Traveling With The Dead(28)

She was beautiful, like something wrought of moonlight, flaxen hair piled high, but snagged and tugged by the branches until its tendrils floated around her face in a glowing halo; light eyes, gray or blue, etiolated and transparent. Her dress was moonlight, too, some oyster shade, colorless as a web, and the luster of satin flickered along its sleeve as she lifted her hands. Her eyes filled with longing and sorrow and desire.

Asher felt his mind shutting down, warm yearning for her flooding heart and thoughts and groin, even though, in the shadows of those waxen lips, he saw the curve of fangs. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he wanted her, as desperately as he had wanted Lydia before they were married, as desperately as he had wanted the pretty shop girls of Oxford when he was a student and frantic with a boy’s nascent lusts. Against his will a sort of drunkenness filled his mind and he found himself reaching for her, filled with the irrational conviction that kissing her, touching her, would not matter, that it would be all right, the way one thinks in a dream.

As if from some tremendous distance he saw himself, his mind protesting but unable to connect its thoughts with his actions. Her hands touched his face, cold even in their gloves of shell-colored kid; they slipped over his ears and down to his neck, and his own hand felt rough and cold on the taut silvery cloth of her side.

Then her mouth twisted in a snarl, wide, like an infuriated cat’s. The glamour snapped away as her hands jerked back from his collar, where even through fabric and leather she felt the sear of the silver underneath. Asher gasped, waking, it seemed, to find her mouth inches from his throat, her grip already like iron on his arms. Before she could move, he struck her cheek with the silver watch palmed in his hand, twisting away from her even as she screamed—shock, pain, fury, like a cheetah’s scream, or a demon’s in hell.

He flung her from him, bolted for the wall. She screamed again, and from the corner of his eye he saw her collapse to her knees, clutching the side of her face, screaming over and over as she clawed at the flesh. Something—some darkness—flashed among the trees, and he felt a smothering sleepiness crush his mind like gloved iron. He thrust it from him, scrambled up and over the wall as men’s voices cried out somewhere close, dropped into the rosebushes below instants before the first of Fairport’s servants pounded around the side of the house. He rolled into the shadow, hiding the pale blur of his face, and they ran through the garden to the gate. The moment the last was gone, he flung himself across the narrow space of gravel and bare thorn to the door under the stair.

Then other men were in the garden, calling to one another. He heard Lukas the coachman’s name, and someone called something about “Herr Kapitan…” presumably Karolyi’s regimental rank.

The screaming had stopped. But they’d all be busy for some time.

Ten minutes, he thought—striding down the stone-flagged passageway to the kitchen—while everyone dashed madly around the perimeter of the wall. Longer, if they had as few men as he thought they did, or if they found anything. He tripped the lever behind the scullery cupboard, slipped down the narrow stairway it revealed. More than once he’d taken Slav nationalists or Russian messengers down this way, to keep them unseen by Fairport’s patients.

God, how the blond woman had screamed!

At the flea market he’d purchased wire to make another picklock; his hands shook while he winkled the lock at the bottom of the stair. It was an old-fashioned tumbler type, and he could have picked it in his sleep—he’d warned Fairport about it a dozen times…

Seventeen years with the Department, he was interested to see, had not inured him to that old chivalric voice within him that protested that there were things that a gentleman did and would not do even in defense of his life: kick a man when he was down or render what was euphemistically called a “foul blow” in a fight; shoot a man in the back; lie on sworn oath; forge another’s name.

Shoot a sixteen-year-old boy who trusted you.

Steal money from a woman who loved you.

Strike a beautiful girl in the face with a handful of substance that you were reasonably certain would react upon her like vitriol.

Evidently the fact that had he not done so, she would have killed him within seconds was of no importance to those old voices of his childhood: his country-doctor father, his grim-faced uncle, his tutors at Winchester and Oxford. He still felt an utter swine.

Did he think she was any different from Anthea?

The pawls of the lock snicked back. As he opened the door, dim gaslight from the scullery above showed him a strange gleam on the lock plate. Asher braced his foot in the door to keep it from closing—it was, as he recalled, heavily springed—and lit a match for a better look.

On the inner side, the lock was silver.

The smell of fresh-sawn wood filled his nose, and beneath it, the smell of blood.

His nape prickled again, and he stood still, listening, barely breathing. Then, slowly, he turned the catch to keep it from locking again, raised his lucifer higher and held it up into the room within.

Silver flashed in the seed of phosphor light. Where he had known only a small underground chamber equipped with bed, chair, and chamber pot, he now saw a glittering grillwork of silver bars that stretched from side to side not three feet from the door. Where the base bar of electroplated steel held them across the floor there were curls of sawdust, yellow and new.

Behind the bars, eyes caught the reflection like the eyes of a cat.

Asher blew out the match as the flame scorched his fingers. Frail, twice-reflected light from the stairway showed him a pale face, pale hands as they approached the bars, the white of a shirt-front and an old-fashioned stock.

A voice spoke out of the darkness. “Have you come for my capitulation? I told you I’d do anything you asked. Isn’t it enough that you’ve betrayed me, lied to me? Was it necessary to… to do what you did?”

There was a pause, while Asher stared blankly into the darkness, and the strange eyes gleamed back at him from behind the silver bars.

Then the voice said, “Dr. Asher. The doctor of languages from London. Don Simon said you had been a spy.”

Asher’s mind made a tardy jump. “That wasn’t your wife’s voice you heard,” he said.

One of the white hands moved; Ernchester pressed it for a moment to his mouth, closed his eyes, like a man trying to still something within himself.

Asher went on quickly, “It was another vampire, a woman, who attacked me just outside the walls. Do you know where they keep the key?”

Ernchester shook his head. “Fairport keeps it,” he said after a moment. As Asher had heard on the train, his accent was far less modern than his wife’s, the flat vowels making it sound very American. “Where is Anthea? They said they had her…”

“I don’t know.”

“Find her. I beg you, take her out of this place…”

Asher stepped to the bar, examined the keyhole of the small doorway set in the lattice. It was a Yale cylinder type, and unlocking it was far beyond the capacity of a piece of wire. At the back of the barred area he could see a trunk, like a block of shadow. In front of it the earl seemed very small in his shabby, swallowtailed coat, his gay red-and-yellow waistcoat and strapped pantaloons, a ghost wrought of dust, a mummy that sunlight would shatter.

“I’ll be back.”

As he turned to go, he saw, lying on the bench beside the outer door, the lace mitts Anthea had worn at LaStanza’s and a red ribbon from which depended a black pearl the size of a pea. It had been around her neck when she’d lain down in the trunk that served her as a traveling coffin. They must have brought them in, to show him that they had her indeed.

What had the original deal been, he wondered as he mounted the hidden stair to the scullery above and pushed the shelves to behind him. A lure, to bring him into their power for something he’d never have consented to do? What? Ernchester had certainly gotten on the train at Charing Cross of his own volition, had been a free man when he’d murdered Cramer. Asher’s jaw tightened bitterly, remembering that large young man’s ingenuous grin. He should shoot the boy’s murderer, not risk his own life setting him loose.

He remembered again as he climbed the stairs to Fairport’s office with quick silence—staying by the wall so the treads would not creak—why he had come to hate the Great Game.

A lamp burned in the office—inconveniently, because one of the curtains was half open, and it meant careful maneuvering not to be seen from outside as he approached the desk on his hands and knees. He’d heard no one in this wing of the house. He had only minutes before they returned and started searching in earnest, and Ernchester was right in that he must, above all, release Anthea. While Karolyi had her, he had the vampire earl, whether or not the man was actually in his possession. The fact that Ernchester had jumped to the conclusion that the dreadful scream he heard had been hers told its own story.

They are killers, he thought, in a kind of baffled rage at himself. Over the years Anthea has done to thousands of men what that woman nearly did to me. Why should I care?

But all he remembered was the face of a woman in a portrait, plump, weary, gray-haired, in mourning for a husband who had died thirty years before. How can he be dead?