Those Who Hunt the Night(59)

The chapel ruin stood in a little dell perhaps a hundred yards from the house, its ivy-draped walls sheltered by a sizable copse of beeches. It offered, as Lydia had said, ideal shelter without the potential imprisonment of the house, the roofless chancel providing cover on most ofthree sides and greatly narrowing the potential field of attack.

“What about the crypt?” Ysidro leaned against the stump of a broken pillar, half doubled-over with pain and dizziness, as Lydia worked a birch sapling loose from among the fallen stones. With an effort, the vampire straightened and cast a quick glance to the moss-covered altar behind them. “If there’s another way in, he can…”

“There isn’t a crypt.” Lydia hauled her skirt to untie one of her several petticoats. The lowest flounce was saturated from the grass but the one above it was dry. With unsteady fingers Ysidro ripped it free and bound it around the wood as a makeshift torch. Never taking his eyes from the rough expanse of hillside that lay between chapel and lawn, Asher tossed them the box of lucifer matches he always kept in his jacket pocket; there was the sharp hiss of sulphur, and the fabric licked into flame. “Dennis’ grandfather had the whole ruin put up at the same time as the house was built—an architect from Birmingham designed it. It’s desperately picturesque in the daylight. This wall, those arches over there, and the tombstones on the hillside are all of it there is.”

Ysidro laughed, his fangs flashing white in the glare of the flame. Lydia came over to them, a second firebrand in one hand and her silver hatpin in the other. The ruddy glow illuminated the weed-curtained stone of the walls, the spurious Gothic corbels, and the shadows of the altar. Behind her spectacles, her face was scratched like an urchin’s, smudged with dirt, and spotted with Dennis’ blood. To Asher’s eyes she was utterly beautiful.

She tucked the matches back into his jacket pocket. Quietly, she asked, “Are you more or less all right?”

Dennis’ screams of pain and fury had ceased; the wind had fallen. The naked beeches and the thick clumps of elder and hawthorn around the walls seemed, like themselves, to be waiting. The silence was worse now than any sound.

“You mean, aside from a broken hand and assorted bites, contusions, and abrasions, and a mutant vampire fifty feet away who’s going to kill us all?”

Her lips twitched. “Aside from that, yes.”

“Yes.”

“I was worried.” Her voice sounded very small; he knew she could see the half-healed red bites that tracked his jugular from ear to collarbone. In the torchlight, her breath blew as a tiny puff of gold.

“Not as worried as I was, believe me.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then: “Was that … that thing we saw … Was that Dennis?”

She’d told him once that Dennis had proposed marriage to her for the first time here at the Peaks. Dennis had never gotten it through his head that she could actually not want to be his wife. It occurred to Asher that Dennis had undoubtedly done so here in the ruins. In the slanting light of a summer’s evening, there would be no more romantic spot in twenty square miles. He sighed and said, “Yes.”

Ysidro moved closer to them, holding his torch aloft. “Can you feel it?” Through the rip in his shirt, Asher could see the wound in his shoulder, still tracking a sluggish trickle of dark blood. A mortal man would have been in shock. The vampire was only shivering as if with deadly cold, his face strained and sunken-looking. The mark of Dennis’ grip was visible on his arm between the rolled-up shirt sleeve and the wrappings on his hands, blackening bruises and five claw rakes where the nails had ripped the colorless flesh. “There’s movement out there, on the lawn. I can’t see exactly…”

For a moment there was nothing, the whole night holding its breath.

Then Dennis was there, appearing with terrible suddenness just beyond range of the torch’s light, as, long ago in the dark of the catacombs, Brother Anthony had seemed to fade into existence from the grinning shadows of the bones.

Beside him, Asher heard Lydia’s breath hiss in pity and horror.

Dennis Blaydon had always been of heroic build and proportion, a golden Hercules in cricket whites. Now his size seemed monstrous, the breadth of his shoulders and chest, visible through his ripped and open shirt, like some maddened bull’s. Blood tracked down his side and blotted his shirt above his ribs—had it been anyone but a vampire, the puncture wound administered by Lydia’s hatpin would have been a serious matter—and where the bar had struck his face the flesh had puffed up like rotting meat. He was barely recognizable; the straight nose was flattened and spread now. Drool and blood dripped from the outsize fangs; the leprous skin gleamed like a snake’s back in the moonlight. The glaring blue eyes were no longer even remotely human.

“Professor Asher,” he whispered, in a sticky decay of a voice. “Lydia, get away from him. I won’t harm you, I swear it. You know I’d never harm you, Lydia; I kept Dad from harming you…”

“Only because you wanted her for yourself,” Asher called into the flickering darkness. “Because you wanted to make her like yourself, infect her with that foul malady in your veins, so she’d be yours forever.”

“That isn’t true!” Dennis’ glaring eyes widened with hate. “Dad will find a cure—Dad will make me better! And why shouldn’t I have her? She should have been mine. Now she’ll be mine forever. I’ll make her love me! It’s him I want—the vampire. I need him. I need him!”

“Since we’re easy prey without him,” Asher said quietly, “I’m afraid we need him, too.”

Then he blinked, trying to keep the vampire in sight—trying to focus his mind on where he had last been. But Dennis was no longer—quite—visible. Asher had the impression he would still be able to see him if he knew where to look, but he could not find him now. A breath of movement stirred the ragged clumps of thorn and elder, catching now here, now there—the whole night seemed to quiver, shifting as soon as he moved his eyes from any given spot.

“He’s a killer, Professor Asher,” a voice breathed out of that darkness. “Killed women, killed sweet little children—he’ll kill Lydia if you’ll let him. You know he’s killed…”

He called into the darkness, “And you haven’t?”

“That’s different. That’s for a good cause. I had to take the risk—this country needs men with my power, my strength. And anyway, it wasn’t me that killed all those people. It was the vampires. Calvaire and Lotta…”

“Calvaire and Lotta were dead by that time and you know it.”

“It was still them,” Dennis insisted, with the kind of logic Asher remembered from having the young man in his classes. “They did it, not me, and, anyway, I did it for a good cause. I need the blood. I NEED IT!”

Something blacked Asher’s mind, a blurring cloud of faintness and exhaustion. He thought he saw movement, a rustle in the long weeds that carpeted the fabricated gravestones far to his left, but the next second Ysidro swung the torch as Dennis came surging out of the darkness almost on top of him. Asher lunged at them, slashing with the metal bar at the mutant vampire’s broad back, but Dennis was gone again, and Ysidro was on his knees, clutching at the big muscle between neck and shoulder, blood welling dark between his fingers. His torch lay guttering out on the damp ground.

“Killer,” Dennis’ voice whispered out of the dark, asAsher, never loosing his grip on the bar, held his arm down to help Ysidro to his feet. “Both of you, killers. Spies, sneaks, cowards, and killers of real men when their backs are turned.” Holding on to his shoulder, Ysidro was shuddering all over, his hand like ice, even through the leather of the jacket, his thin body oddly weightless against Asher’s. The fine bones of his face stood out like a skull’s with shock and fatigue—Asher wondered if it were possible for a vampire to faint.

“You never deserved Lydia. You lied to her, cheated me of what should have been mine. You made her leave me alone. She would have loved me if it hadn’t been for you. But I won’t be alone. When I’ve killed you both, she’ll be mine. I know how to make a vampire now…”

Asher swung toward where he thought the voice was coming from, but there was nothing. Ysidro straightened up a little and staggered, fighting to remain on his feet.

“Where is he?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Oddly enough, his voice sounded as cool and disinterested as ever. “I thought he was over among the tombstones just before he came at me…”

“How long can the three of us hold him off?”

“Long enough for the silver poisoning to take effect on him?” Lydia came up beside them, the flickering brand in her hand making her spectacle lenses seem like rounds of fire.

“No.” The vampire’s light hand tightened over Asher’s shoulder. “It has only made him more frantic than ever for my blood. He has a great deal of strength still. It will be days, maybe weeks … If he takes me or another vampire or sufficient human lives, he may prolong his life indefinitely. In any case, it will be dawn soon.”