Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

Or a prisoner already.

Or...

She put the thought from her.

The compartment was a comfortable one, embellished with rosewood paneling, velvet upholstery, and electrical light fixtures shaped like frosted lilies.

Alone, Lydia unpinned the jade-and-eggplant fantasia of her hat and settled into her seat, gazing out the window at the impressionistic flower bed of color, shadow, and light that was the station platform, seeking, she realized, for the sturdy brown blob, the clumsy stride that would be Margaret Potton. After a moment she opened her handbag and fished forth her spectacles, a little startled, as always, at the sudden sharpness of people's faces, the lettering on the signs. According to the booklet on the little table before her, dinner would be served in the salon car at eight-thirty, but between anxiety about James and the obscure fear that even yet she would encounter Ysidro, she doubted she would feel much hunger. Her head ached, and she realized she hadn't eaten anything since the three-quarters of a croissant she'd consumed before Margaret Potton had entered the dining room at the hotel.

She watched through the window until the train began to move. Then she settled back and closed her eyes, and breathed a sigh.

Jamie...

"If I may say so, mistress," murmured a voice like the sudden slide of silk over unexpecting bare skin, "you make yourself difficult to look after. Were I your husband, I would school you."

Lydia whipped around in her seat, stomach lurching-anger, fear, and, against her will, a deep flash of relief that she'd have some kind of help and advice. Her relief angered her still more, and she replied tartly, "Were you my husband, I would demand a separate establishment." She pulled off her eyeglasses and slipped them behind her hat.

He stood in the doorway, ivory and shadow. As in his tomb, only the slender hands, the gold ring, caught the light. Behind him, spectacle lenses flashed in the corridor.

"You behold it." He stepped inside and his small gesture took in the rosewood, the velvet, the frosted lily lamps.

He had fed. She could see the faint color that stained his white face and close mouth, so that he appeared more nearly human in the staring light.

Sickness filled her that she had ever felt relief. That she had ever asked help or advice of such a thing.

"Miss Potton has taken a compartment at the other end of the carriage," Ysidro went on. "It would be our pleasure, would you join us there for cards."

Lydia stood up, slender and straight in her traveling dress of carnation faille, jet and amber glittering. "Send her home."

"I've already told you I don't have-" began Miss Potton, and Ysidro raised a finger.

"This is not possible."

"Will it not be possible after we return from Vienna?" Lydia 's face was almost as chalky as the vampire's. "Are you going to kill her when you're safe in London again? And me, and James, to secure the secrets you hope to stop Ernchester from telling the Austrians?"

His expression did not change, but she was aware of thoughts passing through the sulfur- crystal mazes of his eyes. Thinking about options? she wondered. Or only about what kind of story she was likely to believe?

"You have admirably guarded the secrets you learned a year ago," he said after a time. "They are no more believable now than they were then. And I believe Miss Potton as capable of keeping them as yourself."

The tram lurched a little, going over the points; lights cascaded past the window. In the corridor a small dog barked furiously and a woman crooned, "La, tais- toi, p'tit malin!"

"I understand that dinner will be served at half past eight." Ysidro's fingers moved toward the folder on the table but did not touch it. Like everything about him, the gesture was minimal, as though long years had wearied him of all but the smallest symbols of what had been human mannerism, human expression, human speech. Lydia was suddenly reminded of the worn stones of a field circle in a pasture near Willoughby Close, her childhood home, like the white stumps of teeth protruding from olive turf.

"I suggest you ladies partake, if so be your wish, and return after to Miss Potton's compartment. Do you play picquet, mistress? The most excellent of games, and the representation in little of all human affairs. I assure you," he added, saffron gaze meeting the brown, "that neither you nor she has aught to fear of me."

"I never did," Margaret said from the doorway. Ysidro did not so much as shift his eyes.

Lydia said, "I don't believe you."

The vampire bowed. "This news breaks my heart."

And he was gone. Margaret, who no more than Lydia had seen him go, looked startled, then hastened away down the corridor without so much as an excuse, leaving Lydia standing alone.

Miss Potton returned half an hour later, tapping gently on the curtained glass. Lydia, who in the intervening time had neither resumed her spectacles nor taken from her portmanteau the issue of Journal des Etudes Physiochemiques she had brought for entertainment, turned from a somewhat blank contemplation of the lights fleeing by in the darkness and said, "Come."

The governess stepped inside, holding to the doorway as if afraid of rebuke. She'd dispensed with her deplorable hat. Her hair, tightly prisoned in pins on the top of her head, was the one thing about her that was truly as it had been in the dreams, thick, heavy, silky, and black as night.

I did call her a fool, thought Lydia, seeing the hesitation in the other woman's eyes.

But she is a fool!

But telling her so again would not break Ysidro's hold on her.

Lydia took a deep breath, rose to her feet and held out her hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't trust him, but that's no reason to... to be angry with you."

Miss Potton smiled tremulously in return. She had envisaged, Lydia realized, a journey in company with a frozenly hostile traveling companion, reason enough to look wretched. "You can trust him, you know," she said, her blue eyes widening with earnestness. "He is a true gentleman."

And a multiple murderer who hasn't been human for at least four hundred years.

"I never doubted that," Lydia said. "Is he there?" She nodded down the corridor.

When Margaret bobbed her head, she went on, "Would you wait here for me? There's something I need to say to him in private."

He was playing solitaire. An abacus, a small calculating machine, and a notebook lay on the table beside the spread of the cards. Four decks. The corridor lights made wan mirrors of his eyes. No light burned above the little table where he sat.

"You summoned her for me, because no lady travels alone, is this correct?"

The pale head inclined. In the near dark she had the impression of a skull surrounded by the spider strands of his long hair.

"Then the corollary would be that no lady travels with a known killer?"

"You've lain with one every night for seven years, mistress," replied the nearly soundless voice. "In my time ladies traveled with them regularly, quite sensibly, I might add, for protection." A white hand, almost disembodied in shadow, laid card upon card and shifted a column; flicked a bead in the abacus; made a note.

"In your time," Lydia persisted, "was it not customary for gentlemen to respect the wishes of the ladies with whom they traveled?"

"If they were not foolish." He turned a card, made another note.

"I won't have you killing while we're traveling together."

Another card, colors indistinguishable in the cinder-colored gloom. He did not look at her. "Unless it be for your convenience?"

Lydia stood for a time, her breath coming fast. Then she turned and strode down the corridor to the restaurant car, leaving him alone turning cards in the dark.