Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"And who took the first moment when Grippen was gone," Simon murmured softly, "to satisfy a craving that must by that time have been monstrous. Butnine.. ,"

"In any case," Asher said, "it means that we are definitely dealing with another vampire."

Ysidro nodded. "Yes," he said. "And by the sound of it, in all proba-bility, a mad one."

Asher sighed. "My old nanny used to say, 'Every day in every way things are getting better and better.' It comforts me to know she was right." And he dropped his head to the thin straw of the pillow and fell instantly to sleep.

EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED [From theManchester Herald ]

Fire ravaged the cotton warehouse of Moyle Co. in Liverpool Street last night, claiming the lives of eight vagrants who are be-lieved to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold. How-ever, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pavement of the alley behind the warehouse, indicating that some sort of foul play may have taken place, though all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues. All eight bodies were found clumped close together in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attempted to extinguish the blaze in its early stages, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of some other cause before the fire started. The fire was blazing strongly when first seen by watchman Lawrence Bevington, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier...

No, Lydia thought calmly, he wouldn't. If I were trying to hide my kills by incinerating the bodies, I'd make certain the watchman was sleeping at the appropriate moment.

Her hand was shaking as she set down the newspaper.

Manchester. Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then.

She looked at the list she'd made, lying on top of theJournal of Comparative Folklore, and wondered how long she dared wait now,

She had promised James not to do anything until she had checked with him, not to put herself in danger. She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her

weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the vampires would be waiting. The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her dreams, the fear of the gathering darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vampire. Everything she had been reading had only taught her to fear more.

But how long was she going to wait? The last thing she'd heard from James was that he was going to see the Paris vampires, under the prob-lematical protection of Don Simon Ysidro. She shut her heart, trying to freeze it into submission, trying not to connect that letter with this long silence. But her heart whispered to her that they had no reason to keep him alive. And there was a good chance that, as Calvaire's friends, they might have something to hide, not only from humans, but from vampire kin.

I'll wait one more day, she promised herself, trying to relax the steely hand that seemed to clutch at her throat from the inside.His letters have to go long-ways-about through Oxford... it could have gotten delayed...

She looked back at her list, which she had compiled last night, and at the newspaper lying beside it. The vampire's rampages had killed seven-teen people in the last three days.

Her fingers still unsteady, she took off her spectacles and set them aside, then lowered her head to her crossed arms and wept.

Asher woke feeling stronger, but still weighted, not only with exhaus-tion, but with an uncaring lassitude of the spirit with which he was familiar from his more rough-and-tumble philological research trips. His dreams had been plagued by the sensation that there was something he was forgetting, some detail he was missing. He was back in the van der Platz house in Pretoria, hunting for something. He had to move swiftly because the family was due back, the family which considered him such a pleasant and trustworthy guest, a Bavarian professor only there to study linguistic absorption.

But he had forgotten what it was that he hunted. He only knew it was vital, not only to the war between England and its recalcitrant colonials, but to his own life, to the lives of everyone dear to him. Notes, he thought, or a list-that was it, the list of the articles he'd published; they mustn't find it, mustn't trace him through them... So he hunted, increasingly frightened, partly because he knew the van der Platzes, though Boers, were the kingpins of German intelligence in Pre-toria and would not hesitate to turn him over to the commandos if they discovered he was not as he seemed, partly because he knew that behind one of those doors he opened and closed in such aimless haste he was going to find Jan, the sixteen-year-old son of the household and his friend, with the top of his head shot off...

"I killed him," he said as he opened his eyes.

Cold, fragile fingers touched his. Against the dimness of the low ceiling, he saw the thin white Face floating in its pale cloud of tonsure, green eyes gleaming strangely against the sunken shadows of the skull-like head. He had spoken in English, and in English a voice whispered back, "Killed thou this boy in anger, or for gain?"

He knew Brother Anthony had read his dream, seen it like a cinemat-ograph picture, though how he knew this he was not sure.

"It would have been better if I had," Asher replied softly. "He might have understood that. But no." His

mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his own awareness. "I killed for policy, to protect the information I had learned, so I could get back to England with it, and return to learn more. I did not want to be..." He hesitated on the wordblown, an idiom the old monk would not understand, and then finished the phrase, "... revealed as a spy."

What a euphemism, he thought, reflecting how much thought was erased by that simple change of wording. No, he had not wanted to be revealed to these people who had trusted him as a spy, who was using their trust as he'd have used a stolen bicycle, to be later abandoned to rust by the side of the road.

"It is no longer lawful for me to absolve thee of this." Like broken wisps of straw, the thin fingers stroked at his hands; the green eyes looking into his were mad and haunted and filled with pain, but Asher had no fear of him, no sense of a lust for blood. The whispering voice went on, "I, who cried against simoniac priests, venal priests, and priests who took bribes to forgive in advance the sins their patrons longed to commit-how can I expect God to hear the words of a mur-derer-priest, a vampire-priest? Yet Saint Augustine says that it is lawful for soldiers to kill in battle, and that those deaths will not be held against them before the throne of God."

"I was not a soldier," Asher said quietly. "In battle, one shoots at men who are shooting at one. It is self-defense, to protect one's own life."

"To protect one's own life," the vampire echoed tiredly. The skull-face did not change, save that the sunken green eyes blinked. "How many have died to protect my life, my-immortality? I argue that I did not choose to become what I am, but I did. I chose it when the vampire that made me drank of my blood, forced his bleeding wrist against my lips, and bade me drink, bade me seize the mind that I saw burn before me in darkness like a flame, willing me to live. I chose then to live and not to die. I chose then and I have chosen every night since."