Those Who Hunt the Night(10)

“I don’t think so,” she said now, shaking back the clouds of her sleeve-lace and pushing up her specs. “Could a vampire go on a reducing diet? There isn’t any fat in blood.”

Her mind scouted the thought while Asher hid his grin behind a cup of coffee.

She unwrapped the two vertebrae from James’ handkerchief, and held them to the slowly brightening light of the window. Third and fourth cervical, badly charred andoddly decomposed, but, as James had described, the scratch on the bone was clearly visible. “There must be tissue repair of some kind, you know,” she went on, wetting her finger to rub some of the soot away, “if Don Simon’s burns ‘took years to heal.’ I wonder what causes the combustion? Though there are stories of spontaneous human combustion happening in very rare instances to quite ordinary people—if they were ordinary, of course. Did you get a look at the coffin lining? Was it burned away, too?”

Asher’s thick brows pulled together as he narrowed his eyes, trying to call back the details of that silent charnel house. He hadn’t had medical training, but, Lydia had found, he had the best eye for detail she had ever encountered in a world that ignored so much. He would be that way, she thought, even if his life hadn’t depended on it for so many years.

“Not burned away, no,” he said after a moment. “The lining at the bottom was corroded and stained, almost down to the wood; charred and stained to a few inches above where the body would come on the sides. The clothes, flesh, and hair had been entirely destroyed.”

“Color of the stains?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t see by lantern light.”

“Hmn.” She paused in thought, then began patting and shaking the pillows, comforter, and beribboned froth of shams around her, looking for her magnifying glass—she was sure she’d been using it to peruse some dissecting-room drawings the other night in bed.

“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 cuttingbone. 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 tightening 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 mendo 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 momentarilytoo 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 moreand 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.