She stumbled on her high-heeled shoes as Adrienne turned and tugged sharply with the lead over her shoulder; the Shadowspawn could feel the flush of humiliation and fear and dreadful excitement.
“Be glad you’re not doing this naked,” she said sharply.
Then she smiled and turned. “In fact, that’s a brilliant idea. Who knows what might happen? To you, that is. To the skin, chérie, right now. Just the shoes and the garter-belt.”
Heads were turning in their direction, and Adrienne laughed merrily.
CHAPTER FIVE
Paris
Twenty-four hours later, Ellen Brézé whistled softly as Adrian handed her out of the cab in the chill dampness of the Paris night and she looked up at the palace. “Well, that’s quite something. Rococo, Louis XV, and well done. Very impressive.”
“In more senses than one,” Adrian answered grimly. “Particularly if you know the history. The history of my family, near enough.”
The great house-or small palace-was shaped like an elongated H in form, the front court enclosed by the outer arms and more courtyards within down the length of it. The frontage was pale stone, three stories high with engaged columns. Light streamed out of the tall windows, but outside, the illumination was from iron crescents of burning wood, shedding highly illegal sparks along with a yellow-red light that flickered across the wet stone. Footmen in eighteenth-century liveries and white powdered wigs were bowing the guests up the sweeping stairs to the gates. They were just as politely attentive to the pair of Siberian tigers padding by as they were to the ones in top-hat and frock coat, or Jazz Age beaded dresses, classical kimonos, Chinese cheongsan or Zulu outfits of cow’s-tails and leopard skins.
A frieze of running low-relief wolves gamboled above the entranceway amid lambs and babies.
“That’s a joke, right?” Ellen said.
“The center of the ancestral estates was known as Beauloup, from the thirteenth century and possibly earlier,” Adrian said. “Domain of the Beautiful Wolf. A very ancient family joke. Individuals strong enough to nightwalk came along every few generations back then. They did not understand genetics, but they did marry their cousins, or worse. And the genes…reach back along the lines of descent, from future to past, protecting their own potential existence. They want to find each other.”
“Jesus, them and the One Ring. Ah, and the little symbol too.”
That was a motif set into the wrought iron of the gates, a jagged gilt trident across a broken black circle representing a shattered sun. The sigil of the Order of the Black Dawn, and the Council of Shadows.
“And they say you’re stuck with your in-laws. How true,” Ellen said, tucking her hand into Adrian’s arm as he offered it with a classic crooked elbow.
The Hôtel de Brézé had been built when the French nobility abandoned the more central, medieval Marais district for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, then a greenfield suburb made newly fashionable by Louis XIV. The Revolution had come and gone; young Henri de Beauloup had reopened the townhouse when he emerged from the family’s discreet retirement to fight for Napoleon; indeed, that emperor had referred to his exploits in Spain as showing that at least one of his cavalry commanders knew how to deal with rebels without false sentiment. Goya himself had painted several of those episodes, then kept the work secret for forty years.
Eventually, a Brézé with the Victorian taste for science and statistics had made the acquaintance of an obscure monk by the name of Gregor Mendel, and suppressed his findings while he applied the cleric’s work to a breeding program that had previously relied on mere superstition and on incest practiced mainly for its own sake. Combined with the new science, even his limited command of the Power had produced startling results. His far more adept son Étienne-Maurice Brézé had celebrated his own twenty-first birthday by torturing and butchering his father, in the waning days of the nineteenth century.
Inside the main doors the host was waiting, smiling, chatting with each guest as they entered and handed hats and cloaks to the servants…or in a few cases transformed back into human form and accepted robes. One had arrived as a golden eagle, flown into a window, and was now rubbing at his forehead and cursing in some language Ellen didn’t even recognize, a brown-skinned man with heavy bold features. Behind him a great silverpoint gorilla knuckled by, deep in soundless conversation with a blade-nosed man in a black burnouse and gutrah headdress, who fingered a curved knife thrust through his sash as if that was his hand’s natural resting-place.
The Duc de Beauloup had been post-corporeal for over a century. The form he wore was his own, in what his own era considered the prime of life, so that he looked like a slim, swarthy, vital man of around forty. His height was average for the twenty-first century, which made him tall for a Frenchman of the nineteenth. The face was eerily similar to Adrian’s, though blunter and somehow a little coarser. His black hair fell down his back nearly to his waist, the top layer gathered in a horse-tail by a jet clasp above the loose torrent below; he wore a full robe of thick black silk that swept the floor, embroidered with black yli-silk thread down the front panel and around the neck and cuffs.
The Shadowspawn’s eyes were hot yellow pools, blank glowing fire. An attendant carried a sheathed sword, carefully keeping the hilt within reach, a gray shadow against the gilt and convolutions and worked plaster of the interior.
“Great-grandfather,” Adrian said politely, bowing to kiss the extended hand and the golden ring with the Council’s sigil.
“We have met twice in a year now, my descendant,” the head of the Council said. “There is hope for you yet. And many of your earlier attempts to kill me for the Brotherhood terrorists were truly ingenious, worthy of a Brézé, if a trifle childish and impulsive.”
And I thought I had a dysfunctional family! ran through Ellen’s mind as she sank into a curtsey.
“One attempts to maintain some traditions, sire, even as a rebel,” Adrian said coolly. “You have met Ellen.”
The molten-sulfur eyes turned on her. For an instant Ellen felt a sensation roughly like the mental equivalent of having your skin plucked off with tweezers. Constructs Adrian had planted within her mind came alert with a clanging of internal barriers, and the Shadowspawn lord smiled.
“And your lovely and now very well-guarded wife,” he said. “Enchanted, my dear.” To Adrian: “There is even something to be said for it from a eugenic point of view. I have come to think that reconcentrating our heritage beyond a certain point is…problematic, is that the word currently used for possibly unwise?”
She could tell Adrian was actually interested now. “Why, Sire?” he said.
Étienne-Maurice smiled thinly. “Have you ever tried to compel a cat to obedience by inflicting pain upon it?” he said.
“No, I cannot say that I have,” Adrian said carefully.
“An interesting but ultimately futile pursuit, producing only a thoroughly uncooperative cat. The most you can do is drive it away. Whereas with dogs, and of course humans, that approach often works well. I suspect that our remote ancestors were too much like cats for comfort; at least, for the comfort of those who seek to impose discipline and rule upon them.”
Adrian nodded. “You were perhaps thinking of me, Sire?”
“And your sister. You are as near pureblood as we have achieved to date. And while your command of the Power is admirable, formidable…”
Adrian bowed wordless, polite thanks at the compliment.
“…post-corporeally the command of the Power increases little by little anyway. I have more raw strength now than you, for example, however much you surpass what I had at your age and in the body. Given that there are certain drawbacks to excessive purity of blood…Perhaps it would be better to stop after we achieve consistent survival past the body’s death, which would require a much lower score on the Albermann than you have, for example. Between fifty and sixty percent would do.”