Barbara Hambly - 02 TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

There was a telephone in the kiosk. Undoubtedly the police could trace him through the exchange if he phoned Halliwell- he'd dealt with the endless polite chatter of Viennese telephone operators too often to think the transaction could be accomplished quickly. And the delay of a night in jail meant that Ernchester-and Anthea-would vanish untraceably.

When he'd taken a seat at this table, half screened from the path by a hedge, there had been two or three other brave souls sipping coffee and gazing contemplatively over the slaty waters of the canal. Now he was alone. Across the river the clock on St. Stephen's struck three.

Unwillingly Asher got to his feet, thrust his bare hands into his pockets, and after a cautious glance up and down the path for signs of pursuit, headed back along the Haupt Allee for the Praterstern, where with his last few pfennigs he could catch a tram at least partway to the Vienna Woods.

It was not long after the coming of full dark that Asher realized he was being followed.

He took the tram as far as Dobling, then climbed the winding road through thin rust- and-pewter woods past Grinzing. Moving kept him a little warm, though his side hurt at every step and he had to stop repeatedly to rest on the low rock walls that divided woods or vineyards from the road. He was sitting thus, trying to get his breath after a particularly steep patch of road, when he heard the church clock in that storybook village chime five.

Now and then a farm wagon passed, and once a motorcar full of homebound seekers after pastoral calm, but as the twilight clotted under the trees, such things became few. A small wind cleared the clouds; a shaved silver coin of moon floated in a halo of ice. By six it was utterly dark.

That mattered less than it might have, for Asher knew the road. Toiling upward with the ache of fatigue dragging at his bones, there were times when he felt he'd never been away. He didn't even have to look for the Fruhlmgzeit Sanitarium's gateposts of ivy-covered stone. The slope of the road told him exactly how far yet he had to go.

He listened for the sound of human pursuit. But that was not what he heard. He would have been hard put to say exactly what it was he did hear, or what he felt, that told him they were in the woods be-hind him. Perhaps, had he not come so close to death at their hands-or the hand of those like them in Paris -a year ago, he would not even have known he was being stalked.

But he knew. A touch of sleepiness at his mind, in spite of the wind eating through his holed coat and the ache of his wound. A sense that it wasn't really necessary to look behind him, or around him, at the woods. And then, when a single breath of moving air sighed from the cinder-colored darkness among the trees, the sweetish stink of blood.

He didn't slow his step, or quicken it, not daring to let them see he knew, but he did wonder what he was going to do. He was nearly at the drive that turned into Fruhlingzeit, and the drive, at least, would be watched by Karolyi's men. He'd have to leave the road then. The silver on his throat and wrists would buy him a few seconds, but they wouldn't save him from a broken neck. The road before him lay deserted.

On the whole they moved without sound, but it was late in the autumn, and beneath the pale stems of the beeches the brown leaves mounded thick, and dead fern and ivy rustled and whispered with the passage of unseen feet.

He stopped on the edge of the road-he'd been keeping to the shadows along the ditch in case Karolyi had patrols on the road- and took his watch from his pocket, angling it to the moonlight, then closed it with a click and, under cover of slipping it into his pocket again, unhooked the fob from his belt. A quick motion wrapped the chain twice around his middle finger, so that when he drew his hand out again-and tucked it under his armpit, as if for warmth-he carried the rounded disk of silver cradled out of sight in his palm.

It wasn't much, but it would have to do.

He sprang across the ditch, scrambled a little up the bank, wondering if they could hear the sudden heavy slamming of his heart. The Vienna Woods were thin. Beneath a summer canopy of leaves he doubted he could have navigated by night, but with the trees bare, the familiar shapes of beech and sycamore were just visible by the latticed pallor of the moon. There was no way of telling how great a force of men Karolyi had at the sanitarium. It would take only one to spread an alarm.

Provided he lived to get anywhere near the walls.

What had Anthea said? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. He remembered, too, that pitiful fledgling Bully Joe Davies back in London, glancing in terror over his shoulders: They'd kill me, they would- Grippen don't want none in London but his own get, his own slaves...

Had they, too-whoever they were-read that tiny mention in the Neue Freie Presse about the dead lacemaker and known that another was hunting on their territory, killing in such a way as to rouse the suspicions of the rulers of the day?

Or did they simply recognize his heartbeat, Asher wondered, the smell of his blood, as those of an intruder who had been snooping around the walls of their palaces last night?

Asher walked as quickly as he dared, moving purposefully. Once he heard the leaves rustle, and some sound that might have been a taffeta petticoat, but his senses screamed at him that there were more than one. Like sharks they followed him, slipping unseen through the abysses between the trees.

White glimmered ahead. Black veins of ivy traced it: the rear wall of Fruhlmgzeit. Above it bulked the house's steep roofs and stuccoed walls, the golden ochre hue so characteristic of Viennese houses grubby in the dark. Most of the windows facing the woods were shuttered, but lamplight from those facing the court outlined what had been the stable, since converted into a laboratory and therapy room. Asher had always suspected that the aged cats and dogs-and the occasional Viennese businessmen-upon whom Fairport experimented showed improvement because of the therapeutic massage, good food, and careful tending that went with "magnetic induction." There was a sort of crypt under the stable, Asher remembered, where Fairport's generator was housed among stores of carbolic, ether, kerosene, and coal.

Nearer the wall he smelled the smoke of a guard's cigarette.

The trees pressed close around the back of the property. From the concealment of an oak he could see the window where he'd sat all that long ago afternoon, planning how to get himself out of Vienna and betray Francoise in the most painful possible fashion in the process.

Then he turned his head and saw a woman standing beside him.

The hair lifted on his nape. He had not heard one single sound.

She was beautiful, like something wrought of moonlight, flaxen hair piled high, but snagged and tugged by the branches until its tendrils floated around her face in a glowing halo; light eyes, gray or blue, etiolated and transparent. Her dress was moonlight, too, some oyster shade, colorless as a web, and the luster of satin flickered along its sleeve as she lifted her hands. Her eyes filled with longing and sorrow and desire.

Asher felt his mind shutting down, warm yearning for her flooding heart and thoughts and groin, even though, in the shadows of those waxen lips, he saw the curve of fangs. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that he wanted her, as desperately as he had wanted Lydia before they were married, as desperately as he had wanted the pretty shop girls of Oxford when he was a student and frantic with a boy's nascent lusts. Against his will a sort of drunkenness filled his mind and he found himself reaching for her, filled with the irrational conviction that kissing her, touching her, would not matter, that it would be all right, the way one thinks in a dream.