The Kindred of Darkness (24 page)

‘As you will, Mistress.' He kissed her hand.

When she went back into the house – considerably after the fifteen-minute grace period granted by Ellen, but she found the servants only just bringing supper into the dining room – she found also the college post, which Mick had brought over from James' study at New College. One missive caught her eye and she carried it at once to the lamps on the table: ordinary yellow foolscap, folded together rather than placed into an envelope, and sealed as before with red wax.

The jagged handwriting was the same, vertical sixteenth-century letters written with what looked like an ordinary fountain pen.

Jms Cl Asher, New College, Oxford

She cracked the seals, and a second, half-sheet of foolscap fell out, folded small.

Thursday, May 15, 1913

Dear Mr Asher. I am well and so is Miss Miranda. We're taken care of, it's so quiet here, barring sometimes the train whistles, and fresh milk and fresh eggs for Miss Miranda, why a few nights ago I heard a nightjar. They even give me books to read, only this was a magazine, the Comprondooz of the Acadamy of Sciences with an article by Mrs Ashers favorite Mrs Curie, all about raydium and pishblen. Please don't worry. We are both well.

Nan
.

T
here were four of them. A man and a woman gripped Asher by the arms, and another man – tall, aristocratic, with smooth brown hair and an immaculate dark suit that screamed of Savile Row – constrained Wirt. The fourth, a kittenish girl who looked to be only in her late teens, was clothed in extremely expensive poor taste: gaudy, lacy, jet beads and sequins flashing on heavy green silk. She was laughing as she slowly untied Wirt's tie.

‘Look, you don't understand,' the American said, almost stammering in his haste to get the words out. ‘I'm on your side. I've got a deal for you, for all of you.'

‘And we've got a deal for you,' purred the girl. She stood close to him, rubbed her hip across his groin. ‘Don't we, Geoff?' She gazed up at the tall vampire beside her.

‘I tell you, beautiful, I'm not the one you want. Titus Armistead – you heard of him? Richest millionaire in the States. He wants to meet you. Wants to work with you. You think this place is something?' Wirt nodded back toward the silent blackness of the house. ‘This is nothing! Armistead'll give you whatever you want: silk-lined coffins, hydraulic self-sealed vaults … He's got judges, police chiefs, Congressmen on his payroll. You'll never have to worry about who you kill again!'

‘Do we worry about who we kill, Geoff?' The girl slipped the tie from around Wirt's throat, draped it over her bare shoulder, and raised languid brown eyes to the tall vampire again.

‘I cannot sleep within my coffin, sweet Penelope,' responded Geoff gravely, ‘with the agony of my anxiety.'

Her fangs glinted as she smiled, and undid the buttons on Wirt's collar.

‘I brought him!' Wirt jerked his head frantically toward Asher. ‘I brought him for you …'

‘Oooh, so kind of you.' She ran the tip of one claw along the pounding artery beneath the man's ear.

‘You got it all wrong! You do a deal with me – you let me introduce you to Armistead – and you're set for life! I mean – uh – you're set for eternity …'

‘But we
are
set for eternity,' murmured Geoff, and ran his claws over Wirt's hair. ‘Really, if we start killing everyone your imbecilic boss wants out of the way, how long will it be before someone figures it out? Before people start hunting us? How long will it be before one of your boss's own idiot helpers decides to use us against
him
?'

‘We may be trying to get clear of ol' Grippen,' added the young man who held Asher's arm, in clipped Cockney, ‘but God forbid we 'ave to move to America to do it.'

‘Shut up, Jerry.' Geoff placed one hand on the side of Wirt's face, to turn his head. Penelope leaned close, baring her fangs as her lips touched the skin of the man's throat.

Asher saw Geoff's smile of gleeful anticipation.

Wirt twisted in the vampire's grip, jabbed an elbow into that expensive waistcoat, jerked himself free. Plunged away into the overgrown tangle of the garden.

Penelope, Geoff and Jerry exchanged huge grins of delight and darted after him, with the foxfire swiftness that, even without the sleepy inattention that the vampire can lay upon living minds, was nearly impossible to follow. Asher felt the pressure of sleepy darkness on his own thoughts and thrust it aside. The grip of the fourth fledgling, a sturdily built woman with a strong chin and a heavy, sensual mouth, tightened on his arms and he knew better than to try and break free. In the African war he'd encountered more than one lion and knew that flight only marked one as prey.

Standing behind him, she shifted her weight, and he guessed she was listening to Wirt's blundering footfalls among the jungle of laurel-thickets between Thamesmire House and the surrounding wall. It would be pitch dark in there. Even at this distance Asher could hear the sawing of Wirt's breath.

‘
Are
you trying to get clear of Grippen?' he asked conversationally.

‘They're idiots.' Her voice was a brisk alto, her accent Sussex overlain by a lifetime of French and German governesses. ‘Without Lionel they won't last a year.'

‘I don't imagine a fugitive Romanian is going to be of much use arranging local conditions, no.'

Her fingers tightened on his arms, bruising even through the sleeves of his jacket. Wirt would never, Asher knew, have been able to break free of Geoff's grip if he hadn't been released. By the sound of it the American was being driven, blundering through the dense leaves guided by touch and by whisper, crying out now and then as cold claws brushed him in the dark.

It wasn't often the Kindred of Darkness got a chance genuinely to play with their prey. They were making the most of this one.

‘If you think he arranges them with us you don't know the man.' Resentment tinged her voice. ‘We're only told, “Don't kill this man or that”, “Don't kill at all five nights out of seven”, “Don't kill this type of person or that” …'

‘You think the Romanian wouldn't have that power over you?'

She laughed shortly. ‘I'd like to see him try. You know a great deal about it.'

‘Did you think Grippen doesn't?'

Her body shifted again, pressing against his back. He felt the cold of her forehead against his ear as she brought her lips close to his throat; felt her recoil in shock, at the silver he wore under his collar. She twisted his arm viciously.

Then, more carefully, she drew close again. ‘You wouldn't happen to know the means by which Damien claims he can break Lionel's hold on us, now, would you?'

Asher said nothing. From the dark tangle of the overgrown garden he heard Wirt's voice sob, ‘Don't! Oh, God, don't – please, stop it! Please! No …'

And a moment later, Penelope's sweet laugh.

Don't think about it
.
You were probably going to have to kill him yourself
.

‘Oh, God!'

But not like that
.

He'd once spent seventy-two hours in a cell under the Okhrana headquarters in St Petersburg. During that time they'd brought in someone – to this day he had no idea who it had been, or why they'd needed the information they thought the man had. The torture had lasted most of a day.

‘Or whether, when he's done it, he'll command us, as Lionel does?'

Screams ripped the darkness, agony, horror, frantic pleading lost in an animal shriek of pain.

Asher felt the woman behind him shiver. She could smell his blood, feel the warmth of it through his flesh and his clothing. Alone with her in the darkness – this woman who had the strength of a machine in her big white hands – he could tell she was listening to the sounds of the kill with the devouring instinct of a starved demon.

Would they never finish the poor bastard off?

Her voice was thick when she murmured, ‘What is his secret?'

‘What has he told you?'

‘He says he's met the Devil.' One hand released his arm, slipped around his waist. ‘And the Devil taught him tricks. He says he knows spells, can make elixirs. I think he's lying.' The cloudy sleepiness of her mind reached for his again, clumsy and heavy-handed, compared to the subtle inattention that Ysidro or Grippen could introduce, and easy to push aside. She thrust him back against what felt like the trunk of one of the peach trees in the blackness, stood in front of him, her face barely a blur. ‘But I don't know what he's lying about. Do you?

‘Answer me,' she added, when he kept his silence. ‘Or I'll break your neck, and drink your blood and your soul as you die.'

‘Is it worth it? I've seen what masters do to fledglings who displease them.'

She drew back a little. In the garden behind them, Wirt's voice had sunk to a steady thread of sound, a constant pleading ‘Uhnn … uhnnn … uhnn …' broken now and then by a sob of agony.

‘Are you one of Lionel's?'

‘Would I have found this place if I wasn't?'

‘I don't believe you. He trusts no one. Not us, not that publican in Stepney who gets his bully boys for him, not that Jew moneylender in Whitechapel he uses as a paymaster. No one.'

‘He had no choice,' said Asher. ‘I don't suppose you trust those others – your friend Geoff, and the little tart in the flashy dress …'

He heard her hiss in contempt. Then she turned, sharply, and in the dense blackness Asher thought he glimpsed movement. Nowhere near the broken whimpers of the dying victim. A trace of starlight showed him what he thought was the gleam of eyes.

The fledgling beside him whispered, ‘
Who is that?
'

There was fear in her voice.

Instants later the tall vampire Geoff appeared from another direction, Penelope and Jerry behind him. The latter two were giggling, like schoolgirls tipsy on champagne. Geoff wiped traces of blood from his lips, licked it from the tips of his nails. ‘Have a nice chat with our friend, Mrs Raleigh?' His tone was that of a drunkard in mid-binge, with no intention of stopping until he's had enough. Asher's eyes had adjusted to the minimal ghost of starlight through the mists, and he could make out Geoff's long, pale face, the elongated white V of his shirt front, the ivory gleam of Penelope's shoulders.

Wirt has to have come by motor car. It'll be by the gates
.

Mrs Raleigh turned to speak to Geoff, and Asher struck down at the hand still on his arm with his free wrist. Even through the cloth of his shirt he knew the silver would burn her – new-made vampire flesh was a hundred times more tender to the effect of the metal than Grippen's would be. She screamed, jerked her hand away, and he plunged into the darkness, knowing by instinct where the low place in the wall was, praying he'd get there before the others could surround him.

Like the lions on the veldt, once the chase started they wouldn't give it up. If they surrounded him – and vampires were faster even than the great African cats – they'd drive him, as they'd driven Wirt, prolonging his pain and terror for their amusement, relishing his knowledge that ultimately he wouldn't – and couldn't – escape. He blundered into the wall, barely glimpsed the lighter patch in the darkness that showed the low place. His breath labored in his lungs and his head swam.
At least outside the wall I'll keep my bearings
…

He dropped from the gap and nearly fell, blood-loss and exhaustion buckling his knees. A sort of dark confusion – he could put on it no more description than that – flailed at his mind, as if someone were trying to put a hand before his eyes, and he focused his concentration, as he sometimes could do when dealing with Ysidro. He ran with everything that was in him, stumbling on the muddy tussocks. Sometimes it seemed to him that he lost sight of the wall, and the bulk of the house – that he was lost in fog suddenly thicker than the mists of the night. That he
was
in Africa, fleeing lions, their musty animal pong in his nostrils. That he was dreaming.

He fought to keep his bearings, to remember the slope of the ground.

Claws touched his face, or he thought they did. Phantom lights flickered far to his left and it passed through his mind that a pub was there – safety was there – where he knew no building stood. In the darkness he heard Penelope laugh.

Not far … Not far
…

A shadow on the wall, springing down. The flash of beaded sleeves, a pale face.

Ahead, the black bulk of a motor car, standing before the black bulk of the gates.

Someone was beside it, tall and slim and dark. Reflective eyes caught the starlight. Asher stumbled, turned, knowing he'd been headed off, seeking another direction to run. There was one more of them than he'd thought. Five, not four …

They were all around him, ghostly swirls of movement. Ferrety Jerry and Penelope like marsh fire incarnate to his left, Mrs Raleigh to his right and Geoff before him, a shadow-cloaked torero weaving back and forth, making feints to draw his attention. Asher backed a little, knowing the fifth vampire beside Wirt's motor car would take him from behind. There was nowhere to run.

They closed in.

A shadow for an instant – or longer, he wasn't certain – covered his eyes, and with a sense of sharp waking he found himself on his knees on the wet gravel. A voice like dark thunder cursed above him and the corner of a cloak brushed his face: ‘Puking foot-lickers! The man's mine! Clot-heads! Rabbit-suckers! Leave him be! Hang the lot of you!'

Asher's eyes cleared and he saw Geoff sprawled twenty feet away. Before the tall vampire could regain his feet, Grippen – for it was Grippen standing over him – strode to his fledgling and kicked him with vicious strength that sent him another several yards.