Oh, twice over I do not want that image in my head.
“So how is he at the tying up and whipping thing?” Monica said cheerfully; she’d always been a chatterbox with a poor sense of boundaries. “The Doña is still using that lovely little nine-tailed silk switch she found in your stuff on me, and those restraints. You really broadened her horizons, you know, made her try more subtle methods and I’m having such a good time! Well, I always did, after I, umm, got used to things, but it’s even better. Thanks!”
“Ah…glad to be of service, Monica.” I think.
“Well, I’ll see you around,” she said warmly, as Adrienne turned and sauntered away, raising one hand, snapping her fingers without looking around and crooking a finger. “Duty calls.”
Ellen put a hand over her eyes for a second. Adrian touched her gently on one shoulder. “My darling?” he said softly.
“You know, your sister just loves to put thumbtacks in people’s heads. Not just in person, either.”
“We have been married less than a year, yet already our thoughts move in tandem. It would have been even more unpleasant without you. Though the metaphor I used to myself was fishhooks.”
Ellen thought for a moment, then nodded. “Better choice of words. Fishhooks come with lines attached, so you can pull on them. How is it that she’s planning to destroy the world and she still finds time for this?”
“It’s all part of her plan. Also…I did tell you how she would punish her dolls when we were children?”
Ellen shivered and nodded; she knew exactly how the toys would have felt, if they’d been sentient beings.
Being Shadowspawn means you never have to grow up.
She liked children, but children were like housecats, safe to be around because they were small and relatively powerless. Jillyboo the Kitten was lovable and amusing. Jillyboo the five-hundred-pound tiger wasn’t. And a tantrum or cruel impulse with the Power behind it…
“You know, I don’t think Adrienne would make a very good ruler of the world,” Ellen said. “Though she’d enjoy the hell out of it. I can see her issuing National Misery Quotient targets at meetings, and starting a Disaster Production Agency.”
“My great-grandfather has no intention of retiring from his position as Emperor of the Earth at any time in the next few millennia. He does not approve of…”
“Klingon promotion,” Ellen said. “At least, not for other people doing it to him.”
They looked at each other and smiled grimly. Ellen felt a knot relax slightly in her middle, and she was conscious of her hunger in a way that nerves had suppressed. A servant passed by with a tray of canapés. She reached for one, then had a sudden horrid thought and glanced at Adrian. He shook his head.
“With the al-Lanarkis, you would have to be careful about the kebabs and shwarma. They always thought of themselves as ghūl, ghouls, and their favorite transformation is to cave hyenas.”
Ellen shuddered and rolled her eyes. “And cave hyenas, I suppose, are big.”
“Two hundred and fifty, three hundred pounds. The size of a smallish lion.”
“What is it with Shadowspawn and the huge? Freudian, much?”
Adrian smiled at her. “Size is not altogether to be despised. I have transformed into a giraffe on occasion.”
“A giraffe?” she said, and he nodded solemnly. “What’s it like?”
“Peaceful. Extremely peaceful. And the view, my darling, is superb. Not just the height, but the two-hundred-and-seventy degree arc of the eyes…”
She laughed, relaxed despite herself. He went on:
“And with some of the other families, one must be cautious as well; the von Trupps, for example, who are deeply committed to the werwolf legend.”
She nodded understanding as he used the Germanic v pronunciation. Before the eugenic program of the Victorian period, the part-breed witch-clans had mostly believed the legends that were based on their own remote ancestors. They still formed part of the family traditions.
He went on: “But the Brézés traditionally took only the blood. When they were in human form, at least. Cooking humans would be…intolerably crude. This is, you understand, an aesthetic and culinary judgment, not a moral one.”
The liveried servant had halted with blank-faced politesse, the big wrought-silver tray held at a perfect angle. Ellen wondered how he’d ended up here, if some household renfields hadn’t simply kidnapped him because they needed a footman. He was so polished that even thought seemed to glance off-which was probably a survival skill in his position, working for people who might suddenly decide you looked better with your hair on fire or transfer you from the staff to the menu. She took one of the beignets D’Huitres au vin and followed it with a concoction of fig jam and foie gras with a very slight touch of cinnamon on a piece of baguette.
Adrian offered her a glass of wine and his arm, and they strolled off down a corridor. He gently steered her from chamber to chamber, which was normally something she didn’t like outside the bedroom. After something glimpsed out of the corner of her eye through a set of great doors she was grateful. She wasn’t sure what it had been and forced her mind not to speculate.
At least I don’t have to sense what’s going on in the private rooms the way he does. Christ, I’m partying in the middle of a mass murder. Getting case-hardened or what?
“Like Grand Guignol,” she murmured. “But for real.”
“My darling, who do you think founded the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol? And formed a good many of the audience? And it was real, often enough.”
“You’re joking, aren’t-” She winced at the sadness with which he shook his head. “Oh, man…”
They gravely examined painting and sculpture, and in a few minutes her interest was genuine. The Hôtel de Brézé wasn’t exactly a museum, but it had been in the family’s hands a long time, and they collected. In recent generations, by just walking off with anything they fancied, starting with the Louvre, too. The management of the museums and galleries simply substituted fakes.
A servant coughed discreetly, and her heart thudded. The disadvantage of living in a place like this was that things could be very far apart indeed; it took ten minutes to bring them to the library the master had chosen. An odd-looking group-dark men and women wearing striped ponchos and derby-style hats-was leaving as they arrived.
When they entered, the Duc de Beauloup was sitting in a leather chair before a fire, cradling a brandy snifter while Seraphine leaned against the mantel with hers; she was wearing a new form, a slender freckled redhead with great brilliant green eyes, in a 50’s-style Chanel classic, the Little Black Dress.
“Peruvians,” Étienne-Maurice said, with a weight of disgust, and his wife laughed.
Adrian raised an eyebrow. His great-grandfather went on:
“Your Californian branch of the family is responsible. They brought the message of our discoveries to the Andes for the Council. The Spanish-speakers are well enough, for Spaniards, if a trifle provincial and given to hidalgo airs. But the cult up in the Andes called themselves lik’ichiri, fat-stealers, and dealing with them is…ah, but enough of that. Even the Power cannot turn a dirty dog of a savage with a bone through his nose and a tom-tom fixation into something worthy of civilized company.”
Ellen blinked. Remember, born in the 1870s, she told herself. Hasn’t seen sunlight since Hitler was a two-bit agitator in Munich.
It was surprising how dealing with an inhuman monster became so much more difficult when he also had the all-too-human casual prejudices of someone born shortly after the Franco-Prussian War.