Free A Taint in the Blood by S. M. Stirling Page A

a tray with small glasses, a bowl of caviar and strips of toast, the girl the mouthpiece of a water-pipe. They looked Asian, with the extremely high cheekbones, ruddy skin and flat faces found from Mongolia northward.
    The man was quite different, sharp-featured, with long pale hair and gray eyes and a thin pointed nose, his torso lean but the muscles sharply defined.
    What Vladimir Putin wishes he looked like, Ellen thought. What he’d look like if he were in his thirties and not ugly.
    She flushed as his eyes slid over her. She’d thought she knew what it was to have a man look at her like a piece of meat.
    But I didn’t. That’s a flip-her-over-and-fuck-her glance, all right, but it’s also a literal piece-of-meat look. Or a bottle-of-good-hooch look. Oh, Jesus this is scary. I wish I could wake up!
    “ Dobry den’, Dmitri Pavlovitch ,” Adrienne said. “ Kak vashi dela?” in
    “I’m in fucking Siberia in February, Adrienne Juliyevna,” he said in good English, only about as accented as hers. “It’s cold , and that is how I am, and to make matters worse I am in fucking Seversk, which is not even the arsehole of Siberia. It is a chancre upon the lower intestine of Siberia. And I am stuck here until the Council relents. Where are you?”
    “On my jet, bound for California.” She smiled. “Just think how much better it would be if you were in a castle without central heating or plumbing, and I was traveling by coach or rowed by galley slaves, talking to you by telepathy .”
    He laughed. “The galley slaves would have their points.”
    “Not as a means of transportation .”
    “Certainly not here! If you spit, it freezes before it hits the ground. Though the long nights have been convenient. I have gotten in some excellent hunting.”
    “What game?”
    “Bears by day. Chechens or Tartars by night, mostly. And the odd wandering tourist. Nobody misses them, and they look so surprised. One had but the guidebook said tigers are extinct here as her last words, I swear to God.”
    He smiled. “But we are impolite. First we should honor our ancient heritage with the traditional signs.”
    He made a gesture with his left hand. “Hail to the Dread Empire of Shadows and the Secret Reign that is to come!”
    Adrienne raised her right hand, divided the first and second fingers from the fourth and fifth to form a V, and solemnly intoned:
    “Live long and prosper!”
    Ellen bit back a startled snort. Then they both stuck their index fingers in their ears, waggled the little fingers and chanted:
    “Uga-Chuga . . . Uga-Chuga . . . Bow! Wow! Wow!”
    With both fists in the air: “Goooooo TEAM!”
    Both dissolved in laughter. “Ah, Adrienne, it does me good to speak with you again, after dealing with the Gheorghe Brâncuşi matter for so long. If you knew how many times I had to actually go through those pseudo-medieval rituals, as if I was some legend-besotted Victorian secret-society occultist like our ancestors . . .”
    “You haven’t had to deal with the Demon Daimyo of the West Coast as long as I have, Dmitri. Any real progress?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Progress that can be laid before the Council. Let us toast success!”
    He made another gesture, one that seemed natural; forefinger to thumb, like the sign for OK , and a finger tapped to the neck. Then he reached for the tray, dipping a strip of the dark toast into the caviar, and taking one of the small glasses.
    Ellen almost missed Adrienne’s signal. She turned and took the service from Theresa and bent to put it on the sideboard and pour; it had a dark rich aroma, different from anything she’d smelled before. Her flush grew deeper as her full breasts swayed with the gesture; the whole thing made her feel horribly like an extra glimpsed in some obtrusive pop-up ad for an Internet porn site.
    “Za vashe zdorovye!”
    He downed the whole glass, Russian-style.
    “À votre santé , ” she answered and sipped the cognac, following it with black