Hyacinthe.
And Jürgen Schaumm.
‘She’ll be here.’ Hyacinthe’s voice was dreamy, but its hard edge spoke of strain. ‘Don Simon would never take a house that didn’t open into the mines.’
If she’s taken anything like what Ysidro took the other day, to remain awake into the morning …
‘It’s only a matter of time before the woman finds a way past Elysée’s guards …’
‘Shut up and let me concentrate.’ The vampire’s rough French had a sing-song note to it. ‘I can hardly hear a thing, underground.’ In the dim halo of Schaumm’s lantern-light Lydia could make out Hyacinthe’s curly mane of dark hair, an impression of skin like bronze silk, and a dark area – a bruise? A burn? – on the side of her face. She was taller than the German, who besides being short was a little stooped. His black hair gleamed greasily, and a sling held one arm close to his body. As I thought: M’sieu de Saint-Vrain’s bullet only grazed him.
‘I know she’s been twice to the church,’ persisted Schaumm. ‘Asher has to have told her. If she finds some way to put chloral hydrate into the guards’ coffee before we can … You know they’ve got to be making coffee on their watch, or sending out for ginger pop.’
‘We’ll get her, little man.’ The smile in Hyacinthe’s voice masked – Lydia was certain – an overwhelming desire to make a meal of him and leave his body here for the rats. ‘Nobody’s going to get the Facinum away from us. I’ll swear it’s one of the relics in the chapel. And I’ll take oath that dumb bitch Elysée doesn’t even know for sure it exists. I bet she thinks the power’s in the house itself. You should hear the stories she comes up with to explain why they must come to her there, to be changed. She took me in her dressing-room. The whole place reeked of Houbigant perfume, like a whorehouse. Serge, Augustin, Évariste she did in her bedroom there … I know she had hell’s own time getting Baptiste into the place to do the deed … no surprise, in that neighborhood! Why go to that trouble, when she’s got a damn palace out in Passy? Believe me, she thinks it’s the house.’
She closed her eyes, her nostrils flaring a little, as if sniffing for the smell of Lydia’s dusting-powder, Lydia’s blood. ‘Now you do your part, little man, and let me do mine.’
‘How do you know they’re even in this district? She didn’t take your bait last night, when you called out.’
‘They’re here. Somewhere. She’ll come …’
Under the ground or not, thought Lydia, they’ll hear me if I move. This close, Hyacinthe – Lydia was virtually certain – would detect the rustle of her petticoats, the pat of her slippers.
It’s only a matter of time before she smells the hot paraffin in the lamp.
A matter of time.
And the time one waits in the Métro station is about …
Far off, the shuddering rumble of the train came again along Line A, and the moment it started Lydia retreated soundlessly, hoping she hadn’t turned and gotten herself disoriented and away from her last mark. Under cover of the train’s passage she slipped away into the dark, put her glasses back on, flashed the lantern close to the floor, and found the little white squiggle that could so easily have been a boot-scratch, pointing back in the direction from which she’d come.
TWENTY-THREE
They took the Boulevard de Sébastopol to the Pont au Change when the final slits of daylight had faded in the wooden shutters. Stanislas Greuze was of the opinion that Lydia didn’t need to deal with the tangled ways of the third and fourth arrondissements.
But turning on to the wide avenue from the Rue de Paradis the dark anonymous Crossley saloon was halted by a stream of trucks, motor cars, and even wagons like that of Greuze’s neighbor’s cousin Dupont, whose faithful horses had up until last week been hauling groceries or coal.
Now they hauled men.
‘From Liège,’ said Greuze quietly. He twisted in the driver’s seat and cursed to see a number of cars pulled up behind them, boxing him in. ‘They’re coming in at the Gare du Nord. Let me drive. I’ll see if I can get us out of here and around on the Rue Richer.’
Lydia got out of the car. There was a snarl-up where traffic from the Boulevard de Magenta came on to the larger thoroughfare. The line of makeshift ambulances was stopped in the blue-white glare of the electric street lighting of which Paris was so proud. By it she could see into the back of the nearest truck, where a dozen men lay on stretchers and benches, their bright red-and-blue uniforms indescribably filthy and soaked with gore.
Tourniquets stanched bleeding on limbs that Lydia could see at once were shattered beyond hope of anything but amputation. Makeshift dressings oozed blood like a signal of the horrors they hid. The blood looked black in the cold glare. One man’s face seemed to be held together only by a dirty strapwork of bandages, his eyes staring – conscious hell-pits of agony – from a gleaming mask of grime. Vomit, piss, feces mixed with the blood in the truck-bed and the stink nearly drowned out the stench of bodies and uniforms weeks unwashed. The sound of them was almost worse than the smell: individual sobs and curses and screams with each jolt of the truck, rising like stones above a constant flow of muffled animal wails.
Lydia had worked the night clinic in the East End. She knew the stinks of mortal flesh. But the sound was horrifying in the way it filled the night, the way it hung above the boulevard all the way back to the station. Blended notes of agony. Thousands of men trying not to scream, unmanned with terror and pain, and most not succeeding. Men who’d held their wives’ hands at the train station only weeks ago, boys crying for the mothers they’d kissed goodbye. A woman got out of the cab of a stopped truck and grabbed a canteen hanging on its side, clambered up into the back, and bent over this man or that, giving them sips. Another woman leaned from the window of the other side of the cab and yelled in very un-genteel accents, what the hell was the hold-up, goddammit?
From another truck someone yelled back, ‘École Militaire! Saint-Antoine’s can’t take more, they say.’
Another truck lurched to a halt and Lydia automatically assessed the men in the back. Even from a distance of fifteen feet she could see that several were dead, that two others wouldn’t make it. Save those you can save …
‘Machine guns.’ Greuze came to her side on the pavement, a dark bulk in darkness. ‘Damn imbeciles think what worked for Napoleon is going to work now.’
She took a step toward the woman with the canteen, climbing down from the back of the truck with a look on her face that Lydia knew – knew because it was her own. Fury, pain, helplessness. Hatred not against the enemy, but against the god of war himself.
‘They need help,’ Lydia had never liked practice in the night clinic and had never cared for the actual binding-up-wounds part of medicine. Heart and soul, she was a researcher, fascinated by the minute inner intricacies of kidneys, glands, nerves: the secret chemistry of brain and blood and tissue. But the impact of that ruin and horror, the sight of what shrapnel and machine guns could do, smote her with the understanding that every pair of kidneys, every tangle of nerve endings, every pair of lungs, every heart, every brain, belonged to a man who loved as Jamie loved, who dreamed as Jamie and Lydia and Stanislas Greuze the cab-driver and Ysidro the vampire dreamed …
‘They’re going to need every doctor,’ she said, ‘every surgeon. Everyone who can work an operating room without fainting.’
Greuze looked sidelong at her, dark eyes filled with pity, and Lydia, as if waking from a dream, glanced back to see Don Simon Ysidro in the back of the car.
Jamie.
They need every pair of hands … but Jamie needs ME. ME, because I know about those who hunt the night. Mosquito-bite drips, she thought, compared to this shocking Acheron of blood and pain.
And it has to be tonight. The effort Hyacinthe had made to call Lydia to her in the daylight hours, while Ysidro slept, meant that Hyacinthe herself would be as debilitated as Ysidro was, weakened and shaky from the effects of Emeric the alchemist’s potions. But that d
idn’t mean Hyacinthe couldn’t find a way to dose the guards at La Santé and simply walk past them, and each night that James Asher lay in the prison infirmary doubled the chances that he wouldn’t see morning.
Someone had evidently got the traffic moving again. With a hideous grinding of gears the trucks in front of her jolted forward, and men screamed or wept or shouted weakly over and over, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ The river of pain began to flow again, toward whatever spaces in Paris would take them.
Every organ and blood vessel in Lydia’s body seemed to wrench her toward the men in the trucks. Dear GOD, how many of them are there?
But she climbed back into the car, and looked over her shoulder as Greuze steered it away.
Asher guessed that he was dying. It took conscious effort now to breathe. If he slept, he sensed dimly that he would simply stop. The weight of exhaustion seemed to pull him into darkness, and he had trouble recalling why it was that he wanted to gather his strength to fight his way out of it again. The news that his parents were dead had come on him with a kind of cold shock; he had felt almost nothing when he’d gotten the letter from his Uncle Theobald about the accident. His father he barely knew. His mother he had loved dearly, but had never been in a moment’s doubt that time spent reading to him, walking with him in the fields around Wychford, teaching him to play the piano, and playing those lively duets that had been the joys of his afternoons, was all time carefully husbanded, orchestrated around parish duties and the Reverend Arthur Asher’s need for his wife’s approval and company. In the weeks following their deaths Asher sometimes felt as if both his hands had been chopped off: painlessly, but with incalculable, irreparable changes to the whole of his life. When scarlet fever had gone through the school he had gone down with it almost casually, as if it were expected of him.
They’re dead, so I should die too.
But I didn’t die, he thought, did I?
Didn’t I go to Africa?
To China?
To Prague?
Somewhere in the deeps of the darkness he heard screaming again, the screaming of a man trapped in sleep, locked in a coffin. Heard the sound of screaming, the thick roar of flame, and smelled the smell of burning flesh.
Incense.
When the chaplain came to give Danny Barrow the last rites, in the bed next to mine, they burned incense …
Simon opened the door of Father Jeffrey’s house, climbed the stairs. He moved slowly and stopped halfway up, as if he would turn back. Asher knew, without knowing how, that the vampire had stood for a long time in the dark of the Rue de l’Épée de Bois before entering. That he had gone away twice, and twice returned, cold and shaky with the hunger that the Undead cannot describe to the living, almost sick with it. The narrow slot of the Rue de l’Épée de Bois was nearly pitch-black. Even the threads of candle flame that had earlier burned at the joints of shutters were quenched now, the fires in every kitchen in Paris banked for the night.
Rats scurried across roofs. A cat’s eyes winked in the dark. The house where Father Jeffrey stayed had been locked, but Simon had already learned the skill of whispering to the dreams of the scullery boy who slept in the kitchen, and the youth unbarred the door to him without waking. The door to Father Jeffrey’s room on the third floor was unbolted.
Though the mud in the street outside had been rimmed with spring ice and the priest’s breath made a cloud in the light of the room’s candles, still Father Jeffrey was stripped to a single garment, a coarse shirt of goat-hair whose edges and creases, driven into his flesh by his outer clothing during the day, had rubbed swaths of scarlet in his wrists and neck. He knelt before the crucifix, white hair damp with sweat, rocking a little on his knees, and did not raise his head when Simon entered the room. Only when the vampire spoke did he look up, and there was no surprise in his face.
‘Jeffrey …’
‘Simon.’ Father Jeffrey got to his feet, staggered a little with cramp, and went to take the vampire’s cold hands.
Simon backed from him, shaking his head. ‘I need help,’ he said, ‘I need counsel.’ He cast a look around the dark chamber. The bed, with its single threadbare cover cast back, showed, instead of a mattress, a couple of planks of wood with a thin strip raised in the middle like a cleat, that its occupant might not rest too easy nor seek to linger there when the world had need of his service. ‘Cardinal Montevierde?’
‘He’s back at the palace. But he is most pleased with you.’
Simon, who had been about to speak again, fell back a step, nonplussed. ‘Pleased with me?’
Father Jeffrey caught the vampire’s hands, gripped them. ‘It was well done.’ And, when Simon only looked at him uncomprehendingly, ‘Jambicque the alchemist. We heard of it this morning when his body was found. In the streets they’re saying the Devil came to claim his own, but I knew it had to be you. For years we’ve been trying—’
‘I did nothing.’ Simon stared at him in shock. ‘’Twas what I came tonight to tell you. That I cannot …’
‘It must have been you.’ Jeffrey shifted his hands to his friend’s narrow shoulders, studied his face with concern. ‘Or men you instructed, as you set them on to kill de Colle. For years now we’ve been trying to find where he made his lair. Who but you could have learned of the house on Montparnasse, of the well which had been dug down into the old mines beneath it? Who but you could have traced the mine tunnels that went to the chamber where his coffin lay?’
‘I found the place, yes,’ whispered Simon. ‘But enter it I did not. Nor did I stir others to the deed. I swore I would not break the peace among the Undead of this city. I couldn’t—’
‘I told you before, Simon,’ said the priest gently. ‘Cardinal Montevierde absolved you of any vow given to the damned. Such promises cannot hold back a Christian soul from salvation. And in truth,’ he added with a slight smile, ‘you can’t be said to have broken that vow in the case of the heretic de Colle, now, can you? If you spoke of it …’
‘I spoke of it to none. Nor do I think anyone followed me—’
He broke off, his eyes widening, even as Father Jeffrey went on, ‘I think there is no need for either of us to speak to Cardinal Montevierde of what you tell me.’ He gave Simon’s shoulder a gentle shake. ‘The simple truth is that Jambicque is dead. Does it matter whose hand struck the actual blow? You have brought about the death of an enemy of the Faith, Simon. Be assured, the Cardinal will be grateful. Sometimes God extends a helping hand to those willing to be guided.’
Simon shook his head, horrified by a truth that only he could see. ‘No …’
And was gone.
The man in the next bed cried out, ‘Don’t do it!’
Asher turned his head, shivering with cold but aware at least that he was awake. He still breathed, though it was like a knife grinding into his ribs. The school infirmary …
No. Not the hospital either – Saint-Antoine. Lydia had been there, and Don Simon Ysidro …
This room he didn’t recognize. By the grimy glow of dimmed gaslights he could tell it was an infirmary of some kind, and that it probably wasn’t in a regular hospital. The window in the door was barred. The stink of vomit and rats, of bedpans unemptied and dressings long unchanged. Somewhere close, the sick-sweet stink of gangrene, unmistakable. Bars on the outside window as well. The man in the bed next to his, a burly fair man whose hair had all been cropped off, was chained in his bed with a leg-iron fastened around the bed-frame.
The man, jerked from sleep, had sat up shaking, staring around him wild-eyed. Asher moved a little, confused and weaker than he’d felt since he’d had scarlet fever in school, and felt the harsh rub of steel around his own ankle.
The Hôtel Batoux. Jürgen Schaumm. Elysée de Montadour’s green eyes gleaming at him in candlelight.
Descending the stair to the bone chapel …
‘LISETTE!’ At the end of the infirmary ward a man in another bed screamed, thrashed with both hands at some invisible adversary, and at the same mom
ent another man shouted, incoherent words of terror and shock.
Two more men began to shout, jerking at their shackles, and the man who’d been dozing in the chair by the door leaped to his feet and yelled, ‘Shut up the lot of you!’
Bolts slammed back on the outside of the door, a man’s head framed against the barred judas. An instant later a guard strode in from the corridor. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ He and the guard who’d been in the chair raged down the center of the room banging on the iron bedsteads with truncheons and cursing. ‘Eat shit, sons of whores! Quiet, or I’ll give you good reason to yell!’
The men in the beds began to yell back at the guards and Asher, looking beside him, saw a woman enter the ward, slim and dark and demurely smiling. No one else seemed to notice her in the confusion, but he saw her, and knew her, with her velvet smile and hazel-dark African eyes and the burn on her face that vanished as he looked at her …
She reached down and brushed his unshaven cheek with her nails. Smiled, letting him see her fangs.
Then she was gone.
‘Turn up the gas!’ Asher reached from his bed, caught at the sleeve of the corridor guard as he stomped back to the door. ‘There was a woman came in—’
He knew the minute the words were out of his mouth that they wouldn’t believe him, and he was right. The man struck at his hand with the truncheon, ‘What the hell you on about, you dirty German?’ and the man in the next bed – who had recovered from the shock of his nightmare – guffawed. ‘Like we’d have missed a woman! Yeah, Drouet, turn up the gas! Find that slut and bring her over here to me …’
Asher could smell her perfume, mixed with the whiff of blood. She was in the shadows, waiting for them to leave …
‘Hey, Goubert, you hidin’ a slut in your bed?’
‘The Boche says a woman came in here—’
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