Blood Maidens (2 page)

But the moonlight faded, turning a ghastly greenish-yellow. Instead of guerrilla fighters, something like a mist began to ooze into the hut with a thick movement not like other mist. Wisps of it burned Asher’s throat and eyes, gagging him with a smell like concentrated mustard. He’d heard of this at the Foreign Office, this new weapon the Germans were developing, poison gas that would leave a man paralysed and blind . . .

There was a door at the rear of the hut, (
why wasn’t it there in June of 1898?
he wondered), and when he dodged through it he found himself at the base of what appeared to be a stone stair, winding up into a tower that was certainly no part of the hut he’d just come from. The gas trickled in under the door into the tower, and he didn’t hesitate, fled up the stone stairs where the smell of blood grew stronger and stronger. A sliver of moonlight showed him a running line of blood, trickling down the stairs.

It has to be coming in from somewhere
 . . .

The gas was rising behind him. The Foreign Office reports said that the gas was heavier than air, and he told himself he had to be able to out-climb it eventually. But the moonlight blinked out around him, and he was groping his way in blackness, choking on the stench of blood and poison. The stairs ended, and there was no door after all, only a stone wall. He could see nothing and didn’t know whether this was because the tower was windowless or whether the gas had blinded him. He dropped to his knees in the darkness, pawed at the edge of the floor –
the blood has to be coming in from somewhere
 . . .

He could find no crack, no join. Only the stickiness gumming his hands, hot and fresh as if just pumped from a wound. The gas seared his throat, and he stood, groping desperately at the wall in the blackness—

And very softly, a voice whispered in his ear. ‘James,’ it said. ‘We must speak.’

‘He can do that.’ Lydia returned to the breakfast table with a cup of coffee, an egg and toast on a pink-and-green china plate and a second muffin for him. The note of remote disinterest in her voice didn’t fool Asher for one single second. ‘When he decided I needed a chaperone, if I was going to travel with him to Vienna to find you last year, he – he used dreams to summon one.’

And killed her when he was done with her
, Lydia did not add, though she kept her wide, velvet-brown eyes on her egg as she tore her toast into tiny fragments and dabbled them in the rummelled-up yolk – fragments that she set on the edge of her plate, uneaten.

Asher knew the signs and wished he had not needed to bring up the vampire’s name with her.

She had loved him.

Asher suspected – watching how his young wife now carefully arranged her coffee spoon, egg spoon, and knife so that they made a precisely symmetrical pattern where they rested on the edge of the plate – that she loved Don Simon Ysidro still.

It is our lure to be attractive
, Ysidro had told him, when they had parted in the stillness of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
It is how we hunt. It means nothing.

This Asher knew. His own emotions had been scalded by his relationship with the vampire Countess of Ernchester: he knew what Lydia had gone through. Though she was no longer the sheltered girl who’d scandalized her family by marrying a man a dozen years older than herself – and an impoverished lecturer at that! – he knew that in many ways, her absorption in medical research had continued the emotional insulation that her father’s fortune had begun. She was still far more conversant with the endocrine systems of human beings than she was with their behavior, lives, or souls.

Loving Ysidro – and finding the body of that poor companion lying drained of blood on her bed – had torn her apart inside. For nearly eighteen months now Asher had watched her shut herself into the dissecting rooms of the Radcliffe Infirmary, retreat into the Radcliffe Camera’s shelves of medical lore, and conceal herself in her study here on Holywell Street as she penned concisely-reasoned articles about experimental procedures and pineal secretions. He had thought she was coming out of it last September – not quite a year after they had returned from that terrible journey to Constantinople – when, he suspected, she had conceived a child . . .

A suspicion confirmed when she had miscarried at the end of October, returning to her silence and, for a time, passing into a remoteness that had terrified him. She had done her best to comfort his grief, and had seemed to be forcing herself through the motions of being comforted, but he knew there was a part of her that had retreated too far to be touched.

Only at Christmas – at long last – had he heard her laugh unaffectedly for the first time; had he heard her get into an argument, as she’d used to, with one of her stuffier Willoughby cousins about whether or not cats had souls. Christmas night, she had woken up in the darkness and wept in his arms. At New Year’s, on the way home from dinner with her uncle, the Dean of the College, she had asked him, ‘What will you do with this year, Jamie?’ and he’d heard in her voice that she didn’t mean his students or his research into obscure legends or Serbian verb-forms.

For three months, it had seemed to him that he watched green shoots peeping hesitantly from the cracks in a sheathing of stone.

Now, at the mention of the vampire’s name, the guarded silence was back.

Speaking carefully – as if she were carrying fragile glass – he replied, ‘I know. It doesn’t mean I’m going to obey him.’

Her spectacled glance touched his very briefly, then dropped quickly to the rearrangement of the silverware. ‘Not even to see what he wants?’

‘I know what he wants. He wants me to do something for him that he cannot do himself because of what he is.’

She moved the coffee spoon to a more precise angle, as if she would not even think of what they both knew. For all their powers over the human mind, the Undead were powerless to save themselves from daylight. They both had seen the blazing horror when the first touch of sun ignited vampire-flesh. For all their great strength – Asher had watched Don Simon Ysidro bend forged steel in his skinny fingers – vampires could not touch silver without sustaining corrosive blisters and sometimes weeks of illness. And for all their conditional immortality, the Undead were at the mercy of their need to hunt, their need for the physical nourishment of blood, and for the psychic rejuvenation that could only come with the death of their victims.

‘At a guess,’ said Asher in a more normal tone of voice, and scratched one side of his mustache, ‘he either wants me to use my connections in the Foreign Office to learn something for him, or he wants me to accompany him on a journey. Almost anything else, he can trick or buy or blackmail the living into doing, as he tricked poor Miss Potton into being your companion, and blackmailed me back in ’07. And I resent having my personal nightmares used as set decorations for his threats.’

Her long, slim fingers hesitated over a millimeter’s alteration in the placement of the egg spoon. Then her mouth quirked and she scooped the silverware together, set it in deliberate disarray on the edge of the plate, and looked back at him again, her old matter-of-fact self. Against the wan, wet daylight of the windows – it was bitterly cold that March of 1911, and the wind whipped the bare branches of the garden willows – her carnelian hair had the ruddiness of the fireplace coals, and her round spectacle-lenses glinted as bright as the silver toast-racks. ‘Are you expecting a threat?’

It was Asher’s turn to look aside from what he did not wish to see. Was Ysidro fishing in the nightmares that had pursued him for a dozen years only because the vampire knew how to twist compliance from unspoken fears? Or did those visions spring from his own too-informed knowledge of what a modern war would bring?

He didn’t know.

‘If it weren’t important,’ she went on, with the calm logic that sometimes made her such a disconcerting companion, ‘he would never have tried to contact you, you know.’

Asher knew she was right. Knew, too, that his first instinct – to protect her from her memories of the vampire – had been, at least in part, a smokescreen. The other person he wanted to protect was himself.

Tiredly, he said, ‘It’s always important, Lydia. Every time the Department chiefs asked me to risk my life for Queen and Country, it was always because it was the most vital thing in the world and they were relying on me. And it always ended in death, or betrayal, or me doing something to someone that I would
never
have done – would never have
considered
doing – if it were not the most vital thing in the world.’ He sighed bitterly, as if trying to flush from his lungs the smells of blood and mustard gas. ‘I got tired of it, Lydia. And I grew frightened because I was starting not to mind. And now my tea is cold,’ he added, and she laughed and went to the sideboard for the pot. ‘I didn’t mean you should fetch it—’

‘Josetta and I are going to a lecture on ancient Egyptian medical texts after I’m done at the dissecting rooms.’ She named her closest friend, who had been the Literature mistress at one of her very expensive boarding-schools, and poured his tea. ‘So this is the last you’ll see of me till evening.’ She set the teapot back on its little spirit-lamp and shook down the layers of lace-edged sleeve-ruffles to cover her hands, like a thin red-haired marsh-fairy inexplicably playing dress-up in a Worth suit of hunter-green wool. Hesitantly, she added, ‘You aren’t angry at Don Simon, are you, Jamie?’

He raised one eyebrow. ‘Should I not be angry at a man who has murdered hundreds of people, only that he himself might continue to live beyond mankind’s allotted span? No,’ he added, seeing the troubled look that returned to her eyes. ‘I’m not angry. He’s helped us in the past – and whatever he wants of me may be desperately important – but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t dangerous in himself. Every time I or you or anyone crosses his path – crosses the path of
any
vampire – we take our lives in our hands.’ He removed the cup from her grip, and his fingers closed around hers. ‘If I knew where to write to him, I would send him a polite note telling him I’m not for hire this week.’

She smiled, her quicksilver beauty piercing his heart as it had when she’d been sixteen and he, her academic uncle’s guest at croquet parties at Willoughby Towers, with not the slightest hope of ever being more than a family friend who might one day be invited to see her wedded to someone else. Then she sobered. ‘Just be careful, Jamie.’ She removed her spectacles – God forbid cab drivers, or her best friend, should see her in them – and stowed them in their silver case. ‘If it’s important, I don’t think he’s going to take no for an answer.’

‘He’ll have to.’

But, with a sinking heart, Asher guessed that his wife was, in fact, correct.

TWO

‘Lydia?’

The shadows of the stairwell swallowed up the sound of her name, and in the silence of the house – death-still but not empty – Asher thought,
This is a dream
.

Anger flooded him, at the knowledge that he had stood here once before.

A foggy evening in the autumn of 1907. The house chill. The clip of hooves in Holywell Street loud in the silence. Standing in the front hall in his dark academic gown, Asher knew that if he went downstairs to the kitchen he’d find Mrs Grimes, Ellen the maid, and Sylvie the tweeny – who had married the butcher’s son last year and been replaced by the equally feckless Daisy – crumpled asleep at the table, like a tableau in a cheap melodrama . . .

And upstairs, Lydia would be lying unconscious on the divan in the upstairs parlor, fingers clasped around her spectacles where they rested upon her breast and hair hanging in a pottery-red coil to the floor. Don Simon Ysidro would be sitting at Asher’s desk, just out of the line of sight of the door, long hands folded, like a skeletal white mantis awaiting his prey. ‘My name is Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro, and I am what you call a vampire.’

And despite half a lifetime of research into the folklore of a dozen cultures, Asher had not believed him until he had listened to his chest with Lydia’s stethoscope and satisfied himself that his uncanny guest had neither heartbeat nor breath.

He whispered, ‘Damn you—’ and strode up the stairs.

But when he threw open the door of the upstairs study, the divan – though it was back in the same position it had been in, that evening four years before, visible through the half-open connecting door – was empty. No whispered suggestion, as there had been on that occasion:
I can kill your wife, your servants, and all those you care for, if I choose . . . if you do not do as I say
. The lamp on his desk was lit, but no slender gentleman sat there, with his long white hair hanging to his shoulders and his eyes like crystallized sulfur, and the faint lilt of archaic Spanish still lingering in his soft voice.

The papers at the desk had been splattered with droplets of blood.

And in blood was written –
on Lydia’s stationery, damn his effrontery!
– in a sixteenth-century hand:

James
,

We must speak
.

It took Asher a day to find the court he had seen in dreams.