Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"And one day you'll waken with your precious professor hammering an ashwood map pointer into your heart, and good shuttance to you," Grippen returned angrily. "We deal with our own. You tell your little wordsmith that. An he conies back to London, you'd best stick close by his side."

And seizing Chloe roughly by the wrist, he strode from the cellar, the girl following him in a flutter of pale hair and ribbons, their monster shadows swooping after them in the flickering gloom.

"You're a fool, Simon," Elysee said mildly and trailed along after them, vanishing, as vampires did, in a momentary swirl of spider-gauze shawl.

Hyacinthe remained, blinking lazily at the Spanish vampire with her pansy-brown eyes. "Did you find him?" she asked in her golden syrup voice. "That ha'nt of the boneyards, the Most Ancient Vampire in the World?" Like a flirt, she reached out and touched his shirt collar, finger-ing it as she fingered everything, as if contemplating seduction.

"When I pulled you and Grippen and the others off James here," Simon replied softly, "did you see who carried him away?"

Hyacinthe drew back, nonplussed, as mortals must be, Asher thought, when confronted with the elusiveness of vampires. Without smiling, Simon continued. "Nor did I." Confused, Hyacinthe, too, left, seeming to flick out of sight like a candle puffed by wind. But Ysidro, by the tilt of his head and the direction of his cold eyes, obviously saw her go.

For a long moment, he stood there outside the bars, looking around him at the dark cellar. It had clearly been disused for years, perhaps centuries; past him, as his eyes grew more used to the light, Asher could see the open grillwork in the floor which communicated with the sew-ers, though the other vampires had left in another direction, presum-ably upstairs to some building above. One of the oldhostels particuliers in the Marais or the Faubourg St. Germain, he wondered, which had survived the attentions of the Prussians? Or simply one of those ubiqui-tous buildings purchased in the course of centuries by some vampire or other, as a bolthole in case of need?

Then Ysidro spoke, so softly that it was only because he was used to the whispering voices of vampires that Asher heard him at all. "An-thony?"

From the dusty, curtaining shadows came no reply. After a moment the vampire took a key from his pocket, and, muf-fling his fingers in several thicknesses of the corner of his Inverness, steadied the lock to insert and turn it. Then he picked up a small satchel from a corner where, presumably, he had laid it down before addressing the others, and came into the cell. "How do you feel?"

"Rather like a lobster in the tank at Maxim's." A fleet grin touched the vampire's mouth, then vanished. "My apolo-gies," he said. "I could not be assured of reaching here before they did." He glanced down at something beside Asher's cot. When he lifted it, Asher saw that it was a pitcher, soft porcelain and once very pretty, now old and chipped, but with a little water in it. "Was he here?"

"Anthony?" Asher shook his head. His hoarse voice was so weak none but a vampire would have heard. "I don't know. Someone was." A dream-a hallucination?-of skeleton fingers caressing the silver pad-lock floated somewhere in his consciousness; but, like light on water, it eluded his grasp.

"I left this on the other side of the cell." From the satchel the vampire took a wide-mouthed flask and a carton which smelled faintly of bread pudding.

As Ysidro poured a thick soup out of the flask, Asher remarked, "What, not blood?"

Ysidro smiled again. "I suppose it is customary in novels-it was in Mr. Stoker's, anyway-for the victims of a vampire to receive transfu-sions from all their friends, but somehow I could not see myself solicit-ing such favors from passers-by."

" 'Just come down this cellar with me, I'd like a little of your blood?" I expect Hyacinthe could do it, too. But it wouldn't work, or so Lydia tells me. Apparently human blood isn't all of one type."

"Of course, such matters have been considered among vampires ever since Mr. Harvey's interesting articles first appeared." Ysidro handed him the soup and helped him sit up to eat it. "We have long been familiar with the whole apparatus of transfusions and hollow needles. In fact I'm told some of the Vienna vampires used to inject their victims with cocaine before they drank. When Dewar containers were devel-oped last year, Danny made some experiments in storing blood, but it seems to lose both its taste

and its efficacy literally within moments after it leaves the living body. In any case it is not the blood alone that chiefly sustains us. If it were," he added, without change in the soft inflections of his voice, "do you think that any of us would be the way we are?"

Asher set down the bowl on his knees, his hands shaking too much with sheer weakness to hold it. Ysidro's steadying grip was chill as the hand of a corpse. Their eyes met. "Don't be naive."

The vampire's pale eyebrow tilted. "You may be right, at that." Whether he spoke of Lotta, Hyacinthe, or himself was impossible to tell. He took the empty bowl and turned away, every movement spare and economical as a sonnet. "I doubt you'll need concern yourself with Grippen at the moment. He and Chloe are bound back to Lon-don..."

"Simon..."

He looked back, the gilt candlelight seeming almost to shine through him, as it shone through the edges of fingers held near to the flame- demon and killer a thousand times over, and the man who had saved Asher's life.

"Thank you."

"You are in my service," the vampire replied, the unstressed axiom of a nobleman who questions neither his rights nor his duties. "And we have not yet scotched this killer.

"I am still not entirely convinced," he continued, neatly returning bowl, flask, and spoon to his satchel, "that the killer is not Grippen himself. I have given thought to your assertion that our state is a medi-cal pathology. If there is some alteration of state which takes place close to the three hundred and fiftieth year..."

"Then wouldn't you be experiencing it, too?"

"Not necessarily." He turned back and held up his white, long-fin-gered hands shoulder-high, showing the colorless flesh next to his stringy, ash-pale hair. "Though I was still quite fair-haired as a living man, I had more color than this, and my eyes were quite dark. This- bleaching-is not common, but not unknown among our kind. Perhaps it is what they call a mutation of the virus, if virus it be. The oldest vampire I knew, my own master Rhys, was also 'bleached,' though other vampires he created were not. Therefore as a condition it might affect other changes that take place when a vampire ages. And since it seems that Calvaire left Paris for precisely those reasons which turned Grippen against him in London..."

"No." Asher sank back to his pillow, exhausted with the mere effort of sitting up and eating, wanting nothing more, now, than to sleep again. "Didn't you read the newspaper? It was in my pocket..." He hesitated. "No it wasn't, I left it in the catacombs. A section of the London Times. It can't have taken Grippen less than a night to come here, and the night before I was attacked, nine people were killed by a vampire in London. Oh, the police were puzzled by the lack of blood in the bodies, but it was..."

"Nine!"

It was the first time he had ever seen Simon truly shocked. Or per-haps, he thought, he was simply able to read the vampire better now.

"I didn't think it sounded like any of the London vampires. Grippen may be a brute, but he hasn't

survived three hundred and fifty years by indulging in stupid rampages like that. And now I know it couldn't have been either Grippen or Chloe, and it certainly doesn't sound like the Farrens. What it sounded like was a vampire who'd been lying low."