The Kindred of Darkness

by Barbara Hambly

Feeling strangely unlike herself, Lydia unhooked the swags of garlic and wolfsbane from the curtain rods. Did Cece dream something like this? About how she had to go to the window, open it for whatever that is – that white flying thing out there?

  Did it whisper like this in her mind?

  She stood for a moment, hands filled with dried blossom, looking out into the darkness. Then she carried the garlands to the farthest corner of the room, covered them with the bed pillows, came back to the window and opened the casements.

  Stretched out her hand into the blackness of the night.

  It landed on her wrist, a white mantis half again the length of her palm. Tilted its triangular head to regard her with yellow eyes. Four little feet pricked the skin as it walked up her wrist, the other two, tucked centaur-like up under its breast, for all the world as if it was indeed about to recite a Paternoster for the insects it would kill.

  She brought it inside, set it on the corner of the table where the reflections of the street-lamps did not reach. Wondered again if this was really happening.

  The mantis changed, and a man stood beside the table. He was young and very thin, his long hair like dusty moonlight over his shoulders and his champagne-colored eyes reflecting the dim luminosity like a cat’s.

  Scars marked his cheekbone and throat, as if the wax-white flesh had been sliced with razors.

  He said, ‘Mistress,’ and because this was a dream Lydia stepped forward into his arms.

  His flesh was cold through his clothing and his grip like whalebone and steel cable. It was like embracing a skeleton in a two-hundred-guinea suit.

  ‘Hush.’ He brought up a gentle thumb to wipe the tears on her face. She realized she was weeping, and could not stop. ‘Hush, t’will be well. T’will all be well, Mistress.’ The clawed nail touched her skin like a dagger-point. For a time she could only cling to him, terrified that waking would drag them apart, until her tears were all cried.

  ‘He took my child,’ she whispered at last. ‘Grippen took my child.’ Just being able to say it was like a steel band breaking from around her chest.

  She didn’t have to keep silent any longer, or be strong, or explain.

  Don Simon Christian Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro understood.

  He said one word, in Spanish, that Lydia guessed would have taken paint off a gate.

  Then, ‘What does he want of you?’ He handed her into the desk chair where she had been sitting, replaced the blanket around her shoulders. Then he perched one narrow flank on the corner of the table, folded those long hands upon his knee. He had a gold signet ring, worn nearly smooth by time.

  ‘There’s an interloper here, another vampire.’ She removed her spectacles, wiped her eyes. Replaced them. Simon had seen her in worse state than as a goggle-eyed golliwog, and anyway this was only a dream. ‘You got my telegram?’

  ‘Upon arising. Service in Rome is villainous.’

  ‘When will you be in England?’

  ‘Tomorrow night. Die Todten reiten schnell, as Burger observes. One of the few advantages I have ever found in being dead. He wishes you to find this interloper?’ Another man’s brows would have knit – there was only a flicker of shadow in those yellow pupils pleated with faded gray.

  ‘He says he can’t. He’s a Serb, or a Montenegrin, Grippen says, calling himself Zahorec … Simon, before anything else, please, can you learn if Miranda is still alive? She’s with her nursery maid; Grippen kidnapped both.’

  ‘Then I should say the odds are good that both thrive.’

  ‘But it doesn’t mean she’s safe. It doesn’t mean she isn’t terrified, or hungry, or cold, or alone in the dark. It doesn’t mean they haven’t murdered poor Nan—’

  ‘Nan?’

  ‘Nan Wellit. The nursery maid.’ Lydia wiped her eyes again, propped her spectacles back into place. ‘She’s only seventeen. Heaven knows what will happen to her – to them both – if she tries to escape. Or if whoever is keeping watch over them panics. …’

  ‘Were I employed by Lionel Grippen to guard one whom he wished to keep well,’ remarked Don Simon, ‘I should take great care how I panicked.’

  In appearance, the young man before her was as he had been when death had claimed him, in his mid-twenties, in 1555. Lydia had not seen him in waking life since a November night last year in Peking, and the scars on his face – taken in a struggle with the Master of Constantinople, to protect her – seemed fresh as ever after four years. How long DOES it take vampire flesh to heal? He could keep the living from seeing them, though Lydia suspected that they would be visible in a mirror.

  She wished she could do as much with her eyeglasses.

  He had killed, probably, at least as many people as Grippen had. Drunk the energies of their deaths in order to maintain his own powers to tamper with the perceptions of the living.

  Murderer and monster, a walking corpse.

  She took his thin hand. ‘Please.’

  ‘It shall be as you desire, Mistress.’ Inflections of sixteenth-century Castille clung to his whispering voice. ‘At this distance, knowing neither your child nor the girl, no, my mind cannot touch theirs. In any case I would hazard that Lionel guesses you will call on me – though to my knowledge he knows not where I am hid – and he will have bestowed the pair of them underground. The thickness of earth baffles our senses. Thus it is, I suspect, that he can find no trace of this interloper himself. London is an old city, and built upon river clay. Underground rivers flow beneath her streets, and the movement of living water confuses perception. Ancient crypts lie deep below the palaces of your progress, and Roman vaults below them. An interloper, whose mind Lionel knows not, could easily hide from him for a time.’

  ‘Since early February, Grippen says. But Grippen’s dealt with interlopers before.’

  ‘But interlopers before promenaded themselves upon their arrival, walked the night streets that he might see them, and asked his leave to hunt. I take it this man has not.’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘Grippen says he’s been killing, every night and sometimes twice and thrice—’

  ‘Has he, indeed?’ This time the vampire’s eyebrows really did go up.

  ‘Grippen said the police – and worse, the people of the neighborhood – were getting angry and suspicious—’

  ‘Well they might. There are those among the Undead who would – an they could – kill twice and thrice in a night, and most would hunt every night an t’were possible. But ’tis not. Indeed, without stooping to the vulgarity of a pun, I would say ’tis the chief bone of contention between most Masters and their fledglings that the Master must keep those he has created from over-hunting their grounds, and revealing to the living the existence of the nest. ’Tis curious that this interloper, knowing himself in a strange city with a powerful master, would kill in this fashion. What does he do, that he would need to kill so?’

  He looked about him at the dingy flowered wallpaper, the narrow bed. ‘And where is James during all of this? I take it you are in London—’

  ‘Yes, at the Women’s Temperance Hotel on Blomfield Street. James is at a philology conference in Venice, lecturing on Balkan dialects. I wired him this morning.’ Already it seemed weeks ago. ‘At the same time I wired you, but I’ve heard nothing. I think he must have gone on from Venice to … somewhere else …’

  Her voice faltered. Another woman might have suspected an errant husband of marital divagation. Lydia’s own fears ran deeper than that. James had often said that no one ever really left the Department: working for them was more than something you did. It was something you were.

  Since October – according to both Jamie and to her friend Josetta Beyerly – warfare had again raged in the Balkans, as the small nations that had broken from the Turkish Empire in the previous war in May turned on that weakened giant (and one another, James said) with demands for more territory. With Russia egging on the three attackers there was a very real danger (James said) that Russia would be drawn in to fight the Turks – who
would call on their allies the Germans, causing Russia to call on their allies the French, who for forty years had been waiting for an excuse to attack Germany and retrieve territory lost in a previous conflict …

  Even as Germany champed like a racehorse in the gate, seeking the first justification to launch itself at France in the hopes of a quick victory and the chance to seize France’s possessions in Indo-China, in Africa, on the far-flung islands of the Pacific.

  Europe is a powder keg, Jamie had said before he’d left for Venice, waiting for a spark …

  Maybe that was why James had finally gone. Venice is next door to the fighting.

  ‘Have you sought this invisible interloper?’

  ‘I have detectives going through the shipping records from the end of January. I think he must have fled Montenegro when the fighting started. Once I can find a name, or names, I’ll start checking the land registry office, though of course he may not have registered a sale—’

  ‘I never do.’

  ‘What I really need is bank records. I’m guessing Zahorec will have used Barclays Bank, since they have offices in Bucharest and Sofia. I don’t know if Jamie can get that information out of his old colleagues at the Department.’

  ‘It may be that I can assist in this matter. One would not wish James’ former colleagues – worthy men as I am sure they are – brought in any way to notice this interloper. One never knows what they will do with such information, nor where such trails may lead.’

  Lydia regarded him with widened eyes. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Think you that such matters lie beyond me?’ And, when she did not reply, but looked aside with a sudden flood of hope coloring her cheeks, he asked, ‘Aught else, Lady?’

  She hesitated for so long, her heart pounding (which he can perfectly well hear, drat him), that he repeated softly, ‘Aught else?’

  She almost whispered, ‘The Bank of England.’

  Stillness after the words, like water frozen to silence. In the street a drunk raised his voice in song, faded again.

  ‘Barclays were more likely, for Zahorec to use.’

  ‘Not Zahorec,’ she said. ‘Grippen.’ She looked back at him. ‘That’s where he kept his money back in 1907. I won’t do anything silly,’ she added, a little defiantly. ‘But I need to know where they are. Miranda and Nan. I need to know they’re all right. I think they’re being kept by living accomplices, not his fledglings—’

  ‘Heaven forefend. Lionel is a fool when it comes to the making of fledglings. I’d not trust any of his get, nor can he.’

  ‘All the more reason I have to find them,’ she said. ‘And I need to know who the fledglings are, so I won’t waste my time on false scents. And there’s a girl here,’ she added, a little uncertainly. ‘An American. A millionaire’s daughter. She’s being seduced by a vampire. Hunted.’ Her eyes met his again. ‘The way you said once that vampires hunt the living for sport.’

  She spoke accusingly, defying him to say he had not played that mocking game. Meeting for champagne suppers, walking by night along the Embankment. Using the psychic glamour of the vampire to make the victim think they were with a living man or woman, make them not notice the clawed nails, the long teeth …

  Killing elsewhere early in the night so as not to be hungry too urgently, so as not to harvest the victim until the evil sweetness of love and betrayal and tragedy has sufficiently ripened. But loving the smell of the blood, the smell of trust soon to be betrayed.

  Have you done that?

  His eyes were an expressionless labyrinth of sulfur and salt. I am as I am. What do you think I have done?

  It was her gaze that fell.

  ‘But I can’t let Grippen know that I learn anything about his fledglings, you see. Not even that I’m asking. And it might be Grippen that’s after her.’

  ‘A man of no logic.’ The soft voice was dismissive. ‘And a Protestant to boot.’ He walked to the window. Though over the real London – the London of soot and grief and Court presentations and little girls who had to play the violin for pennies on station platforms – the fingernail moon had set hours ago, there was moonlight in her dream. ‘If he wants this Bohemian destroyed—’

  ‘He didn’t say he wanted him destroyed,’ said Lydia. ‘What he asked for, specifically, was for me to find Zahorec’s lairs and hiding places. In fact he commanded that I not set foot in any of them …’

  ‘Did he so?’ Don Simon tilted his head. ‘Curious. Most curious.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Tread carefully, Mistress.’ He turned back to her, held out long fingers cold as death. ‘Remember always that Lionel’s fledglings hate him – an emotion not uncommon between Master vampires and those whom they draw into the world of the night, once they discover what it is truly to be a slave. In their hatred they distrust all his works, and will watch you if nothing else, particularly if this girl is indeed their quarry. I will be with you soon.’

  She shivered, and drew the blanket about her shoulders again. It was YOU who drew James into the world of the night. Had you not done that, Miranda would be sleeping safely in her own bed tonight, and I safely in mine.

  When she did not take his hand he crossed to her, and laid his palm to her cheek.

  ‘I beg pardon, Mistress.’

  She did not look at him. ‘I don’t know that I can give it.’

  ‘You need not. Send to your home for things which belong to your child and the maid. I doubt I shall be able to find them e’en so, but I shall make the attempt. I know well that this is in part my doing, and if for no other reason than that I will do all that I can, to make good what I owe.’

  Speaking carefully, to keep her voice from shaking, Lydia said, ‘I’m not sure there is any way that you can do that.’

  ‘Nor I,’ replied the vampire. ‘Thus all I can give you is my willingness to perish in the attempt.’

  She woke still sitting at the rickety table in pre-dawn gray, chilled to the bone in her cousin’s silk evening frock, to the groaning of the trains and the rusty chime of All Hallows, and the grumpy clunk as the hotel’s bootboy dropped a pair of shoes outside her door.

  SIX

  For two days, Lydia found herself prey to the frequent sensation of being in a dream – or, rather, of being in several dreams, traversing between them by cab rides along High Holborn.

  Six years ago, when her husband had first been blackmailed by Don Simon Ysidro into seeking out a vampire-hunter considerably more efficient than Osric Millward, she had gone into hiding in London and out of curiosity had made the attempt to read that classic of vampire fiction, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Don Simon had little good to say of the work, which Lydia had found unreadable, but then few things compared to a good solid medical case history in her opinion. One scene, however, remained in her mind. While a prisoner in Castle Dracula, the fictional hero Jonathan Harker witnesses the arrival of a woman before the castle walls, a woman whose child the vampire count stole: she pounds upon the castle gate, crying ‘Monster, give me my child …’

  A scene of melodramatic horror (‘If Dracula and all three of his wives were living on the excess population of a small mountain village,’ Simon had remarked, ‘I doubt he would have left it to the wolves to make a meal of her.’), but one which returned to her now in her dreams.

  Monster, give me my child …

  Had she known where Lionel Grippen slept in his coffin, she thought those first two nights that she would have gone there, pounded on the panels, cried to him: Monster, give me my child.

  And would have been killed, she reflected despairingly, by the two-legged wolves he was capable of summoning, as surely as that poor Transylvanian peasant-woman had been.

  Polybius Teazle knew whereof he spoke, when he’d warned her of the sheer volume of travelers who had entered London at the end of January burdened with a trunk large enough to conceal the body of a man. Patiently, Lydia divided those who’d come singly (What man would endanger his family by bringing
them on such an enterprise?) from those traveling en famille (And what vampire would trust three or four – some of them children – with his secret?), and apportioned them by port of origin: Athens, Trieste, Bordeaux, Cherbourg, Amsterdam. Here again it was the names she sought. Few people (James said) had the wits to discard a perfectly good set of identity papers once they’d been used: the temptation was always to use them again. The kidnapping had brought home to her how easy it was for a vampire to utilize human helpers – like the hapless madman Renfield in Dracula, like her own poor companion Margaret Potton in Constantinople …

  Like Jamie.

  Like myself.

  She wondered who Ysidro had coerced to help him travel from Rome. And what had become of him or her upon arrival.

  Someone is watching over Miranda and Nan during daylight hours.

  And she would wrench her mind back to the lists. She purchased a tin kettle and a cup at an Italian grocery shop in Wormwood Street, and brewed herself endless pots of tea on the room’s minuscule grate, through the gray of dawn. At ten she’d go down the hall to wash, and changed into the chintz dress she’d borrowed from Mrs Grimes, to visit her drop boxes in Finsbury Circus. If Grippen can’t tell where Zahorec is, even, how can I be sure he isn’t aware that someone is hunting him?

  No wonder poor Jamie was driven half mad, living like this.

  There was something at once penitential and militant about the room at the Temperance Hotel, like a cell or a barracks. The tiny deal table, the single broken chair: teapot, cup, and paper bag of tea lined up at the back of the table. The locked suitcase that held the dry, softly crunching wreathes of garlic and wolfsbane … the mountain of frocks and stockings and gloves and notes and hats that heaped the narrow bed, and beside which she slept … and dreamed.

  These were the half of her life. The real half, she thought of them.

  At one on Saturday she donned one of the elegant frocks that Ellen had sent her, arranged her hair, applied rouge, mascaro, Recamier beauty cream, rice powder, kohl, rosewater and glycerin to her hands, and the perfume of vanilla and sandalwood that long ago her father had had formulated for her by Houbigant of Paris, and took a cab to Halfdene House. The thought of a masquerade ball – of listening to Lady Savenake on the iniquities of servants and Aunt Lavinnia on the iniquities of Valentina Willoughby while a bad band played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ – acted upon Lydia as the threat of being chained for a night in a haunted catacomb would have upon the heroine in the average romantic novel: at least in a haunted catacomb one could read a book. But one of the things Lydia had overheard at Aunt Lavinnia’s dinner party had been that Titus Armistead and his daughter were staying with the Binneys at Wycliffe House.