Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

"And because," Ysidro's light, disinterested voice whispered, "to drain the death of a vampire, to drink of a mind so rich, so deep, so filled with the colors of living, and so thick with the overtints of all the lives it has taken, might be the greatest temptation, the greatest intoxi-cation, of all."

There was silence-shocked, furious, and, Asher reflected grimly, not without recognition. The silken pattering of the rain pierced it faintly, muffled by the moldering brocades of the window drapes. Then

Grippen snarled, "Buggering Spanish dog- you'd think so."

Seated on a chair near the head of the couch, his ankles crossed negligently but with his usual erectness of posture, Ysidro continued, unperturbed, "But the question was not of life and death, but merely of blood. We can gain physical nourishment from drinking an animal's blood, or a human's, though we kill him not-as you yourself can attest, James." By that light, cool tone, one would never have guessed that he had fought to rescue Asher from that death in Paris, nor pro-tected him, at a certain amount of personal risk, afterward. 'To drink even a small quantity of another vampire's blood is repellent, after our own flesh has undergone the change. I am told that it often causes nausea."

"Then it's been tried."

The vampire leaned a little into the high crimson wing of his chair and folded slim hands around his knee, A slight smile touched his mouth, but left his sulphur eyes hooded in shadow. "Everything has been tried."

The others, still grouped around the couch where Chloe's body lay, regarded him uneasily, save for Ernchester, who simply sat on a chair in the darkness of a corner, staring down at his white, workless fingers, turning them over and over, as if they were some queer and unknown growth he had suddenly found sprouting at the ends of his arms,

"Then merely the drinking of another vampire's blood, whether he killed him or not, wouldn't cause that kind of change?"

"It did not," Ysidro replied in the careful tone he had used at the beginning of the investigation to reveal those few fragments of informa-tion with which he was willing to part, "in those that I have known." "And who were those?" Grippen demanded angrily. "As they are dead now," the Spanish vampire responded, "it scarce matters."

"What about vampires who were older than Brother Anthony is now, that you knew or heard spoken of?"

Ysidro thought, still immobile as an alabaster votive, his pale eyes half-shut. "Rhys the Minstrel was nearly five hundred years old when he perished-if he did perish-in the Fire. Like Anthony, his skills had increased; like Anthony he had become at least in part tolerant of silver and perhaps of daylight, too, though I'm not sure. One saw him less and less. I know that he fed regularly and did not show signs of any abnor-mality. I never knew how old Johannis Magnus was supposed to be..."

Anthea spoke up, resting her hip on the curved head of the couch, "Tulloch the Scot told me once of vampires in China and in Asia, who have lived for thousands of years, going on as they always have, death-less."

"And lifeless," her husband whispered behind her, almost unheard.

To Asher, still sitting on his haunches beside Chloe's motionless form, Ysidro remarked, "As a rule it is not something which concerns us, and I suspect that most of us do not wish to know of it."

"What would be the point?" Grippen demanded sullenly.

"The point, my dearest doctor, is to know whether this abnormal pathology is something to which we all must look forward."

"That's a lot of Popish cock!"

"What's this?" Asher lifted Chloe's arm, limp and soft in his grasp and without rigor. He wondered if the vampire flesh went through rigor when they died. It was another of the things Lydia would want to know... He swiftly pushed the thought of Lydia from his mind. The but-tons of Chloe's sleeve had all been undone-there was a good handspan of them, reaching nearly to her elbow-and the whitepoint d'esprit fell back from the icy flesh to show a small mark on the inside of the elbow, like the puncture of a needle. "Was her sleeve unfastened like this when you found her, Lionel?"

He shook his head heavily. "God's body, I know not! As if I hadn't aught else to look for but..."

"Yes, it was," Anthea replied. "Why?"

"Because there's a wound here-look."

They gathered close, Ysidro rising from his chair and even Ernchester stumbling out of his shocked lethargy to look around his tall wife's shoulder.

"It has to have been done as she died, or after," Simon said after a moment, his long fingers brushing the pinched flesh. "Something that small would heal almost instantly on one of us. See?" With uncon-cerned deftness he drew the pearl-headed stick pin from his gray silk cravat and plunged its point deep into his own wrist. When he withdrew it, a bead of blood came up like a ruby, and he wiped it away with a fastidious handkerchief Asher had a momentary glimpse of a tiny hole, which closed up again, literally before his eyes.

"She'd no such thing when she were made," Grippen put in, leaning close, his words weighted with the nauseating reek of blood. Asher realized the master vampire must have fed while he and Ysidro were waiting for him to finish with the police at Charing Cross; it had be-come, to him, a matter of almost academic note. "I knew every inch of her body and 'twas flawless as mapping linen."

He looked sidelong at Asher, grayish, gleaming eyes full of intelligent malice. "We are as we were when we were made, sithee. I'd this..." He held out a square, hairy hand, to show a faint scar cutting over the back of it. "... from carving an abscess out of a damned Lombard's thigh, and the clothhead fighting the scalpel every inch of the way, damn him."

"Like Dante's damned," Ysidro murmured lightly, "we are eternally renewed from the cuts we receive in Hell." Ernchester covered his face and looked away.

"Interesting." Asher turned his attention back to the white arm in its slender shroud of lace. "It's as if her blood were drawn with a needle, as well as drunk."

"A frugal villain."

"Not so frugal, if he's in the habit of slaughtering nine men in a night." Anthea's dark brows pulled together in a frown.

"His human friend, then?"

"What use would a living man have for a vampire's blood?"

Grippen shrugged. "An he were an alchemist. I'd have sold much for it, in the days when my own veins

weren't bursting with the stuff..."

"An alchemist," Asher said slowly, remembering Lydia strolling along the rocky brink of a lake of boiling blood, a beaker in her hand. Reaching down to dip it full.. .I wanted to examine him medically, she had said... The articles about blood viruses in her rooms...

"Or a doctor." He looked up again at them grouped behind him- Ysidro, Grippen, and the vampire Countess of Ernchester. "Take me back to Lydia's rooms. There's something there I need to see."

"A doctor would have the equipment for drawing blood, and for storing it once it was drawn." Seated at Lydia's desk, Asher leafed unhandily through the chaos of notes and lists in his wife's sprawling script, pick-ing up and discarding them and searching under the heaped papers for more. He was so tired his flesh ached, but he felt, as he often had in the midst of his work abroad or on a promising track in some research library in Vienna or Warsaw, an odd, fiery lightness that made such consideration academic.

"This is somewhat embarrassing," Ysidro remarked, studying the Ordnance Survey map on the wall with its clusterings of colored pins. "I had no idea you hunted so much to a pattern, Lionel."

" 'Tisn't I as leaves my carrion where it may be fallen over by girls out a-maying," Grippen retorted, turning the newspaper clippings over roughly. " 'Bermondsey Slasher,' forsooth!"