James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (7 page)

“Night stand?” Asher suggested helpfully. She fished it out to look more closely at the third cervical.

“This was done with one stroke.” She held it out—he leaned across to take it and the glass and studied it in his turn. “Something very sharp, with a drawing stroke: a cleaver or a surgical knife. Something made for cutting bone. Whoever used it knew what he was doing.”

“And wasn't about to lose his nerve over severing a woman's head,” Asher added thoughtfully, setting aside the bone. “He'd already killed three other vampires, of course. Presumably whatever started him on his hunt for vampires was enough to overcome his revulsion, if he felt any, the first time—and after that, he'd have proof that they do in fact exist and must be destroyed.” As he spoke, he tugged gently on the faded silk ribbons of the old reticule, coaxing it open in a dry whisper of cracking silk.

“Surely the mere circumstances of their loved one's death would have proved that.” When James didn't answer, she looked up from examining the oddly dissolved-looking bone. What she saw in his face—in his eyes, like a burned-on reflection of things he had seen—caused the same odd little lightening within her that she'd felt when she was four and had awakened in the night to realize there was a huge rat in her room and that it was between her and the door.

Slowly he said, “If that's the reason behind the killings, yes. But I think there's more to it than that—and I don't know what. If Ysidro's telling the truth, vampires can generally see ordinary mortals coming,” if he was telling the truth. It might have been a lie to make you keep your distance, you know.“ She shook one long, delicate finger at him and mimicked, ” 'Don't you try nuthin' wi' me, bucko, 'cos we'll see you comin',' "

“You haven't seen him in action.” The somberness fled from his eyes as he grinned at himself. “That's the whole point, I suppose: nobody sees them in action. But no. I believe him. His senses are preternaturally sharp—he can count the people in a train coach by the sound of their breathing, see in the dark . . . Yet the whole time I was with him, I could feel him listening to the wind. I've seen men do that when they think they're being followed, but can't be sure. He hides it well, but he's afraid.”

“Well, it does serve him right,” Lydia observed. She hesitated, turning the vertebra over and over in her fingers, not looking at it now any more than she looked at the grass stems she plucked when she was nervous. She swallowed hard, trying to sound casual and not succeeding. “How much danger am I in?”

“Quite a lot, I think.” He got up and came around to sit on the pillows beside her; his arm in its white shirt sleeve was sinewy and strong around her shoulders. Her mother's anxious coddling—not to mention the overwhelming chivalry of a number of young men who seemed to believe that, because they found her pretty, she would automatically think them fascinating—had given Lydia a horror of clinginess. But it was good to lean into James' strength, to feel the warmth of his flesh through the shirt sleeve, the muscle and rib beneath that nondescript tweed waistcoat, and to smell ink and book dust and Macassar oil. Though she knew objectively that he was no more able to defend either of them against this supernatural danger than she was, she cherished the momentary illusion that he would not let her come to harm. His lips brushed her hair. “I'm going to have to go down to London again,” he said after a few minutes, “to search for the murderer and to pursue investigations as to the whereabouts of the other vampires in London. If I can locate where they sleep, where they store their things, where they hunt, it should give me a weapon to use against them. It's probably best that you leave Oxford as well . . .”

“Well, of course!” She turned abruptly in the circle of his arm, the fragile suspension of disbelief dissolving like a cigarette genie with the opening of a door. “I'll come down to London with you. Not to stay with you,” she added hastily, as his mouth opened in a protest he was momentarily too shocked to voice. “I know that would put me in danger, if they saw us together. But to take rooms near yours, to be close enough to help you, if you need it . . .”

“Lydia . . . !”

Their eyes met. She fought to keep hers from saying Don't leave me, fought even to keep herself from thinking it or from admitting to a fear that would only make things harder for him. She squared her pointed little chin. “And you will need it,” she said reasonably. “If you're going to be investigating the vampire murders, you won't have time to go hunting through the public records for evidence of where the vampires themselves might be living, not if Don Simon wants to see results quickly. And we could meet in the daytime, when—when they can't see us. If what you say about them is true, I'd be in no more danger in London than I would be in Oxford—or anywhere else, really. And in London you would be closer, in case of . . .” She shied away from saying it. “Just in case.”

He looked away from her, saying nothing for a time, just running the dry ribbons of the vampire's reticule through the fingers of his free hand. “Maybe,” he said after a time. “And it's true I'll need a researcher who believes . , . You do believe they're really vampires, don't you?” His eyes came back to hers. She thought about it, turning that odd, anomalous chunk of bone over and over in her lap. James was one of the few men to whom she knew she could say anything without fear of either shock, uncertain laughter, or—worse—that blankly incomprehending stare that young men gave her when she made some straight-faced joke.

“Probably as much as you do,” she said at last. “That is, there's a lot of me that says, ”This is silly, there's no such thing.' But up until a year or so ago, nobody believed there was such a thing as viruses, you know. We still don't know what they are, but we do know now they exist, and more and more are being discovered ... A hundred years ago, they would have said it was silly to believe that diseases were caused by little animals too small to see, instead of either evil spirits or an imbalance of bodily humors—which really are more logical explanations, when you think of it. And there's something definitely odd about this bone."

She took a deep breath and relaxed as her worst fear—the fear of being left alone while her fate was decided elsewhere and by others— receded into darkness. James, evidently resigned to his fate, took his arm from around her shoulders and began picking out the reticule's contents, laying them on the lace of the counterpane—yellowing bills, old theater programmes folded small, appointment cards, invitations— in his neat, scholarly way.

“Are you going to get in touch with the killer?”

“I certainly intend to try.” He held up an extremely faded calling card to the light. “But I'll have to go very carefully. The vampires will know it's a logical alliance to make . . . What is it?”

Against his side, through the bed, he had felt her start.

Lydia dropped the card she had been looking at, her hand shaking a little with an odd sort of shock, as if she'd seen someone she knew . . . Which, she reflected, was in a way exactly what had happened. She didn't know what to say, how to define that sense of helpless hurt, as if she'd just seen a very brainless cat walk straight into the savaging jaws of a dog.

He had already picked up the card and was reading the assignation on the back. Then he flipped it over to see the front, where the name of the Honorable Albert Westmoreland was printed in meticulous copperplate.

“I knew him,” Lydia explained, a little shakily. “Not well—he was one of Uncle Ambrose's students when I was still in school. His father was a friend of Papa's in the City.”

“One of your suitors?” The teasing note he sometimes had when speaking of her suitors was absent. She had had flocks of them, due in pan to the Willoughby fortune, which had paid for this house and everything in it, and in part to her waiflike charm. After being told for years that she was ugly, she enjoyed their attentions and enjoyed flirting with them—though not as much as she enjoyed a good, solid analysis of nervous lesions—and charming people had become second nature to her. A just girl, she didn't hold it against those earnest young men that they'd frequently bored her to death, but the distinction was something her father had never been able to grasp. With Baptista-like faith in man's ability to change a woman's personality, he had encouraged them all, never, until the last, losing his touching hope that he'd see his wayward daughter marry her way into the peerage,

She smiled a little, mostly at the recollection of her father's face when she'd announced her intention to marry a middle-aged Lecturer in Philology without an “Honorable” to his name, and shook her head. “He was already engaged to Lord Carringford's daughter. But he was in their set. So I saw him a good deal. I knew—well, nobody spoke of it before me, of course, and Nanna would have killed them if they had, but I guessed that when they went larking about in town it wasn't with girls like me. I remember Dennis Blaydon coming round and telling me Bertie had died.”

She shivered, and he drew her close again, his hand warm and strong on her shoulder. Oddly enough, the news hadn't upset her much at the time, though she'd felt shocked and sad, for Bertie had been the first contemporary, the first of her set, who had died. Even then, she had been familiar with death—old Horace Blaydon, chief Lecturer in Pathology at Radclyffe, had said it was positively indecent to watch her carve up cadavers—but it was different, it seemed, when it was someone you knew. Dennis, she recalled, had done his best to comfort her, with disappointing results, “Did he say how?”

She shook her head. “But it was very sudden. I remember thinking I'd seen him only a few weeks before, when all their set went down to watch Dennis play in the rugger match against Kings. Poor Bertie.” The memory made her smile again wanly. “The Honorable Bertie—he made straight for the shadiest seat and spent the whole time being terrified the bench would leave spots on his trousers, lemonade would drip onto his sleeve, or his buttonhole would wilt. His brother, the Equally Honorable Evelyn, was on the Gloucester side and nearly died of embarrassment.”

What a thing to be remembered for, she thought. She wondered if he had cried out, if he had known what was happening to him, or if this vampire woman had taken him in his sleep, as Ysidro could so easily have done to them all. Her hand closed tighter around James'. After a very long silence, she asked, “Can we meet in the daytime?” “I don't know,” he said quietly. “Not safely, I don't think. The killer can be about by day, even if the vampires can't. Until I can contact him —talk to him—see how and why he's doing this—I don't want anyone knowing where to get at you.” His arm tightened a little around her, his fingers feeling hers, gently, as if treasuring even the bones within her thin flesh. She felt the tension in his body and turned to look up into his face.

“And it isn't only that,” he said. “There's something Ysidro isn't telling me, Lydia, something critical. Whatever he says, he'd be a fool to hire a human; and whatever else he is, Don Simon Ysidro isn't a fool. He had a reason beyond what he's telling me. And whatever that reason is—whatever it is that he knows—it's the first thing I'm going to have to find out if either of us is going to make it to Guy Fawkes' Day alive.”

Before noon Asher was on his way back to London. Over breakfast he had informed Ellen and Mrs. Grimes that the night's events had left Lydia in such a state of nervous prostration that he thought it better to arrange for her to see a specialist in London, a story which disgusted the phlegmatic Lydia and puzzled Ellen. “She was fine, Mr. Asher, sir, indeed she was, when she woke up me and Cook. And she's never been one to take on.”

“Well, Fve just spent the morning with her, and, believe me, she needs to see a specialist,” Asher said firmly. Twenty-four hours without sleep on top of the events and exertions of the night had left him in no mood for invention.

Ellen had regarded his pallor and his dark-circled eyes with deep disapproval. “It isn't my place to say so, sir, but if anyone needs a nerve doctor ...”

“No, it isn't your place to say so,” Asher retorted, draining his coffee. “So just assist Mrs. Asher to pack her things, and I'll be back to fetch her this evening.” It would probably take that long, he reflected bemusedly, for Lydia to assemble everything she considered essential for a few weeks in London.

The mere thought of another train trip before nightfall made his bones ache, but no husband as worried about the state of his wife's health as he currently purported to be would entrust her on the journey with no other escort than her maid. Besides, once in London it would be difficult to get rid of Ellen, who, in addition to being more intelligent than she sometimes seemed, was incurably inquisitive.

Why was it, Asher wondered, crossing the Magdalen Bridge on his way out of Oxford a short time later, that qualities deemed laudable in anyone else were nothing but a damned nuisance in servants? Past the bridge's gray stone balustrade, he had a flying glimpse of the tops of the willows and a distant fragment of brown-green waters; he recalled Ysidro's words about teak and cottonwood and smiled in spite of himself. Coming off the bridge, he veered onto St. Clement's Street, which led through wooded byways toward the green rise of the downs.

In preference to another two hours on the Great Western, he had elected to take his motorcycle down to London, a five horsepower American V-twin Indian that had always been a bone of contention between himself and the other dons. There were Lecturers of All Souls and Fellows of Christ Church who might possess motorcars, but, it was implied, such things were thought to be far more typical of Cambridge men. To own a motorcycle, much less ride it through the countryside, was generally looked upon as scarcely above the level of an undergraduate. Out of deference for his colleagues' sensibilities, as well as for his own reputation of mild harmlessness—to say nothing of what such behavior would do to his academic gown—Asher did not generally ride within the Town itself.

At the moment, however, time was of the essence. There were things which needed to be arranged while the sun was yet in the sky and Ysidro and the other vampires safely asleep in their coffins, and the quickest way to London was over the downs and through High Wycombe. The road was execrable, potholed and unpaved in places and awash in yellowish mud which liberally splattered his boots, leather jacket, goggles, and hair. But their silence enfolded him. For the first time he was alone, in that vast stillness of rolling chalk hills and hair-fine, dull-olive turf, to think and to plan, and the stillness seeped imperceptibly into thought and muscle and soul, like salve on a burn.