Those Who Hunt the Night(49)

“Like Dante’s damned,” Ysidro murmured lightly, “we are eternally renewed from the cuts we receive in Hell.” Ernchester covered his face and looked away.

“Interesting.” Asher turned his attention back to the white arm in its slender shroud of lace. “It’s as if her blood were drawn with a needle, as well as drunk.”

“A frugal villain.”

“Not so frugal, if he’s in the habit of slaughtering nine men in a night.” Anthea’s dark brows pulled together in a frown.

“His human friend, then?”

“What use would a living man have for a vampire’s blood?”

Grippen shrugged. “An he were an alchemist. I’d have sold much for it, in the days when my own veins weren’t bursting with the stuff…”

“An alchemist,” Asher said slowly, remembering Lydia strolling along the rocky brink of a lake of boiling blood, a beaker in her hand. Reaching down to dip it full … I wanted to examine him medically, she had said … The articles about blood viruses in her rooms …

“Or a doctor.” He looked up again at them grouped behind him—Ysidro, Grippen, and the vampire Countess ofErnchester. ‘Take me back to Lydia’s rooms. There’s something there I need to see.”

“A doctor would have the equipment for drawing blood, and for storing it once it was drawn.” Seated at Lydia’s desk, Asher leafed unhandily through the chaos of notes and lists in his wife’s sprawling script, picking up and discarding them and searching under the heaped papers for more. He was so tired his flesh ached, but he felt, as he often had in the midst of his work abroad or on a promising track in some research library in Vienna or Warsaw, an odd, fiery lightness that made such consideration academic.

“This is somewhat embarrassing,” Ysidro remarked, studying the Ordnance Survey map on the wall with its clusterings of colored pins. “I had no idea you hunted so much to a pattern, Lionel.”

“’Tisn’t I as leaves my carrion where it may be fallen over by girls out amaying,” Grippen retorted, turning the newspaper clippings over roughly. “‘Bermondsey Slasher,’ forsooth!”

“I think that was Lotta.” Ysidro walked over to where Asher had turned his attention to the pile of medical journals on the bed, opening them to the marked articles and taking mental note of the topics: Some Aspects of Blood Pathology; Psychic Phenomena, Heredity or Hoax; Breeding a Better Briton. “What would a doctor want with a vampire?”

“Study,” Asher replied promptly. “You have to make allowance for the scientific mind—if Lydia met you, she’d be pestering you for a sample of your blood within the first five minutes.”

“Sounds like Hyacinthe,” Ysidro remarked. “It still does not explain how such a partnership commenced—why a vampire would work for a human, doctor though he may be…”

“No?” Asher looked up from the stiff pages of the journals. “I can think of only one reason a vampire would go into partnership with a doctor and would reveal to him who and what he was—the same reason you went into partnership with me. Because he needed his services.”

“Balderdash,” Grippen snarled, stepping close to tower over him. “We’re free of mortal ills…”

“What about immortal ones?” Asher cut him off. “If the virus of vampirism began to change, began to mutate, either as the result of long-ago exposure to the Plague or from some other cause…”

“Virus forsooth! Ills have root in the humors of the body…”

“Then if the humors of the vampire flesh slipped out of true,” Asher continued smoothly, “what could a vampire do? Say a vampire who had lived in secret, even from other vampires—or any vampire, for that matter—if he found himself suddenly, frenziedly craving the blood of other vampires or knew himself in danger of going on rampages for human blood, as you said was an occasional symptom that developed in a few of those who had been exposed to the Plague. If he found himself transforming, day by day, into the thing I saw at your house, Grippen—if he knew such a course would inevitably lead to his destruction—wouldn’t it be logical for him to seek help wherever he could find it?”

Grippen looked uncomfortable and angry, black brow lowering like a goaded bull’s; beside him, Ysidro’s face was inscrutable as always.

“It might account for the renewed sensitivity to silver,” the Spaniard remarked. “Certainly for the wounds caused in his own flesh by the growth of his fangs. And you think this vampire, whoever he was, chose his physician in thesame fashion in which I chose you—through journal articles?”

“He must have,” Asher said. “Depending on who it is, he may be forcing the doctor to work as you are forcing me—with a threat against the life of someone he cares for. Maybe that isn’t even necessary. Some doctors would welcome the chance to do research on an unknown virus and wouldn’t care that they were working for a killer. Or maybe,” he added pointedly, his gaze suddenly locking with Ysidro’s, “like Calvaire’s friends, he’s under the impression that he’ll win, and that his partner won’t kill him when it’s over.”

Ysidro’s chilly eyes returned his gaze blandly. “I am sure he is quite safe so long as there is a use for him.” He turned away and began sorting through the papers scattered across the bed. “And I take it Mistress Lydia discovered the medical partner in the same fashion? Through the journals?”

“I think so.” Asher returned to his own examination, flipping the pages awkwardly with his single good hand. “She may only have had a list of suspects and was visiting them one by one. It would account for her not taking her weapons—the silver knife, the revolver, or the silver nitrate …”

“Silver nitrate?” Ysidro looked up from a list he’d fished from the floor. “Pox,” he added mildly. “I see we’re all going to have to go through the tiresome business of changing residences again. Do you really own a place on Caswell Court under the name of Bowfinch, Lionel?”

“None o’ your business an I do!”

“Filthy neighborhood, anyway. Gin shops everywhere—you can’t feed without getting stinking drunk in the process. This one doesn’t look familiar…”

“’Twas one of Danny’s.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t get fleas. As for the one inHoxton, I wouldn’t be buried there, much less sleep the day. Where would she get silver nitrate?”

Asher nodded toward the little velvet box. Ysidro picked up the hypodermic gingerly, but did not touch the gleaming crystal ampoules. “As a doctor, she’d have access to it—it’s used as an antiseptic, I think. I do know most doctors carry it in small quantities.”

“This is scarce a small quantity,” the vampire remarked, setting the syringe back in its case. “That much must have cost a pretty penny.”

“I expect it did,” Asher said. “But Lydia’s an heiress and she’s always had control of her own money—though I suspect her father wouldn’t have settled it that way if she’d married someone more respectable than a penniless junior don at her uncle’s college. I expect she thought to inject the silver nitrate intravenously. It would certainly kill a human, let alone a vampire. It was naïve of her,” he added quietly. “A vampire’s psychic field alone would prevent her from getting that close, and she obviously had no idea of how quickly a vampire can strike.”

“Here’s more of the curst things.” Grippen came over, carrying a pile of journals which had been stacked on the bureau.

Asher flipped open the dog-eared pages. Viral Mutation. Interaction of Viruses in a Medium. The Pathology of Psychic Phenomena. Eugenics for National Defense. Physical Origins of So-Called Psychic Powers. Isolating a Viral Complex in a Serum Medium.

He paused, and leafed back through the articles again.

They were all by Horace Blaydon.

Softly, he said, “Dennis Blaydon was a friend of Bertie Westmoreland’s. He’d have known Lotta. And through him, Calvaire and anyone with whom Calvaire had associated would have known of Blaydon.”





EIGHTEEN




IT WAS NEARLY THREE in the morning, and the windows of Horace Blaydon’s tall brown-brick house on Queen Anne Street were dark.

“Can you hear anything?” Asher whispered, from the shelter of the corner of Harley Street. “Anyone within?”

Ysidro bowed his head, colorless hair falling down over his thin features in the glow of the street lamp, his heavy-lidded eyes shut. The silence in this part of the West End was profound, sunk deep in the sleep of the well-to-do and self-justified who knew nothing of vampires beyond the covers of yellow-backed penny dreadfuls and gave little thought to how their government got its information about the Germans. The rain had ceased. In an alley, two cats swore at one another—lovers or rivals in love—and there was the smallest flicker of Ysidro’s head as he moved to listen and to identify.

At length he whispered, “It’s difficult to tell at this distance. Certainly there’s no one in the upper part of thehouse, though servants sometimes have rooms in the cellars.”