Traveling With The Dead(69)

I’ve done it , she thought, looking down at the face of the man who slept beside her—unshaven, bruised, his neck mottled with sticking plaster and dried blood, his flesh horribly white under the beard stubble.

I saved him. Well, more or less.

I found him. He’s not dead.

She realized she hadn’t really expected to succeed, to be able to do anything right, especially not that which was most important to her happiness. Not when it involved something as unpredictable as living people.

The happiness filling her had a soap-bubble quality, as if it could be taken from her at an unwary breath, but he was here with her… breathing. She checked the gashes on his neck. So deeply asleep was he, on the thin mattress on the floor, that he didn’t wake. Like the older, red scars, they seemed like the marks of claws, but lacked the mangled puffiness of a wound from which a vampire would have drawn blood.

Relieved, she touched his hair, the white streaks in his mustache, then leaned back against the wall and, for no reason she could discern, burst into tears. From this she passed very quickly into sleep.

An hour or so later one of the army corporals brought them bread, honey, white goat cheese, and tea. He brought a set of Turkish army fatigues for Asher, who was still deeply asleep—the pile of his clothing in the corner was torn and bloodied and stank even to Lydia’s dissecting-room-toughened sensibilities—and a lady’s trousers, tunic, vest, yashmak, veils, and slippers.

“Wife’s,” he explained, with a shy grin. “Wife she say—” He gestured to Lydia’s torn and blood-crusted gown. “—not good. Better.” He held up the veils, grinned quickly again—he didn’t look old enough to have a wife, thought Lydia—and took a hasty departure.

She hung one of the veils over the judas in the door and another over the window, and changed clothes, glad to be out of the gown with its dried blood and the smell of charred flesh caught in its folds. The horror she had experienced made her want never to see the green gown again, but she knew that feeling would pass and she’d be glad of the copious samples of vampire blood. She wondered, as she settled back in the corner by Asher’s head—the room was innocent of furniture other than one chair and the mattress on the floor—whether there was any way she could talk the authorities into letting her see the remains of the burned bodies.

Probably not, she thought. She felt better for having slept and eaten, and despite the nightmare of her memories—blue fire, charred flesh, screams like nothing human—she found herself wishing she’d had a notebook with her, and a watch.

Ysidro…

Cold tightened in her chest. Had he gotten to safety? The rioters had been gone by dawn, but he’d been unable to stand. And where in the city could he go?

Golge Kurt’s words returned to her, about the taste of death bringing healing. In the riot-torn streets a victim wouldn’t have been far to seek. She closed her eyes, not wanting to admit to herself how close she stood to condoning an innocent person’s murder.

Looking back—remembering how Ysidro had torn like a mad wolf into Golge Kurt on the stairway—she felt a vast astonishment that he had refrained from hunting at all, upon her bare word.

Their compact was done.

Ernchester was dead. Karolyi had taken the secret of the vampires with him to the Constantinople morgue.

Jamie was alive.

Like an echo, she heard the whisper of a voice in her mind: There’s a brightness dwells not in the veins…

Had he really been drawn to her, as to a flame of warmth? Or had that only been a literary conceit to compare the red warmth of fire and blood to the auburn of her hair?

She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she wanted to know. There was a strange hurt inside when she thought of him, a dark wanting that she didn’t know what to do with. It felt nothing like the love, the need, that had made it impossible for her to contemplate a life that did not include James’ arms around her when she woke up in the night.

When Ysidro had carried her inside after Golge Kurt’s attack on her…

She did not finish the thought. She curled up close to her husband, and taking his hand as for protection, let herself drift into sleep.

At sunset Asher woke to the cries of the muezzins of Aya Sofia, calling the Faithful to prayer. His startle of panic woke Lydia; for a moment his grip closed hard enough around her fingers to bruise the bones.

“I never thought I’d find you.”

“Find me?” Asher said. His voice was raw and hoarse. “If I’d known you were looking, I’d have white hair by now!”

Lydia laughed a little shakily, and touched the silver glints in the brown. “I’m sorry.” She pushed aside her own heavy red coils, groped for her spectacles as if to satisfy herself that they lay on the floor beside her, but did not put them on. “I was afraid I wasn’t doing it right, but I was as careful as I could be. I always wore silver and carried a gun and made sure someone knew where I was—well, mostly. Not that that would have done me much good some of the time. But I did try.”

“You did well.” He cupped the side of her face in his good hand. “But then I never thought it would be otherwise, in anything you set out to do.”

Lydia started to protest, and he covered her mouth with his own.

Someone knocked at the door, and a man called out in bad French, “Monsieur Ash? Madame? Here we have of the British Embassy Sir Burnwell Clapham, and a lady, for to fetch you away.”

The house on Rue Abydos was absolutely dark when the embassy carriage left Asher and Lydia at its door. “I expect poor Miss Potton’s still out looking for you,” Lady Clapham said as Lydia unlocked the gate. “We didn’t get back ourselves until nearly dawn, what with looking for you and making a detour and our carriage being attacked by rioters. We sent a man over at about nine, and he said the house was locked up and silent, so we knew she must be doing what we proceeded to do: check all the hospitals in the city. It was only toward evening we started checking police stations.”

“Then you didn’t get the message?” Lydia asked. In her all-encompassing black garments, with her red hair piled on her head again and the mud washed from her face, she felt like a schoolgirl playing dress-up; Asher, beside her in his khaki uniform, with his arm in a sling, appeared some casualty of a war.

“Heavens, did you send one?” The attache’s wife shook her head. “We haven’t been back to the villa all day, child. We’ll probably find it under the door—if those villains at the prefecture bothered to send one at all.”

The carriage rattled off into the dark. Lydia shivered. The house had a cold, unused feeling. She thought at first that Madame Potoneros and her daughter had departed that morning as soon as Margaret would let them, but found the kitchen fires unlit. They must have left sometime the night before. Lydia wondered uneasily, as she fished a match from the drawer in the hall to kindle the lamp on the little table, whether the housekeeper lived in Pera or across the Horn in Stamboul. The riot had spread to Galata, where the army had killed almost a dozen Armenians. Soldiers had been posted on the street corners as they’d come up the hill.

The back entry to the kitchen was unlatched. They could have fled that way as soon as the sounds of strife were heard at the foot of the hill.

“I hope Margaret hasn’t come to grief herself.” Lydia raised the lamp as she returned to the front hall. “She’s really not very bright, and completely out of her depth here. I shouldn’t like to think of her trying to negotiate with a Turkish cabdriver, or…”

Asher straightened up from examining something heaped on the hall table—a wreath of garlic bulbs and hawthorn. “There are four or five of them here,” he said. “And none on the windows.”

“Madame Potoneros may have taken them down,” said Lydia, though she felt a qualm of cold within.

“Maybe.” They looked at each other, then turned as one to hasten up the stairs.

Lydia froze in the doorway of the bedroom, lamp lifted so that the light fell through to show the unshuttered windows, the protective wreaths heaped in the corner, the still figure lying on the bed.

Asher disengaged his arm from her shoulder at once, crossed to the bed. Lydia set down the lamp, a little numbly, on the vanity, and with a taper kindled the two smaller lights there. The added glow warmed the colors of the room but did little to dispel the dark in the corners.

The woman on the bed was Margaret. But then, she hadn’t really had any doubts.

Asher touched the woman’s neck. There was a little dried blood around the mangled puncture marks, but of that, also, Lydia had never really had any doubts.

The waxiness of the skin, the blue color of the lips, the fingers, the bare toes visible under the white flannel nightgown, were very clear. Lydia set the lamp down again on the bedside table next to Margaret’s eyeglasses, reached down—as Asher had already done—to touch the mangled neck, the short, unpretty jaw.

They were still rock-hard. If Margaret had died at the beginning of last night’s darkness, rather than at the extreme end, almost at dawn, the rigor would be wearing off now.

“She took the herbs from the windows herself,” she said softly. “Ysidro said… a vampire could get a mortal to do that, if once he met her eyes.”