“Still,” said a deep, scratchy voice that I knew immediately was Small, “hadn’t we better take some precautions?”
“What do you mean?” said the first voice.
“More guards on the door,” said Small. “Meier got lucky that there were people here to help him.”
“Meier panicked,” said the first voice. “There’s nothing here to connect us to you. He could have led the doctor and the girl all over the damned place and they would have found nothing. As it is, now we have another prisoner to deal with.”
“There’s one easy way to deal with prisoners,” Small said, and they all laughed again. I disliked the sound of their laughter; they sounded intoxicated, although not with alcohol. They had something—or they thought they had something—that would let them negotiate with a vampiric hunt. They were drunk on a feeling of invincibility. And that did not bode well for their prisoners.
There were four of them: a tall man who had the fussy look of a schoolmaster; two shorter men, one stocky, one slim, who looked indistinguishable from the thousands of clerks who flooded the City every day; and Jonathan Small, a broad-shouldered, bulky man with a grizzled beard and a fanatic’s eyes.
“You must be Dr. Doyle,” he said. “I hear you’ve been asking questions about me.”
“Yes, Mr. Small,” I said. “Where is the Agra treasure?”
It was a gamble and a foolish one, for if Small had already told the other hemophages of the treasure, I would achieve nothing but making all of them angry, but it paid off immediately, for the stocky man said, “Treasure?”
“He must have told you he’s evading the police,” I said. “The treasure is why.”
“Shut up!” said Jonathan Small, realizing the apple of discord I had thrown at him, but it was already working, as it had done throughout its existence.
“You didn’t mention a treasure,” the schoolmaster said.
“You said you could never repay us for our help,” said the stocky one. “It sounds as if perhaps you can.”
“The treasure is nothing to do with you!” said Small. “It belongs to me and my friends and us alone. We murdered for it and served years in Kala Pani for it and no one else has any right to it. No one!” As he spoke and his fury grew, I saw his fangs drop and his eyes burn redder and redder; his face became a twisted caricature of a human face, the terrible fangs gnashing with every word.
The other hemophages drew back from him as he became more and more a beast and less and less a man. He needed to feed before he lost control of himself entirely, at which point he might very well turn on his fellow hemophages, and their glances at me said they knew it.
Moriarty saw those glances, too, for he said abruptly, “You cannot have him. He is mine.”
It caught even Small’s attention, and his face gradually returned to normal.
“You haven’t fed from him,” said the skinny hemophage.
“You only think you know that,” said Moriarty. “You don’t have the nose to tell.”
“I think we’d bloody well know,” said the skinny hemophage and giggled at his own pun.
“You hemophages are so unsubtle,” Moriarty complained. “Doyle, give me your wrist.”
My choice was between the vampire and the hemophage. Small’s eyes were still glaring red and he looked more than ready to tear my throat out. Moriarty was a bad risk, but he was better than that.
I extended my arm.
Moriarty carefully rolled back my cuff, bending over my wrist so that the hemophages couldn’t see. He nicked the vein in my wrist so delicately I barely felt it, and when he raised his head, he was ostentatiously licking my blood off his lips.
My nausea returned in a rush. I slumped over in a fashion I hoped might look like an addict’s ecstasy and concentrated on not vomiting.
“Satisfied?” Moriarty asked the hemophages. “He is mine and you cannot have him.”
“You’re awfully presumptuous for a prisoner,” said the schoolmaster.
“You threw him in here with me,” Moriarty countered. “What did you expect to happen?”
“You could feed without bloody claiming him,” said the skinny hemophage.
“I don’t share,” Moriarty said flatly, and I shuddered, remembering his beast’s eyes.
“That’s not why we came down here,” said Jonathan Small, who had himself back under control. “We have a favor to ask of Mr. Moriarty.” His faux-ingratiating tone made me feel even more ill.
“Even if I do what you want,” Moriarty said, “it will not help you and will mean nothing.”
“The legal position—” the schoolmaster began pompously, but Moriarty interrupted:
“Is based on facts that cannot be bent to your whims. Vampires and hemophages are different. A courtesy extended to a predator that does not kill its prey is not applicable to a predator that does. You commit murder every time you feed, and no contortion you go through will make that legal.”
“You’re overthinking your position,” said the schoolmaster. “Either you do what we want or Small feeds on you while the rest of us feed on Dr. Doyle.”
Moriarty stood up, a slow uncoiling of muscle like a panther in a man’s respectable suit. “You’re welcome to try,” he said. “Go ahead. Unlock the grille.”
The London hemophages suddenly seemed uncertain that four on one were favorable enough odds.
Small sneered at them. “You’re all a bunch of pantywaists. Open the grille, and I’ll fight your vampire for you.”
“Please do,” Moriarty said, smiling the smile that was all teeth.
Sick as I still felt, I knew what the next line was, and there was no one else to say it. I sat up and said to Small, “I don’t think you can.”
It infuriated him as only a sneer from someone you’ve already marked as dinner can. “Open the bloody grille!” he roared, and the schoolmaster—a sheep in wolf’s clothing if ever there was one—fumbled his key out and complied.
Moriarty surged out, shouldering the door aside before it was even fully open.
As hemophages, Small and his friends were generally able to overpower anything they encountered, but a hemophage, no matter how twisted, was still a human being. Moriarty was not. Even cuffed with silver he was stronger than a hemophage, and he had made the same assessment I had, that the schoolmaster and the two clerks would run at the first sign of serious danger. Which they did, so incontinently that the schoolmaster left his key in the lock of the grille and the stocky one dropped their lantern.
Small was a brawler with no science; his size and his condition guaranteed that he would almost never need anything more. Moriarty, on the other hand, closed and wrestled savagely, throwing Small across his hip to the ground and then kneeling on his chest. “You may have developed a taste for my kind,” he said, “but I have not developed a taste for yours. I could kill you all the same, but it is part of our treaty with the city of London that we will kill no one unnecessarily, and we have abided by this treaty for four hundred years. I will not be the one to break it. I will let you up, and you will run, or I will reassess whether or not your death is necessary. Do you understand?” He wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Yes,” said Small, who was panting.
“Very well,” said Moriarty and managed, in one smooth movement my eye could not follow, to get them both on their feet, Small staggering one direction while Moriarty leapt the other.
Small stood a moment, glowering, and Moriarty said, “I will begin reassessing your death in ten seconds,” and while his voice was perfectly pleasant, it sent a chill down my spine—perhaps because it was so serenely pleasant and unbothered, as if it were no great matter to the vampire whether Jonathan Small lived or died.
It wasn’t a bluff, unlike Small’s glower. Small turned and ran, the lurch of his wooden leg offset by a hemophage’s strength and agility. Moriarty watched him go until we heard the clang of him scrambling through the iron hatch; then the vampire turned to me and said, in much the same ple
asant voice, “Can you stand?”
“If I can’t, will you eat me?”
“No, I thank you,” Moriarty said and made a face. “Hell-hound isn’t a great deal more appealing than hemophage, and if you’ll forgive the familiarity, I favor the other sex. No, if you can’t stand, I will carry you, but I thought you might prefer I didn’t.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
I crawled to my feet, using the wall for handholds and leverage. Once there, I wobbled precariously for a moment, but caught myself and did not fall.
I limped out of our prison and Moriarty said, “Are you hurt?”
“What? Oh. No, this is old. Got too close to a Fallen.”
“And that’s how you became a hell-hound,” he said, as if the puzzle had been bothering him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you all right to walk? I don’t know how long it will take to find a way out that isn’t swarming with hemophages.”
“I can manage,” I said grimly. I wasn’t about to let him carry me. “But before we proceed, there is a question I require an answer to.”
His eyebrows went up. “Then by all means ask.”
“You claimed me,” I said, though the words were nearly choking. “So far as I know, that isn’t something you can simply lie about.”
“You are blunt,” he said.
“I have reason to be. Pray explain.”
“It’s really no reason for concern.”
“That, I believe, you can lie about.”
His eyes flashed bright yellow in the lantern light. “Are you calling me a liar, Dr. Doyle?”
“Are you a liar, Mr. Moriarty?”
We stared at each other. The gaze of a vampire was notoriously mesmerizing; I kept expecting my will to cave before his—and I thought perhaps he was expecting that, too—but I did not lower my eyes.
He looked away first. “My mark is on you,” he said sullenly, “and no other vampire can touch you.”
I turned back my cuff. On my wrist, where he had nicked me, there was a black mark like a tattoo, a sigil that looked a little like the tracery for a stained-glass window. “That’s your mark,” I said, not so much a question as a need to say the horrifying truth out loud. I was marked by a vampire.
“Yes,” he said.
“How does it come off?”
“It doesn’t. Would you prefer to have been eaten by a hemophage, because that was your other option.”
“No,” I said and forced the words past my gritted teeth: “I mean, thank you.”
“Look at it this way. I won’t feed from you and no other vampire can feed from you. And since you are obviously not the sort of person who wants a vampire’s kiss, you are now completely protected from vampires. Think of it as an advantage.”
I couldn’t quite do that, but I fastened my cuff again and said, “All right. I still feel as if there’s a catch you aren’t telling me about, but I suppose I’ll find out about it the hard way. Shall we go?”
“Very well,” said he, not denying that there might be a hidden catch. “I shall give you the lantern which Simpson so carelessly dropped, and we shall proceed”—he hesitated, testing the air—“this way, away from the reek of hemophage.”
“So that we can become lost in the ancient catacombs beneath London and die. Excellent.”
“This isn’t a catacomb,” Moriarty said. “Nor is it ancient. This was probably a service tunnel two or three hundred years ago. It might even once have been an alley before it was built over. Come on.”
I followed him into the dark, away from the hemophages’ warehouse.
* * *
We walked in silence for some time, but Moriarty did not find silence congenial, and he began to talk, aimlessly at first—nervously, I should have said in a creature other than a vampire—but then he began to talk about London. Vampires live a prodigiously long time, of course—some people claim they are immortal, which is nonsense—and at about three hundred, Moriarty was still comparatively young. He had come to London in 1732, a new husband for the seraglio of his vampiric Master’s hunt, which was still rebuilding itself after the Great Fire. “It’s how we ended up in Lambeth. Kate fled across the Thames when the City burned and afterward she could not bear to go back. She lost her oldest husband to the Fire—she was in mourning for him for nearly a hundred years, which the other Masters considered excessive—and of course vampires invest in property.”
“Of course,” I said. Jokes about vampire landlords were probably as old as London.
“She still keeps more sisters than most Masters,” said Moriarty, “but I think that makes our hunt healthier, rather than the reverse. Vampires who try to become Masters too soon generally make a poor go of it.”
“Has your Master managed to recoup her holdings?”
“She says the fortunes of our hunt are not what they were in King Charles’s day, but we are one of the three or four wealthiest hunts in London—certainly the wealthiest on the Surreyside. She was livid when they started building the Needle—all the slum land they cleared in St. George’s in the East just became worse and more crowded slums in Whitechapel and Bermondsey and Lambeth.”
“The Queen gets her Needle, St. George’s in the East becomes a model parish, and the rest of the East End can go hang.”
“One foot taller than the Eiffel Tower because God forbid we don’t outdo the Frogs,” Moriarty said. He sighed and shook himself and said, “Let’s try here.” I followed him down a side tunnel so narrow and set at such an oblique angle that it was invisible practically until I was inside it.
I braced one hand against the wall to relieve some of the strain on my bad leg, and we had not been walking long before I heard a noise like thunder in the far distance and felt the vibrations in the wall.
“What on Earth is that?”
“Under earth, Doctor,” Moriarty said. “Or, more precisely, the Underground. We’re heading toward Waterloo Station.”
“Was that your plan?”
“Would that I could take the credit,” he said, “but no. It was just luck that I picked the correct direction.”
“The luck of the Irish,” I said, impressed, and he laughed.
“Hopefully, it doesn’t bring us out directly in the path of an oncoming train.”
The noise of the trains got louder as we went, a hollow rushing sound that I kept hearing as demonic laughter, as the voice of a Fallen. Soon I could feel the vibrations of the passing trains even when I wasn’t touching the wall.
But before we came to an actual Underground tunnel, we found a wooden door, quite literally black with age. It was locked, but it might as well have not been, for Moriarty simply shoved it open as if there were no lock at all. On the other side there was a staircase, a tight, steep spiral that looked to me like pure unmitigated murder.
Even Moriarty looked a little daunted. He gave me an assessing glance. “Can you manage?”
“Yes,” I said, because my other two options—being left behind or being carried—were equally unacceptable.
“God save me from stubborn Scots,” he said. “All right, but if you cannot keep up, I shall leave you behind.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and we started up the stairs.
The climb was hellish from the beginning. The steps were unevenly worn, making for treacherous footing, and my muscles were already burning with fatigue. Periodically, the entire staircase would vibrate and hum with the roar of a train. I started slowly, which became slower and slower. True to his word, Moriarty did not wait for me, and I was glad: it was bad enough without an audience. I deliberately chose not to count the steps, so I do not know how high I climbed before Moriarty’s voice came ringing down to me: “I’ve found another door!”
The news gave me a fresh surge of sorely needed energy, but I was still surprised to find Moriarty sitting on the landing when I finally reached the point where the half-size door was set awkwardly into the wall above the steps. He saw the question on my face and shru
gged, saying, “I don’t know what’s on the other side. It seemed foolish to proceed alone.”
He got up and turned his attention to the door. It proved not to be locked, although the hinges were so rusty it might as well have been. Moriarty forced it open and then had to bend double to fit himself through. I gave up on one more shred of my dignity and simply crawled.
On the other side, we were in the back of a storeroom—Moriarty had had to shove a box out of line to give us room even to get through the door. I got to my feet, using the boxes beside me for support, and immediately found myself festooned with cobwebs.
“Forgive me, Arachne,” I said reflexively, even though the spider who spun this web was surely long dead; it had been drilled into me as a child to be courteous to spiders.
Moriarty said, “Do you want to rest a minute? I believe we’re going to have to climb over this box to get out, for I can’t push it any farther. The aisle isn’t wide enough.”
“I would appreciate a moment, yes,” I said. Inwardly, I was railing against fate and the Fallen; a year ago I could have raced Moriarty up the steps and still had the stamina to climb over a box. But now I leaned against a box to take my weight off my bad leg, and I was, God help me, grateful for a chance to rest without being abandoned.
Moriarty observed, “The metaphysicum morbi is still very thick around your leg.”
“I didn’t know vampires could see that,” I said, instead of snapping at him to tend to his own business and leave mine to me.
“Our eyes don’t actually work the same way yours do. We see heat instead of light, and the metaphysicum shows itself to us as cold. Hell-hounds and hemophages and necrophages always look colder—and thus, I confess, less appealing even if I could not smell what you are—but you have a very distinct clot of coldness around your thigh. It hasn’t healed properly, has it?”
“No,” I said. “The Armed Forces doctors have done all they can.”
“That’s because they should have sent you to an aetheric practitioner,” he said with considerable exasperation. “You’re a doctor. You should have thought of that yourself.”
The Angel of the Crows Page 19