Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “It is not simply a matter of refusal.”

  “Lying won’t help you, you know…”

  “No more than lying to yourself helps you, Professor.” Behind that unemotional tone, Asher detected the faintest echo of a human sigh. Blaydon backed a few steps away, brandishing his gun.

  “But if that is your choice, I shall have to take what measures I can…”

  “More humans?” Asher inquired. “More of those you consider unfit?”

  “It’s to save my son!” The old man’s voice cracked with desperation, and he fought to bring it to normal again. Rather shakily, he added, “And also for the good of the country. Once we have the experiment under control…”

  “Good God, man, you don’t mean you’re going on with it!” Truly angry, Asher jerked himself to a sitting position, his back to the planed mahogany of the coffin. “Because of your failure, your own son is rotting to pieces under your eyes and you propose to go on with it?”

  Blaydon strode forward and struck Asher across the face with the barrel of the gun, knocking him sprawling. Ysidro, impassive, merely moved his foot aside so that Asher wouldn’t fall across it and watched the enraged pathologist with only the mildest of interest as he stepped back and picked up the lamp.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way about it,” Blaydon said quietly, the lamplight jerking with the angry trembling of his hands. “You, Don Simon, because I’m going to have tokeep you fed and healthy while I take your blood for experiments, until I can locate another vampire more compliant. You, James, because I think I’m going to have to force either you or your wife to tell me where her rooms were in the city—she refused to do so, and, of course, Dennis wouldn’t hear of me forcing her—so that I can find her notes on her researches…”

  “Don’t be naïve,” Ysidro sighed. “Grippen put them all on the fire before he left Lydia’s rooms last night.”

  “Then I shall have to get Mrs. Asher to tell me herself,” Blaydon said. “Now that I have James here, that shouldn’t be too difficult. I think Dennis will even rather enjoy it.”

  Keeping his gun trained on Ysidro, he backed out the door.

  “Don’t trip over your son on the way out,” the vampire remarked derisively as the door closed upon the amber radiance of the lamplight and the bolts slid home.

  A west wind had been blowing all day, and the night outside was clear. Leaky white moonlight added somewhat to the faint glow of the gas lamps visible beyond the garden wall. With his usual languid grace, Ysidro unfolded his thin legs and rose from the coffin lid, knelt beside Asher, and stooped to bite through the ropes that bound his wrists. Asher felt the cold touch of bloodless lips against the veins of his left wrist and the scrape of teeth. Then the ropes were pulled away. The pain in his right arm almost made him sick as Ysidro brought it gently around and installed it in its sling again.

  “You think he was listening?”

  “Of course he was listening.” The vampire twisted the slack of the ankle ropes between his white hands, and the strands parted with a snap. “He was right outside the door; he never even went into the garden, though a vampire of his abilities certainly could have heard us from there, had he chosen to listen, soundproofing or no soundproofing.”

  With light strength, he helped Asher to sit on the coffin lid, while he prowled like a faded tomcat to the room’s single window, keeping a wary distance from the silver bars. “Triple glazed,” he remarked briefly. “Wired glass, too. We might wrench the lock free, could we get past the bars to get some kind of purchase on it…”

  “Do you think he followed us in the mews?”

  “I am sure of it. I felt—sensed—I don’t know. A presence in the night, once or twice … He took me from behind, before I even knew he was there.” He tilted his head, angling to see if he could reach through to the lock, his hooked profile white against the darkness outside, like a colorless orchid. “But I had been listening for days for things I am not certain I ever truly heard. Fear makes it very difficult to judge.” Asher wondered how long it had been since Ysidro had admitted to fear. Looking at that slender, insubstantial shape in its white shirt, gray trousers, and vest, he had the odd sense that he was dealing now with the original Don Simon Ysidro, rather than with the vampire the man had become.

  “Merde alors.” Ysidro stepped back from the bars, shaking a burned finger. “Curious that Blaydon did not wish his son to learn how vampires are made. It is a sensible precaution to keep him under his control, but…” He paused, tipping his head a little to listen. “He’s gone.”

  He had not needed to speak; for the last few moments, Asher had heard Blaydon’s hurrying steps vibrating the floors of the house, his querulous voice calling dimly, “Dennis? Dennis…”

  Cold flooded over him as he suddenly understood.

  “He’s gone to get Lydia.”

  Then the cold was swept away by a heat of rage that burned out all pain, all exhaustion, and all despair.

  “That’s why he listened. He wanted to know how to create a fledgling.”

  “Sangre de Dios.” In a single fluid move Ysidro stripped out of his gray waistcoat, wrapping it around his hand. Asher, knowing already what the vampire meant to do, clumsily unslung his arm and pulled off his own. It was gone from his grasp before he was aware the vampire had moved; Ysidro was back at the window, using the fabric to muffle his hands against the silver of the bars. For a moment he strained, shadows jumping on the ropy white muscle of his forearms, then he let go of the bars and backed away, rubbing his hands as if in pain.

  “No good. Metallurgy has vastly improved since the days when we had the strength of ten, and I cannot grip them long enough. If we could dig into the masonry around them and dislodge them…”His pale gaze flicked swiftly around the prison, touching Asher. “Curst be the man who decreed gentlemen should wear braces and not belts with large, fierce metal buckles, as they did in my day…”

  “He’d have taken them.” Asher was kneeling beside the coffin. “He thought of that. The handles have been removed. I noticed when I opened it that there were no corner braces or other metal fittings.”

  Ysidro cursed dispassionately, archaically, and in several languages. Asher eased his arm gingerly back into its sling, and remembered the isolation of that big house on the downs, miles from the nearest habitation. “Dennis must know it’s the only way he’ll have her now.”

  “If it works,” the vampire said, not moving, but his eyes traveling again over the room. “If, as you think, the vampire state is caused by organisms—which I myself do not believe—it may still not be transmittable in this artificial form, even by a master who understands what he is doing, a description that scarcely fits our friend.”

  “That doesn’t mean he won’t kill her trying.” Anger filled him at his own helplessness, at Blaydon, at Dennis, at Ysidro, and at the other vampires who were hiding Godknew where. “Maybe I can reach the lock … if we could force it, we could call for help…”

  “Your fingers would not have the strength to pull it from the casement.”

  Asher cursed, then said, “How soon can he get there? It’s forty miles or so to the Peaks—he obviously can’t take the train…”

  “He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays…”

  “Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”

  “Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics. Where is this place? I was unaware there were peaks of any sort on this island�
��”

  “There aren’t. It’s in the chalk downs back of Oxford, sheep country. Blaydon’s wife’s father built the place when he came into his money in the forties. Blaydon stayed there ’til his wife died. He had rooms at his college when he was teaching…”

  “You know the way, then?” Ysidro was working at the window, his hands muffled in both waistcoats against accidental contact with the bars. The harsh scrape of metal on cement was like the steady rasping of a saw.

  “Of course. I was there a number of times, though not in the past seven years.”

  The vampire paused, listening. A dim vibration throughthe floor spoke of a door closing. Softly Ysidro said, “He is in the garden now, calling; he sounds afraid.” Their eyes met, Asher’s hard with rage, Ysidro’s inscrutable. Listen as he would, Asher heard no sound of the house door closing, or of returning footfalls on floor or stair. “He’s gone.”

  Impossibly swift and strong, Ysidro resumed his digging, while he petitioned God to visit Blaydon’s armpits with the lice of a shipful of sailors, and his belly with worms, in the archaic, lisping Spanish of the conquistadors. Switching to English, he added, “We can get horses from the mews…”

  “A motorcycle will be faster, and we won’t need remounts. Mine’s in the shed at my lodgings; I’ve tinkered with it enough that it’s more reliable than most.” With his good hand and his teeth, Asher gingerly tightened the bandages around his splints, sweat standing out suddenly on his forehead with the renewed shock of the pain. “Do you need help?”

  “What I need is an iron crow and a few slabs of guncotton, not the problematical assistance of a crippled old spy. Unless you have suddenly acquired the ability to bend steel bars, stay where you are and rest.”

  Asher was only too glad to do so. The swelling had spread up his arm nearly to the elbow; he felt dizzy and a little sick. He could still flex his first two fingers after a fashion—enough, he hoped, to work the throttle lever on the Indian, at any rate.

  How fast could a vampire run? He’d seen Ysidro and Grippen move with incredible swiftness. Could that speed be sustained, as Ysidro said, untiring through the night? The scraping of the metal continued … It seemed to be taking forever.

  “Dios!” Simon stepped back from the window, shaking loose the cloth from around his hands and rubbing his wrists. His teeth gritting against the pain, he said, “The baris loose but I cannot grip it. My hands weaken already; that much silver burns, even through the cloth.”

  “Here.” Asher kicked off his other shoe out of the irrational human dislike of uneven footgear, and came to the window. The bar was very loose in the socket, now chipped away from the cement; with his single good hand, he shifted it back and forth, twisting and pulling until it came free. Ysidro wrapped his arm again, and gingerly angled it through to tear off the window’s complicated latch and force the casement up.

  “Can you get through that?”

  Asher gauged the resultant gap. “I think so.”

  It was a difficult wriggle, with one arm barely usable and nothing on the other side but the narrow ledge. The vampire steadied and braced him through as best he could, but once his arm inadvertently brushed one of the remaining bars, and Asher felt the grip spasm and slack. “It’s all right, I’ve got a footing,” he said and received only a faint gasp in reply. He slipped as quickly as he dared along the ledge to the laboratory window, the cold air biting fiercely through his shirt-sleeved arms and stockinged feet, and through the house as he had before, to undo the bolts of the steel-sheathed door.

  Ysidro had resumed his creased waistcoat, but his long, slim hands were welting up in what looked like massive burns. The fingers shook as Asher knotted both their handkerchiefs around the swellings, to keep the air from the raw, blistering flesh. As he worked, he said rapidly, “Blaydon will have money in the study. We’ll get a cab to Bloomsbury—there’s a stand on Harley Street…”

  “It is past midnight already.” Ysidro flexed his hands carefully and winced. “You will be taking your lady away with you on this motorcycle of yours. Is there a place on these downs where I can go to ground, if the daylight overtakes us while we are there?”

  Asher shook his head. “I don’t know. The nearest town’s eight miles away and it’s not very large.”

  Ysidro was quiet for a moment, then shrugged with his mobile, colorless brows. “The village church, perhaps. There are always village churches. James…”

  He turned, as Asher strode past him into the prison room again and over to the window where the detached window bar lay shining frostily in the square of moonlight on the floor. It was two and a half feet long, steel electroplated with silver, and heavy as a large spanner—or crow, as Ysidro called it—in his hand. Asher hefted it and looked back at the vampire who stood like a disheveled ghost against the blackness of the doorway.

  Picking his words as if tiptoeing through a swamp, Ysidro said, “Did Dennis bring you here, as he did me? Or did you come of your own accord, looking for me at daybreak?”

  “I came looking for you.”

  “That was stupid…” He hesitated, for a moment awkward and oddly human in the face of saying something he had not said in many hundreds of years and perhaps, Asher thought, never. “Thank you.”

  “I’m in your service,” Asher reminded him, and walked back to the door, silver bar like a gleaming club in his hand. “And,” he added grimly, “we haven’t scotched this killer yet.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “COULD HE HAVE beaten us here?” Asher kicked the Indian’s engine out of gear as they came around the side of the hill into full view of the Peaks’ wall and lodge gate; as on most motorcycles, the brake wasn’t very strong. The moon had set; it was hard to keep the tires out of ruts only dimly seen. He didn’t bother to whisper. If Dennis was there already, he’d have picked up the sound of the engine miles away.

  “I’m not sure.” Ysidro’s arms were like whalebone and thin cable around Asher’s waist, his body a skeletal lightness against the leather of the jacket. Asher wasn’t sure whether a living man could have kept his seat on the narrow carrier as they’d come up the winding road from Wycombe Parva. “As Burger—quoted by the invaluable Mr. Stoker—has observed, ‘Die Todten reiten schnell’—the dead travel fast.”

  Asher braked gently, easing the machine to a stop in front of the iron spears of the locked gates. Through them he could see the house, a rambling pseudo-Gothic monstrosityof native brick and hewn stone appropriated from some ruined building closer to Oxford, dark against the dim shapes of the naked beeches of the park and the vast swell of the down behind. The unkempt lawn was thick with weeds, and the woods that lay to the south and east of the house were already making their first encroachments of broom sedge and elder saplings. The place had probably housed no more than a caretaker since Blaydon had closed it up after his wife’s death three years ago, and it was obvious that not even a caretaker dwelt here now.

  He’d probably been turned off when Dennis first began to change, Asher thought, and anger stirred him again at Blaydon’s stupid irresponsibility. Had anything gone amiss, from a gas leak to an omnibus accident in London, Lydia would have been condemned to death here without anyone being the wiser.

  Except Dennis, of course.

  “So in other words, he could be waiting for us in the house?” He dismounted, and Ysidro sprang off lightly. Behind the long, wind-frayed curtain of hair, the vampire’s eyes were sparkling, and Asher had the impression that he had found this mode of travel greatly to his taste.

  “Or hard upon our heels.” Ysidro stooped, bracing his bandaged hands on bent knees. Asher pushed up his goggles, leaned the bike against the wall, unlashed the silvered steel bar from the handlebars, and hung it around his own neck. Using Ysidro’s back as a step, he could reach the top corners of the rustic stone gateway, to scramble over the six-foot palings. He had scarcely dropped to the drive on the other side when Ysidro appeared, palely silhouetted against the uneasy darkness, and sprang down with
out a sound to his side. At his lodgings, Asher had paused only long enough to don his boots, goggles, and leather jacket, for the night was freezing cold; Ysidro in his open shirt seemed to feel nothing.

  “Thus I do not suggest we divide to search.”

  “Can you hear anything from here?” Asher asked.

  The vampire shut his eyes, listening intently to the half-heard muttering of the wind in the autumn woods. “Not clearly,” he murmured at last. “Yet the house is not empty—that I know.”

  Asher used his good hand to unsling the bar from around his neck. Scudding overcast was beginning to cover the sky. Through it, the house was a barely seen shape of gray, dotted with the black of windows, disturbingly like some monster’s misshapen skull. “If he’s behind us, he may arrive on top of us before we’d finished reconnoitering,” he said grimly, striding up the ghostly stripe of the drive. “And if he’s there already—would you or I be able to see or hear him?”

  Asher knew the floor plan of the Peaks, though he’d never been more than a casual acquaintance of Blaydon’s. But most of the dons had received invitations at one time or another, and Asher had a field agent’s memory for such things. Every atom of his flesh shrank from entering the dark trap of those encircling walls without the usual preliminary checks. But there was no time, and they would, in any case, be useless.

  They skirted the lawn and garden to the kitchen yard, Ysidro leading the way across the leaf-strewn pavement. At this point, concealment was of no more use to them than whispering; they were either perfectly safe or beyond help. And if Dennis had not arrived before them—if they were, for the moment, safe—outdoors there was a remote chance that Ysidro’s vampire senses could detect his coming.

  In any case, the cellars were reached from the kitchen.

  The wind was rising, groaning faintly over the tops of the downs and stirring the dark hem of the woods a hundred feet from the house in a way Asher did not like.The stables stretched along one side of the yard, every door shut and bolted; the kitchen door was locked as well, but Asher drove his elbow through the window pane next to it and reached through to wrench over the latch. Beside him, he was aware of Ysidro listening, turning his head this way and that, the stray gusts flicking at his long hair, trying by some leap of the senses to detect the undetectable and to hear what was no more audible than the slow falling of dust.