Those Who Hunt the Night(62)

Asher gazed at him, saying nothing, while those pale, inhuman eyes looked without mockery into his. It was ethically wrong, he knew. Poor, stupid Dennis had killed twenty-four men and women, blindly, feverishly, in the grip of a craving that amounted to madness; Ysidro’s coolly executed murders totaled in the tens of thousands at least. Ethically it was his duty to hunt them down and to destroy them before they could kill again or create other killers like themselves, in a widening pool of blood.

But in his heart he knew Ysidro was right. It would take obsession to track them now, and the obsession with abstract “shoulds” had burned out of him six years ago, when he’d blown out the brains of a boy who had been his friend, simply because his duty demanded that he ought. He felt suddenly weary of this, bitterly weary of it all, knowing that he was simply not up to it anymore.

“We will stay away from you and yours,” the vampire went on. “What more can you ask? This is not payment—it is simply prudence on our part. A man whose own ox has not been gored seldom makes a persistent hunter. To hunt us would be to hunt smoke, James, for we have what you do not have. We have time. The days and hours of your happiness are precious to you, and you know how few they are. But we have all the time there is—or at least,” he smiled ironically, “all of it that we want.”

Something—a sense of danger, the tug of the vampire’s psychic glamour at his mind—made Asher turn, sensing a trap, ready to defend himself … But Grippen and Anthea were gone.

He turned back to the desk, and saw it empty.

His footfalls echoed softly in the empty house as he left. When he was halfway down the street, he saw the gold leap of flame in the study window and the gray curl of smoke, but he kept on walking. People were running past him, shouting as they, too, saw the fire spreading in the house. With the papers scattered everywhere, the whole place would go quickly.

At the corner of Harley Street, he hailed a cab to return him to his lodgings in Prince of Wales Colonnade, where Lydia would be curled up in bed, her red hair lying in swathes over the lace of her shoulders, reading a medical journal and waiting for his return.