Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “You never deserved Lydia. You lied to her, cheated me of what should have been mine. You made her leave me alone. She would have loved me if it hadn’t been for you. But I won’t be alone. When I’ve killed you both, she’ll be mine. I know how to make a vampire now…”

  Asher swung toward where he thought the voice was coming from, but there was nothing. Ysidro straightened up a little and staggered, fighting to remain on his feet.

  “Where is he?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Oddly enough, his voice sounded as cool and disinterested as ever. “I thought he was over among the tombstones just before he came at me…”

  “How long can the three of us hold him off?”

  “Long enough for the silver poisoning to take effect on him?” Lydia came up beside them, the flickering brand in her hand making her spectacle lenses seem like rounds of fire.

  “No.” The vampire’s light hand tightened over Asher’s shoulder. “It has only made him more frantic than ever for my blood. He has a great deal of strength still. It will be days, maybe weeks … If he takes me or another vampire or sufficient human lives, he may prolong his life indefinitely. In any case, it will be dawn soon.”

  She pushed her spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose. “The room where I was kept had nowindows,” she said. “If we can make it back to the house we can guard you…”

  “You’d never even see him strike.” The vampire straightened slowly away from Asher’s grip, removed his hand from the wound in his neck; the thin fingers were dark with gore, and the handkerchief that bound the silver burns saturated and dripping. His voice was expressionless. “The dawnlight will kill me—and then he will have you…”

  Lydia whirled sharply, raising her torch. “What’s that?”

  Something white flickered and moved among the tombstones.

  Threads of milky hair caught the lift of the night wind. There was a fluttering tangle of black over limbs colorless as bone, like dead ivy cloaking marble. The unearthly, unmistakable gleam of vampire eyes showed.

  Asher breathed, “Anthony…”

  Tiny, skeletal-white hands lifted to the cloud-patched sky. Asher had a glimpse of a white skull-face, the tonsure framed in pouring streams of filthy white mane; he seemed to hear on the night wind the whispered cry: “In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”

  Ysidro shouted, “Antonius, non!”as the dark shape of Dennis rushed out of the night and fell like storm cloud upon that lonely, fragile shape among the tombstones.

  If the little monk could have avoided his attacker or fought him, he did not—it did not even seem that he tried. Dennis caught him up like a snake seizing a bird, even as Asher plunged out of the safety of the chapel ruin, pain jarring his broken hand with every step on the uneven ground. He heard Lydia call his name, Ysidro shout, “You fool … !” A deep, sticky groan of satiation broke from Dennis, and somewhere he thought he heard, perhaps only in his mind, a frail drift of voice: “In manus tuas, Domini…”as the two vampires locked together in the obscene parody of a kiss.

  Then Dennis flung the broken body aside and turned, blood running down his fangs, swollen lips, and rutted chin. With a bestial snarl, he fell upon Asher like a charging bear.

  Asher knew it was blood frenzy beyond caution and swung the silver bar with all the strength he had. But Dennis’ weight smashed into him with full force, throwing him backward. He had a confused glimpse of the bloody mouth gaping wider and wider, the blue eyes suffused, not with hatred, but with astonishment and agony. In the split second as they collided, Asher realized that Dennis died even as he sprang.

  The impact of the corpse knocked the breath out of him as they hit the ground; the broken edge of an imitation tombstone gouged him in the back. He lay for a moment stunned, under the stinking and inert mass of infected flesh that had been Dennis, and in that moment it came to him what must have killed him.

  Painfully, he rolled out from under the body. Torchlight splashed jerkily over him; he heard the swish of Lydia’s skirt in the long weeds and Ysidro’s voice saying, “James… ?” For a moment, he stood swaying over the monster carcass, the silver bar dangling uselessly from his hand. Then he dropped it and stumbled a few feet away to the body of Brother Anthony, like a broken marionette among the frilled Victorian gothic of the pinchbeck tombs.

  The little Minorite lay crumpled together, a shrunken tangle of old bones, rotting robes, and white hair bound together with a filthy rosary, clotted with his own blood and that of six centuries of kills. His bare feet were scratched and bloody. The big veins of his throat had been ripped open by the violence of Dennis’ attack, not merely punctured—there was very little blood left. Thoughsunken and fallen in upon the skull, his face wore a look of strange serenity and the faintest hint of a smile.

  Behind him, Lydia and Ysidro were silent. Asher raised the dead vampire’s left arm and pushed back the decayed shreds of the sleeve. The torchlight showed clearly the line of dark-stained punctures that tracked the big vein. Rising to his feet, he stepped around behind the tombstone to the place where he had first thought he’d seen movement.

  His own ulster lay there, its nubby brown tweed still flecked with the hay from the bales in the Queen Anne mews where he’d left it with Ysidro’s cloak. On top of it lay the velvet box that had contained the hypodermic needle and its ten ampoules of silver nitrate.

  The ampoules were all empty.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “HE WAS THE ONLY vampire who could have done it.” Pausing in the act of trying to do up shirt buttons one-handed—as he had paused already half a dozen times that afternoon—Asher looked again at the brown velvet box where it lay on a corner of the dressing table, with its empty ampoules and its bloodstained needle. “I don’t think a living man, much less a younger vampire, would have survived to inject himself a second time.”

  Lydia shook her head. “How did he know?” Frowning with concentration, she stood before Asher’s shaving mirror to construct a running Windsor knot in one of his ties around her own neck. The last of the evening sunlight, falling through the cheap lace curtains of Asher’s rooms on Prince of Wales Colonnade, sprinkled the ghosts of shadow flowers over her white shirtwaist and freckled her auburn hair with gold.

  “About the ampoules themselves? If he’d been following us from Paris, he could easily have listened through the windows of your room when Ysidro and I spoke of it.Ysidro tells me vampires often listen for days to the conversations of their prey. And he wasn’t unfamiliar with the activities and technology of modern men, you know—merely apart from them, as the other vampires, the so-called ‘good’ vampires, were not. If he was following me the day Dennis attacked me at Grippen’s house, he would have seen Dennis and guessed that only something as—as heroic as the measures he took—would have served.”

  “Poor Dennis.” Lydia loosened the tie, stood for a moment, looking into Asher’s eyes in the mirror before them. “He used to say the most horrid things about the other girls at Somerville—about them wanting to act like men because they couldn’t getmen—absolutely without thinking. And whenever I’d point out it was what I was doing, he’d be so patronizing, as if I were only at University until I could find a husband and a home and have children. ‘You’re different,’ he’d say … He could be so sweet to me, so kind, and yet…”

  She shook her head. Removing the tie from her own neck, she turned to slip it over Asher’s head. “He wanted so much to be a hero, but the fact is that I never took him seriously at all.”

  He took her wrist in the fingers of his good hand as she adjusted his collar. “You have to admit that, in my place, he never would have let you endanger yourself by coming to London.”

  “I know.” The expression of sorrow that was more pity than grief faded; she smiled ruefully up into his eyes. “That’s why I never took him seriously. He couldn’t conceive of anyone being able to save a situation but himself.” She sighed and fixed her attention for a few mom
ents on the placing of his stickpin and the minute adjustments in the set of his tie. “The awful thing is that I’m sure that’s why he injected himself with his father’s serum—becausehe couldn’t stand the thought of such powers as Calvaire had going to anyone but him.”

  They had burned Brother Anthony’s body before the coming of dawn on a pyre hastily assembled from the Peaks’ woodshed—Anthony’s, and Dennis’ with him. The flames were searingly hot and blue, and Asher had been wryly amused to see Lydia studying the atypical blaze with interest, clearly taking notes in her head. But she hadn’t, he noticed, suggested preserving either of the vampires for further experimentation. Whatever alien pathologies lingered in their tainted blood, she had no desire to permit them further existence, even in the allegedly controlled conditions of a laboratory.

  Ysidro had been gone long before the fire began to sink. By the time the police arrived, drawn by a shepherd’s report of the blaze, it was sunup, and Asher and Lydia were far down the road to Prince’s Risborough, looking like a couple of tinkers and walking the motorcycle Dennis had disabled between them, the grimy brown ulster thrown round both their shoulders for warmth. The fire had been reported in a minor article on a back page in that afternoon’s Daily Mail. There was no mention of human remains in the blaze.

  “In any case,” Lydia went on after a moment, turning back from gazing rather abstractedly out at the sunset maze of rooftops and chimneys, “if the positions had been reversed, Dennis would have told me nothing of what was going on—merely not to worry myself about such things. And it wouldn’t have answered. Because the killer, the day stalker—Dennis—knew me, and wanted me. He did see me once, while he was stalking Bully Joe Davies. And he’d been—calling me, tracking me—in my dreams. He wasn’t as good as the other vampires were at it, but … And then again, sooner or later, whether you or I or anyone did anything about it or not, he would have learned somehow about how to make another vampire like himself and he would have come after me.” She wiped her eyes almost surreptitiously and shoved her spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose. “My going to snoop about Blaydon’s place in Queen Anne Street only speeded things up.”

  She picked up his coat from the bed and came over to help him on with it again. By the time they’d waked up after their return from the Peaks, the short autumn afternoon had been far advanced, and a goodly portion of what remained had been spent at Middlesex Hospital, getting Asher’s battered arm reset. He could cheerfully have gone back to bed now and slept the clock round, but there remained one thing yet to do.

  “Are you sure you want to?” Lydia asked.

  Asher glanced past her at his own reflection in the mirror. Shaved and bathed, he no longer looked like a tramp, but his face had a drawn, exhausted look he hadn’t seen there in years. He knew it, however, from his missions abroad—the familiar, soul-deep ache he associated with climbing tiredly onto the boat train for home.

  “No,” he said. “But with Dennis gone, I don’t think there’s any danger. And someone has to tell him. Just promise me you’ll stay here—stay indoors—’til I come back. All right?”

  She nodded. Asher cast one last glance at the sky, visible through the windows, satisfying himself that, before full dark fell, he would be well away from these rooms. Grippen knew about Lydia’s rooms in Bruton Place, but he didn’t—or at least Asher thought he didn’t—know about 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade.

  Unless, of course, Ysidro had told him.

  While the doctors at Middlesex had been tushing and tsking over his arm, he’d sent Lydia out to Lambert’s to buy five more silver chains; he was conscious of the twoaround his throat and left wrist as he descended the lodging-house steps and began his unhurried walk toward Oxford Street. The gas lamps were lighted, soft and primrose in the dusk. He had made sure Lydia was wearing hers, though he privately suspected they wouldn’t do either of them much good, if the vampires were really determined to let no one who knew of their existence survive.

  His term of service toYsidro was over.

  And in the meantime, someone had to tell Blaydon… And someone had to make sure that there weren’t going to be any more experiments “for the good of the country.”

  The other thing Lydia had bought on her shopping trip had been a revolver, though he hadn’t told her who it was for. He suspected he wouldn’t have needed to.

  In the deep twilight, Queen Anne Street had a placid air, the windows of its tall, narrow houses bright with lights. Occasionally Asher could see into one of them, through the shams of curtain lace: two friends playing chess beside a parlor fire; a dark woman standing dreaming in a window, her arm around the tall form of an androgynous youth. Were he a vampire, Asher thought, he could have heard their every word.

  There was a light on in Blaydon’s house, in the room he guessed was the study on the same floor as the laboratory and the little prison. He rapped sharply at the front door, and it gave back beneath his knuckles.

  “Blaydon?”

  He didn’t raise his voice much. The shadows of the stairwell swallowed the echoes of his words; for an instant, he seemed to be back in Oxford again, listening to the ominous stillness of a house he knew was not empty.

  Then, like a whisper more within his skull than without, he heard Ysidro say, “Up here.”

  He climbed the stairs, knowing already what he would find.

  Ysidro sat in the study at Blaydon’s inlaid Persian desk, sorting papers—they spilled down in drifts and covered the carpet for a yard around. The vampire himself was as Asher had first seen him, a delicate thing of alabaster and peeled ivory, cobweb hair falling to the shoulders of his gray Bond Street suit—a displaced grandee, a nobleman in exile from another age, who had once danced with the Virgin Queen, with every cell petrified as it had been, and with his soul trapped somewhere among them like a mantis in amber. Asher wondered with what study or pastime Ysidro had beguiled those passing centuries; he had never even found that out.

  Pale as brimstone or the clearest champagne, the calm eyes lifted to meet Asher’s.

  “You will find him in his laboratory,” he said quietly. “His neck is broken. He was working on another batch of serum, taken from the last of Chloé’s blood.”

  “Did he know about Dennis?”

  “There was a telegram there from the Buckinghamshire police, saying that there had been a mysterious fire at the Peaks. The metal buttons of a man’s trousers had been found in the ashes, along with a few cracked glass beads, a steel crucifix, and some unidentifiable bones.”

  Asher was silent. Ysidro upended another folder of notes over the general mess. They slithered across the top of the pile before him and swooped like awkward birds to the floor.

  “Would you have done it?”

  Asher sighed. He had done worse than kill Blaydon, and for slighter cause. He knew if he’d been caught he could always have pleaded his Foreign Office connections, and might even have been backed up by friends in the Department. The pistol weighed heavily in his ulster pocket. “Yes.”

  “I thought you would have.” Simon smiled, wry and yetoddly sweet, and Asher had the impression—as he had fleetingly during the dark horrors of the previous night—of dealing with the man Ysidro had once been, before he had become a vampire. “I wished to spare you awkwardness.”

  “You wished to spare me a discussion with the police on the subject of Blaydon’s experiments.”

  That faint, cynical smile widened and, for the first time, warmed Ysidro’s chilly eyes. “That, too.”

  Asher came over and stood beside the desk, looking down at the slender form of white and gray. If the gouges left in Ysidro’s flesh by Dennis’ fangs still pained him, as Asher’s broken arm throbbed dully beneath its shroud of novocaine, he gave no sign. His slender hands were neatly bandaged. Asher wondered if Grippen had done that.

  “You realize,” Asher said slowly, “that not only was Brother Anthony the only vampire who could have killed Dennis—the only vampire who physi
cally could have survived that much silver in his system for even the minute or so it took for Dennis to drink his blood—but he was the only one who would have. He was the only vampire who valued the redemption of his soul above the continuation of his existence.”

  A stray gust of wind shook the trees in the back garden, knocking bonily against the windows; distantly, a church clock chimed six. Ysidro’s long fingers lay unmoving in the jumbled leaves of notes before him, the pale gold of his ring shining faintly in the gaslight. “Do you think he achieved it?” he asked at last.

  “Are you familiar with the legend of Tannhäuser?”

  The vampire smiled slightly. “The sinner who came to the Pope of Rome and made confession of such frightful deeds that the Holy Father drove him forth, saying, ‘There is more likelihood of my staff putting forth flowers, than there is of God forgiving such wickedness as yours.’ Tannhäuserdespaired and departed from Rome, to return to his life of sin, and three days later the Pope found his staff standing in a corner where he had left it, covered in living blossom. Yes.” The gaslight echoed itself softly in a thousand tiny flickers in the endless labyrinth of his eyes. “But as Brother Anthony himself said, I will never know.”

  A faint sound behind him caused Asher to turn. In the doorway at his back stood Anthea Farren and Lionel Grippen, the woman weary and pinched-looking, the doctor a massive form of inexhaustible, ruddy-faced evil, his fangs bright against the stolen redness of his lips.

  Ysidro went on softly, “I don’t think it would even have occurred to any of us that such sacrifice was conceivable. Certainly I don’t think it occurred to Brother Anthony until he encountered you, a mortal man, in the catacombs, and you spoke of God’s eternal willingness to forgive and that there might be, for such as he, a way out.”

  “If that’s what he chose to fool himself into thinking, that was his affair,” Grippen grunted. “A man casting about for a polite excuse to leave the table in the midst of a feast he’d no stomach for, that is all.”