Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 20

"What you want is not possible." In the upside-down glow of the oil lamp Blaydon had set on the floor, Ysidro's face had the queen stark look of a Beardsley drawing, framed in his long, color-less hair. His rolled-up shirt sleeves showed the hard sinewiness of his arms; like his throat and chest, visible through the unbuttoned collar, they were white as the linen of the garment. He sat cross-legged, like the idol of some decadent cult, on his own coffin, with Asher lying, bound hand and foot, at his feet.

Blaydon and Dennis had come in and done that toward sunset. Be-fore he'd fallen asleep again that morning, which he'd done shortly after Blaydon had left him, Asher had heard Blaydon go out, with muffled admonitions to Dennis to remain in the house, to guard them, and on no account to harm them. Don't eat the prisoners while Daddy's away, he had thought caustically. Straining his ears, he'd heard Blaydon men-tion the Peaks, that sprawling brick villa on the Downs near Oxford that had belonged to Blaydon's wife, where she had lived, playing the gracious hostess on weekends to her husband's Oxford colleagues or her son's friends from London or the Guards.

They must be keeping Lydia there, Asher thought, the rage in him oddly distant now, as if the emotions belonged to someone else. No wonder Blaydon had the look of a man run ragged. Even if he had kept a staff there after his wife's death three years ago-and Asher knew he'd simply shut the place up when he'd moved his residence to London -he still wouldn't have been able to trust them. The Peaks might be isolated; but, as the vampires had always known, servants have a way of finding things out. Once Blaydon had taken Lydia prisoner, he had to keep her someplace and look after her. That meant an hour and a half by train to Prince's Risborough and another forty minutes to an hour by gig over the downs to the isolated house in its little vale of beechwoods, then back again, at least once, perhaps twice a day. And on top of that, the vampires were deeper in hiding, and Dennis was getting physically worse and more difficult to control. No wonder Blaydon looked as if he had not slept in a week.

As he had said, he and Dennis both had been a month in Hell.

If it hadn't been Lydia who was in his power, Lydia who was lying drugged and helpless in that empty house, Asher would have felt a kind of spiteful satisfaction at the situation. As it was, he could only thank God that Dennis still had sufficient twisted passion for Lydia to keep Blaydon from harming her.

Although, Asher thought, as he fruitlessly searched the barren room for anything which could conceivably be used as a weapon or to facili-tate escape, he wasn't sure whether Blaydon would have killed a stranger to protect Dennis' secret. At least, he added with a shiver, he wouldn't have four days ago, when they'd caught her snooping around. That had been before he'd learned what a desperately time-consuming inconvenience keeping a hostage was. And that had been while he and Dennis were far more firmly anchored in sanity.

Looking at them now-Blaydon in his soiled collar and rumpled suit, with his silver-dust stubble of whiskers that glittered like the mad, fierce obsession in his eyes, and Dennis, hulking, restless, and fidgeting hun-grily in the background-Asher was uncomfortably aware that both were stretched to the snapping point. However long father and son might have been able to go on undisturbed, Lydia's imprisonment had thrown a strain on the situation, which his own wounding of Dennis had then made intolerable. They had the look of men who were fast losing their last vestiges of rationality.

With forced mildness, Blaydon said, "Dennis is going to want to feed on some vampire tonight, my friend. Now it can be you, or it can be James. Which way do you want it?" He still had the revolver with silver bullets in his hand, which was steady now-he must have gotten a little sleep in the train, Asher thought abstractedly. And as a doctor, of course, he'd have easy access to enough cocaine to keep him going for a while, at least.

Behind him, Dennis smirked.

Looking perfectly relaxed, Ysidro set one foot on the floor, folded his long hands on his knee, and considered the pair of them in the flickering lamplight. "It is clear to me that you do not understand the process by which one becomes vampire. If, when I drank James' blood, I forced him to..."

Blaydon raised his hand sharply. "Dennis?" he barked. "Have you made a patrol? Checked for searchers?"

"There's no one out there," Dennis said, his gluey bass barely com-prehensible now. "I've listened-don't you think I'd hear another vam-pire, if any came looking for these two? Don't you think I'd smell their blood? They're hiding, Dad. You've got to dig them out or let me..."

"Check anyway," Blaydon ordered sharply, Dennis' naked brow ridges pulled together into a horrible frown. "Do it!"

"I'm hungry, Dad," the vampire whispered sullenly. As he moved nearer, his monstrous shadow lurched over the low plaster of the ceiling and the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls. "Hungry-starving- my hands are burning me, and the craving's on me like fever..."

Blaydon swallowed nervously, but kept his voice commanding with an effort. "I understand, Dennis, and I'm going to get you well. But you must do as I say."

There was a long, ugly silence, Asher, lying at Ysidro's feet, could see the struggle of wills reflected in Blaydon's haggard face as he met his son's glare.He's slipping and he knows it, he thought, watching the sweat start on the old man's face.How long before Dennis makes him a victim, as well as Ysidro and myself?

And Lydia,he added, with a chill of fear. And Lydia.

Then Dennis was gone. Asher realized they must all have had their consciousnesses momentarily blanked as the vampire moved, but it was so quick, so subtle, that he was not even aware of it, merely that Dennis vanished into the crowding shadows. He did not even hear the closing of the steel-sheathed door.

Blaydon wiped his mouth nervously with the hand that wasn't hold-ing the gun. He was still wearing the rather countrified tweed suit he'd had on that morning-that he'd had on for days, by the smell of it. Not, Asher reflected, that he or Ysidro could have passed for dandies either, both in shirt sleeves, himself unshaven and splotched with soot stains from climbing the wall last night. At least they'd slept, albeit uncom-fortably. Once, when he'd wakened in the afternoon, there had been a tray of food there, undoubtedly brought by Dennis-an unsettling thought. He'd eaten it and searched the room again, but it had yielded nothing but reinforced brick walls and door and Sheffield silver-plated steel window bars.

Blaydon waved his pistol at Ysidro. "Don't get any ideas, my friend. While you're in this room with me, you're safe. Dennis would pull you down before you got out of the house, as easily as he brought you here in the first place."

There was an annoyed glitter behind Ysidro's hooded eyelids-a grandee, Asher thought, who did not care to be reminded that he'd been overpowered and manhandled by the hoi polloi. But he only regarded Blaydon levelly for a moment and asked, "Do you really believe that any of this will do you any good?"

"I'll be the judge of that," the pathologist said, rather sharply. "Go on with what you were saying. If you forced James...?"

"To drink my blood," Ysidro said slowly, unwillingly, his champagne gaze fixed upon Blaydon's face. "That is how it is done-the physical part, at least. But the-perhaps you would say mental, but I think spiritual would be a better term, though these days it is an unfashion-able one-"

"Let us say psychic," Blaydon put in. "That's what we're really talk-ing about, aren't we?"

"Perhaps." That faint, wry flick of a smile touched Ysidro's narrow-lipped mouth. "In any case, it is the giving of his spirit, his self, his conscious, and what Herr Freud politely terms his unconscious into the embrace of mine, for me to show him the way over that abyss. It is the yielding of all secrets, the giving of all trust, the admission of another into the most secret chambers of the heart. Most do not even join so close with those they deeply love. To do this, you understand, requires an act of the most desperate will, the all-consuming desire to continue in consciousness at whatever the cost." The shadow flung by the lamp on the wall behind him, huge and dark, echoed the slight movement of his white hand. "Under this set of circumstances, I think James would find no point in making so desperate an effort at survival, though I suspect that under others he might."

You will never know,Brother Anthony had whispered, deathlessly sorting bones in the crypts below Paris. Asher shook his head and said quietly, "No."

Ysidro turned his head to look down at him, without any expression in his eyes. "And they say that faith in God is dead," he commented. "I should think that your conscience, more than another man's, might make of you a coward,.," He turned back to regard his captor. "Whether or not James has that will to live, how many of those scum of the gutters whom you purpose to bring for me to transform into others like me would be capable of it? When a master vampire creates a fledgling, it is in part the master's will and in part the fledgling's trust which act. I do not believe myself capable of creating fodder, even did I consent to try. I certainly do not believe that one person in a hundred, or a thousand, has that will to survive."

"That's balderdash," Blaydon said uneasily. "All this talk of the will and the spirit..."

"And if you did get lucky," Asher put in, trying to shift his shoulders to take some of the pressure from his throbbing right arm, "what then? Are you really going to stay in a house with two, three, or four fledgling vampires? Fledglings whose wills are entirely subservient to their mas-ter's? The start of this whole affair-Calvaire-was a careless choice on the part of the woman who made him. Are you going to be choosier? Especially if you're giving Dennis specific orders to bring in none but the unfit, the socially useless, and the wicked?"

"You let me worry about that," Blaydon's voice had an edge like flint now, his eyes showing their old stubborn glint. "It's only a temporary measure..."

"Like the income tax?"

"In any case Ihave no choice. Dennis' condition is deteriorating. You've seen that. He needs blood, the blood of vampires, to arrest the symptoms. If you, Ysidro, refuse to help me..."

"It is not simply a matter of refusal,"

"Lying won't help you, you know..."

"No more than lying to yourself helps you, Professor." Behind that unemotional tone, Asher detected the faintest echo of a human sigh. Blaydon backed a few steps away, brandishing his gun.

"But if that is your choice, I shall have to take what measures I can...'*

"More humans?" Asher inquired. "More of those you consider un-fit?"

"It's to save my son!" The old man's voice cracked with desperation, and he fought to bring it to normal again. Rather shakily, he added, "And also for the good of the country. Once we have the experiment under control..."

"Good God, man, you don't mean you're going on with it!" Truly angry, Asher jerked himself to a sitting position, his back to the planed mahogany of the coffin. "Because of your failure, your own son is rot-ting to pieces under your eyes and you propose togo on with it?"

Blaydon strode forward and struck Asher across the face with the barrel of the gun, knocking him sprawling. Ysidro, impassive, merely moved his foot aside so that Asher wouldn't fall across it and watched the enraged pathologist with only the mildest of interest as he stepped back and picked up the lamp.

"I'm sorry you feel that way about it," Blaydon said quietly, the lamplight jerking with the angry trembling of his hands. "You, Don Simon, because I'm going to have to keep you fed and healthy while I take your blood for experiments, until I can locate another vampire more compliant. You, James, because I think I'm going to have to force either you or your wife to tell me where her rooms were in the city-she refused to do so, and, of course, Dennis wouldn't hear of me forcing her -so that I can find her notes on her researches..."

"Don't be naive," Ysidro sighed. "Grippen put them all on the fire before he left Lydia's rooms last night."

"Then I shall have to get Mrs. Asher to tell me herself," Blaydon said. "Now that I have James here, that shouldn't be too difficult. I think Dennis will even rather enjoy it."

Keeping his gun trained on Ysidro, he backed out the door.

"Don't trip over your son on the way out," the vampire remarked derisively as the door closed upon the amber radiance of the lamplight and the bolts slid home.

A west wind had been blowing all day, and the night outside was clear. Leaky white moonlight added somewhat to the faint glow of the gas lamps visible beyond the garden wall. With his usual languid grace, Ysidro unfolded his thin legs and rose from the coffin lid, knelt beside Asher, and stooped to bite through the ropes that bound his wrists. Asher felt the cold touch of bloodless lips against the veins of his left wrist and the scrape of teeth. Then the ropes were pulled away. The pain in his right arm almost made him sick as Ysidro brought it gently around and installed it in its sling again.

"You think he was listening?"

"Of course he was listening." The vampire twisted the slack of the ankle ropes between his white hands, and the strands parted with a snap. "He was right outside the door; he never even went into the garden, though a vampire of his abilities certainly could have heard us from there, had he chosen to listen, soundproofing or no soundproof-ing."

With light strength, he helped Asher to sit on the coffin lid, while he prowled like a faded tomcat to the room's single window, keeping a wary distance from the silver bars. "Triple glazed," he remarked briefly. "Wired glass, too. We might wrench the lock free, could we get past the bars to get some kind of purchase on it..."

"Do you think he followed us in the mews?"

"I am sure of it. I felt-sensed-I don't know. A presence in the night, once or twice... He took me from behind, before I even knew he was there." He tilted his head, angling to see if he could reach through to the lock, his hooked profile white against the darkness outside, like a colorless orchid. "But I had been listening for days for things I am not certain I ever truly heard. Fear makes it very difficult to judge." Asher wondered how long it had been since Ysidro had admit-ted to fear. Looking at that slender, insubstantial shape in its white shirt, gray trousers, and vest, he had the odd sense that he was dealing now with the original Don Simon Ysidro, rather than with the vampire the man had become.

"Merde alors." Ysidro stepped back from the bars, shaking a burned finger. "Curious that Blaydon did not wish his son to learn how vam-pires are made. It is a sensible precaution to keep him under his control, but..." He paused, tipping his head a little to listen. "He's gone."

He had not needed to speak; for the last few moments, Asher had heard Blaydon's hurrying steps vibrating the floors of the house, his querulous voice calling dimly, "Dennis? Dennis..."

Cold flooded over him as he suddenly understood.

"He's gone to get Lydia."

Then the cold was swept away by a heat of rage that burned out all pain, all exhaustion, and all despair.

"That's why he listened. He wanted to know how to create a fledgling."

"Sangre de Dios" In a single fluid move Ysidro stripped out of his gray waistcoat, wrapping it around his hand. Asher, knowing already what the vampire meant to do, clumsily unslung his arm and pulled off his own. It was gone from his grasp before he was aware the vampire had moved; Ysidro was back at the window, using the fabric to muffle his hands against the silver of the bars. For a moment he strained, shadows jumping on the ropy white muscle of his forearms, then he let go of the bars and backed away, rubbing his hands as if in pain.

"No good. Metallurgy has vastly improved since the days when we had the strength of ten, and I cannot grip them long enough. If we could dig into the masonry around them and dislodge them..." His pale gaze flicked swiftly around the prison, touching Asher. "Curst be the man who decreed gentlemen should wear braces and not belts with large, fierce metal buckles, as they did in my day..."

"He'd have taken them." Asher was kneeling beside the coffin. "He thought of that. The handles have been removed. I noticed when I opened it that there were no corner braces or other metal fittings."

Ysidro cursed dispassionately, archaically, and in several languages. Asher eased his arm gingerly back into its sling, and remembered the isolation of that big house on the downs, miles from the nearest habita-tion. "Dennis must know it's the only way he'll have her now."

"If it works," the vampire said, not moving, but his eyes traveling again over the room. "If, as you think, the vampire state is caused by organisms-which I myself do not believe-it may still not be transmit-table in this artificial form, even by a master who understands what he is doing, a description that scarcely fits our friend."

"That doesn't mean he won't kill her trying," Anger filled him at his own helplessness, at Blaydon, at Dennis, at Ysidro, and at the other vampires who were hiding God knew where. "Maybe I can reach the lock... if we could force it, we could call for help..."

"Your fingers would not have the strength to pull it from the case-ment."

Asher cursed, then said, "How soon can he get there? It's forty miles or so to the Peaks-he obviously can't take the train..."

"He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays..."

"Here." Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. "Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It's how men's shoes are made."

"Thus I am served," Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, "for scorning the arts of mechanics. Where is this place? I was unaware there were peaks of any sort on this island..."

"There aren't. It's in the chalk downs back of Oxford, sheep country. Blaydon's wife's father built the place when he came into his money in the forties. Blaydon stayed there 'til his wife died. He had rooms at his college when he was teaching..."

"You know the way, then?" Ysidro was working at the window, his hands muffled in both waistcoats against accidental contact with the bars. The harsh scrape of metal on cement was like the steady rasping of a saw.

"Of course. I was there a number of times, though not in the past seven years."

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 sud-denly 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 case-ment 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 labora-tory 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 motorcy-cle 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, color-less 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."