Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"I've heard of Grippen's cadre, Grippen's get," Asher persisted. "Lord Ernchester, Anthea, Lotta, Chloe, Ned Hammersmith... Even though Danny King was the Farrens' servant, even though it was to them that he owed loyalty, it was Grippen who made him, 'at Charles' request andhis own.' According to Anthea Farren, you were both made by the same master vampire at about the same time. Why is he the Master of London, and not yourself?"

The memory of Anthea's face returned to him, framed in the dark hair with its red streaks like henna. She had warned him, had pulled him out of Grippen's hold; she had held the enraged vampire back from killing him while he escaped. Yet she and her husband were also Grippen's get-as Bully Joe Davies had said, Grippen's slaves. Why slaves?

For a moment he thought Ysidro would maintain that disdainful alabaster silence. But without turning his head back, the vampire re-plied, "Perhaps because I do not care to trouble myself." The familiar supercilious note was absent from his voice as he said it; he sounded, if anything, a little weary. Asher had the momentary sense of dealing, not with a vampire, but with the man whose occasional, oddly sweet smile flickered across those narrow features.

But like the smile, that evanescent glimmer of resignation, of a van-ished humanness, was gone-like the things one thinks one sees by starlight. Ysidro's voice became again as neutral as his coloring, as if even the holding of opinions had become meaningless to him over the years. "And it would be a trouble, as well as a certain amount of peril, to challenge Grippen's authority. I personally do not care to disrupt my existence by stooping to fight with apeon such as he. Calvaire was evidently not so fastidious. He swore allegiance to Grippen, but it is clear that he never intended to submit himself to our medical friend's authority..."

"Medical?" Asher's voice was sharp, and Ysidro looked at him once more with all his old chilly disinterest.

"Lionel Grippen was a Doctor of Medicine and accounted very learned in his time, though, considering the practices of the day, this was not praising him to the skies. For a few decades past his initiation to the vampire state, he kept up with medical practice. Now he reads the journals, curses, and hurls them across the room, enraged that they no longer speak of anything with which he is familiar. Though I under-stand," he added, "that it has been nearly two centuries since he has done even that."

"Has he, indeed?" Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully. "You wouldn't know if he still has any of his old kit?"

"I doubt the originals still exist, though he would know where and how to obtain more." The vampire

regarded him now with interest, his head tipped a little to one side, his long, colorless hair blowing against the fragile cheekbones with the movement of the night. "Interesting," Asher said. "Here, cabby! Pull up!" The man drew rein, cursing as he edged his horse out of the stream of traffic pouring off the Waterloo Bridge. Foot traffic was heavy here as well. Ysidro slipped from the cab and vanished at once into the jostling shapes beneath the blaze of the bridge's lights. At Asher's command, the cabby started forward again, grumbling at care-for-nothing toff fares, and proceeded to the chaos of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and pedes-trians surrounding the half-constructed sprawl of Waterloo Station, a Dantesque vision of brick, gaslight, scaffolding, and smoke. As the cab jostled through the porridge of vehicles, Asher pulled off his gloves and drew from his ulster pocket a thick package. lambert's, said the mod-est label, with a discreet crest.

With chilled fingers, he drew out two silver chains like the one he wore around his neck beneath his starched and respectable collar. It was tricky fastening the small clips around his wrists; but, for obvious reasons, it had been impossible to solicit Ysidro's help. He tugged his shirt cuffs down over them and pulled his gloves back on, for the night was cold as well as wet; there was another shape in the tissue wrap-pings, narrow, like a child's arm bone. He freed it and held it to the rain-streaming light-a sterling silver letter opener in the shape of an ornamental dagger. Having only bought it that afternoon, he had had no time to whet it and doubted in any case that the blade would hold much of an edge, but the point was certainly sharp enough to pierce flesh. Like a Scotsma n' sskean dhu it had no guard. It fit neatly into his boot.

He paid off the cab in front of the station. The man grunted, cracked his whip over his jaded old screw of a horse, and vanished as surely as the vampire had into the teeming mob.

For a time, Asher stood in the open space of light and noise before the station, hearing the screeches of the trains, the hiss of steam, and the voices of thousands of travelers shouting, and feeling the rumble of the engines through the ground under his feet. Weariness made him feel slightly disoriented, for he had waited for Bully Joe Davies in the alley behind Prince of Wales Colonnade for hours after his return from Ernchester House, and had risen to meet Lydia at the Park after only a few hours' sleep. He had meant to nap during the day; but, between Chancery Lane and Lambert's in Bond Street, the rainy afternoon had slipped too quickly away.

Now he felt chilled and weary, trying to recall when he had last slept through the night. A woman jostled past him, unseeing; as he watched her too-bright plaid dress retreat across the square to the platform, he remembered the blonde woman with the two children on the train from Oxford and shivered.

In the field-"abroad," as he and his colleagues politely termed those places where they were licensed to steal and kill-the train station was God's own gift to agents, particularly one as vast as Waterloo, even with half its platforms still under construction: a thousand ways to bolt and so absolutely impersonal that you might brush shoulders with your own brother on the platform and never raise your eyes. Beyond question it was one of the hunting grounds of the vampire.

Pulling his bowler down over his eyes and hunching his shoulders against the rain, he crossed the puddled darkness of the pavement to-ward the blazing maw of the Lambeth Cut.

As he traversed that squalid and tawdry boulevard, his feeling of oppression grew. The crowds around the theatres and gin palaces there were scarcely less thick than those around the station, and far noisier. Music drifted from open doors; men in evening clothes crowded the entryways with women whose rain cloaks fell open to show brightly colored dresses beneath; jewels flashed in the lamplight, some real, some as fake as the women's smiles. Now and then, a woman alone would call to him or crowd through the people on the flagway to stride a few steps with him, with a few jolly words in the characteristic slur

he'd recognized in Bully Joe Davies' voice. As he smiled politely, tipped his hat, and shook his head, he wondered if one of them was Davies' sister Madge.

This, too, was an ideal hunting ground.

It depressed him, this consciousness of those silent killers who drank human life, Ysidro had told him, one night in perhaps four or five. It was, he supposed, like the consciousness he had developed in all those years with the Department, the automatic identification of exits and the habitual checking of a man's shoes, sleeves, or hands.

Horace Blaydon's bellowing voice echoed in his mind, in the big carbolic-smelling theatre at Radclyfle; "I'll tell you one thing that'll happen to you, if any of you manages to stay the course and become a doctor, which, looking at your pasty little faces, I sincerely take leave to doubt-you'll be spoiled forever for the beauty of life. You'll never see a girl's rosy blush again without wondering if it's phthisis, never hear your fat old uncle's jolly laugh without thinkin': 'The old boy's ridin' for a stroke.' You'll never read Dickens again without pickin' it apart for genetic blood factors and unhealthy drains."