“‘It,’” Simon said softly.
“It wasn’t human.”
“Nor are we.”
The cab pulled to a halt at the top of Savoy Walk. Grippen paid off the driver, and the two vampires, their human partner between them, walked down the long tunnel of shadows to the towering, baroque blackness of Ernchester House at the end. Bands and slashes of Madeira-gold marked the curtained windows, and caught the thin rain in a shuddering haze; even as they mounted the soot-streaked marble of the steps, one panel of the carved doors opened to reveal the Farrens standing, an arm-linked silhouette, just within.
“I fear she is truly dead.” Anthea led the way up the long stair, to a small room at the back of the house which had once been used for sewing or letter writing. The dark red of her gown showed like old blood against the creamy whiteness of her bosom and face; its stiff lines and low-cut corsage whispered of some earlier era; knots and fringes of cut jet beads glinted in the lamplight like ripe blackberries. Her thick hair was piled in the modem style; against it, her face looked strained, weary, and frightened, as if her spirit were now fighting against all the pressures of those accumulatedyears. Ernchester, trailing close at her side, looked infinitely worse. “Decomposition isn’t far advanced, but it has begun.”
“That’s wrong,” Grippen growled. “Not cold as it is … She should bare be stiff.”
“Are you speaking from your experience with human corpses?” Asher inquired, and the big man’s black eyebrows pulled down over his nose in a frown. “With a vampire’s, the pathology would be completely different.”
Anthea had laid one of her velvet cloaks over the delicate Regency sofa in the little parlor. Against the thick, cherry-black velvet, Chloé’s hair seemed nearly white. It lay in loops and coils, spilling down to brush the floor; Asher was reminded of how Lydia’s had lain, unraveling in the study lamplight. Her eyes and mouth had been closed. But this did not change the horrible, sunken appearance of her flesh or the ghastly waxiness of her skin. She had been, Asher remembered, absolutely beautiful, like a baroque pearl set in Renaissance gold. Petrified, Lydia had said, every cell individually replaced with something that was not human flesh, and a mind replaced by that which was not a human mind.
A second cloak covered her; over the years, Anthea must have collected hundreds of them as fashions changed. It, too, was black, ruched and beaded; beneath it, Chloé’s shell-pink dress shone like the slash of a fading sunset between banks of clouds. With his left hand Asher reached forward and drew the cloak aside to look at the huge puncture wounds in the throat. Then, thoughtfully, he shrugged off the remaining sleeve of his damp ulster and let the weight of it drop to the floor around him. He shook clear a few inches of wrist from the sleeve of his corduroy jacket and held it out to Anthea. “Undo the cuff, would you, please?”
She did, gingerly avoiding the silver chain which stillcircled that wrist. Even the fleeting grip the thing had taken on it had driven the links into the flesh with sufficient violence to leave a narrow wreath of bruises and the reddening marks of fingers.
Just below the base of Asher’s thumb were two or three sets of punctures, scabbed over like the half dozen or so on his throat. A souvenir, he thought with wry gallows humor, of Paris. He knelt beside Chloé’s body and compared the marks. They were less than a third the size of the mangled white holes in the girl’s skin.
“Its fangs were huge,” he said quietly. “Grotesquely so, like an amateurish stage vampire’s; it might have been funny if it weren’t so terrifying. They grew down over the lip, cutting the flesh…” His fingers sketched the place beneath the thick brush of his mustache, and Ysidro’s eyes narrowed sharply. “It hadn’t callused, so it’s something that came over it fairly recently.”
“Any clown had told you that,” Grippen grumbled. “We’d ha’ known ere this, did any vampire walk that fed on other vampires.”
“What happens to a vampire,” Asher asked, looking up from Chloé’s throat, his eyes traveling around the circle of white, unhuman faces in the amber sweetness of the lamplight, “that drinks the blood of other vampires?”
Grippen’s voice was harsh. “Other vampires kill it.”
“Why?”
“Why do men stone those who eat the corpses of the dead, force children, cut beasts up alive to hear ’em squeal, or play with their own dung? Because it’s abominable.”
“There are so few of us,” Anthea added softly, her strong fingers stroking the massive jewel of jet and hematite that glittered at her bosom, “and our lives are lived so perilously on the shadowlands of death, no traitor to our midst can be tolerated, for fear that all shall die.”
“And because,” Ysidro’s light, disinterested voice whispered, “to drain the death of a vampire, to drink of a mind so rich, so deep, so filled with the colors of living, and so thick with the overtints of all the lives it has taken, might be the greatest temptation, the greatest intoxication, of all.”
There was silence—shocked, furious, and, Asher reflected grimly, not without recognition. The silken pattering of the rain pierced it faintly, muffled by the moldering brocades of the window drapes. Then Grippen snarled, “Buggering Spanish dog—you’d think so.”
Seated on a chair near the head of the couch, his ankles crossed negligently but with his usual erectness of posture, Ysidro continued, unperturbed, “But the question was not of life and death, but merely of blood. We can gain physical nourishment from drinking an animal’s blood, or a human’s, though we kill him not—as you yourself can attest, James.” By that light, cool tone, one would never have guessed that he had fought to rescue Asher from that death in Paris, nor protected him, at a certain amount of personal risk, afterward. “To drink even a small quantity of another vampire’s blood is repellent, after our own flesh has undergone the change. I am told that it often causes nausea.”
“Then it’s been tried.”
The vampire leaned a little into the high crimson wing of his chair and folded slim hands around his knee. A slight smile touched his mouth, but left his sulphur eyes hooded in shadow. “Everything has been tried.”
The others, still grouped around the couch where Chloé’s body lay, regarded him uneasily, save for Ernchester, who simply sat on a chair in the darkness of a corner, staring down at his white, workless fingers, turning them over and over, as if they were some queer and unknowngrowth he had suddenly found sprouting at the ends of his arms.
“Then merely the drinking of another vampire’s blood, whether he killed him or not, wouldn’t cause that kind of change?”
“It did not,” Ysidro replied in the careful tone he had used at the beginning of the investigation to reveal those few fragments of information with which he was willing to part, “in those that I have known.”
“And who were those?” Grippen demanded angrily.
“As they are dead now,” the Spanish vampire responded, “it scarce matters.”
“What about vampires who were older than Brother Anthony is now, that you knew or heard spoken of?”
Ysidro thought, still immobile as an alabaster votive, his pale eyes half-shut. “Rhys the Minstrel was nearly five hundred years old when he perished—if he did perish—in the Fire. Like Anthony, his skills had increased; like Anthony he had become at least in part tolerant of silver and perhaps of daylight, too, though I’m not sure. One saw him less and less. I know that he fed regularly and did not show signs of any abnormality. I never knew how old Johannis Magnus was supposed to be…”
Anthea spoke up, resting her hip on the curved head of the couch, “Tulloch the Scot told me once of vampires in China and in Asia, who have lived for thousands of years, going on as they always have, deathless.”
“And lifeless,” her husband whispered behind her, almost unheard.
To Asher, still sitting on his haunches beside Chloé’s motionless form, Ysidro remarked, “As a tale it is not something which concerns us, and I suspect that most of us do not wish to know of it.”
“What would be the point?” Grippen demanded sullenly.
“The point, my dearest doctor, is to know whether this abnormal pathology is something to which we all must look forward.”
“That’s a lot of Popish cock!”
“What’s this?” Asher lifted Chloé’s arm, limp and soft in his grasp and without rigor. He wondered if the vampire flesh went through rigor when they died. It was another of the things Lydia would want to know … He swiftly pushed the thought of Lydia from his mind. The buttons of Chloé’s sleeve had all been undone—there was a good handspan of them, reaching nearly to her elbow—and the white point d’esprit fell back from the icy flesh to show a small mark on the inside of the elbow, like the puncture of a needle. “Was her sleeve unfastened like this when you found her, Lionel?”
He shook his head heavily. “God’s body, I know not! As if I hadn’t aught else to look for but…”
“Yes, it was,” Anthea replied. “Why?”
“Because there’s a wound here—look.”
They gathered close, Ysidro rising from his chair and even Ernchester stumbling out of his shocked lethargy to look around his tall wife’s shoulder.
“It has to have been done as she died, or after,” Simon said after a moment, his long fingers brushing the pinched flesh. “Something that small would heal almost instantly on one of us. See?” With unconcerned deftness he drew the pearl-headed stick pin from his gray silk cravat and plunged its point deep into his own wrist. When he withdrew it, a bead of blood came up like a ruby, and he wiped it away with a fastidious handkerchief. Asher had a momentary glimpse of a tiny hole, which closed up again, literally before his eyes.
“She’d no such thing when she were made,” Grippen put in, leaning close, his words weighted with the nauseating reek of blood. Asher realized the master vampire musthave fed while he and Ysidro were waiting for him to finish with the police at Charing Cross; it had become, to him, a matter of almost academic note. “I knew every inch of her body and ’twas flawless as mapping linen.”
He looked sidelong at Asher, grayish, gleaming eyes full of intelligent malice. “We are as we were when we were made, sithee. I’d this…” He held out a square, hairy hand, to show a faint scar cutting over the back of it. “…from carving an abscess out of a damned Lombard’s thigh, and the clothhead fighting the scalpel every inch of the way, damn him.”
“Like Dante’s damned,” Ysidro murmured lightly, “we are eternally renewed from the cuts we receive in Hell.” Ernchester covered his face and looked away.
“Interesting.” Asher turned his attention back to the white arm in its slender shroud of lace. “It’s as if her blood were drawn with a needle, as well as drunk.”
“A frugal villain.”
“Not so frugal, if he’s in the habit of slaughtering nine men in a night.” Anthea’s dark brows pulled together in a frown.
“His human friend, then?”
“What use would a living man have for a vampire’s blood?”
Grippen shrugged. “An he were an alchemist. I’d have sold much for it, in the days when my own veins weren’t bursting with the stuff…”
“An alchemist,” Asher said slowly, remembering Lydia strolling along the rocky brink of a lake of boiling blood, a beaker in her hand. Reaching down to dip it full … I wanted to examine him medically, she had said … The articles about blood viruses in her rooms …
“Or a doctor.” He looked up again at them grouped behind him—Ysidro, Grippen, and the vampire Countess ofErnchester. ‘Take me back to Lydia’s rooms. There’s something there I need to see.”
“A doctor would have the equipment for drawing blood, and for storing it once it was drawn.” Seated at Lydia’s desk, Asher leafed unhandily through the chaos of notes and lists in his wife’s sprawling script, picking up and discarding them and searching under the heaped papers for more. He was so tired his flesh ached, but he felt, as he often had in the midst of his work abroad or on a promising track in some research library in Vienna or Warsaw, an odd, fiery lightness that made such consideration academic.
“This is somewhat embarrassing,” Ysidro remarked, studying the Ordnance Survey map on the wall with its clusterings of colored pins. “I had no idea you hunted so much to a pattern, Lionel.”
“’Tisn’t I as leaves my carrion where it may be fallen over by girls out amaying,” Grippen retorted, turning the newspaper clippings over roughly. “‘Bermondsey Slasher,’ forsooth!”
“I think that was Lotta.” Ysidro walked over to where Asher had turned his attention to the pile of medical journals on the bed, opening them to the marked articles and taking mental note of the topics: Some Aspects of Blood Pathology; Psychic Phenomena, Heredity or Hoax; Breeding a Better Briton. “What would a doctor want with a vampire?”
“Study,” Asher replied promptly. “You have to make allowance for the scientific mind—if Lydia met you, she’d be pestering you for a sample of your blood within the first five minutes.”
“Sounds like Hyacinthe,” Ysidro remarked. “It still does not explain how such a partnership commenced—why a vampire would work for a human, doctor though he may be…”
“No?” Asher looked up from the stiff pages of the journals. “I can think of only one reason a vampire would go into partnership with a doctor and would reveal to him who and what he was—the same reason you went into partnership with me. Because he needed his services.”
“Balderdash,” Grippen snarled, stepping close to tower over him. “We’re free of mortal ills…”
“What about immortal ones?” Asher cut him off. “If the virus of vampirism began to change, began to mutate, either as the result of long-ago exposure to the Plague or from some other cause…”
“Virus forsooth! Ills have root in the humors of the body…”
“Then if the humors of the vampire flesh slipped out of true,” Asher continued smoothly, “what could a vampire do? Say a vampire who had lived in secret, even from other vampires—or any vampire, for that matter—if he found himself suddenly, frenziedly craving the blood of other vampires or knew himself in danger of going on rampages for human blood, as you said was an occasional symptom that developed in a few of those who had been exposed to the Plague. If he found himself transforming, day by day, into the thing I saw at your house, Grippen—if he knew such a course would inevitably lead to his destruction—wouldn’t it be logical for him to seek help wherever he could find it?”
Grippen looked uncomfortable and angry, black brow lowering like a goaded bull’s; beside him, Ysidro’s face was inscrutable as always.
“It might account for the renewed sensitivity to silver,” the Spaniard remarked. “Certainly for the wounds caused in his own flesh by the growth of his fangs. And you think this vampire, whoever he was, chose his physician in thesame fashion in which I chose you—through journal articles?”
“He must have,” Asher said. “Depending on who it is, he may be forcing the doctor to work as you are forcing me—with a threat against the life of someone he cares for. Maybe that isn’t even necessary. Some doctors would welcome the chance to do research on an unknown virus and wouldn’t care that they were working for a killer. Or maybe,” he added pointedly, his gaze suddenly locking with Ysidro’s, “like Calvaire’s friends, he’s under the impression that he’ll win, and that his partner won’t kill him when it’s over.”
Ysidro’s chilly eyes returned his gaze blandly. “I am sure he is quite safe so long as there is a use for him.” He turned away and began sorting through the papers scattered across the bed. “And I take it Mistress Lydia discovered the medical partner in the same fashion? Through the journals?”
“I think so.” Asher returned to his own examination, flipping the pages awkwardly with his single good hand. “She may only have had a list of suspects and was visiting them one by one. It would account for her not taking her weapons—the silver knife, the revolver, or the silver nitrate …”
“Silver ni
trate?” Ysidro looked up from a list he’d fished from the floor. “Pox,” he added mildly. “I see we’re all going to have to go through the tiresome business of changing residences again. Do you really own a place on Caswell Court under the name of Bowfinch, Lionel?”
“None o’ your business an I do!”
“Filthy neighborhood, anyway. Gin shops everywhere—you can’t feed without getting stinking drunk in the process. This one doesn’t look familiar…”
“’Twas one of Danny’s.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t get fleas. As for the one inHoxton, I wouldn’t be buried there, much less sleep the day. Where would she get silver nitrate?”
Asher nodded toward the little velvet box. Ysidro picked up the hypodermic gingerly, but did not touch the gleaming crystal ampoules. “As a doctor, she’d have access to it—it’s used as an antiseptic, I think. I do know most doctors carry it in small quantities.”
“This is scarce a small quantity,” the vampire remarked, setting the syringe back in its case. “That much must have cost a pretty penny.”
“I expect it did,” Asher said. “But Lydia’s an heiress and she’s always had control of her own money—though I suspect her father wouldn’t have settled it that way if she’d married someone more respectable than a penniless junior don at her uncle’s college. I expect she thought to inject the silver nitrate intravenously. It would certainly kill a human, let alone a vampire. It was naïve of her,” he added quietly. “A vampire’s psychic field alone would prevent her from getting that close, and she obviously had no idea of how quickly a vampire can strike.”
“Here’s more of the curst things.” Grippen came over, carrying a pile of journals which had been stacked on the bureau.
Asher flipped open the dog-eared pages. Viral Mutation. Interaction of Viruses in a Medium. The Pathology of Psychic Phenomena. Eugenics for National Defense. Physical Origins of So-Called Psychic Powers. Isolating a Viral Complex in a Serum Medium.
He paused, and leafed back through the articles again.
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