Those Who Hunt the Night(58)

“We’ll check the cellars first,” Asher said, crossing the worn stone floor to the narrow door beside the stove. “Upstairs we can always bolt through a window.” He pushed the door open. The smell of dust, coals, and mice almost choked him. “You lead. If he’s here, he’s likelier to be behind than before.”

He kept his back flattened to the worn, slatted wainscot of the staircase, his left hand with the silver bar on the upstairs side, while Ysidro edged swiftly down the steps before him. There was a wine cellar, stripped of everything but the racks, and a coal hole, half-filled with coals and dirt.

“There’s another cellar off the butler’s pantry,” Asher said as they swiftly ascended the stairs back to the kitchen, their shadows reeling drunkenly in the lamplight. “You’d never know the door wasn’t just a cupboard. I’ve never been down there—it may be just a boot hole, but it might be large enough to keep someone in.”

The butler’s pantry was more like a closet than a room, filled with shelves and family silver. The door, tucked away behind a cupboard, was bolted from the outside. “She’s down there,” Simon murmured, even as Asher slipped the bolts. “At least someone is, and the breathing sounds like hers.”

“Lydia?” Asher called softly down the dark twist of the stairs, but kept his post at the top until Ysidro had edged his way down them. There was a door at the bottom, too; between them, the brick-walled slot of the staircase smelled like a death trap. The door at the bottom was bolted, as well. “Lydia, it’s James! Don’t be afraid…”

The door burst open as Ysidro slid the bolts, the violence of it taking him almost totally by surprise. The swerving lamplight showed Asher the whiteness of Lydia’s face, under a carnelian whirlwind of unbound hair. Her spectacles flashed in the light, and there was the thin slip of something silver in one of her hands as she stabbed at Ysidro’s eyes. The vampire was out of her way before Asher could see where he moved; Lydia whirled, confused, and Asher called out, “Lydia, it’s James!”

She’d already begun to pelt up the stairs and now stopped short at the sight of the dark form looming at their top; Ysidro, with considerable presence of mind, raised the lamp to shed its rays as far as the top of the stairs. “James … !” she sobbed, and then swung back, looking at the vampire who stood, lamp aloft like Liberty’s torch, just beside the door.

“Oh…” She looked momentarily nonplussed, the silverhatpin with which she had attacked him still glinting sharp and vicious in her hand. “I am sorry. You must be Don Simon Ysidro…” She held out her other hand to him, and he took it and kissed it with antique grace.

“It was my pleasure,” the vampire replied, and she laughed shakily at this patently mendacious platitude as they hastened up the stairs. “I am at your service, Madame.”

At the top, she caught Asher violently around the waist, burying her face in his leather-clad shoulder and hugging him hard enough to drive the breath from him. Through the ferocity of the embrace, he felt her trembling with cold and shock and reaction to her attack on what she had thought were her captors. He wrapped his good arm reassuringly tight around her shoulders, silver bar and all.

Typically, she broke from him almost at once, so as not to tie up a hand with a weapon in it. Ysidro had somehow moved past them—Asher never did figure out how, given the narrowness of the door—and was leading the way swiftly through the close confines of the pantry; Asher was aware of the clinical avidness with which Lydia watched his slender back.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, pulling tighter around her the snagged gray cardigan she wore over shirtwaist and skirt—Blaydon’s, he noted, and far too big for her. “That was the butler’s apartments. Have we time to pump some water? I didn’t drink the last pitcher Professor Blaydon brought me; I knew he must be putting the drugs in it…”

“No,” Ysidro said briefly. “I don’t like the smell of the night—I don’t like the feel. There’s something about…”

Asher started to protest, but Lydia said, “No, it’s all right, the pump here always took forever. What happened to your arm?”

“Dennis.”

They halted just within the kitchen door. In the uncertain starlight the yard and the woods beyond seemed alive with the sinister movement of the wind. Asher hated the look of them and hated still more the dark house which seemed to be closing around them like a fist.

“Stay close to the house wall,” he breathed. “We won’t be able to see him in the open. At least, near a wall, he’ll have to come at us from one direction.”

Taking a deep breath, he stepped outside. Lydia followed, holding the lamp. Ysidro brought up the rear. Seeing them standing together for the first time, Asher realized with a start that the vampire stood no taller than she.

Softly, she whispered, “Have you—seen him?”

The wind moved his hair against the strap of the goggles still pushed up on his forehead—he nearly started out of his skin. “Did you?”

She shook her head. “But I assume there’s a reason why he—he only spoke to me through the shut door.” She glanced back at Ysidro and wet her lips. “His father’s serum must have done something other than make him … like you.”

“Indeed,” the vampire responded, never taking his eyes from the lawn and shrubbery around them. “Dennis is not like me.”

They reached the front of the house. Seventy-plus feet of rutted gravel drive stretched before them to the iron bars of the gates. The wind drove a swirl of dead beech leaves over it, like the whirling souls of Dante’s damned, who could not forgo the pleasures of the living. The motorcycle was just beyond the gate, and Asher’s whole soul revolted at that nebulous vista of dark. He glanced quickly back at Ysidro, who was turning his head, listening with fear in his eyes to the night.

“Can you make it back to London afoot?”

“Not before dawn. But I have boltholes nearer than that—property purchased too recently to show up on your precious lists, my dear Mistress Asher. Go back to London. Stay awake and stay always around people in some public place. He cannot take you there; he dare not let his existence be suspected. I will come as soon as I can in the night…”

Together, the three of them stepped from the sheltering shadows of the house. The wind swirled Lydia’s dark skirts and the tangle of her hair and made all the weed stems caught in the platter-sized blob of the jiggling lamplight jerk and tremble erratically, Iron gloom stretched in all directions; Asher felt naked before it. Lydia whispered, “Shall we run?”

“It wouldn’t make us any safer,” he murmured back, “and running, we’d be less likely to see a threat.”

It would, however, have made him feel better, as they moved slowly and cautiously through what felt like the Great American Desert of blowing darkness. The wall loomed before them—stone gateposts, shut and boarded lodge, and weeds shivering thick around the open ironwork of the gate.

Ysidro’s hand touched his arm suddenly, staying him, drawing him back toward the house. There was a gray flutter of movement somewhere beyond the gate …

Asher saw Dennis come over the gate, though his mind stalled on the detail, with a sense of jamais vu as in a dream, as if he had momentarily forgotten the significance of that bulking form dropping like a cougar from me top of the stone gate pillar, eyes glinting in the reflected light of the lamp. The next second, it seemed, it was upon them, though later Asher had clear memories of standing, staring like an idiot, and watching it rush at them with horrible speed. Ysidro must have already started to move, for Dennis caught him, not full-on, but by one arm in an unbreakable grip.

Asher brought the silver bar down with all his strength on Dennis’ wrist, even as the mutant fledgling ripped at Ysidro’s throat. From the tail of his eye, Asher caught the black glitter of blood. It streamed down from Dennis’ fangs as he drew back with a glottal roar of pain, and Asher backhanded him with the bar across the face, hearing as well as feeling the facial bones crunch. Dennis screamed. Blood splattered Asher’s face like gouts of hot syrup. Then the vampire was gone, and Lydia and Ysidro, blood streaming from his torn shoulder, were dragging Asher, stumbling, across the open lawn toward the woods. Behind them, the dropped lamp was guttering erratically in a pool of kerosene.

“Chapel ruins!” Lydia gasped. “Shelter without being closed in!” Blood was splattered liberally over one side of her white shirtwaist and the sweater, droplets of it beading even on her spectacle lenses; it covered the first four inches of the silver hatpin still in her hand. She must have stabbed Dennis from the other side. Ysidro’s shoulder had been opened to halfway down his back, a dark stain spreading with terrible speed over the torn rags of his shirt.

Long weeds tangled at their knees as they cut through the overgrown garden. Their feet skidded on mud and wet leaves. Behind them as they ran, Asher could hear Dennis shrieking in pain, as if the impact of the silver still burned. On his right, Ysidro’s bony grip on his swollen arm was excruciating, but he hardly cared. They had to reach shelter of some kind, a wall or enclosure at their backs, or they were dead.