Seeing the slim dark form beside the vehicle.
Knowing he was trapped.
He saw her clearly now: a woman, tall and stately. Power came off her like smoke. Her black hair hung down her back past her hips, and her features, not beautiful, were strong and sensual and her dark eyes blazed with cold intelligence. Her hand moved, like silver in the darkness, and his pursuers dissolved into mist and moonlight. He knew she would kill him and yet a yearning for her swept over him, velvet and blackness. Not caring. Only wanting to touch her, to be near her …
Lydia, he thought. Lydia dreamed about her, too.
‘Ippolyta,’ he called out, and she turned her head, and he woke with the pain as if someone had chopped into his ankle with an ax.
She stood six feet from him, between him and the dark alcove where Ned Seabury and Roddy had taken their post of ambush. Roddy’s arm, in its cheap plum-colored sleeve, stretched out of the shadow that hid the rest of his body, lying on the floor.
With a hunting cat’s concentration she moved toward the tiny well room where Millward had taken his stand for ambush, and Asher knew to his bone-marrow that Millward was dozing. As Seabury and Roddy must have been dozing when she’d taken them, as sleep even now suffocated him, pressed his lungs breathless with a weight of dust, closed his mouth against a warning shout. Her dress was dark red, and by the lantern’s dim glow her skin was flushed to human warmth with the blood of her kill. Blood stained her lips.
Asher drifted back to sleep.
Dreamed of Miranda. Miranda in the sunlight of a hillside yellow with autumn, crying – crying with exhaustion, with fear at being lost and alone. He could feel the heat of the place on his skin, smell the scrubby woodlands at the hill’s foot, where a pale track of a dirt road ran. Spain, he thought, and wondered how she’d got there, and how he could possibly find her before it was too late.
(Too late for what?)
A young man was walking on that stony trail, and he stopped, turned aside to climb the hill toward her, he must have heard her crying. He wore a black robe and, Asher saw, chains of silver around his throat and wrists; there was gray in his hair, and a few streaks of it in the thin beard along his jaw. He knelt beside the child and gathered her into his arms. ‘It’s all right,’ he said (only he said it in Spanish, and, Asher thought, late medieval Spanish at that). ‘You are safe. It will be all right.’
Then he turned to Asher and said, in perfectly modern English, ‘But you must wake up.’
Waking hit him like cold water and he shouted, ‘Ippolyta!’
She swung around to face him, eyes inhuman as a hawk’s. The next second – with the horrifying speed of the vampire – she was beside him, stooping over him, her hand in his hair dragging his head back—
There’s only one reason she’d come to England.
In the High German of the Austrian Empire he said, ‘I know where Damien is.’
Her countenance changed. Lost its murderous intensity and filled with a kind of brilliance, half rage and half triumph, even a kind of joy.
Shoot her …
‘Where?’
SHOOT HER, YOU NUMBSKULLS!
‘There’s a house across the river from Thamesmire,’ he said. ‘Across from the place you searched the night before last.’ Damn it, Millward, are you bloody asleep? ‘He’s been taking the train into London every night to kill, and—’
The crash of Millward’s rifle in the confined space of the vault was like thunder. The bullet took her in the chest, close enough that Asher felt the sting of its passing on his cheekbone. She rocked back with the impact and a second shot roared, taking her from a different direction (she must have missed killing Seabury, how’d that happen?) and she was knocked sidelong, blood spraying Asher’s face. The next instant they were running toward him, Millward from the well chamber and Ned Seabury from somewhere in the darkness toward the end of the vault, bending over him – ‘Are you hurt, man?’
‘Get her, you idiots!’ yelled Asher, and they both turned. ‘Finish her!’
Ippolyta’s body was gone. Only pools of blood remained behind.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Whose motor-car is this?’ demanded Lydia, when Don Simon – now quite properly attired in his usual gray and a long black greatcoat that spread behind him like sinister wings – led her out the door of the house on Spaniard’s Lane. The Sunbeam touring-car took up most of the narrow pavement, polished brass gleaming in the headlamps’ reflection.
‘That need not concern you.’ He opened the door for her, offered her a gloved hand. ‘Have you money to take the train back to Oxford? I fear we will need to abandon this vehicle at some point … Excellent.’ He piloted carefully down the cobblestones. Lydia hoped the vampire was capable of causing the police not to notice a full-sized touring car in the same way that he could cause people not to notice himself … hoped also that sometime in the past six years he had actually learned to drive. ‘How did Zahorec come to learn of your daughter’s whereabouts?’
‘He searched my room. He traced me to my hotel – I went into Dallaby House, found his lair … Simon, he’s been … possessing Noel Wredemere during the daytimes, that’s where he’s been hiding. He’s been taking drugs to stay awake, as you did with your Mr Ballard at the Bank of England, didn’t you? Got him to smoke opium …’
‘Had I the time to undertake a long campaign of dreams and clues and hints, believe me, Mistress, I would have pursued a less drastic course.’ He turned up Thames Street, finagled through the traffic that even at this hour milled around the entrances of London Bridge. ‘’Tis not precisely “possession”, thank God,’ he added. ‘Else I would be confounded utterly, having not the smallest idea myself of how these transactions are recorded within the bank. And the effects of the elixir of wakefulness – a compound of silver chloride and cocaine – are devastating. Our friend must be strong indeed – desperate indeed – to pursue safe haven in such fashion.’
‘He is desperate.’ Lydia clung to the door as the Sunbeam skimmed between two lorry-loads of coal and dove into the vaulted blackness of the tunnel beneath Cannon Street station. ‘His master vampire – I presume the Master of Romania or Montenegro or wherever he comes from originally – is in hot pursuit of him, a woman named Ippolyta … Or at least Ippolyta is what he calls her in … in the silly dreams he’s been giving me.’
Even the knowledge that these exercises in romantic fol-de-rol had nothing to do with what she, Lydia Asher, actually wanted or needed or considered desirable, didn’t serve to keep a blush from heating her face, and Simon, damn him, would sense it.
‘In the night-times he just gets people to think he is Noel. That’s why he chose him. Because they look enough alike, and he’s of a respectable enough family for Cece to marry. But it’s taking a toll on him,’ she went on. ‘He’s erratic, the way he moves and speaks … He must be coming to pieces …’
‘Hence his rate of kills,’ surmised the vampire. ‘The damage done him must be agonizing. Hence also his carelessness, and his need to acquire the services of a nest, to provide him with additional victims … Something the living would eventually question, no matter how much he was paying them. Cagafuego,’ he added, in reference, Lydia presumed, to the coster who pushed his barrow out into New Bridge Street almost under the Sunbeam’s wheels. ‘And his need to acquire your services,’ he added more quietly, ‘at whatever cost. Bueno,’ he added, as they swung on to Fleet Street. ‘A decent street at last.’
He tromped the accelerator and the motor car sprang forward like a cheetah.
‘Come on!’ Millward snatched up the lantern. ‘She’s left a trail …’
Asher caught Seabury’s arm as the young man turned to follow. ‘Not going to stay here and shoot the next vampire that comes for me, Millward? That’ll happen quicker than you’ll find Miss Ippolyta.’
By the way Millward looked back at him, then at Seabury – by the sudden twist of expression on the faces of both the older man and the younger – A
sher knew that in their eagerness to achieve their quarry both had totally forgotten his existence. Had certainly forgotten that he had, at the very least, an ankle so badly bruised and twisted that it would not bear weight.
Not to mention, he reflected bitterly as Seabury fetched a crowbar to lever the stone block from his leg, leaving poor Roddy’s corpse where it lay for the rats to chew, until they had time to come back for it …
Using Seabury’s arm, and the stones of the broken wall for support, he dragged himself to his feet. His left leg, which had also been pinned, was immediately flooded with pins and needles. The pain in his right, even from the smallest weight set on it, made him feel faint.
Millward cried in agony, ‘You fool, she’ll get away!’
‘I’d come along to help,’ Asher said through gritted teeth, ‘except I appear to have carelessly cracked my ankle bone on somebody’s gun-butt earlier in the evening. I presume that was to ensure I couldn’t flee even if I worked myself loose? I think you owe me cab fare back to my hotel – and assistance in getting there, if you’d rather I didn’t explain to the cabbie, and maybe to a policeman, how this happened.’
‘We cannot let her escape! She’s a murderess—’
‘—a thousand times over, yes … Twenty thousand, actually, according to Lydia’s calculations. I’ve let her take one try at me and I got her to stand still long enough for you to shoot her – and I even woke you up to do it. So unless you’re willing to kill me in cold blood, as we discussed earlier in the evening, I suggest you see me home … Because I promise you, Millward, if you go after her alone you’re going to be killed. Or do you still think I don’t know what I’m talking about?’
It was the glance of anguish that Seabury cast – first in the direction of the shadows where Roddy’s body lay, then at Millward – more than his own words, Asher guessed, that dragged Millward from his burning urgency to pursuit. He’ll leave a man to die – which Asher guessed he would, crippled in the darkness underground – rather than give up his hunt, but he won’t risk losing his disciple’s admiration.
Rigid with fury, the vampire hunter slung his rifle, and put a shoulder under Asher’s arm. The Roman merchant’s house lay near Covent Garden, and was reached through crumbling brick drains and an abandoned Underground station in Maiden Lane. Even with three men to manhandle him along instead of two, it must have been a nightmare when he’d been chloroformed and unconscious. What a tribute to Millward’s determination to set a trap for a vampire.
And to his disciples’ devotion to his cause.
Poor Roddy.
He wondered how Millward was going to explain the death to the young man’s family – not to mention the police.
‘If you’re just going to leave your friend down there,’ he remarked, when they reached the Underground station and the hunters concealed their rifles behind some boards, ‘I’d suggest you go back later tonight and remove all identifying objects from his pockets. These things have a way of being discovered.’
Millward glared at him, speechless with rage, though whether at Asher’s sarcasm or his causing Millward to lose his quarry, Asher was too weary to ask.
And when I write my own version of the Liber Gente Tenebrarum, he thought, I’ll have to add the note that the Undead aren’t the only ones who bring about the deaths of their servants.
Even at one in the morning, the streets around Covent Garden jostled with farm carts, with herds of sheep and pigs and geese bound for the shambles of Smithfield, with coster-barrows and market women, beggars and thieves in quest of some out-of-hours refreshment. Clammy mist haloed the gas lights and held in the smoke and stink of the city. The only thing not present was a cab, and they had to limp as far as the Strand, to find a dozing cabbie waiting for a few dissipated revelers to leave the Savoy.
It was only as the man was pulling the rug from his scrawny night horse that Millward finally spoke, jaw tight with fury. ‘I acquit you of deliberately engineering that she-devil’s escape—’
‘I can’t tell you how honored I feel by your good opinion.’
The vampire-hunter’s hand clenched. Asher had the impression he was struggling not to strike him.
‘I acquit you of engineering her escape,’ Millward repeated. ‘But had you any manhood in you, you would have let us go on, to finish what we began. I have no doubt she has got clean away by this time, thanks to you. By way of atonement, you can tell us what you know of her hiding-places, and if she has others like yourself in London, who work for the Undead, to whom she might go—’
‘I do not work for the Undead,’ returned Asher quietly. ‘Ippolyta – and I don’t know her other names – is a newcomer to London and I’m guessing even the vampires of London wouldn’t welcome her. What arrangements she’s made here, I have no idea.’
‘You know of Damien Zahorec.’
‘Did Seabury tell you about him?’
‘Of course.’
So much for one’s word as a gentleman – something Asher had discovered, in his spying days, never extended very far. ‘Everything?’
Millward frowned sharply. ‘Of course. What was there to know? He was himself newly come to London, in search of the Book of the Kindred of Darkness. What more was there?’
‘Nothing.’ Asher threw a glance at Seabury – who looked aside – then climbed wearily into the cab.
‘It’ll be daylight soon.’ Millward turned back to his disciple as if Asher had ceased to exist. ‘She’ll be helpless …’
‘Don’t count on that,’ said Asher. ‘The older they get, the longer after sunrise, and before sunset, they can remain awake.’
That got Millward’s attention. ‘It says nothing about that in the book.’
As the cab pulled away into the nearly empty Strand, Asher wondered whether the myriad lies in the myriad printings of the Liber Gente Tenebrarum had all been engineered by vampire hunters for the confusion of their prey, or whether some of them had been the other way around.
The driver helped Asher up the step of the Temperance Hotel; the desk clerk sprang to his feet: ‘Mr Berkhampstead!’
And before he rushed around the counter to help him into a chair, he snatched the room key from the board behind him.
‘Is Mrs Berkhampstead not in?’ The exhaustion and cold that had swamped him in the cab vanished.
‘No, sir. There’s a doctor just over in New Broad Street …’
‘Did she leave a message?’
The man paused on his way into the back room where the hotel’s boy was doubtless sleeping: ‘Why, yes, sir! It’s right here …’ He ducked through the door behind the counter. Had Asher been able to get to his feet and knock the man’s head against the wall, he would have done so. As it was he could only sit in the worn green lobby chair until the clerk, and the young lad in his rumpled uniform, came back out. The boy darted away through the door, into the mists that had not yet begun to stain with the first daylight, and the clerk came around the counter again and handed Asher Lydia’s note. ‘She came in about ten, sir – looked to be bound for the theater – and went up to her room, then came right back down and went out.’
Damn it, thought Asher, his hands trembling. Damn it.
Tufton Farm, Herts. 5 mi on Hatfield Road outside St Albans. Z learned of Miranda there, has gone to take her. I’m going to find Simon. Follow us.
He crushed the paper.
Damn it.
TWENTY-SIX
Don Simon switched off the headlamps beyond St Albans. Lydia reminded herself that the vampire could see perfectly well in the dark. Even with the moon waxing, the hedgerows rendered the road a perfect abyss, and when Simon halted the car she couldn’t tell whether they were near a farmhouse or not. The whole night seemed thick with the smell of hay, without the more localized aromas of wood smoke or cows.
An owl cried, answered by the far-off barking of a dog.
‘He can hear your footfalls if he is listening,’ the vampire whispered. ‘Yet I will not leave you here
alone.’
Lydia wished she had the courage to say, ‘Leave me here if it will make the difference.’ But the words wouldn’t come out. She clung instead to the cold fingers that wrapped hers, and tried to walk as silently as she could on ground that was invisible, uneven, and thick with last year’s leaves.
Branches tangled in her hair in passing. Wispy moonlight showed the roughcast walls of a house: half-timbered gables, dormers like death-sealed eyes. Simon halted beside her, listening.
‘None live in the house.’
He strode, soundless, across the graveled yard, Lydia stumbling at his heels.
No …
Two doors opened into the house from the stone porch. Lantern light beneath one of them seemed unbearably bright in the blackness. Simon pushed it open and a cat whipped past their feet, and away into the night.
The room beyond smelled of coffee, coals, bacon, tobacco, ashes.
No blood.
‘What make you of this, Mistress?’
The lantern on the table in the stone-floored kitchen showed a plate with part of a bacon sandwich on it, a dish of butter well-licked by the guilty puss. Coffee half-filled a pottery cup. Simon wrapped his hand briefly around it, went to look at the collapsed coals burning themselves out on the old-fashioned hearth.
‘Two hours.’
A door beyond the stove opened into blackness. Lydia caught up the lantern, the light falling through to show her a stone stair going down. Iron bolts on the kitchen side of the cellar door … the familiar nursery smell of chamber pots and nappies penetrating even the earthen damp of the cellar.
No …
The room below was deserted. Tidy, whitewashed, almost bare, with a little heating stove in one corner (Lydia shut her eyes in a prayer of thanks) and a commode in another. A single cot was drawn up close to the heater. There were three blankets on it, one of which had been on Miranda’s cot at home.
No …
She sank into one of the rickety chairs beside the little table. Cards scattered the tabletop – bezique, she noted automatically. Three hands. Three cups of tepid coffee. A fork lying by itself. A child’s cup, a little saucer and bowl. A tin of biscuits and a stack of newspapers on a shelf, and a Bible: Daphne Jean Robinson 1879 written on the flyleaf. Nan must have asked for something to read. That they’d obliged her filled Lydia with gratitude. They hadn’t been cruel.
The Kindred of Darkness Page 25
