Traveling With The Dead(30)

Arson, thought Asher in alarm. Two places at once. Who the hell…?

He flung himself down the stairs, Fairport’s gun in hand, the smoke already tearing his eyes and eating at his lungs. Under the stucco the old house was mostly wood and would go fast. Downstairs the smoke was worse, the heat pounding on Asher’s face and making him dizzy as he raced along the corridor to the scullery. As he ran he thought, If this is Karolyi’s work, why let Fairport stay free? Or has Anthea somehow started this?

The coachman’s body lay in the scullery door. His eyes and mouth were both wide in a look of utter shock. His collar had been torn open, his shirt pulled back to reveal the hairy masses of neck and chest. Wounds bulged like tattered white mouths from ear to collarbone, but there was almost no blood.

Asher felt as if his heart shrank and turned to ice in his chest.

He crossed the scullery, looked swiftly out the rear door to the yard and saw what looked like another body in the shadows under the outside stair. Smoke seared his nostrils, weighted his rib cage. He couldn’t tell if there was a smell of blood or not.

Not Anthea. And not Ernchester.

The others. The vampires of Vienna.

The ones who had followed him here.

Sweat was rolling down his face as he shoved back the shelving, ran down the stair into the cellars cool abyss. He struck a match as he thrust through the door at the bottom; Ernchester, pacing the silver cage like an animal, wheeled, his eyes flashing in the tiny speck of the flame. “They’re here,” he said hoarsely. “I feel them. The house—they’ve fired the house…”

He flicked through the barred silver door the moment Asher had it open, twisting his body so as not to touch.

“Anthea!”

He started for the door, then turned back, catching Asher by the elbow in a grip that came close to breaking the bone. “Did you find her? She isn’t in this house, I’d have known, I’d have felt her, read her dreams…”

Asher recalled something Ysidro had said to him once, about being unable to sense the presence of people deep in cellars through the muffling weight of the earth.

“She’ll be in the crypt under the stable.”

Flame light poured down the stairs, bloody on the earl’s face; a thin face and not particularly an aristocratic one, with an indefinable air of age despite the fact that, like Anthea, he appeared to be no more than thirty-five. Asher did notice, as they raced up the stairs into the choking inferno of the scullery, that at no time did sweat break from the smooth skin of the vampire’s brow.

Asher crossed the yard at a run, but the vampire earl was ahead of him, moving with an insectile, weightless speed, huge bounds like a gazelle. Ernchester stopped, however, in front of the burning stable, hands raised before his face and his blue-gray eyes sick with horror and shock.

The earl followed him without question, however, circling the building to the rear, where the flames were less. Asher drove his boot through a cellar window, dropping into what had been a boiler room. The place smelled of dirt and damp brick, and the thin, sickly odor of kerosene that lifted the hair on Asher’s neck. He dug another match from his pocket, scratched it on the wall behind him. There were barrels of the stuff, ranged along the wall beyond the hunched black monstrosity of the generator itself. He heard the earl whisper, “God’s death!” behind him, and pointed toward what looked to be the door of a closet, nearly invisible in the shadows by the coal bin.

“Through there. We have a few minutes. The fire’s just caught.”

The door was locked. Ernchester ripped the entire mechanism—lock plate, handle, bolt—free of the wood without visible effort and threw it clanging to the brick floor, then vanished like a moth in the darkness.

Asher had been in the crypt many times. Like the subcellar beneath the scullery, Fairport used it to conceal people who weren’t supposed to be in Vienna or who had to leave the town in a hurry. Because of its remoteness from the main house—and the patients who usually resided there—it had also been used for meetings, if instructions had to be passed along with minimum risk of being seen.

He’d felt his way halfway down the boxed-in stairway when yellow light glowed at the bottom. Through the doorway he saw Ernchester setting on the table a newly lighted oil lamp and turning back to the coffin trunk that filled half of the room.

“She’s in here,” the earl said softly and knelt beside the trunk. He passed his hands along the lid, pressed his cheek to the leather. His eyes closed. The flesh around them rumpled and compressed, like an old man’s. Then he moved his head and looked up over his shoulder at Asher, standing in the doorway. “Can you take an end?”

It was awkward, getting the trunk around the corners of the stair. Even in the few minutes they had been in the crypt, the air in the boiler room had heated, and the smoke there was growing thick. Like the house, the stable was wood, the roof and walls went up like tinder. When they dragged and manhandled the trunk upstairs, they found the ground floor suffocatingly hot, filled with blinding smoke under a vicious rain of cinder and sparks. Asher coughed, gasping for breath, his grip on the trunk slipping. As his knees gave under him, he wondered suddenly what chemicals Fairport had in the laboratories here and what fumes they might be adding to the miasma of smoke.

He tried to get to his feet, and fell.

Above the roaring of the fire overhead he heard the scratch of the trunk’s brass-bound corners as Ernchester—unbreathing, undead, desperate to save his wife at all costs—dragged it toward the door and safety.

Black unconsciousness rolled over Asher like a wave. He tried to stand, then realized that the air was a little cooler down near the floor. Inhaling was like trying to breathe kerosene. Kerosene, he thought dizzily. When the roof goes, it’ll take the floor with it, and the whole place will turn into a furnace… The thought that he’d probably be killed by the falling roof before the kerosene scattered the building over half an acre of the Vienna Woods was not much of a comfort. At one point he thought he was crawling, but a moment later realized he was lying with his cheek to the superheating linoleum of the floor, a fallen cinder burning the back of his left hand.

Hands as cold and strong as machinery took hold of his arms, lifting and dragging him as if he were a bale of sticks. The smell of smoke seemed stronger outside, perhaps because his lungs were working again. He stumbled, trying to get his feet under him, and clutched at the shoulders that supported his arm.

He felt them flinch.

Silver, he thought. The chain on his wrist would sting through Ernchester’s coat.

The trunk lay just within the compound gate. It was still shut. Ernchester must have turned back the moment he’d dragged it out of range of the fire.

“She’s asleep.”

Asher raised his head, his brown hair hanging in his eyes, his face burning in the cold air under a film of sweat, soot, and grime. Ernchester knelt beside the trunk, one arm resting along its lid, the reflection of the flames imparting gory color to his narrow face, glittering in his close-cropped fair hair, his haunted, weary eyes.

“Drugged, I think,” Ernchester went on softly. “That is… as well. Thank you.”

Asher looked back across the gardens. The front part of the main house was in flames. The rear wing, where Fairport’s office and his own rooms had been, was still intact. By the flaring light two bodies were clearly visible on the gravel paths.

He fumbled in his pocket for Fairport’s keys, found two that would open the trunk’s heavy latches. Ernchester touched his hand lightly as he would have opened the lid. “Not yet. The air will revive her, and I don’t think I could stand that. I won’t do that to her.” The earl straightened his back, though he remained kneeling, one hand atop the other on the lid of the trunk. “Take her away from here. Go with her back to England. Take her out of this place. I beg you.” He closed his eyes. “I beg you.”

Firelight picked out the sudden lines around his eyes, the set of the thin lips—a face no one would notice, thought Asher, except that it was not a nineteenth-century face, much less one that belonged to this newborn era. The muscles, the speech, the expressions that had formed the mouth and chin and the set of the cheeks were all from some earlier time, and the years had not changed them.

“I can’t repay you,” he added softly. “I won’t be seeing you, nor anyone known to you, ever again. I will owe you this favor, this boon, for all of time. But please make sure she gets home all right. Tell her—” His voice did not break but halted for a moment, almost as if he sought words. “Tell her that she is all that I ever wanted, and all that I ever had.”

Then he raised first the outer lid, then the inner, to reveal the woman sleeping within.

The living dead, they had been called. By the fevered glare of the firelight she looked, indeed, both alive and dead: waxen, still, unbreathing, with her dark hair scattered about her, the linen of her gown not whiter than the flesh it covered. And beautiful, thought Asher. Beautiful beyond words.

Looking up, he saw Ernchester’s face, without expression, as though all expression had grown too much to be supported under the weight of endless years, save for his eyes.