James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (12 page)

Asher's every sense of danger came alert. “I haven't the faintest idea,” he said coldly. “He could have followed me back here. We parted rather abruptly. I haven't seen or heard him, but then, one doesn't.”

Bully Joe threw a swift glance around him, and Asher saw fear gleam in his bloodshot blue eyes. He edged closer still, his long-nailed fingers picking at Asher's sleeve, his voice lowered to a hoarse breath. “Has he spoke of me?” he whispered. “Does he know of me?”

With an effort Asher kept the surge of overwhelming curiosity out of his voice. “Shouldn't he?”

The hand closed around his arm, reminding Asher of that other tenet of vampire lore—that they had the strength of ten men. Ysidro certainly had. “If you speak of me, if you say aught of me, I'll kill you,” Davies breathed. “They'd kill me, they would—Grippen, and that chilly Papist bastard Ysidro—if they knew about me, knew Calvaire had made me. First, I thought it was Grippen and the others what done for Calvaire. Then I heard them others had been killed—Neddy Hammersmith and Lottie. Christ, they was Grippen's own get! Sodding bas-tard'd never kill his own! And now I'm being followed, being watched . . .”

“By whom?” Asher demanded sharply. “How do you know?”

“Dammit, you think I'd be askin' a mortal man if I knowed that?” Bully Joe swung around, twisting his hands, his hard face contorting with rage rooted in fear, and Asher fought not to step away from him, not to show his own fear. “Summat's after me, I tell you! And I hear the others talking— Coo, ain't that a tickler? I can stand acrost the street in the shadows and hear every word they says! And they say there's some bloke killin' us wi' a stake in the heart, just like in them old books, and lettin' the sun in! You gotta protect me, same as you're helpin' the others ...”

His hands closed around Asher's sleeve again, and Asher thought fast. “I will protect you,” he said, “if you'll help me, answer my questions. Who are you? Why do the others want to kill you?”

The calm authority in his voice seemed to quieten Davies, but the vampire's reply was still sulky and impatient. “I told you, I'm Calvaire's get, Grippen's the Master of London. None of the Others'11 dare get a fledgling wi'out his say-so. Grippen don't want none in London but his own get, his own slaves . . .”

“But Calvaire wasn't Grippen's get.”

Davies shook his head, goaded, weary, confused. “Narh. He come in from Paris, he said, though he talked English like a regular man. He made me, said I'd live forever, have all the gelt I wanted, never die! He never said it'd be like this!” Desperation crept into his tone. “For a month now I been livin' from pillar to post, never sleepin' the same place twicet! Hidin' from Grippen, hidin' from Ysidro . . . Calvaire said he'd take care of me, show me what I got to know! But it's all gone wrong nowf Everything's all dinnin' and burnin' in my ears, smellin' the blood of every livin' soul . . .”

He broke off, licking his lips, his burning eyes fixing on Asher's throat, like a drunkard forgetting his thought in midsentence. Slowly, thickly, he whispered, “I killed a girl last night—Chink girl, down by the Limehouse—and I don't dare hunt another for a couple o' days at least. But my brain's burain' for it! I dunno how the others do it, kill and not get the flatties down on 'em . . .”

Asher felt the hand tighten again around his arm, begin to draw him inexorably closer to that twisted, fanged face. With deliberate calm, he asked, “And now you're being followed?”

Davies flinched, as if he'd been shaken from sleep; he loosed his grip and stepped back, wiping his lips with a hand that shook. “I dunno,” he whispered. “Sometimes it's like I can feel summat in the night, watchin' me, and I'll turn around and there's nuthin'! Other times ... I dunno.” He shook his head, his lip lifting back from stained yellow fangs.

“I don't want to die! I died once already. I went through it with Calvaire! I wouldn't of let him do this to me, 'cept that I didn't want to die! Christ Jesus, I didn't know it'd be like this!”

There was a noise at the end of the alley. Davies swung around, his hand tightening with bone-crushing force on Asher's elbow. Through the pain, Asher was still interested to note that no sweat stood out on the vampire's white face. A man and a teen-age boy stood momentarily framed in the lighter slot of the alley's mouth, the boy looking coyly away as the man bent his head down. Then, as if they heard Asher's involuntary gasp of pain, they paused, peering sightlessly into the darkness. After an uneasy moment they moved away.

Davies let go of his arm, wiped his lips again. “I got to go,” he said, his voice thick.

It was Asher's turn to catch at his sleeve. “Can you take me to Calvaire's lodgings?”

“Not tonight.” The vampire glanced nervously around and flexed his big hands. “I ain't killed yet tonight and I need it bad. Just bein' this close to you turns my brain wi' the wantin' of it. Like me dad, when he gets the cravin' for the gin.” He shot a quick, sullen glance at Asher, daring him to disapprove or to show fear.

Asher had dealt with enough drunkards and addicts to know that, if he did either, Bully Joe might very well kill him from sheer pique. He was uncomfortably aware, too, of Ysidro's warning, and of how long the interview had lasted already. What effect would that psychic pungence have on a mind not oriented, not taught how to handle the influx of new sensation?

“Tomorrow night, then?”

“Late,” Davies said, his eyes turning once again to the alley mouth. "I'll come here and wait for you, after I been and killed. Seems like, until I do, I can't properly think. I'll keep away from the coppers somehow. It keeps hurtin' at me and hurtin' at me. Christ, I saw my sister last night—Madge, the youngest, sixteen she is. She'll still come and see me, look for me—she don't know what happened to me, nor why I left me old lodgings, nor nuthin'. I hadn't killed yet, and by God it was all I could do to keep from sinkin' my fangs into her!

“You seen the others,” he went on, with a gesture of helpless rage which seemed to abort itself midsweep into a kind of futile wave. “You talked to other vamps, now, you must have. Are they all like this? Killin' the ones they love, just because they're handy-like? Calvaire said he'd teach me, tell me, help me to get on, but he's dead now. And the one that done for him is comin' after me . . .”

He swung wildly around at another sound, but it was only a girl, sixteen or so and plain as an old boot, stepping, candle in hand, out into an areaway from the tradesmen's door of one of the houses that backed onto the alley. Asher heard the flap of a shaken rag and the spattering of crumbs on the cement and, beside him, the soft hiss of the vampire's murmured, “Ahhh . . .” In the faint reflection of the light, Asher saw the young man's eyes, blue and shallow in life, blaze with the strange inner fire of the Undead.

Bully Joe muttered thickly again, “I got to go.”

Asher's hand clinched down on the vampire's arm, holding him back. The vampire whirled, enraged, his other hand lifted to strike, and Asher met the hungry devil-eyes coldly, daring him to go through with it. After a moment Bully Joe's arm came down slowly. Beyond his craggy silhouette, Asher saw the smudge of candle flame disappear into the house from which it had come.

An evil anger twisted at the fanged mouth. “So it's bargainin' now?” Bully Joe whispered. “You know, and because of it I got to do what you say. Yeah, Calvaire played that game, too. I'll tell you this and I'll tell you that, if you do as you're bid ... faugh!” His arm twisted free as if Asher's hand had been the weak grip of a child. They faced each other in silence, but Asher felt nothing of the terrible dreamy coercion of the vampire mind—only a kind of inchoate buzzing in his head, as if Bully Joe were groping to do that which he had no notion of how to accomplish. Then this, too, faded, and Bully Joe passed his hand across his mouth again in a gesture of frustration and defeat.

“You hadn't any choice with Calvaire,” Asher said quietly, “and you haven't any now, if I'm to find this killer before he—or she—finds you. Be here tomorrow night after midnight. I'll let you know anything I've found.”

“Right,” Davies muttered, backing a few paces away, a dark bulk against the paler darkness of the alley mouth. “I'll be here. But I tell you this right now, Professor: You tell Ysidro or any of them others about me or about where you're goin', and I'll break your back.”

It was meant to be his exit line, so Asher spoiled it by saying coolly, “You're a vampire, Bully Joe. Do you think I, as a mortal man, can keep Ysidro from following me if he wants to? Don't be ridiculous.”

The vampire snarled, his long fangs glinting in the dark, trying, Asher guessed, to collect a fitting rejoinder.

He wasn't up to it, however. After a long pause, he turned and strode off up the alley toward the gaslights of Bruton Place. Asher felt, as clearly as if the vampire had pointed and said, Look over there, the momentary urge to turn his head, to check for danger in the dark pit of the areaway closest to him. He forced his eyes to remain on Bully Joe and so saw him silhouetted briefly against the street lamps at the alley's narrow mouth. Then he was gone.

Asher threw a quick glance down the areaway to reassure himself that the urge of danger had been, in fact, only a clumsy effort at the psychic glamour which Ysidro wielded so adeptly. Then he pulled his brown ulster more closely about him and walked up the alley and around the corner, to the dim lights and freer air of Prince of Wales Colonnade.

From the doorway of Number 109, Lydia watched the vampire emerge into Bruton Place. She'd seen Asher crossing that street fifteen minutes earlier when she'd come to the front parlor to buy a stamp from her landlady—she was wearing her specs, as she did when working—but had meticulously taken no notice. When she'd seen the tall, brown, rather melancholy-looking figure turn into the alley which she knew led through to his own lodgings, she'd merely assumed he was playing at spies, something he sometimes did in Oxford sheerly out of habit. Nevertheless, a glimpse of him was a glimpse of him. Schoolgirlish, she thought, swiftly climbing the narrow oval of stairs and hurrying down the hall to her little bedroom at the back of the house, but there you have it. After living with him for six years, she was surprised at the depth of her need to see him, if only for a second.

And then she had seen the vampire.

The only light in the alley was what leaked down from the windows of the houses on both sides, but with no light on in her own room—that was another thing she'd learned from James—Lydia could see fairly well. They were talking when she came to the window, moving the lace curtain only barely; James' back was to her, and in the gloom she could see the cold, inhuman white of the other man's face, and realized with a shiver that he must have been waiting down there,

A vampire. The Undead.

They were real.

She had not doubted James' story—not consciously, she reflected, at any rate. But the quickening of her heart, the coldness of her hands, told her now that there had been a part of her that had not really believed. Not really.

Until now.

Even at this distance, her trained eye picked out the coloring of a corpse, the different way he held himself and moved. This man did not fit the description of Don Simon Ysidro—another vampire, then. After the first shock her whole soul swelled into one vast itch to get a closer look at the tongue and mucous membranes of the eyes, at the hair follicles and nails which grow after death, and at the teeth. She'd spent the last thirty-six hours, more or less, in reading, and between the drier tomes of leasehold and quitclaim at the Public Records Office, she'd come home to peruse the trunkful of medical journals she'd brought along—articles on porphyria, pernicious anemia, and the various nervous disorders which constituted the “logical explanations” so dear to the heart of modern man. She realized that she, too, had wanted them to be true.

Now . . .

Keeping an eye on the window, she pulled her medical bag to her from its place near the bed. By touch in the dark, she found her two largest amputation knives and slipped their cased lengths into her coat pocket as she put the garment on. They were polished steel, not the supernaturally recommended silver; she cast her mind about for possibilities for a moment, then dug in the bag again for her little bottle of silver nitrate and slipped that in her pocket as well. If worse came to worst, she could always throw it and hope the legends were right.

There was no time for anything more. Already James and the vampire were parting, the vampire pulling free of James' grip and stepping back; Lydia fancied she saw the glint of eyes in the shadows. For a moment, despite the fact that she knew the vampires had hired him and would not harm him under the circumstances, she felt afraid for him, for there was murder latent in every line of that half-crouching dark form. Then, with an angry gesture, the vampire moved away.

With swift silence, Lydia was down three flights of stairs, coiling up her hair and pinning on a hat on the run; people who knew her to take three hours assembling herself for a party would not have credited her speed in an emergency. She was waiting in the dark of the entryway when the shambling, raw-boned shape of the young man emerged from the alley. She had no intention of getting anywhere near him, nor of coming close enough to let herself be seen; even from half a block's distance, it would be possible to observe how he moved, how those closer to him would be affected by the aura—if there was one—that James had described. It was the best she could do for now.

They were close to Shaftesbury Avenue. Lydia followed the vampire southeast, her high heels tapping like a deer's tiny hooves on the pavement. There were still plenty of people about, crowding the sidewalks under the glare of the gaslights in throngs that had not the purposeful hurry of the day. Women in bright clothes strolled on the arms of gentlemen, laughing and leaning their shining curls close to dark shoulders; jehus, bundled in coats and scarves against the bite of the October night, read newspapers on the high boxes of their cabs in the street-side ranks, their horses breathing steam like dragons. Groups of young swells, of impecunious medical students, and of home-going shop clerks jostled along the pavement. Lydia found it hard to keep the vampire in sight.