Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 6

A the British Museum Asher had his cab set him down and stood before the shut iron palings, listening to the rattle of wheels retreat away down Great Russell Street in the darkness. He knew this area of Bloomsbury the way a jack hare knew its burrows- alleys, mews, quiet squares, and pubs that had inconspicuous doors into back lanes and owners who didn't much mind who used them. It was one reason he'd chosen it.

The streets were relatively deserted, save for an occasional cab clat-tering its way to Euston or back from the theaters on Shaftesbury Ave -nue. He made his way swiftly down small turnings, across a mews behind Bedford Place and through a deep-shadowed lane between high homes whose sunken areaways formed an unbroken line of pits, like a protective moat, between pavement and rose-brick walls. He crossed Bruton Place and found the black slot of the alley that backed both it and Prince of Wales Colonnade. There in the moist and potholed dark-ness he halted, the stenches of a hundred garbage bins floating in the wet night air about him, and looked down the alley, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark.

The vampire was watching his window.

It took some moments for Asher to distinguish the dark angular shape against the blackness of the alley wall-had it possessed Ysidro's weird quality of stillness, he doubted he'd have ever been able to. But the vampire must have moved slightly, resolving what at first seemed to be paler patches on the bricks into an angular white face and big white hands, hands that picked uncomfortably at the ill-setting collar of a black coat. For a moment, Ysidro's words floated into Asher's mind: I am conscious of the smell of live blood.., You would do well to re-member it, if ever you find yourself in the company of other vampires than I...

To hell with it,he thought irritably, angry that they'd be following him, watching him. With Ysidro as my only source of information, I'm certainly never going to get anywhere. If I'm working for them, they jolly well can't kill me.

Yet,his mind added, as he began to walk down the alley.

The vampire swung around at his footstep. For a heart-shaking sec-ond, the creature's eyes caught the dim light, reflective as a cat's; Asher saw the gleam of the long teeth. A split instant before it would have charged to take him, he said, "Come here," in the tone that had always gotten the best results from Prussian farm hands, and it worked. The vampire checked, baffled, and then seemed to realize who he was.

He came shamblingly, without Ysidro's invisibility and without Ysidro's deadly grace, and Asher breathed again.

"And you are...?"

The vampire stopped a few feet from him, staring at him with glint-ing eyes under a narrow, craggy brow. "Bully Joe Davies is me name," he said, in an accent which Asher placed within half a mile of New Lambeth Cut. He licked his lips, showing his fangs disquietingly, a nervous gesture which, after Ysidro's poise, made him seem incredibly gauche. Truculently he added, "You cry out or make a noise and I'll suck you dry afore the cat can lick her ear."

Asher studied him for a moment with deliberate contempt. He was a man in his twenties, long-armed, raw-boned, and awkward-looking in a black suit that did not fit well-that hard little nut of a face would have looked more at home above the corduroy work pants and frieze jacket of a mill hand or docker. Black hair was slicked back under a five-shilling derby; there was blood under the uncut nails.

"If you didn't have some reason to speak to me, I assume you would have done that already," Asher retorted. "Days ago, in fact... Why have you been following me?"

Davies took a step closer. The smell of old blood in his clothes was repulsive. When he spoke his whisper was rank as a enamel house. "That toff Ysidro-he gone?"

Asher's every sense of danger came alert. "I haven't the faintest idea," he said coldly. "He could have followed me back here. We parted rather abruptly. I haven't seen or heard him, but then, one doesn't."

Bully Joe threw a swift glance around him, and Asher saw fear gleam in his bloodshot blue eyes. He edged closer still, his long-nailed fingers picking at Asher's sleeve, his voice lowered to a hoarse breath. "Has he spoke of me?" he whispered. "Does he know of me?"

With an effort Asher kept the surge of overwhelming curiosity out of his voice. "Shouldn't he?"

The hand closed around his arm, reminding Asher of that other tenet of vampire lore-that they had the strength of ten men. Ysidro cer-tainly had. "If you speak of me, if you say aught of me, I'll kill you," Davies breathed. "They'd kill me, they would-Grippen, and that chilly Papist bastard Ysidro-if they knew about me, knew Calvaire had made me. First, I thought it was Grippen and the others what done for Calvaire. Then I heard them others had been killed-Neddy Ham-mersmith and Lottie. Christ, they was Grippen's own get! Sodding bas-tard'd never kill his own! And now I'm being followed, being watched..."

"By whom?" Asher demanded sharply. "How do you know?"

"Dammit, you think I'd be askin' a mortal man if I knowed that?" Bully Joe swung around, twisting his hands, his hard face contorting with rage rooted in fear, and Asher fought not to step away from him, not to show his own fear. "Summat's after me, I tell you! And I hear the others talking- Coo, ain't that a tickler? I can stand acrost the street in the shadows and hear every word they says! And they say there's some bloke killin' us wi' a stake in the heart, just like in them old books, and lettin' the sun in! You gotta protect me, same as you're helpin' the others..."

His hands closed around Asher's sleeve again, and Asher thought fast. "I will protect you," he said, "if you'll help me, answer my ques-tions. Who are you? Why do the others want to kill you?"

The calm authority in his voice seemed to quieten Davies, but the vampire's reply was still sulky and impatient. "I told you, I'm Calvaire's get, Grippen's the Master of London. None of the Others'11 dare get a fledgling wi'out his say-so. Grippen don't want none in Lon-don but his own get, his own slaves..."

"But Calvaire wasn't Grippen's get."

Davies shook his head, goaded, weary, confused. "Narh. He come in from Paris, he said, though he talked English like a regular man. He made me, said I'd live forever, have all the gelt I wanted, never die! He never said it'd be like this!" Desperation crept into his tone. "For a month now I been livin' from pillar to post, never sleepin' the same place twicet! Hidin' from Grippen, hidin' from Ysidro... Calvaire said he'd take care of me, show me what I got to know! But it's all gone wrong nowf Everything's all dinnin' and burnin' in my ears, smellin' the blood of every livin' soul..."

He broke off, licking his lips, his burning eyes fixing on Asher's throat, like a drunkard forgetting his thought in midsentence. Slowly, thickly, he whispered, "I killed a girl last night-Chink girl, down by the Limehouse-and I don't dare hunt another for a couple o' days at least. But my brain's burain' for it! I dunno how the others do it, kill and not get the flatties down on 'em..."

Asher felt the hand tighten again around his arm, begin to draw him inexorably closer to that twisted, fanged face. With deliberate calm, he asked, "And now you're being followed?"

Davies flinched, as if he'd been shaken from sleep; he loosed his grip and stepped back, wiping his lips with a hand that shook. "I dunno," he whispered. "Sometimes it's like I can feel summat in the night, watchin' me, and I'll turn around and there's nuthin'! Other times... I dunno." He shook his head, his lip lifting back from stained yellow fangs.

"I don't want to die! I died once already. I went through it with Calvaire! I wouldn't of let him do this to me, 'cept that I didn't want to die! Christ Jesus, I didn't know it'd be like this!"

There was a noise at the end of the alley. Davies swung around, his hand tightening with bone-crushing force on Asher's elbow. Through the pain, Asher was still interested to note that no sweat stood out on the vampire's white face. A man and a teen-age boy stood momentarily framed in the lighter slot of the alley's mouth, the boy looking coyly away as the man bent his head down. Then, as if they heard Asher's involuntary gasp of pain, they paused, peering sightlessly into the dark-ness. After an uneasy moment they moved away.

Davies let go of his arm, wiped his lips again. "I got to go," he said, his voice thick.

It was Asher's turn to catch at his sleeve. "Can you take me to Calvaire's lodgings?"

"Not tonight." The vampire glanced nervously around and flexed his big hands. "I ain't killed yet tonight and I need it bad. Just bein' this close to you turns my brain wi' the wantin' of it. Like me dad, when he gets the cravin' for the gin." He shot a quick, sullen glance at Asher, daring him to disapprove or to show fear.

Asher had dealt with enough drunkards and addicts to know that, if he did either, Bully Joe might very well kill him from sheer pique. He was uncomfortably aware, too, of Ysidro's warning, and of how long the interview had lasted already. What effect would that psychic pungence have on a mind not oriented, not taught how to handle the influx of new sensation?

"Tomorrow night, then?"

"Late," Davies said, his eyes turning once again to the alley mouth. "I'll come here and wait for you, after I been and killed. Seems like, until I do, I can't properly think. I'll keep away from the coppers somehow. It keeps hurtin' at me and hurtin' at me. Christ, I saw my sister last night-Madge, the

youngest, sixteen she is. She'll still come and see me, look for me-she don't know what happened to me, nor why I left me old lodgings, nor nuthin'. I hadn't killed yet, and by God it was all I could do to keep from sinkin' my fangs into her!

"You seen the others," he went on, with a gesture of helpless rage which seemed to abort itself midsweep into a kind of futile wave. "You talked to other vamps, now, you must have. Are they all like this? Killin' the ones they love, just because they're handy-like? Calvaire said he'd teach me, tell me, help me to get on, but he's dead now. And the one that done for him is comin' after me..."

He swung wildly around at another sound, but it was only a girl, sixteen or so and plain as an old boot, stepping, candle in hand, out into an areaway from the tradesmen's door of one of the houses that backed onto the alley. Asher heard the flap of a shaken rag and the spattering of crumbs on the cement and, beside him, the soft hiss of the vampire's murmured, "Ahhh..." In the faint reflection of the light, Asher saw the young man's eyes, blue and shallow in life, blaze with the strange inner fire of the Undead.

Bully Joe muttered thickly again, "I got to go."

Asher's hand clinched down on the vampire's arm, holding him back. The vampire whirled, enraged, his other hand lifted to strike, and Asher met the hungry devil-eyes coldly, daring him to go through with it. After a moment Bully Joe's arm came down slowly. Beyond his craggy silhouette, Asher saw the smudge of candle flame disappear into the house from which it had come.

An evil anger twisted at the fanged mouth. "So it's bargainin' now?" Bully Joe whispered. "You know, and because of it I got to do what you say. Yeah, Calvaire played that game, too. I'll tell you this and I'll tell you that, if you do as you're bid... faugh!" His arm twisted free as if Asher's hand had been the weak grip of a child. They faced each other in silence, but Asher felt nothing of the terrible dreamy coercion of the vampire mind-only a kind of inchoate buzzing in his head, as if Bully Joe were groping to do that which he had no notion of how to accom-plish. Then this, too, faded, and Bully Joe passed his hand across his mouth again in a gesture of frustration and defeat.

"You hadn't any choice with Calvaire," Asher said quietly, "and you haven't any now, if I'm to find this killer before he-or she-finds you. Be here tomorrow night after midnight. I'll let you know anything I've found."

"Right," Davies muttered, backing a few paces away, a dark bulk against the paler darkness of the alley mouth. "I'll be here. But I tell you this right now, Professor: You tell Ysidro or any of them others about me or about where you're goin', and I'll break your back."

It was meant to be his exit line, so Asher spoiled it by saying coolly, "You're a vampire, Bully Joe. Do you think I, as a mortal man, can keep Ysidro from following me if he wants to? Don't be ridiculous."

The vampire snarled, his long fangs glinting in the dark, trying, Asher guessed, to collect a fitting rejoinder.

He wasn't up to it, however. After a long pause, he turned and strode off up the alley toward the gaslights of Bruton Place. Asher felt, as clearly as if the vampire had pointed and said,Look over there, the momentary urge to turn his head, to check for danger in the dark pit of the areaway closest to him. He forced his eyes to remain on Bully Joe and so saw him silhouetted briefly against the street lamps at the alley's narrow mouth. Then he was gone.

Asher threw a quick glance down the areaway to reassure himself that the urge of danger had been, in fact, only a clumsy effort at the psychic glamour which Ysidro wielded so adeptly. Then he pulled his brown ulster more closely about him and walked up the alley and around the corner, to the dim lights and freer air of Prince of Wales Colonnade.

From the doorway of Number 109, Lydia watched the vampire emerge into Bruton Place. She'd seen Asher crossing that street fifteen minutes earlier when she'd come to the front parlor to buy a stamp from her landlady-she was wearing her specs, as she did when working-but had meticulously taken no notice. When she'd seen the tall, brown, rather melancholy-looking figure turn into the alley which she knew led through to his own lodgings, she'd merely assumed he was playing at spies, something he sometimes did in Oxford sheerly out of habit. Nev-ertheless, a glimpse of him was a glimpse of him. Schoolgirlish, she thought, swiftly climbing the narrow oval of stairs and hurrying down the hall to her little bedroom at the back of the house, but there you have it. After living with him for six years, she was surprised at the depth of her need to see him, if only for a second.

And then she had seen the vampire.

The only light in the alley was what leaked down from the windows of the houses on both sides, but with no light on in her own room-that was another thing she'd learned from James- Lydia could see fairly well. They were talking when she came to the window, moving the lace curtain only barely; James' back was to her, and in the gloom she could see the cold, inhuman white of the other man's face, and realized with a shiver that he must have been waiting down there,

A vampire. The Undead.

They were real.

She had not doubted James' story-not consciously, she reflected, at any rate. But the quickening of her heart, the coldness of her hands, told her now that there had been a part of her that had not really believed. Not really.

Until now.

Even at this distance, her trained eye picked out the coloring of a corpse, the different way he held himself and moved. This man did not fit the description of Don Simon Ysidro-another vampire, then. After the first shock her whole soul swelled into one vast itch to get a closer look at the tongue and mucous membranes of the eyes, at the hair follicles and nails which grow after death, and at the teeth. She'd spent the last thirty-six hours, more or less, in reading, and between the drier tomes of leasehold and quitclaim at the Public Records Office, she'd come home to peruse the trunkful of medical journals she'd brought along-articles on porphyria, pernicious anemia, and the various ner-vous disorders which constituted the "logical explanations" so dear to the heart of modern man. She realized that she, too, had wanted them to be true.

Now...

Keeping an eye on the window, she pulled her medical bag to her from its place near the bed. By touch in the dark, she found her two largest amputation knives and slipped their cased lengths into her coat pocket as she put the garment on. They were polished steel, not the supernaturally recommended silver; she cast her mind about for pos-sibilities for a moment, then dug in the bag again for her little bottle of silver nitrate and slipped that in her pocket as well. If worse came to worst, she could always throw it and hope the legends were right.

There was no time for anything more. Already James and the vam-pire were parting, the vampire pulling free of James' grip and stepping back; Lydia fancied she saw the glint of eyes in the shadows. For a moment, despite the fact that she knew the vampires had hired him and would not harm him under the circumstances, she felt afraid for him, for there was murder latent in every line of that half-crouching dark form. Then, with an angry gesture, the vampire moved away.

With swift silence, Lydia was down three flights of stairs, coiling up her hair and pinning on a hat on the run; people who knew her to take three hours assembling herself for a party would not have credited her speed in an emergency. She was waiting in the dark of the entryway when the shambling, raw-boned shape of the young man emerged from the alley. She had no intention of getting anywhere near him, nor of coming close enough to let herself be seen; even from half a block's distance, it would be possible to observe how he moved, how those closer to him would be affected by the aura-if there was one-that James had described. It was the best she could do for now.

They were close to Shaftesbury Avenue. Lydia followed the vampire southeast, her high heels tapping like a deer's tiny hooves on the pave-ment. There were still plenty of people about, crowding the sidewalks under the glare of the gaslights in throngs that had not the purposeful hurry of the day. Women in bright clothes strolled on the arms of gentlemen, laughing and leaning their shining curls close to dark shoul-ders; jehus, bundled in coats and scarves against the bite of the October night, read newspapers on the high boxes of their cabs in the street-side ranks, their horses breathing steam like dragons. Groups of young swells, of impecunious medical students, and of home-going shop clerks jostled along the pavement. Lydia found it hard to keep the vampire in sight.

And yet, she saw, the vampire was having his own problems. Part of this was because people simply did not look at him, or apparently did not see him when they did, with the result that they did not move aside, as people did for her. The irony of that entertained her a good deal as she moved along, hands in pockets-she'd mislaid her gloves and had no tune to hunt for them-in his wake. She herself had no trouble following him when the ever-growing crowds permitted, but, then, she knew what to look for. He was tall. The cheap black bowler floated over the general crowd like a roach in a cesspool.

He turned one corner and another. The crowds thinned out, and Lydia had to fall back again, glad that her coat was of a nondescript color-unusual for her, and in this case deliberate-and wishing her hair were, too, where it showed beneath the brim of her hat. The vam-pire was moving slower now, and Lydia observed that people now moved aside from him, and treated him as if he were there.

So it was something that came and went, she thought.

And there was something else.

They were near Covent Garden, a tangle of little streets and alleys, the cramped, cheap lodgings of servants and seamstresses, costermongers hawking at half price from carts what they couldn't get rid of earlier in the day, and the smell of rotting vegetables piled with the dung in the gutters. A couple of loungers outside a pub whistled admir-ingly and called out to her. She ignored them and hoped the vampire did, too. Though she vastly preferred the quieter life of Oxford for her work, at her father's insistence she'd spent a certain amount of time in London, but the graceful houses of Mayfair, the green spaciousness of Hyde Park and St. James, and the quiet opulence of the Savoy and Simpson's might have been in another city. This tangle of wet cobble-stones, loud voices, and harsh lights was alien to her experience; though she wasn't particularly frightened-after all, she knew she had only to summon a cab and return to Bruton Place -she knew she would have to go carefully.

She saw the vampire turn into a little court whose broken cobbles leaked black water into the wider street; she ducked her head and passed its entrance swiftly, not daring even to look. In this part of London, circling a block was always a chancy business, but she took the next turning and hurried her steps down the insalubrious and deserted court until she found a dirty alley that seemed to lead through.

She hesitated for a long time-nearly a minute, which, given her quarry and the danger she knew she would be in, was long. The alley, what she could see of it, was dark and crooked. Though the houses of the little court at her back gave evidence of life in the form of lights burning in the windows and shadows crossing back and forth over the cheap curtains or baldly uncurtained glass, all the ground-floor shops had been locked up, and the wet, narrow pavement lay deserted under the chill drift of evening mist. She shivered and huddled deeper into her coat, for the first time conscious of why so many people disliked being alone. The vampire was in the next court. She had a strong suspicion that he had gone there to seek his prey.

Her hand closed tighter on the sheath of the amputation knife in her pocket. A six-inch blade seemed like a broadsword in the dissecting room; she wondered if, put to it, she could bring herself to use it against living flesh.

Or even, she added with involuntary humor, Undead. One way of getting a blood sample, but risky. If the other vampires didn't know of her connection with James, they would have no reason for sparing her life.

And James would be furious.

Like the whisper of a breath, of a footfall, or of the half consciousness of the smell of blood, she knew there was someone behind her.

She swung around, her heart hammering, galvanized into terror such as she had never felt before, the knife whipping out of her pocket, naked in her slim hand. For a moment she stood, flattened to the brick of the corner of the alley wall, the scalpel held before her, facing... noth-ing. The court behind her was deserted.

But, she thought, only just.

Her glance dropped instantly to the wet pavement behind her. No footprint but her own little smudges marred its moist shine. Her hand was shaking-it, her mouth, and her feet all felt like ice as all the blood in her body retreated from her extremities in reaction to the shock. She noted the effect with a clinical detachment, at the same time conscious of the heat of her breath, and how it smoked as it mingled with the mists that had begun to drift through this dark and tangled part of the city. Had it been this misty before?

There had been something there. She knew it.

A smell, she thought, her mind taking refuge in analysis while her eyes swept here and there, to the shadows which suddenly clotted blacker, more twisted, beneath the doorways and shutters of the locked and empty shops-a smell of blood, of rot, of something she had never smelled before and never wanted to smell again... A smell of some-thing wrong.

And close to her. So terrifyingly close.

It was perhaps forty seconds before she gained the courage to move from the protection of the wall at her back.

She kept as close to the wall as she could, making her way back swiftly to the populated noises of Monmouth Street; she felt every door-way and every projection of the shop fronts concealing invisible threats. As she passed the entrance to the next court movement caught her eye. She turned her head to see a girl, fourteen or fifteen and dressed in secondhand finery from the slop shops of the East Side, an exuberantly trimmed orange and blue frock standing out in the darkness. She heard the nasal voice say, "Well, Mister, wot yer doin' 'ere, all by yourself?" It was young and coaxing and already with a professional's edge.

She stood for a long moment, sickened, the knife still in her lowered hand, wondering if she should call out. Beyond the girl's form, in the black darkness of the court, she could see nothing, but half felt the gleam of eyes.

She quickened her steps, cold and shaking, and hailed the first cab she saw to take her back to Bloomsbury.

What little sleep she achieved that night was with the lamp burning beside her bed.

The morning post brought Asher an envelope without return address, containing a blank sheet of paper in which was folded a cloakroom ticket from the British Museum. He packed up the precis of yesterday's findings, the list of relatives of Lotta Harshaw's victims, and the mea-surements of tracks and footprints taken at Half Moon Street and put them in a brown satchel, which he took with him to the Museum and checked in to the cloakroom. After half an hour's quiet perusal of court records of the brief reign of Queen Mary I in the vast hush of that immense rotunda, he slipped an envelope from his pocket, addressed it to Miss Priscilla Merridew, sealed his own cloakroom ticket in it, af-fixed a penny stamp, and left, presenting the ticket he'd received by post and receiving another brown satchel whose contents, opened in his own rooms after posting his missive to Lydia, proved to be several folded sheets covered with his wife's sprawling handwriting.

Even a preliminary list of houses in London which had not changed hands, either by sale or by testamentary deposition, in the last hundred years was dauntingly long. Given the vagaries of the Public Records Office, there were, of course, dozens of reasons why a piece of property would have no records attached to it-everything from bequests by persons living outside Britain to purchase by corporations-but Asher was gratified to note that 10 Half Moon Street was on the list. And it was a start, he thought, a preliminary list against which to check...

A name caught his eye.

Ernchester House.

For a moment he wondered why it was familiar, then he remembered. One of the names Lotta had used on old dressmaker's bills was Carlotta Ernchester.

Lydia was not at the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane when Asher got there, a circumstance which he thought just as well. Though by daylight he knew he had nothing to fear from the vampires of Lon-don, he was uneasily conscious that the man he was stalking was not of the Undead and, like himself, was able to operate both in the daytime and the nighttime worlds.

He established himself at a desk in the most inconspicuous corner of the reading room and sent in his requests with the clerk, aware that the killer could, in fact, be any of the nondescript men at the various desks and counters around the long room, turning over leaves of laborious copperplate in the old record

books, searching the files of corporation and parish records for houses which had never been sold, or bodies which had never been buried. The chap at the far side of the room with the graying side whiskers looked both tall enough and strong enough to have wrenched loose the shutters from Edward Hammersmith's win-dow. Asher leaned idly around the edge of his desk and studied the man's square-toed boots with their military gloss. Far too broad for the single clear track he'd been able to measure.

A tall man and a strong one, he thought, staring abstractedly through the long windows down at the courtyard and at the frilly Gothic fanta-sies of the roof line beyond. A man capable of tracking a vampire? Even an inexperienced fledgling like Bully Joe Davies? Or was Bully Joe, disoriented and maddened by the flood of new sensations and now fur-ther confused by his master Calvaire's death, merely prey to a chronic case of what Asher himself had occasionally experienced abroad-the conviction of perpetual pursuit. God knows, Asher thought, if even Ysidro had picked up the trick of glancing continually over his shoul-der, what shape would Davies be in after-a month, had he said, since Calvaire's death?

And he made a mental note of the fact that Bully Joe seemed in no doubt that Calvaire had, in fact, been "done for," and had not merely disappeared, as Ysidro had once hypothesized.

It was likelier that the killer, like himself, was a man of education, able to track by paper what he could not track in the flesh.

Arguably, he was a man of patience, Asher thought, running his fingers along the dusty leaves of the St. Bride's parish roll book; a man willing to go through the maddening process of sifting records, names, deeds, and wills, checking them against whatever clues he might have found in the vampires' rooms before he-or someone else-burned it all.

Certainly a man of resolution and strength, to slice off the head of the blonde woman in Highgate Cemetery with a single blow.

And- perhaps most odd-a man who had sufficiently believed in vampires in the first place to make his initial stalking, his initial kill, which would conclusively prove to him that his prey, in fact, existed at all.

That in itself Asher found quite curious.

For that matter, he thought uneasily, turning back to his work, it might be Ysidro or the mysterious Grippen whom Bully Joe sensed on his heels. If that were the case, Asher knew he stood in double danger, for if Bully Joe realized it was Ysidro on his trail, he would never believe Asher had not betrayed him.

After a tedious examination of ward records and parish rolls, he ascertained that Ernchester House had been sold in the early 1700s by the Earls of Ernchester, whose town house it had once been, to a Robert Wanthope. The house itself stood in Savoy Walk, a name only vaguely familiar to Asher as one of the innumerable tiny courts and passage-ways that laced the oldest part of London in the vicinity of the Temple. Oddly enough, there was no record of any Robert Wanthope having ever purchased any other property in London, in St. Bride's parish or any other.

Ten minutes' walk to Somerset House and a certain amount of search in the Wills Office sufficed to tell Asher that Mr. Wanthope had never made a will-an unusual circumstance in a man who had sufficient funds to buy a town house. A brief visit to the Registry in another wing of the vast building informed him, not much to his surprise, that no record existed of Wanthope's death or, for that matter, his birth.

In the words of Professor Dodgson, Asher thought, curiouser and curiouser. Almost certainly an alias. Ernchester House had not surfaced in any record whatsoever since.

It was nearly five when he left Somerset House. The raw wind was blowing tatters of cloud in over the Thames as he crossed the wide, cobbled court, emerging on the Strand opposite the new Gaiety The-atre. For a few minutes he considered seeking out Savoy Walk, but reasoned that there would be no one stirring in Ernchester House until dark-and in any case there was something he very much wanted to buy first.

So he turned his steps westward, dodging across the tangles of traffic in Piccadilly and Leicester Square. Lights were beginning to go up, soft and primrose around the wrought-iron palisade of the public lavatories in Piccadilly Circus, brighter and more garish from the doors of the Empire and Alhambra. He quickened his pace, huddling in the volumi-nous folds of his ulster and scarf as the day faded. He had no idea how soon after sunset the vampires began to move, and above all, he did not want Ysidro to spot him now.

The fashionable shops were still open in Bond Street. At Lambert's he purchased a silver chain, thick links of the purest metal available; he stopped in a doorway in Vigo Street to put it on. The metal was cold against his throat as it slid down under his collar. As he wrapped his scarf back over it, he was torn between a vague sensation of embarrass-ment and wondering whether he shouldn't have invested in a crucifix as well.

But silver was spoken of again and again as a guard against the Undead, who far transcended the geographical and chronological limits of Christianity. Perhaps the crucifix was merely a way of placing a greater concentration of the metal near the big vessels of the throat. He only hoped the folklore was right.

If it wasn't, he thought, he might very well be dead before morning.

Or, at least according to some folklore, worse.

Now that was curious, he mused, jostling his way back through the thickening press of young swells and gaily dressed Cyprians around the Empire's wide, carved doors. The folklore all agreed that the victims of vampires often became vampires themselves, but at no time had Ysidro spoken of his own victims, or those of the other mysterious hunters of the dark streets, as joining the ranks of their killers. Bully Joe Davies had spoken of a vampire "getting" fledglings, as Calvaire had "gotten" him-evidently against the commands of the master vampire Grippen.

So it wasn't automatic-not that Asher had ever believed that it was, of course. Even without Lydia's projection of the number of victims a single vampire might kill in the course of a century and a half, logic forbade that simple geometrical principle; the vampires kept on killing, but the world was not innundated with fledgling vampires.

There was something else involved, some deliberate process... a process jealously guarded by the Master of London.

Grippen.

"A big toff", the tobacconist's clerk had said. A hard boy, and never mind the boiled shirt.

Grippen's get, Bully Joe Davies had said. Grippen's slaves.

Was Ysidro? It was hard to picture that poised, pale head bending to anyone.

Yet there was so much that was being hidden: an iceberg beneath dark waters; wheels within invisible wheels; and the power struggles among the Undead,

He left the streaming traffic of Drury Lane, the jumbled brightness of Covent Garden behind him. Crossing the Strand again, he got a glimpse of the vast brooding dome of St. Paul's against the darkening bruise of the sky. The lanes were narrow here, lacing off in all directions, canyons of high brown buildings with pubs flaring like spilled jewel boxes at their corners. Somewhere he heard the insouciant clatter of buskers, and a woman's throaty laugh.

He passed Savoy Walk twice before identifying it-a cobbled passage, like so many in the Temple district, between two rows of buildings, not quite the width of his outstretched arms. It curved a dozen feet along, cutting out the lights from Salisbury Place. His own footsteps pierced the gloom in a moist whisper, for fog was rising from the nearby river.

The tiny passage widened to a little court, where the signs of small shops jutted out over the wet, bumpy stones-a pawnbroker's, a sec-ond-hand bookshop, a manufacturer of glass eyes. All were empty and dark, crouching beneath the tall gambreled silhouette of the house at the rear of the court, a jewel of interlaced brickwork and leaded glass, nearly black with soot. The lights of the populous districts to the north and east caught in the drifting fog to form a mephitic, dimly luminous backdrop behind a baroque jungle of slanting roofs and chimneys. The house, too, was dark; but as Asher walked toward it, a light went up in its long windows.

The steps were tall, soot-stained, and decorated with decaying lions in ochre stone. There was long stillness after the echoes of the door knocker died. Even listening closely, Asher heard no tread upon the floor.

But one leaf of the carved double door opened suddenly, framing against the dark honey of oil light the shape of a tall woman in ivory faille, her reddish-dark hair coiled thick above a face dry, smooth, and cold as white silk. By the glow of the many-paned lamps behind her, he could see the Undead glitter of her brown eyes.

"Mrs. Farren?" he said, using the family name of the Earls of Ernchester, and it surprised her into replying.

"Yes." Then something changed in her eyes.

"Lady Ernchester?"

She didn't answer. He felt the touch of that sleepiness, that mental laziness of not paying attention, and forced it away; he saw in those glittering eyes that she felt that, too.

"My name is Dr. James Asher. I'd like to talk to you about Danny King."