Down These Strange Streets

PAIN AND SUFFERING by S. M. Stirling

Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove’s title of King of the Alternate History Novel, fast-rising science fiction star S. M. Stirling is the bestselling author of the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, On the Ocean of Eternity), in which Nantucket comes unstuck in time and is cast back to the year 1250, and the Draka series (including Marching through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and Drakon , plus an anthology of Draka stories by other hands and edited by Stirling, Drakas!), in which Tories fleeing the American Revolution set up a militant society in South Africa and eventually end up conquering most of the earth. He’s also produced the five-volume Fifth Millennium series and the seven-volume General series (with David Drake), as well as stand-alone novels such as Conquistador , The Peshawar Lancers, and The Sky People. Stirling has also written novels in collaboration with Raymond F. Feist, Jerry Pournelle, Holly Lisle, Shirley Meier, Karen Wehrstein, and Star Trek actor James Doohan, as well as contributing to the Babylon 5, T2, Brainship, War World, and Man-Kzin Warseries. His short fiction has been collected in Ice, Iron and Gold. Stirling’s New York Times bestselling Emberverse postapocalyptic series (which is related to the Island in the Sea of Time novels) consists of the trilogy Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, and A Meeting at Corvallis, and the subsequent sequels The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, The Sword of the Lady, The High King of Montival, and The Tears of the Sun. He has also written the Lords of Creation novels, The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. His most recent work, the Shadowspawn series, consists of A Taint in the Blood and The Council of Shadows. Born in France and raised in Europe, Africa, and Canada, he now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In the suspenseful story that follows, he takes us along with an ordinary cop who finds himself trying to deal with a most unordinary criminal—one of extraordinary abilities, in fact, who seems impossible to beat.

I

DREAM.

Eric Salvador always knew it was a dream; he just couldn’t affect it or get out of it or do anything except watch and smell and taste and feel an overwhelming sick dread as it unfolded. There hadn’t really been a burned-out MRAP at the end of the village street by the mosque. That had been somewhere else, that little shithole outside Kandahar he’d seen on his first tour, and it had only been there one day. It was a composite of all the bads, building up to the Big Bad itself.

A couple of other things are right for the day, he thought.

The way Olsen flicked the little Raven surveillance drone into the air, and the buzz of its engine as it climbed to circle above them, and the dopy little smiley-face button with fangs he’d glued to the nose of the Corps’ thirty-five-thousand-dollar toy airplane. He’d tried to put little fake Hellfire missiles under the wings too, and Gunny had torn him a new asshole about it. The way the translator was sweating and his eyes were flicking here and there, you wondered if it was just the heat or generalized fear or if he knew something he wasn’t saying.

Christ, I’ve had this fucking nightmare so many times I’m starting to sound like a movie critic.

Smith always went into the door of the compound the same way, the way he really had. Regulation, the two of them plastered on either side, Jackson taking out the lock on the gate with a doorknocker round, whump-boom, the warped old planks smacking inward as the slug blew the rusty lock into the courtyard, Smith following, his M-4 tucked into his shoulder and Jackson on his heels.

The explosion was always silent. Silent, slo-mo, the flames leaking around the fragments of wood and the two men flying and just enough time to realize Oh, shit, this is a bad one before a giant’s hand picked him up and threw him backward until there was the impact and the pain.

Only this time was different. This time something walked out of the fire to where he lay with the broken ends of his ribs grating under the body armor that had saved his life.

The shape twisted and its wrongness made him want to scream out the bloody foam in his lungs, but the eyes were flecked yellow. And the voice slithered into his ears:

“Who’s been a naughty boy, then?”

He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into his mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.

“Naughty!”

“Christ!”

He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake—sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then he remembered he’d stopped.

“Go back to sleep,” he told himself. “Dreaming’s no worse than remembering, anyway.”

Christ.

THE FIRE DEPARTMENT WERE TURNING OFF THEIR HOSES; DANK STEAM ROSE into the night, and chilly water dripped from the buildings to either side where they’d sprayed to keep the flames from spreading; there was a blank wall across the street. It was high-desert winter, cold, dry, moonlight visible on the white peaks of the Sangres floating off to the north.

“So what made it burn down, hey?” Salvador asked the investigator from the fire marshal’s office.

“Arson,” she said to the detective. “And it burned up.”

“Yeah, arson. Some specifics would be nice, Alice,” he said.

“That’s the thing. I can’t find any reason it should have burned. None of the usual indicators. It just did.”

“Very much.”

He ducked under the yellow police tape, a stocky man of thirty or so with a mustache and a blue jowl who’d put on a few pounds lately, not many, not enough to hide his hard outlines, with his coarse black hair still in a highand-tight. There was a deep scar across one olive cheek, and he rubbed at it with a thumb; it hurt a little sometimes, where the flying metal of the IED had cracked the bone. The scar ran down under his mustache, giving a bit of a quirk to his mouth.

“One thing I can tell you,” the investigator said. “This thing burned hot.”

“Heavy accelerants? I can’t smell anything.”

“Right, gasoline or diesel you usually can. But damned if I can prove it yet, maybe with the lab work . . . I’d say yes, though. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if it wanted to burn. There’s no sign it started in one place and spread. Everything capable of combining with oxygen just went up all at once, whoosh. The cutlery melted, and that’s a lot hotter than your typical house fire.”

The building had been a little two-story apartment house, one up and one down. This wasn’t far off Canyon Road and the strip of galleries and was close to the Acequia Madre, the ancient irrigation canal, which meant it had been fairly expensive. But not close enough to be real adobe, which in Santa Fe meant old and pricey. Brown stucco pseudo-pueblo-Spanish-style originally over frame, like nearly everything in town that stayed on the right side of the building code.

Alice had worked with him before. She was a bit older than he—midthirties—and always looked tired, her blond hair short and disorderly. He liked the way she never let a detail slip by, no matter how hard she had to work at it.

“Santa Fe, where prestige is a mud house on a dirt road,” she quoted. “So it’s not likely an insurance torch. Not enough money here.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t afford this either. When it was still there. It must have gone up like a match head.”

There wasn’t enough left to tell any more details. There was a heavy wetash smell where bits and blackened pieces rested on the scorched concrete pad of the foundation. He blinked again. That smell, and the way the bullets had chewed at the mud brick below the window, flecking bits of adobe into his face. The way his armor had chafed, the fear as he made himself jerk up over the sill and aim the M-4, laying the red dot, the instant when the mouj had stared at him wide-eyed just before the burst tracked across his body in a row of black-red dots and made him dance like a jointed doll . . .

“Eric?” Alice said, jarring him out of the memory.

“Sorry,” he said. “Deep thought.”

She spared him any offensive sympathy and he nodded to her in silent gratitude, still feeling a little shaky. Got to get over this. I can have flashbacks later.

“Let me have the workup when you can,” he said.

Of course, when I was on the rock pile I said I’d deal with it later, when it wouldn’t screw the mission. This is later, I suppose.

“I’ll zap it to your notepad,” Alice said. “I’ve got to get some more samples now.”

He turned away. Cesar Martinez was talking to the Lopez family, minus the three children who were with some neighbor or relative; the couple were sitting in one of the emergency vans, and someone had given them foam cups of coffee. His own nose twitched at the smell, though what he really wanted was a drink. Or a cigarette. He suppressed both urges and listened to his partner’s gentle voice, calm and sympathetic. He was a hotshot, and he’d go far; he was good at making people want to help him, soothing them, never stepping on what they had to say.

“I was going to go back in. They were gone, and I was going to go back in and then—”

Cesar made a sympathetic noise. “You were having dinner when the man forced you out of the house?”

“Takeout Chinese, from Chow’s,” the wife said. Her husband took up the thread:

“And this man came in. He had a gun . . . a gun like a shotgun, but smaller, like a pistol,” Anthony Lopez said. “It still looked pretty damn big. So was he.”

He chuckled, and Salvador’s opinion of him went up. It was never easy for civilians when reality crashed into what they thought had been their lives.

“How could you tell it was a shotgun?”

“Two barrels. Looked like tunnels.”

“And the man?”

“He was older than me—fifty, sixty, gray hair cut short, but he was moving fast. He had blue eyes, sort of tanned skin but you could tell he was pink?”

“Anglo, but weathered?”

“Right. And he was dressed all in black, black leather. And he shouted at us, just Go, go, go, get out, run, keep running. We did.”

“Exactly the right thing to do,” Cesar said.

“But I was going to go back. Then it burned . . .” he whispered. “If I had—”

You’d be dead, Salvador thought. On the other hand, if the guy hadn’t run you all out, you’d all be dead. There’s something screwy here. Arsonists don’t care who gets hurt and they certainly don’t risk getting made to warn people.

Mrs. Lopez spoke again. “There was a younger man outside, when we ran out. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, with his hands in the air, almost like he was high or something. And there was a, a van or a truck over there.”

She pointed to the wall of the compound across the street from what had been her house. Salvador made a note to see if they could get tire tracks.

“When we were across the street the younger man sort of, oh, collapsed. The older man with the gun, the one in black, helped him over to the van, not carrying him but nearly, sort of dragging him and putting him in the backseat. Then they drove off.”

Cesar tapped at his notepad and called up the face-sketch program.

“The younger man looked like this?” he began, and patiently ran them through the process of adjustment.

Salvador stared, fascinated as always, watching the image shift, slowly morphing and changing and then switching into something that only an expert could tell from a photograph of a living person. He knew that in the old days you’d had to use a sketch artist for this, but now it was automatic. It would even check the final result against the databases with a face-recognition subsystem. When they’d given all the help they could, Cesar went on:

“Thank you, thank you both. We may have to talk to you again later.”

He blew out a sigh and turned and leaned back against the end of the van, looking at the notepad in his hand. Salvador prompted him:

“Their stories were consistent?”

“Yeah, jefe. Right from the start, it wasn’t just listening to each other and editing the memory.”

He touched the screen. “Okay, sequence: When Mrs. Lopez got home with the kids, around five, Ellen Tarnowski’s car, she’s the upper-floor tenant, was there. Mr. Lopez, the husband, got home a little later and noticed it too. Because she’s usually not back from work by then.”

“They friends with her?”

“They know her to talk to, just in passing. Said she was nice, but they didn’t have much in common.”

The senior detective grunted and looked at his notepad, tapping for information; Mr. and Mrs. Lopez were a midlevel state government functionary and a dental hygienist respectively. Ellen Tarnowski . . .

Works at Hans & Demarcio Galleries. Okay, artsy. God knows we’ve got enough of them around here.

There were three-hundred-odd galleries in Santa Fe, plus every other diner and taco joint had original artwork on the walls and on sale. Half the waiters and checkout clerks in town were aspiring artists of one sort or another too, like the would-be actors in L.A. She looked out at him, a picture from some website or maybe the DMV: blond, midtwenties, full red lips, short straight nose, high cheekbones, wide blue eyes. Something in those eyes too, an odd look. Kind of haunted. The figure below . . .

“Jesus.”

“Just what I said. Anyway, she comes downstairs just after Mr. Lopez arrives. Mrs. Lopez looks out the kitchen window and notices her because she’s wearing—”

He checked his notes again.

“—a white silk sheath dress and a wrap. She knew it was Tarnowski’s best fancy-occasion dress from a chat they’d had months ago. Another woman was with her. About Tarnowski’s age, but shorter, slim, olive complexion or a tan, long dark hair, dark eyes . . .”

“Really going to stand out in this town.”

“Sí, though if she’s going around with la Tarnowski she will! I got a composite on her too, but it’s not as definite. Mrs. Lopez said her clothes looked really expensive, and she was wearing a tanzanite necklace.”

“What the fuck’s tanzanite?”

The other thing we have hundreds of is jewelry stores.

“Like sapphire, but expensive. Here’s what she looked like.”

He showed a picture. The face was triangular, smiling slightly, framed by long straight black hair. Attractive too, but . . .

Reminds me of that mink I handled once. Pretty, and it bit like a bastard. Took three stitches and a tetanus shot.

“I don’t think she’s Latina, somehow,” he said aloud, as his fingers caressed the slight scar at the base of his right thumb.

“Yeah, me too, but I can’t put my finger on why. Incidentally, let’s do a side-by-side with the composite on the man they saw standing still outside, when the old goatsucker with the gun ran them out past him. The one he shoved into the backseat later.”

Salvador’s eyebrows went up as the pictures appeared together. “Are they sure that’s not the same person? It’s an easy mistake to make, in the dark, with the right clothes.”

His partner nodded; it was, surprisingly so under some circumstances.

“Looks a lot like Dark Mystery Woman, eh? But it was a guy, very certainly. Wearing a dark zippered jacket open with a tee underneath. Mrs. Lopez said he looked real fit. Not bulked up but someone who worked out a lot. She got a better look at him than at the woman; they went right by. Nothing from the databases on either of them, by the way, but look at this.”

His fingers moved on the screen, and the two images slid until they were superimposed. Then he tapped a function box.

“Okay, the little machine thinks they’re relatives,” Salvador said. “I could have figured that out.”

“But could you have said it was a ninety-three percent chance?”

“Sure. I just say: It’s a ninety-three percent chance. Or in old-fashioned human language, certainemente. Okay, back up to what Mystery Woman was doing earlier. She and Tarnowski get in Tarnowski’s car and drive off around five thirty, a few minutes earlier?”

“Mystery Woman was driving. Tarnowski looked shaky.” Cesar consulted his notes. “Yeah, Mrs. Lopez said Tarnowski looked like she was going to fall over, maybe sick, and the other one helped her into the car.”

“That’s two people who have to be helped into cars. This smells.”

“And then two and a half hours later someone runs in waving a sawed-off shotgun, while Mystery Woman’s brother or cousin or whatever was standing outside ignoring everything and talking to himself in a strange language—”

“Strange language?”

“They just heard a few words. Not English, not Spanish, and not anything they recognized. He talks in the strange language, falls, goatsucker-withthe-gun gives him a hand, they drive off, and then the place just happens to burn down a few minutes later.”

Salvador sighed and turned up the collar of his coat; it was dark, and cold.

“I need a drink. But get an APB out on Ellen Tarnowski and flag her name with municipal services and the hospitals statewide. Also the old gringo with the sawed-off shotgun, use the face-recognition protocol for surveillance cameras. We can get him on a reckless endangerment charge, trespassing, uttering threats, suspicion of arson, bad breath, whatever.”

“Sí, and littering. The Mystery Woman and the Mystery Man too?”

“Yeah, why not? Let them all do a perp walk and we can apologize later.”

He sat down and began doggedly prodding at the screen. First thing tomorrow he’d start tracing Tarnowski’s life. So far nobody had died, and he’d like to keep it that way. The employer was a good first place.

II

ONE OF THE JOYS OF A POLICEMAN’S LIFE, ERIC SALVADOR THOUGHT THE next day, wishing he’d taken more Tylenol with his breakfast. You meet all kinds of people. Most of them hate you. Asi es la vida. At least she’s not likely to try and blow me up with a fertilizer bomb.

Giselle Demarcio was in her fifties, with a taut, dry, ageless appearance and a slight East Coast accent, dressed in a mildly funky Santa Fe look, silver jewelry and a blouse and flounced skirt.

Sort of a fashionista version of what my great-grandmother wore around the house, Salvador thought cynically; his family, the Spanish part at least, had been in Santa Fe since the seventeenth century. Everything old gets new if you wait long enough. Rich Anglos get off the bus and live in pimped-up adobes and you end up in a double-wide on Airport Road.

She had a white mark on her finger where a wedding ring would go, and she fit in perfectly with the airy white-on-white decor of Hans & Demarcio Galleries. He was not, he noticed, being invited back to her office; this was a semipublic reception room. The art on the walls was something he could understand, at least—actual pictures of actual things. Not the cowboy-pueblo-Western art a lot of the places on Canyon Road had either, mostly older-looking stuff. There was a very faint odor of woodsmoke from a piñon fire crackling in a kiva fireplace. The whole thing screamed money. It had been a very long time since Canyon Road attracted artists because the rents were low.

Santa Fe, the town where ten thousand people can buy the State and fifty thousand can’t afford lunch, he thought.

“Would you like some coffee, Detective?” Demarcio said.

Wait a minute, Salvador thought. She’s not really hostile. She’s scared for some reason. Not of me, but scared silly and hiding it well.

“Thank you,” he said, and took the cup. “That’s nice.”

It was excellent coffee, especially compared to what he drank at home or at the station, with a rich, dark, nutty taste. He enjoyed it, and waited. Most people couldn’t stand silence. It wore on their nerves and eventually they blurted out something to fill it. Salvador had learned patience and silence in a very hard school.

“I’m worried about Ellen,” the older woman said suddenly.

The detective made a sympathetic noise. “Ms. Tarnowski worked for you?” he said.

“Works. She’s my assistant even if she didn’t show up this morning; that’s understandable with the fire and all. Not a secretary, she’s an art history graduate from NYU and I was bringing her in on our acquisitions side. I’m . . . she’s a sweet kid, but she’s gotten mixed up in something, hasn’t she?”

“You tell me, Ms. Demarcio,” Salvador said.

“I never liked that boyfriend of hers. She met him playing tennis at the country club about a year ago and they, well, it was a whirlwind thing. He gave me this creepy feeling. And then his sister showed up—”

Salvador blinked. The sister . . . the woman who was with Tarnowski? “Boyfriend?” he asked.

“Adrian Brézé.”

“Ah,” Salvador said.

As he spoke he tapped the name into his notepad’s virtual keyboard and hit the rather specialized search function. He’d long ago mastered the trick of reading a screen and paying attention to someone at the same time.

“Now, that’s interesting. Do you have a picture of him?”

It was interesting because Salvador didn’t have a picture; or much of anything else. Usually these days you drowned in data on anyone. There was nothing here but bare bones: a social security number, a passport number, and an address way, way out west of town. Just out of Santa Fe County, in fact. A quick Google Earth flick showed a big house on a low mountain or big hill, right in the foothills of the Sangres, nothing else for miles.

Not even a passport picture to go with the number. Someone likes his privacy, he thought, looking at the address. Then: Hey, could you . . . nah, nobody can evade the Web.

Demarcio hesitated, then pulled a framed picture out of a drawer. The glass was cracked, as if someone had thrown it at a wall.

“She told me she was going to break up with him. Couldn’t take the emotional distance and lies anymore. Then she didn’t show up to work yesterday.”

“So she’s missing the day before the fire,” Salvador said, looking at the picture. “She didn’t call in? Just nothing?”

“Nothing. That’s not like her. She’s the most reliable person who’s ever worked for me.”

The photo beneath the cracked glass showed a youngish man, though on second thought perhaps Salvador’s own age. Or maybe somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dark hair worn a little longer than was fashionable these days, a vaguely Mediterranean-looking face. Handsome, perhaps a little too much so.

Androgynous, that’s the word. But there’s something dangerous looking about him too.

“He’s . . .” Demarcio frowned. “You know, I met him a dozen times and I listened to her talk about him a lot and I really can’t tell you much. He’s wealthy . . . very wealthy, I think. Some sort of old money, but that’s an impression, not knowledge. He wouldn’t tell Ellen anything about that either, just some vague bullshit about ‘investments.’ American born, but he has a slight accent, French I think, which would fit with the name. I know he speaks French and Italian and Spanish . . . and yes, German too. I couldn’t tell you where his money comes from, or where he went to university, or, well, anything.”

Salvador looked at the photo. Unobtrusively, he brought up the composite picture on the notepad. The resemblance to the reconstruction of the man the Lopez family had seen standing motionless outside their house just before the fire was unmistakable. He scanned the picture into the notepad, and the program came up with a solid positive when it did its comparison.

“Would you say this is Adrian Brézé?” he said and showed her the screen.

“Absolutely,” she said.

“And this is his sister?” he said, changing to the composite of the woman the Lopezes had seen with Ellen Tarnowski earlier.

“Well . . .” The picture wasn’t quite as definite; they’d only glimpsed the face in passing and through a window. “Yes, I’d say so. It’s a striking resemblance, isn’t it? Like twins, only they’d have to be fraternal.”

“Have you seen this man?”

The composite this time was the older man with the gun who’d frightened the Lopezes out of their home . . . and probably saved their lives, considering how fast the building had gone up.

“No, I can’t say I have. That is, it’s similar to any number of people I’ve seen but it doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind.”

Salvador grunted; it was a rather generic Anglo countenance, in fact. Offhand he’d have said Texan or Southern of some sort; there was something about the cheekbones that brought Scots-Irish hillbilly to mind, and the long face on a long skull, but even that was just an educated guess. The Corps was lousy with that type.

“Do you think Mr. Brézé is capable of, mmm, violent actions?”

She paused for a long moment, looking down at her fingers. When she met his eyes again, his alarm bells rang once more.

“I think he’s capable of anything. Anything at all.”

“Had a temper?”

She shook her head. “No. He was always a perfect gentleman. But I could feel it.”

Which would be a big help in court.

“Now, you saw Ms. Tarnowski later that evening?”

Now Demarcio flushed. “Yes, with Ms. Brézé . . . Adrienne Brézé. At La Casa Sena; they were having dinner at a table near mine.”

That was an expensive restaurant on Palace, just off the plaza, in an old renovated adobe that had started out as a hacendado’s townhouse. Not the most expensive in town by a long shot, but up there.

“You didn’t speak with them?”

“No. They, umm, didn’t seem to want company.” Her eyes shifted upward and she blushed slightly. “They seemed sort of preoccupied.”

Ah, Salvador thought. That sort of preoccupied. Is this an arson case or a bad movie? Sister catches her on the rebound from her brother, so brother burns the house down? Where do these sorts of people come from? Do they step out of TV screens or do the screenwriters know them and use them for material?

“You knew Adrienne Brézé socially?”

“No. I’d never seen her before. Didn’t even know Adrian had a sister.”

“Then how did you know the woman’s name?” he said.

An exasperated glance. “I asked the maitre d’hotel at La Casa Sena, of course! I’m a regular there. So is Adrian.”

He hid a smile. I think Ms. Demarcio is a nice lady. She’s concerned about Tarnowski. But I also think she’s a gossip of the first water.

“Thank you, Ms. Demarcio—”

“Well, aren’t you going to tell me anything?”

He sighed. Usually you didn’t, but he needed to develop this source.

“We’re investigating the circumstances of the fire at Ms. Tarnowski’s apartment, and trying to find where she is.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly; that meant We think it was torched, without actually saying it.

“And her disappearance?”

“Ah, yes. There’s no reason to suppose it’s anything but a sudden move—”

“And no reason to suppose it is. I talked to the Lopez family, and there was a man with a gun.”

He sighed. Santa Fe was a small town. “True. We’ve got Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the state police all looking. Here’s my card.”

He slid it across the low table. “Please let me know immediately if Ms. Tarnowski contacts you, or you get any other information.”

Outside, Cesar met him, and they walked down toward the end of Canyon, then turned right across the bridge over the small and entirely dry Santa Fe river with its strip of grass and cottonwoods. That led to Palace just north of the Cathedral, the reddish sandstone bulk of it towering over the adobe and stucco of the neighboring buildings. Salvador jammed his fists into the pockets of his sheepskin jacket and scowled, pausing only to give the finger to a Mercedes that ran the yellow light and nearly hit them. Right afterward, a rusting clunker with the driver’s door held on with coat-hanger wire did the same thing.

“This is screwy,” he complained, after he’d filled his partner in. “But at least we’ve got names to go with our composites. Adrian and Adrienne Brézé.”

“This is fucked up, amigo,” Cesar said cheerfully. “Because the databases are still not giving us anything even though we’ve got the names. They don’t have e-mail addresses, they don’t have bank accounts . . . You did send them out?”

“Yeah, local, state, Fart Barf and Itch, and Homeland Insecurity, which means the spooks. It can take a while, even now they’ve got the whole system cross-referenced.”

“It shouldn’t take a while to get something. Everyone leaves footprints. The question is, my friend, should we be thinking of this as an arson case, or some sort of kidnapping? Scorned boyfriend revenge thing, he burns the house and snatches her?”

“A little early for that.”

Cesar grinned and showed his notepad, a picture of an elderly but wellmaintained Prius. “Abandoned car on Palace, ticketed and towed about an hour ago. Registered to—”

“Ellen Tarnowski.”

“So maybe, it’s not so early.”

Salvador’s notepad beeped. “Well, fuck me. Take a look.”

The picture was from the security cams at Albuquerque Sunport, the airport in the larger city an hour’s drive south; the face-recognition software had tagged it.

“That’s Brézé and our mystery man with the gun, all right. Still in the black leather outfit. Nine thirty to San Francisco last night, just opened up and the request got it. Wait a minute—”

He tapped at the screen. “Fuck me.”

“What’s wrong?”

“They didn’t have tickets. Look.”

“Could be tickets under someone else’s name.”

“No, there were two vacant first-class seats according to the ticketing record. But look, when they cleared for takeoff they recorded all the first-class seats as full. But there aren’t any names attached to these two. Which isn’t supposed to be possible. Breaks three laws and twenty regulations.”

Cesar made a hissing sound of frustration. “Mierda, for a second I thought we’d get a name on Mr. Shotgun. What about the other end?”

“Flight got into San Francisco International . . . nothing on the surveillance cam there, and it should have got them.”

The younger man grinned. “Maybe they got out on the way, sí?”

“Yeah, at forty thousand feet. At least we can retire the kidnapping theory, Cesar. But Tarnowski’s still missing, even if Mr. Boyfriend didn’t snatch her. Or I suppose he could have a third party holding her.”

“Okay, we got her last known location in Santa Fe. Here.”

The building that housed La Casa Sena and several upscale shops was mainly nineteenth century, adobe-built with baked-brick trim, rising around a courtyard-patio that featured a pool and a huge cottonwood. Originally it had comprised thirty-three rooms of living-place-workroomstoreroom-quasi-fortress that presented a blank defensive wall four feet thick to the outside, intended to repel Apaches, bandits, rebels, and tax collectors whether Mexican or gringo. Now there was a wine boutique, several stores selling upscale jewelry and froofraw, and the restaurant occupying two sides of the rectangle.

Iron tables stood out under the cottonwoods, vacant this time of year; the flower beds were sere and brown as well. A glassed-in box near the entrance covered the original well that had supplied water to the complex. He glanced at the menu posted beside the door; they weren’t open for lunch yet.

“Ever eaten here?” he asked.

“Twenty-five for a ham sandwich?” Cesar said, peering at the prices. “You loco?”

“I had dinner here once. An anniversary, the last one before Julia divorced me. The food was actually pretty damn good.”

“Jesus, if lunch is like this, what’s dinner for two cost?”

“About the price of a trip to Paris.” Salvador grinned and read the small print: “And the ham sandwich has green chile aioli, ciabatta, aged Wisconsin Gouda—”

“It’s still twenty-five dollars for a fucking ham sandwich. Okay, a ham and cheese. I don’t care if the butter was made from the Virgin’s milk.”

“Can I help you?” a young woman in a bow-tie outfit said, opening the door. “Lunch doesn’t start seating until—”

They flashed their badges. “The manager, please.”

That brought quick action: “I’m Mr. Tortensen—”

After the introductions, the manager showed them through to his office, though Salvador felt as if half the contents of his wallet had vanished just stepping over the threshold of the front door into the pale Taos-style interior. Even the office was stylish. The man was worried, brown-haired, in his thirties, lean to the point of emaciation, and licking his lips.

“What can I do for you, officers?” he said.

Salvador leaned back in the chair. He knew he could be intimidating to some. People who’d led sheltered lives particularly. He didn’t have to do anything in particular, even if they were people who’d consciously think of him as something they’d scrape off their shoe on a hot day.

“You had two guests at dinner yesterday,” he said. “From a little after five thirty to seven thirty. Ellen Tarnowski and Adrienne Brézé. I’d like some details.”

The man started very slightly, and then his mouth firmed. “I’m afraid our clients’ confidentiality is—”

Cesar cut in smoothly: “Ms. Tarnowski’s house burned down last night, and there’s suspicion of arson. Her car was found and towed from a parking spot not too far from here. We have independent confirmation that she was here last night, and she’s a missing person with this as her last known location.”

Salvador nodded. “So we’d really appreciate your cooperation in this arson and possible kidnapping investigation.”

The manager started; short of shouting terrorism it was about the best possible way of getting his attention.

“Let me make a few calls,” he said, pulling out his phone.

Cesar worked on his notepad. Salvador crossed his arms on his chest and enjoyed watching the manager sweat as he tried to get back to his routine. People came in to talk to Mr. Tortensen about purchasing and things that probably made perfect sense. At last, a harassed-looking man in his early twenties came in; he was slimly handsome, but looked as if he really wasn’t used to waking up this early. Which, with a night-shift job like waiting tables, he might not be.

“Ah, this is Joseph Morales, officer,” Tortensen said. “He had A17 . . . their table . . . last night.”

Maricón, Salvador thought—clinically, he wasn’t bothered by them. There had been one he knew who was an artist with a Javelin launcher. He could put a rocket right through a firing slit, which has a good dirty joke in it somewhere.

“Pleased to meet you,” Morales said to the policemen with transparent dishonesty, but he was at least trying to hide it. “How can I help you?”

The restaurant manager started to speak, and Salvador held up a hand. “We’re interested in a party of two at one of your tables last night.”

He held up his notepad with Tarnowski’s face.

The waiter laughed—it was almost a giggle. “Oh, them. Yes, I remember them well. They ordered—well, Ms. Brézé ordered—”

He rattled off a list of things, most of which Salvador had never heard of. He held up a hand.

“What did that come to?”

“With the wines? About . . . twenty-five hundred.”

The manager was working his desktop, and nodded confirmation. Cesar gave a smothered sound that had probably started as an agonized grunt, passed through indignation, and was finally suppressed with a tightening of the mouth.

“Tip?”

“Very generous. Seven hundred.”

Outside, Cesar shook his head. “Seven hundred for the tip? And you went there?”

“I was starting to get worried about Julia, wanted to show her I thought about something besides my job. Didn’t work. Three weeks later, she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”

“Ai!”

“Yeah, sweet, eh? What’s the next stop?”

“I’ll try and see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”

Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”

“So we could just work one case at a time? Sí, the thought has crossed my mind.”

III

“OKAY,” CESAR SAID TWO WEEKS LATER. “GUESS WHAT? SOMETHING FUNNY on the Brézé case.”

“Tell me something funny. I could use it.”

Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling piñon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, which happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.

The prospect was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now. Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sues cops. Tell me again why I’m not selling insurance?

“The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,” Cesar said.

“Ain’t a policeman’s life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?”

“Sí, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on U.S. soil. Anyway, there’s blood in the puke.”

“I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Brézé’s puke, right?”

“Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I’m pretty sure that Brézé paid him something to forget about it—he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it too.”

“So he’s got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?”

Cesar scratched his mustache, and Salvador consciously stopped himself from doing likewise.

“I’m not sure it does,” he said. “But it’s funny. Because the DNA from the puke is not the same as the DNA from the blood. In fact, the DNA from the blood is on the Red Cross list. One of their donors, a Shirley Whitworth, donated it at that place just off Rodeo and Camino Carlos Rey. It seems to have gone missing from their system. They clammed up about it pretty tight. We’ll have to work on that.”

Salvador grunted. “Let’s get this straight. The puke is Brézé—”

“Presumably. Male chromosomes in the body fluids. But there’s no Brézé in the DNA database.”

“That’s not so surprising; they only started it a couple of years ago, and it just means he’s not a donor and hasn’t been arrested or gone to a hospital or whatever. But the blood is definitely some Red Cross donor’s?”

“Sí. So, funny, eh?”

“Funny as in fucking weird, not funny as in ha-ha. Because it had to be in his stomach, right?”

They both laughed. “Good thing we know he comes out in daylight, eh?” Cesar said.

“Yeah, and he doesn’t sparkle. I’d feel fucking silly chasing a perp who looked like a walking disco ball . . . but he did drink it . . . maybe some sort of kink cult thing?”

“So I’m not surprised he puked,” Cesar said, still chuckling. “It’d be like drinking salt water, you know? Blood is salt water, seawater. My mother used salt water and mustard to make you heave if you’d eaten more than you should.”

Salvador could feel his brain starting to move, things connecting under the fatigue of a half-dozen cases that were never going to go anywhere. Then his phone rang. When he closed it, he was frowning.

“What’s the news, jefe?”

“The boss wants to see us, now.”

The chief’s office wasn’t much bigger than his; Santa Fe was a small town, still well under a hundred thousand people. It was on a corner, second story, and had bigger windows. The chief also had three stars on the collar of his uniform; he still didn’t make nearly as much as, say, Giselle Demarcio. On the other hand, his money didn’t come from San Francisco and L.A. and New York, either.

Cesar’s breath hissed a little, and Salvador felt his eyes narrow. There were two suits waiting for them as well as the chief. Literally suits, natty, one woman and one man, one black and one some variety of Anglo. Both definitely from out of state; he’d have put the black woman down as FBI if he had to guess, and the younger man as some sort of spook, but not a desk man. Ex-military of some type, but not in the least retired.

Possibly from the Army of Northern Virginia, a.k.a. the Waffen-CIA.

“Sit down,” the chief said.

He was as local as Salvador and more so than Cesar, and might have been Salvador’s older cousin—in fact, they were distantly related. Right now, he was giving a good impression of someone who’d never met either of the detectives, his face like something carved out of wood on Canyon Road.

The male suit spoke. “You’re working on a case involving the Brézé family?”

“Yes,” Salvador said. “Chief, who are these people?”

“You don’t need to know,” the woman said neutrally; somehow she gave the impression of wearing sunglasses without actually doing it. More softly: “You don’t want to know.”

“They’re Homeland Security,” the chief said.

“Homeland Security is interested in weird love triangles?” Salvador said skeptically. “Besides, Homeland Security is like person, it’s sort of generic. You people FBI, Company, NSA, what?”

“You don’t need to know. You do need to know we’re handling this,” the man said.

Wait a minute, Salvador thought. He’s scared. Controlling it well, he’s a complete hardcase if I ever saw one, and hell, I’ve been one. But he’s scared.

Which made him start thinking a little uncomfortably that maybe he should be scared. The man was someone he might have been himself, if things had gone a little differently with that IED.

“Handling it how?” Salvador said, meeting his pale stare.

“We’ve got some of our best people on it.”

“Oh, Christ—” he began.

“Eric, drop it. Right now,” the chief said.

He’s scared too.

“Hey, Chief, no problem,” Cesar cut in. “It’s not like we haven’t got enough work. Right, drop it, national security business, need to know, eh?”

The two suits looked at each other and then Salvador. He nodded himself.

“Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Curiosity killed the cat, that right? And unless I want to go meow-oh-shit as my last words . . .”

“You have no idea,” the woman said, looking past him. “None at all.”

Then she turned her eyes on him. “Let’s be clear. There was no fire. There is no such thing as a Brézé family. You never heard of them. You particularly haven’t made any records or files of anything concerning them. That will be checked.”

“Sure,” he grinned. “Check what? About who?”

Salvador waited until they were back in the office before he began to swear; English, Spanish, and some Pushtu, which was about the best reviling language he’d ever come across, though some people he’d known said Arabic was better.

“Let’s get some lunch,” Cesar said, winking.

Yeah, Salvador thought. Got to remember anything can be a bug these days.

“Sure, I could use a burrito.”

When they were outside Cesar went on: “How soon you want to start poking around, jefe?”

Salvador let out his breath and rolled his head, kneading at the back of his head with one spadelike hand. The muscles there felt like a mass of woven iron rods under his hand, and he pressed on the silver chain that held the crucifix around his neck.

“It’s fucking Eurotrash terrorists now, eh?” he said.

“Yeah. Eurotrash vampire terrorists. Maybe Osama bit them?” Cesar said, still smiling.

“Or vice versa.”

“What sort of shit is going on?” Cesar said, more seriously.

“Our chances of getting that from those people . . .”

“. . . are nada.”

Cesar looked up into the cloudless blue sky. “Maybe these Brézés are just so rich they can shitcan anything they don’t like? Call me cynical . . .”

“Nah,” Salvador shook his head. “You can’t get that just with money. Not with those people, the spooks. You need heavy political leverage. Whoever they were, they were feds, and not your average cubicle slave either. They’re not going to tell any of us boondockers shit. The chief didn’t know any more than we did; he was just taking orders.”

“You sure?”

“I’ve known him a long time.”

“So . . .” Cesar said.

He leaned back against a wall. “How long do you want to let it cool before we start poking in violation of our solemn promise?”

“Couple of months,” Salvador said. “First thing, get all the data on an SD card and make some copies and let me have one. Scrub your notebook and anything you’ve got at the office. None of this ever goes on anything connected to anything else.”

Cesar grinned. “I like the way you think, jefe.”

DREAM.

The sense of sick dread got worse as the flames erupted through the door and he was flung back to lie helpless. This time he could see the figure who walked through the fire.

It was a woman, young, naked, her face doll-like and pretty with slanted eyes, hair piled up on her head in an elaborate coiffure that looked Asian. If he’d seen a picture like that, he’d have gotten horny. Instead, he felt as if giant fingernails were screeching down slate everywhere in the universe, as if he should run and run and run, and there was a stink that wasn’t physical at all, and he retched hopelessly.

“Who’s been a naughty boy?” she crooned.

Then she knelt by Johnson’s body, only it wasn’t Johnson anymore, it was Cesar, and he was naked too. They rolled in the dust, coupling like dogs, but Cesar was screaming. When she raised her head, blood masked her mouth and dripped from her chin and poured from Cesar’s throat. Yellow flecks sparkled in her dark-brown eyes.

“I just love brave men,” she said. “They’re delicious.”

“CHRIST!”

This time there were cigarettes under his searching hand. He fumbled the lighter twice. The dark coal glowed like eyes as he sucked in the smoke. Salvador fumbled for the light switch and sat with his feet on the floor. He pulled the smoke into his lungs again, coughed, inhaled again. After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he looked at the time. It was just three o’clock, which meant he’d been asleep a bit less than two hours. The air in his bedroom smelled close, despite the warm breeze that rattled the Venetian blinds against the frame of the window. Sweat cooled on his back and flanks.

He looked at the phone. “I’m not going to call. Cesar puts up with a lot, but he’s not sleeping alone. I can’t tell him I had a bad—”

The phone rang. He picked it up.

“Jefe ?

“There’s anyone else at this address?”

“Get over here. I’ve got something you need to see.”

SALVADOR KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG. HE COULD FEEL IT, A PRICKLING along the back of his neck. The house was completely dark except for the light from the streetlamp, which was very damned odd even at three thirty, since Cesar had just called him. His partner’s new Chinese import was parked in the driveway; the ground between the road and the house was gravel with a few weeds poking through. The neighborhood was utterly quiet, and the stars were bright. A cat walked by, looked at him with eyes that turned into green mirrors for an instant, and then passed. Nothing else moved.

“Shit,” he mouthed soundlessly, and pulled his Glock 22, his thumb moving the safety to off.

Then he touched the door. It swung in. He crossed the hallway, instinctively keeping the muzzle up and tucking his shoulder into the angle between the bedroom door and the wall. Then the smell hit him. He looked down. It looked black in the low light, but the tackiness under his foot was unmistakable.

“WELL, THAT’S UNIQUE,” THE CHIEF SAID.

The forensics team moved around the room. Most of them had more than one hat; Santa Fe’s police force didn’t run to elaborate hierarchies.

Salvador felt a surge of anger, and throttled it back automatically. It wouldn’t help . . . and he’d said the same sort of thing. You did, it helped you deal with what you were seeing. Usually.

Cecile was on the bed. Usually bodies didn’t have much expression, but usually they weren’t arched in a galvanic spasm that was never going to end. They’d have to break her bones to get her into a body bag. The look on her face was not quite like anything he’d ever seen. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat.

Cesar was naked, lying on his face between the bed and the window. His pistol was in his right hand; the spent brass of fourteen shells littered the floor around him. Most of them were in the coagulating blood, turned dark red now with brown spots. In his left was clutched a knife, not a fighting knife, some sort of tableware. A wedge of glass as broad as a man’s hand at its base was in his throat, the point coming out the back of his neck.

“This is a murder-suicide,” the chief said quietly.

Salvador stirred. The older man didn’t look at him. “That’s exactly what it is, Eric.”

He doesn’t call me by my first name very often.

“Probably that’s what the evidence will show. Sir,” Salvador added.

I’ve seen friends die before. I didn’t sit down and cry. I did my job. I can do it now.

He hadn’t been this angry then, either. He’d killed every mouj he could while he was on the rock pile, and that had been a good round number, but he hadn’t usually hated them. Sort of a sour disgust, most of the time; he hadn’t thought of them as personal enough to hate, really.

This is extremely personal.

“Chief.”

That was one of the evidence squad. He walked around the pool of blood to them. “We got something on the windowsill, going out. Sort of strange. When did you say you got here, Salvador?”

“Three thirty. Half an hour after . . . Cesar called me.”

The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.

Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he’d recorded on the ledge turned into a print. A paw print.

“You notice a dog? Or something else like that?”

“No,” he said dully. “Just a cat.”

“Well, that’s not it.” The print was too large for a house cat. “Probably just something drawn by the smell.”

“Time of death?”

“Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything’s fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in.”

The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

“You know you can’t be on this investigation, Eric,” the older man said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle and get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off.”

Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard, and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to St. Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings, probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.

“Okay, Cesar, talk to me,” he said aloud, and slid the data card he’d palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he’d left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. “This better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabron.”

The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.

Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home-officecum-TV-room, lit only by one small lamp.

“I’m recording this before you get here, jefe, ’cause I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when, you know? They said there were some interesting anomalies and did I want any more information on the Brézé guy, and they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough.”

Cesar’s image licked its lips; Salvador could see that, but his mind superimposed how he’d looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.

“Okay, it was stupid. I should have asked them Who dat? or just hit the spam blocker. We weren’t getting anywhere, creeping Adrian Brézé’s house is desperation stuff, so I downloaded. Here’s what I got, repeated a whole lot of times.”

Letters appeared, a paragraph of boldface:

—youaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouareso—

“I—”

“Cesar!” A scream, a woman’s voice, high and desperate. Then: “Don’t—don’t—please , don’t—”

Then just screaming. Cesar snatched up the pistol and ran. Salvador heard himself screaming too, as the shots began. Then more sounds, for a long time. Then another face in the screen.

It was the woman he’d seen in the dream; he could tell, even though her face was one liquid sheet of dull red. Only the golden flecks in her eyes showed bright, and then her teeth were very white when she licked them clean.

“You are so fucked,” she crooned, and the screen went black.

THE ROAD TO ADRIAN BRÉZÉ’S HOUSE WAS TEN MILES NORTH ON THE I-25 and then east. The empty highway stretched through the night, cool air flowing in through the open windows as the tires hummed. He was going to his death—but maybe he’d learn something. Maybe the world would make sense again.

Since when has it made sense anyway? I’m thirty-two years old, no wife, no kids, and my best friend just died because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The only thing I’ve ever been any good at was killing people and frightening them. Cesar had twice my brains and now he’s dead and his girl’s dead.

East, and then north again on a dirt road. The Sangres low on the horizon in the light of the three-quarter moon. That and the stars were the only light as the last gas station fell away, and only a few distant earthbound stars marked houses. The road turned, winding in the pitch-dark night, and then a steep drop to his left, a hundred near-vertical feet; this was the edge of the plateau. He forced himself to stop when the wheels skidded and a spray of gravel fanned out and out of sight. He clenched his hands on the wheel.

“Am I trying to kill myself?” he murmured. Then: “No. Not yet. I’ve got to find out what this all means.”

Instead, he got out and walked down the last stretch of road. The night scents were strong, the sweaty leather of chamisos, the strong resin of the bleeding pines. Gravel crunched under his feet—it was nearly six months since Adrian Brézé had vanished, and the housekeeper came in only once a month to clean. The house itself was built right into the edge of the cliff; the final dip in the road left him looking down on its fieldstone walls. The high copper-surfaced door swung open to his touch, and a few soft lights came on under the high metal ceiling.

Yeah, about what I expected, he thought.

The whole of the opposite wall was glass, right at the edge of the cliff. It fell in crags and gullies washed pale by the moon, until the rolling surface of the semidesert stretched eastward to the edge of sight. There were a couple of pictures on the walls, ancient and beautiful.

“Why did I think I could find something here?” he said aloud.

“Maybe a little bird told you.”

The voice seemed to come from behind him. He wheeled. Nothing. Back again . . . and the woman was there. A spurt of dreadful joy filled him. This wasn’t a dream, or pixels. That was an actual person in front of him. There was even an appendix scar.

He raised the Glock in the regulation grip, left hand under right.

Crack. Crack.

The ten-millimeter bullets punched into her belly and she folded backward.

Crack.

Two in the center of mass, one in the head; the last snapped her head around in a whirling of long black hair and a spray of blood and the bullet starred through the glass behind her. He felt his teeth begin to show as he walked toward her. The gold-flecked eyes were already beginning to glaze.

Then her head came up. “Oooooh, that hurt,” she said. “That can be sort of hot, you know? For starters. Then I get to hurt you. You like that, lover?”

Salvador leaped backward, almost fell as he half-sprawled against a malachite-surfaced table of rough-cast glass, then wrenched himself into a crouched firing position.

Crack. Crack. Crack—

Ten shots. Five hit. Five more punched the great window behind, starring it, then collapsing it out in a shatter of milky fragments.

“Ooooo, ooooo, you’re so rough,” the thing laughed as it advanced on him, laughing.

A hand reached out toward his neck. Then jerked back as she hissed:

“We really have to do something about those silver chains. Maybe we could make people think they cause cancer?”

She dabbed at the blood on the side of her head and stuck the fingers in her mouth for a moment, tongue curling around them.

“Mmmmm, tasty! But you want to take that stupid chain off, don’t you . . . that’s right . . .”

The eyes grew, the yellow flecks drawing together like drops of molten gold, running into two lakes of fire. Depth, depth, drawing him into a whirling—

She screamed, pain and rage. The great ten-foot wings beat behind her as the talons slammed home and the hooked beak drove into her neck. The snow-leopard rolled over and over—

—leopard?—

its paws striking in a blur of speed and claws. The eagle dropped out of the air into a huge tawny something and the big cats rolled over and over shrieking and striking and lunging for each other’s throats as furniture smashed and broken glass crunched under their weight. Then the man was standing with his back to Salvador, every muscle in his lean body standing out like static waves as his thumbs dug into her throat. She was making the same bestial snarling sound as she reared back with a knee braced against his chest and her hands driving up between his forearms—

CRACK!

Much louder this time. The double splash of impact and her skull started to deform under the huge kinetic energy, and then a sparkle, and she was gone. Blood fell to the floor, with a sharp, sour, iron-salt smell. The man went to one knee for a second, panting, then rose and turned.

“You’re Adrian Brézé,” he said, trying to make his mind function again.

The gun came up, almost of its own volition. The slim dark man pointed a finger at him.

“Don’t. Just don’t. It’s been a long day.”

He cast a glance over his shoulder; the first paling of the night sky showed that dawn was coming, and he winced a little.

“I’d better go corporeal. Right back, Detective Salvador.”

Salvador looked down at the pistol. Why the hell not? he thought, and began to bring it up toward his mouth. That’s safer. Only amateurs try to shoot themselves in the head . . .

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Why don’t you kill me? Why don’t you kill me?” he screamed. “Why don’t you just fucking kill me?”

“That’s why don’t they fucking kill you,” the man said. “I can tell you, if you want to know.”

“You’re one of them.”

Brézé was slight, a bit below medium height, pale olive skin and dark hair and gold-flecked brown eyes . . .

“You’re Adrian Brézé!”

“Yes.”

Salvador drew breath in, held it, let it out. “Okay, I get it: I’m supposed to believe you’re a good monster.”

“Oh, he’s a great monster, believe me. But all mine.”

Salvador jerked at the other voice, looked down at the pistol, then dropped it to the table he was sitting on. A copper box had spilled open, full of slim cigarettes. He took one out and lit it; some distant part of himself was proud of the fact that his hand didn’t shake. The second voice belonged to a woman. Tall, blond, dressed in dark outdoor clothes and boots, with a knit cap over her head and a rifle cradled in her arms—he recognized it, big Brit sniper job, long scope, aircraft-alloy body.

“You’re . . . Ellen Tarnowski.”

“Technically, Ellen Brézé, now. No, I’m not one of them. You don’t catch it from getting bit.”

A sudden charming smile. “And believe me, I know! Not even from getting married to one.”

“I get the feeling you’ve changed.”

“I had to . . . ah . . . take a couple of levels in badass, let’s say.”

“You killed her.”

His eyes went back to the puddle of blood; there wasn’t a body.

“Oh, yes.” Her eyes were large and turquoise blue; for a moment they held a hot satisfaction. “There’s a body, probably a long way away, but it’s empty now.”

“That . . . that wasn’t his sister, was it?”

“No. That was Michiko. She’s a friend of his sister. Sort of a wannabe Mistress of Ultimate Darkness.”

Brézé was back. Now he was dressed, in the same sort of clothes; a light jacket covered a shoulder rig with a knife worn hilt-down on one flank and a Glock on the other.

“All right,” Salvador said, taking a pull on the cigarette. “Fill me in. I know I’m really somewhere under heavy meds, baying at the moon.”

For some reason, that made Adrian Brézé smile. “I’m a Shadowspawn . . . that’s what we call ourselves, mostly. But . . . well, I try not to be a monster. It’s complicated. You can choose to learn, or you can choose to forget. If you forget, you can make yourself a new life. If you learn, it’ll probably kill you—but at least you’ll know why you’re fighting, mon ami.”

“If you offer me a blue pill and a red pill, I’ll fucking kill you!”

The couple laughed. “It’s actually two file cards. Take your pick.”

“Knowledge—and you can try being the guerrilla. Ignorance—and long life.”

Salvador looked at the butt of the cigarette. Then he tossed it accurately into the blood; it hissed into extinction.

“Like that’s really a choice?”