Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 2

It was perhaps ten minutes' walk along Holywell Street to the train station. Alone in the clinging veils of the September fog, Asher was conscious of a wish that the distance were three or four times as great. He felt in need of time to think.

On his very doorstep, Ysidro had vanished, fading effortlessly away into the mists. Asher had fought to keep his concentration on the vam-pire during what he was virtually certain was a momentary blanking of his consciousness, but hadn't succeeded. Little wonder legend attrib-uted to vampires the ability to dissolve into fog and moonbeams, to slither through keyholes or under doors. In a way, that would have been easier to understand.

It was the ultimate tool of the hunter-or the spy.

The night was cold, the fog wet and heavy in his lungs-not the black, killer fog of London, but the peculiarly moist, dripping, Oxford variety, which made the whole town seem slightly shaggy with moss and greenness and age. To his left as he emerged into Broad Street, the sculpted busts around the Sheldonian Theater seemed to watch him pass, a dim assemblage of ghosts; the dome of the theater itself was lost in the fog beyond. Was Ysidro moving among those ghosts somewhere, he wondered, leaving no footprint on the wet granite of the pavernent?

Or was he somewhere behind Asher in the fog, trailing silently, watching to see whether his unwilling agent would double back and return home?

Asher knew it would do him no good if he did. His conscious mind might still revolt at the notion that he had spent the last half hour conversing with a live vampire- an oxymoron if ever I heard one, he reflected wryly-but the difference, if one existed, was at this point academic.

He had been in deadly danger tonight. That he did not doubt.

As for Lydia...

He had absolutely no reason to believe Don Simon's claim to be alone. Asher had considered demanding to search the house before he left, but realized it would be a useless gesture. Even a mortal accomplice could have stood hidden in the fog in the garden, let alone one capable of willing mortal eyes to pass him by. He had contented himself with lighting the fires laid in the study fireplace and the kitchen stove, so that the servants would not wake in cold-as wake they would, Ysidro had assured him, within an hour of their departure.

And at all events, Ysidro knew where Asher lived. If the vampire were watching him, there was no chance of returning to the house and getting Lydia to safety before they were intercepted.

And- another academic point-what precisely constituted safety?

Asher shoved his gloved hands deeper into the pockets of the baggy brown ulster he had donned and mentally reviewed everything he had ever learned about vampires.

That they were the dead who infinitely prolonged their lives by drink-ing the blood of the living seemed to be the one point never in dispute, bitten-off noses in Rome notwithstanding. From Odysseus' first inter-view with the shades, there was so little divergence from that central theme that Asher was-intellectually, at least-mildly astounded at his own disbelief before he had pressed the stethoscope to that thin, hard ribcage under the dark silk of the vest, and had heard... nothing. His researches in folklore had taken him from China to Mexico to the Australian bush, and there was virtually no tongue which had not yielded some equivalent of that word,vampire.

Around that central truth, however, lay such a morass of legend about how to deal with vampires that he felt a momentary spasm of irritation at the scholars who had never troubled to codify such knowl-edge. He made a mental note to do so, provided Ysidro hadn't simply invited him to London for dinner with a few friends. Naturally, he reflected wryly, there wasn't a greengrocer open at this hour, and he would look fairly foolish investigating back-garden vegetable patches for garlic en route to the station... totally aside from missing his train. And given the general standard of British cookery, searching for garlic would be a futile task at best.

His ironic smile faded as he paused on the Hythe Bridge, looking down at the water, like slate the color of glass and smudged with the lights of Fisher Row, whose wet gray walls seemed to rise straight out of the stream. Garlic was said to be a protection against the Undead, as were ash, whitethorn, wolfsbane, and a startling salad of other herbs, few of which Asher would have recognized had he found them by the road. But the Undead were also said to be unable to cross running water, which Ysidro had obviously done on his way from the station- orhad he come up from London to Oxford by train?

A crucifix allegedly protected its wearer from the vampire's bite- some tales specified a silver crucifix, and Asher's practical mind inquired at once:How high a silver content? But like tales of the Catholic Limbo, that theory left vast numbers of ancient and modern Chinese, Aztecs, ancient Greeks, Australian bushmen, and Hawaiian Islanders, to name only a few, at an unfair disadvantage. Or did ancient Greek vampires fear other sacred things? And how, in that case, had unconverted pagan vampires in the first century a.d. reacted to Christians frantically waving the symbols of their faith at them to protect themselves from having their blood drunk or their noses bitten off?Not much vincere in hoc signo, he mused ironically, turning his steps past the Crystal Palace absurdity of the old London and Northwestern station and along the Botley Road to the more prosaic soot-stained brick of the Great Western station a hundred yards beyond.

He was now not alone in the fog-shrouded roadbed between the nameless brick pits and sheds that railway stations seemed to litter spontaneously about themselves. Other dark forms were hastening from the lights of the one station to the lights of the other, struggling with heavy valises or striding blithely along in front of brass-buttoned porters whose breath swirled away to mingle with the dark vapors around hem. From the direction of the London and Northwestern station, a train whistle groaned dismally, followed by the lugubrious hissing of steam; Asher glanced back toward the vast, arched greenhouse of the station and saw Don Simon walking, with oddly weightless stride, at his elbow.

The vampire held out a train ticket in his black-gloved hand. "It is only right that I provide your expenses," he said in his soft voice, "if you are to be in my service."

Asher pushed aside the ends of his scarf-a woolly gray thing knitted for him by the mother of one of his wilder pupils-and tucked the little slip of pasteboard into his waistcoat pocket. "Is that what it is?" They climbed the shallow ramp to the platform. In the harsh glare of the gaslights, Ysidro's face looked white and queer, the delicate swoop of the eyebrows standing out against pale hair and paler skin, the eyes like sulfur and honey. A woman sitting on a bench with two sleepy little girls glanced up curiously, as if she sensed something amiss. Don Simon smiled into her eyes, and she quickly looked away.

The vampire's smile vanished as swiftly as it had been put on; In any case, it had never reached his eyes. Like every other gesture or expres-sion about him, his smile had an odd, minimal air, almost like a carica-turist's line, though Asher had from it a sudden impression of an an-tique sweetness, the faded-out shape of what it once had been. For a moment more Ysidro studied the averted profile and the silvery-fair heads of the two children pressed against the woman's shabby serge shoulders. Then his glance returned to Asher's.

"From the time Francis Walsingham started running his agents in Geneva and Amsterdam to find out about King Philip's invasion of England, your secret service has had its links with the scholars," he said quietly. The antique inflection to his speech, like its faint Castilian lisp, was barely discernible. "Scholarship, religion, philosophy-they were killing matters in those days, and at that time I was still close enough to my human habits of thought to be concerned about the outcome of the invasion. And too, it was still respectable among scholars to be a war-rior, and among warriors to be a scholar, which it is no longer, as I'm sure you know."

Asher's old colleague, the Warden of Brasenose, sprang to mind, tutting disapprovingly over some minor Balkan flare-up in the course of which Asher had nearly lost his life, while Asher, cozily consuming scones on the other side of the hearth, had nodded agreement that no,h'rm, England had no business meddling in European politics, damned ungen tl emanly,hrmph, mphf. He suppressed his smile, unwilling to give this slender young man anything, and kept silent. He leaned his shoul-ders against the sooty brick of the station wall, folded his arms, and waited.

After a moment Ysidro went on, "My solicitor-a young man, and agreeable to meet with his clients at late hours if they so desire-did mention that, when he worked in the Foreign Office, there was talk of at least one don at Oxford and several at Cambridge who 'did good work,' as the euphemism goes. This was years ago, but I remembered it, out of habit, and of interest in things secret. When I had need of an-agent-it was no great matter to track you down by the simple expedient of comparing the areas about which papers were published and their prob-able research dates with times and places of diplomatic unease. It still left the field rather wide, but the only Fellow younger than yourself who might possibly have fit the criteria of time and place would have diffi-culty passing himself off as anything other than an obese and myopic rabbit..."

"Singletary of Queens," sighed Asher. "Yes, he was researching in Pretoria at the same time I was, trying to prove the degeneracy of the African brain by comparative anatomy. The silly bleater still doesn't know how close he came to getting us both killed."

That slight, ironic line flicked into existence at the corner of Ysidro's thin mouth, then vanished at once. The train came puffing in, steam roiling out to blend with the fog, while vague forms hurried onto the platform to meet it. A girl with a face like a pound of dough sprang from a third-class carriage as it slowed, into the arms of a podgy young man in a shop clerk's worn old coat, and they embraced with the de-lighted fervor of a knight welcoming his princess bride. A mob of un-dergraduates came boiling out of the waiting room, noisily bidding good-by to a furiously embarrassed old don whom Asher recognized as the Classics lecturer of St. John's. Linking then: arms, they began to carol "Till We Meet Again" in chorus, holding then- boaters over their hearts. Asher did not like the way his companion turned his head, studying them with expressionless yellow eyes as if memorizing every lineament of each rosy face. Too like a cook, he thought, watching lambs play at a spring fair.

"The war was my last job," Asher went on after a moment, drawing Ysidro's glance once more to him as they crossed the platform. "I became-unsuitably friendly with some people in Pretoria, including a boy I later had to kill. They call it the Great Game, but it's neither. I came back here, got married, and incorporated the results into a paper on linguistic borrowings from aboriginal tongues." He shrugged, his face now as expressionless as the vampire's. "A lecturer's salary isn't a great deal, but at least I can drink with my friends without wondering if what they're telling me is the truth."

"You are fortunate," the vampire said softly. He paused, then contin-ued, "I have taken a first-class compartment for us-at this time of night, we should have it to ourselves. I will join you there after the train leaves the station."

Oh, will you? Asher thought, his right eyebrow quirking up and his every instinct and curiosity coming suddenly alert as the vampire moved off down the platform with a lithe, disquieting stride, his dark Inverness cloak flaring behind him. Thoughtfully, Asher sought out their compartment, divested himself of bowler and scarf, and watched the comings and goings on the platform with great interest until the train moved away.

The cloudy halo of the platform lights dropped behind them; a scat-tering of brick buildings and signal gantries flipped past in the foggy dark. He saw the gleam of lights, like an ironic omen, on the ancient markers of the old graveyard, then on the brown sheet-silk of the river as they passed over the bridge. The darkness of the countryside took them.

Asher settled back against the worn red plush as the compartment door slid open and Ysidro entered, slim and strange as some Egyptian cat-god, his fair, cobweb-fine hair all sprinkled with points of dampness in the jolting flicker of the gas jet overhead. With a graceful movement, he shrugged out of his slate-gray Inverness; but, in spite of his flawless Bond Street tailoring, Asher was coming to wonder how anyone ever mistook him for anything human.

Folding his hands on his knee, Asher inquired casually, "Just whom are you afraid of?"

The long, gloved hands froze momentarily in their motion; the saf-fron eyes slid sharply to him, then away.

"In this day and age I'd be surprised to learn it's a mob with a crucifix and torches, but a man doesn't jump on a train at the last moment unless he's making damned sure who gets on ahead of him, and that no one's coming behind."

Ysidro's gaze rested on him for a moment longer, calm as ever, though his whole body seemed poised for movement; then he seemed infinitesimally to relax. He set his coat aside and sat down. "No," he said presently. "That is our strength-that no one believes, and, not believing, lets us be. It is a superstition that is one of the many things 'not done' in this country. We learned long ago that it is good policy to cover our traces, to hide our kills or to make them look like something else. Generally it is only the greedy, the careless, the arrogant, or those with poor judgment who are traced and killed, and even they not imme-diately. At least so it has been."

"So there are more of you."

"Of course," the vampire said simply. He folded his gloved hands, sitting very straight, as if, centuries after he had ceased to wear the boned and padded doublets of the Spanish court, the habit of their

armoring persisted. Long used to judging men by the tiny details of their appearance, Asher marked down the medium-gray suit he wore at fifty guineas or better, the shoes as made to order in the Burlington Arcade, the gloves of kid fine as silk. Even minimal investments, he thought dryly, must accrue an incredible amount of interest in three hundred years...

"There were some-two or three, a master vampire and her fledg-lings-at one time in Edinburgh, but Edinburgh is a small town; late in the seventeenth century the witch-hunters found the places where they hid their coffins. There are some in Liverpool now, and in that packed, crass, and stinking cesspit of factories and slums that has spread like cancer across the north." He shook his head. "But it is a young town, and does not offer the hiding places that London does."

"Who's after you?" Asher asked.

The champagne-colored eyes avoided his own. "We don't know."

"I should think that with your powers..."

"So should I." The eyes returned to his, again level and cool as the soft voice. "But that does not seem to be the case. Someone has been killing the vampires of London."

Asher raised one thick brow. "Why does that surprise you?"

"Because we do not know who it is."

"The people you kill don't know who you are," Asher pointed out.

"Not invariably," the vampire agreed. "But when they do, or when a friend, or a lover, or a member of their family guesses what has hap-pened to them, as occasionally chances, we usually have warning of their suspicions. We see them poking about the places where their loved ones were wont to meet their killers-for it is a frequent practice of vampires to befriend their victims, sometimes for months before the kill -or the churchyards where they were buried. Most of us have good memories for faces, for names, and for details-we have much leisure, you understand, in which to study the human race. These would-be vampire hunters in general take several weeks to bring themselves to believe what has happened, to harden their resolve, and in that time we often see them."

"And dispose of them," Asher asked caustically, "as you disposed of their friends?"

"Dios,no." That flexible smile touched his face again, for one instant; this time Asher saw the flicker of genuine amusement in the pale, ironic eyes. "You see, time is always on our side. We have only to melt into the shadows, to change our haunts and the places where we sleep for five years, or ten, or twenty. It is astounding how quickly the living forget. But this time..." He shook his head. "Four of us have died. Their coffins were opened, the light of the sun permitted to stream in and reduce their flesh to ashes. The murders were done by daylight-there was nothing any vampire could have done to prevent them, or to catch the one who did them. It was this that decided me to hire help."

"To hire help," Asher said slowly. "Why should I..." He stopped, remembering the still gaslight of the library shining on Lydia 's unbound red hair.

"Precisely," Ysidro said. "And don't pretend you did not know that you were hired to kill by other killers in the days when you took the Queen's Coin. Wherein lies the difference between the Empire, which holds its immortality in many men's consciousness, and the vampire, who holds it in one?"

It could have been a rhetorical question, but there was not that inflec-tion in the vampire's voice, and he waited afterward for an answer.

"Perhaps in the fact that the Empire never blackmailed me into serv-ing it?"

"Did it not?" There was the faintest movement of one of those curv-ing brows-like the smile, the bleached echo of what had once been a human mannerism. "Did you not serve it out of that peculiarly English brand of sentimentalism that cherishes sodden lawns and the skyline of Oxford and even the yammering dialects of your peasants? Did you not risk your own life and take those of others, so that ' England would remain England '-as if, without Maxim guns and submarines, it would somehow attach itself to the fabric of Germany or Spain? And when this ceased to be a consideration for you, did you not turn your back in disgust upon what you had done like a man falling out of love?

"We need a man who can move about in the daylight as well as in the hours of darkness, who is acquainted with the techniques of research and the nuances of legend, as well as with the skills of a killer and a spy. We merely agree with your late Queen as to the choice of the man."

Asher studied him for a long moment under the jumpy glare of the gas jet in its pierced metal sheath. The face was smooth and unwrinkled and hard, the slender body poised and balanced like a young man's in its well-tailored gray suit. But the jeweled eyes held in them an expres-sion beyond denning, the knowledge of one who has seen three and a half centuries of human folly and human sin reel gigglingly by; they were the eyes of one who was once human, but is no longer.

"You're not telling me everything," he said.

"Did your Foreign Office?" Ysidro inquired. "And I am telling you this, James. We will hire you, we will pay you, but if you betray us, in word or in deed, there will be no place on this earth where you or your lady Lydia will be safe from us, ever. I hope you believe that, for both your sakes."

Asher folded his hands, settled his shoulders back into the worn plush. "You hope I believe it for your own sake as well. In the night you're powerful, but by daylight you seem to be curiously easy to kill."

"So," the vampire murmured. For an instant his delicate mouth tightened; then the expression, if expression it was, smoothed away, and the pale eyes lost some of their focus, as if that ancient soul sank momentarily into its dreams. Though the whole car vibrated with the rush of the dark rails beneath their feet, Asher had a sense of terrible silence, like a monster waiting in absolute stillness for its prey.

Then he heard a hesitant step in the corridor, a woman's, though traffic up and down the narrow passage had long ceased. The compart-ment door slid open without a knock. Framed in the slot of brown oak and gaslight stood the woman who had watched over her two sleeping children on the platform, staring before her like a sleepwalker.

Ysidro said nothing; but, as if he had invited her in, the woman closed the door behind her. Stepping carefully with the swaying of the train, she came to sit on the edge of the seat at the vampire's side.

"I- I'm here," she stammered in a tiny voice, her eyes glassy under straight, thin lashes. "Who-why...?"

"It is nothing you need trouble about,bellisima" Ysidro whispered, putting out one slim hand in its black glove to touch her face. "Nothing at all."

"No," she whispered mechanically. "Nothing at all." Her dress was of shabby red cloth, clean but very old, the fabric several times turned; she wore a flat black straw hat, and a purple scarf round her neck against the cold. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five- Lydia's age-and had once been pretty, Asher thought, before ceaseless worry had graven those petty lines around her mouth and eyes. Tersely he said, "All right, you've made your point..."

"Have I?" The delicate black fingers drew forth the wooden pin that held the hat to the tight screw of fair hair; caressingly, like a lover's, they began to work loose the pins from the hair itself. "In all the rather silly legends about us, no one ever seems to have pinpointed the true nature of the vampire's power-a kind of mesmerism, as they used to call it, an influence over the minds of humans and, to some extent, beasts. Though I am not sure into which category this creature would fall..."

"Send her away." Asher found his own voice was thick, his own mind seeming clogged, as if he, too, were half dreaming. He made as if to rise, but it was like contemplating getting out of bed too early on a foggy morning-far easier to remain where he was. He was aware of Ysidro's glance on him, sidelong under long, straight eyelashes nearly white.

"She was only along in one of the third-class carriages, she and her daughters." With slow care the vampire unwound the purple scarf, letting it slither heedless to the carriage floor; unfastened the cheap celluloid buttons of the woman's collar. "I could have summoned her from anywhere on the train, or, had she not been on it, I could have stood on the platform at Paddington and called her; and believe me, James, she would have gotten the money somehow and come. Do you believe that?"

Like dark spiders, his fingers parted her collar, down to the sad little ruffle of her mended muslin chemise; the milky throat rose like a col-umn from the white slope of her breast. "Do you remember your wife and her servants, asleep because I willed that they should sleep? We can do that, I and my-friends. I know your people now. At my calling, believe me, they would come-that big mare of a chambermaid, your skinny little Mrs. Grimes, your stupid scullion, or the lout who looks after your gardens and stables-do you believe that? And all without knowing any more about it than this woman here." His black leather flngers stroked the untouched skin. The woman's open eyes never moved. As if he were deep in the sleep of exhaustion, Asher's mind kept screaming at him, Get up! Get up! But he only regarded himself with a kind of bemusement, as if separated from his body by an incredible distance. The noises of the train seemed dulled, its shaking almost lull-ing, and it seemed as if this scene, this woman who was about to die, and indeed everything that had happened since that afternoon, which he'd spent explaining the Sanskrit roots of Romany to an undergradu-ate named Pettifer, were all a dream. In a way it made more sense when viewed so.

"A poor specimen, but then we feed upon the poor, mostly-they're far less likely to be avenged than the rich." A fang gleamed in the trembling gaslight. "Do you believe I can do this to whomever I will? To you or to anyone whose eyes I meet?"

No, thought Asher dully, struggling toward the surface of what seemed to be an endless depth of dark waters. No.

"No." He forced himself to his feet, staggering a little, as if he had truly been asleep. For a moment he felt the vampire's naked mind on his, like a steel hand, and quite deliberately he walled his mind against it-In his years of working for the Foreign Office there were things he had willed himself not to know, the consequences of actions he had taken. The night he had shot poor Jan van der Platz in Pretoria he had forced himself to feel nothing, as he did now. The fact that he had succeeded in it then was what had turned him, finally, from the Great Game.

As deliberately as he had pressed the trigger then, he walked over to the woman and pulled her to her feet. Ysidro's pale eyes followed him, but he did not meet them; he pushed the woman out of the compartment ahead of him and into the corridor. She moved easily, still sleep-walking. On the little platform between the cars the wind was raw and icy; with the cold air, his mind seemed to clear. He leaned in the door-frame, feeling oddly shaken, letting the cold smite his face.

Beside him the woman shuddered. Her hands-ungloved, red, chapped, and callused, in contrast to that white throat-fumbled at her open collar as her eyes flared with alarm and she stared, shaken and disoriented, up into his face. "What-who-?" She pushed away from him, to the very rail of the narrow space, as if she would back off it entirely into the flying night.

Asher dropped at once into his most harmless, donnish stance and manner, an exaggeration of the most gentle facet of his own personality that he generally used when abroad. "I saw you just standing in the corridor, madam," he said. "Please forgive my liberty, but my wife sleepwalks like that, and something about the way you looked made me think that might be the case. I did speak to you and, when you didn't answer, I was sure of it."

"I..." She clutched at her unbuttoned collar, confusion, suspicion, terror in her rabbity eyes. He wondered how much she recalled as a dream, and became at once even more consciously the Oxford don, the Fellow of New College, the philologist who had never evenheard of machine guns, let alone wadded up plans of them into hollowed-out books to ship out of Berlin.

"Fresh air will wake her up-my wife, I mean. Her sister sleepwalks, too. May I escort you back to your compartment?"

She shook her head quickly and mumbled, "No-thank you, sir-I- you're very kind..." Her accent Asher automatically identified as originating in Cornwall. Then she hurried over the small gap between the cars and into the one beyond, huddled with cold and embarrass-ment.

Asher remained where he was for some minutes, the cold wind lash-ing at his hair.

When he returned to the compartment, Ysidro was gone. The only thing that remained to tell him that all which had passed was not, in fact, a dream was the woman's purple scarf, collapsed like a discarded grave band on the floor between the two seats. Asher felt the anger surge in him, guessing where the vampire was and what he would be doing, but knowing there was nothing he could do. He could, he sup-posed, run up and down the train shouting to beware of vampires. But he had seen Ysidro move and knew there was very little chance of even glimpsing him before he found another victim. In a crowded third-class carriage or an isolated sleeping car, a dead man or woman would pass unnoticed until the end of the journey, always provided the body were not simply tipped out. Mangled under the train wheels, there would be no questions about the cause of death or the amount of blood in the veins.

But of course, if he issued a warning, nothing at all would happen save that he would be locked up as a bedlamite.

Filled with impotent rage, Asher flung himself back in the red cush-ioned seat to await Don Simon Ysidro's reappearance, knowing that he would do as the vampire asked.