Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 8

Seven years is a long time," The Honorable Evelyn Westmoreland stirred at his coffee with a tiny spoon, looking down into its midnight depths. Across the table from him, Lydia hoped that seven years was long enough.

"I know," she said softly and rested her hand on the table, close enough to his to let him know that, had she not been married, he could have covered it with his. The plumes on her hat, like pink-tinged sunset clouds, moved as she leaned forward; from the lace of her cuffs, her kid-gloved hands emerged like the slim stamens of a rose. Her brown eyes were wide and gentle-she could see him as a soft-edged pattern of dark and light, but had decided that in this case it was better to look well than to see well. Besides, she had learned how to interpret the most subtle of signs. "Believe me, I wish I could let the matter rest."

"You should." There was an edge of bitter distaste in his voice. "It's not the sort of thing you should be asking about... Mrs. Asher." The soft lips, fleshy as those of some decadent Roman bust, pinched up. Past him, the red-and-black shape of one of Gatti's well-trained waiters glided by and, though it was well past the hour when teas ceased being served, fetched a little more hot water, which he soundlessly added to the teapot at Lydia's elbow, and removed the ruins of the little cake-and-sandwich plate. The restaurant was beginning to smell of dinner now rather than tea. The quality of the voices of the few diners coming in was different; the women's indistinct forms were colored differently than for daytime and flashed with jewels. Beyond the square leads of the windowpanes, a misty dusk had fallen on the Strand.

Those seven years, Lydia reflected privately, had not been particu-larly kind to the Equally Honorable Evelyn. He was still as big and burly as he'd been in those halcyon days of rugger matches against Kings; but, even without her specs, she could tell that under his immaculate tailoring he'd put on flesh. When he'd taken her arm to lead her to their little table, Lydia had been close enough to see that, though not yet thirty, he bore the crumpled pouchiness of dissipation beneath his blue-gray eyes, the bitter weariness of one who does not quite know what has gone wrong; his flesh smelled faintly of expensive pomade. He was not the young man who had so assiduously offered her his arm at croquet matches and concerts of Oriental music, no longer Dennis Blaydon's puppylike brother-in-arms against all comers on the field. Even back when she'd been most impressed with his considerable good looks, Lydia had found his conversation stilted and boring, and it was worse now. It had taken nearly an hour of patient chitchat over tea to relax him to the point of, she hoped, confidences.

She looked down at her teacup, fingering the fragile curlicues of its handle, aware that, with her eyes downcast, he was studying her face. "Howdid he die, Evelyn?"

"It was a carriage accident." The voice turned crisp, defensive.

"Oh," she said softly. "I thought... I'd heard..."

"Whatever you heard," Evelyn said, "and whomever you heard it from, it was a carriage accident. I'd rather not..."

"Please..." She raised her eyes to his once more. "I need to talk to you, Evelyn. I didn't know who else I could ask. I sent you that note asking to meet me here because... I've heard there was a woman."

Anger flicked at the edges of his tone. "She had nothing to do with it. He died in a..."

"I think a friend of mine has gotten involved with her."

"Who?" He moved his head, his eyes narrowing, the wary inflection reminding her of her father when he was getting ready to say things like "station in life" and "not done."

"No one you know," Lydia stammered.

He paused a moment, thinking about that, turning things over in his mind with the slow deliberation she had remembered. The Honorable Bertie, dimwitted though he had been, had always been the brighter brother. Then he said slowly, "Don't worry about it, Lydia... Mrs. Asher. Truly," he added more gently, seeing the pucker of worry be-tween her copper-dark brows. "I... You see, I heard recently that... that someone I know had been seeing her. Of course, you were barely out of school when Bertie was found... when Bertie died, and there was a lot we couldn't tell you. But she was a pernicious woman, Lydia, truly evil. And a week or so ago I... er... I met her and warned her off... paid her off... gave her money and told her to leave the country. She's gone." He didn't look at her as he spoke.

Embarrassment?she wondered. Or something else?

Truly?" She leaned forward a little, her eyes on his face, trying to detect shifts of expression without being obvious about it.

She heard the weary distaste, the revulsion in his voice as he said, "Truly."

She let another long pause rest on the scented air between them, then asked, "What was she like? I have a reason for asking," she added, as the Equally Honorable Evelyn puffed himself up preparatory to expos-tulation on the subject of curiosity unseemly for a woman of her class and position. "You know I've become a doctor."

"I do," he said, with a trace of indignation, as if he'd had the right to forbid it, and she'd flouted his authority anyway. "Though I really can't see how Professor Asher, or any husband, could let his wife..."

"Well," she continued, cutting off a too-familiar tirade with an artless appearance of eagerness, "in my studies I've come across two or three cases of a kind of nervous disorder that reminded me of things I-my friend-told me about this-this woman Carlotta. I suspect that she may be insane."

That got his interest, as she'd found it got nine people's out of ten, even those who considered her authority for the accusation an affront to their manhood. He leaned forward, his watery eyes intent, and she reached across the small table with its starched white cloth and took his chubby hand in both of hers, "But I haven't met her, or seen her, and you have... if you'd be willing to talk about it. Evelyn, please. I do need your help."

In the cab on her way back to Bruton Place she jotted down the main points of the subsequent discussion-it would have looked bad, she had decided, to be taking notes while Evelyn was talking, and would have put him off his stride. The waiters at Gatti's, well-trained, had observed the intentness of the discussion between the wealthy-looking gentleman and the delicate, red-haired girl, and had tactfully let them alone- something they probably would not have done had she been scribbling notes.

The interview had been frustrating, because Evelyn was as much wrapped up in sports-and now in the stock market-as his brother Bertie had been in clothes and fashion and was grossly inobservant of anything else, but with patient questioning she'd been able to piece certain things together.

First, Lotta had been seen as early as an hour after sunset, when the sky was still fairly light-Evelyn had thought that was in spring, but wasn't sure.

Second, sometimes she had been paler, and sometimes rosier- though it was difficult to tell by gaslight-indicating that sometimes she had fed before joining the Honorable Bertie and his friends. Evelyn did not remember whether she had ever been rosy on those occasions upon which she had met them early, which would indicate that she had ris enjust after sunset to hunt.

Third, she often wore heavy perfume. James had said nothing about vampires smelling different from humans, but presumably, with a differ-ent diet, they might have a different odor, though a very faint one-she tried not to think about the smell of blood and strangeness that had touched her nostrils in the dark of the Covent Garden court.

Other than that, he'd thought there was something odd about her fingernails, he couldn't say what. And her eyes, but he couldn't say what either, so had fallen back on "an expression of evil," which was no help toward clinical analysis.

About the circumstances of his brother's death he would not speak at all, but Lydia guessed, from things James had told her about the tech-niques of spying, that when Lotta finally killed her victim, she had arranged for the body to be found in circumstances that were either disgraceful or compromising, such as dressed in women's clothing, or in an alley behind an opium den, or something equally damning.

And lastly, Evelyn had told her that Bertie had once had a charm made, a lover's knot, out of Lotta's red-gold hair. It was still among Bertie's things. He would send it to her by the morning post, to the accommodation address where she picked up her mail.

She sat back in the cab as it jolted along the crowded pavement of Gower Street, staring abstractedly out at the blurred yellow halos of the street lamps where they shone through the mists against the mono-chrome cutouts of the house fronts behind. The rising fog seemed to damp noises, making all things slightly unreal; omnibuses like moving towers loomed out of it, their knife-board advertisements for Pond's Arthriticus or Clincher Tires-Still Unequaled for Quality and Dura-bility-transformed into strange portents by the surrounding gloom.

When the cab reached Number 109 Bruton Place, Lydia paid the driver off quickly and hurried inside, displeased to find her heart racing with a swift, nervous fear. She found she was becoming uncomfortable at the thought of being outside, even for a few moments, after dark.

The room to which the vampires took Asher was a cellar, not of Ernchester House but of a deserted shop whose narrow door opened into the blackness of the lane. Ernchester produced the keys to its two padlocks from a waistcoat pocket and led the way into a tiny back room, piled high with dusty boxes and crates and boasting an old soap-stone sink in one corner, whose rusty pump, silhouetted against the dim yellowish reflection of the window, had the appearance of some wry-necked monster brooding in the darkness. An oil lamp stood on the side of the sink; Ernchester lighted it and led the way to another door nearly hidden behind the crates, whose padlock and hasp had been ripped off with a crowbar-recently, by the look of the gouges in the wood. The smell of mildew and dampness rose chokingly to engulf them as they descended the hairpin spiral of stairs to a cellar, certainly much wider, Asher guessed, than the building above; probably deeper, he thought, glancing at its far end, nearly obscured in shadows, and beyond a doubt older. Rough-hewn arched beams supported a ceiling of smoke-stained stone; just below them, at the other end of the room, two pairs of locked shutters indicated windows either at street level or set into a light well just below it.

"They're barred behind those shutters," the Earl remarked, taking an old-fashioned, long-barreled key from a nail beside the door. "So even if you could get the padlocks on them open, it wouldn't do you much good. Chloe, my dear, would you be so good as to fetch Dr. Asher's coat? And mine as well?"

The fair- haired vampire girl shot him a look that was both sullen and annoyed, childish on that angelic face. ''Don't trust me to stay with 'im while you get 'em yourself, ducks?" she mocked in accents that put her origins within half a dozen streets of the Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow. She threw a glance back at Asher in the flickering light of the oil lamp they'd collected when they'd passed through the room above. "And don't go givin' yourself airs over that bit o' tin you got hung round your gullet, Professor-we can drink from the veins in your wrists, you know."

She raised Asher's wrist to her mouth, pressed her cold lips to the thin skin there in a smiling kiss. Then she turned and with barely a rustle of her silk petticoats was gone in the darkness.

Asher became aware that he was shivering. Though the cellar was dry, it was intensely cold. Beside him Ernchester, lamp still in hand, was frowning at the narrow black slot of the door through which Asher knew the girl must have gone, though he had not seen her do so. She, like Ysidro, moved largely unseen.

"An impertinent child." Ernchester frowned, his sparse brows bris-tling queerly in the shaky light. "It isn't just a question of breeding- though of course I understand that things do change. It just seems that no one knows how to behave anymore." He set the lamp down on the floor beside him and held thin hands in the column of heat that rose from its chimney.

"Anthea has gone to look for Ysidro," he went on after a moment. "Neither of us approved of Don Simon's plan for hunting the killer- for reasons which are obvious by your mere presence here. But now that he has hired you, I agree with her that it would be most unfair simply to kill you out of hand, leaving aside the fact that you are, in a sense, a guest beneath my roof." Those dulled, weary blue eyes rested on him for a moment, as if seeking reasons other than an old habit of noblesse oblige for sparing his life.

Dryly, Asher said, "I take it Grippen voted against it, also?"

"Oh, there was never a question of avote." By his tone the elderly vampire had entirely missed the sarcasm. "Don Simon is and always has been a law unto himself. He was the only one of us to think it necessary to hire a human. But he has always been most high in the instep and will carry his humors against all opposition,"

Asher rubbed his shoulder, which ached where Grippen had flung him into the wall. "He might have mentioned that."

Beneath their feet, the stone floor vibrated; the glass of the lamp chimney sang faintly in its metal socket, "The Underground Railroad runs very close to this cellar," Ernchester explained, as the nimble died away. "Indeed, when they were cutting for it, we feared they might break through, as in fact they did in another house we own a few streets away. That cellar was deeper than this one, without windows-it had been the wine room of an old tavern, paved over and forgotten after the Fire. There are a great number of such places in the old City, some of them dating back to Roman times. It was desperately damp and uncom-fortable, which was why no one was sleeping there when the workmen broke in."

Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully and wandered across the uneven slab floor to the coffin against the wall Opening it, he saw the lining burned entirely away at the bottom, only clinging in charred shreds around the upper rim. Nothing but a faint film of scraped-at ash lay over the charred wood of the coffin's floor.

He wondered in what church's crypt they had buried the remains. St. Bride's, beyond a doubt. Odd, that after so many years that should still be a concern to them... or perhaps not so odd.

He replaced the lid and turned back. "Were the padlocks on the windows open, then, when you found Danny's body?"

Ernchester glanced quickly at the barred shutters of the windows, then back at the empty coffin. For a moment he seemed to be trying to figure out how much he should tell a human; then, with a tired gesture, he gave it up. "Yes. The key was on the sill."

Asher walked over to the window, stretched his long arm up to touch the tips of his fingers to the lock. He looked back at the vampire. "But the bars were undisturbed?"

"Yes. Had someone-a tramp, or a vagabond-entered this cellar and been looking about, it would be natural for him to open the shutters to obtain light, you see."

"Was there any sign of a tramp elsewhere in the building? Cupboards open, drawers ajar? Or in the rest of the house? Any sign that the place had been searched?"

"No," Ernchester admitted. "That is-I don't think so. I really don't know. Anthea would." Another man-a living man-might have sighed and shaken his head, but, as with Anthea and Ysidro, such gestures seemed to have been drained from him by the passing weari-ness of centuries. There was only a slight relaxing of that straight, stocky body, a loosening of the tired lines of the face. "Anthea-does such things these days. I know it's the portion of the man to manage affairs, but... it seems as if all the world is changing. I used to keep up better than I do now. I dare say it's only the effect of the factory soot in the air or the noise in the streets... it usen't to be like this, you know. I sometimes think the living suffer from it as much as we. Folk are different now from what they were."

Keyed and alert for the silent approach of some new peril, Asher saw the girl Chloe enter the cellar again, his own jacket and greatcoat and Ernchester's seedy velvet coat over her arm. She was dressed, he saw now, in an expensive and beautiful gown of dark green velvet, beaded thickly with jet; her soft white hands and pale face seemed like flowers against the opulent fabric. Here was one, he thought, who would have no trouble winning kisses from strangers in alleyways. As he took the coat from her arm he said, "Thank you," and the brown eyes flicked up to his, startled at being thanked. "Did you hunt with Lotta Harshaw?"

She smiled again, but this time the mockery did not quite hide the frightened flinch of her lips. "Still the nosy-parker, then? You saw what it'll buy you." She reached up to touch his throat, then drew back as the silver of his neck chain caught the lamplight. "You know what they said curiosity did to the cat."

"Then it's a good thing cats have nine lives," he replied quietly. "Did you hunt with Lotta?" She shrugged, an elaborately coquettish gesture with her bare white shoulders, and looked away.

"I know you went for dress fittings with her. Probably other shop-ping as well. I imagine the pair of you looked very fetching together. Personally I find it a bore to have dinner alone-do you?"

The conversational tone of his voice brought her eyes back to his, flirtatious and amused. "Sometimes. But y'see, we don't ever have din-ner quite alone." She smiled, showing the glint of teeth against a lip like ruby silk.

"Did you like Lotta?"

The long lashes veiled her brown eyes once more. "She showed me the ropes, like," she said, after a long moment, and he remembered Bully Joe Davies' frantic cry: I dunno how the others do it... To achieve the vampire state, the vampire powers, was evidently far from enough. "And we-birds, I

mean- hunt differently from gents. And that..." She stopped her next words on her lips and threw a quick, wary glance at Ernchester, silent beside the lamp. After a long pause for rewording, she continued, "Lotta and me, we got along. There's some things a lady needs from another lady, see."

And that... That what? How would this beautiful, over-dressed porcelain doll of a girl see the quiet antique lady Anthea? As a stiff-necked and uncongenial bitch, Asher thought, beyond a doubt. Mde. La Tour had known at a glance that Lotta and Chloe were two of a kind and that Anthea-for undoubtedly it was she who went by the name of Mrs. Wren-was far other than they.

"Did you know her rich young men?" he asked. "Albert Westmoreland? Tom Gobey? Paul Farrington?"

She smiled again, playing hard to get. "Oh, I met most of 'em," she said, toying with one of her thick blonde curls. "Lambs, they were-even Bertie Westmorland, so stiff and proper, like it killed him to admit he wanted her, but following her wherever she went with his eyes. We'd go to theatre panics together-Bertie's brother, me and Lotta, and some girls Bertie's friends might have along... It was all I could do sometimes not to drink one of 'em right there in the shadow of the back of the box. Like smelling sausages frying when you're hun-gry... It would have been so easy..."

"It's a trick you could only have done once," Asher remarked, and got a sullen glance from under those long lashes.

"That's what Lionel said. Not when others are around, no matter how bad I want it-not where anyone will know." She moved closer to him, her head no higher than the top button of his waistcoat; he could smell the patchouli of her perfume, and the faint reek of blood on her words as she spoke. "But no others are around now-and no one will know."

Her tongue slipped out, to touch the protruding tips of her teeth; her fingers slid around his hand, warm with the evening's earlier kill. He could see her eyes on his throat and on the heavy silver links of the chain. Though he dared not look away from her to check, he had no impression of Ernchester being in the room. Perhaps it was only that the vampire Earl would not have cared whether she killed him or not.

"Ysidro will know," he reminded her.

She dropped his hand and looked away. A shiver went through her, "Cold dago bugger."

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Aren't you?" Her glance slid back to his, brown eyes that should have been angelic, but had never been so, he thought, even in life. Her red mouth twisted. "You think he'll protect you from Lionel? That'll last just as long as he needs you. You'd better not be so quick about findin' the answers to your questions."

"And I have already told him he had best not be slow," the soft, drawling voice of Ysidro murmured. Turning, Asher saw the Spanish vampire at his elbow, as Grippen had appeared earlier that evening; his glance cut quickly back in tune to see Chloe start. She hadn't seen him either.

"So perhaps," Don Simon continued, "we had best stick simply to things as they are and not attempt to mold them to what we think they ought to be. You should not have come here, James."

"On the contrary," Asher said, "I've learned a great deal."

"That is what I meant. But as the horses are well and truly gone, permit me to open the barn door for you. Calvaire's rooms are upstairs-or one set of Calvaire's rooms. I know of at least two others that he had. There may have been more."

"Hence all the secrecy," Asher said, as he preceded the vampire into the dark stair outside. "Any in Lambeth?"

"Lambeth? Not that I knew of," He was aware of those cold yellow eyes piercing his back.

They ascended the neck-breaking twist of steps to the stuffy back room again; though he listened closely, Asher could hear no footfall behind him from either Ysidro or Chloe and only the faintest of rustles from the girl's petticoats. He thought Ernchester must have left at the same time Ysidro had entered, for the Earl had been nowhere in the cellar as they departed. And, in fact, Charles and Anthea were both waiting for them in the parlor of a small flat which had been fitted up on the second floor, with its Tiffany-glass lamps all lighted, giving their strange, white faces the rosy illusion of humanity, save for their gleam-ing eyes.

"I trust you're not still sleeping in the building, Chloe?" Ysidro in-quired, as they entered and the girl set her lamp on the table.

"No," she said sullenly. She retreated to a corner of the room and perched there on one of the patterned chintz chairs; the place was furbished up in several styles, fat overstuffed chairs alternating with pieces of Sheraton and Hepplewhite, and here and there a lacquered cabinet of chinoiserie filled with knickknacks and books. The parlor was tidily kept, with none of the decades-deep clutter of other vampire rooms Asher had seen. Through an open door beyond Lady Anthea's chair, he could see a neat bedroom, its windows heavily shrouded and, no doubt, shuttered beneath those layers of curtain. There was no coffin in sight-Asher guessed it would be in the dressing room beyond.

"Lionel's gone," Lady Ernchester said softly. Her tea-brown eyes went to Asher. She had put up her hair again and bore no evidence of her struggle with Grippen beyond the fact that she had changed her dress for a dark gown of purple-black taffeta. Asher wondered if Minette had made it for her.

"You've made a dangerous enemy; his hand's welted up where he touched the silver of your chain."

Asher privately thought it served the master vampire right, but re-frained from saying so. His whole body was stiff and aching from the impact with the wall. He was still, he reminded himself, quite probably in desperate and immediate danger, but, nevertheless, Grippen's ab-sence comforted him. He prowled over to the small cabinet that stood under the gas jet and opened its drawers. They were empty.

"Lionel did that," Anthea's voice came from behind him. "He tells me he did the same at Neddy's house."

"He'sthe one who seems to be locking the barn door after the horse has escaped." Asher turned back, roving cautiously about the room, examining the French books in the bookshelves, the cushions on the camel-backed divan. He glanced across at Ysidro, who had gone to stand next to Anthea's chair. "If silver affects you that badly, how do you purchase what you need?"

"As any gentleman of fashion can tell you," Anthea said with a faint smile, "one can go for years-centuries, even-without actually touching cash. In earlier years we used gold. Flimsies-bank notes, and later treasury notes-were a godsend, but one must always tip. I've found that in general there is enough of a chill at night to warrant the wearing of gloves."

"But they've got to be leather," Chloe put in ungraciously. "And I mean good leather, none of your kid; it'll bum right through silk."

Anthea frowned. "Does it? I never found it so."

Ysidro held up one long, white hand. "I suspect it toughens a little with time. I know if you had touched silver as Grippen did, Chloe, your arm would have been swollen to the shoulder for weeks, and you would have been ill into the bargain. So it was with me, up almost to the time of the Fire. It is curiously fragile stuff, this pseudoflesh of ours."

"I remember," Anthea said slowly. 'The first time I touched silver-it was bullion lace on the sleeve of one of my old gowns, I think-it not only hurt me at the time, but it made me very ill. I remember being desperately thirsty and unable to hunt. Charles had to hunt for me-bring me..." She broke off suddenly and looked away, her beautiful face impassive. Thinking about it, Asher realized that the logical prey to capture and bring back alive to Ernchester House had to be some-thing human-since it was the death of the human psyche as much as the physical blood that the vampires seemed to crave-but small enough to be easily transportable.

"Kiddies?" Chloe laughed, cold and tingling, like shaken silver bells. "God, you could have had the lot of my brothers and sisters-puking little vermin. Dear God, and the youngest of 'em has brats of her own now..." She paused and turned her face away suddenly, her mouth pressing tight; a delicate, beautiful face that would never grow old. She took a deep breath, a conscious gesture, to steady herself, then went on evenly. "Funny-I see girls who was in the Opera ballet with me back then, years too old to dance now-years too old to get anythin' on the streets but maybe a real nearsighted sailor. I could go into the Opera right now and get my old job back in the ballet, you know? Old Harry the stage man would even recognize me, from bein' the prop boy then."

She fell silent again, staring before her with her great dark eyes, as if seeing into that other time-like Anthea, Asher thought, standing on Harrow Hill and feeling the furnace heat of burning London washing over her mortal flesh. After a moment, Chloe said in a strange voice, "It's queer, that's all." Asher felt the pressure of her mind on his, as she made her swift, sudden exit from the room.

Anthea glanced quickly at her husband; Ernchester, much more qui-etly, almost invisibly, followed the girl out.

"It becomes easier," the Countess said softly, turning back to Asher, "once those we knew in life are all-gone. One is not-reminded. One can-pretend." Her dark brows drew down again, that small gesture making her calm face human again. "Even when one is for all practical purposes immortal, age is unsettling." And getting to her feet, she fol-lowed her husband in a whisper of dark taffeta from the room.

For a long time Asher stood where he had been by the fireplace, his arms folded, regarding Ysidro by the pink and amber glow of the shaded lights. The vampire remained standing by the vacated chair, his gaze still resting thoughtfully on the door, and Asher had the impres-sion he listened to the lady's retreating footfalls blending away into the other sounds of London, the rattle of traffic in Salisbury Place and the nocturnal roar of Fleet Street beyond, the deep vibration of the Under-ground, the sough of the river below the Embankment, and the voices of those who crowded its flagways in the night.

At length Ysidro said, "It is a dangerous time in Chloe's life." The enigmatic gaze returned to him, still remote, without giving anything away. "It happens to vampires. There are stages-I have seen them myself, passed through them myself, some of them... When a vam-pire has existed thirty, forty years, and sees all his friends dying, grow-ing senile, or changing unrecognizably from what they were in the sweetness of a shared youth. Or at a hundred or so, when the whole world mutates into something other

than what he grew up with; when all the small things that were so precious to him are no longer even remembered. When there is no one left who recalls the voices of the singers which so inextricably formed the warp and weft of his days, Then it is easy to grow careless, and the sun will always rise."

He glanced over at Asher, and that odd ghost of what had once been a half-rueful, bittersweet smile flicked back onto the thin lines of his face. "Sometimes I think Charles and Anthea are becoming-friable- that way. They change with the times, as we all must, but it becomes more and more difficult. I still become enraged when shopkeepers are impertinent to me, when these grubby hackney cabs dart out in front of me in the street, or when I see the filth of factory soot fouling the sky. We are, like Dr. Swift's Struldbruggs, old people, and we tend to the unreasonable conservatism of the old. Very little is left of the world as it was in King Charles' day, and nothing, I fear, remains of the world I knew. Except Grippen, of course." The smile turned sardonic. "What a companion for one's immortality."

He strolled over to the fireplace where Asher stood and prodded with one well-shod toe at the cold debris within, amillefeuille of white paper ash, like that which had decorated Neddy Hammersmith's long-cold hearth. "That is, provided, of course," he added ironically, "one sur-vives the first few years, the terrible dangers of simply learning how to be a vampire."

"Did Rhys the Minstrel teach you?"

"Yes." It was the first softening Asher had seen in those gleaming eyes. "He was a good master-a good teacher. It was, you understand, more dangerous in those days, for in those days folk believed in us."

It was on the tip of Asher's tongue to ask about that, but instead he asked, "Did you know Calvaire created a fledgling?"

The cold eyes seemed to widen and harden, the long, thin nostrils flared. "Hewhat? "

"He created a fledgling," Asher said.

"How do you know this?"

"I've spoken to him," Asher said, "A man named Bully Joe Davies, from Lambeth or thereabouts-he said he'd break my neck if I told anyone of it, particularly yourself. You seem," he added dryly, "to enjoy a certain reputation among your peers."

"Do you refer," the vampire asked coldly, "to that rabble of steve-dores, sluts, and tradesmen as my peers? The Farrenscome close, but, when all's said, his grandfather was no more than a jumped-up baron..."

"Your fellows, then," Asher amended. "And in any case, I trust you'll protect me. He says he's being followed-stalked. I'm supposed to meet him later tonight, to go to another of Calvaire's safe houses."

Ysidro nodded; Asher could see the thought moving in the pale laby-rinth of his eyes.

He walked over to the cabinet again, ran a finger, idly questing, through its emptied pigeonholes, every scrap of evidence of contacts burned by the cautious Grippen lest any should do what Asher had done-trace a name, a shop, an address, that would lead him to another cellar where a vampire might sleep. He glanced back at the vampire, standing quietly in the molten halo of the lamplight.

"I hadn't intended on telling you that," he went on after a moment. "But I've been finding out some things tonight about Calvaire, a little, and about vampires. I understand now why you've been lying to me all along. In a way, Grippen is right. You'd be an absolute fool to hire a human to track down your killer, much less tell him who and what you are-if your killer is human. But you don't think he is,

"In fact, you think the killer is another vampire."