Those Who Hunt the Night(56)

Blaydon strode forward and struck Asher across the face with the barrel of the gun, knocking him sprawling. Ysidro, impassive, merely moved his foot aside so that Asher wouldn’t fall across it and watched the enraged pathologist with only the mildest of interest as he stepped back and picked up the lamp.

“I’m sorry you feel that way about it,” Blaydon said quietly, the lamplight jerking with the angry trembling of his hands. “You, Don Simon, because I’m going to have tokeep you fed and healthy while I take your blood for experiments, until I can locate another vampire more compliant. You, James, because I think I’m going to have to force either you or your wife to tell me where her rooms were in the city—she refused to do so, and, of course, Dennis wouldn’t hear of me forcing her—so that I can find her notes on her researches…”

“Don’t be naïve,” Ysidro sighed. “Grippen put them all on the fire before he left Lydia’s rooms last night.”

“Then I shall have to get Mrs. Asher to tell me herself,” Blaydon said. “Now that I have James here, that shouldn’t be too difficult. I think Dennis will even rather enjoy it.”

Keeping his gun trained on Ysidro, he backed out the door.

“Don’t trip over your son on the way out,” the vampire remarked derisively as the door closed upon the amber radiance of the lamplight and the bolts slid home.

A west wind had been blowing all day, and the night outside was clear. Leaky white moonlight added somewhat to the faint glow of the gas lamps visible beyond the garden wall. With his usual languid grace, Ysidro unfolded his thin legs and rose from the coffin lid, knelt beside Asher, and stooped to bite through the ropes that bound his wrists. Asher felt the cold touch of bloodless lips against the veins of his left wrist and the scrape of teeth. Then the ropes were pulled away. The pain in his right arm almost made him sick as Ysidro brought it gently around and installed it in its sling again.

“You think he was listening?”

“Of course he was listening.” The vampire twisted the slack of the ankle ropes between his white hands, and the strands parted with a snap. “He was right outside the door; he never even went into the garden, though a vampire of his abilities certainly could have heard us from there, had he chosen to listen, soundproofing or no soundproofing.”

With light strength, he helped Asher to sit on the coffin lid, while he prowled like a faded tomcat to the room’s single window, keeping a wary distance from the silver bars. “Triple glazed,” he remarked briefly. “Wired glass, too. We might wrench the lock free, could we get past the bars to get some kind of purchase on it…”

“Do you think he followed us in the mews?”

“I am sure of it. I felt—sensed—I don’t know. A presence in the night, once or twice … He took me from behind, before I even knew he was there.” He tilted his head, angling to see if he could reach through to the lock, his hooked profile white against the darkness outside, like a colorless orchid. “But I had been listening for days for things I am not certain I ever truly heard. Fear makes it very difficult to judge.” Asher wondered how long it had been since Ysidro had admitted to fear. Looking at that slender, insubstantial shape in its white shirt, gray trousers, and vest, he had the odd sense that he was dealing now with the original Don Simon Ysidro, rather than with the vampire the man had become.

“Merde alors.” Ysidro stepped back from the bars, shaking a burned finger. “Curious that Blaydon did not wish his son to learn how vampires are made. It is a sensible precaution to keep him under his control, but…” He paused, tipping his head a little to listen. “He’s gone.”

He had not needed to speak; for the last few moments, Asher had heard Blaydon’s hurrying steps vibrating the floors of the house, his querulous voice calling dimly, “Dennis? Dennis…”

Cold flooded over him as he suddenly understood.

“He’s gone to get Lydia.”

Then the cold was swept away by a heat of rage that burned out all pain, all exhaustion, and all despair.

“That’s why he listened. He wanted to know how to create a fledgling.”

“Sangre de Dios.” In a single fluid move Ysidro stripped out of his gray waistcoat, wrapping it around his hand. Asher, knowing already what the vampire meant to do, clumsily unslung his arm and pulled off his own. It was gone from his grasp before he was aware the vampire had moved; Ysidro was back at the window, using the fabric to muffle his hands against the silver of the bars. For a moment he strained, shadows jumping on the ropy white muscle of his forearms, then he let go of the bars and backed away, rubbing his hands as if in pain.

“No good. Metallurgy has vastly improved since the days when we had the strength of ten, and I cannot grip them long enough. If we could dig into the masonry around them and dislodge them…”His pale gaze flicked swiftly around the prison, touching Asher. “Curst be the man who decreed gentlemen should wear braces and not belts with large, fierce metal buckles, as they did in my day…”

“He’d have taken them.” Asher was kneeling beside the coffin. “He thought of that. The handles have been removed. I noticed when I opened it that there were no corner braces or other metal fittings.”

Ysidro cursed dispassionately, archaically, and in several languages. Asher eased his arm gingerly back into its sling, and remembered the isolation of that big house on the downs, miles from the nearest habitation. “Dennis must know it’s the only way he’ll have her now.”

“If it works,” the vampire said, not moving, but his eyes traveling again over the room. “If, as you think, the vampire state is caused by organisms—which I myself do not believe—it may still not be transmittable in this artificial form, even by a master who understands what he is doing, a description that scarcely fits our friend.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t kill her trying.” Anger filled him at his own helplessness, at Blaydon, at Dennis, at Ysidro, and at the other vampires who were hiding Godknew where. “Maybe I can reach the lock … if we could force it, we could call for help…”

“Your fingers would not have the strength to pull it from the casement.”

Asher cursed, then said, “How soon can he get there? It’s forty miles or so to the Peaks—he obviously can’t take the train…”

“He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays…”

“Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It’s how men’s shoes are made.”

“Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics. Where is this place? I was unaware there were peaks of any sort on this island…”

“There aren’t. It’s in the chalk downs back of Oxford, sheep country. Blaydon’s wife’s father built the place when he came into his money in the forties. Blaydon stayed there ’til his wife died. He had rooms at his college when he was teaching…”

“You know the way, then?” Ysidro was working at the window, his hands muffled in both waistcoats against accidental contact with the bars. The harsh scrape of metal on cement was like the steady rasping of a saw.

“Of course. I was there a number of times, though not in the past seven years.”

The vampire paused, listening. A dim vibration throughthe floor spoke of a door closing. Softly Ysidro said, “He is in the garden now, calling; he sounds afraid.” Their eyes met, Asher’s hard with rage, Ysidro’s inscrutable. Listen as he would, Asher heard no sound of the house door closing, or of returning footfalls on floor or stair. “He’s gone.”

Impossibly swift and strong, Ysidro resumed his digging, while he petitioned God to visit Blaydon’s armpits with the lice of a shipful of sailors, and his belly with worms, in the archaic, lisping Spanish of the conquistadors. Switching to English, he added, “We can get horses from the mews…”

“A motorcycle will be faster, and we won’t need remounts. Mine’s in the shed at my lodgings; I’ve tinkered with it enough that it’s more reliable than most.” With his good hand and his teeth, Asher gingerly tightened the bandages around his splints, sweat standing out suddenly on his forehead with the renewed shock of the pain. “Do you need help?”

“What I need is an iron crow and a few slabs of guncotton, not the problematical assistance of a crippled old spy. Unless you have suddenly acquired the ability to bend steel bars, stay where you are and rest.”

Asher was only too glad to do so. The swelling had spread up his arm nearly to the elbow; he felt dizzy and a little sick. He could still flex his first two fingers after a fashion—enough, he hoped, to work the throttle lever on the Indian, at any rate.