Those Who Hunt the Night(18)

Davies took a step closer. The smell of old blood in his clothes was repulsive. When he spoke his whisper was rank as a charnel house. “That toff Ysidro—he gone?”

Asher’s every sense of danger came alert. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said coldly. “He could have followed me back here. We parted rather abruptly. I haven’t seen or heard him, but then, one doesn’t.”

Bully Joe threw a swift glance around him, and Asher saw fear gleam in his bloodshot blue eyes. He edged closer still, his long-nailed fingers picking at Asher’s sleeve, his voice lowered to a hoarse breath. “Has he spoke of me?” he whispered. “Does he know of me?”

With an effort Asher kept the surge of overwhelming curiosity out of his voice. “Shouldn’t he?”

The hand closed around his arm, reminding Asher of that other tenet of vampire lore—that they had the strength of ten men. Ysidro certainly had. “If you speak of me, if you say aught of me, I’ll kill you,” Davies breathed. “They’d kill me, they would—Grippen, and that chilly Papistbastard Ysidro—if they knew about me, knew Calvaire had made me. First, I thought it was Grippen and the others what done for Calvaire. Then I heard them others had been killed—Neddy Hammersmith and Lottie. Christ, they was Grippen’s own get! Sodding bastard’d never kill his own! And now I’m being followed, being watched …”

“By whom?” Asher demanded sharply. “How do you know?”

“Dammit, you think I’d be askin’ a mortal man if I knowed that?” Bully Joe swung around, twisting his hands, his hard face contorting with rage rooted in fear, and Asher fought not to step away from him, not to show his own fear. “Summat’s after me, I tell you! And I hear the others talking—Coo, ain’t that a tickler? I can stand acrost the street in the shadows and hear every word they says! And they say there’s some bloke killin’ us wi’ a stake in the heart, just like in them old books, and lettin’ the sun in! You gotta protect me, same as you’re helpin’ the others…”

His hands closed around Asher’s sleeve again, and Asher thought fast. “I will protect you,” he said, “if you’ll help me, answer my questions. Who are you? Why do the others want to kill you?”

The calm authority in his voice seemed to quieten Davies, but the vampire’s reply was still sulky and impatient. “I told you, I’m Calvaire’s get. Grippen’s the Master of London. None of the others’ll dare get a fledgling wi’out his say-so. Grippen don’t want none in London but his own get, his own slaves …”

“But Calvaire wasn’t Grippen’s get.”

Davies shook his head, goaded, weary, confused. “Narh. He come in from Paris, he said, though he talked English like a regular man. He made me, said I’d live forever, have all the gelt I wanted, never die! He never said it’d be like this!” Desperation crept into his tone. “For amonth now I been livin’ from pillar to post, never sleepin’ the same place twicet! Hidin’ from Grippen, hidin’ from Ysidro … Calvaire said he’d take care of me, show me what I got to know! But it’s all gone wrong now! Everything’s all dinnin’ and burnin’ in my ears, smellin’ the blood of every livin’ soul…”

He broke off, licking his lips, his burning eyes fixing on Asher’s throat, like a drunkard forgetting his thought in midsentence. Slowly, thickly, he whispered, “I killed a girl last night—Chink girl, down by the Limehouse—and I don’t dare hunt another for a couple o’ days at least. But my brain’s burnin’ for it! I dunno how the others do it, kill and not get the flatties down on ’em…”

Asher felt the hand tighten again around his arm, begin to draw him inexorably closer to that twisted, fanged face. With deliberate calm, he asked, “And now you’re being followed?”

Davies flinched, as if he’d been shaken from sleep; he loosed his grip and stepped back, wiping his lips with a hand that shook. “I dunno,” he whispered. “Sometimes it’s like I can feel summat in the night, watchin’ me, and I’ll turn around and there’s nuthin’! Other times … I dunno.” He shook his head, his lip lifting back from stained yellow fangs.

“I don’t want to die! I died once already. I went through it with Calvaire! I wouldn’t of let him do this to me, ’cept that I didn’t want to die! Christ Jesus, I didn’t know it’d be like this!”

There was a noise at the end of the alley. Davies swung around, his hand tightening with bone-crushing force on Asher’s elbow. Through the pain, Asher was still interested to note that no sweat stood out on the vampire’s white face. A man and a teen-age boy stood momentarily framed in the lighter slot of the alley’s mouth, the boy looking coyly away as the man bent his head down. Then, as if theyheard Asher’s involuntary gasp of pain, they paused, peering sightlessly into the darkness. After an uneasy moment they moved away.

Davies let go of his arm, wiped his lips again. “I got to go,” he said, his voice thick.

It was Asher’s turn to catch at his sleeve. “Can you take me to Calvaire’s lodgings?”

“Not tonight.” The vampire glanced nervously around and flexed his big hands. “I ain’t killed yet tonight and I need it bad. Just bein’ this close to you turns my brain wi’ the wantin’ of it. Like me dad, when he gets the cravin’ for the gin.” He shot a quick, sullen glance at Asher, daring him to disapprove or to show fear.

Asher had dealt with enough drunkards and addicts to know that, if he did either, Bully Joe might very well kill him from sheer pique. He was uncomfortably aware, too, of Ysidro’s warning, and of how long the interview had lasted already. What effect would that psychic pungence have on a mind not oriented, not taught how to handle the influx of new sensation?

“Tomorrow night, then?”

“Late,” Davies said, his eyes turning once again to the alley mouth. “I’ll come here and wait for you, after I been and killed. Seems like, until I do, I can’t properly think. I’ll keep away from the coppers somehow. It keeps hurtin’ at me and hurtin’ at me. Christ, I saw my sister last night—Madge, the youngest, sixteen she is. She’ll still come and see me, look for me—she don’t know what happened to me, nor why I left me old lodgings, nor nuthin’. I hadn’t killed yet, and by God it was all I could do to keep from sinkin’ my fangs into her!

“You seen the others,” he went on, with a gesture of helpless rage which seemed to abort itself midsweep into a kind of futile wave. “You talked to other vamps, now, you must have. Are they all like this? Killin’ the ones theylove, just because they’re handy-like? Calvaire said he’d teach me, tell me, help me to get on, but he’s dead now. And the one that done for him is comin’ after me…”

He swung wildly around at another sound, but it was only a girl, sixteen or so and plain as an old boot, stepping, candle in hand, out into an areaway from the tradesmen’s door of one of the houses that backed onto the alley. Asher heard the flap of a shaken rag and the spattering of crumbs on the cement and, beside him, the soft hiss of the vampire’s murmured, “Ahhh…” In the faint reflection of the light, Asher saw the young man’s eyes, blue and shallow in life, blaze with the strange inner fire of the Undead.

Bully Joe muttered thickly again, “I got to go.”

Asher’s hand clinched down on the vampire’s arm, holding him back. The vampire whirled, enraged, his other hand lifted to strike, and Asher met the hungry devil-eyes coldly, daring him to go through with it. After a moment Bully Joe’s arm came down slowly. Beyond his craggy silhouette, Asher saw the smudge of candle flame disappear into the house from which it had come.

An evil anger twisted at the fanged mouth. “So it’s bargainin’ now,” Bully Joe whispered. “You know, and because of it I got to do what you say. Yeah, Calvaire played that game, too. I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you that, if you do as you’re bid … faugh!” His arm twisted free as if Asher’s hand had been the weak grip of a child. They faced each other in silence, but Asher felt nothing of the terrible dreamy coercion of the vampire mind—only a kind of inchoate buzzing in his head, as if Bully Joe were groping to do that which he had no notion of how to accomplish. Then this, too, faded, and Bully Joe passed his hand across his mouth again in a gesture of frustration and defeat.

“You hadn’t any choice with Calvaire,” Asher said quietly, “and you haven’t any now, if I’m to find this killer before he—or she—finds you. Be here tomorrow nightafter midnight. I’ll let you know anything I’ve found.”

“Right,” Davies muttered, backing a few paces away, a dark hulk against the paler darkness of the alley mouth. “I’ll be here. But I tell you this right now, Professor: You tell Ysidro or any of them others about me or about where you’re goin’, and I’ll break your back.”