Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"Henriette never recovered, though she lived near a life span after that.Eh Men, she was after all a lady of Versailles. She used to say, nights when we had brought her some drunkard whose blood filled her with wine in turn, that no one who had not experienced the sweetness of those days could ever understand just what it was which had been lost. Perhaps she could not get used to the fact that it was gone."

"She was an old lady," the dark girl's voice said, syrupy and languor-ous from behind Asher's head. "She didn't need no drunkard's blood to loosen her tongue about the old days, about the kings and about Ver-sailles." Her nails idled at the ends of his hair, as if she toyed with a pet dog. "Just an old lady whinin' for yesterday."

"When one day you return to Charleston, Hyacinthe," Ysidro said quietly in the English in which Hyacinthe spoke, "and see where the American army shelled the streets where you grew up, when you find that men themselves have changed there, I hope you will remember."

"Men never change." She shifted her body again, her hip touching Asher's shoulder, a disturbing shiver passing into his body as if commu-nicated by electricity. "They only die... and there are always more men."

"Even so."

Asher found himself sitting very still, aware that Simon, behind Elysee's divan, was poised on the verge of lightning speed; aware, too, of the touch of a quarter-inch of Hyacinthe's fingertip against the skin of his throat. At Ysidro's request, he had left his silver chains behind at the hotel. They would never have let him in, the vampire had said, if they'd suspected, and such a show of bad faith would have damaged Ysidro's own somewhat questionable standing among them. Though Asher could not see it, he was aware of the quadroon girl's glance, teasing and defiant, daring Simon to stop her if she decided to kill this human protege of his, challenging him to try his speed against hers.

Ysidro went on softly, his eyes never leaving hers, "As for Henriette, she was a lady of Versailles, speaking even the language of 'this coun-try,' as they used to call it: that enchanted Cythera that floated like an almond blossom balanced on a zephyr's breath above a cesspit. I under-stand her comparing the world after Napoleon marched through it to what it was before and finding it wanting. I think she simply grew tired of watching for danger, tired of struggling-tired of life. I saw her the last time I visited Paris, before the Prussians came, and I was not surprised to hear that she did not survive the siege. Did she ever speak, Elysee, of the Vampire of the Innocents?"

"No." Elysee fanned herself, a nervous gesture, since Asher had ob-served that the other vampires seemed to feel neither heat nor cold. The others were slowly gathering around his chair in a semicircle behind Hyacinthe, facing Elysee on the divan and Simon at her back. "Yes. Only that there was one." She made a scornful gesture which did not quite disguise her discomfort at the topic.

"The Innocents was a foul place, the ground mucky with the bodies rotting a few niches beneath the feet, skulls and bones lying everywhere on the ground. It stank, too. In the booksellers' and lingerie vendors' stands that were built in the arches, you could look up and see through the chinks in the rafters the bones stacked in the lofts above. The Great Flesh-Eater of Paris, we called it. Francois and the others-Henriette, Jean de Valois, old Louis-Charles d'Auvergne-sometimes talked about the stories of a vampire who lived there, a vampire no one ever saw.

After I became vampire I went there to look for him, but the place.,. I didn't like it." An old fear flickered briefly in those hard emerald eyes.

"Nobody blames you for that, honey, I'm sure," Hyacinthe purred with malicious sympathy. "I'm thinking if he ever bided there at all, he's got to have been crazy as a loon."

"Did Calvaire ever go there?" Asher inquired, turning his head to look up into her face, and she smiled down at him, beautiful as a long-contemplated sin.

"It was all gone 'fore Calvaire was even bit, honey."

"Did he go to the catacombs, then? Did he ever speak of this-this spectral vampire?"

"Calvaire," sniffed one of the other vampires, a dark-haired boy whom Asher had guessed had barely begun to grow a beard when Elysee had claimed him. "The Great Vampire of Paris. He might just."

Asher glanced over at him curiously in the shimmering refulgence of light. "Why?"

Behind him, Hyacinthe replied with silky scorn, "Because it was the kind of thing the Great Vampire of Paris would do."

"He was very taken with being-one of us," explained Elysee slowly.

The brown-haired young man, Serge, seated himself gracefully on the divan at Elysee's feet. "We all have a little fun, when we can," he explained with a grin that would have been disarming, but for the fangs. "Calvaire was just a little grandiose about it."

"I don't understand."

Hyacinthe's fingers touched his hair. "You wouldn't, under the cir-cumstances."

"Calvaire was a braggart, a boaster," Elysee said, closing her swan's-down fan, stroking the soft white fluff between fingers as hard and as pale as the ivory of the sticks. "Like some others." Her glance touched Hyacinthe for a malignant instant. "To sit with your victim in an opera box, a cafe, or a carriage-to feel the blood with your lips through the skin, spinning it out as long as you can, waiting... then to go drink elsewhere, only to quench the thirst, and go back the next night to him again, to that personal, innocent death..." She smiled dreamily once more, and Asher was conscious of a slight movement among the vam-pires behind him and of the swift flick of Ysidro's eyes.

"But Valentin carried it a step further, a dangerous step. Perhaps it was partly that he wanted power, that he wanted fledglings of his own, though he dared not make them here in Paris, where I rule, where I dominated him through that which he gave me in passing from life to... everlife. But I think he did it for the-the 'kick,' as you say in English-alone. He would sometimes let his victim know, especially the victims who foundit piquant to know how near they flirted with death.

"He would lead them into it, seduce them... he had a fine grace and would play death like an instrument, drinking it, in all its perverse sweetness.Bien stir, he could not be permitted to continue.,."

"It is a dangerous thing," the boy vampire to Asher's right said, "to let anyone know just who we are and what we are, no matter what the reason."

"He was furious when I forbade it him," Elysee remembered. "Furi-ous when I forbade him to make fledglings of his own, his own coterie... for that was the reason he gave. But I think that it was just that he enjoyed it."

"But then," Hyacinthe murmured, "the ones he told always expected to win."

Something in her voice made Asher look up; her hand caught him very lightly under the jaw, forcing his head back so that his eyes met hers. Under her fingers, he could feel the movement of his own pulse; she was looking down into his eyes and smiling. For a moment it did not seem to him that he breathed, sensing Simon's readiness to spring and knowing there was no way-even if Elysee's fledglings did not try to stop him-that he could cross the distance in the time it would take Hyacinthe to strike.

Elysee's voice was soft, as if she feared to tip some fragile balance. "Let him alone." He saw Hyacinthe's mocking smile widen and felt the slight tensing of her fingertips against his throat.

Quite deliberately, he put up his hand and grasped the cold wrist. For an instant it was like pulling at the limb of a tree; then it yielded, mockingly fluid in his, and she stepped back as he stood up. But she still

smiled into his eyes, lazily amused, as if he'd failed some test of nerve, and there was in the honey-dark eyes the savoring of what it was like to seduce a victim who knew what was happening. His eyes held hers; then, just as deliberately, he dismissed her and turned back to Elysee.