Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 7

"Come in."

She stepped back from the door, gestured him to a salon whose pilastered archway opened to the right of the hall. Her voice was low and very sweet, without seductiveness or artifice of any kind. As he followed her, Asher was acutely conscious of the thud-ding of his own heart. He wondered if she was, too.

The salon was large, perfectly orderly, but had a chilled air of long neglect. One dim oil lamp on the corner of a curlicued Baroque mantel-piece picked out the edges of the furnishings nearest it-graceful Hepplewhite chairs, the curve of a bow-front cabinet, and the claret-red gleam of carved mahogany in a thick archaic style. Asher wondered who would dust the place and brickbat that dingy front step, now that Danny King was dead.

Mrs. Farren said, "I've heard of you, Dr. Asher." As in Ysidro's, there was neither commitment nor emotion in her voice. Standing be-fore her in the small pool of lamplight, he could see the gleam of her protruding fangs, and the fact that, except when she spoke, the creamy thickness of her breasts did not rise or fall.

"My apologies for intruding," he said, with a slight bow. "If you've heard of me you know I'm seeking information-and if you know Don Simon Ysidro, you probably know I'm not getting much. Was Daniel King your servant?"

"Yes." She nodded once. Unlike Ysidro, though her voice was abso-lutely neutral, there was a world of brightness, of watchfulness, of feel-ing in her large, golden-brown eyes. "He was my husband's," she added after a moment, and inwardly Asher sighed with relief-he'd been afraid for a moment that all vampires were as utterly uncommunicative as Don Simon. "His carriage-groom-a tiger, they used to call them. That was during our last..." She hunted for the word for a moment, dark brows flinching slightly together, and suddenly seemed infinitely more human. "Our last period of being of the world, I suppose you could say. We had a number of servants. In those days such extravagant eccentricities as barring a whole wing of the house and leading an ut-terly nocturnal existence were more accepted by servants than they are now. But Danny guessed."

She stood with her back to the mantelpiece, her hands clasped lightly before her slender waist, in an attitude regal and slightly archaic, like a stiffly painted Restoration portrait. In life, Asher guessed, she had been a little plump, but that was all smoothed away now, like any trace of archaism in her speech. Her gown with its flared tulip skirt was mod-ern, but the baroque pearls she wore in her ears could only have been so extravagantly set in the days of the last of the Stuart kings.

When she moved, it had the same unexpectedness Ysidro's move-ments did, that momentary inattention, and then finding her at his side. But she only said, "I suppose now that he's gone, it's I who must take your coat..."

"Did you make him a vampire?"

"No." She hesitated a moment in the act of laying ulster, hat, and scarf on a nearby sideboard, her eyes moving from his, then back. "Grippen did that, at our request-and Danny's. Danny was very de-voted to Charles-my husband."

"Could you have?"

"Is that question pertinent?" she inquired levelly. "Or just curiosity?"

"The answer is that we would not have," a voice spoke from the shadows, and Asher turned swiftly, having heard no creak from the floorboards that had murmured beneath his own weight. The man who stood there, face white as chalk in the gloom, seemed more like a ghost than a human being-thinnish, medium height, and with an indefinable air about him of shabbiness, of age, as if one would expect to see cob-webs caught in his short-cropped light-brown hair. "Not without Lio-nel's permission."

"Lionel?"

"Grippen." The vampire shook his head, as if the name tasted flat and old upon his tongue. There was a weariness to his movements, a slowness, like age that had not yet reached his face. Glancing swiftly back at Mrs. Farren, Asher saw her eyes on this newcomer filled with concern.

"He never would have stood for it," the vampire explained. "He would have driven poor Danny out of every hole and corner within a year. He's very jealous that way." He held out one thin hand, said, "I'm Ernchester," in a voice that echoed the resonance of that vanished title.

Asher, who had gained a certain amount of familiarity with the Earls of Ernchester from his afternoon's researches, guessed: "Lord Charles Farren, third Earl of Ernchester?"

A faint smile brushed that white, square-jawed face, and for a mo-ment there was a flicker of animation in the dead eyes. He inclined his head. "I fear I don't look much like the portrait," he said. Any number of portraits of ancient gentlemen lurked on the gloomy salon walls, too obscured with time and shadow to be even remotely recognizable. But Asher reasoned that, since the third Earl of Ernchester had died in 1682, and any portrait would have been two-thirds devoted to an elabo-rate periwig, it scarcely mattered. And, in fact, the third Earl of Ernchester had not died. Asher frowned, trying to recall the name of the Countess, and with the curious perspicacity of vampires Mrs. Farren said, "Anthea." She stepped over beside her husband and guided him to a chair near the cold hearth; in her brown eyes was still that wariness, that concern when she looked at him and that watchful enmity when she regarded Asher. Asher saw the way Ernchester moved when he took his seat- with the same economy of movement he had seen in Ysidro, and indeed in Lady Anthea, but without life.

"Did Danny sleep here?" he asked, and it was Anthea who replied, "Only very occasionally." She straightened up and walked back to the hearth; it was a relief to Asher not to have to fight to see them move, as he did with Ysidro.

"And I take it it wasn't here that you found his body?" From the comer of his eye Asher was conscious of Ernchester look-ing away, resting his brow on his hand in a gesture that hid his face. It came as a shock to him that the Earl felt grief, and he saw anger for that, too-a protective anger-in Anthea Barren's brown eyes.

"If it had been," she replied coolly, "you may be sure that the killer would have dispatched the both of us as well."

He bit his lip. Then, answering her anger and not her words, "I'm sorry."

Some of the tension seemed to slack in her strong frame, and the anger left her eyes. She, too, answered not his words. "It was foolish of you to come here," she said. "Ysidro can be maddening, but, believe me, if he has kept things from you, it is because there is ground that it is perilous for a living man to tread."

"That may be," Asher said. "But as long as he has a pistol to my head-as long as someone I love will suffer for it if I don't find this killer-he's not going to be able to have it both ways. I want to be shut of

this business quickly-before he finds where I've hidden away the woman whose life is in hostage to him, before the killer realizes he has a day hunter on his trail, learns who I am, and tracks down this woman also-before I get any deeper entangled into the side of this affair that isn't my business. But I can't do that unless I have more information than Ysidro's willing to give."

She considered him for a long moment, her head a little tilted, as if with the glossy weight of her dark hair. "He is-a very old vampire," she said after a time. "He is cautious, like an old snake in a hole; he errs on the side of caution, maybe. Maybe it's because he doesn't really care much about anything."

It was odd to hear her speak of Ysidro as "old," for the Spaniard had the queerly graceful air of a young man, almost a boy. It was Ernchester, thought Asher, with his oddly dead motions and his weary eyes, who seemed old. Asher glanced back at the chair where the Earl had sat, but the vampire was no longer there. Asher could not recall just when he had vanished. It was early evening, he remembered, and neither of his hosts had fed. But somehow, speaking to this quiet and beautiful woman who had been dead long before he was born, he could not fear her.

He wondered if that were because she meant him no harm, or be-cause she was using some subtle variation of the mental glamour of the vampire on him, as Ysidro had tried to do on the train. Ysidro's words about "other vampires than I" lingered unnervingly in his thoughts.

After a long pause, Anthea went on, "I'm not sure whether he or Grippen is the elder-they were both made about the same time, by the same master. Rhys the White, that was. A minstrel, who was master vampire of London-oh, years, years.

"You understand that it was never usual for a commoner to survive as a vampire until cities began to get large enough for deaths to be invisible," she added after a moment. "Only the landed had money and a place to be secure during the days when we sleep. Simon tells me that even in his time, London was like a small market town." She smiled a little, her teeth white against a lip full but pale as wax. "And I suppose you'd think the London I grew up in paltry-we used to pick catkins in the marshes where Liverpool Station now stands.

"It was the nobles who could sustain their security, who could hunt far enough afield-who could live on the blood of cattle and deer, if need be, to prevent suspicion from falling on themselves. But one can-not live for too long on the blood of animals. One cannot go too long without the kill. One grows-dull. Stupid. Weary. All things begin to seem very pointless. And out of that dullness, it is very easy to be trapped and killed."

She raised her eyes to his, folding her hands-soft and large and strong enough, he knew, to break his neck-over one another, her rings gleaming coldly. "That sounds vile, doesn't it? But that blunting of mind-that laxing of the concentration-is death to a vampire, whom the rising sun will reduce to ashes. Do you think us vile?"

"I think that what you are is vile," Asher said evenly. "Does that matter to you?"

Her eyes left his again, to consider the pearls and moonstones of her ring. "If it mattered all that greatly I suppose I would have died years ago." Another woman might have shrugged-he only sensed her setting the thought aside with some attenuated shift of musculature he did not quite see, before her eyes returned to his. "Of course Rhys was gone by the time Charles and I became what we are. He lived in the crypts below the old Church of St. Giles, haunting the waterfronts for sailors at night. He made his money playing in taverns, in Eastcheap and the Steelyard-the German Hansa merchants loved him. Simon tells me his touch upon the lute could bring tears to your eyes. That's where Simon met him, a thin, little, white- haired man, Simon says, so fragile to look at, like a little spider in strange garb two centuries out of date. There was a great frenzy of witch-killing in the days of old King James, and those in London who survived it perished in the Fire, all save Grippen and Simon. God knows where they found to sleep, in the days the fire burned."

"But you weren't made until after the fire?" It was ancient history to him, like the Fall of Rome; the woodcuts of that monster conflagration that had devoured London in 1666.

"Years after," she said. "I remember, as a little girl, standing on Harrow Hill in the dark, looking down on the city like a carpet of flame, and feeling the heat blowing off it onto my face on the wind. It had been windy all that week, hot and dry... I remember the crackle of the air in my hair, and being afraid the fire would cover all the earth." She shook her head, as if wondering at that child's naivete. "They said there were buildings whose stones exploded like bombs in the heat, and little streams of molten lead from the church roofs were seen running like water down the gutters. Even after I became-what I am-it was years before I saw Ysidro; after the turn of the new century. His face was still covered with scars from the Fire, his hands like the scabby-barked branches of a tree."

"And Grippen?"

Her mouth tightened a little. "Lionel got a lot of fledglings in the years after the Fire," she said. "Charles was far from the first. He needed money, needed protection..."

"Protection?"

Her voice was deliberately colorless. "There are always feuds. All his fledglings had perished in the Fire. For years I thought Charles was dead." She gave a little shake of her head, as if putting aside some old letter she had been reading, and glanced up at him again, the oil light glowing amber in her eyes. "But that isn't what you came here to hear."

"I came here to hear about vampires," Asher said quietly. "About who you are and what you are; what you do and what you want. You're a hunter, Lady Farren. You know that you must see the pattern first, before you can see where it breaks."

"It's dangerous," she began, and a thread of anger seeped into Asher's voice.

"Ysidro didn't give me any choice."

He was still standing in front of her, in the small pool of light that surrounded the vast marble edifice of the carved mantel, close enough now that he could have reached out and touched her face. Her face did not change its expression, but he saw her eyes alter their focus, flick past his shoulder to the dark cavern of the room behind him; her hand shot out, dragging at his arm even as he whirled to see the massive shadow looming only feet behind him and the terrible glint of red eyes.

Anthea cried, "Grippen, no...!" at the same instant Asher swung with his forearm to strike away the huge hand that clutched at his throat. It was like striking a tree, but he managed to twist aside. Hairy and powerful, the vampire Grippen's hand shut around the shoulder of his coat instead of his neck.

Asher twisted, slithering out of the garment. Grippen was massive, as tall as Asher and broad as a door, with greasy black hair falling in his eyes, his face pocked with old scars and ruddy with ingested blood. For all his size, he was blindingly fast. His massive arm locked around Asher's chest, trapping him with his own arms tangled still in his half-discarded coat; he felt the vampire's mind smothering his, cloudy and strong as steel, and fought it as he had fought Ysidro's in the train. The arm around his chest crushed tighter, and he twisted with both his hands at the fingers buried in his coat-he might just as well have tried to break the fingers of a statue.

Anthea, too, was tearing at Grippen's wrists, trying to force them loose. He heard her cry, "Don't...!" as he felt the man's huge, square hand tear his shirt collar free, and thought, with bizarre abstrac-tion, And now for a little experiment in applied folklore...

"God's death!" Grippen's hand jerked back from the silver chain, the reek of blood on his breath nauseating. Asher dropped his weight against the slackened hold, slipping free for an instant before the en-raged vampire struck him a blow on the side of the head that knocked him spinning into the opposite wall. He hit it like a rag doll-the strike had been blindingly fast, coming out of nowhere with an impact like that of a speeding motorcar. As he sank, stunned, to the floor the philologist in him picked out the sixteenth-century rounded vowels- far more pronounced than Ysidro's-as the vampire bellowed, "Poxy whoreson, I'll give you silver!"

His vision graying out, he saw two shapes melt and whirl together, black and ivory in the lamplight. Anthea had hold of both of Grippen's wrists, trying to drag him back, her storm-colored hair falling loose from its pins around her shoulders. Though his mind was swimming, Asher staggered to his feet and stumbled the length of the room to the pillared archway. An inglorious enough exit, he thought dizzily. Prop-erly speaking, a gentleman should remain and not let a lady take the brunt of a fracas, but the fact was that she was far more qualified than he for the task. It was also very unlikely Grippen could or would kill her, and virtually certain that, if Asher remained, he was a dead man.

Savoy Walk was silent, empty, wreathed thickly now in fog. If he could make it to the end of the street, up Salisbury Court to the lights of Fleet Street, he'd be safe...

He stumbled down the tall stone steps, scarcely feeling the raw cold of the river mist that lanced through his shirt sleeves and froze his throat through his torn co lla r.Dangerous ground for a mortal to tread indeed, he thought, as his feet splashed in the shallow puddles of the uneven cobbles. Heedless of appearances, he began to run.

He made it no farther than the black slot where the court narrowed into the crevice of the lane.

In that shadowy opening a form materialized, seeming to take shape, as they were said to, out of the mist itself-a diminutive girl, a pocket Venus, primrose curls heaped high on her head and dark eyes gleaming feral in the diffuse glow from the lights of the house. He turned, seeking some other escape, and saw behind him in the fog the pale face of a world-weary ghost that belonged to the third Earl of Ernchester.

Their hands were like ice as they closed around his arms.

"I'm sorry," Ernchester said softly, "but you have to come with us."