The Kindred of Darkness (19 page)

Were they keeping Miranda in such a place?

Terror of such a thing ground through him, distracting his thought.
I will kill them
…

Present and clear as if she were cradled in his arms he felt the extraordinary silkiness of her baby hair – orange-red as poppies – against his lips, smelled the sweetness of her skin, when he'd kissed her before leaving for Venice. He'd loved Lydia almost from the moment he met her, his deep affection for the child merging into love as he'd seen her grow from girl to womanhood, but the love he bore his daughter had been instant and total, a sort of soul-deep daffiness that defied description or challenge.

He could not put her image from his mind. Sleeping … gravely searching his study for her alphabet-blocks … snatching at milkweed pods with tiny hands in the garden …

If I don't get her back … if I can't get her back
…

Years of work for the Department had taught him precisely how many things could go wrong with the most foolproof of arrangements. …

At the last minute he realized he was surrounded –
Jesus, I didn't even hear them!
– as shadows materialized from between the buildings of the narrow court into which he'd somehow wandered in his abstraction, as hands grabbed him from both sides by the arms. He tried to wrench free but was slammed like a rag-doll into the brick of the wall behind him, and in the near-pitch darkness, discerned the shape of a man who stepped in front of him, and the steely glitter of a drawn knife.

‘Help me …'

Damien Zahorec's voice, barely more than a whisper among the murmur of the leaves around her.

‘Lydia, help me …'

Yew leaves. Lydia identified them, with the clarity of eyesight that she invariably enjoyed in dreams.

The garden maze at Wycliffe House. High over her head, she could see the ragged line of the bushes against a sky black and clear and bannered with stars, a sky such as she had never seen in London in her life. No glare of street-lights reflected on river fog and smoke. It was like the sky at sea, jeweled infinity down to the horizon.

‘I need you …' There was desperate weariness in his voice, the weariness of the prisoner she'd seen in his cell.

She followed the maze's turnings, the way she remembered from childhood.
He'll be in the belvedere at the center
. Smelled recent rain on the leaves, and from the damp gravel underfoot. In the weeds of the lawn at the maze's center her stiff satin skirts whispered on curled brown leaves. Damien Zahorec rose from the broken plinth of the miniature temple, and the linen of his shirt hung open to show his jailer's bite-marks on his throat. Infinite loneliness seemed to surround him and yet in a small corner at the bottom of her heart, Lydia was aware that this was artificial, like the radiant blondness of her stepmother's hair.

A very good job … but a job, nonetheless.

‘Why did you run from me?'

‘You sounded like you had other fish to fry.' She threw a wistful note into her voice. ‘This is a dream, isn't it?'

His face gentle and a little sad, he held out his hand to her. She put hers behind her back, remained where she stood.

‘Don't be like the others,' he pleaded. ‘They look at me and see one who is beyond salvation, beyond hope. Or they want to use me. To use these gifts that I have, these abilities that I swear every waking moment that I will not use …' He spread his hands, begging.

‘I don't understand.'

There was a thing that vampires did. Lydia had experienced it before: a crushing sleepiness, a period of blank unawareness that wasn't exactly sleep, as if the mind uncoupled itself from her awareness …

And then she was in the circle of pillars, and in his arms. His grip was gentle, careful, yet crushingly strong, his lips on hers soft and cool as rose petals. (
How does he keep his fangs out of the way during a kiss? Or do I just not notice
?) Her whole body responded, with a cresting frantic awareness of the shape and strength of his back under her hands, a thousand times more powerful than the passion she felt in Jamie's arms. She let him tilt her head back, kiss her throat and her breast. The nip of his teeth was feather-light on the skin, not drawing blood – a testing, to see how she'd take it.

Her desperate body ached for more. (
He's influencing glandular reactions on the nerves in some fashion
…) His body pressed hers against the wall. (
What wall? We're in a circle of pillars
…) His breath hot against her neck. (
Vampires don't breathe
…) His hands doing things to her, calling responses from her that she'd never dreamed possible. She was aware of her heart racing. (
A hundred and twelve beats per minute
? She wondered if she had a watch in this dream to time it.) Her knees trembling and growing weak. (
At a hundred and twelve beats per minute that's no surprise
…) Aware of the tangy salt smell of his flesh, and the scent of the pines beyond the window. (
Window?
)

She opened her eyes and saw they were in his prison cell.

‘She's coming,' he whispered. ‘She'll take me, change me. Force me under the shadow of damnation … Make me her slave. Lydia, I'm begging you. Help me.'

Though she knew transition to the vampire state to be voluntary – although the alternative was death – she gasped, as she was fairly certain Cecelia Armistead had gasped before her, ‘What can I do?'

With a convulsive sob he thrust her from him, and she saw that they were definitely in his cell. He pushed her behind him, away from the door as it opened, and the dark woman stood framed there, the dark woman who'd smiled to him when as a living man she'd encountered him at that candlelit gathering. She saw Lydia (
how much of this is a dream?
) and her face twisted. ‘Who is this?' She reached toward Lydia with a hand tipped by long vampire claws, and Damien caught her wrists.

‘She is no one …'

She flung him aside with the terrible strength of the vampire, and as Lydia backed away (
oh, God, what if this isn't a dream?
) Damien sprang up, seized the woman's arms. ‘Ippolyta, don't …'

The woman Ippolyta turned upon him, seized his arm with a grip that drove her nails into his flesh. She dragged him to her by the hair at the back of his head and thrust him to his knees, kneeling over him while she released her grip for the second it took to rip his throat with her claws.

His eyes met Lydia's in that last mortal second and he gasped, ‘Run!' and Lydia fell back another step as the vampire woman fastened her lips on the spouting wound. Her black hair fell from its twisted braids, half covering his face; the black silk of her garments billowed around them like a cloud, the jewels in it flashing like half-concealed lightning. Lydia saw his hand grip the woman's arm, frantically trying to thrust her away, then clinging as if he felt himself swing suspended over the blackness of a deeper abyss.

‘Lydia, run … and wait for me. I will come …'

She woke trembling, her whole body reverberant with the memory of his lips, his hands, his strength … his blood black-red in moonlight …

What a farrago of nonsense!

The dry pungency of garlic filled the darkness. Beyond the windows of her bedroom she heard the dim chiming of the Great Tom bell in Christ Church College's gatehouse. Heard birds begin to sing.

If he thought I'd fall for that I think I've just been insulted
.

But the taste of his lips lingered in her memory as the first stains of day infused the sky.

‘Y
ou Asher?'

The hands that crushed the silver links under his shirt-cuffs into his flesh were warm. The bodies pressed against his on both sides stank of the living, not the dead. Someone dug at his throat with fingers like tanned leather and pulled his collar away, grabbed the handful of silver chains.

‘Looks like,' grunted a voice accompanied by a wash of beer and dental caries.

Other hands tore open his cuffs, stripped the silver from his wrists and his left hand.

‘Oi'll take them,' said the man in front of him, a deadly quiet voice with a south Irish
dh
to his speech. ‘Grippen said he'd be wantin' 'em.' He held out his hand and Asher heard the protective metal jingle as it went into the man's palm and pocket. ‘And that one you kept out, Jem,' added the Irishman, and the man holding Asher's arm cursed unimaginatively and handed it over.

‘It's real silver.'

‘And Grippen's real easy to fool, ain't he, then?'

The would-be thief didn't even attempt a rebuttal.

‘Let's be havin' no monkey tricks then, Professor.' The Irishman yanked Asher's neckerchief free of his collar, used it to bind his eyes.

‘I wouldn't dream of it.'

In the clammy darkness somewhere nearby, he smelled the whiff of blood.

The stink of sewage and coal smoke and the river; the occasional brush of wet bricks against his shoulder or sleeve. Voices yammering. A woman screamed
Spendthrift!
and
Godless drunkard!
in Romanian and a man yelled that he owed nothing to a shrewish whore. Neighbors shouted at them both to shut up. Someone played a barrel organ, a shrill rickety approximation of ‘
Il balen del suo sorriso …
'

Ships hooted on the river, not more than a few streets away.
The old inn near the Tower
…

Steps underfoot, deeply worn in the centers, slick with moisture and stinking of vomit and piss. A door creaked and he smelled the musty reek of filthy bedding on top of the other myriad stinks of poverty, overcrowding, degradation. An uneven floor beneath the crunchy sponginess of soiled straw.

The men holding his arms fell silent and Asher smelled blood again, a moment before Grippen's claws scratched his face in pulling the blindfold down.

‘Leave him go.' The Master of London's voice was cold slag. ‘And get out.'

The feeble gleam of a dark lantern showed Asher brick support piers crumbling to nothing, and between them what might have been two dozen makeshift bunks in a space barely larger than his parlor in Oxford.

The bunks were empty. From the darkness that clotted the farther end of the room a draft breathed the scent of deeper underground, mud and wet rock.

‘The Russkys want back in,' said one of the men behind him. ‘'Fraid we'll steal their blankets – faugh! Ol' 'Atter at the two-to-one wouldn't touch 'em wi' a bargepole—'

‘Tell 'em, the man that comes in now, wears his blanket for a shroud ere morning.' Grippen put a hand on Asher's shoulder, hooked dark claws against the skin of his neck. The men murmured and retreated. The screaming argument outside grew louder for a few seconds as the door was opened, and the cold fog flowed down the stair.

Then stillness.

‘You've a rare craving to get your veins opened, Professor.'

‘I've a rare craving for a word with you.'

The broad nostrils flared. ‘And cocky with it.'

‘I want you to leave my wife alone,' said Asher. ‘And return our daughter. I'll do whatever it is you ask me to do – find this Zahorec and kill him –'

If it's the book he's seeking, let him think we misunderstand
.

‘– and give you a list of where he's been hiding, but give her back to us. You've no need to hold her prisoner, for me to do as you ask.'

‘Huh.' The noise was a grunt rather than any attempt at a laugh. ‘The minute you have her you'll discover on a sudden that what I ask is what you can't do on any consideration, and I haven't time to prove to you otherwise. You'll get the brat back when I've what I want. She's well.'

‘Prove it.'

‘And you prove to me I'll live forever and go to Heaven when I die.'

‘I think we can both see how promises about
that
worked to make you a good and holy man in life.'

The vampire growled within his throat. Massive in the grubby frock coat of forty years ago, his gaudy vest of Chinese silk stained and spotted with old blood, Grippen reminded Asher of the lions that roved the veldt in his African days: eyes intelligent but without the slightest resemblance to humanity. Still as shadow.

‘Fear for our child has stolen Mrs Asher's sleep,' Asher went on. ‘You know – none better – that in such a state one makes mistakes.'

At the word
mistakes
Grippen moved his head a little. Mistakes – inattention through weariness or distraction – were the vampire's power, what he lived by, hunted by. He knew indeed how deadly they were.

‘You say our child is well. But what about the nursery maid you took to look after her? She's young, and frightened – and probably not frightened enough. She may try to escape, and run afoul of those who have them in keeping. What if your fledglings start one of their damned games with her, what if they lie to you, tell you she escaped or tried to escape … What do they do with her, with my daughter, when they go hunting?'

He watched Grippen as he spoke, and though the Master Vampire had some of Don Simon Ysidro's quality of stillness, yet he saw him relax, just slightly, when Asher spoke of the fledglings.

Lydia was right. She's being watched over by the living
.

He has that much sense
.

‘You leave that to me.'

‘I can't.'

‘You'll have to.' Fangs glinted with the lift of his lip.

‘Will you do this, then?' said Asher, when the silence had gone on long enough for the Master of London to turn over all possibilities in his mind. ‘Have the nursery maid write me a note. Tell her that if what she says in it is the truth, she's to mention Lydia's favorite book in it. If she's being forced to lie, she's to mention my favorite book.'

‘And the chit'll know these?'