Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 17

At least, Asher reflected with exasperated irony at some point in the long hours between six-thirty and ten, when he was finally released from the Charing Cross station house, they couldn't charge him with Chloe Winterdon's murder. But this was only because Grip-pen had gently gathered the blonde girl's body into his arms and van-ished through some bolthole in the roof, leaving Asher to the tedious business of finding some story to tell the police-which they didn't believe-being held for questioning, and getting

his broken hand splinted by the police surgeon. They injected it with novocaine and warned him to take it to a regular doctor in the morning, but Asher refused all offers of veronal or other sedatives. He knew already it would be a long night.

To questioning, he responded that he was a friend of Dr. Grippen's, that he had gone there on the off chance that a mutual acquaintance, Miss Merridew, had taken refuge with the doctor; she had been missing some days. No, he hadn't reported it before-he had just returned from Paris to find her gone. No, he didn't know where Dr. Grippen could be reached. No, he had no idea why the burglars would have silver-tipped bullets in their gun. They made no comments about the bite marks on his throat and wrists, which was just as well.

It was raining when he stepped outside, a thin, dispiriting rain. Wea-riness made him cold to the bones as he descended the station house steps, his brown ulster flapping cloakwise about him, his right arm in its sling folded up underneath. Even with the novocaine, it hurt damnably. Nearly half the night gone, he thought, and no nearer to finding Lydia than he had been that afternoon.

There was a cab stand at the end of the street. He started toward it, and a dark shape was suddenly at his side, seeming to materialize from the misty rain. A heavy hand caught his elbow. "You're coming with me."

It was Grippen.

"Good," Asher said wearily. "I want to talk to you." After the thing that had attacked him, Grippen no longer impressed him much.

Ysidro was waiting for them in a four-wheeler a little ways down the street. "You certainly took long enough," he remarked, and Asher firmly resisted the urge to punch him as he slumped into the seat at his side.

"I took a few hours out for dinner at the Cafe Royale and a nap," he retorted instead. "If you'd put in an appearance earlier you could have joined me for coffee. They have very handsome waiters." The cab jolted into movement, its wheels swishing softly on the wet pavement; Asher's arm throbbed sharply in its sling. "Lydia's gone. And I've seen the killer."

"Lydia?" Grippen said, puzzled.

"My wife." Asher's brown eyes narrowed as he looked across at the big vampire in his rain-dewed evening cloak, the blunt, square head shadowed by the brim of his silk top hat. "The red-haired girl I asked you about, whose life is the price I'm allegedly being paid for this investigation." Cold anger still filled him at Ysidro, at Grippen, at all of them, and at himself most of all for leading her into this.

"Ah," the master vampire said softly, and his hard, gray glance flicked to Ysidro. "I wondered on that."

"She was in London all the time, helping me with my investigation," Asher said, and Ysidro's colorless eyebrows quirked.

"I knew she had left Oxford, of course. I did not think you would bring her here."

"It seemed a good idea at the time," Asher replied harshly. "She managed to find most of your lairs and all of your aliases before she disappeared. And if you didn't take her," he added, looking across again at Grippen, whose red face had gone redder as rage added to whatever blood he'd imbibed that evening,

"then I suspect she found the killer as well. Now tell me the truth, because it's going to have a bearing on how I conduct this investigation. Did you take her? And is she dead?"

"You waste your breath," the Master of London said slowly. "No to both your questions is the answer that'll keep you for us and not against us; I know that, and you know that, and I'm thinking you'll not believe it an I say it, but it is so. I've seen no red-headed moppet. I plight my faith on't."

Asher drew a deep breath. He was shivering slightly all over, in nervous waves, reaction setting in on him to anger, exhaustion, and pain. He'd lost his hat at some part in the proceedings, and his brown hair fell forward over his forehead, the thin face beneath hard and far less clerkish than it usually seemed.

From the corner of the cab, Ysidro's light, disinterested voice said, "Tell us about the killer."

Asher sighed, and some of the tension ebbed from his tall frame. "It was-monstrous," he said slowly. "Foul. Diseased-looking. But beyond a doubt a vampire. It was bleached, as you are, Ysidro, but its skin was leprous and peeling. It was taller than I, taller than Grippen by an inch or so, and as broad or broader. Fair hair, but not much of it; it was falling out, I think. Blue eyes. It had a human partner-I heard his footsteps running down the stairs from the attic, and later he called the thing away from me; and that's odd, when you realize the thing goes on killing rampages, taking seven or nine humans at a time. I'd certainly think twice about riding anywhere in a closed carriage with it."

"'It,' " Simon said softly.

"It wasn't human."

"Nor are we."

The cab pulled to a halt at the top of Savoy Walk. Grippen paid off the driver, and the two vampires, their human partner between them, walked down the long tunnel of shadows to the towering, baroque blackness of Ernchester House at the end. Bands and slashes of Ma-deira-gold marked the curtained windows, and caught the thin rain in a shuddering haze: even as they mounted the soot-streaked marble of the steps, one panel of the carved doors opened to reveal the Farrens stand-ing, an arm-linked silhouette, just within.

"I fear she is truly dead." Anthea led the way up the long stair, to a small room at the back of the house which had once been used for sewing or letter writing. The dark red of her gown showed like old blood against the creamy whiteness of her bosom and face; its stiff lines and low-cut corsage whispered of some earlier era; knots and fringes of cut jet beads glinted in the lamplight like ripe blackberries. Her thick hair was piled in the modern style; against it, her face looked strained, weary, and frightened, as if her spirit were now fighting against all the pressures of those accumulated years. Ernchester, trailing close at her side, looked infinitely worse. "Decomposition isn't far advanced, but it has begun."

"That's wrong," Grippen growled. "Not cold as it is... She should bare be stiff."

"Are you speaking from your experience with human corpses?" Asher inquired, and the big man's black eyebrows pulled down over his nose in a frown. "With a vampire's, the pathology would be completely different."

Anthea had laid one of her velvet cloaks over the delicate Regency sofa in the little parlor. Against the thick, cherry-black velvet, Chloe's hair seemed nearly white. It lay in loops and coils, spilling down to brush the floor; Asher was reminded of how Lydia's had lain, unrav-eling in the study lamplight. Her eyes and mouth had been closed. But this did not change the horrible, sunken appearance of her flesh or the ghastly waxiness of her skin. She had been, Asher remembered, abso-lutely beautiful, like a baroque pearl set in Renaissance gold. Petrified, Lydia had said, every cell individually replaced with something that was not human flesh, and a mind replaced by that which was not a human mind.

A second cloak covered her; over the years, Anthea must have col-lected hundreds of them as fashions changed. It, too, was black, niched and beaded; beneath it, Chloe's shell-pink dress shone like the slash of a fading sunset between banks of clouds. With his left hand Asher reached forward and drew the cloak aside to look at the huge puncture wounds in the throat. Then, thoughtfully, he shrugged off the remaining sleeve of his damp ulster and let the weight of it drop to the floor around him. He shook clear a few inches of wrist from the sleeve of his corduroy jacket and held it out to Anthea. "Undo the cuff, would you, please?"

She did, gingerly avoiding the silver chain which still circled that wrist. Even the fleeting grip the thing had taken on it had driven the links into the flesh with sufficient violence to leave a narrow wreath of bruises and the reddening marks of fingers.

Just below the base of Asher's thumb were two or three sets of punc-tures, scabbed over like the half dozen or so on his throat. A souvenir, he thought with wry gallows humor, of Paris. He knelt beside Chloe's body and compared the marks. They were less than a third the size of the mangled white holes in the girl's skin.

"Its fangs were huge," he said quietly. "Grotesquely so, like an ama-teurish stage vampire's; it might have been funny if it weren't so terri-fying. They grew down over the lip, cutting the flesh..." His fingers sketched the place beneath the thick brush of his mustache, and Ysidro's eyes narrowed sharply. "It hadn't callused, so it's something that came over it fairly recently."

"Any clown had told you that," Grippen grumbled. "We'd ha' known ere this, did any vampire walk that fed on other vampires."

"What happens to a vampire," Asher asked, looking up from Chloe's throat, his eyes traveling around the circle of white, unhuman faces in the amber sweetness of the lamplight, "that drinks the blood of other vampires?"

Grippen's voice was harsh. "Other vampires kill it."

"Why?"

"Why do men stone those who eat the corpses of the dead, force children, cut beasts up alive to hear 'em squeal, or play with their own dung? Because it's abominable."

'There are so few of us," Anthea added softly, her strong fingers stroking the massive jewel of jet and hematite that glittered at her bo-som, "and our lives are lived so perilously on the shadowlands of death, no traitor to our midst can be tolerated, for fear that all shall die."

"And because," Ysidro's light, disinterested voice whispered, "to drain the death of a vampire, to drink of a mind so rich, so deep, so filled with the colors of living, and so thick with the overtints of all the lives it has taken, might be the greatest temptation, the greatest intoxi-cation, of all."

There was silence-shocked, furious, and, Asher reflected grimly, not without recognition. The silken pattering of the rain pierced it faintly, muffled by the moldering brocades of the window drapes. Then

Grippen snarled, "Buggering Spanish dog- you'd think so."

Seated on a chair near the head of the couch, his ankles crossed negligently but with his usual erectness of posture, Ysidro continued, unperturbed, "But the question was not of life and death, but merely of blood. We can gain physical nourishment from drinking an animal's blood, or a human's, though we kill him not-as you yourself can attest, James." By that light, cool tone, one would never have guessed that he had fought to rescue Asher from that death in Paris, nor pro-tected him, at a certain amount of personal risk, afterward. 'To drink even a small quantity of another vampire's blood is repellent, after our own flesh has undergone the change. I am told that it often causes nausea."

"Then it's been tried."

The vampire leaned a little into the high crimson wing of his chair and folded slim hands around his knee, A slight smile touched his mouth, but left his sulphur eyes hooded in shadow. "Everything has been tried."

The others, still grouped around the couch where Chloe's body lay, regarded him uneasily, save for Ernchester, who simply sat on a chair in the darkness of a corner, staring down at his white, workless fingers, turning them over and over, as if they were some queer and unknown growth he had suddenly found sprouting at the ends of his arms,

"Then merely the drinking of another vampire's blood, whether he killed him or not, wouldn't cause that kind of change?"

"It did not," Ysidro replied in the careful tone he had used at the beginning of the investigation to reveal those few fragments of informa-tion with which he was willing to part, "in those that I have known." "And who were those?" Grippen demanded angrily. "As they are dead now," the Spanish vampire responded, "it scarce matters."

"What about vampires who were older than Brother Anthony is now, that you knew or heard spoken of?"

Ysidro thought, still immobile as an alabaster votive, his pale eyes half-shut. "Rhys the Minstrel was nearly five hundred years old when he perished-if he did perish-in the Fire. Like Anthony, his skills had increased; like Anthony he had become at least in part tolerant of silver and perhaps of daylight, too, though I'm not sure. One saw him less and less. I know that he fed regularly and did not show signs of any abnor-mality. I never knew how old Johannis Magnus was supposed to be..."

Anthea spoke up, resting her hip on the curved head of the couch, "Tulloch the Scot told me once of vampires in China and in Asia, who have lived for thousands of years, going on as they always have, death-less."

"And lifeless," her husband whispered behind her, almost unheard.

To Asher, still sitting on his haunches beside Chloe's motionless form, Ysidro remarked, "As a rule it is not something which concerns us, and I suspect that most of us do not wish to know of it."

"What would be the point?" Grippen demanded sullenly.

"The point, my dearest doctor, is to know whether this abnormal pathology is something to which we all must look forward."

"That's a lot of Popish cock!"

"What's this?" Asher lifted Chloe's arm, limp and soft in his grasp and without rigor. He wondered if the vampire flesh went through rigor when they died. It was another of the things Lydia would want to know... He swiftly pushed the thought of Lydia from his mind. The but-tons of Chloe's sleeve had all been undone-there was a good handspan of them, reaching nearly to her elbow-and the whitepoint d'esprit fell back from the icy flesh to show a small mark on the inside of the elbow, like the puncture of a needle. "Was her sleeve unfastened like this when you found her, Lionel?"

He shook his head heavily. "God's body, I know not! As if I hadn't aught else to look for but..."

"Yes, it was," Anthea replied. "Why?"

"Because there's a wound here-look."

They gathered close, Ysidro rising from his chair and even Ernchester stumbling out of his shocked lethargy to look around his tall wife's shoulder.

"It has to have been done as she died, or after," Simon said after a moment, his long fingers brushing the pinched flesh. "Something that small would heal almost instantly on one of us. See?" With uncon-cerned deftness he drew the pearl-headed stick pin from his gray silk cravat and plunged its point deep into his own wrist. When he withdrew it, a bead of blood came up like a ruby, and he wiped it away with a fastidious handkerchief Asher had a momentary glimpse of a tiny hole, which closed up again, literally before his eyes.

"She'd no such thing when she were made," Grippen put in, leaning close, his words weighted with the nauseating reek of blood. Asher realized the master vampire must have fed while he and Ysidro were waiting for him to finish with the police at Charing Cross; it had be-come, to him, a matter of almost academic note. "I knew every inch of her body and 'twas flawless as mapping linen."

He looked sidelong at Asher, grayish, gleaming eyes full of intelligent malice. "We are as we were when we were made, sithee. I'd this..." He held out a square, hairy hand, to show a faint scar cutting over the back of it. "... from carving an abscess out of a damned Lombard's thigh, and the clothhead fighting the scalpel every inch of the way, damn him."

"Like Dante's damned," Ysidro murmured lightly, "we are eternally renewed from the cuts we receive in Hell." Ernchester covered his face and looked away.

"Interesting." Asher turned his attention back to the white arm in its slender shroud of lace. "It's as if her blood were drawn with a needle, as well as drunk."

"A frugal villain."

"Not so frugal, if he's in the habit of slaughtering nine men in a night." Anthea's dark brows pulled together in a frown.

"His human friend, then?"

"What use would a living man have for a vampire's blood?"

Grippen shrugged. "An he were an alchemist. I'd have sold much for it, in the days when my own veins weren't bursting with the stuff..."

"An alchemist," Asher said slowly, remembering Lydia strolling along the rocky brink of a lake of boiling blood, a beaker in her hand. Reaching down to dip it full.. .I wanted to examine him medically, she had said... The articles about blood viruses in her rooms...

"Or a doctor." He looked up again at them grouped behind him- Ysidro, Grippen, and the vampire Countess of Ernchester. "Take me back to Lydia's rooms. There's something there I need to see."

"A doctor would have the equipment for drawing blood, and for storing it once it was drawn." Seated at Lydia's desk, Asher leafed unhandily through the chaos of notes and lists in his wife's sprawling script, pick-ing up and discarding them and searching under the heaped papers for more. He was so tired his flesh ached, but he felt, as he often had in the midst of his work abroad or on a promising track in some research library in Vienna or Warsaw, an odd, fiery lightness that made such consideration academic.

"This is somewhat embarrassing," Ysidro remarked, studying the Ordnance Survey map on the wall with its clusterings of colored pins. "I had no idea you hunted so much to a pattern, Lionel."

" 'Tisn't I as leaves my carrion where it may be fallen over by girls out a-maying," Grippen retorted, turning the newspaper clippings over roughly. " 'Bermondsey Slasher,' forsooth!"

"I think that was Lotta." Ysidro walked over to where Asher had turned his attention to the pile of medical journals on the bed, opening them to the marked articles and taking mental note of the topics: Some Aspects of Blood Pathology; Psychic Phenomena, Heredity or Hoax; Breeding a Better Briton. "What would a doctor want with a vampire?"

"Study," Asher replied promptly. "You have to make allowance for the scientific mind-if Lydia met you, she'd be pestering you for a sample of your blood within the first five minutes."

"Sounds like Hyacinthe," Ysidro remarked. "It still does not explain how such a partnership commenced-why a vampire would work for a human, doctor though he may be..."

"No?" Asher looked up from the stiff pages of the journals. "I can think of only one reason a vampire would go into partnership with a doctor and would reveal to him who and what he was-the same reason you went into partnership with me. Because he needed his services."

"Balderdash," Grippen snarled, stepping close to tower over him. "We're free of mortal ills..."

"What about immortal ones?" Asher cut him off. "If the virus of vampirism began to change, began to mutate, either as the result of long-ago exposure to the Plague or from some other cause..."

"Virus forsooth! Ills have root in the humors of the body.,."

"Then if the humors of the vampire flesh slipped out of true," Asher continued smoothly, "what could a vampire do? Say a vampire who had lived in secret, even from other vampires-or any vampire, for that matter-if he found himself suddenly, frenziedly craving the blood of other vampires or knew himself in danger of going on rampages for human blood, as you said was an occasional symptom that developed in a few of those who had been exposed to the Plague. If he found himself transforming, day by day, into the thing I saw at your house, Grippen -if he knew such a course would inevitably lead to his destruction- wouldn't it be logical for him to seek help wherever he could find it?"

Grippen looked uncomfortable and angry, black brow lowering like a goaded bull's; beside him, Ysidro's face was inscrutable as always.

"It might account for the renewed sensitivity to silver," the Spaniard remarked. "Certainly for the wounds caused in his own flesh by the growth of his fangs. And you think this vampire, whoever he was, chose his physician in the same fashion in which I chose you-through jour-nal articles?"

"He must have," Asher said. "Depending on who it is, he may be forcing the doctor to work as you are forcing me-with a threat against the life of someone he cares for. Maybe that isn't even necessary. Some doctors would welcome the chance to do research on an unknown virus and wouldn't care that they were working for a killer. Or maybe," he added pointedly, his gaze suddenly locking with Ysidro's, "like Calvaire's friends, he's under the impression that he'll win, and that his partner won't kill him when it's over."

Ysidro's chilly eyes returned his gaze blandly. "I am sure he is quite safe so long as there is a use for him." He turned away and began sorting through the papers scattered across the bed. "And I take it Mistress Lydia discovered the medical partner in the same fashion? Through the journals?"

"I think so." Asher returned to his own examination, flipping the pages awkwardly with his single good hand. "She may only have had a list of suspects and was visiting them one by one. It would account for her not taking her weapons-the silver knife, the revolver, or the silver nitrate..."

"Silver nitrate?" Ysidro looked up from a list he'd fished from the floor. "Pox," he added mildly. "I see we're all going to have to go through the tiresome business of changing residences again. Do you really own a place on Caswell Court under the name of Bowfinch, Lionel?"

"None o' your business an I do!"

"Filthy neighborhood, anyway. Gin shops everywhere-you can't feed without getting stinking drunk in the process. This one doesn't look familiar..."

"Twas one of Danny's."

"I'm surprised he didn't get fleas. As for the one in Hoxton, I wouldn't be buried there, much less sleep the day. Where would she get silver nitrate?"

Asher nodded toward the little velvet box. Ysidro picked up the hypodermic gingerly, but did not touch the gleaming crystal ampoules. "As a doctor, she'd have access to it-it's used as an antiseptic, I think. I do know most doctors carry it in small quantities."

"This is scarce a small quantity," the vampire remarked, setting the syringe back in its case. "That much must have cost a pretty penny."

"I expect it did," Asher said. "But Lydia's an heiress and she's al-ways had control of her own money-though I suspect her father wouldn't have settled it that way if she'd married someone more re-spectable than a penniless junior don at her uncle's college. I expect she thought to inject the silver nitrate intravenously. It would certainly kill a human, let alone a vampire. It was naive of her," he added quietly. "A vampire's psychic field alone would prevent her from getting that close, and she obviously had no idea of how quickly a vampire can strike."

"Here's more of the curst things." Grippen came over, carrying a pile of journals which had been stacked on the bureau.

Asher flipped open the dog-eared pages. Viral Mutation. Interaction of Viruses in a Medium. The Pathology of Psychic Phenomena. Eugenics for National Defense. Physical Origins of So-Called Psychic Powers. Iso-lating a Viral Complex in a Serum Medium, He paused, and leafed back through the articles again. They were all by Horace Blaydon.

Softly, he said, "Dennis Blaydon was a friend of Bertie Westmoreland's. He'd have known Lotta. And through him, Calvaire and anyone with whom Calvaire had associated would have known of Blaydon."