Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 14

How did one destroy a vampire who had passed beyond vulnera-bility to daylight? he wondered. Or presumably to silver and garlic and all the rest of it? He wished he could talk to Lydia, to hear her speculations on the problem, and he tried to think what they might be.

If Anthony did not help him...

Did this mutation in the course of time open other vulnerabilities-to cold, for instance? Simon had mentioned an extreme sensitivity to cold in the very old vampires. But short of luring the killer into a giant refrigerator, he didn't see how that knowledge, even if it were true, would be of any assistance. He grinned wryly at the thought of himself and Ysidro, Eskimo-like in furs, grimly driving an icicle through the renegade's heart, cutting off his head, and stuffing the mouth with snowballs. And, of course, the monthly bill for ice would be prohibitive.

Perhaps, if Lydia was right and vampirism was simply a pathology of the blood, there might be a serum which could be devised to combat it,More applied folklore, he thought wryly. Maybe a concentration of whatever essence was in garlic, injected straight into the blood-stream...

By whom? You and Sexton Blake?

And in any case, vampirism was not simply a physical pathology. It had its psychic element, too, and that, like the physical abilities, seemed to increase with time. Could it perhaps be fought on psychic grounds?

As he walked down the empty back streets toward the lights of the boulevards, he shivered at the thought of those slow-ripening powers, vampire pawns advancing powerlessly across the chessboard of time, until they could become queens...

In the deserted darkness of the street ahead of him, a figure faded from the mists. A dusky face stood out above the white blur of a dress, framed in loose masses of thick, black hair. Small, soft hands reached toward him, and he felt himself go cold with dread. There was another reason, he remembered, for wanting to leave the catacombs while day-light lingered in the sky.

The white figure drifted toward him, with that same almost unbear-able slowness he'd seen in Elysee's drawing room, as if propelled only now and then by a vagrant breeze. But if he took his eyes from her, she would be on him like lightning; that much he knew. The murmur of that soothing-syrup voice was so low it was impossible that he should hear it at this distance as clearly as he did: "Why, James, there's no need to run away. I just want to talk with you..."

She was already much closer than she should have been, drifting that slowly; he could see the smile in her sinful eyes. Feeling naked, he began to back slowly away, never taking his eyes from her...

Granite hands seized him from behind, pinning his arms, crushing suffocatingly over his mouth and twisting his head back. The foetor of old blood clogged his nostrils as other hands closed around him, drag-ging him into the darkness of an alley, cold and impossibly strong. His body twisted and fought like a salmon on a line, but he knew already that he was doomed.

They pressed closer around him, white faces swimming in the gloom; he kicked at them, but his feet met nothing, and their laughter was sweet and rippling in his ears. A hand tore his collar away; he tried to cry "No!" but the palm over his mouth was smothering him, the brutal grip that dragged his head back all but breaking his neck. Against the naked flesh of his throat, the night air was cold, cold as the bodies pressing closer and closer...

Slashing pain, then the long, swimming drop of weakness. He felt his knees give way, the massive grip on his arms holding him up. He thought he heard Hyacinthe's husky laugh. Small hands, a woman's, stripped back his shirt cuff and he felt her rip open the vein and drink. Darkness seemed to flutter down over his mind, a dim consciousness of chill, bright candles seen far away, spinning over a terrifying abyss; for a moment, he had the impression that these people had been there with him when he had shot Jan van der Platz in Pretoria and played croquet with Lydia in her father's garden.

A woman's arms were around his body. Opening his eyes he saw Elysee's face near his, her auburn hair tickling his jaw as she bent to drink. Beyond her was Grippen, bloated and red, blood smudging his coarse, grinning lips. Others crowded up-Chloe, Serge, the dark-haired boy, and others still-clamoring in sweet, thin voices for their turn. He tried again to whisper, "No..." but his breath was gone. Red darkness swallowed him and turned swiftly black.

"I'm sorry, dear." Mrs. Shelton came out of the narrow little dining-room door beneath the stairs, wiping her hands on her apron-she must have been watching, Lydia thought, looking quickly up from the little pile of the evening's post on the hall table. "Nothing for you, I'm afraid."

In the face of that kindly sympathy, Lydia could only smile back and, tucking her book bag awkwardly under her arm, start up the stairs, groping one-handed to unpin her hat from her hair. Mrs. Shelton fol-lowed her up a few steps and laid an anxious hand on her arm. "It's hard, dear," the landlady said gently. "Your young man?"

Lydia nodded. Disengaging herself, she went on up the stairs, think-ing. I'll strangle him. And then,He's got to come back soon.

Reasons why he didn't-or couldn't-crowded unpleasantly to her mind. She pushed them away, letting herself think only, I've got to get in touch with him somehow...

I've got to let him know...

The note to the charwoman was still pinned to the door with a blue-headed drawing pin: research in progress. please do not clean. She had half expected to have to fight for unviolated space, as she had always had to fight with every woman with whom she'd lived from her nanny down to Ellen, but evidently Dolly, the woman who did the cleaning for Mrs, Shelton, valued her own leisure far above "what was proper." Lydia was confident the woman hadn't so much as crossed the threshold.

She dumped her book bag on the floor beside the stacks of journals already there, removed her hat, and turned up the lamp. Though she knew James would have communicated to her in some fashion if he had come back to London at all, she walked through to the bedroom and looked out, down the grimy slit of the alley, to the window of 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade.

Both curtains were closed. No lamp burned behind them.

Drat you, Jamie, she thought, turning back to the sitting room with a queer, terrible tightness clenching inside her,Drat you, drat you, drat you, WRITE to me! Come back, I have to tell you this.

She leaned in the doorway between the two rooms, scarcely aware of the headache she'd had since two or three in the afternoon-scarcely aware, in fact, that she'd eaten nothing since breakfast-gazing at her desk with its heaps of journals, its notes, and its books: Peterkin's Ori - gins of Psychic Abilities, Freiborg's Brain Chemistry and the Seventh Sense, Mason' sPathological Mutation, On top of it lay the hastily writ-ten note from James, telling her he was dreadfully sorry, but he and Ysidro were leaving for Paris; beside it was the letter he had written from Paris itself, telling her he had arrived safely and was going to visit the Paris vampires that night.

Her heart seemed to be jarring uncomfortably beneath her stays. She understood, with the possibility of a day-stalking vampire, that he could not have met her to say farewell; it was her safety he was trying to protect, and she had guessed that he felt the vampires' nets closer than ever about him. Anger at him was irrational, she told herself calmly; anger at the situation was irrational, because it was how it was and there were far worse things to happen to one; anger at him for not writing was irrational, because God only knew where he was, and he would write when he could. Screaming and kicking the walls would not help either him, her, or Mrs. Shelton's charlady.

But I know the answer,she thought, and the steel-spring coil of knowledge, fear, and dread twisted itself a notch tighter within her. I know how we can find them. Jamie, come back and tell me I'm doing this right.

Jamie, come back, please.

Mechanically she shed her coat and her hat and pulled the pins from her hair, which uncoiled in a dry silken whisper down her back. For a time, she stood over the mounds of papers, the articles on porphyria, that hideous and deforming malady of anemia and photosensitivity, on plague, on vampires-there were even two of James'-and on telepathy. She'd been working at Somerset House, at the newspaper offices, at Chancery Lane all day for days, then coming back to the lending librar-ies to get medical and folkloric journals, and returning every night to this.

From among the papers, she lifted something small and golden, like a flattened flower, soft and dry in her hands-the lover's knot, braided by a shop which specialized in such things, from Lotta's no-longer-human hair. As the tiny bud of knowledge had opened before her eyes like a rose, she had thought, I have to check this with James. It made perfect sense to her, but she didn't know whether it was, in fact, practicable, and now there was literally no one to whom she could go.

But it's the answer! she thought. I know it is!

She had promised James.

Frank Ellis' fancy motorcar came to mind; to impress her he'd run the throttle out full but wouldn't engage the engine; she, too, was fight-ing to go and knowing there was nothing to do but remain in this room and wait.

Wait for how long? She had to talk to him, had to tell him.

She walked to the window and drew the curtain-lately she had become uneasy about that, too. For the last two nights she had dreamed of lying half-asleep in bed, listening to a deep, muttering voice calling her name-calling her name from somewhere quite nearby. But some-thing about that voice had terrified her, and she had buried herself in the covers, trying to hide, wanting to call for James and knowing she dare not make a sound...

And she had wakened, trying to get out of bed.

She had taken to buying extra kerosene and leaving a small lamp burning low all night. This childishness troubled her, but not, she had decided, as much as waking in the darkness did.

He had to come back.

She took her seat at the desk, picked up the top journal of the stack she had marked to scan, and opened it, though she knew it would do nothing but confirm what she already suspected. All she could do for the moment was work, until James came back from Paris.

With a sigh, she settled into her study, carefully avoiding, for one more night, the question of what she would do if he did not.

Asher woke up dying of thirst. Someone gave him something to drink-orange juice, of all things-and he slept again.

This happened three or four times. He never had the strength to open his eyes. He could smell water, the cold stink of filth, and the moldery reek of underground; it was utterly silent. Then he slept again.

When he finally could open his eyes, the light of the single candle, burning in an ornate gilt holder near the opposite wall, seemed unbear-ably bright. It took all the strength he had to turn his head, to see that he lay on a narrow bed in a small cell which still contained half a dozen stacked crates of wine bottles caked with plaster and dust. One open archway looked into a larger room beyond; the archway was barred all across, the narrow grilled door padlocked. On the other side of the bars stood Grippen, Elysee, Chloe, and Hyacinthe.

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 be-gun. 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 Appala-chian 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 ex-hausted 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 per-son 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 Span-iards 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 wordsenility.

"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, finger-ing 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 sew-ers, though the other vampires had left in another direction, presum-ably upstairs to some building above. One of the oldhostels particuliers in the Marais or the Faubourg St. Germain, he wondered, which had survived the attentions of the Prussians? Or simply one of those ubiqui-tous 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. "An-thony?"

From the dusty, curtaining shadows came no reply. After a moment the vampire took a key from his pocket, and, muf-fling 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 apolo-gies," 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 pad-lock 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 transfu-sions from all their friends, but somehow I could not see myself solicit-ing 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 devel-oped 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 Lon-don..."

"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 medi-cal 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-fin-gered 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 per-haps, 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. Butnine.. ,"

"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 proba-bility, 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.