Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 4

How does one go about investigating the personal life of a woman who's done murder on a regular basis for the last hun-dred and fifty years?"

Lydia Asher paused, the handkerchief-wrapped fragments of bone in hand, and tilted her head consideringly at her husband's question. With her long red hair hanging down over nightgowned shoulders and her spectacles glinting faintly in the misty gray of the window light, she looked more like a fragile and gawky schoolgirl than a doctor. Asher stretched out his long legs to rest slippered feet on the end of the bed. "She must have hundreds of potential enemies."

"Thousands, I should say," Lydia guessed, after a moment's mental calculation. "Over fifty thousand, counting one per night times three hundred and sixty-five times a hundred and fifty..."

"Taking off a few here and there when she went on a reducing diet?" Asher's mustache quirked in his fleet grin; only his eyes, Lydia thought, were not the same as they had been. Below them in the house, Ellen's footsteps tapped a half-heard pulse as she went from room to room, laying fires; further off, on the edge of awareness, Lydia could detect the regular clatter and tread of breakfast being prepared.

Ellen had insisted on remaining awake long enough to fix a scratch dinner, after they had all wakened mysteriously in the chilled depths of the night. Lydia had sent them all to bed as soon as possible. The last thing she'd needed was the parlor maid's unbridled imagination, the cook's self-dramatization, and the tweeny's morbid credulity to add to what she herself had found a deeply disturbing experience. That James had been home she'd deduced from the fact that the fires were built up, though why he should have taken apart his revolver and left the knife he didn't think she knew he carried in his boot among the pieces on his desk had left her somewhat at a loss. Characteristically, she had spent the remainder of the night searching through her medical journals- which she kept in boxes under the bed, as they'd overflowed the library -for references to similar occurrences, alternately outlining an article on the pathological basis for the legend of Sleeping Beauty and dozing in the tangle of lace-trimmed counterpane and issues of theLancet. But her dreams had been disturbing, and she had kept waking, expecting to find some slender stranger standing silently in the room.

"I don't think so," she said now, shaking back the clouds of her sleeve-lace and pushing up her specs. "Could a vampire go on a reduc-ing diet? There isn't any fat in blood."

Her mind scouted the thought while Asher hid his grin behind a cup of coffee, ***

She unwrapped the two vertebrae from James' handkerchief, and held them to the slowly brightening light of the window. Third and fourth cervical, badly charred and oddly decomposed, but, as James had described, the scratch on the bone was clearly visible. "There must be tissue repair of some kind, you know," she went on, wetting her finger to rub some of the soot away, "if Don Simon's burns 'took years to heal.' I wonder what causes the combustion? Though there are sto-ries of spontaneous human combustion happening in very rare instances to quite ordinary people-if theywere ordinary, of course. Did you get a look at the coffin lining? Was it burned away, too?"

Asher's thick brows pulled together as he narrowed his eyes, trying to call back the details of that silent charnel house. He hadn't had medical training, but, Lydia had found, he had the best eye for detail she had ever encountered in a world that ignored so much. He would be that way, she thought, even if his life hadn't depended on it for so many years.

"Not burned away, no," he said after a moment. "The lining at the bottom was corroded and stained, almost down to the wood; charred and stained to a few inches above where the body would come on the sides. The clothes, flesh, and hair had been entirely destroyed."

"Color of the stains?"

He shook his head. "I couldn't see by lantern light."

"Hmm." She paused in thought, then began patting and shaking the pillows, comforter, and beribboned froth of shams around her, looking for her magnifying glass-she was sure she'd been using it to peruse some dissecting-room drawings the other night in bed.

"Night stand?" Asher suggested helpfully. She fished it out to look more closely at the third cervical.

"This was done with one stroke." She held it out-he leaned across to take it and the glass and studied it in his turn. "Something very sharp, with a drawing stroke: a cleaver or a surgical knife. Something made

for cutting bone. Whoever used it knew what he was doing."

"And wasn't about to lose his nerve over severing a woman's head," Asher added thoughtfully, setting aside the bone. "He'd already killed three other vampires, of course. Presumably whatever started him on his hunt for vampires was enough to overcome his revulsion, if he felt any, the first time-and after that, he'd have proof that they do in fact exist and must be destroyed." As he spoke, he tugged gently on the faded silk ribbons of the old reticule, coaxing it open in a dry whisper of cracking silk.

"Surely the mere circumstances of their loved one's death would have proved that." When James didn't answer, she looked up from examin-ing the oddly dissolved-looking bone. What she saw in his face-in his eyes, like a burned-on reflection of things he had seen-caused the same odd little lightening within her that she'd felt when she was four and had awakened in the night to realize there was a huge rat in her room and that it was between her and the door.

Slowly he said, "If that's the reason behind the killings, yes. But I think there's more to it than that-and I don't know what. If Ysidro's telling the truth, vampires can generally see ordinary mortals coming," if he was telling the truth. It might have been a lie to make you keep your distance, you know." She shook one long, delicate finger at him and mimicked, " 'Don't you try nuthin' wi' me, bucko, 'cos we'll see you comin',' "

"You haven't seen him in action." The somberness fled from his eyes as he grinned at himself. "That's the whole point, I suppose: nobody sees them in action. But no. I believe him. His senses are preternaturally sharp-he can count the people in a train coach by the sound of their breathing, see in the dark... Yet the whole time I was with him, I could feel him listening to the wind. I've seen men do that when they think they're being followed, but can't be sure. He hides it well, but he's afraid."

"Well, it does serve him right," Lydia observed. She hesitated, turn-ing the vertebra over and over in her fingers, not looking at it now any more than she looked at the grass stems she plucked when she was nervous. She swallowed hard, trying to sound casual and not suc-ceeding. "How much danger am I in?"

"Quite a lot, I think." He got up and came around to sit on the pillows beside her; his arm in its white shirt sleeve was sinewy and strong around her shoulders. Her mother's anxious coddling-not to mention the overwhelming chivalry of a number of young men who seemed to believe that, because they found her pretty, she would auto-matically think them fascinating-had given Lydia a horror of clinginess. But it was good to lean into James' strength, to feel the warmth of his flesh through the shirt sleeve, the muscle and rib beneath that non-descript tweed waistcoat, and to smell ink and book dust and Macassar oil. Though she knew objectively that he was no more able to defend either of them against this supernatural danger than she was, she cher-ished the momentary illusion that he would not let her come to harm. His lips brushed her hair. "I'm going to have to go down to London again," he said after a few minutes, "to search for the murderer and to pursue investigations as to the whereabouts of the other vampires in London. If I can locate where they sleep, where they store their things, where they hunt, it should give me a weapon to use against them. It's probably best that you leave Oxford as well..."

"Well, of course!" She turned abruptly in the circle of his arm, the fragile suspension of disbelief dissolving like a cigarette genie with the opening of a door. "I'll come down to London with you. Not to stay with you," she added hastily, as his mouth opened in a protest he was momentarily too shocked to voice. "I know that would put me in dan-ger, if they saw us together. But to take rooms near yours, to be close enough to help you, if you need it..."

" Lydia...!"

Their eyes met. She fought to keep hers from say in gDon't leave me, fought even to keep herself from thinking it or from admitting to a fear that would only make things harder for him. She squared her pointed little chin. "And you will need it," she said reasonably. "If you're going to be investigating the vampire murders, you won't have time to go hunting through the public records for evidence of where the vampires themselves might be living, not if Don Simon wants to see results quickly. And we could meet in the daytime, when- whenthey can't see us. If what you say about them is true, I'd be in no more danger in London than I would be in Oxford -or anywhere else, really. And in London you would be closer, in case of..." She shied away from saying it. "Just in case."

He looked away from her, saying nothing for a time, just running the dry ribbons of the vampire's reticule through the fingers of his free hand. "Maybe," he said after a time. "And it's true I'll need a re-searcher who believes.,. Youdo believe they're really vampires, don't you?" His eyes came back to hers. She thought about it, turning that odd, anomalous chunk of bone over and over in her lap. James was one of the few men to whom she knew she could say anything without fear of either shock, uncertain laughter, or-worse-that blankly incomprehending stare that young men gave her when she made some straight-faced joke.

"Probably as much as you do," she said at last. "That is, there's a lot of me that says, "This is silly, there's no such thing.' But up until a year or so ago, nobody believed there was such a thing as viruses, you know. We still don't know what they are, but we do know now they exist, and more and more are being discovered... A hundred years ago, they would have said it was silly to believe that diseases were caused by little animals too small to see, instead of either evil spirits or an imbalance of bodily humors-which really are more logical explanations, when you think of it. And there's something definitely odd about this bone."

She took a deep breath and relaxed as her worst fear-the fear of being left alone while her fate was decided elsewhere and by others- receded into darkness. James, evidently resigned to his fate, took his arm from around her shoulders and began picking out the reticule's contents, laying them on the lace of the counterpane-yellowing bills, old theater programmes folded small, appointment cards, invitations- in his neat, scholarly way.

"Are you going to get in touch with the killer?"

"I certainly intend to try." He held up an extremely faded calling card to the light. "But I'll have to go very carefully. The vampires will know it's a logical alliance to make... What is it?"

Against his side, through the bed, he had felt her start.

Lydia dropped the card she had been looking at, her hand shaking a little with an odd sort of shock, as if she'd seen someone she knew... Which, she reflected, was in a way exactly what had happened. She didn't know what to say, how to define that sense of helpless hurt, as if she'd just seen a very brainless cat walk straight into the savaging jaws of a dog.

He had already picked up the card and was reading the assignation on the back. Then he flipped it over to see the front, where the name of the Honorable Albert Westmoreland was printed in meticulous copper-plate.

"I knew him," Lydia explained, a little shakily. "Not well-he was one of Uncle Ambrose's students when I was still in school. His father was a friend of Papa's in the City."

"One of your suitors?" The teasing note he sometimes had when speaking of her suitors was absent. She

had had flocks of them, due in pan to the Willoughby fortune, which had paid for this house and everything in it, and in part to her waiflike charm. After being told for years that she was ugly, she enjoyed their attentions and enjoyed flirting with them-though not as much as she enjoyed a good, solid analysis of nervous lesions-and charming people had become second nature to her. A just girl, she didn't hold it against those earnest young men that they'd frequently bored her to death, but the distinction was something her father had never been able to grasp. With Baptista-like faith in man's ability to change a woman's personality, he had encouraged them all, never, until the last, losing his touching hope that he'd see his wayward daughter marry her way into the peerage,

She smiled a little, mostly at the recollection of her father's face when she'd announced her intention to marry a middle-aged Lecturer in Phi-lology without an "Honorable" to his name, and shook her head. "He was already engaged to Lord Carringford's daughter. But he was in their set. So I saw him a good deal. I knew-well, nobody spoke of it before me, of course, and Nanna would have killed them if they had, but I guessed that when they went larking about in town it wasn't with girls like me. I remember Dennis Blaydon coming round and telling me Bertie had died."

She shivered, and he drew her close again, his hand warm and strong on her shoulder. Oddly enough, the news hadn't upset her much at the time, though she'd felt shocked and sad, for Bertie had been the first contemporary, the first of her set, who had died. Even then, she had been familiar with death-old Horace Blaydon, chief Lecturer in Pa-thology at Radclyffe, had said it was positively indecent to watch her carve up cadavers-but it was different, it seemed, when it was someone you knew. Dennis, she recalled, had done his best to comfort her, with disappointing results, "Did he say how?"

She shook her head. "But it was very sudden. I remember thinking I'd seen him only a few weeks before, when all their set went down to watch Dennis play in the rugger match against Kings. Poor Bertie." The memory made her smile again wanly. "The Honorable Bertie-he made straight for the shadiest seat and spent the whole time being terrified the bench would leave spots on his trousers, lemonade would drip onto his sleeve, or his buttonhole would wilt. His brother, the Equally Honorable Evelyn, was on the Gloucester side and nearly died of embarrassment."

What a thing to be remembered for, she thought. She wondered if he had cried out, if he had known what was happening to him, or if this vampire woman had taken him in his sleep, as Ysidro could so easily have done to them all. Her hand closed tighter around James'. After a very long silence, she asked, "Can we meet in the daytime?" "I don't know," he said quietly. "Not safely, I don't think. The killer can be about by day, even if the vampires can't. Until I can contact him -talk to him-see how and why he's doing this-I don't want anyone knowing where to get at you." His arm tightened a little around her, his fingers feeling hers, gently, as if treasuring even the bones within her thin flesh. She felt the tension in his body and turned to look up into his face.

"And it isn't only that," he said. "There's something Ysidro isn't telling me, Lydia, something critical. Whatever he says, he'd be a fool to hire a human; and whatever else he is, Don Simon Ysidro isn't a fool. He had a reason beyond what he's telling me. And whatever that reason is-whatever it is that he knows-it's the first thing I'm going to have to find out if either of us is going to make it to Guy Fawkes' Day alive."

Before noon Asher was on his way back to London. Over breakfast he had informed Ellen and Mrs. Grimes that the night's events had left Lydia in such a state of nervous prostration that he thought it better to arrange for her to see a specialist in London, a story which disgusted the phlegmatic Lydia and puzzled Ellen. "She was fine, Mr. Asher, sir, indeed she was, when she woke up me and Cook. And she's never been one to take on."

"Well, Fve just spent the morning with her, and, believe me, she needs to see a specialist," Asher said firmly. Twenty-four hours without sleep on top of the events and exertions of the night had left him in no mood for invention.

Ellen had regarded his pallor and his dark-circled eyes with deep disapproval. "It isn't my place to say so, sir, but if anyone needs a nerve doctor..."

"No, it isn't your place to say so," Asher retorted, draining his coffee. "So just assist Mrs. Asher to pack her things, and I'll be back to fetch her this evening." It would probably take that long, he reflected bemusedly, for Lydia to assemble everything she considered essential for a few weeks in London.

The mere thought of another train trip before nightfall made his bones ache, but no husband as worried about the state of his wife's health as he currently purported to be would entrust her on the journey with no other escort than her maid. Besides, once in London it would be difficult to get rid of Ellen, who, in addition to being more intelligent than she sometimes seemed, was incurably inquisitive.

Why was it, Asher wondered, crossing the Magdalen Bridge on his way out of Oxford a short time later, that qualities deemed laudable in anyone else were nothing but a damned nuisance in servants? Past the bridge's gray stone balustrade, he had a flying glimpse of the tops of the willows and a distant fragment of brown-green waters; he recalled Ysidro's words about teak and cottonwood and smiled in spite of him-self Coming off the bridge, he veered onto St. Clement's Street, which led through wooded byways toward the green rise of the downs.

In preference to another two hours on the Great Western, he had elected to take his motorcycle down to London, a five horsepower American V-twin Indian that had always been a bone of contention between himself and the other dons. There were Lecturers of All Souls and Fellows of Christ Church who might possess motorcars, but, it was implied, such things were thought to be far more typical of Cambridge men. To own a motorcycle, much less ride it through the countryside, was generally looked upon as scarcely above the level of an undergradu-ate. Out of deference for his colleagues' sensibilities, as well as for his own reputation of mild harmlessness-to say nothing of what such behavior would do to his academic gown-Asher did not generally ride within the Town itself.

At the moment, however, time was of the essence. There were things which needed to be arranged while the sun was yet in the sky and Ysidro and the other vampires safely asleep in their coffins, and the quickest way to London was over the downs and through High Wycombe. The road was execrable, potholed and unpaved in places and awash in yellowish mud which liberally splattered his boots, leather jacket, goggles, and hair. But their silence enfolded him. For the first time he was alone, in that vast stillness of rolling chalk hills and hair-fine, dull-olive turf, to think and to plan, and the stillness seeped imper-ceptibly into thought and muscle and soul, like salve on a burn.

On the high backbone of the downs, he stopped and turned to look back on the green valley, the far-off glitter where half a dozen streams met amid a lingering suggestion of damp mists and dark clouds of trees. He could pick out the towers of the colleges, not as the crystal company of dreaming spires that dawn or sunset made them, but gray, lichen-stained, familiar-the ogee cupola of Tom, Magdalen seeming to float above its trees, Merton's spires and the square proportions of his own New College Tower, like the faces of friends lined up on a railway platform to see him off-the place that had been his home, on and off, for the better part of twenty-seven years.

Abroad, he remembered, he had lived in constant danger, to the point where he could almost forget about it; there had been times when he could have been killed as easily as a candle being snuffed out. But through it he had always had this place, the memory of this gentle haven, at his back. He had always thought: If I can make it back to Oxford... And latterly had been the knowledge that Oxford had included Lydia.

Half the women he knew, he thought with an inward grin, would have swooned at the story he'd told her this morning or else gone into feverish speculation on how Asher had been hoaxed. Beneath her occa-sional and wholly illusory facade of scatter-witted loveliness, Lydia had a doctor's cool practicality and a willingness to deal with facts-how-ever bizarre-as they stood. He was reminded of himself, with his own life and hers at stake, concerning himself with the archaic pronuncia-tion of the vampire's speech.

Perhaps that was one reason why, out of all the men-mostly younger than he, and all a good deal wealthier than he-who had been captivated by her waiflike charm, it was he who lived with her now, and would, he hoped, for the next forty years.

Ysidro would be sorry, he thought grimly, that he had dragged Lydia into this.

He squeezed the throttle lever, startling a dozen larks into swift, slanting flight; turning the 'bike, he began to make his way down the long slopes toward Beaconsfield and Wycombe and, eventually, toward the distant smear of gray-yellow smoke that was London.

His journeys through the back blocks of Europe in quest of Latin roots or stranger things had given Asher a good deal of practice in finding lodgings quickly. He settled on two lodging houses in Bloomsbury, not far from the Museum, facing onto different streets, but backing on the same alley; the rear window of the small suite of rooms he engaged for Lydia at 109 Bruton Place could be seen from his own solitary chamber at 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade. They weren't as close as he would have liked, and there would be a good deal of shinning up and down drain pipes and climbing fences in the event of a real emergency, but it was as good as he could get in the time. Even so, it was getting perilously close to dark when he stumbled once more onto the Oxford train.

He slept all the way up. As he had feared, his dreams were troubled by the image of the coffin full of ashes in Highgate Cemetery and by the dim sense of dread that, if he went there and listened, those ashes might whisper to him in a voice that he could understand,

Lydia was waiting for him, simply but beautifully dressed and care-fully veiled to hide the fact that she was far less wan and pale than he. On the train down, fortified by yet more of the black coffee that had latterly kept his body and soul together, Asher explained the message-drop system he'd worked out at the cloakroom of the Museum's reading room, and the signals between Bruton Place and Prince of Wales Colon-nade: one curtain open, one shut, if a meeting was necessary, and a telegram to follow; a lamp in the window in case of an emergency.

"I'd suggest you start at Somerset House," he said as the leaden dusk flashed by the windows. Coming over the hills that afternoon had been pleasant; but, as the cold of the night closed in, he admitted there was a great deal to be said for the cozy stuffiness of a train after all. "You can match information from the Wills Office and Registry with the old Property Rolls in the Public Records Office-it's my guess that at least some of the vampires own property. I can't see Ysidro entrusting his Bond Street suits, let alone his coffin, to the care of a ten-bob-a-month landlady. Get me records of places where the leasehold hasn't changed ownership for-oh, seventy years or longer. Reader's Passes are easy enough to get. All the records of the original estate ground-landlords should be available. You might also see what you can get me on death certificates for which there was no body. We're eventually going to have to check back issues of newspapers as well for deaths which could be attributed to vampires, but, from the sound of it, those may be con-cealed. God knows how many cases of malnutrition or typhus were really Ysidro and his friends. I suspect that, during epidemics of jail fever at Newgate and Fleet, a vampire could feed for

weeks without anyone being the wiser or caring. Poor devils," he added and studied in silence that clear-cut white profile against the compartment's sepia gloom.

More quietly, he asked, "Will you mind learning what you can about Albert Westmoreland's death? I'll look into that, if you'd rather not."

She shook her head, a tiny gesture, understanding that she was af-fected, not because she had particularly cared about the man, but sim-ply because it brought the reality of her own danger closer. Without her spectacles, her brown eyes seemed softer, more dreamy. "No. You're going to need your time to follow the main trail. Besides, I knew him and his friends. I don't suppose I could look up Dennis Blaydon again without him pouting and fretting because I married you instead of him, but I could talk to Frank Ellis-Viscount Haverford he is now-or to the Equally Honorable Evelyn-Bertie's brother. He was a freshman, I think, the year Bertie... died."

"I don't like it," Asher said slowly. "Having you do research in London is one thing; when I send a letter to my leftover Foreign Office connections on theDaily Mail, it won't introduce you under your own name. Ysidro spoke of vampires knowing when a human-a friend or relative of a recent victim-is on their trail; they go about interviewing people or loitering in churchyards, and the vampires eventually see them at it. I don't want them to see you, Lydia. That would surely be the death of us both,"

Her back stiffened-"I don't see how,.."

"Nor do I," he cut her off. "But for the moment, I'm going to have to assume that it's true-They have powers we do not; until we know more about them, I'm not disposed to take chances."

"Maybe," she said. "But they also have weaknesses, and the more we learn about them-the more we can talk to people who have actually dealt with a vampire-the more we may be able to put together a means of dealing with them if,.. if worse comes to worst. As long ago as Bertie's death was, it isn't likely there's a connection, but at least we'll have another view of them."

"I still don't like it," he said again, knowing she was probably right. "I'd rather you didn't, but if you do, please be careful. Take every precaution, no matter how foolish it seems. As for what you may learn.,. Have you ever tried to piece together an account of an accident from witnesses, even ten minutes after it happened? And Bertie's death was... when?"

"Nineteen hundred." Her mouth twitched in an ironic smile. "Turn of the new century."

"That was seven years ago." He'd been in Africa then, riding across tawny velvet distances by the light of the swollen and honey-colored moon. He sometimes found it difficult to believe it was any longer ago than seven weeks. He leaned across and kissed her, her hat veils tickling the bridge of his nose; it was odd to remind himself once again that she was, in fact, his wife. He went on, "Even had Lotta been the first victim instead of the fourth, that's a long time between. But we need any background, any leads we can get. Can you look up all that?"

"Certainly, Professor Asher." She folded her gloved hands primly in her rose twill lap and widened her eyes at him sweetly. "And what would you like me to look up in the afternoon?"

He laughed ruefully. "Gas company records for private residences that show abnormally high consumption? I'd like to get at banking records, but that means pulling F.Q. or Yard credentials, and that might get back to Ysidro. Leave whatever notes you make in the mes-sage-drop at the Museum-I'll keep them in a locker at Euston rather than at my rooms overnight. At the moment, I'd rather Ysidro and

his friends have no idea the way my research is tending. And, Lydia -let me know if you run across any evidence that someone else is following the same trails."

"The killer, you mean." By her voice she'd already thought of it; he nodded.

"Will you kill them, then?"

Something in her tone brought his eyes back to her face; its look of regret surprised nun. She shook her head, dismissing her reservations. "It's just that I'd like the chance to examine one of them medically."

The concern was so typical of Lydia that Asher nearly laughed. "Yes," he said, and then the lightness faded from his face and his soul. "I'll have to for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that if I don't catch the killer, sooner or later they're going to suspect me of killing them anyway, and using the original murders to mask whatever I may do. They have to be destroyed, Lydia," he went on quietly. "But if-and when-it comes to that, I'd better get them all, because God help both of us if even one survives."

Asher got off the train at Reading, taking a slow local to Baling and then the Underground the long way round, through Victoria and the City, and thence back to Euston Station, to avoid being anywhere near Paddington when Lydia debarked. It was now fully dark. Staring through the rattling windows at the high brick walls and the occasional flickering reflection of gaslight where the Underground ran through cuts rather than tunnels, he wondered whether the vampires ever took the Underground, ever hunted its third-class carriages. Could they use its passages as boltholes, emergency hiding places safe from the sun? How much sun was fatal to that white, fragile flesh?

Not a great deal, he thought, crossing the platform and ascending the steps that led upward to the open square of night outside. Even with its door open, the crypt in Highgate wouldn't be brightly lighted, looking as it did into the gloom of the narrow avenue of tombs.

As he reached the flagway, he felt a pang of uneasiness for Lydia, disembarking by herself at Paddington. Not that she wasn't perfectly capable of looking out for herself in the crowd of a railway station, where she would undoubtedly have six or seven handsome young men fighting to carry her luggage, but his brush with Ysidro had frightened him.

How much were the vampires capable of knowing or guessing about those who began to piece together their trails? Perhaps Lydia was right -perhaps the warning was only intended to keep him away. There must be very few relatives and friends of victims who looked past the comfort of the "logical explanation," particularly, as Ysidro had pointed out, if there was no second set of suspicious circumstances to link it with. And yet...

He reminded himself firmly, as he joined the crowding throng on Euston Road, that Ysidro would have no way of knowing that he had gone up to Oxford and returned twice that day, instead of once. He might have guessed.. .

Asher shook his head firmly. He was exhausted past the point, he was beginning to suspect, of rational thought. He'd been without unbroken sleep for over thirty-six hours; he was starting at shadows. That queer prickling on the back of his neck was nerves, he told himself, not the instincts of years of the secret life whispering to him. His uneasiness was simply the result of knowing he might be watched, rather than a certainty that he was.

He slowed his steps. Casually, he scanned the hurrying line of traffic, the crowds jostling along in the glare of the gaslights-clerks and shop-girls bustling toward the Underground to catch the next train to what-ever dreary suburb they called home, laborers eager for a cheap dinner of bubble and squeak and a few beers at the local pub. The gaslight was deceptive, making all faces queer, but he could see no sign of any whiter and more still than the rest.

Why, then, he wondered, did he have the growing conviction of miss-ing something, the sensation of a blind spot somewhere in his mind?

At the corner, he crossed Gower Street, walking down its western side, casually scanning the stream of traffic passing before the long line of Georgian shops. There were a number of motorbuses and lorries, an omnibus and motorized cabs, and horse trams with gaudy advertising posters on their sides, but for the most part it was a crowding melee of horses and high wheels-delivery vans drawn by hairy-footed nags, open Victoria carriages, the closed broughams favored by doctors, and high-topped hansom cabs. He was very tired and his vision blurred; the glare of streetlight and shadow made it all the worse, but it would have to be risked. The traffic was thick and therefore not moving fast, except where an occasional cabby lashed his horse into a dash for a momentary hole. Well, there was always that chance...

Without warning, as he came opposite the turning of Little Museum Street that led to Prince of Wales Colonnade, Asher stepped sideways off the curb and plunged into the thick of the melee. With a shrill neigh, a cab horse pulled sideways nearly on top of him. Hooters and curses in exotic dialect- What was a Yorkshireman doing driving a cab in Lon-don?he wondered-pursued him across the road. The macadam was wet and slippery with horse dung; he ducked and wove between shifting masses of flesh, wood, and iron, and on the opposite side turned sud-denly, looking back at the way he had come.

A costermonger's horse in the midst of the road flung up its head and swerved; a motorcab's brakes screeched. Asher wasn't sure, but he thought he saw a shadow flit through the glare of the electric head-lamps.

Good, he thought, and turned down Little Museum Street, still pant-ing from his exertions.Pit your immortality against that one, my haemophagic friend.

At Prince of Wales Colonnade he turned up the gas, leaving the window curtains open. He shed coat, bowler, scarf, and cravat and opened the valise he'd brought down from Oxford strapped to the nar-row carrier of the motorcycle, now safely bestowed in a shed in the yard -half a dozen clean shirts, a change of clothing, clean collars, shaving tackle, and books. Whatever else he would need of the arcane parapher-nalia of vampire-hunters, he supposed, could be purchased in London, and his ill-regulated imagination momentarily conjured a small shop in some dark street specializing in silver bullets, hawthorn stakes, and garlic. He grinned. Withharker and van helsing painted above the door, presumably. Keeping himself in the line of sight of the window, he turned toward the dresser, frowned, and looked around as if some-thing he had meant to bring were missing from its chipped marble top, then strode impatiently from the room.

He descended two flights of curving stairs at a silent run, and another to the basement. His landlady looked up, startled, as he passed the kitchen door, but he was already out in the tiny, sunken well of the areaway, standing on the narrow twist of moss-flecked stone steps to raise his eye level just above that of the pavement of the alley behind the house.

Evidently taken in by his feigned exit, the dark shape in the alley was still watching his lighted window. It stood motionless, nearly invisible in the dense gloom between the tall rows of houses; even so, he could make out the almost luminous whiteness of an unhuman face raised toward the light above. For a moment he kept his eyes on that dark form, scarcely daring to breathe, remembering the quickness of vampire

hearing. Then, as if he had blinked, the figure was gone.

Thirty minutes later he had unpacked and put away the last of his things, changed clothes, and shaved. Though this refreshed him slightly, he still ached for sleep, feeling half-tempted to leave Ysidro to wait in his damp alley, if that was what he wanted to do, while he went to bed. But in that case, he was certain, the vampire would simply break in, Don Simon having apparently never heard that vampires could not enter any new place save at the bidding of one of its inhabitants.

On the other hand, Asher thought as he stepped from the lighted doorway of Number Six and strolled slowly up the pavement through the foggy darkness, what place in London could be called new? Six Prince of Wales Colonnade had obviously been standing since the latter days of George IV's reign; his own house in Oxford since Anne's, Don Simon Ysidro had been quietly killing in the streets of London since long before either place was built.

It crossed his mind to wonder about that ancient London-a thick gaggle of half-timbered houses, tiny churches, old stone monasteries near the river, and a dozen conflicting legal jurisdictions whose officers could not cross the street to apprehend criminals-a London whose jammed houses spilled across the bridge onto Southwark, with its cheap theaters where Shakespeare was learning his trade as an actor and cobbler-up of plays, and taverns where men who sailed with Francis Drake could be found drinking to the health of the red-haired queen...

"We cannot continue to meet this way," purred a soft, familiar voice beside him. "People will begin to talk."

Asher swung quickly around, cursing his momentary abstraction of mind. He was tired, true, but ordinarily he was more aware of someone that close to him.

Ysidro had fed; his face, though still pale, had lost the cold gleam that had caught Asher's attention in the gloom of the alley. His black cloak half concealed sable evening dress; his stiff white shirt front was of silk, and several shades paler, now, than the skin tailored so deli-cately over his cheekbones. As always, he was bare-headed, the high horns of his forehead gleaming faintly as they passed beneath the lamps of the houses round the square. Pearl-gray gloves clasped the crystal head of a slender ebony stick.

"I had a good mind to let you wait in that alley," Asher retorted. "You should know for yourself I'll have nothing to report except that, as you've seen, I've taken rooms here." He nodded back toward Num-ber Six, indistinguishable from the other houses of the terrace, its glow-ing windows casting soft spangles of light on the trees of the narrow square across the street, "Now that we've spoken, I have every inten-tion of going back to them and getting some sleep."

"Alley?" The vampire tilted his head a little, a gesture somehow reminiscent of a mantis.

"You didn't follow me as soon as it grew dark? Watch me from the alley while I was unpacking?"

Ysidro hesitated for a long moment, sifting through possible replies, picking and choosing what it was best to admit. Exasperated, Asher stopped upon the pavement and turned to face him. "Look. You don't trust me, I know, and I'd certainly be a fool to trust you. But it's you who's in danger, not me, and unless you give me more information- unless you stop this endless game of 'Animal, Vegetable, Mineral' with anything I want to know-I won't be able to help you."

"Is helping us your object?" The vampire tipped his head to one side, looking up the handspan of difference in their heights. There was no hint of sarcasm in his tone-he asked as if truly interested in the answer.

"No," said Asher bluntly. "But neither is killing you-not at the moment. You've made the stake pretty high for me. So be it. I've taken what precautions I can to keep Lydia safe, as you've probably guessed, and, believe me, it wasn't easy to come up with answers to her questions about why she had to leave Oxford. But I can't do anything until you're willing to answer some questions so I'll have something to work on." "Very well." The vampire studied him for the count of several breaths, leisurely as if this quiet Bloomsbury square were a private room and entirely at his convenience. "I will meet you here tomorrow at this time, and we shall visit, as you say, the scene of the crime. As for what you saw in the alley..." His small silence lay in the conversa-tion like a floating spot of light upon water, too deliberate to be called a hesitation; nothing in his face changed to indicate the flow of his thoughts. "That was not me."