Those Who Hunt the Night(19)

It was meant to be his exit line, so Asher spoiled it by saying coolly, “You’re a vampire, Bully Joe. Do you think I, as a mortal man, can keep Ysidro from following me if he wants to? Don’t be ridiculous.”

The vampire snarled, his long fangs glinting in the dark, trying, Asher guessed, to collect a fitting rejoinder.

He wasn’t up to it, however. After a long pause, he turned and strode off up the alley toward the gaslights of Bruton Place. Asher felt, as clearly as if the vampire had pointed and said, Look over there, the momentary urge to turn his head, to check for danger in the dark pit of the areaway closest to him. He forced his eyes to remain on Bully Joe and so saw him silhouetted briefly against the street lamps at the alley’s narrow mouth. Then he was gone.

Asher threw a quick glance down the areaway to reassure himself that the urge of danger had been, in fact, only a clumsy effort at the psychic glamour which Ysidro wielded so adeptly. Then he pulled his brown ulster more closely about him and walked up the alley and around the corner, to the dim lights and freer air of Prince of Wales Colonnade.

From the doorway of Number 109, Lydia watched the vampire emerge into Bruton Place. She’d seen Asher crossing that street fifteen minutes earlier when she’d come to the front parlor to buy a stamp from her landlady—she was wearing her specs, as she did when working—but had meticulously taken no notice. When she’d seen the tall,brown, rather melancholy-looking figure turn into the alley which she knew led through to his own lodgings, she’d merely assumed he was playing at spies, something he sometimes did in Oxford sheerly out of habit. Nevertheless, a glimpse of him was a glimpse of him. Schoolgirlish, she thought, swiftly climbing the narrow oval of stairs and hurrying down the hall to her little bedroom at the back of the house, but there you have it. After living with him for six years, she was surprised at the depth of her need to see him, if only for a second.

And then she had seen the vampire.

The only light in the alley was what leaked down from the windows of the houses on both sides, but with no light on in her own room—that was another thing she’d learned from James—Lydia could see fairly well. They were talking when she came to the window, moving the lace curtain only barely; James’ back was to her, and in the gloom she could see the cold, inhuman white of the other man’s face, and realized with a shiver that he must have been waiting down there.

A vampire. The Undead.

They were real.

She had not doubted James’ story—not consciously, she reflected, at any rate. But the quickening of her heart, the coldness of her hands, told her now that there had been a part of her that had not really believed. Not really.

Until now.

Even at this distance, her trained eye picked out the coloring of a corpse, the different way he held himself and moved. This man did not fit the description of Don Simon Ysidro—another vampire, then. After the first shock her whole soul swelled into one vast itch to get a closer look at the tongue and mucous membranes of the eyes, at the hair follicles and nails which grow after death, and at the teeth. She’d spent the last thirty-six hours, more or less, in reading, and between the drier tomes of leasehold and quitclaim at the Public Records Office, she’d come home to peruse the trunkful of medical journals she’d brought along—articles on porphyria, pernicious anemia, and the various nervous disorders which constituted the “logical explanations” so dear to the heart of modern man. She realized that she, too, had wanted them to be true.

Now …

Keeping an eye on the window, she pulled her medical bag to her from its place near the bed. By touch in the dark, she found her two largest amputation knives and slipped their cased lengths into her coat pocket as she put the garment on. They were polished steel, not the supernaturally recommended silver; she cast her mind about for possibilities for a moment, then dug in the bag again for her little bottle of silver nitrate and slipped that in her pocket as well. If worse came to worst, she could always throw it and hope the legends were right.

There was no time for anything more. Already James and the vampire were parting, the vampire pulling free of James’ grip and stepping back; Lydia fancied she saw the glint of eyes in the shadows. For a moment, despite the fact that she knew the vampires had hired him and would not harm him under the circumstances, she felt afraid for him, for there was murder latent in every line of that half-crouching dark form. Then, with an angry gesture, the vampire moved away.

With swift silence, Lydia was down three flights of stairs, coiling up her hair and pinning on a hat on the run; people who knew her to take three hours assembling herself for a party would not have credited her speed in an emergency. She was waiting in the dark of the entryway when the shambling, raw-boned shape of the young man emerged from the alley. She had no intention of getting anywhere near him, nor of coming close enough to let herselfbe seen; even from half a block’s distance, it would be possible to observe how he moved, how those closer to him would be affected by the aura—if there was one—that James had described. It was the best she could do for now.

They were close to Shaftesbury Avenue. Lydia followed the vampire southeast, her high heels tapping like a deer’s tiny hooves on the pavement. There were still plenty of people about, crowding the sidewalks under the glare of the gaslights in throngs that had not the purposeful hurry of the day. Women in bright clothes strolled on the arms of gentlemen, laughing and leaning their shining curls close to dark shoulders; jehus, bundled in coats and scarves against the bite of the October night, read newspapers on the high boxes of their cabs in the street-side ranks, their horses breathing steam like dragons. Groups of young swells, of impecunious medical students, and of home-going shop clerks jostled along the pavement. Lydia found it hard to keep the vampire in sight.

And yet, she saw, the vampire was having his own problems. Part of this was because people simply did not look at him, or apparently did not see him when they did, with the result that they did not move aside, as people did for her. The irony of that entertained her a good deal as she moved along, hands in pockets—she’d mislaid her gloves and had no time to hunt for them—in his wake. She herself had no trouble following him when the ever-growing crowds permitted, but, then, she knew what to look for. He was tall. The cheap black bowler floated over the general crowd like a roach in a cesspool.

He turned one corner and another. The crowds thinned out, and Lydia had to fall back again, glad that her coat was of a nondescript color—unusual for her, and in this case deliberate—and wishing her hair were, too, where it showed beneath the brim of her hat. The vampire wasmoving slower now, and Lydia observed that people now moved aside from him, and treated him as if he were there.

So it was something that came and went, she thought.

And there was something else.

They were near Covent Garden, a tangle of little streets and alleys, the cramped, cheap lodgings of servants and seamstresses, costermongers hawking at half price from carts what they couldn’t get rid of earlier in the day, and the smell of rotting vegetables piled with the dung in the gutters. A couple of loungers outside a pub whistled admiringly and called out to her. She ignored them and hoped the vampire did, too. Though she vastly preferred the quieter life of Oxford for her work, at her father’s insistence she’d spent a certain amount of time in London, but the graceful houses of Mayfair, the green spaciousness of Hyde Park and St. James, and the quiet opulence of the Savoy and Simpson’s might have been in another city. This tangle of wet cobblestones, loud voices, and harsh lights was alien to her experience; though she wasn’t particularly frightened—after all, she knew she had only to summon a cab and return to Bruton Place—she knew she would have to go carefully.

She saw the vampire turn into a little court whose broken cobbles leaked black water into the wider street; she ducked her head and passed its entrance swiftly, not daring even to look. In this part of London, circling a block was always a chancy business, but she took the next turning and hurried her steps down the insalubrious and deserted court until she found a dirty alley that seemed to lead through.

She hesitated for a long time—nearly a minute, which, given her quarry and the danger she knew she would be in, was long. The alley, what she could see of it, was dark and crooked. Though the houses of the little court at her back gave evidence of life in the form of lights burning in thewindows and shadows crossing back and forth over the cheap curtains or baldly uncurtained glass, all the ground-floor shops had been locked up, and the wet, narrow pavement lay deserted under the chill drift of evening mist. She shivered and huddled deeper into her coat, for the first time conscious of why so many people disliked being alone. The vampire was in the next court. She had a strong suspicion that he had gone there to seek his prey.

Her hand closed tighter on the sheath of the amputation knife in her pocket. A six-inch blade seemed like a broadsword in the dissecting room; she wondered if, put to it, she could bring herself to use it against living flesh.

Or even, she added with involuntary humor, Undead. One way of getting a blood sample, but risky. If the other vampires didn’t know of her connection with James, they would have no reason for sparing her life.