Shadows of Falling Night

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Vienna

“Why do Shadowspawn have funerals?” Eric asked Adrian Brézé, just after sunset a day later. “I mean, for starters there’s no body, not with the old ones like him.”

He was more or less getting used to the nocturnal sleep cycle; it seemed to be easier for him than it was for Peter or Cheba. Of course, according to the Albermann test he had more of the H. nocturnis genes than the average, though not all that much more. That might account for it.

He preferred to think of it as just being adaptable.

“After the first death, the death of the body, it’s quite common to have a party,” Adrian said seriously. “Often both the killer and the victim will attend.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Ellen shook her head sadly.

“Mierda,” he said. “And anyway, there isn’t much question about the afterlife, either. I mean, they get one, but then it ends.”

Cheba smiled an unpleasant smile. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there is a hell for them, after this spirit form is killed.”

“I certainly hope so,” Peter said. “And I’m speaking as a guy who decided there was no Santa Claus when he was four years old.”

The limousine wasn’t particularly large by American standards, but it was still having problems negotiating the narrow streets. They were a bit winding, too, and fewer of the buildings were what he’d come to consider Viennese-looking, which was to say fewer of them were symmetrical and stuccoed with a lot of flamboyant ornament. A few had half timbering like that little village where they had been snowed in; more were brick or stone in irregular masses, here an overhang, there a pointed arch. Then Ellen saw him frowning a little out of the window.

“This is the old part of town,” she said. “Old by local standards, that is. Richard the Lion-Heart was held prisoner not far from here.”

“Yes,” Adrian said grimly. “And it has been a…meeting place of sorts…For a long time too. Not quite that long, but for many generations.”

The car stopped, let them out, and drove away. A flicker of curiosity passed through Eric’s mind; what had the driver thought of it all? He looked around the…he supposed you’d have to call it a church. It certainly had the same form as a church, Austrian Baroque Catholic variety, and a lingering smell of incense. He was willing to bet that it had been one a long time ago. It was full of formally dressed Shadowspawn in suits or robes for various weird costumes, something like a couple of hundred of the most powerful adepts on earth.

Nearly all of them would be delighted to kill him in some hideous fashion, but at least he wasn’t running away from them through the snow with wolf-form fangs inches from his ass and a civilian, a girl and two kids to look after and him sick into the bargain. It was a lot easier to view the enemy objectively now that he wasn’t on his own; not that Peter and Cheba and even Leon and Leila hadn’t done their part. You didn’t feel nearly as much like a rabbit at a coyote party when there was a friendly adept around.

So seeing Adrian Brézé again had been pure deep relief. Eric was reasonably satisfied with the way he had coped on his own; after all, he was still alive and so were those he was supposed to be looking out for. It had still been far too damned close for comfort. And he and Cheba were feeling fine physically now, thanks to that same friendly adept.

“And funerals in church?” he went on.

He remembered Rancho Sangre, the Brézé estate in California. That had a church, or what had once been a church…And lavishly built in the same neo-Spanish fashion as the rest of the place, what he privately thought of as the Zorro Revival style. It hadn’t been used as a church for a very long time, if ever. The sign outside said it was a community theater. From his brief spell undercover masquerading as a renfield button-man for an allied family of Shadowspawn…well, they certainly put on performances there. Not exactly Shakespeare in the park, though.

The Council weren’t actually Satanists anymore. On the other hand, they hadn’t forgotten their roots either. They kept a lot of the ambience and trappings.

“This is a church,” Adrian said. “But not to the Christian God, that’s merely camouflage.”

Ellen nodded, her face stark behind the net veil attached to a little round black hat. “It’s only a century or so since they started surviving death,” she said. “Before that, they were just people-bad, murderous people with psychic powers.”

“And take a gander at some of the details,” Peter said grimly; he’d been looking closely. “This…this so-called church…Maybe it was a church once…isn’t what it looks like at first glance.”

At first glance it looked like a typically gaudy example of Counter-Reformation Baroque, Austrian-style. The exterior had a turreted dome flanked by two towers, all white and yellow stone; that looked positively restrained when you walked into the interior, a blaze of gilt stucco, porphyry columns, colored marbles in every shade from cream to Imperial purple, and contorted murals done in the style of El Greco, only plump and pink to match the carved plaster.

Then you saw what the murals and statuary actually portrayed. Eric felt an impulse to clap his hands over the children’s eyes, followed by one to squeeze his own shut.

I’ve seen a real lot of really bad shit, he thought. Even more as a cop than I did in the Suck. That…that’s just plain…nasty.

Beside him Cheba gave a sharp intake of breath-he suspected the sight was even worse for her, given her time at Rancho Sangre. Even though she probably wasn’t all that religious, the blasphemy would hit the small-town Mexican girl a lot harder, though the obscenity and cruelty were bad enough.

Ushers in formal pearl-gray suits with black carnations in their buttonholes showed them to their seats; thankfully Adrian had a block to himself, so his retainers didn’t have to rub elbows with those of the other Brézé lines. From the glances he was getting out of the corners of their eyes, the feeling was entirely mutual. He leaned forward to whisper in Adrian’s ear, but the other man forestalled him:

“No, we won’t have to stay for long. It is necessary that we put in an appearance. Take the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the players.”

He did, including Dale Shadowblade, who was sitting on the other side of the aisle not far from Adrienne’s party. He kept his face impassive, but he could feel an involuntary bristling at the sight of that slab-sided, high-cheeked, hook-nosed countenance.

So is he going to deliver, or was that all some sort of elaborate set up?

The memory of that face snarling at him, the outstretched clawed hand, an impalpable blow like a ripsaw of pure malevolence made tangible…

And I blasted some silver shot into him, or at least sort of into him because he was only sorta-kinda of there. And he’s an Apache pretty much, not one of these old-school stiff upper lip Euro types. Odd that he’s not paying me more attention.

Étienne-Maurice Brézé took the lectern, dressed in a black silk robe picked out in crimson embroidery at the cuffs and hems and neck. A roll of organ music sounded through the big church, a sprightly mocking tune before he began:

“My brother Arnaud Brézé was one of us,” the master of the Council said. “A vampire, a werewolf, a malignant sorcerer, cruel and murderous…and stylish. His body of the flesh perished many years ago, and he became entirely a creature of darkness, among the first generation to survive the body’s loss since the first Empire of Shadow ten thousand years ago and more. Now his aetheric form has perished as well. Just as one might expect, his death came at the most inconvenient possible moment and has cost and will cost us all a great deal of trouble. Would he have wished it any other way?”

Laughter ran through the church, the merriment of devils, and Eric shivered slightly. The thing that had once been almost a man went on:

“Let me begin my tribute to my kinsman with an anecdote. When my brother and I were torturing our father to death-ah, the lost merry times of youth-”

Eric tuned out the speech and studied the faces instead, as closely as he could without being utterly obvious. Adrienne Brézé had a pleasant social smile on her face, but he could see her eyes flicker once or twice towards Dale Shadowblade as if puzzled. Slightly puzzled, more than a little angry.

He jolted back to awareness as the cool irony in Étienne-Maurice’s voice change to something much flatter and more matter of fact. The tiny hairs under his collar bristled a little.

“-But this leaves the matter of killing a Brézé while under my protection. This constitutes disrespect, and I am…annoyed.”

Those blank yellow eyes him came to rest on Adrian. There was a small quiet rustle as many more joined them. Eric made himself aware of the location of all his weapons, sat very still, and for the first time in several decades actually prayed. It was easier, somehow, in this obscenely desecrated place.

Adrian came easily to his feet, the fingers of both hands resting lightly on the back of the pew in front of him. He inclined his head slightly, then spoke:

“The matter is simple: Adrienne Brézé ordered her follower Dale Shadowblade, well known to you as a killer of our kind, to kill Arnaud. This I heard from his own lips yesterday. I will now drop my shields long enough for you to know that I speak the truth.”

The plan had been for him to do that in a flash and then get them back up again before anyone could do anything seriously manky. Adrian looked intense for a moment, staggered, then swore in some language Eric didn’t recognize and put his hand to his head. Ellen put her hand on his arm, then turned and nodded slightly to the others with a small tight smile.

Stage one, Eric thought. And-

Dale Shadowblade leapt to his feet. “It’s true!” he shouted. “And she plans to kill you all!”

The not-really-a-church erupted in a chorus of screams and shouts and howls; some of them were quite literal howls or shrieks as the nightwalkers and post-corporeals reflexively changed as they scented danger and animal instinct overrode muffled intelligence. Hands-and in several cases, claws-reached for the Council’s assassin. He seized Kai, pitched her slight form at the nearest assailant and bolted out the door.

“Seize him! Alive!” Étienne-Maurice shouted.

Shadowspawn might not know much about discipline or organization, but they got fear and domination down like a treat. Even so, Adrian was in the first wave after the fleeing man. Something huge and furry raised a paw to smash Kai down, some sort of weird cat striped and spotted at the same time and the size of a horse, but Ellen stepped forward and swept her behind herself to tumble into the pew, then skipped backward brandishing her curved silvered knife to discourage any random violence. Cheba and Peter had their weapons drawn as well, and the Mexican girl shoved the children down as they tried to stand on the seat and crane their necks to see the action.

“What the fuck was that son of a whore!” Eric blurted.

“Liger,” Peter said, holding his coach gun in both hands. “Lion-tiger hybrid, biggest cats in the world, they grow over a thousand pounds-”

“Later!”

That was a God damned rhetorical question, professor!

Eric had been told what his part was, and he’d studied the ground, both maps and Google Earth. Running out into a night full of man-eating monsters with their blood up was still one of the harder things he’d ever done, but he did it. And the renfields could kill you just as dead, which meant he had to keep an eye out for the human servants as well. It was deep dark once he was past the lights of the “church,” and the streets were narrow and twisty. It was a good thing that he had a lot of experience in making the map in his head correspond to the real terrain.

“This way!” he heard Adrian’s voice call the Wild Hunt that had boiled out of the building with fangs bared and fur bristling.

And he could feel the same thing, like a compass pointing in his head combined with a snarling eagerness for blood. Some part of him-one that wasn’t counting turns and jogging carefully down slippery cobblestones-was uneasily conscious that this must be the way the wolf pack had felt as they chased him and the others through the snowy woods. The bestial snarling reinforced the impression, except that this time he was running with the pack, more or less, even if for purposes of misdirection.

It was a profoundly disquieting sensation, and he felt sorry for any bystander who got in the way. Or even for anyone who observed it, not least because no one would ever believe them and they would probably go nuts thinking about it. Somewhere a faint hint of zither music from some busker died with a scream and a crash of splintering wood.

A manhole cover clanged down. Cutting it close, he thought. Something flashed down out of the night, a huge shaggy-crested white-breasted eagle of a type he’d never seen before. There was a glimmer as it dove through the iron disk, turning impalpable for a critical fraction of a second. That was apparently a bravura display of nightwalker skill; the Shadowspawn in bird form would have to turn palpable again really quickly to avoid a fatal plunge into the solid fabric of the earth beneath the tunnel’s floor. Transitioning back to human form, or some favorite four-footed attack machine, in the fractional second before their momentum carried them across the height of the tunnel.

Whoever it was carried the trick off, but it didn’t seem to help much. There was a shot from below, a racking animal screech and then two more discharges echoing away underfoot. Then dead silence. He drew his own coach gun, levered up the manhole cover with his left hand and dropped through. It wasn’t much of a drop, particularly since he wasn’t overburdened with gear, and he landed with flexed knees in something wet and truly unpleasant. There was a low reddish glow from caged utility lights at inconveniently long intervals, brighter pools fading into shadow. The stench was stunning, but there was enough adrenaline in his system that it didn’t bother him.

He trotted forward. The sewer was an arched tunnel, with smaller openings feeding into it on either side, each contributing its loathsome flow. Suddenly Adrian was trotting up beside him, and farther back a yammering broke out-human shouts and whoops horribly mixed with wolf-howl, tiger-snarl and a grunting boom he’d heard only once before, on a training exercise in northern Australia.

“Saltie,” he said.

“Crocodylus porosus,” Adrian said, with specificity worthy of Peter Boase.

Not very long ago according to an Aussie he’d met in a bar in Darwin, a saltwater crocodile weighing about two tons had bitten an eighteen-foot section of teak decking from the side of a yacht in the Coral Sea. It was just the sort of thing you wanted to meet in the sewer.

“This is going to take careful timing,” Adrian said.

“Doesn’t it always?” Eric replied.

They weren’t exactly friends, and he didn’t know if they ever would be. Technically speaking they weren’t even of the same species, or subspecies, and he strongly suspected that he’d find some parts of Adrian’s life rather squicky. At that moment, though they were operating on exactly the same wavelength.

The sewer was sort of a flattened egg shape with the point upwards; Adrian broke left and he went right, both of them splashing through the shallower portion. Eric bared his teeth. His part in this would actually be more difficult than fighting. A glimpse of movement ahead, and he pushed forward at a run, waving Adrian back with his left hand. Through a dark patch, and then into another pool of dingy red light. Another flicker of movement, and this time it was a man in soiled evening dress, standing with his right foot advanced and his left arm tucked into the small of his back. The right was lowering the pistol into a formal range-style aim, and behind the muzzle broad brown face split into an exceedingly nasty smile.

It would be just like the son of several bitches to aim for his face. Best to shoot soon, before curse-wreaking bollixed even the Stone Age excuse for a weapon.

The coach gun bucked in his hand and pellets whipped the foul water to froth and scored runnels in the mold on brick and concrete. A flash and a flat elastic bang, and something overwhelming punched him in the gut. He made a strangled sound somewhere between pain and ooof!

“He is mine!” Adrian Brézé shouted, his voice high and harsh.

A great black wolf with yellow eyes rose from the boiling ruck of men and monsters. It blurred, and became the semblance of a man. Étienne-Maurice stood naked, only the eyes the same, flinging out both arms with the hands backward.

“Hunt!” he shouted at his great-grandson.

The living Brézé went forward, around a gradual curve. He aimed and shot with the same fluid sureness. A degree of silence fell, breaking into another predator babble as he returned dragging the body by one ankle, much of its weight supported in the filthy flow down the center of the sewer. His great-grandfather stepped forward and touched the still warm flesh.

“It would’ve been far more elegant, not to mention more entertaining, to take him alive,” he said dryly. “As I ordered, and so that information not be lost.”

“I’m sorry not to fulfill your order, sire,” Adrian said politely. “But I was concerned that he might flee in nightwalking form if I hesitated even an instant.”

“Ah, yes,” the Lord of the Council said. “That odd hesitation to lose the body of flesh, as if the garment mattered.”

He straightened and spoke to carry: “I sense from the dying mind the chaos of death. The aetheric form born of this body is no more; there has been a Final Death.”

Adrian moved aside, and flicked a kick at the nose of a leopard that was sniffing at Eric Salvador’s form. He went to one knee and pulled the man’s arm over his shoulder, bracing himself to help lift the solid muscular weight.

“Armor stopped it,” the New Mexican wheezed. “Hurts like fuck, though.”

As he spoke the horde of Shadowspawn in their varied forms parted for the great thirty-foot, four-ton bulk of the saltwater crocodile to flow endlessly forward, half submerged. There was a surge that sent the dark water curling up the sides of the sewer, and the cavern jaws closed on the body. A flick of the great sculling tail sent droplets spattering and the reptile vanished into the darkness with its prey.

“Just keep walking, Monica,” Adrienne said.

She did, struggling to control her breathing. For one moment and one long cold considering look like a strip of ice laid on the inside of her breastbone she’d thought that the Doña was going to leave her there in the ongoing riot. Most of the crowd in the church…sort of a church, and her mind stuttered as it refused to process images…had bolted out after the fleeing Dale Shadowblade. Many of the rest were either cringing back against the walls, walking out through the walls, or arguing with each other. A few had collapsed to the ground and were hugging themselves and shivering; those would be the lucies and pets.

I know how they feel, Monica thought.

She felt another rush of liquid-loose-in-the-lower-belly fear too as Adrienne halted near her brother’s pew. The folk there tensed, and their hands went to weapons-all except the children, whose faces blossomed with smiles.

“’Allo, Maman,” Leila said, waving. “Have you come to take us back? ’Allo, Monica! Tell Josh and Sophia ’allo from us!”

“We have been having a lot of fun, but we miss you,” Leon added. “And the dog. Papa is busy a lot of the time.”

“Not yet, my darling little weasels,” she said. “I’ve just come to pick up something for a friend.”

Her hand darted out in a blur of speed, latched onto Kai’s collar and wrenched her out from where she cowered on the floor between pews, casting the slight form into the aisle in front of them with a casual and astonishing display of strength. She dodged Ellen’s knife with almost contemptuous ease.

The young woman landed with a thump and then an ooof! of expelled breath. Peter made an abortive lunge, but Cheba pulled him back. She had a little gun in her hand, the silvered barrels glinting between her fingers.

“No!” she said sharply. “Guard los niños!”

“Excellent tactics, my little chocolate drop of delight,” Adrienne chuckled. “I’ll be seeing much more of you later, and you too, my svelte blond boy toy.”

She blew Cheba a mocking air kiss, twiddled her fingers at Peter, then turned and kicked Kai with vicious precision just as she started to get up. Monica winced a little in sympathy; she knew exactly how that felt, especially when it took you by surprise rather than as part of a scenario.

And this was far too chaotic for play. Even with most of the crowd gone, the church still resounded with snarls, howls and shrieks of pain interspersed with babbling and pleading. Some of the Shadowspawn were fighting, or just attacking in reflex, with instant hungry malice; Monica averted her eyes from some of the things going on in the pews and on the floor. That could’ve been her. They walked quickly, Adrienne leading and pushing Kai ahead of her in an agonizing arm lock.

A few cold-eyed renfields looked at her, then flicked their eyes aside. They’d be the ones in charge of guarding their masters’ possessions. One yellow-eyed nightwalker with a black silk top hat gave a snarling hiss and reached for Monica. Adrienne pivoted on one heel and thrust out her free fist, the little finger extended. She spat something in Mhabrogast and dark light seemed to explode behind Monica’s eyes. When it cleared the elegant Edwardian clothes lay vacant across the marble and polished wood, and a rat scuttled for the walls.

Adrienne snickered and gestured, and the rat gave a despairing squeal as its fur caught on fire. Flame and the hard stench of burning hair all vanished as it plunged into the stone of the wall, leaving a blackened spot on the plaster.

“Don’t run, Monica. It’s undignified, and also it is so stimulating. Later, and not in public.”

She forced herself not to dash; Adrienne was already bright-eyed in a way that told how true her words were, and the last thing she wanted to do was start a stampede in her direction. Then they were outside in the chill damp. A car pulled up, but not the one they had arrived in. It was a Mercedes S600 limousine, looming in the narrow street like a sleek black yacht. The driver popped out and held the rear-opening door open; he was dressed in something halfway between a chauffeur’s outfit and a ninja costume, smiling very slightly beneath the mirrorshade glasses that she knew were also night goggles. It was David Cheung, one of Adrienne’s renfields Monica liked even less than she did most of them, but an inexpressible relief now. So was the light machine pistol in his right hand, and the way he scanned the ground behind them.

Monica abandoned her brisk stride and dove, tumbling into the back compartment in a headfirst plunge that might have hurt if the interior hadn’t been so luxuriously padded, panting in sheer relief. Adrienne threw Kai in and swung in after, seating herself with her usual slinking grace. She kicked off one shoe and pressed the foot between Monica’s shoulder blades, pushing her into the thousand-knot Turfan carpet that covered the limousine’s floor as the door swung shut with an almost inaudible but very solid chunking sound.

“Just relax down there for now, chérie,” she said. “I need the room up here to deal with our guest, and it will be a little while before your talents are called for.”

Kai scrambled away and crouched against the opposite door, her eyes huge and her hand fumbling with the lock despite the obvious futility of it. The limousine didn’t have anything as plebeian as seats; the rear was a U-shaped set of couches upholstered in buttery off-white kidskin, like the fantail of a yacht, with a scattering of throw-pillows.

“Dale won’t let you kill me,” she said, her voice a thin reedy whisper.

“You flatter yourself, little snack,” Adrienne said.

Monica couldn’t see her Shadowspawn from where she lay on the floor, but she knew that steel and velvet tone of voice. It made her shiver, and her skin roughen all over, but that was familiar and welcome in its way.

“But in any case, we need to have a little talk before we consider such ultimate pleasures as your death. Why, we’ve hardly gotten to know each other at all! First, let’s disorganize your mind a bit. It makes dealing with those tiresome Wreakings easier. Hmmm…pain, I think. Lots and lots of pain.”

To the air: “And yes, David, you can watch over the monitor. Am I not the very model of a sensitive and caring employer? But I will be very annoyed if there are any traffic accidents; remember to multitask. I really do wish to be in Istanbul shortly.”

Then she sprang. There was a tumbling thrash of limbs, human cursing and the shrill nocturnis snarl, and then a despairing wail. When the motion ceased, Adrienne had the girl in a feeding lock, one leg behind the small of her back, the other hooked across her knees and both wrists in her left hand. Her right clamped the victim’s jaw and bent it back until the neck was a tight arch.

Monica smiled, relaxing and sighing, propping up her head on one elbow. They were out of danger, and…

Ooooh, but that looks sexy, she thought, touching her tongue to her upper lip. Really, really hot.

And it made her remember that first terrifying time when she hadn’t known what was going on. She still had bad dreams about it, but most of the time it was as if it had happened to somebody else, that lost housewife from Simi Valley whose car had broken down south of San Luis Obispo. That was before she’d realized what a turn-on fear could be, of course. Her own, that is.

I was so inexperienced and naive then, of course. I still usually don’t like watching this side of things when it’s not me on the receiving end, but I’m going to make an exception for you, Kai.

It was what human beings like them were for, after all, as mice were for cats. And she had never liked Kai, who had always put on airs because she had a small dose of the Power. And Dale Shadowblade was frankly terrifying, but not in a good way like the Doña, and Kai had been his assistant as well as victim. Generally speaking she didn’t find other people’s fear all that stimulating, but the girl was making a lot of fuss about nothing anyway. Probably.

And it feels really sexy too, being held like that, after the first couple of times. Come on, you little bitch, you’re no blood virgin, and it’s better than you deserve.

Adrienne chuckled again and whispered in Kai’s ear, “Did Dale ever tell you that if you’re habituated to a single Shadowspawn’s feeding for a long time and then get bitten by another the pain is almost as intense as the pleasure for a while? This is really going to hurt and then you’ll beg for more.”

“Please, please!”

“Is that please yes, please no, or both…? Name of a dog, but I am vile! Also more of a Californian than I thought-making out in the back seat of the car…Now scream for me, you little minx.”

The tip of her tongue traced the taut skin, and then her head moved with the swift predatory grace of the feeding bite like the final pounce of a cat on a mouse it’d been toying with. Monica winced and stuck her thumbs in her ears at the earsplitting shriek of raw agony; it had to be even louder for the Shadowspawn, and they had such sensitive ears, but Adrienne was smiling as a trickle of blood dripped past her working lips. She really appreciated a good heartfelt scream.

Kai’s body arched in a galvanic spasm, then slumped. Released, her hands went trembling to the Shadowspawn’s shoulders.

“Hurts…don’t stop…hurts…”

After a while Adrienne lifted her mouth, panting a little, with a thread string of blood dangling from one corner until she licked it up.

“Tasty! Now open your mind,” she crooned.

She licked the neck clean-something in the saliva made a feeding bite clot with unnatural speed and guarded against infection-and shifted until she was facing her victim, forehead to forehead. There was a sharp vinegary scent of sweat and fluids as Kai sobbed and clenched arms and legs around Adrienne.

“That’s right, spread wide inside…oh, this is a well-traveled path…tsk, Dale, that’s a clumsy set of Wreakings, undo here…give in, give in, right to the core, that’s right…What’s that? You actually said I wouldn’t touch her twat with a Taser? So naughty, isn’t it, Monica? Mmmm…now, let’s run through what Dale’s done since that little job on the train…”

Having your memories riffled like that set up an intolerable inward itching; it also gave you this suffused feeling of being filled beyond your capacity like tissues just before they tore. Plus it was really humiliating…which could be a lot of fun in an odd fashion once you were used to it and put your mind to cultivating the right attitude.

Like an inner equivalent of the crawling and foot-licking, and that’s really satisfying, she thought. Kai probably is well experienced that way, though this is all rather abrupt.

“Your brother did what to you when you were twelve?” Adrienne laughed. “Oh, my, that’s entertaining-but do let us concentrate on business, don’t just free-associate…”

After a few moments of silence: “Dale must have learned something from Great-uncle Arnaud when he killed him; he definitely seems to have changed his behavior after that. A pity he didn’t tell you what it was that he learned, precisely. Perhaps he soul-captured Arnaud for a really prolonged, enjoyable interrogation internally? Dangerous…but Dale always was excessively non-risk-averse. Vraiment, it is a puzzle…”

Kai flopped backward when the Shadowspawn broke the link, mouth working and tears leaking down her cheeks as she covered her face with her hands. Adrienne rubbed her hands and looked around:

“Now, we do have a Taser here somewhere, do we not? Let us literalize the metaphor! And when we reach the manor we’re stopping at, you can show David some appropriate gratitude, Kai. He is growing quite excited, and it would be cruel to deny him. Travel can be a broadening experience, don’t you agree?”