Those Who Hunt the Night(41)

Wait for how long? She had to talk to him, had to tell him.

She walked to the window and drew the curtain—lately she had become uneasy about that, too. For the last two nights she had dreamed of lying half-asleep in bed, listening to a deep, muttering voice calling her name—calling her name from somewhere quite nearby. But something about that voice had terrified her, and she had buried herself in the covers, trying to hide, wanting to call for James and knowing she dare not make a sound …

And she had wakened, trying to get out of bed.

She had taken to buying extra kerosene and leaving asmall lamp burning low all night. This childishness troubled her, but not, she had decided, as much as waking in the darkness did.

He had to come back.

She took her seat at the desk, picked up the top journal of the stack she had marked to scan, and opened it, though she knew it would do nothing but confirm what she already suspected. All she could do for the moment was work, until James came back from Paris.

With a sigh, she settled into her study, carefully avoiding, for one more night, the question of what she would do if he did not.

Asher woke up dying of thirst. Someone gave him something to drink—orange juice, of all things—and he slept again.

This happened three or four times. He never had the strength to open his eyes. He could smell water, the cold stink of filth, and the moldery reek of underground; it was utterly silent. Then he slept again.

When he finally could open his eyes, the light of the single candle, burning in an ornate gilt holder near the opposite wall, seemed unbearably bright. It took all the strength he had to turn his head, to see that he lay on a narrow bed in a small cell which still contained half a dozen stacked crates of wine bottles caked with plaster and dust. One open archway looked into a larger room beyond; the archway was barred all across, the narrow grilled door padlocked. On the other side of the bars stood Grippen, Elysée, Chloé, and Hyacinthe.

Chloé said, “I thought you said you could touch silver,” in a voice of kittenish reproach.

“A man can have the strength to bend a poker in half and still not be able to do so with a red-hot one,” Grippen retorted. “Don’t be stupider than you are.”

The padlock must be silver, Asher thought, dimly inferring that the discussion was about entering his cell and finishing what they had begun. The philologist in him noticed Grippen’s accent, far more archaic than Ysidro’s and a little like that which he’d heard among the Appalachian mountaineers of America. He could feel bandages on his throat and both wrists and the scratchiness of considerable stubble on his jaw.

“Can you make him come and do it?” Hyacinthe inquired, regarding Asher with narrowed dark eyes. Something changed in her voice, and she murmured, as if for his ears alone, “Will you come and let me in, honey?”

For a moment the notion seemed entirely logical to Asher’s exhausted mind; he only wondered where Simon might have put the key. Then he realized what he was thinking and shook his head.

Her huge dark eyes glowed into his, for that moment all that he saw or knew. “Please? I won’t harm you—won’t let them harm you. You can lock the door again after me.”

For a few seconds he truly believed her, in spite of the fact that it had been she who had diverted his attention in the alley, in spite of knowing down to the marrow of his bones that she lied. That was, he supposed, what Simon had meant of Lotta when he had said that she was a “good vampire.”

“Bah,” Grippen said. “I misdoubt he could stand an he would.”

Hyacinthe laughed.

“Are you having fun, children?”

Even as the words were spoken, Grippen was already turning his head, as if startled by them the moment before they sounded; the three women swung around, white faces hard in the single gold light of the candle as it curtsied in the flicker of wind. An instant later, Ysidro stepped out of the darkness, graceful and withdrawn-looking, but Ashernoticed he did not come too near to the others.

“I ought to have guessed you’d have a bolthole in the sewers, like the Spanish rat you are,” Grippen growled.

“If the French government will dig them, it were a shame not to put them to use. Did you ever know Tulloch the Scot? Or Johannis Magnus?”

“The Scot’s got to be dead, and this curst penpusher’s got you in the way of asking questions like a curst Jesuit. Those concerns have ceased to be ours—ceased from the moment the breath went out of our lungs and the last waste of mortality from out of our bodies, and we woke with the taste of blood on our mouths and the hunger for more of it in our hearts. The dead don’t traffic with the living, Spaniard.”

“There are things which the living can do which the dead cannot.”

“Aye—die and feed the dead. And if your precious doctor e’er sets foot in London, that’s aye what he’ll do.”

“Unless you plan to keep him prisoner forever,” Elysée crooned mockingly. “Are you that fond of him, Simon? I never guessed it of you.”

Chloé let out a silvery titter of laughter.

“The dead can still die,” Simon said quietly. “As Lotta would tell you, if she could; or Calvaire, or Neddy…”

“Lotta was a fool and Calvaire a bigger one,” Grippen snapped. “Calvaire was a boaster who boasted once too often to the wrong person of who and what he was. Think’ee that telling yet another mortal who and what we are is going to keep us safe? I always thought Spaniards had dung for brains and I’m sure on it now.”

“The composition of my brains,” said Simon, “makes neither Lotta, Neddy, Calvaire, nor Danny less dead, nor does it alter the fact that none of us has seen or heard a single breath of the one who has stalked and killed them. Only another vampire could have followed them, and onlya vampire very ancient, very skilled, could have followed them unseen. More ancient than you, or I…”

“That’s cock.”

“There are no older vampires,” Elysée added. “You border on…” She glanced quickly at Grippen, as if remembering he and Simon were the same age, and visibly bit back the word senility.

“He’s a day hunter, Lionel,” Simon said. “And one day you may waken to find the sun in your eyes.”

“And one day you’ll waken with your precious professor hammering an ashwood map pointer into your heart, and good shuttance to you,” Grippen returned angrily. “We deal with our own. You tell your little wordsmith that. An he comes back to London, you’d best stick close by his side.”

And seizing Chloé roughly by the wrist, he strode from the cellar, the girl following him in a flutter of pale hair and ribbons, their monster shadows swooping after them in the flickering gloom.

“You’re a fool, Simon,” Elysée said mildly and trailed along after them, vanishing, as vampires did, in a momentary swirl of spider-gauze shawl.

Hyacinthe remained, blinking lazily at the Spanish vampire with her pansy-brown eyes. “Did you find him?” she asked in her golden syrup voice. “That ha’nt of the boneyards, the Most Ancient Vampire in the World?” Like a flirt, she reached out and touched his shirt collar, fingering it as she fingered everything, as if contemplating seduction.

“When I pulled you and Grippen and the others off James here,” Simon replied softly, “did you see who carried him away?”

Hyacinthe drew back, nonplussed, as mortals must be,Asher thought, when confronted with the elusiveness of vampires.

Without smiling, Simon continued. “Nor did I.” Confused, Hyacinthe, too, left, seeming to flick out of sight like a candle puffed by wind. But Ysidro, by the tilt of his head and the direction of his cold eyes, obviously saw her go.

For a long moment, he stood there outside the bars, looking around him at the dark cellar. It had clearly been disused for years, perhaps centuries; past him, as his eyes grew more used to the light, Asher could see the open grillwork in the floor which communicated with the sewers, though the other vampires had left in another direction, presumably upstairs to some building above. One of the old hôtels particuliers in the Marais or the Faubourg St. Germain, he wondered, which had survived the attentions of the Prussians? Or simply one of those ubiquitous buildings purchased in the course of centuries by some vampire or other, as a bolthole in case of need?

Then Ysidro spoke, so softly that it was only because he was used to the whispering voices of vampires that Asher heard him at all. “Anthony?”

From the dusty, curtaining shadows came no reply.

After a moment the vampire took a key from his pocket, and, muffling his fingers in several thicknesses of the corner of his Inverness, steadied the lock to insert and turn it. Then he picked up a small satchel from a corner where, presumably, he had laid it down before addressing the others, and came into the cell. “How do you feel?”

“Rather like a lobster in the tank at Maxim’s.”

A fleet grin touched the vampire’s mouth, then vanished.

“My apologies,” he said. “I could not be assured of reaching here before they did.” He glanced down at somethingbeside Asher’s cot. When he lifted it, Asher saw thatit was a pitcher, soft porcelain and once very pretty, now old and chipped, but with a little water in it. “Was he here?”