James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (36 page)

“Check anyway,” Blaydon ordered sharply, Dennis' naked brow ridges pulled together into a horrible frown. “Do it!”

“I'm hungry, Dad,” the vampire whispered sullenly. As he moved nearer, his monstrous shadow lurched over the low plaster of the ceiling and the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls. “Hungry—starving— my hands are burning me, and the craving's on me like fever . . .”

Blaydon swallowed nervously, but kept his voice commanding with an effort. “I understand, Dennis, and I'm going to get you well. But you must do as I say.”

There was a long, ugly silence, Asher, lying at Ysidro's feet, could see the struggle of wills reflected in Blaydon's haggard face as he met his son's glare. He's slipping and he knows it, he thought, watching the sweat start on the old man's face. How long before Dennis makes him a victim, as well as Ysidro and myself?

And Lydia, he added, with a chill of fear. And Lydia.

Then Dennis was gone. Asher realized they must all have had their consciousnesses momentarily blanked as the vampire moved, but it was so quick, so subtle, that he was not even aware of it, merely that Dennis vanished into the crowding shadows. He did not even hear the closing of the steel-sheathed door.

Blaydon wiped his mouth nervously with the hand that wasn't holding the gun. He was still wearing the rather countrified tweed suit he'd had on that morning—that he'd had on for days, by the smell of it. Not, Asher reflected, that he or Ysidro could have passed for dandies either, both in shirt sleeves, himself unshaven and splotched with soot stains from climbing the wall last night. At least they'd slept, albeit uncomfortably. Once, when he'd wakened in the afternoon, there had been a tray of food there, undoubtedly brought by Dennis—an unsettling thought. He'd eaten it and searched the room again, but it had yielded nothing but reinforced brick walls and door and Sheffield silver-plated steel window bars.

Blaydon waved his pistol at Ysidro. “Don't get any ideas, my friend. While you're in this room with me, you're safe. Dennis would pull you down before you got out of the house, as easily as he brought you here in the first place.”

There was an annoyed glitter behind Ysidro's hooded eyelids—a grandee, Asher thought, who did not care to be reminded that he'd been overpowered and manhandled by the hoi polloi. But he only regarded Blaydon levelly for a moment and asked, “Do you really believe that any of this will do you any good?”

“I'll be the judge of that,” the pathologist said, rather sharply. “Go on with what you were saying. If you forced James . . . ?”

“To drink my blood,” Ysidro said slowly, unwillingly, his champagne gaze fixed upon Blaydon's face. “That is how it is done—the physical part, at least. But the—perhaps you would say mental, but I think spiritual would be a better term, though these days it is an unfashionable one—”

“Let us say psychic,” Blaydon put in. “That's what we're really talking about, aren't we?”

“Perhaps.” That faint, wry flick of a smile touched Ysidro's narrow-lipped mouth. “In any case, it is the giving of his spirit, his self, his conscious, and what Herr Freud politely terms his unconscious into the embrace of mine, for me to show him the way over that abyss. It is the yielding of all secrets, the giving of all trust, the admission of another into the most secret chambers of the heart. Most do not even join so close with those they deeply love. To do this, you understand, requires an act of the most desperate will, the all-consuming desire to continue in consciousness at whatever the cost.” The shadow flung by the lamp on the wall behind him, huge and dark, echoed the slight movement of his white hand. “Under this set of circumstances, I think James would find no point in making so desperate an effort at survival, though I suspect that under others he might.”

You will never know, Brother Anthony had whispered, deathlessly sorting bones in the crypts below Paris. Asher shook his head and said quietly, “No.”

Ysidro turned his head to look down at him, without any expression in his eyes. “And they say that faith in God is dead,” he commented. “I should think that your conscience, more than another man's, might make of you a coward , . ,” He turned back to regard his captor. “Whether or not James has that will to live, how many of those scum of the gutters whom you purpose to bring for me to transform into others like me would be capable of it? When a master vampire creates a fledgling, it is in part the master's will and in part the fledgling's trust which act. I do not believe myself capable of creating fodder, even did I consent to try. I certainly do not believe that one person in a hundred, or a thousand, has that will to survive.”

“That's balderdash,” Blaydon said uneasily. “All this talk of the will and the spirit . . .”

“And if you did get lucky,” Asher put in, trying to shift his shoulders to take some of the pressure from his throbbing right arm, “what then? Are you really going to stay in a house with two, three, or four fledgling vampires? Fledglings whose wills are entirely subservient to their master's? The start of this whole affair—Calvaire—was a careless choice on the part of the woman who made him. Are you going to be choosier? Especially if you're giving Dennis specific orders to bring in none but the unfit, the socially useless, and the wicked?”

“You let me worry about that,” Blaydon's voice had an edge like flint now, his eyes showing their old stubborn glint. “It's only a temporary measure . . .”

“Like the income tax?”

“In any case I have no choice. Dennis' condition is deteriorating. You've seen that. He needs blood, the blood of vampires, to arrest the symptoms. If you, Ysidro, refuse to help me . . .”

“It is not simply a matter of refusal,”

“Lying won't help you, you know ...”

“No more than lying to yourself helps you, Professor.” Behind that unemotional tone, Asher detected the faintest echo of a human sigh. Blaydon backed a few steps away, brandishing his gun.

"But if that is your choice, I shall have to take what measures I can . . .'*

“More humans?” Asher inquired. “More of those you consider unfit?”

“It's to save my son!” The old man's voice cracked with desperation, and he fought to bring it to normal again. Rather shakily, he added, “And also for the good of the country. Once we have the experiment under control ...”

“Good God, man, you don't mean you're going on with it!” Truly angry, Asher jerked himself to a sitting position, his back to the planed mahogany of the coffin. “Because of your failure, your own son is rotting to pieces under your eyes and you propose to go on with it?”

Blaydon strode forward and struck Asher across the face with the barrel of the gun, knocking him sprawling. Ysidro, impassive, merely moved his foot aside so that Asher wouldn't fall across it and watched the enraged pathologist with only the mildest of interest as he stepped back and picked up the lamp.

“I'm sorry you feel that way about it,” Blaydon said quietly, the lamplight jerking with the angry trembling of his hands. “You, Don Simon, because I'm going to have to keep you fed and healthy while I take your blood for experiments, until I can locate another vampire more compliant. You, James, because I think I'm going to have to force either you or your wife to tell me where her rooms were in the city—she refused to do so, and, of course, Dennis wouldn't hear of me forcing her —so that I can find her notes on her researches . . .”

“Don't be naive,” Ysidro sighed. “Grippen put them all on the fire before he left Lydia's rooms last night.”

“Then I shall have to get Mrs. Asher to tell me herself,” Blaydon said. “Now that I have James here, that shouldn't be too difficult. I think Dennis will even rather enjoy it.”

Keeping his gun trained on Ysidro, he backed out the door.

“Don't trip over your son on the way out,” the vampire remarked derisively as the door closed upon the amber radiance of the lamplight and the bolts slid home.

A west wind had been blowing all day, and the night outside was clear. Leaky white moonlight added somewhat to the faint glow of the gas lamps visible beyond the garden wall. With his usual languid grace, Ysidro unfolded his thin legs and rose from the coffin lid, knelt beside Asher, and stooped to bite through the ropes that bound his wrists. Asher felt the cold touch of bloodless lips against the veins of his left wrist and the scrape of teeth. Then the ropes were pulled away. The pain in his right arm almost made him sick as Ysidro brought it gently around and installed it in its sling again.

“You think he was listening?”

“Of course he was listening.” The vampire twisted the slack of the ankle ropes between his white hands, and the strands parted with a snap. “He was right outside the door; he never even went into the garden, though a vampire of his abilities certainly could have heard us from there, had he chosen to listen, soundproofing or no soundproofing.”

With light strength, he helped Asher to sit on the coffin lid, while he prowled like a faded tomcat to the room's single window, keeping a wary distance from the silver bars. “Triple glazed,” he remarked briefly. “Wired glass, too. We might wrench the lock free, could we get past the bars to get some kind of purchase on it . . .”

“Do you think he followed us in the mews?”

“I am sure of it. I felt—sensed—I don't know. A presence in the night, once or twice ... He took me from behind, before I even knew he was there.” He tilted his head, angling to see if he could reach through to the lock, his hooked profile white against the darkness outside, like a colorless orchid. “But I had been listening for days for things I am not certain I ever truly heard. Fear makes it very difficult to judge.” Asher wondered how long it had been since Ysidro had admitted to fear. Looking at that slender, insubstantial shape in its white shirt, gray trousers, and vest, he had the odd sense that he was dealing now with the original Don Simon Ysidro, rather than with the vampire the man had become.

“Merde alors.” Ysidro stepped back from the bars, shaking a burned finger. “Curious that Blaydon did not wish his son to learn how vampires are made. It is a sensible precaution to keep him under his control, but . . .” He paused, tipping his head a little to listen. “He's gone.”

He had not needed to speak; for the last few moments, Asher had heard Blaydon's hurrying steps vibrating the floors of the house, his querulous voice calling dimly, “Dennis? Dennis . . .”

Cold flooded over him as he suddenly understood.

“He's gone to get Lydia.”

Then the cold was swept away by a heat of rage that burned out all pain, all exhaustion, and all despair.

“That's why he listened. He wanted to know how to create a fledgling.”

“Sangre de Dios” In a single fluid move Ysidro stripped out of his gray waistcoat, wrapping it around his hand. Asher, knowing already what the vampire meant to do, clumsily unslung his arm and pulled off his own. It was gone from his grasp before he was aware the vampire had moved; Ysidro was back at the window, using the fabric to muffle his hands against the silver of the bars. For a moment he strained, shadows jumping on the ropy white muscle of his forearms, then he let go of the bars and backed away, rubbing his hands as if in pain.

“No good. Metallurgy has vastly improved since the days when we had the strength of ten, and I cannot grip them long enough. If we could dig into the masonry around them and dislodge them ...” His pale gaze flicked swiftly around the prison, touching Asher. “Curst be the man who decreed gentlemen should wear braces and not belts with large, fierce metal buckles, as they did in my day . . .”

“He'd have taken them.” Asher was kneeling beside the coffin. “He thought of that. The handles have been removed. I noticed when I opened it that there were no corner braces or other metal fittings.”

Ysidro cursed dispassionately, archaically, and in several languages. Asher eased his arm gingerly back into its sling, and remembered the isolation of that big house on the downs, miles from the nearest habitation. “Dennis must know it's the only way he'll have her now.”

“If it works,” the vampire said, not moving, but his eyes traveling again over the room. “If, as you think, the vampire state is caused by organisms—which I myself do not believe—it may still not be transmit-table in this artificial form, even by a master who understands what he is doing, a description that scarcely fits our friend.”

“That doesn't mean he won't kill her trying,” Anger filled him at his own helplessness, at Blaydon, at Dennis, at Ysidro, and at the other vampires who were hiding God knew where. “Maybe I can reach the lock ... if we could force it, we could call for help . . .”

“Your fingers would not have the strength to pull it from the casement.”

Asher cursed, then said, “How soon can he get there? It's forty miles or so to the Peaks—he obviously can't take the train . . .”

“He will run. A vampire can run throughout the night, untiring. Verdammnis, is there no metal in this room larger than the buckles on braces? Were we women, at least we would have corset stays ...”

“Here.” Asher sat suddenly on the lid of the coffin and pulled off one of his shoes with his good hand. He tossed it to the startled vampire, who plucked it out of the air without seeming to move. “Is your strength of ten men up to ripping apart the sole leather? Because there should be a three-inch shank of tempered steel supporting the instep. It's how men's shoes are made.”

“Thus I am served,” Ysidro muttered through his teeth, as his long white fingers ripped apart the leather with terrifying ease, “for scorning the arts of mechanics. Where is this place? I was unaware there were peaks of any sort on this island . . .”

“There aren't. It's in the chalk downs back of Oxford, sheep country. Blaydon's wife's father built the place when he came into his money in the forties. Blaydon stayed there 'til his wife died. He had rooms at his college when he was teaching . . .”

“You know the way, then?” Ysidro was working at the window, his hands muffled in both waistcoats against accidental contact with the bars. The harsh scrape of metal on cement was like the steady rasping of a saw.

“Of course. I was there a number of times, though not in the past seven years.”