Yet he had no sense that she was influencing his mind, laying upon it the vampires glamour that blinded victims to their danger. Which might only mean, he thought, that she was very, very good at what she did.
Into his hesitation, she continued, “Save for one thing only, traveling alone on that train was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.” They moved on along the wide street, two isolated figures in the thickening brume. Beside them the Plague Pillar ascended in an astonishment of cherubs, saints, and clouds, white in gaslight and shadow. “I only just reached the hotel room in Paris in time, and I was terrified that sleep—the unbreakable sleep of the Undead—would overcome me where I stood in the street. They must have thought me a madwoman, hurrying the porters to take my trunks into my room and then pushing them all out and locking and double-locking the doors. And even when I was alone, the fear near overwhelmed me. How could I know that I’d wake with the setting of the sun again and not burn up screaming through some chambermaid’s prying or greed?”
Her step quickened and her hand tightened on his arm, the memory of that terror making her fingers, for a moment, crushing iron.
“And it was worse, shipping the trunk the following night,” she went on. “Sending myself like a parcel, falling asleep to the rocking of the train, trusting to fate. Not knowing if I’d ever wake. They say we don’t wake, should our darkness be violated by sunlight—that we burn up in sleep. But who knows?” Under the veils her face was calm, but there was a flaw in her voice, and she drew her cloak close about her, as if even her Undead flesh felt the cold. “None of us are ever there, to see it happen to another. Even in utter blackness, the sun submerges our minds. Sometimes we hear and know what happens about us, but we do not wake.”
They reached the door of her hotel, a splendid mansion whose lower stories comprised the palatial residence of some wealthy family, but whose marble stair led to a far humbler lobby on the upper floor.
Anthea paused in the columned shadows of the entryway. “A year ago Ysidro hired you—forced you—to be his servant. To do for him in daylight what he himself was unable to do. And you did it honorably.”
His breath mingled whitely with the fog that had floated through the outer gate behind them. Her words had produced no such clouding. “I had no choice.”
“We all have choice.” Her gaze met his in the dim light from the chandelier of crystal and gilt. “I can only ask you. Stay with me in the room until the sun sets again. Please.”
Lydia had once calculated how many human beings the average vampire killed in a century. If he were the man he once had been, Asher thought, he would have said yes, then later thrown open the trunk lid and let the sun reduce such a murderess to dust.
Perhaps because she had saved his life, he would only have said no.
The clock on St. Stephen’s was striking two, and like courtiers repeating a sovereign’s joke, clocks on churches and monasteries throughout the Altstadt took up the chime. He would be alone, awake, with this woman for hours before she would be with him, alone and sleeping, trusting him as he must trust her.
If it weren’t all a trap, to get him to a place where he could not call for help.
But surely the crypt had been that.
He told himself it was because he needed to find Ernchester, something he could not do without a vampires help. But he knew that wasn’t true.
“Very well,” he said.
“He ceased to care at all, about anything, fifty, maybe sixty years ago.” Anthea removed her hat, and despite the renewed slash of pain in his side, Asher helped her off with her cloak and the jacket beneath it. Her frock was Norwich silk, its ruffles glittering with star fields of jet. “Music, watching people—not for prey but just for the curiosity about how they live their lives—it all meant less and less to him. Like that fairy book that came out a few years ago, where a man’s limbs are replaced, one by one, by magic with limbs of tin, until suddenly he realizes he has no heart and is no longer a man.” She passed her gloved hand across her eyes, the smooth skin of the lids pinching at the memory of pain.
“You’re thinking that all those fifty, sixty years, when his life meant less and less to him, still he prolonged it by killing two and sometimes three men a week. There are things that can’t… be explained. It’s easier than you think, to fall into… habits.”
“I’m not thinking anything.” He remembered Jan van der Platz’s blood on the barn wall, the shocked hurt in the boy’s eyes just before Asher pulled the trigger.
She lighted the lamp on the heavy table. Asher wondered if she had been aware of the brassy-haired prostitute’s death agonies, and it occurred to him that this woman had probably seen worse. Maybe done worse herself. The small chamber, copiously decorated with swathes of peacock feathers and dried flowers and smelling vaguely of carpets, had not even been fitted with gas, much less electricity. The topaz light made the vampire’s face more human, lent color to her cheeks and a kind of life to her eyes, and brought forth cinnabar glints in her hair. Asher remembered again his vision of her lying on the floor of what he realized now was the old Ernchester town house in Savoy Walk, the house where first he had met this woman—where she had saved him from the Master of London’s wrath.
“I’m sorry to have provoked this division,” he said. “To have robbed you of whatever support Grippen would give.”
She shook her head. “It’s been decades coming. Maybe centuries. He wanted Charles—and the houses and land that would give him a system of bolt-holes. We had no living child, and there are ways of manipulating even entailed property, to keep a good part of what you own. Grippen lost much in the Great Fire, and afterward the city was greatly changed. I kept the property tied up in trusts, so Grippen couldn’t own them outright. But it was only a matter of time before he would come to an end of needing Charles. Vampires do not kill vampires, but… I suspect in any case he would not have helped.
“Who is this Karolyi?” She took off her mitts, and her long nails glinted oddly in the lamplight.
While she plucked the jewel-headed pins from her hair, Asher told her about his early acquaintance with Karolyi in Vienna. “He’s continued in the diplomatic corps, I understand. Young men of his class do, with only minimal qualifications. I know he’s been responsible for the deaths of at least two of our agents over the last ten years, but it’s never been proven.”
“How would he have known about my husband?” She paused, brush in hand. “He may be ruthless, yes, clever and dangerous, but it would not have told him how to find a London vampire. Only another vampire could have done that. And why would he have chosen a London vampire to… to bring here? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. They do not tolerate vampires who are not their fledglings and subservient to their wills. Ernchester knows this.”
“That may be part of Karolyi’s plan.” Stiffly and clumsily, Asher began to sponge with cold water at the blood in his coat, and Anthea said, “I’ll do that,” and took it from him. Now that the shock had worn off, he felt very tired, the pain in his side settling into a dull ache. He was glad to sit quietly on the room’s overstuffed brocade settee.
“What he wants your husband for is less clear,” he said after a time. “Maybe he wants your husband because he isn’t a fledgling to some local master, here or someplace like Bulgaria or Greece. That’s what I need to find out. It may be he wants your husband to make a fledgling who can be put to Karolyi’s uses. But whatever he planned, he had to get your husband out of London because of Grippen.”
“Yes,” Anthea said softly. “Grippen would know.”
She walked to the doorway between that chamber and the next, the movement of her shadow summoning vague blinks of light from the brass fittings of the trunk that filled most of the space not already occupied by the four-poster bed. Her hands, straying in the lace at her throat, were like lilies, ringed with solitary gold.
“When a master vampire begets a fledgling,” Anthea said slowly, “he… he takes the fledgling’s mind, the fledgling’s consciousness and personality, into his own being, for the time it takes that… that fledgling’s body to die. Once death is complete, once the… the changes to the vampire state have begun, then the master breathes that mind, that soul, back into the changing body once again. But not all of it. And what is breathed back is… stained. Altered. Just a little.”
The marble profile remained averted, sienna eyes staring blankly into distance.
“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t use Charles in London. Grippen knows… everything. And he has been watching us. Maybe waiting for his chance. I hate him.”
She shook her head, moved her shoulders as if to shed a weight of thought. “I have hated him since the first night Charles brought me to his house. Elysee de Montadour, the Master of Paris, is not so old or so powerful as Grippen, but she would sense it, I think, if a strange vampire came to Paris. Still, they could have gone to Rouen or Orleans to make their plans. The vampires of those cities perished in the confusions of the last German war. Such a journey would have been safer, would not have involved travel by day…”