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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.”
    “Oh, you are always so
serious
, Étienne,” a woman’s voice said. “Wasting this splendid golden creature on mere breeding when she is obviously meant for pleasure!”
    Seraphine Brézé’s natural appearance—insofar as the term had any meaning with a post-corporeal—would have been very much like Adrianor his sister. Today she was wearing one of her victims, a petite Asian woman in a tight sheath crimson
áo dài
, slit nearly to the waist at the sides over some sort of hose and jeweled slippers. She had acquired it during the French conquest of Indochina, an after-dinner story of which she was fond. Her piled hair was secured by long golden pins whose ends were wrought into Art Nouveau butterflies by Lalique. She took her spouse’s arm and smiled at them:
    “Such a fascinating mind…it would be a pity not to kill her, a wonderful project spanning years, spanning circle upon descending circle of horror and pain, spiritual and physical torment and degradation complementing each other. Only a great soul is capable of a really satisfying despair, which adds so much to the experience…”
    “My dear, you paint an enchanting picture, but perhaps another time?”
    The doll-like face smiled at Ellen impishly. “They can be such…such grim puritans, the men, can they not?”
    Ellen contented herself with another curtsey, and they moved ahead to let the next in line follow.
    “You know,” she said when they were hopefully out of earshot, “this assumption that I’d be a party pooper not to appreciate the grand fun of my own slow-tortured demise gets really old, quickly. She isn’t the first Shadowspawn to suggest it, either.”
    “Even humans are prone to solipsism,” Adrian replied. “Imagine being a thing of murderous power and darkness and unfettered will for generation after