James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (37 page)

The vampire paused, listening. A dim vibration through the floor spoke of a door closing. Softly Ysidro said, “He is in the garden now, calling; he sounds afraid.” Their eyes met, Asher's hard with rage, Ysidro's inscrutable. Listen as he would, Asher heard no sound of the house door closing, or of returning footfalls on floor or stair. “He's gone.”

Impossibly swift and strong, Ysidro resumed his digging, while he petitioned God to visit Blaydon's armpits with the lice of a shipful of sailors, and his belly with worms, in the archaic, lisping Spanish of the conquistadors. Switching to English, he added, “We can get horses from the mews ...”

“A motorcycle will be faster, and we won't need remounts. Mine's in the shed at my lodgings; I've tinkered with it enough that it's more reliable than most.” With his good hand and his teeth, Asher gingerly tightened the bandages around his splints, sweat standing out suddenly on his forehead with the renewed shock of the pain. “Do you need help?”

“What I need is an iron crow and a few slabs of guncotton, not the problematical assistance of a crippled old spy. Unless you have suddenly acquired the ability to bend steel bars, stay where you are and rest.”

Asher was only too glad to do so. The swelling had spread up his arm nearly to the elbow; he felt dizzy and a little sick. He could still flex his first two fingers after a fashion—enough, he hoped, to work the throttle lever on the Indian, at any rate.

How fast could a vampire run? He'd seen Ysidro and Grippen move with incredible swiftness. Could that speed be sustained, as Ysidro said, untiring through the night? The scraping of the metal continued . . . It seemed to be taking forever.

“Dios!” Simon stepped back from the window, shaking loose the cloth from around his hands and rubbing his wrists. His teeth gritting against the pain, he said, “The bar is loose but I cannot grip it. My hands weaken already; that much silver burns, even through the cloth.”

“Here.” Asher kicked off his other shoe out of the irrational human dislike of uneven footgear, and came to the window. The bar was very loose in the socket, now chipped away from the cement; with his single good hand, he shifted it back and forth, twisting and pulling until it came free. Ysidro wrapped his arm again, and gingerly angled it through to tear off the window's complicated latch and force the casement up.

“Can you get through that?”

Asher gauged the resultant gap. “I think so.”

It was a difficult wriggle, with one arm barely usable and nothing on the other side but the narrow ledge. The vampire steadied and braced him through as best he could, but once his arm inadvertently brushed one of the remaining bars, and Asher felt the grip spasm and slack. “It's all right, I've got a footing,” he said and received only a fault gasp in reply. He slipped as quickly as he dared along the ledge to the laboratory window, the cold air biting fiercely through his shirt-sleeved arms and stockinged feet, and through the house as he had before, to undo the bolts of the steel-sheathed door.

Ysidro had resumed his creased waistcoat, but his long, slim hands were welting up in what looked like massive burns. The fingers shook as Asher knotted both their handkerchiefs around the swellings, to keep the air from the raw, blistering flesh. As he worked, he said rapidly, “Blaydon will have money in the study. We'll get a cab to Bloomsbury —there's a stand on Harley Street . . .”

“It is past midnight already.” Ysidro flexed his hands carefully and winced. “You will be taking your lady away with you on this motorcycle of yours. Is there a place on these downs where I can go to ground, if the daylight overtakes us while we are there?”

Asher shook his head. “I don't know. The nearest town's eight miles away and it's not very large.”

Ysidro was quiet for a moment, then shrugged with his mobile, colorless brows. “The village church, perhaps. There are always village churches. James . . .”

He turned, as Asher strode past him into the prison room again and over to the window where the detached window bar lay shining frostily in the square of moonlight on the floor. It was two and a half feet long, steel electroplated with silver, and heavy as a large spanner—or crow, as Ysidro called it—in his hand. Asher hefted it and looked back at the vampire who stood like a disheveled ghost against the blackness of the doorway.

Picking his words as if tiptoeing through a swamp, Ysidro said, “Did Dennis bring you here, as he did me? Or did you come of your own accord, looking for me at daybreak?”

“I came looking for you.”

“That was stupid . . .” He hesitated, for a moment awkward and oddly human in the face of saying something he had not said in many hundreds of years and perhaps, Asher thought, never. “Thank you.”

“I'm in your service,” Asher reminded him, and walked back to the door, silver bar like a gleaming club in his hand. “And,” he added grimly, “we haven't scotched this killer yet.”

“Could he have beaten us here?” Asher kicked the Indian's engine out of gear as they came around the side of the hill into full view of the Peaks' wall and lodge gate; as on most motorcycles, the brake wasn't very strong. The moon had set; it was hard to keep the tires out of ruts only dimly seen. He didn't bother to whisper. If Dennis was there already, he'd have picked up the sound of the engine miles away.

“I'm not sure.” Ysidro's arms were like whalebone and thin cable around Asher's waist, his body a skeletal lightness against the leather of the jacket. Asher wasn't sure whether a living man could have kept his seat on the narrow carrier as they'd come up the winding road from Wycombe Parva, “As Burger—quoted by the invaluable Mr. Stoker— has observed, 'Die Todten reiten schnell'—the dead travel fast.”

Asher braked gently, easing the machine to a stop in front of the iron spears of the locked gates. Through them he could see the house, a rambling pseudo-Gothic monstrosity of native brick and hewn stone appropriated from some ruined building closer to Oxford, dark against the dim shapes of the naked beeches of the park and the vast swell of the down behind. The unkempt lawn was thick with weeds, and the woods that lay to the south and east of the house were already making their first encroachments of broom sedge and elder saplings. The place had probably housed no more than a caretaker since Blaydon had closed it up after his wife's death three years ago, and it was obvious that not even a caretaker dwelt here now.

He'd probably been turned off when Dennis first began to change, Asher thought, and anger stirred him again at Blaydon's stupid irresponsibility. Had anything gone amiss, from a gas leak to an omnibus accident in London, Lydia would have been condemned to death here without anyone being the wiser.

Except Dennis, of course.

“So in other words, he could be waiting for us in the house?” He dismounted, and Ysidro sprang off lightly. Behind the long, wind-frayed curtain of hair, the vampire's eyes were sparkling, and Asher had the impression that he had found this mode of travel greatly to his taste.

“Or hard upon our heels.” Ysidro stooped, bracing his bandaged hands on bent knees. Asher pushed up his goggles, leaned the bike against the wall, unlashed the silvered steel bar from the handlebars, and hung it around his own neck. Using Ysidro's back as a step, he could reach the top corners of the rustic stone gateway, to scramble over the six-foot palings. He had scarcely dropped to the drive on the other side when Ysidro appeared, palely silhouetted against the uneasy darkness, and sprang down without a sound to his side. At his lodgings, Asher had paused only long enough to don his boots, goggles, and leather jacket, for the night was freezing cold; Ysidro in his open shirt seemed to feel nothing.

“Thus I do not suggest we divide to search.”

“Can you hear anything from here?” Asher asked.

The vampire shut his eyes, listening intently to the half-heard muttering of the wind in the autumn woods. “Not clearly,” he murmured at last. “Yet the house is not empty—that I know.”

Asher used his good hand to unsling the bar from around his neck. Scudding overcast was beginning to cover the sky. Through it, the house was a barely seen shape of gray, dotted with the black of windows, disturbingly like some monster's misshapen skull. “If he's behind us, he may arrive on top of us before we'd finished reconnoitering,” he said grimly, striding up the ghostly stripe of the drive. “And if he's there already—would you or I be able to see or hear him?”

Asher knew the floor plan of the Peaks, though he'd never been more than a casual acquaintance of Blaydon's. But most of the dons had received invitations at one time or another, and Asher had a field agent's memory for such things. Every atom of his flesh shrank from entering the dark trap of those encircling walls without the usual preliminary checks. But there was no time, and they would, in any case, be useless.

They skirted the lawn and garden to the kitchen yard, Ysidro leading the way across the leaf-strewn pavement. At this point, concealment was of no more use to them than whispering; they were either perfectly safe or beyond help. And if Dennis had not arrived before them—if they were, for the moment, safe—outdoors there was a remote chance that Ysidro's vampire senses could detect his coming.

In any case, the cellars were reached from the kitchen.

The wind was rising, groaning faintly over the tops of the downs and stirring the dark hem of the woods a hundred feet from the house in a way Asher did not like. The stables stretched along one side of the yard, every door shut and bolted; the kitchen door was locked as well, but Asher drove his elbow through the window pane next to it and reached through to wrench over the latch. Beside him, he was aware of Ysidro listening, turning his head this way and that, the stray gusts flicking at his long hair, trying by some leap of the senses to detect the undetectable and to hear what was no more audible than the slow falling of dust.

The darkness of the kitchen stank of mildew and spoiling table scraps. As Ysidro found and lit a lamp, there was a flurrying rustle of tiny feet, and the primrose kerchief of light caught the tails of mice as they whipped out of sight. Asher cursed again, softly. Open tins and dirty dishes lined the old-fashioned soapstone counters, like sleeping tramps below the Embankment on a summer night. Blaydon, of course —in too great a hurry to pump and heat water to clean up. The vampire raised the lamp to shed a greater light; in its glow, Asher could see his fastidious nostrils flare.

“He may be here, covering our minds from his presence, but I do not think he has been and gone. There is a smell of decay about him which lingers in still air.”

“We'll check the cellars first,” Asher said, crossing the worn stone floor to the narrow door beside the stove. “Upstairs we can always bolt through a window.” He pushed the door open. The smell of dust, coals, and mice almost choked him. “You lead. If he's here, he's likelier to be behind than before.”

He kept his back flattened to the worn, slatted wainscot of the staircase, his left hand with the silver bar on the upstairs side, while Ysidro edged swiftly down the steps before him. There was a wine cellar, stripped of everything but the racks, and a coal hole, half-filled with coals and dirt.

“There's another cellar off the butler's pantry,” Asher said as they swiftly ascended the stairs back to the kitchen, their shadows reeling drunkenly in the lamplight. “You'd never know the door wasn't just a cupboard. I've never been down there—it may be just a boot hole, but it might be large enough to keep someone in.”

The butler's pantry was more like a closet than a room, filled with shelves and family silver. The door, tucked away behind a cupboard, was bolted from the outside. “She's down there,” Simon murmured, even as Asher slipped the bolts. “At least someone is, and the breathing sounds like hers.”

“Lydia?” Asher called softly down the dark twist of the stairs, but kept his post at the top until Ysidro had edged his way down them. There was a door at the bottom, too; between them, the brick-walled slot of the staircase smelled like a death trap. The door at the bottom was bolted, as well. “Lydia, it's James! Don't be afraid . . .”

The door burst open as Ysidro slid the bolts, the violence of it taking him almost totally by surprise. The swerving lamplight showed Asher the whiteness of Lydia's face, under a carnelian whirlwind of unbound hair, Her spectacles flashed in the light, and there was the thin slip of something silver in one of her hands as she stabbed at Ysidro's eyes. The vampire was out of her way before Asher could see where he moved; Lydia whirled, confused, and Asher called out, “Lydia, it's James!”

She'd already begun to pelt up the stairs and now stopped short at the sight of the dark form looming at their top; Ysidro, with considerable presence of mind, raised the lamp to shed its rays as far as the top of the stairs. “James . . . !” she sobbed, and then swung back, looking at the vampire who stood, lamp aloft like Liberty's torch, just beside the door.

“Oh ...” She looked momentarily nonplussed, the silver hatpin with which she had attacked him still glinting sharp and vicious in her hand, “I am sorry. You must be Don Simon Ysidro . . .” She held out her other hand to him, and he took it and kissed it with antique grace. “It was my pleasure,” the vampire replied, and she laughed shakily at this patently mendacious platitude as they hastened up the stairs. “I am at your service, Madame.”

At the top, she caught Asher violently around the waist, burying her face in his leather-clad shoulder and hugging him hard enough to drive the breath from him. Through the ferocity of the embrace, he felt her trembling with cold and shock and reaction to her attack on what she had thought were her captors. He wrapped his good arm reassuringly tight around her shoulders, silver bar and all.

Typically, she broke from him almost at once, so as not to tie up a hand with a weapon in it. Ysidro had somehow moved past them—Asher never did figure out how, given the narrowness of the door—and was leading the way swiftly through the close confines of the pantry; Asher was aware of the clinical avidness with which Lydia watched his slender back.