James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (2 page)

From his own experiences in Germany and Russia, Asher knew how easy such a pallor was to fake, particularly by gaslight. And it might simply be madness or drugs that glittered at him from those grave yellow eyes. Yet there was an eerie quality to Don Simon Ysidro, an immobility so total it was as if he had been there behind the desk for hundreds of years, waiting . . .

As Asher knelt beside Lydia to feel her pulse, he kept his eyes on the Spaniard, sensing the danger in the man. And even as his mind at last identified the underlying inflections of speech, he realized, with an odd, sinking chill, whence that dreadful sense of stillness stemmed.

The tonal shift in a few of his word endings was characteristic of those areas which had been linguistically isolated since the end of the sixteenth century.

And except when he spoke, Don Simon Ysidro did not appear to be breathing.

The carving knife still in his left hand, Asher got to his feet and said, “Come here.”

Ysidro did not move. His slender hands remained exactly as they had been, dead white against the blued steel of the dissected gun, but no more inert than the spider who awaits the slightest vibration of the blundering fly.

“You understand, it is not always easy to conceal what we are, particularly if we have not fed,” he explained in his low, light voice. Heavy lids gave his eyes an almost sleepy expression, not quite concealing cynicism and mockery, not quite concealing that odd gleam. “Up until ninety years ago, it was a simple matter, for no one looks quite normal by candlelight. Now that they are lighting houses by electricity, I know not what we shah” do."

Ysidro must have moved. The terrifying thing was that Asher did not see the man do it, was not—for a span of what must have been several seconds—conscious of anything, as if he had literally slipped into a trance on his feet. One second he was standing, knife in hand, between Lydia's sleeping form and the desk where the slim intruder sat; the next, it seemed, he came to himself with a start to find the iciness of Ysidro's fingers still chilling his hand, and the knife gone.

Shock and disorientation doused him like cold water. Don Simon tossed the knife onto the desk among the scattered pieces of the useless revolver and turned back, with an ironic smile, to offer his bared wrist to Asher.

Asher shook his head, his mouth dry. He'd faked his own death once, on a German archaeological expedition to the Congo, by means of a tourniquet, and he'd seen fakirs in India who didn't even need that. He backed away, absurdly turning over in his mind the eerie similarities of hundreds of legends he'd uncovered in the genuinely scholarly half of his career, and walked to Lydia's desk.

It stood on the opposite side of the study from his own—in actual fact a Regency secretaire Lydia's mother had once used for gilt-edged invitations and the delicately nuanced jugglings of seating arrangements at dinners. It was jammed now with Lydia's appallingly untidy collection of books, notes, and research on glands. Since she had taken her degree and begun research at the Radclyffe Infirmary, Asher had been promising to get her a proper desk. In one slim compartment her stethoscope was coiled, like an obscene snake of rubber and steel . . .

His hands were not quite steady as he replaced the stethoscope in its pigeonhole once more. He was suddenly extremely conscious of the beat of the blood in his veins.

His voice remained level. “What do you want?”

“Help,” the vampire said,

“What?” Asher stared at the vampire, he realized—seeing the dark amusement in Ysidro's eyes—like a fool. His own mind still felt twisted out of true by what he had heard—or more properly by what he had absolutely not heard—through the stethoscope, but the fact that the shadowy predator that lurked in the legends of every culture he had ever studied did exist was in a way easier to believe than what that predator had just said.

The pale eyes held his. There was no shift in them, no expression; only a remote calm, centuries deep. Ysidro was silent for a few moments as if considering how much of what he should explain. Then he moved, a kind of weightless, leisurely drifting that, like Asher's habitual stride, was as noiseless as the passage of shadow. He perched on a corner of the desk, long white hands folded on one well-tailored gray knee, regarding Asher for a moment with his head a little on one side. There was something almost hypnotic in that stillness, without nervous gesture, almost completely without movement, as if that had all been rinsed from him by the passing moons of time.

Then Don Simon said, “You are Dr. James Claudius Asher, author of Language and Concepts in Eastern and Central Europe, Lecturer in Philology at New College, expert on languages and their permutations in the folklore of countries from the Balkans to Port Arthur to Pretoria ...”

Asher did not for a moment believe it coincidence that Ysidro had named three of the trouble spots of which the Foreign Office had been most desirous of obtaining maps.

“Surely, in that context, you must be familiar with the vampire.”

“I am.” Asher settled his weight on one curved arm of the divan where Lydia still lay, unmoving in her unnatural sleep. He felt slightly unreal, but very calm now. Whatever was happening must be dealt with on its own bizarre terms, rather than panicked over. “I don't know why I should be surprised,” he went on after a moment. “I've run across legends of vampires in every civilization from China to Mexico. They crop up again and again—blood-drinking ghosts that live as long as they prey on the living. You get them from ancient Greece, ancient Rome—though I remember the classical Roman ones were supposed to bite off their victims' noses rather than drink their blood. Did they?”

“I do not know,” Ysidro replied gravely, “having only become vampire myself in the Year of Our Lord 1555. I came to England in the train of his Majesty King Philip, you understand, when he came to marry the English queen—I did not go home again. But personally, I cannot see why anyone would trouble to do such a thing.” Though his expression did not change, Asher had the momentary impression of amusement glittering far back in those champagne-colored eyes.

“And as for the legends,” the vampire went on, still oddly immobile, as if over the centuries he had eventually grown weary of any extraneous gesture, “one hears of fairies everywhere also, yet neither you nor I expect to encounter them at the bottom of the garden.” Under the long, pale wisps of Ysidro's hair, Asher could see the earlobes had once been pierced for earrings, and there was a ring of antique gold on one of those long, white fingers. With his narrow lips closed, Ysidro's oversized canines—twice the length of his other teeth—were hidden, but they glinted in the gaslight when he spoke.

“I want you to come with me tonight,” he said after a brief pause during which Asher had the impression of some final, inner debate which never touched the milky stillness of his calm. “It is now half past seven—there is a train which goes to London at eight, and the station but the walk of minutes. It is necessary that I speak with you, and it is probably safer that we do so in a moving vehicle away from the hostages that the living surrender to fortune.”

Asher looked down at Lydia, her hair scattered like red smoke over the creamy lace of her gown, her fingers, where they rested over that light frame of wire and glass, stained with smears of ink. Even under the circumstances, the incongruity of the tea gown's languorous draperies and the spectacles made him smile. The combination was somehow very like Lydia, despite her occasionally stated preference for the more strenuous forms of martyrdom over being seen wearing spectacles in public. She had never quite forgotten the sting of her ugly-duckling days. She was writing a paper on glands. He knew she'd probably spent most of the morning at the infirmary's dissecting rooms and had been hurriedly scribbling what she could after she'd come home and changed clothes while waiting for him to arrive. He wondered what she'd make of Don Simon Ysidro and reflected that she'd probably produce a dental mirror from somewhere about her person and demand that he open his mouth—wide.

He glanced back at Ysidro, oddly cheered by this mental image. “Safer for whom?”

“For me,” the vampire replied smoothly. “For you. And for your lady. Do not mistake, James; it is truly death that you smell, clinging to my coat sleeves. But had I intended to kill your lady or you, I would already have done so. I have killed so many men. There is nothing you could do which could stop me.”

Having once felt that disorienting moment of psychic blindness, Asher was ready for him, but still only barely saw him move. His hand had not dropped the twenty inches or so that separated his fingers from the hideout knife in his boot when he was flung backward across the head of the divan, in spite of his effort to roll aside. Somehow both arms were wrenched behind him, the wrists pinned in a single grip of steel and ice. The vampire's other hand was in his hair, cold against his scalp as it dragged his head back, arching his spine down toward the floor. Though he was conscious of very little weight in the bony limbs that forced his head back and still further back over nothing, he could get no leverage to struggle; and in any case, he knew it was far too late. Silky lips brushed his throat above the line of the collar—there was no sensation of breath.

Then the lips touched his skin in a mocking kiss, and the next instant he was free.

He was moving even as he sensed the pressure slack from his spine, not even thinking that Ysidro could kill him, but only aware of Lydia's danger. But by the time he was on his feet again, his knife in his hand, Ysidro was back behind the desk, unruffled and immobile, as if he had never moved. Asher blinked and shook his head, aware there'd been another of those moments of induced trance, but not sure where it had been.

The fine strands of Ysidro's hair snagged at his velvet collar as he tipped his head a little to one side. There was no mockery in his topaz eyes. “I could have had you both in the time it takes to prove to you that I choose otherwise,” he said in his soft voice. “I—we—need your help, and it is best that I explain it to you on the way to London and away from this girl for whom you would undertake another fit of pointless chivalry. Believe me, James, I am the least dangerous thing with which you—or she—may have to contend. The train departs at eight, and it is many years since public transportation has awaited the convenience of persons of breeding. Will you come?”

It was perhaps ten minutes' walk along Holywell Street to the train station. Alone in the clinging veils of the September fog, Asher was conscious of a wish that the distance were three or four times as great. He felt in need of time to think.

On his very doorstep, Ysidro had vanished, fading effortlessly away into the mists. Asher had fought to keep his concentration on the vampire during what he was virtually certain was a momentary blanking of his consciousness, but hadn't succeeded. Little wonder legend attributed to vampires the ability to dissolve into fog and moonbeams, to slither through keyholes or under doors. In a way, that would have been easier to understand.

It was the ultimate tool of the hunter—or the spy.

The night was cold, the fog wet and heavy in his lungs—not the black, killer fog of London, but the peculiarly moist, dripping, Oxford variety, which made the whole town seem slightly shaggy with moss and greenness and age. To his left as he emerged into Broad Street, the sculpted busts around the Sheldonian Theater seemed to watch him pass, a dim assemblage of ghosts; the dome of the theater itself was lost in the fog beyond. Was Ysidro moving among those ghosts somewhere, he wondered, leaving no footprint on the wet granite of the pavernent?

Or was he somewhere behind Asher in the fog, trailing silently, watching to see whether his unwilling agent would double back and return home?

Asher knew it would do him no good if he did. His conscious mind might still revolt at the notion that he had spent the last half hour conversing with a live vampire—an oxymoron if ever I heard one, he reflected wryly—but the difference, if one existed, was at this point academic.

He had been in deadly danger tonight. That he did not doubt.

As for Lydia . . .

He had absolutely no reason to believe Don Simon's claim to be alone. Asher had considered demanding to search the house before he left, but realized it would be a useless gesture. Even a mortal accomplice could have stood hidden in the fog in the garden, let alone one capable of willing mortal eyes to pass him by. He had contented himself with lighting the fires laid in the study fireplace and the kitchen stove, so that the servants would not wake in cold—as wake they would, Ysidro had assured him, within an hour of their departure.

And at all events, Ysidro knew where Asher lived. If the vampire were watching him, there was no chance of returning to the house and getting Lydia to safety before they were intercepted.

And—another academic point—what precisely constituted safety?

Asher shoved his gloved hands deeper into the pockets of the baggy brown ulster he had donned and mentally reviewed everything he had ever learned about vampires.

That they were the dead who infinitely prolonged their lives by drinking the blood of the living seemed to be the one point never in dispute, bitten-off noses in Rome notwithstanding. From Odysseus' first interview with the shades, there was so little divergence from that central theme that Asher was—intellectually, at least—mildly astounded at his own disbelief before he had pressed the stethoscope to that thin, hard ribcage under the dark silk of the vest, and had heard . . . nothing. His researches in folklore had taken him from China to Mexico to the Australian bush, and there was virtually no tongue which had not yielded some equivalent of that word, vampire.

Around that central truth, however, lay such a morass of legend about how to deal with vampires that he felt a momentary spasm of irritation at the scholars who had never troubled to codify such knowledge. He made a mental note to do so, provided Ysidro hadn't simply invited him to London for dinner with a few friends. Naturally, he reflected wryly, there wasn't a greengrocer open at this hour, and he would look fairly foolish investigating back-garden vegetable patches for garlic en route to the station . . . totally aside from missing his train. And given the general standard of British cookery, searching for garlic would be a futile task at best.