James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (27 page)

Chloe said, “I thought you said you could touch silver,” in a voice of kittenish reproach.

“A man can have the strength to bend a poker in half and still not be able to do so with a red-hot one,” Grippen retorted. “Don't be stupider than you are.”

The padlock must be silver, Asher thought, dimly inferring that the discussion was about entering his cell and finishing what they had begun. The philologist in him noticed Grippen's accent, far more archaic than Ysidro's and a little like that which he'd heard among the Appalachian mountaineers of America, He could feel bandages on his throat and both wrists and the scratchiness of considerable stubble on his jaw.

“Can you make him come and do it?” Hyacinthe inquired, regarding Asher with narrowed dark eyes. Something changed in her voice, and she murmured, as if for his ears alone, “Will you come and let me in, honey?”

For a moment the notion seemed entirely logical to Asher's exhausted mind; he only wondered where Simon might have put the key, Then he realized what he was thinking and shook his head.

Her huge dark eyes glowed into his, for that moment all that he saw or knew. “Please? I won't harm you—won't let them harm you. You can lock the door again after me.”

For a few seconds he truly believed her, in spite of the fact that it had been she who had diverted his attention in the alley, in spite of knowing down to the marrow of his bones that she lied. That was, he supposed, what Simon had meant of Lotta when he had said that she was a “good vampire.”

“Bah,” Grippen said. “I misdoubt he could stand an he would.”

Hyacinthe laughed.

“Are you having fun, children?”

Even as the words were spoken, Grippen was already turning his head, as if startled by them the moment before they sounded; the three women swung around, white faces hard in the single gold light of the candle as it curtsied in the flicker of wind. An instant later, Ysidro stepped out of the darkness, graceful and withdrawn-looking, but Asher noticed he did not come too near to the others.

“I ought to have guessed you'd have a bolthole in the sewers, like the Spanish rat you are,” Grippen growled.

“If the French government will dig them, it were a shame not to put them to use. Did you ever know Tulloch the Scot? Or Johannis Magnus?”

“The Scot's got to be dead, and this curst penpusher's got you in the way of asking questions like a curst Jesuit. Those concerns have ceased to be ours—ceased from the moment the breath went out of our lungs and the last waste of mortality from out of our bodies, and we woke with the taste of blood on our mouths and the hunger for more of it in our hearts. The dead don't traffic with the living, Spaniard.”

“There are things which the living can do which the dead cannot.”

“Aye—die and feed the dead. And if your precious doctor e'er sets foot in London, that's aye what he'll do.”

“Unless you plan to keep him prisoner forever,” Elysee crooned mockingly. “Are you that fond of him, Simon? I never guessed it of you.”

Chloe let out a silvery titter of laughter.

“The dead can still die,” Simon said quietly. “As Lotta would tell you, if she could; or Calvaire, or Neddy ...”

“Lotta was a fool and Calvaire a bigger one,” Grippen snapped. “Calvaire was a boaster who boasted once too often to the wrong person of who and what he was. Think'ee that telling yet another mortal who and what we are is going to keep us safe? I always thought Spaniards had dung for brains and I'm sure on it now.”

“The composition of my brains,” said Simon, “makes neither Lotta, Neddy, Calvaire, nor Danny less dead, nor does it alter the fact that none of us has seen or heard a single breath of the one who has stalked and killed them. Only another vampire could have followed them, and only a vampire very ancient, very skilled, could have followed them unseen. More ancient than you, or I . . .”

“That's cock.”

“There are no older vampires,” Elysee added. “You border on . , .” She glanced quickly at Grippen, as if remembering he and Simon were the same age, and visibly bit back the word senility.

“He's a day hunter, Lionel,” Simon said. “And one day you may waken to find the sun in your eyes.”

“And one day you'll waken with your precious professor hammering an ashwood map pointer into your heart, and good shuttance to you,” Grippen returned angrily. “We deal with our own. You tell your little wordsmith that. An he conies back to London, you'd best stick close by his side.”

And seizing Chloe roughly by the wrist, he strode from the cellar, the girl following him in a flutter of pale hair and ribbons, their monster shadows swooping after them in the flickering gloom.

“You're a fool, Simon,” Elysee said mildly and trailed along after them, vanishing, as vampires did, in a momentary swirl of spider-gauze shawl.

Hyacinthe remained, blinking lazily at the Spanish vampire with her pansy-brown eyes. “Did you find him?” she asked in her golden syrup voice. “That ha'nt of the boneyards, the Most Ancient Vampire in the World?” Like a flirt, she reached out and touched his shirt collar, fingering it as she fingered everything, as if contemplating seduction.

“When I pulled you and Grippen and the others off James here,” Simon replied softly, “did you see who carried him away?”

Hyacinthe drew back,  nonplussed,  as mortals must be,  Asher thought, when confronted with the elusiveness of vampires. Without smiling, Simon continued. “Nor did I.” Confused, Hyacinthe, too, left, seeming to flick out of sight like a candle puffed by wind. But Ysidro, by the tilt of his head and the direction of his cold eyes, obviously saw her go.

For a long moment, he stood there outside the bars, looking around him at the dark cellar. It had clearly been disused for years, perhaps centuries; past him, as his eyes grew more used to the light, Asher could see the open grillwork in the floor which communicated with the sewers, though the other vampires had left in another direction, presumably upstairs to some building above. One of the old hostels particuliers in the Marais or the Faubourg St. Germain, he wondered, which had survived the attentions of the Prussians? Or simply one of those ubiquitous buildings purchased in the course of centuries by some vampire or other, as a bolthole in case of need?

Then Ysidro spoke, so softly that it was only because he was used to the whispering voices of vampires that Asher heard him at all. “Anthony?”

From the dusty, curtaining shadows came no reply. After a moment the vampire took a key from his pocket, and, muffling his fingers in several thicknesses of the corner of his Inverness, steadied the lock to insert and turn it. Then he picked up a small satchel from a corner where, presumably, he had laid it down before addressing the others, and came into the cell. “How do you feel?”

“Rather like a lobster in the tank at Maxim's.” A fleet grin touched the vampire's mouth, then vanished. “My apologies,” he said. “I could not be assured of reaching here before they did.” He glanced down at something beside Asher's cot. When he lifted it, Asher saw that it was a pitcher, soft porcelain and once very pretty, now old and chipped, but with a little water in it. “Was he here?”

“Anthony?” Asher shook his head. His hoarse voice was so weak none but a vampire would have heard. “I don't know. Someone was.” A dream—a hallucination?—of skeleton fingers caressing the silver padlock floated somewhere in his consciousness; but, like light on water, it eluded his grasp.

“I left this on the other side of the cell.” From the satchel the vampire took a wide-mouthed flask and a carton which smelled faintly of bread pudding.

As Ysidro poured a thick soup out of the flask, Asher remarked, “What, not blood?”

Ysidro smiled again. “I suppose it is customary in novels—it was in Mr. Stoker's, anyway—for the victims of a vampire to receive transfusions from all their friends, but somehow I could not see myself soliciting such favors from passers-by.”

“ 'Just come down this cellar with me, I'd like a little of your blood?”  I expect Hyacinthe could do it, too. But it wouldn't work, or so Lydia tells me. Apparently human blood isn't all of one type."

“Of course, such matters have been considered among vampires ever since Mr. Harvey's interesting articles first appeared.” Ysidro handed him the soup and helped him sit up to eat it. “We have long been familiar with the whole apparatus of transfusions and hollow needles. In fact I'm told some of the Vienna vampires used to inject their victims with cocaine before they drank. When Dewar containers were developed last year, Danny made some experiments in storing blood, but it seems to lose both its taste and its efficacy literally within moments after it leaves the living body. In any case it is not the blood alone that chiefly sustains us. If it were,” he added, without change in the soft inflections of his voice, “do you think that any of us would be the way we are?”

Asher set down the bowl on his knees, his hands shaking too much with sheer weakness to hold it. Ysidro's steadying grip was chill as the hand of a corpse. Their eyes met. “Don't be naive.”

The vampire's pale eyebrow tilted. “You may be right, at that.” Whether he spoke of Lotta, Hyacinthe, or himself was impossible to tell. He took the empty bowl and turned away, every movement spare and economical as a sonnet. “I doubt you'll need concern yourself with Grippen at the moment. He and Chloe are bound back to London . . .”

“Simon . . .”

He looked back, the gilt candlelight seeming almost to shine through him, as it shone through the edges of fingers held near to the flame— demon and killer a thousand times over, and the man who had saved Asher's life.

“Thank you.”

“You are in my service,” the vampire replied, the unstressed axiom of a nobleman who questions neither his rights nor his duties. "And we have not yet scotched this killer.

“I am still not entirely convinced,” he continued, neatly returning bowl, flask, and spoon to his satchel, “that the killer is not Grippen himself. I have given thought to your assertion that our state is a medical pathology. If there is some alteration of state which takes place close to the three hundred and fiftieth year . . .”

“Then wouldn't you be experiencing it, too?”

“Not necessarily.” He turned back and held up his white, long-fingered hands shoulder-high, showing the colorless flesh next to his stringy, ash-pale hair. “Though I was still quite fair-haired as a living man, I had more color than this, and my eyes were quite dark. This— bleaching—is not common, but not unknown among our kind. Perhaps it is what they call a mutation of the virus, if virus it be. The oldest vampire I knew, my own master Rhys, was also 'bleached,' though other vampires he created were not. Therefore as a condition it might affect other changes that take place when a vampire ages. And since it seems that Calvaire left Paris for precisely those reasons which turned Grippen against him in London . . .”

“No.” Asher sank back to his pillow, exhausted with the mere effort of sitting up and eating, wanting nothing more, now, than to sleep again. “Didn't you read the newspaper? It was in my pocket . . .” He hesitated. “No it wasn't, I left it in the catacombs. A section of the London Times. It can't have taken Grippen less than a night to come here, and the night before I was attacked, nine people were killed by a vampire in London. Oh, the police were puzzled by the lack of blood in the bodies, but it was . . .”

“Nine!”

It was the first time he had ever seen Simon truly shocked. Or perhaps, he thought, he was simply able to read the vampire better now.

“I didn't think it sounded like any of the London vampires. Grippen may be a brute, but he hasn't survived three hundred and fifty years by indulging in stupid rampages like that. And now I know it couldn't have been either Grippen or Chloe, and it certainly doesn't sound like the Farrens. What it sounded like was a vampire who'd been lying low.”

“And who took the first moment when Grippen was gone,” Simon murmured softly, “to satisfy a craving that must by that time have been monstrous. But nine . . ,”

“In any case,” Asher said, “it means that we are definitely dealing with another vampire.”

Ysidro nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And by the sound of it, in all probability, a mad one.”

Asher sighed. “My old nanny used to say, 'Every day in every way things are getting better and better.' It comforts me to know she was right.” And he dropped his head to the thin straw of the pillow and fell instantly to sleep.

EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE

FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED

[From the Manchester Herald]

Fire ravaged the cotton warehouse of Moyle & Co. in Liverpool Street last night, claiming the lives of eight vagrants who are believed to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold. However, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pavement of the alley behind the warehouse, indicating that some sort of foul play may have taken place, though all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues. All eight bodies were found clumped close together in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attempted to extinguish the blaze in its early stages, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of some other cause before the fire started. The fire was blazing strongly when first seen by watchman Lawrence Bevington, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier . . .

No, Lydia thought calmly, he wouldn't. If I were trying to hide my kills by incinerating the bodies, I'd make certain the watchman was sleeping at the appropriate moment.

Her hand was shaking as she set down the newspaper.

Manchester. Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then.

She looked at the list she'd made, lying on top of the Journal of Comparative Folklore, and wondered how long she dared wait now,

She had promised James not to do anything until she had checked with him, not to put herself in danger. She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the vampires would be waiting. The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her dreams, the fear of the gathering darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vampire. Everything she had been reading had only taught her to fear more.