Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  She raised her eyes to his, folding her hands—soft and large and strong enough, he knew, to break his neck—over one another, her rings gleaming coldly. “That sounds vile, doesn’t it? But that blunting of mind—that laxing of the concentration—is death to a vampire, whom the rising sun will reduce to ashes. Do you think us vile?”

  “I think that what you are is vile,” Asher said evenly. “Does that matter to you?”

  Her eyes left his again, to consider the pearls and moonstones of her ring. “If it mattered all that greatly I suppose I would have died years ago.” Another woman might have shrugged—he only sensed her setting the thought aside with some attenuated shift of musculature he did not quite see, before her eyes returned to his. “Of course Rhys was gone by the time Charles and I became what we are. He lived in the crypts below the old Church of St. Giles, haunting the waterfronts for sailors at night. He made his money playing in taverns, in Eastcheap and the Steelyard—the German Hansa merchants loved him. Simon tells me his touch upon the lute could bring tears to your eyes. That’s where Simon met him, a thin, little, white-haired man, Simon says, so fragile to look at, like a little spider in strange garb two centuries out of date. There was a great frenzy of witch-killing in the days of old King James, and those in London who survived it perished in the Fire, all save Grippen and Simon. God knows where they found to sleep, in the days the fire burned.”

  “But you weren’t made until after the fire?” It was ancient history to him, like the Fall of Rome; the woodcuts of that monster conflagration that had devoured London in 1666.

  “Years after,” she said. “I remember, as a little girl, standing on Harrow Hill in the dark, looking down on the city like a carpet of flame, and feeling the heat blowing off it onto my face on the wind. It had been windy all that week, hot and dry … I remember the crackle of the air in my hair, and being afraid the fire would cover all the earth.” She shook her head, as if wondering at that child’s naïveté. “They said there were buildings whose stones exploded like bombs in the heat, and little streams of molten lead from the church roofs were seen running like waterdown the gutters. Even after I became—what I am—it was years before I saw Ysidro; after the turn of the new century. His face was still covered with scars from the Fire, his hands like the scabby-barked branches of a tree.”

  “And Grippen?”

  Her mouth tightened a little. “Lionel got a lot of fledglings in the years after the Fire,” she said. “Charles was far from the first. He needed money, needed protection…”

  “Protection?”

  Her voice was deliberately colorless. “There are always feuds. All his fledglings had perished in the Fire. For years I thought Charles was dead.” She gave a little shake of her head, as if putting aside some old letter she had been reading, and glanced up at him again, the oil light glowing amber in her eyes. “But that isn’t what you came here to hear.”

  “I came here to hear about vampires,” Asher said quietly. “About who you are and what you are; what you do and what you want. You’re a hunter, Lady Farren. You know that you must see the pattern first, before you can see where it breaks.”

  “It’s dangerous,” she began, and a thread of anger seeped into Asher’s voice.

  “Ysidro didn’t give me any choice.”

  He was still standing in front of her, in the small pool of light that surrounded the vast marble edifice of the carved mantel, close enough now that he could have reached out and touched her face. Her face did not change its expression, but he saw her eyes alter their focus, flick past his shoulder to the dark cavern of the room behind him; her hand shot out, dragging at his arm even as he whirled to see the massive shadow looming only feet behind him and the terrible glint of red eyes.

  Anthea cried, “Grippen, no … !” at the same instant Asher swung with his forearm to strike away the huge handthat clutched at his throat. It was like striking a tree, but he managed to twist aside. Hairy and powerful, the vampire Grippen’s hand shut around the shoulder of his coat instead of his neck.

  Asher twisted, slithering out of the garment. Grippen was massive, as tall as Asher and broad as a door, with greasy black hair falling in his eyes, his face pocked with old scars and ruddy with ingested blood. For all his size, he was blindingly fast. His massive arm locked around Asher’s chest, trapping him with his own arms tangled still in his half-discarded coat; he felt the vampire’s mind smothering his, cloudy and strong as steel, and fought it as he had fought Ysidro’s in the train. The arm around his chest crushed tighter, and he twisted with both his hands at the fingers buried in his coat—he might just as well have tried to break the fingers of a statue.

  Anthea, too, was tearing at Grippen’s wrists, trying to force them loose. He heard her cry, “Don’t … !” as he felt the man’s huge, square hand tear his shirt collar free, and thought, with bizarre abstraction, And now for a little experiment in applied folklore …

  “God’s death!” Grippen’s hand jerked back from the silver chain, the reek of blood on his breath nauseating. Asher dropped his weight against the slackened hold, slipping free for an instant before the enraged vampire struck him a blow on the side of the head that knocked him spinning into the opposite wall. He hit it like a rag doll—the strike had been blindingly fast, coming out of nowhere with an impact like that of a speeding motorcar. As he sank, stunned, to the floor the philologist in him picked out the sixteenth-century rounded vowels—far more pronounced than Ysidro’s—as the vampire bellowed, “Poxy whoreson, I’ll give you silver!”

  His vision graying out, he saw two shapes melt and whirl together, black and ivory in the lamplight. Antheahad hold of both of Grippen’s wrists, trying to drag him back, her storm-colored hair falling loose from its pins around her shoulders. Though his mind was swimming, Asher staggered to his feet and stumbled the length of the room to the pillared archway. An inglorious enough exit, he thought dizzily. Properly speaking, a gentleman should remain and not let a lady take the brunt of a fracas, but the fact was that she was far more qualified than he for the task. It was also very unlikely Grippen could or would kill her, and virtually certain that, if Asher remained, he was a dead man.

  Savoy Walk was silent, empty, wreathed thickly now infog. If he could make it to the end of the street, up Salisbury Court to the lights of Fleet Street, he’d be safe …

  He stumbled down the tall stone steps, scarcely feeling the raw cold of the river mist that lanced through his shirt sleeves and froze his throat through his torn collar. Dangerous ground for a mortal to tread indeed, he thought, as his feet splashed in the shallow puddles of the uneven cobbles. Heedless of appearances, he began to run.

  He made it no farther than the black slot where the court narrowed into the crevice of the lane.

  In that shadowy opening a form materialized, seeming to take shape, as they were said to, out of the mist itself—a diminutive girl, a pocket Venus, primrose curls heaped high on her head and dark eyes gleaming feral in the diffuse glow from the lights of the house. He turned, seeking some other escape, and saw behind him in the fog the pale face of a world-weary ghost that belonged to the third Earl of Ernchester.

  Their hands were like ice as they closed around his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Ernchester said softly, “but you have to come with us.”

  EIGHT

  “SEVEN YEARS is a long time.” The Honorable Evelyn Westmoreland stirred at his coffee with a tiny spoon, looking down into its midnight depths. Across the table from him, Lydia hoped that seven years was long enough.

  “I know,” she said softly and rested her hand on the table, close enough to his to let him know that, had she not been married, he could have covered it with his. The plumes on her hat, like pink-tinged sunset clouds, moved as she leaned forward; from the lace of her cuffs, her kid-gloved hands emerged like the slim stamens of a rose. Her brown eyes were wide and gentle—she could see him as a soft-edged pattern of dark and light, but had decided that in this case it was
better to look well than to see well. Besides, she had learned how to interpret the most subtle of signs. “Believe me, I wish I could let the matter rest.”

  “You should.” There was an edge of bitter distaste in his voice. “It’s not the sort of thing you should be asking about… Mrs. Asher.” The soft lips, fleshy as those of some decadent Roman bust, pinched up. Past him, the red-and-black shape of one of Gatti’s well-trained waiters glided by and, though it was well past the hour when teas ceased being served, fetched a little more hot water, which he soundlessly added to the teapot at Lydia’s elbow, and removed the ruins of the little cake-and-sandwich plate. The restaurant was beginning to smell of dinner now rather than tea. The quality of the voices of the few diners coming in was different; the women’s indistinct forms were colored differently than for daytime and flashed with jewels. Beyond the square leads of the windowpanes, a misty dusk had fallen on the Strand.

  Those seven years, Lydia reflected privately, had not been particularly kind to the Equally Honorable Evelyn. He was still as big and burly as he’d been in those halcyon days of rugger matches against Kings; but, even without her specs, she could tell that under his immaculate tailoring he’d put on flesh. When he’d taken her arm to lead her to their little table, Lydia had been close enough to see that, though not yet thirty, he bore the crumpled pouchiness of dissipation beneath his blue-gray eyes, the bitter weariness of one who does not quite know what has gone wrong; his flesh smelled faintly of expensive pomade. He was not the young man who had so assiduously offered her his arm at croquet matches and concerts of Oriental music, no longer Dennis Blaydon’s puppylike brother-in-arms against all comers on the field. Even back when she’d been most impressed with his considerable good looks, Lydia had found his conversation stilted and boring, and it was worse now. It had taken nearly an hour of patient chitchat over tea to relax him to the point of, she hoped, confidences.

  She looked down at her teacup, fingering the fragile curlicues of its handle, aware that, with her eyes downcast, he was studying her face. “How did he die, Evelyn?”

  “It was a carriage accident.” The voice turned crisp, defensive.

  “Oh,” she said softly. “I thought … I’d heard …”

  “Whatever you heard,” Evelyn said, “and whomever you heard it from, it was a carriage accident. I’d rather not…”

  “Please…” She raised her eyes to his once more. “I need to talk to you, Evelyn. I didn’t know who else I could ask. I sent you that note asking to meet me here because … I’ve heard there was a woman.”

  Anger flicked at the edges of his tone. “She had nothing to do with it. He died in a…”

  “I think a friend of mine has gotten involved with her.”

  “Who?” He moved his head, his eyes narrowing, the wary inflection reminding her of her father when he was getting ready to say things like “station in life” and “not done.”

  “No one you know,” Lydia stammered.

  He paused a moment, thinking about that, turning things over in his mind with the slow deliberation she had remembered. The Honorable Bertie, dimwitted though he had been, had always been the brighter brother. Then he said slowly, “Don’t worry about it, Lydia… Mrs. Asher. Truly,” he added more gently, seeing the pucker of worry between her copper-dark brows. “I… You see, I heard recently that … that someone I know had been seeing her. Of course, you were barely out of school when Bertie was found… when Bertie died, and there was a lot we couldn’t tell you. But she was a pernicious woman, Lydia, truly evil. And a week or so ago I … er … I met her and warned her off … paid her off … gave her money and told her to leave the country. She’s gone.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke.

  Embarrassment? she wondered. Or something else?

  “Truly?” She leaned forward a little, her eyes on his face, trying to detect shifts of expression without being obvious about it.

  She heard the weary distaste, the revulsion in his voice as he said, “Truly.”

  She let another long pause rest on the scented air between them, then asked, “What was she like? I have a reason for asking,” she added, as the Equally Honorable Evelyn puffed himself up preparatory to expostulation on the subject of curiosity unseemly for a woman of her class and position. “You know I’ve become a doctor.”

  “I do,” he said, with a trace of indignation, as if he’d had the right to forbid it, and she’d flouted his authority anyway. “Though I really can’t see how Professor Asher, or any husband, could let his wife…”

  “Well,” she continued, cutting off a too-familiar tirade with an artless appearance of eagerness, “in my studies I’ve come across two or three cases of a kind of nervous disorder that reminded me of things J—my friend—told me about this—this woman Carlotta. I suspect that she may be insane.”

  That got his interest, as she’d found it got nine people’s out of ten, even those who considered her authority for the accusation an affront to their manhood. He leaned forward, his watery eyes intent, and she reached across the small table with its starched white cloth and took his chubby hand in both of hers. “But I haven’t met her, or seen her, and you have … if you’d be willing to talk about it. Evelyn, please. I do need your help.”

  In the cab on her way back to Bruton Place she jotted down the main points of the subsequent discussion—it would have looked bad, she had decided, to be taking notes while Evelyn was talking, and would have put him off his stride. The waiters at Gatti’s, well-trained, had observed the intentness of the discussion between the wealthy-looking gentleman and the delicate, red-haired girl, and had tactfullylet them alone—something they probably would not have done had she been scribbling notes.

  The interview had been frustrating, because Evelyn was as much wrapped up in sports—and now in the stock market—as his brother Bertie had been in clothes and fashion and was grossly inobservant of anything else, but with patient questioning she’d been able to piece certain things together.

  First, Lotta had been seen as early as an hour after sunset, when the sky was still fairly light—Evelyn had thought that was in spring, but wasn’t sure.

  Second, sometimes she had been paler, and sometimes rosier—though it was difficult to tell by gaslight—indicating that sometimes she had fed before joining the Honorable Bertie and his friends. Evelyn did not remember whether she had ever been rosy on those occasions upon which she had met them early, which would indicate that she had risen just after sunset to hunt.

  Third, she often wore heavy perfume. James had said nothing about vampires smelling different from humans, but presumably, with a different diet, they might have a different odor, though a very faint one—she tried not to think about the smell of blood and strangeness that had touched her nostrils in the dark of the Covent Garden court.

  Other than that, he’d thought there was something odd about her fingernails, he couldn’t say what. And her eyes, but he couldn’t say what either, so had fallen back on “an expression of evil,” which was no help toward clinical analysis.

  About the circumstances of his brother’s death he would not speak at all, but Lydia guessed, from things James had told her about the techniques of spying, that when Lotta finally killed her victim, she had arranged for the body to be found in circumstances that were either disgraceful orcompromising, such as dressed in women’s clothing, or in an alley behind an opium den, or something equally damning.

  And lastly, Evelyn had told her that Bertie had once had a charm made, a lover’s knot, out of Lotta’s red-gold hair. It was still among Bertie’s things. He would send it to her by the morning post, to the accommodation address where she picked up her mail.

  She sat back in the cab as it jolted along the crowded pavement of Gower Street, staring abstractedly out at the blurred yellow halos of the street lamps where they shone through the mists against the monochrome cutouts of the house fronts behind. The rising fog seemed to damp noises, making all things slightly unreal; omnibuses like movi
ng towers loomed out of it, their knife-board advertisements for Pond’s Arthriticus or Clincher Tires—Still Unequaled for Quality and Durability—transformed into strange portents by the surrounding gloom.

  When the cab reached Number 109 Bruton Place, Lydia paid the driver off quickly and hurried inside, displeased to find her heart racing with a swift, nervous fear. She found she was becoming uncomfortable at the thought of being outside, even for a few moments, after dark.

  The room to which the vampires took Asher was a cellar, not of Ernchester House but of a deserted shop whose narrow door opened into the blackness of the lane. Ernchester produced the keys to its two padlocks from a waistcoat pocket and led the way into a tiny back room, piled high with dusty boxes and crates and boasting an old soapstone sink in one corner, whose rusty pump, silhouetted against the dim yellowish reflection of the window, had the appearance of some wry-necked monster brooding in the darkness. An oil lamp stood on the side of the sink; Ernchester lighted it and led the way to another door nearly hiddenbehind the crates, whose padlock and hasp had been ripped off with a crowbar—recently, by the look of the gouges in the wood. The smell of mildew and dampness rose chokingly to engulf them as they descended the hairpin spiral of stairs to a cellar, certainly much wider, Asher guessed, than the building above; probably deeper, he thought, glancing at its far end, nearly obscured in shadows, and beyond a doubt older. Rough-hewn arched beams supported a ceiling of smoke-stained stone; just below them, at the other end of the room, two pairs of locked shutters indicated windows either at street level or set into a light well just below it.

  “They’re barred behind those shutters,” the Earl remarked, taking an old-fashioned, long-barreled key from a nail beside the door. “So even if you could get the padlocks on them open, it wouldn’t do you much good. Chloé, my dear, would you be so good as to fetch Dr. Asher’s coat? And mine as well?”