And Anthea tipped her head slightly to the side and agreed softly, “It was a mortal thing to do.”
“Huh,” Grippen said. “He found it mortal enow.”
For a moment Asher studied the woman’s smooth white face framed in the woody black of her hair, gazing into those immense brown eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It was the act of a man and not of a vampire.”
“And in any case, it has fulfilled the bargain between us,” Ysidro said, without rising from the desk. “And so you are free to go.”
“Go?” Asher glanced back at him, then to the two vampires who stood behind him, Grippen on his right, and the Countess of Ernchester on his left, cold and strong and old,the gaslight playing softly over those faces of white nacre in which burned living eyes.
“Go,” Ysidro’s gentle, whispering voice repeated. “Oh, I dare say you could, if you would, turn vampire-hunter and run the last of us to earth, or at least such of us as you personally dislike. Or all of us, since you are at least in part still a man of principle, albeit somewhat eroded principle.
“Yet I think that unlikely. We know how you and Mistress Lydia tracked us—we have been repairing omissions made, finding new lairs under ‘cover,’ as you call it, which will better bear scrutiny in the modern world. You could hunt us down eventually, I dare say, were you willing to put the time into it, to give your soul to it, to become obsessed, as all vampire-hunters must be obsessed with their prey. But it would still take years. Are you willing to give it years?”
Asher gazed at him, saying nothing, while those pale, inhuman eyes looked without mockery into his. It was ethically wrong, he knew. Poor, stupid Dennis had killed twenty-four men and women, blindly, feverishly, in the grip of a craving that amounted to madness; Ysidro’s coolly executed murders totaled in the tens of thousands at least. Ethically it was his duty to hunt them down and to destroy them before they could kill again or create other killers like themselves, in a widening pool of blood.
But in his heart he knew Ysidro was right. It would take obsession to track them now, and the obsession with abstract “shoulds” had burned out of him six years ago, when he’d blown out the brains of a boy who had been his friend, simply because his duty demanded that he ought. He felt suddenly weary of this, bitterly weary of it all, knowing that he was simply not up to it anymore.
“We will stay away from you and yours,” the vampire went on. “What more can you ask? This is not payment—it is simply prudence on our part. A man whose own ox has not been gored seldom makes a persistent hunter. To hunt us would be to hunt smoke, James, for we have what you do not have. We have time. The days and hours of your happiness are precious to you, and you know how few they are. But we have all the time there is—or at least,” he smiled ironically, “all of it that we want.”
Something—a sense of danger, the tug of the vampire’s psychic glamour at his mind—made Asher turn, sensing a trap, ready to defend himself … But Grippen and Anthea were gone.
He turned back to the desk, and saw it empty.
His footfalls echoed softly in the empty house as he left. When he was halfway down the street, he saw the gold leap of flame in the study window and the gray curl of smoke, but he kept on walking. People were running past him, shouting as they, too, saw the fire spreading in the house. With the papers scattered everywhere, the whole place would go quickly.
At the corner of Harley Street, he hailed a cab to return him to his lodgings in Prince of Wales Colonnade, where Lydia would be curled up in bed, her red hair lying in swathes over the lace of her shoulders, reading a medical journal and waiting for his return.
A Biography of Barbara Hambly
Barbara Hambly (b. 1951) is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction, as well as historical novels set in the nineteenth century.
Born in San Diego and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Montclair, Hambly attended college at the University of California, Riverside, where she majored in medieval history, earning a master’s degree in the subject in 1975. Inspired by her childhood love of fantasy classics such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings, she decided to pursue writing as soon as she finished school. Her road was not so direct, however, and she spent time waitressing, modeling, working at a liquor store, and teaching karate before selling her first novel, Time of the Dark, in 1982. That was the birth of her Darwath series, which she expanded on in four more novels over the next two decades. More than simple sword-and-sorcery novels, they tell the story of nightmares come to life to terrorize the world. The series helped to establish Hambly’s reputation as an author of intelligent fantasy fiction.
Since the early 1980s, when she made her living writing scripts for Saturday morning cartoons such as Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and He-Man, Hambly has published dozens of books in several different series. Besides fantasy novels such as 1985’s Dragonsbane, which she has called one of her favorite books, she has used her background in history to craft gripping historical fiction.
The inventor of many different fantasy universes, including those featured in the Windrose Chronicles, Sun Wolf and Starhawk series, and Sun-Cross novels, Hambly has also worked in universes created by others. In the 1990s she wrote two well-received Star Wars novels, including the New York Times bestseller Children of the Jedi, while in the eighties she dabbled in the world of Star Trek, producing several novels for that series.
In 1999 she published A Free Man of Color, the first Benjamin January novel. That mystery and its eight sequels follow a brilliant African-American surgeon who moves from Paris to New Orleans in the 1830s, where he must use his wits to navigate the prejudice and death that lurk around every corner of antebellum Louisiana. Hambly ventured into straight historical fiction with The Emancipator's Wife, a nuanced look at the private life of Mary Todd Lincoln, which was a finalist for the 2005 Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War writing.
From 1994 to 1996 Hambly was the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her James Asher vampire series won the Locus Award for best horror novel in 1989 and the Lord Ruthven Award in 1996. She lives in Los Angeles with an assortment of cats and dogs.
Hambly with her parents and older sister in San Diego, California, in September 1951.
Hambly (right) with her mother, sister, and brother in 1955. For three years, the family lived in this thirty-foot trailer at China Lake, California, a Marine Base in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Hambly (left), at the age of nine, with her brother and sister on Christmas in 1960.
Hambly’s graduation from high school, June 1969.
A self-portrait that Hambly drew while studying abroad in France in 1971.
Hambly dressed up for a Renaissance fair.
Hambly at an event for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She served as the association’s president from 1994 to 1996.
The “official wedding picture” of Hambly and science-fiction writer George Alec Effinger, in 1998.
Hambly with her husband, George, in New Orleans around 1998. At the time, she was researching New Orleans cemeteries for her book Graveyard Dust (2002).
Hambly at her birthday party in 2005.
Hambly (right) with her sister, Mary, and brother, Eddy, at a family reunion in San Diego in 2009.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, l
iving or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1988 by Barbara Hambly
cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1646-0
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel Page 32
