and five feet broad. And six . . . seven of the women have young! That one is still nursing!”

  “I am very sorry—”

  “No, you’re not. You’re just sorry I’m making a fuss about it. My guests will be arriving momentarily and we are not ready!”

  “I will take a little less for each, perhaps—”

  “You’ll take nothing for the ones who don’t meet my specifications.”

  She turned her head to Monica and Ellen: “You two get the children out . . . and that older woman. The transport for them should be here by now. Vite!”

  Mendoza unlocked the gate; the people within surged forward, then back again as two of the policemen drew their automatics. Monica wet her lips and called out in understandable but clumsy Spanish:

  “Los niños . . . the children should be brought out now. Nothing bad will happen to them. Van los niños a la guarderia, no se preocupen. They will stay with good families while you are . . . are busy with the Doña’s guests. Please, bring the children right now. And, you, señora. There are things . . . there are things it is not good for children to see.”

  There was a desperate earnestness in her voice; Ellen nodded wordlessly and beckoned. The prisoners murmured among themselves for a moment; then one of the mothers decisively pushed her six-year-old forward. The others followed suit, some crying silently, and the heavy-set middle-aged woman shepherded them through the gate, carrying the nursing infant. One was a girl who looked to be somewhere between eleven and thirteen, the breasts just showing under her T-shirt. A young man who was probably her brother held her back, then shoved her forward at the last moment.

  “Vaya con Dios, carnala! ” he called. Then: “Go!” as she hesitated.

  Mendoza stopped her at the gate.

  “Doña?” he asked, looking at Adrienne.

  Her nostrils flared for a moment, and the man who’d pushed her forward closed his eyes and crossed himself.

  “A little too young for feeding,” the Shadowspawn said. “Doesn’t smell quite ripe yet. She can help with the other youngsters.”

  “Come, little ones,” Ellen said, her voice trembling. “Some nice ladies will take you to a good place.”

  Getting the children out was like herding sobbing cats, and several of them tried to break back towards their mothers; outside SUVs driven by Monica’s friends were waiting. Ellen stood, clenched her hands, and made herself turn around and walk back in.

  Don’t wait to be ordered or dragged. Just do it. The vicious bitch is going to make you watch anyway.

  Adrienne produced an envelope that probably had high-denomination bills and tossed it to the coyote. He counted it, and flushed.

  “This isn’t two thousand each!”

  “Hey!” someone shouted from within the pen. “We paid him two thousand each, lady!”

  Adrienne snarled. “It’s the full amount for the ones who met my request. This is your last chance to walk away, little man.”

  “I want my money—” he began.

  The riding crop slashed across his face. He stood for a moment in shocked surprise, clutching at the bleeding weal. Then his hand darted under the tail of his shirt.

  It came out with an automatic. His face showed an ooops reaction even before he leveled it, then a frantic determination.

  “Nobody hits Paco!” he said.

  There was a ringing silence. Ellen could tell that he hadn’t expected Adrienne’s grin, or the indifference of the policemen. The prisoners were stock-still, watching breathlessly. The Shadowspawn’s smile grew wider, and she lifted the riding crop again, slowly and deliberately. Paco’s lips tightened, and his grip on the pistol. Ellen’s breath caught as she saw the finger close on the trigger.

  Click-crink!

  The gun misfired, and there was the unmistakable crinkling sound of something metallic snapping as it did. He stared at it incredulously, and tried to fire again three more times as the crop slashed at him. Then her hand blurred and he screamed with the pain of a broken finger as she snatched it away.

  “Automatics have a high probability of failure,” she said cheerfully.

  Paco began to back up, hands in front of his face. Adrienne followed, teeth showing in a happy smile, delivering a series of cruelly precise strikes with the crop, each ending in a meaty smack sound.

  Several of the prisoners surged forwa
rd as Paco was driven back towards the wire mesh, reaching their hands through towards him. One very dark and very pretty young woman was leaping up and down, shaking her fists in the air and shouting:

  “¡Orale y órale! ¡Dale! ¡Jodele al bruto!”

  “Meaning, smack him, harder, fuck him up,” Ellen muttered to herself, clutching one hand against the other to control the shaking. “Oh, I guess he’s not really popular in there right now. And I can guess why she doesn’t like him in particular.”

  Adrienne laughed and pounced. Suddenly Paco was held helpless across her body, one of her arms pinning his, the other bending his jaw back. The shouts from the cage died away as she struck; Paco froze, and her throat moved as she fed briefly. When she released him he slumped down, dazed, and she looked up smiling with blood on her chin and lips and teeth.

  One man blurted into the silence: “Es chupacabra!”

  The goat-sucker of Hispanic legend.

  Another barked harsh laughter: “No seas güey . . . Paco no es cabra, es cabrón!”

  Ellen found her eyes prickling for the first time; the second man had managed to make a pun, of all things, in the middle of this, calling the coyote cabrón, a bastard, rather than cabra, a goat.

  Adrienne laughed. “I completely agree,” she said.

  She grabbed Paco by the back of the neck. Three steps and she flung him through the door, and Mendoza clashed it shut. For a moment nobody moved, and then the young woman stepped forward, waving the others back:

  “Mío! Es mío! Y solo mío!” she half-screamed.

  She launched a vicious kick, gathering up her skirts in both hands to get a better swing, and shouting to the rhythm of the solid blows as she struck again and again. Ellen didn’t have any trouble following it despite the volume and machine-gun speed; curses were the first things you picked up.

  Thud.

  “¿Te sientes muy macho, ahora?”

  Feeling like a big man now?

  Another thud.

  “¡Orale, trata de jodernos ahora!”

  Try to screw us over now!

  Adrienne was laughing as she watched. Then she called out sharply:

  “Niña!” The young woman looked up, and Adrienne shook a finger at her.

  “Puedes matarlo si quieres, pero le haces un favor enorme.”

  Kill him if you want, but you’ll be doing him a big favor, Ellen translated to herself.

  “What’s your name?” Adrienne went on.

  “Eusebia,” the woman said.

  “I like your spirit, little Cheba. And now . . .”

  She looked up. There were open windows at both ends of the barn-prison, under the peaks of the roof. A great snowy owl swept through, turning and banking and braking to a landing, folding its five-foot wingspan. Then there was a naked man rising from one knee.

  “Efectos especiales,” one of the Mexicans said, loudly as if to convince himself.

  “Inahualli, inahualli!” another cried, which wasn’t Spanish at all.

  “It’s Nahuatl. Shapeshifter,” Adrienne said over her shoulder to Ellen. “Absolutely everyone has legends about us.”

  The man stretched and then bowed over Adrienne’s extended hand with the panache of one used to the gesture, touching only the fingertips.

  “Wilbur Peterson,” he said; he spoke as if his voice was slightly rusty with disuse. “We haven’t met, Miss Brézé. I’ve been . . . very out of touch for a long time. Thank you for your invitation. My . . . baggage and servants are on the way, but . . .”

  Ellen looked at him and felt an odd shock of recognition and relief.

  Which is crazy. He looks a little bit like Adrian except for that brownybronze hair, but he’s just another monster.

  “Then I’m honored you should choose this little affair to get back into the social circuit, cousin,” Adrienne said. “You must be ravenous. Feel free to choose.”

  She indicated the prisoners with a gracious wave of her hand. They were stock-still now, staring huge-eyed. Several crossed themselves, and Ellen heard the murmur of prayer.

  I wish I could pray. Oh, how I wish. Or that I could call to Adrian.

  “Thank . . . you. That one, please.”

  He pointed to the girl who still stood near the semiconscious Paco. The others backed away from her as if from plague, and she looked wildly around herself.

  “A good choice,” Adrienne said. Then sharply: “Ven tú, Cheba. Come and meet your fate, the purpose for which you were born.”

  Mendoza opened the gate. “Better for you if you come now, chica,” he said roughly. “Don’t make them chase after you.”

  She did, first wiping her palms on her skirt, then walking slowly towards them. Mendoza opened the door briefly, then clashed it shut again. She slowed still more as she approached the Shadowspawn, walking step by step. The man took her by the arm and smiled; she gave a little gasp as she met the sulfur-yellow eyes.

  “Feel free to feed as you will,” Adrienne said. “It’s . . . neater to start here, if you mean to kill your first one.”

  Ellen’s eyes darted around. The textured concrete of the floor and lower walls, the big screened drains . . . and the neatly coiled hoses beside the large-capacity water outlets for sluicing it all down. Things like bronze showerheads shaped into the mouths of bats, with wrought taps below them. And all of it old, generations old, carefully maintained but at least three times as old as Ellen Tarnowski. For an instant she thought she could feel the shrieks sunken into the fabric of the place, a century of agony and death, and she gave a little whimper.

  “No, I’ll . . . take my time,” Peterson said.

  “Ah, a man of taste. My renfields are waiting to show you to your rooms in the casa grande. If you don’t kill her, she’s yours to take with you when you leave, of course.”

  “Very . . . hospitable of you. But I wouldn’t expect anything else of a Brézé.”

  He bowed slightly and began to lead the girl away. She started to squirm and then try to pull free, but the grip on her upper arm was evidently like a band of steel as she was marched into the darkness.

  “The early bird and the choice worm,” Adrienne said absently.

  Another whisper of wings, and three more birds soared into the big chamber; a golden eagle, a bald eagle, and a red-tailed hawk. They fluttered to the ground, and were Shadowspawn in human form—Dale Shadowblade, Dmitri Usov and Tōkairin Michiko. A moan went through the men and women behind the cage as the three touched fingertips with Adrienne.

  “You’re early, but you’re not the first,” she said. “Wilbur Peterson, of all people. I never expected him to actually attend.”

  “I thought he’d gone seriously hermit?” Michiko said, stretching luxuriously, rising on the balls of her feet with her fingers linked high over her head. “God, but I love flying.”

  “He hasn’t left his nest for thirty years!” Adrienne confirmed.

  “Peterson is another ancient fossil of the type we will have to deal with,” Dmitri snorted. “An obstacle to the progressive forces.”

  “Oh, now, Dmitri Pavlovich, we have to be tolerant and inclusive,” Adrienne said unctuously.

  Then she laughed like a cruel girl-child and clapped her hands together. “Oh! I forgot! We don’t! All we have to be is evil and ruthless, hein?”

  “Da,” Dmitri said. “And I also like flying. But it leaves one with an appetite. Is all in order?”

  “All according to plan so far,” Adrienne said. “Have a little snack, and we’ll talk later as everyone mills-and-swills, eh?”

  Dale was looking at the cage. “Not bad. I always was partial to Mexican. Mind if we make a mess?”

  “Of course not, within reason. Pick a pair each and go crazy. I can always have a few extras sent up from San Simeon if we run short; the place is like a perpetual revolving larder with those tour buses.”

  Adrienne made a flicking gesture with her hand, and Mendoza and his men left; one of them stumbled a little, and another helped him along. Mi
chiko giggled and walked towards the unlatched door of the cage, her nude body moving cat-graceful with a mocking sway of the hips.

  “Paco, Paco,” she said, her voice silvery. “Adrienne says you’ve been very naughty. But I’m naughty too sometimes. Let’s play a little game. It’s called, you die now.”

  The coyote was fully conscious again, but he had missed the last twenty minutes. Ellen saw his eyes bulge as Michiko let herself fall forward . . . and landed on paws. The animal was a Himalayan snow leopard, smoke-gray with black rosettes on its silky fur, even then beautiful enough to make the breath catch. The long tail swung a little as the great paws placed themselves with smooth precision, and the fangs showed bone-white as it snarled, a high-pitched half-yowl that echoed from the roof. Paco turned and ran, bounced into a wall of people who thrust him back and then faced around into the leopard’s leap.

  He screamed once as he went down beneath the beast, and then again, and again and again on a rising squealing note of unbearable agony. A spray of blood flicked across the faces of the other prisoners, and there were wet ripping noises. The metallic scent was suddenly, shockingly intense.

  Ellen shut her eyes for an instant, but lights still flashed across her vision; her mouth was paper-dry, a ringing sounding in her ears above the rending sounds. Monica suddenly buried her face against Ellen’s shoulder and clutched her, and they leaned against each other for support.

  Oh, God, I’m going to lose it. I’m going to wet myself. I’m going to puke all over Jean-Charles’ dress . . . God what a thing to think about . . . I want to close my eyes and I can’t keep them shut.

  They fluttered unwillingly open. An Amur tiger and a great black wolf were slinking forward through the gate in the wire fence, ears laid back, teeth showing as their heads swung back and forth to scent their prey. Michiko was in human form again, crouched over Paco with her face buried in the blood that welled from his torn throat, turning her pale neck and breasts crimson. It coated her face in a glistening bright-red sheet when she turned it upward, laughing.

  “Let’s pick one and play a bit longer, boys,” she said to the two beasts; they halted on either side of her, and she rested a hand on each ruff as she crouched. “That one. She’s in milk. We could have a fascinating mix of tastes.”