James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (17 page)

“Lionel's gone,” Lady Ernchester said softly. Her tea-brown eyes went to Asher. She had put up her hair again and bore no evidence of her struggle with Grippen beyond the fact that she had changed her dress for a dark gown of purple-black taffeta. Asher wondered if Minette had made it for her.

“You've made a dangerous enemy; his hand's welted up where he touched the silver of your chain.”

Asher privately thought it served the master vampire right, but refrained from saying so. His whole body was stiff and aching from the impact with the wall. He was still, he reminded himself, quite probably in desperate and immediate danger, but, nevertheless, Grippen's absence comforted him. He prowled over to the small cabinet that stood under the gas jet and opened its drawers. They were empty.

“Lionel did that,” Anthea's voice came from behind him. “He tells me he did the same at Neddy's house.”

“He's the one who seems to be locking the barn door after the horse has escaped.” Asher turned back, roving cautiously about the room, examining the French books in the bookshelves, the cushions on the camel-backed divan. He glanced across at Ysidro, who had gone to stand next to Anthea's chair. “If silver affects you that badly, how do you purchase what you need?”

“As any gentleman of fashion can tell you,” Anthea said with a faint smile, “one can go for years—centuries, even—without actually touching cash. In earlier years we used gold. Flimsies—bank notes, and later treasury notes—were a godsend, but one must always tip. I've found that in general there is enough of a chill at night to warrant the wearing of gloves.”

“But they've got to be leather,” Chloe put in ungraciously. “And I mean good leather, none of your kid; it'll bum right through silk.”

Anthea frowned. “Does it? I never found it so.”

Ysidro held up one long, white hand. “I suspect it toughens a little with time. I know if you had touched silver as Grippen did, Chloe, your arm would have been swollen to the shoulder for weeks, and you would have been ill into the bargain. So it was with me, up almost to the time of the Fire. It is curiously fragile stuff, this pseudoflesh of ours.”

“I remember,” Anthea said slowly. 'The first time I touched silver—it was bullion lace on the sleeve of one of my old gowns, I think—it not only hurt me at the time, but it made me very ill. I remember being desperately thirsty and unable to hunt. Charles had to hunt for me—bring me . . ." She broke off suddenly and looked away, her beautiful face impassive. Thinking about it, Asher realized that the logical prey to capture and bring back alive to Ernchester House had to be something human—since it was the death of the human psyche as much as the physical blood that the vampires seemed to crave—but small enough to be easily transportable.

“Kiddies?” Chloe laughed, cold and tingling, like shaken silver bells. “God, you could have had the lot of my brothers and sisters—puking little vermin. Dear God, and the youngest of 'em has brats of her own now . . .” She paused and turned her face away suddenly, her mouth pressing tight; a delicate, beautiful face that would never grow old. She took a deep breath, a conscious gesture, to steady herself, then went on evenly. “Funny—I see girls who was in the Opera ballet with me back then, years too old to dance now—years too old to get anythin' on the streets but maybe a real nearsighted sailor. I could go into the Opera right now and get my old job back in the ballet, you know? Old Harry the stage man would even recognize me, from bein' the prop boy then.”

She fell silent again, staring before her with her great dark eyes, as if seeing into that other time—like Anthea, Asher thought, standing on Harrow Hill and feeling the furnace heat of burning London washing over her mortal flesh. After a moment, Chloe said in a strange voice, “It's queer, that's all.” Asher felt the pressure of her mind on his, as she made her swift, sudden exit from the room.

Anthea glanced quickly at her husband; Ernchester, much more quietly, almost invisibly, followed the girl out.

“It becomes easier,” the Countess said softly, turning back to Asher, “once those we knew in life are all—gone. One is not—reminded. One can—pretend.” Her dark brows drew down again, that small gesture making her calm face human again. “Even when one is for all practical purposes immortal, age is unsettling.” And getting to her feet, she followed her husband in a whisper of dark taffeta from the room.

For a long time Asher stood where he had been by the fireplace, his arms folded, regarding Ysidro by the pink and amber glow of the shaded lights. The vampire remained standing by the vacated chair, his gaze still resting thoughtfully on the door, and Asher had the impression he listened to the lady's retreating footfalls blending away into the other sounds of London, the rattle of traffic in Salisbury Place and the nocturnal roar of Fleet Street beyond, the deep vibration of the Underground, the sough of the river below the Embankment, and the voices of those who crowded its flagways in the night.

At length Ysidro said, “It is a dangerous time in Chloe's life.” The enigmatic gaze returned to him, still remote, without giving anything away. “It happens to vampires. There are stages—I have seen them myself, passed through them myself, some of them . . . When a vampire has existed thirty, forty years, and sees all his friends dying, growing senile, or changing unrecognizably from what they were in the sweetness of a shared youth. Or at a hundred or so, when the whole world mutates into something other than what he grew up with; when all the small things that were so precious to him are no longer even remembered. When there is no one left who recalls the voices of the singers which so inextricably formed the warp and weft of his days, Then it is easy to grow careless, and the sun will always rise.”

He glanced over at Asher, and that odd ghost of what had once been a half-rueful, bittersweet smile flicked back onto the thin lines of his face. “Sometimes I think Charles and Anthea are becoming—friable— that way. They change with the times, as we all must, but it becomes more and more difficult. I still become enraged when shopkeepers are impertinent to me, when these grubby hackney cabs dart out in front of me in the street, or when I see the filth of factory soot fouling the sky. We are, like Dr. Swift's Struldbruggs, old people, and we tend to the unreasonable conservatism of the old. Very little is left of the world as it was in King Charles' day, and nothing, I fear, remains of the world I knew. Except Grippen, of course.” The smile turned sardonic. “What a companion for one's immortality.”

He strolled over to the fireplace where Asher stood and prodded with one well-shod toe at the cold debris within, a millefeuille of white paper ash, like that which had decorated Neddy Hammersmith's long-cold hearth. “That is, provided, of course,” he added ironically, “one survives the first few years, the terrible dangers of simply learning how to be a vampire.”

“Did Rhys the Minstrel teach you?”

“Yes.” It was the first softening Asher had seen in those gleaming eyes. “He was a good master—a good teacher. It was, you understand, more dangerous in those days, for in those days folk believed in us.”

It was on the tip of Asher's tongue to ask about that, but instead he asked, “Did you know Calvaire created a fledgling?”

The cold eyes seemed to widen and harden, the long, thin nostrils flared. “He what?”

“He created a fledgling,” Asher said.

“How do you know this?”

“I've spoken to him,” Asher said, “A man named Bully Joe Davies, from Lambeth or thereabouts—he said he'd break my neck if I told anyone of it, particularly yourself. You seem,” he added dryly, “to enjoy a certain reputation among your peers.”

“Do you refer,” the vampire asked coldly, “to that rabble of stevedores, sluts, and tradesmen as my peers? The Farrens come close, but, when all's said, his grandfather was no more than a jumped-up baron ...”

“Your fellows, then,” Asher amended. “And in any case, I trust you'll protect me. He says he's being followed—stalked. I'm supposed to meet him later tonight, to go to another of Calvaire's safe houses.”

Ysidro nodded; Asher could see the thought moving in the pale labyrinth of his eyes.

He walked over to the cabinet again, ran a finger, idly questing, through its emptied pigeonholes, every scrap of evidence of contacts burned by the cautious Grippen lest any should do what Asher had done—trace a name, a shop, an address, that would lead him to another cellar where a vampire might sleep. He glanced back at the vampire, standing quietly in the molten halo of the lamplight.

“I hadn't intended on telling you that,” he went on after a moment. "But I've been finding out some things tonight about Calvaire, a little, and about vampires. I understand now why you've been lying to me all along. In a way, Grippen is right. You'd be an absolute fool to hire a human to track down your killer, much less tell him who and what you are—if your killer is human. But you don't think he is,

“In fact, you think the killer is another vampire.”

I don't see how that could be." As she walked, Lydia folded her arms across her chest against the chill that dampened even the changeable sunlight of the autumn forenoon. Beside the dull purple-brown of her coat, her red hair, pinned under the only unobtrusive hat in her vast collection, seemed blazingly bright; her spectacles winked like a heliograph when she turned her head. In spite of them, she looked absurdly young, with a delicate prettiness which would have seemed touchingly vulnerable to anyone who had never seen her in the dissection rooms.

Asher, at her side, kept a weather eye out across the sepia vistas of lawn and copse to both sides of the walk, but saw few other strollers. It had rained late in the night, and Hyde Park bore a slightly dispirited air; scudding clouds were collecting again overhead. A few black-clothed nannies hustled then- charges at double time through a rapid constitutional before the rain should commence again; that was all.

“Neither does Ysidro,” Asher said. “But he suspected all along that the killer wasn't human. It's why he had to hire a human and, moreover, find one who could or would believe in vampires, who could operate to some degree independently—why he had to tell me what he was, in spite of the opposition from the other vampires. I think the others might have suspected they were dealing with a vampire, too. No human could stalk a vampire unseen—a human would be lucky to see one in the first place, let alone either recognize it for what it is or keep it in sight.”

“You did,” she pointed out.

Asher shook his head. “A fledgling, and an untrained one, at that,” His glance skimmed the borders of the trees that half hid the steely gleam of the Serpentine, off to their left. Like Bully Joe Davies, he found himself wondering all the time now about shadows, noises, bent blades of grass . . .

“Did Bully Joe Davies ever turn up?”

“No. Ysidro and I waited until almost dawn. He just might have seen Ysidro and sheered off, but I doubt it. However, I think we'll be able to locate Calvaire's rooms in Lambeth—if he has them, and I'm virtually certain he does—by tracking property purchases since February, which was when Calvaire came here from Paris. If Calvaire was attempting to establish a power base in London—which he seems to have been doing, since he made a fledgling—he'd have bought property. Since Grippen didn't know about it, either, we may find something there.”

They walked in silence for a time, the wind tugging now and then at the ends of Asher's scarf and at Lydia's skirts and coat.

Lydia nodded. “I'm wondering whether all vampires fall asleep at the same time—into the deep sleep. For, of course, just because the windows were opened to let in the sunlight doesn't mean that it was done while the sun was in the sky.”

“I suppose, if the killer were a vampire, he might have—oh, a half-hour or so—to get to safety,” Asher said, “More than enough, in London. And it would certainly solve the question of why he believed in vampires in the first place, let alone knew where to look.”

“In all the books, the vampire hunter drives a stake through the vampire's heart,” Lydia remarked thoughtfully. “If this one did, everything's been too charred to tell, but Lotta's head was certainly severed. If the sun weren't yet in the sky, I wonder if that would wake a sleeping vampire?—for that matter, if the mere opening of the coffin would do so? Are you sure I can't put my hand in your pocket?”

“Quite sure,” Asher said, fighting his own inclination to walk closer to her, to hold out his arm to hers, or to have some kind of physical contact with this woman. “In spite of the evidence that the killer is a vampire, I still don't feel safe meeting you, even by daylight . . .”

She widened her brown eyes at him behind the schoolgirl specs. “Perhaps I could disguise myself as a pickpocket? Or if I tripped and stumbled, and you caught me? Or fainted?” She put a gloved hand dramatically to her brow. “I feel an attack of the vapors coining on now . . .”

“No,” Asher said firmly, grinning,

She frowned and tucked her hands primly into her muff. “Very well, but the next time Uncle Ambrose goes on about Plato and Platonic friendship, I'll have a few words to say to him. No wonder Don Simon didn't seem to worry too much about your allying yourself with the killer, as you'd originally thought you might. Do you still plan to do that, by the way?”

“I don't know,” Asher said. “It isn't out of court entirely, but I'd have to know a good deal more than I do now. The fact that he's destroying them for reasons of his—or her—own doesn't mean he wouldn't destroy me with just as much alacrity.” Or you, he added to himself, looking at that slim figure beside him, like a heroine of legend lying beside the hero, separated by a drawn sword.

Lydia nodded, accepting the change in a situation upon which her life depended with her usual calm trust. They walked along for a time, Lydia apparently sunk in her own trains of thought; Asher was content—almost—only to be with her, the dun gravel of the damp path scrunching faintly under their feet. Off across the gray lawns, a dog barked, the sound carrying fantastically in the cold air.

“Have you any idea how much light it takes to destroy their flesh?”