01 Those Who Hunt The Night ja-1

by Barbara Hambly

  Asher leaned back in the chair, fighting to remain conscious as the policeman left the darkening room. The shock of the fight was coming over him, clouding his mind, and his whole body ached. The face of the daylight vampire swam before his thoughts, queerly colorless as Ysidro's was, but not smooth and dry-looking-rather it was swollen, puffy, pustulant. Thin rags of fair hair had clung to the scalp; he tried to recall eyebrows and could not-only those huge teeth, grotesque and outsize, and the staring hatred of the blue eyes.

  Forcing his mind back to alertness, he fished the picklocks from his coat pocket-clumsily, for he had to reach across his body to do so- and placed them inconspicuously on a blackwood sideboard near the French doors. He guessed he would be under enough suspicion without having those found on his person. Staggering back to the chair, he mentally began ticking off details: brown jacket, corduroy or tweed, countrified and incongruous on that massive shape; and lobeless ears, oddly ordinary given the deformation of the rest of the face. He glanced at his left arm. Blood was staining the claw rips in the coat sleeve.

  Dear God, was that what vampires became, if they lived long enough? Was that what the Plague, mixing with God only knew what other organisms of the vampire syndrome, could do? Would he, at the last, have to track down and kill Ysidro, to prevent him from turning into that?

  He realized he was singularly lucky to be still alive.

  The name, he thought. The voice had shouted a name, just as his head had cracked against the wall. His recollection was blurry, drown-ing under shock and pain and the weight of the vampire's dark mind. Then there was the rattle of harness, the clatter of retreating wheels...

  The images faded as his consciousness slipped toward darkness.

  "You!"

  A powerful hand grabbed him and thrust him back against the back of the chair. His mind cleared, and he saw Grippen looming in the shadows of the now-dark room.

  Still holding his swollen right hand to his chest, Asher said wearily, "Let me alone, Lionel. The killer was

  here. Grippen...!" For the vampire had turned sharply and, had Asher not seized the corner of his cloak, would have been already halfway to the stairs. Grippen whirled back, his scarred face dark with impatient fury. Quietly, Asher said, "The red-haired girl."

  "What red-haired girl? Let go, man!"

  The cloak was gone from his grip-even his unbroken left hand hadn't much strength to it. Asher got to his feet, fighting a surge of dizziness as he strode after the vampire up the stairs.

  He found Grippen in one of the upper bedrooms, an attic chamber that had at one time housed the maids. He had to light one of the bedroom candles before ascending the narrow stair, no easy feat with only one workable hand; though the vaguest twilight still lingered out-side, the windows of all the attics had been boarded shut, and the place was dark as pitch. He could hear nothing of the bobby Charley moving about the upper regions of the house. Presumably he was lying in one of the bedrooms in a trance cast by the master vampire's mind. That unnatural slumber pressed on his own consciousness as he staggered up the stairs. The pain in his broken wrist helped.

  In the darkness he heard Grippen whisper, "Christ's bowels," un-voiced as the wind. The candle gleam caught a velvety sheen from his spreading cloak, and beyond it something glinted, polished gold-the brass mountings of a casket.

  There was a coffin in the attic.

  Asher stumbled forward into the room. As he did so his foot brushed something on the floor that scraped... a crowbar. Grippen was kneeling beside the coffin, staring in shock at what lay within. Asher's glance went to the window; the boards were gouged but intact. The killers must have been just starting that part of the operation, he thought, when his own footfalls had drawn them from their task.

  Grippen whispered again, "Sweet Jesu."

  Asher came silently to his side.

  Chloe Winterdon lay in the coffin, her head tilted to one side among the pillowing mounds of her gilt hair, her mouth open, fangs bared in her colorless gums, her eyes staring in frozen horror. She was clearly dead, almost withered-looking, the white flesh sunken back onto her bones.

  Only slightly bloodied, the pounded end of a stake protruded from between her breasts.

  Ragged white punctures marked her throat.

  Quietly, Grippen said, "Her blood has all been drained."

  Seventeen

  At least, Asher reflected with exasperated irony at some point in the long hours between six-thirty and ten, when he was finally released from the Charing Cross station house, they couldn't charge him with Chloe Winterdon's murder. But this was only because Grip-pen had gently gathered the blonde girl's body into his arms and van-ished through some bolthole in the roof, leaving Asher to the tedious business of finding some story to tell the police-which they didn't believe-being held for questioning, and getting

  his broken hand splinted by the police surgeon. They injected it with novocaine and warned him to take it to a regular doctor in the morning, but Asher refused all offers of veronal or other sedatives. He knew already it would be a long night.

  To questioning, he responded that he was a friend of Dr. Grippen's, that he had gone there on the off chance that a mutual acquaintance, Miss Merridew, had taken refuge with the doctor; she had been missing some days. No, he hadn't reported it before-he had just returned from Paris to find her gone. No, he didn't know where Dr. Grippen could be reached. No, he had no idea why the burglars would have silver-tipped bullets in their gun. They made no comments about the bite marks on his throat and wrists, which was just as well.

  It was raining when he stepped outside, a thin, dispiriting rain. Wea-riness made him cold to the bones as he descended the station house steps, his brown ulster flapping cloakwise about him, his right arm in its sling folded up underneath. Even with the novocaine, it hurt damnably. Nearly half the night gone, he thought, and no nearer to finding Lydia than he had been that afternoon.

  There was a cab stand at the end of the street. He started toward it, and a dark shape was suddenly at his side, seeming to materialize from the misty rain. A heavy hand caught his elbow. "You're coming with me."

  It was Grippen.

  "Good," Asher said wearily. "I want to talk to you." After the thing that had attacked him, Grippen no longer impressed him much.

  Ysidro was waiting for them in a four-wheeler a little ways down the street. "You certainly took long enough," he remarked, and Asher firmly resisted the urge to punch him as he slumped into the seat at his side.

  "I took a few hours out for dinner at the Cafe Royale and a nap," he retorted instead. "If you'd put in an appearance earlier you could have joined me for coffee. They have very handsome waiters." The cab jolted into movement, its wheels swishing softly on the wet pavement; Asher's arm throbbed sharply in its sling. "Lydia's gone. And I've seen the killer."

  "Lydia?" Grippen said, puzzled.

  "My wife." Asher's brown eyes narrowed as he looked across at the big vampire in his rain-dewed evening cloak, the blunt, square head shadowed by the brim of his silk top hat. "The red-haired girl I asked you about, whose life is the price I'm allegedly being paid for this investigation." Cold anger still filled him at Ysidro, at Grippen, at all of them, and at himself most of all for leading her into this.

  "Ah," the master vampire said softly, and his hard, gray glance flicked to Ysidro. "I wondered on that."

  "She was in London all the time, helping me with my investigation," Asher said, and Ysidro's colorless eyebrows quirked.

  "I knew she had left Oxford, of course. I did not think you would bring her here."

  "It seemed a good idea at the time," Asher replied harshly. "She managed to find most of your lairs and all of your aliases before she disappeared. And if you didn't take her," he added, looking across again at Grippen, whose red face had gone redder as rage added to whatever blood he'd imbibed that evening,

  "then I suspect she found the killer as well. Now tell me the truth, because it's going to have a bearing on how
I conduct this investigation. Did you take her? And is she dead?"

  "You waste your breath," the Master of London said slowly. "No to both your questions is the answer that'll keep you for us and not against us; I know that, and you know that, and I'm thinking you'll not believe it an I say it, but it is so. I've seen no red-headed moppet. I plight my faith on't."

  Asher drew a deep breath. He was shivering slightly all over, in nervous waves, reaction setting in on him to anger, exhaustion, and pain. He'd lost his hat at some part in the proceedings, and his brown hair fell forward over his forehead, the thin face beneath hard and far less clerkish than it usually seemed.

  From the corner of the cab, Ysidro's light, disinterested voice said, "Tell us about the killer."

  Asher sighed, and some of the tension ebbed from his tall frame. "It was-monstrous," he said slowly. "Foul. Diseased-looking. But beyond a doubt a vampire. It was bleached, as you are, Ysidro, but its skin was leprous and peeling. It was taller than I, taller than Grippen by an inch or so, and as broad or broader. Fair hair, but not much of it; it was falling out, I think. Blue eyes. It had a human partner-I heard his footsteps running down the stairs from the attic, and later he called the thing away from me; and that's odd, when you realize the thing goes on killing rampages, taking seven or nine humans at a time. I'd certainly think twice about riding anywhere in a closed carriage with it."

  " 'It,' " Simon said softly.

  "It wasn't human."

  "Nor are we."

  The cab pulled to a halt at the top of Savoy Walk. Grippen paid off the driver, and the two vampires, their human partner between them, walked down the long tunnel of shadows to the towering, baroque blackness of Ernchester House at the end. Bands and slashes of Ma-deira-gold marked the curtained windows, and caught the thin rain in a shuddering haze: even as they mounted the soot-streaked marble of the steps, one panel of the carved doors opened to reveal the Farrens stand-ing, an arm-linked silhouette, just within.

  "I fear she is truly dead." Anthea led the way up the long stair, to a small room at the back of the house which had once been used for sewing or letter writing. The dark red of her gown showed like old blood against the creamy whiteness of her bosom and face; its stiff lines and low-cut corsage whispered of some earlier era; knots and fringes of cut jet beads glinted in the lamplight like ripe blackberries. Her thick hair was piled in the modern style; against it, her face looked strained, weary, and frightened, as if her spirit were now fighting against all the pressures of those accumulated years. Ernchester, trailing close at her side, looked infinitely worse. "Decomposition isn't far advanced, but it has begun."

  "That's wrong," Grippen growled. "Not cold as it is... She should bare be stiff."

  "Are you speaking from your experience with human corpses?" Asher inquired, and the big man's black eyebrows pulled down over his nose in a frown. "With a vampire's, the pathology would be completely different."

  Anthea had laid one of her velvet cloaks over the delicate Regency sofa in the little parlor. Against the thick, cherry-black velvet, Chloe's hair seemed nearly white. It lay in loops and coils, spilling down to brush the floor; Asher was reminded of how Lydia's had lain, unrav-eling in the study lamplight. Her eyes

  and mouth had been closed. But this did not change the horrible, sunken appearance of her flesh or the ghastly waxiness of her skin. She had been, Asher remembered, abso-lutely beautiful, like a baroque pearl set in Renaissance gold. Petrified, Lydia had said, every cell individually replaced with something that was not human flesh, and a mind replaced by that which was not a human mind.

  A second cloak covered her; over the years, Anthea must have col-lected hundreds of them as fashions changed. It, too, was black, niched and beaded; beneath it, Chloe's shell-pink dress shone like the slash of a fading sunset between banks of clouds. With his left hand Asher reached forward and drew the cloak aside to look at the huge puncture wounds in the throat. Then, thoughtfully, he shrugged off the remaining sleeve of his damp ulster and let the weight of it drop to the floor around him. He shook clear a few inches of wrist from the sleeve of his corduroy jacket and held it out to Anthea. "Undo the cuff, would you, please?"

  She did, gingerly avoiding the silver chain which still circled that wrist. Even the fleeting grip the thing had taken on it had driven the links into the flesh with sufficient violence to leave a narrow wreath of bruises and the reddening marks of fingers.

  Just below the base of Asher's thumb were two or three sets of punc-tures, scabbed over like the half dozen or so on his throat. A souvenir, he thought with wry gallows humor, of Paris. He knelt beside Chloe's body and compared the marks. They were less than a third the size of the mangled white holes in the girl's skin.

  "Its fangs were huge," he said quietly. "Grotesquely so, like an ama-teurish stage vampire's; it might have been funny if it weren't so terri-fying. They grew down over the lip, cutting the flesh..." His fingers sketched the place beneath the thick brush of his mustache, and Ysidro's eyes narrowed sharply. "It hadn't callused, so it's something that came over it fairly recently."

  "Any clown had told you that," Grippen grumbled. "We'd ha' known ere this, did any vampire walk that fed on other vampires."

  "What happens to a vampire," Asher asked, looking up from Chloe's throat, his eyes traveling around the circle of white, unhuman faces in the amber sweetness of the lamplight, "that drinks the blood of other vampires?"

  Grippen's voice was harsh. "Other vampires kill it."

  "Why?"

  "Why do men stone those who eat the corpses of the dead, force children, cut beasts up alive to hear 'em squeal, or play with their own dung? Because it's abominable."

  'There are so few of us," Anthea added softly, her strong fingers stroking the massive jewel of jet and hematite that glittered at her bo-som, "and our lives are lived so perilously on the shadowlands of death, no traitor to our midst can be tolerated, for fear that all shall die."

  "And because," Ysidro's light, disinterested voice whispered, "to drain the death of a vampire, to drink of a mind so rich, so deep, so filled with the colors of living, and so thick with the overtints of all the lives it has taken, might be the greatest temptation, the greatest intoxi-cation, of all."

  There was silence-shocked, furious, and, Asher reflected grimly, not without recognition. The silken pattering of the rain pierced it faintly, muffled by the moldering brocades of the window drapes. Then

  Grippen snarled, "Buggering Spanish dog- you'd think so."

  Seated on a chair near the head of the couch, his ankles crossed negligently but with his usual erectness of posture, Ysidro continued, unperturbed, "But the question was not of life and death, but merely of blood. We can gain physical nourishment from drinking an animal's blood, or a human's, though we kill him not-as you yourself can attest, James." By that light, cool tone, one would never have guessed that he had fought to rescue Asher from that death in Paris, nor pro-tected him, at a certain amount of personal risk, afterward. 'To drink even a small quantity of another vampire's blood is repellent, after our own flesh has undergone the change. I am told that it often causes nausea."

  "Then it's been tried."

  The vampire leaned a little into the high crimson wing of his chair and folded slim hands around his knee, A slight smile touched his mouth, but left his sulphur eyes hooded in shadow. "Everything has been tried."

  The others, still grouped around the couch where Chloe's body lay, regarded him uneasily, save for Ernchester, who simply sat on a chair in the darkness of a corner, staring down at his white, workless fingers, turning them over and over, as if they were some queer and unknown growth he had suddenly found sprouting at the ends of his arms,

  "Then merely the drinking of another vampire's blood, whether he killed him or not, wouldn't cause that kind of change?"

  "It did not," Ysidro replied in the careful tone he had used at the beginning of the investigation to reveal those few fragments of informa-tion with which he was willing to
part, "in those that I have known." "And who were those?" Grippen demanded angrily. "As they are dead now," the Spanish vampire responded, "it scarce matters."

  "What about vampires who were older than Brother Anthony is now, that you knew or heard spoken of?"

  Ysidro thought, still immobile as an alabaster votive, his pale eyes half-shut. "Rhys the Minstrel was nearly five hundred years old when he perished-if he did perish-in the Fire. Like Anthony, his skills had increased; like Anthony he had become at least in part tolerant of silver and perhaps of daylight, too, though I'm not sure. One saw him less and less. I know that he fed regularly and did not show signs of any abnor-mality. I never knew how old Johannis Magnus was supposed to be..."

  Anthea spoke up, resting her hip on the curved head of the couch, "Tulloch the Scot told me once of vampires in China and in Asia, who have lived for thousands of years, going on as they always have, death-less."

  "And lifeless," her husband whispered behind her, almost unheard.

  To Asher, still sitting on his haunches beside Chloe's motionless form, Ysidro remarked, "As a rule it is not something which concerns us, and I suspect that most of us do not wish to know of it."

  "What would be the point?" Grippen demanded sullenly.

  "The point, my dearest doctor, is to know whether this abnormal pathology is something to which we all must look forward."

  "That's a lot of Popish cock!"

  "What's this?" Asher lifted Chloe's arm, limp and soft in his grasp and without rigor. He wondered if the vampire flesh went through rigor when they died. It was another of the things Lydia would want to know... He swiftly pushed the thought of Lydia from his mind. The but-tons of Chloe's sleeve had all been undone-there was a good handspan of them, reaching nearly to her elbow-and the whitepoint d'esprit fell back from the icy flesh to show a small mark on the inside of the elbow, like the puncture of a needle. "Was her sleeve unfastened like this when you found her, Lionel?"

  He shook his head heavily. "God's body, I know not! As if I hadn't aught else to look for but..."