Those Who Hunt the Night(13)

How much were the vampires capable of knowing or guessing about those who began to piece together their trails? Perhaps Lydia was right—perhaps the warning wasonly intended to keep him away. There must be very few relatives and friends of victims who looked past the comfort of the “logical explanation,” particularly, as Ysidro had pointed out, if there was no second set of suspicious circumstances to link it with. And yet …

He reminded himself firmly, as he joined the crowding throng on Euston Road, that Ysidro would have no way of knowing that he had gone up to Oxford and returned twice that day, instead of once. He might have guessed …

Asher shook his head firmly. He was exhausted past the point, he was beginning to suspect, of rational thought. He’d been without unbroken sleep for over thirty-six hours; he was starting at shadows. That queer prickling on the back of his neck was nerves, he told himself, not the instincts of years of the secret life whispering to him. His uneasiness was simply the result of knowing he might be watched, rather than a certainty that he was.

He slowed his steps. Casually, he scanned the hurrying line of traffic, the crowds jostling along in the glare of the gaslights—clerks and shopgirls bustling toward the Underground to catch the next train to whatever dreary suburb they called home, laborers eager for a cheap dinner of bubble and squeak and a few beers at the local pub. The gaslight was deceptive, making all faces queer, but he could see no sign of any whiter and more still than the rest.

Why, then, he wondered, did he have the growing conviction of missing something, the sensation of a blind spot somewhere in his mind?

At the corner, he crossed Gower Street, walking down its western side, casually scanning the stream of traffic passing before the long line of Georgian shops. There were a number of motorbuses and lorries, an omnibus and motorized cabs, and horse trams with gaudy advertising posters on their sides, but for the most part it was a crowding mêlée of horses and high wheels—delivery vans drawnby hairy-footed nags, open Victoria carriages, the closed broughams favored by doctors, and high-topped hansom cabs. He was very tired and his vision blurred; the glare of streetlight and shadow made it all the worse, but it would have to be risked. The traffic was thick and therefore not moving fast, except where an occasional cabby lashed his horse into a dash for a momentary hole. Well, there was always that chance …

Without warning, as he came opposite the turning of Little Museum Street that led to Prince of Wales Colonnade, Asher stepped sideways off the curb and plunged into the thick of the mêlée. With a shrill neigh, a cab horse pulled sideways nearly on top of him. Hooters and curses in exotic dialect—What was a Yorkshireman doing driving a cab in London? he wondered—pursued him across the road. The macadam was wet and slippery with horse dung; he ducked and wove between shifting masses of flesh, wood, and iron, and on the opposite side turned suddenly, looking back at the way he had come.

A costermonger’s horse in the midst of the road flung up its head and swerved; a motorcab’s brakes screeched. Asher wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a shadow flit through the glare of the electric headlamps.

Good, he thought, and turned down Little Museum Street, still panting from his exertions. Pit your immortality against that one, my haemophagic friend.

At Prince of Wales Colonnade he turned up the gas, leaving the window curtains open. He shed coat, bowler, scarf, and cravat and opened the valise he’d brought down from Oxford strapped to the narrow carrier of the motorcycle, now safely bestowed in a shed in the yard—half a dozen clean shirts, a change of clothing, clean collars, shaving tackle, and books. Whatever else he would need of the arcane paraphernalia of vampire-hunters, he supposed, could be purchased in London, and his ill-regulated imaginationmomentarily conjured a small shop in some dark street specializing in silver bullets, hawthorn stakes, and garlic. He grinned. With HARKER AND VAN HELSING painted above the door, presumably. Keeping himself in the line of sight of the window, he turned toward the dresser, frowned, and looked around as if something he had meant to bring were missing from its chipped marble top, then strode impatiently from the room.

He descended two flights of curving stairs at a silent run, and another to the basement. His landlady looked up, startled, as he passed the kitchen door, but he was already out in the tiny, sunken well of the areaway, standing on the narrow twist of moss-flecked stone steps to raise his eye level just above that of the pavement of the alley behind the house.

Evidently taken in by his feigned exit, the dark shape in the alley was still watching his lighted window. It stood motionless, nearly invisible in the dense gloom between the tall rows of houses; even so, he could make out the almost luminous whiteness of an unhuman face raised toward the light above. For a moment he kept his eyes on that dark form, scarcely daring to breathe, remembering the quickness of vampire hearing. Then, as if he had blinked, the figure was gone.

Thirty minutes later he had unpacked and put away the last of his things, changed clothes, and shaved. Though this refreshed him slightly, he still ached for sleep, feeling half-tempted to leave Ysidro to wait in his damp alley, if that was what he wanted to do, while he went to bed. But in that case, he was certain, the vampire would simply break in, Don Simon having apparently never heard that vampires could not enter any new place save at the bidding of one of its inhabitants.

On the other hand, Asher thought as he stepped fromthe lighted doorway of Number Six and strolled slowly up the pavement through the foggy darkness, what place in London could be called new? Six Prince of Wales Colonnade had obviously been standing since the latter days of George IV’s reign; his own house in Oxford since Anne’s. Don Simon Ysidro had been quietly killing in the streets of London since long before either place was built.

It crossed his mind to wonder about that ancient London—a thick gaggle of half-timbered houses, tiny churches, old stone monasteries near the river, and a dozen conflicting legal jurisdictions whose officers could not cross the street to apprehend criminals—a London whose jammed houses spilled across the bridge onto Southwark, with its cheap theaters where Shakespeare was learning his trade as an actor and cobbler-up of plays, and taverns where men who sailed with Francis Drake could be found drinking to the health of the red-haired queen …

“We cannot continue to meet this way,” purred a soft, familiar voice beside him. “People will begin to talk.”

Asher swung quickly around, cursing his momentary abstraction of mind. He was tired, true, but ordinarily he was more aware of someone that close to him.

Ysidro had fed; his face, though still pale, had lost the cold gleam that had caught Asher’s attention in the gloom of the alley. His black cloak half concealed sable evening dress; his stiff white shirt front was of silk, and several shades paler, now, than the skin tailored so delicately over his cheekbones. As always, he was bare-headed, the high horns of his forehead gleaming faintly as they passed beneath the lamps of the houses round the square. Pearl-gray gloves clasped the crystal head of a slender ebony stick.

“I had a good mind to let you wait in that alley,” Asher retorted. “You should know for yourself I’ll have nothing to report except that, as you’ve seen, I’ve taken roomshere.” He nodded back toward Number Six, indistinguishable from the other houses of the terrace, its glowing windows casting soft spangles of light on the trees of the narrow square across the street. “Now that we’ve spoken, I have every intention of going back to them and getting some sleep.”

“Alley?” The vampire tilted his head a little, a gesture somehow reminiscent of a mantis.

“You didn’t follow me as soon as it grew dark? Watch me from the alley while I was unpacking?”

Ysidro hesitated for a long moment, sifting through possible replies, picking and choosing what it was best to admit. Exasperated, Asher stopped upon the pavement and turned to face him. “Look. You don’t trust me, I know, and I’d certainly be a fool to trust you. But it’s you who’s in danger, not me, and unless you give me more information—unless you stop this endless game of ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ with anything I want to know—I won’t be able to help you.”

“Is helping us your object?” The vampire tipped his head to one side, looking up the handspan of difference in their heights. There was no hint of sarcasm in his tone—he asked as if truly interested in the answer.

“No,” said Asher bluntly. “But neither is killing you—not at the moment. You’ve made the stake pretty high for me. So be it. I’ve taken what precautions I can to keep Lydia safe, as you’ve probably guessed, and, believe me, it wasn’t easy to come up with answers to her questions about why she had to leave Oxford. But I can’t do anything until you’re willing to answer some questions so I’ll have something to work on.”

“Very well.” The vampire studied him for the count of several breaths, leisurely as if this quiet Bloomsbury square were a private room and entirely at his convenience.“I will meet you here tomorrow at this time, and we shall visit, as you say, the scene of the crime. As for what you saw in the alley…” His small silence lay in the conversation like a floating spot of light upon water, too deliberate to be called a hesitation; nothing in his face changed to indicate the flow of his thoughts. “That was not me.”