Those Who Hunt the Night(47)

The name, he thought. The voice had shouted a name, just as his head had cracked against the wall. His recollection was blurry, drowning under shock and pain and the weight of the vampire’s dark mind. Then there was the rattle of harness, the clatter of retreating wheels …

The images faded as his consciousness slipped toward darkness.

“You!”

A powerful hand grabbed him and thrust him back against the back of the chair. His mind cleared, and he saw Grippen looming in the shadows of the now-dark room.

Still holding his swollen right hand to his chest, Asher said wearily, “Let me alone, Lionel. The killer was here. Grippen … !” For the vampire had turned sharply and, had Asher not seized the corner of his cloak, would have been already halfway to the stairs. Grippen whirled back, his scarred face dark with impatient fury. Quietly, Asher said, “The red-haired girl.”

“What red-haired girl? Let go, man!”

The cloak was gone from his grip—even his unbroken left hand hadn’t much strength to it. Asher got to his feet, fighting a surge of dizziness as he strode after the vampire up the stairs.

He found Grippen in one of the upper bedrooms, an attic chamber that had at one time housed the maids. He had to light one of the bedroom candles before ascending the narrow stair, no easy feat with only one workable hand; though the vaguest twilight still lingered outside, the windows of all the attics had been boarded shut, and the place was dark as pitch. He could hear nothing of the bobby Charley moving about the upper regions of the house. Presumably he was lying in one of the bedrooms in a trance cast by the master vampire’s mind. That unnatural slumber pressed on his own consciousness as he staggered up the stairs. The pain in his broken wrist helped.

In the darkness he heard Grippen whisper, “Christ’s bowels,” unvoiced as the wind. The candle gleam caught a velvety sheen from his spreading cloak, and beyond it something glinted, polished gold—the brass mountings of a casket.

There was a coffin in the attic.

Asher stumbled forward into the room. As he did so his foot brushed something on the floor that scraped … a crowbar. Grippen was kneeling beside the coffin, staring in shock at what lay within. Asher’s glance went to the window; the boards were gouged but intact. The killers must have been just starting that part of the operation, he thought, when his own footfalls had drawn them from their task.

Grippen whispered again, “Sweet Jesu.”

Asher came silently to his side.

Chloé Winterdon lay in the coffin, her head tilted to one side among the pillowing mounds of her gilt hair, her mouth open, fangs bared in her colorless gums, her eyes staring in frozen horror. She was clearly dead, almost withered-looking, the white flesh sunken back onto her bones.

Only slightly bloodied, the pounded end of a stake protruded from between her breasts.

Ragged white punctures marked her throat.

Quietly, Grippen said, “Her blood has all been drained.”





SEVENTEEN




AT LEAST, ASHER reflected with exasperated irony at some point in the long hours between six-thirty and ten, when he was finally released from the Charing Cross station house, they couldn’t charge him with Chloé Winterdon’s murder. But this was only because Grippen had gently gathered the blonde girl’s body into his arms and vanished through some bolthole in the roof, leaving Asher to the tedious business of finding some story to tell the police—which they didn’t believe—being held for questioning, and getting his broken hand splinted by the police surgeon. They injected it with novocaine and warned him to take it to a regular doctor in the morning, but Asher refused all offers of veronal or other sedatives. He knew already it would be a long night.

To questioning, he responded that he was a friend of Dr. Grippen’s, that he had gone there on the off chance that a mutual acquaintance, Miss Merridew, had taken refuge with the doctor; she had been missing some days. No, he hadn’t reported it before—he had just returned from Paristo find her gone. No, he didn’t know where Dr. Grippen could be reached. No, he had no idea why the burglars would have silver-tipped bullets in their gun. They made no comments about the bite marks on his throat and wrists, which was just as well.

It was raining when he stepped outside, a thin, dispiriting rain. Weariness made him cold to the bones as he descended the station house steps, his brown ulster flapping cloakwise about him, his right arm in its sling folded up underneath. Even with the novocaine, it hurt damnably. Nearly half the night gone, he thought, and no nearer to finding Lydia than he had been that afternoon.

There was a cab stand at the end of the street. He started toward it, and a dark shape was suddenly at his side, seeming to materialize from the misty rain. A heavy hand caught his elbow. “You’re coming with me.”

It was Grippen.

“Good,” Asher said wearily. “I want to talk to you.” After the thing that had attacked him, Grippen no longer impressed him much.

Ysidro was waiting for them in a four-wheeler a little ways down the street. “You certainly took long enough,” he remarked, and Asher firmly resisted the urge to punch him as he slumped into the seat at his side.

“I took a few hours out for dinner at the Café Royale and a nap,” he retorted instead. “If you’d put in an appearance earlier you could have joined me for coffee. They have very handsome waiters.” The cab jolted into movement, its wheels swishing softly on the wet pavement; Asher’s arm throbbed sharply in its sling. “Lydia’s gone. And I’ve seen the killer.”

“Lydia?” Grippen said, puzzled.

“My wife.” Asher’s brown eyes narrowed as he looked across at the big vampire in his rain-dewed evening cloak, the blunt, square head shadowed by the brim of his silk tophat. “The red-haired girl I asked you about, whose life is the price I’m allegedly being paid for this investigation.” Cold anger still filled him at Ysidro, at Grippen, at all of them, and at himself most of all for leading her into this.

“Ah,” the master vampire said softly, and his hard, gray glance flicked to Ysidro. “I wondered on that.”

“She was in London all the time, helping me with my investigation,” Asher said, and Ysidro’s colorless eyebrows quirked.

“I knew she had left Oxford, of course. I did not think you would bring her here.”

“It seemed a good idea at the time,” Asher replied harshly. “She managed to find most of your lairs and all of your aliases before she disappeared. And if you didn’t take her,” he added, looking across again at Grippen, whose red face had gone redder as rage added to whatever blood he’d imbibed that evening, “then I suspect she found the killer as well. Now tell me the truth, because it’s going to have a bearing on how I conduct this investigation. Did you take her? And is she dead?”

“You waste your breath,” the Master of London said slowly. “No to both your questions is the answer that’ll keep you for us and not against us; I know that, and you know that, and I’m thinking you’ll not believe it an I say it, but it is so. I’ve seen no red-headed moppet. I plight my faith on’t.”

Asher drew a deep breath. He was shivering slightly all over, in nervous waves, reaction setting in on him to anger, exhaustion, and pain. He’d lost his hat at some part in the proceedings, and his brown hair fell forward over his forehead, the thin face beneath hard and far less clerkish than it usually seemed.

From the corner of the cab, Ysidro’s light, disinterested voice said, “Tell us about the killer.”

Asher sighed, and some of the tension ebbed from histall frame. “It was—monstrous,” he said slowly. “Foul. Diseased-looking. But beyond a doubt a vampire. It was bleached, as you are, Ysidro, but its skin was leprous and peeling. It was taller than I, taller than Grippen by an inch or so, and as broad or broader. Fair hair, but not much of it; it was falling out, I think. Blue eyes. It had a human partner—I heard his footsteps running down the stairs from the attic, and later he called the thing away from me; and that’s odd, when you realize the thing goes on killing rampages, taking seven or nine humans at a time. I’d certainly think twice about riding anywhere in a closed carriage with it.”

“‘It,’” Simon said softly.

“It wasn’t human.”

“Nor are we.”

The cab pulled to a halt at the top of Savoy Walk. Grippen paid off the driver, and the two vampires, their human partner between them, walked down the long tunnel of shadows to the towering, baroque blackness of Ernchester House at the end. Bands and slashes of Madeira-gold marked the curtained windows, and caught the thin rain in a shuddering haze; even as they mounted the soot-streaked marble of the steps, one panel of the carved doors opened to reveal the Farrens standing, an arm-linked silhouette, just within.

“I fear she is truly dead.” Anthea led the way up the long stair, to a small room at the back of the house which had once been used for sewing or letter writing. The dark red of her gown showed like old blood against the creamy whiteness of her bosom and face; its stiff lines and low-cut corsage whispered of some earlier era; knots and fringes of cut jet beads glinted in the lamplight like ripe blackberries. Her thick hair was piled in the modem style; against it, her face looked strained, weary, and frightened, as if her spirit were now fighting against all the pressures of those accumulatedyears. Ernchester, trailing close at her side, looked infinitely worse. “Decomposition isn’t far advanced, but it has begun.”