A Taint in the Blood by S. M. Stirling

Author:S. M. Stirling [Stirling, S. M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780451463418
Amazon: 0451463412
Publisher: Bill
Published: 0101-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Adrian gave a gasping scream as he felt his body wake. Waken from nightmare of being caught by the sun in night-walker form, of his self peeling away in flakes and strings of fire…

“Ah, you’re with us again,” Harvey said. “Give it a few minutes and maybe you’ll stop wishing you weren’t.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, flicked it out the window and pulled over. Wet gravel pinged and crunched under the wheels as the car slowed and stopped.

“Sorry this is cold,” he went on, sliding into the rear seat.

He put a blood-bag from the cooler to Adrian’s mouth. It wasn’t very old, which made it a little less horrible; he must have stocked up at the hospital. Adrian gasped again, drank, retched, clapped his hands to his mouth.

“Water,” he rasped through his fingers. “Then more.”

He drank and swallowed the pills the other man shook into his hand. Then he curled around himself, hugging knees to chest. Gradually the shaking and chills and the sick pain behind his eyes and in his temples subsided, along with the missing spots and bits of glitter in his vision. He became conscious of something beside the gray misery inside his skull, took Harvey’s arm and used it to help lever himself upright; a sleeping bag he hadn’t noticed fell away from his shoulders, and he clutched it back for the warmth. The thin cotton of the hospital gown only emphasized the chill against which the car’s asthmatic heater strained.

It was a nondescript Toyota Venza, flaking red and old enough to be unremarkable, smelling of ancient cheap stale tobacco, his own cigarettes which Harvey had presumably plundered and nameless things and children and dogs.

Harvey probably lifted it, he thought.

Some absent corner of his mind noted that they’d have to dump the hot vehicle; he could simply buy something from a used lot. Outside was the gray of a Central Valley wintertime tule fog, thick enough that he couldn’t see more than ten yards in any direction. The world was a bubble of cold, dark-gray nothingness, with a few bare-limbed trees along the edge of the field dripping moisture on flat black mud. The air was heavy with it, a chilly, silty smell with an undertone of manure and vegetable rot.

“Name of a black dog, it looks and smells just precisely the way I feel!” he said.

Inside, somewhere in the depths of his mind, there was a dull wonder that he didn’t say: I do not care. Back to Santa Fe, me, and goodbye to you, Harvey! The physical misery was enough to swamp emotion; the memory of Ellen was distant. It was a commitment of the will that kept the words unsaid.

To love someone is not to feel loving continuously. That is impossible, for humans or Shadowspawn either. It is to always act that way.

“Bit strenuous?” Harvey asked.

“You might say,” he said, letting his head fall back. “What a fuckup. Adrienne was waiting for me again. After,” he added bitterly, “spending the previous four

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