Those Who Hunt the Night(22)

And, in fact, the third Earl of Ernchester had not died.

Asher frowned, trying to recall the name of the Countess, and with the curious perspicacity of vampires Mrs. Farren said, “Anthea.” She stepped over beside her husband and guided him to a chair near the cold hearth; in her brown eyes was still that wariness, that concern when she looked at him and that watchful enmity when she regarded Asher. Asher saw the way Ernchester moved when he took his seat—with the same economy of movement he had seen in Ysidro, and indeed in Lady Anthea, but without life.

“Did Danny sleep here?” he asked, and it was Anthea who replied.

“Only very occasionally.” She straightened up and walked back to the hearth; it was a relief to Asher not to have to fight to see them move, as he did with Ysidro.

“And I take it it wasn’t here that you found his body?”

From the corner of his eye Asher was conscious of Ernchester looking away, resting his brow on his hand in a gesture that hid his face. It came as a shock to him that the Earl felt grief, and he saw anger for that, too—a protective anger—in Anthea Farren’s brown eyes.

“If it had been,” she replied coolly, “you may be sure that the killer would have dispatched the both of us as well.”

He bit his lip. Then, answering her anger and not her words, “I’m sorry.”

Some of the tension seemed to slack in her strong frame, and the anger left her eyes. She, too, answered not his words. “It was foolish of you to come here,” she said. “Ysidro can be maddening, but, believe me, if he has kept things from you, it is because there is ground that it is perilous for a living man to tread.”

“That may be,” Asher said. “But as long as he has a pistol to my head—as long as someone I love will suffer for it if I don’t find this killer—he’s not going to be able to have it both ways. I want to be shut of this business quickly—before he finds where I’ve hidden away the woman whose life is in hostage to him, before the killer realizes he has a day hunter on his trail, learns who I am, and tracks down this woman also—before I get any deeper entangled into the side of this affair that isn’t my business. But I can’t do that unless I have more information than Ysidro’s willing to give.”

She considered him for a long moment, her head a little tilted, as if with the glossy weight of her dark hair. “He is—a very old vampire,” she said after a time. “He is cautious, like an old snake in a hole; he errs on the side of caution, maybe. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t really care much about anything.”

It was odd to hear her speak of Ysidro as “old,” for the Spaniard had the queerly graceful air of a young man, almost a boy. It was Ernchester, thought Asher, with his oddly dead motions and his weary eyes, who seemed old. Asher glanced back at the chair where the Earl had sat, but the vampire was no longer there. Asher could not recall just when he had vanished. It was early evening, he remembered, and neither of his hosts had fed. But somehow, speaking to this quiet and beautiful woman who had been dead long before he was born, he could not fear her.

He wondered if that were because she meant him no harm, or because she was using some subtle variation of the mental glamour of the vampire on him, as Ysidro had tried to do on the train. Ysidro’s words about “other vampires than I” lingered unnervingly in his thoughts.

After a long pause, Anthea went on, “I’m not sure whether he or Grippen is the elder—they were both made about the same time, by the same master. Rhys the White, that was. A minstrel, who was master vampire of London—oh, years, years.

“You understand that it was never usual for a commoner to survive as a vampire until cities began to get large enough for deaths to be invisible,” she added after a moment. “Only the landed had money and a place to be secure during the days when we sleep. Simon tells me that even in his time, London was like a small market town.” She smiled a little, her teeth white against a lip full but pale as wax. “And I suppose you’d think the London I grew up in paltry—we used to pick catkins in the marshes where Liverpool Station now stands.

“It was the nobles who could sustain their security, who could hunt far enough afield—who could live on the blood of cattle and deer, if need be, to prevent suspicion from falling on themselves. But one cannot live for too long on the blood of animals. One cannot go too long without the kill. One grows—dull. Stupid. Weary. All things begin to seem very pointless. And out of that dullness, it is very easy to be trapped and killed.”

She raised her eyes to his, folding her hands—soft and large and strong enough, he knew, to break his neck—over one another, her rings gleaming coldly. “That sounds vile, doesn’t it? But that blunting of mind—that laxing of the concentration—is death to a vampire, whom the rising sun will reduce to ashes. Do you think us vile?”

“I think that what you are is vile,” Asher said evenly. “Does that matter to you?”

Her eyes left his again, to consider the pearls and moonstones of her ring. “If it mattered all that greatly I suppose I would have died years ago.” Another woman might have shrugged—he only sensed her setting the thought aside with some attenuated shift of musculature he did not quite see, before her eyes returned to his. “Of course Rhys was gone by the time Charles and I became what we are. He lived in the crypts below the old Church of St. Giles, haunting the waterfronts for sailors at night. He made his money playing in taverns, in Eastcheap and the Steelyard—the German Hansa merchants loved him. Simon tells me his touch upon the lute could bring tears to your eyes. That’s where Simon met him, a thin, little, white-haired man, Simon says, so fragile to look at, like a little spider in strange garb two centuries out of date. There was a great frenzy of witch-killing in the days of old King James, and those in London who survived it perished in the Fire, all save Grippen and Simon. God knows where they found to sleep, in the days the fire burned.”

“But you weren’t made until after the fire?” It was ancient history to him, like the Fall of Rome; the woodcuts of that monster conflagration that had devoured London in 1666.

“Years after,” she said. “I remember, as a little girl, standing on Harrow Hill in the dark, looking down on the city like a carpet of flame, and feeling the heat blowing off it onto my face on the wind. It had been windy all that week, hot and dry … I remember the crackle of the air in my hair, and being afraid the fire would cover all the earth.” She shook her head, as if wondering at that child’s naïveté. “They said there were buildings whose stones exploded like bombs in the heat, and little streams of molten lead from the church roofs were seen running like waterdown the gutters. Even after I became—what I am—it was years before I saw Ysidro; after the turn of the new century. His face was still covered with scars from the Fire, his hands like the scabby-barked branches of a tree.”

“And Grippen?”

Her mouth tightened a little. “Lionel got a lot of fledglings in the years after the Fire,” she said. “Charles was far from the first. He needed money, needed protection…”

“Protection?”

Her voice was deliberately colorless. “There are always feuds. All his fledglings had perished in the Fire. For years I thought Charles was dead.” She gave a little shake of her head, as if putting aside some old letter she had been reading, and glanced up at him again, the oil light glowing amber in her eyes. “But that isn’t what you came here to hear.”

“I came here to hear about vampires,” Asher said quietly. “About who you are and what you are; what you do and what you want. You’re a hunter, Lady Farren. You know that you must see the pattern first, before you can see where it breaks.”

“It’s dangerous,” she began, and a thread of anger seeped into Asher’s voice.

“Ysidro didn’t give me any choice.”

He was still standing in front of her, in the small pool of light that surrounded the vast marble edifice of the carved mantel, close enough now that he could have reached out and touched her face. Her face did not change its expression, but he saw her eyes alter their focus, flick past his shoulder to the dark cavern of the room behind him; her hand shot out, dragging at his arm even as he whirled to see the massive shadow looming only feet behind him and the terrible glint of red eyes.

Anthea cried, “Grippen, no … !” at the same instant Asher swung with his forearm to strike away the huge handthat clutched at his throat. It was like striking a tree, but he managed to twist aside. Hairy and powerful, the vampire Grippen’s hand shut around the shoulder of his coat instead of his neck.

Asher twisted, slithering out of the garment. Grippen was massive, as tall as Asher and broad as a door, with greasy black hair falling in his eyes, his face pocked with old scars and ruddy with ingested blood. For all his size, he was blindingly fast. His massive arm locked around Asher’s chest, trapping him with his own arms tangled still in his half-discarded coat; he felt the vampire’s mind smothering his, cloudy and strong as steel, and fought it as he had fought Ysidro’s in the train. The arm around his chest crushed tighter, and he twisted with both his hands at the fingers buried in his coat—he might just as well have tried to break the fingers of a statue.