Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

How much time? he wondered. How much light?

The door of that small room over the kitchen was reinforced with steel and massively bolted from the outside. The bolt made the faintest of whispered clicks as he eased it over. Beyond, in the wan glow of the street lamp somewhere outside, the room lay bare and empty, except for the closed coffin.

Arizona Landscape with Apaches, he thought, remembering the old Indian-fighter's sketch. He took a deep breath and strode swiftly, si-lently, across to the coffin's side.

The sky beyond the barred window was distinctly lighter than it had been. They'd have to run for cover, he thought-after three hundred and fifty years, Ysidro would doubtless know every bolthole in Lon-don

If it were Ysidro, and not the day stalker, who lay in that coffin.

The lid was heavy and fitted close. It was an effort to raise it with one hand. As Asher lifted it clear, Ysidro turned and flinched, trying to shield his face with his shirt-sleeved arms, his long, ghostly hair tan-gling over the coffin's dark lining beneath his head. "No..."

Behind him, Asher heard the door close and the bolts slide home. He was too tired, too spent, even to curse; he had thrown on the longest of long shots and lost.

"Close it." The long fingers that covered the vampire's eyes were shaking; beneath them Asher could see the white-lashed eyes shut in pain. The light voice was sunk to a whisper, shivering, like his hands, under

the strain of exhaustion and despair, "Please, close it. There is nothing we can do."

Knowing he was right, Asher obeyed. Whether he had been brought here forcibly, lured, or driven, once the doors had been locked behind him, there was literally nothing Don Simon could have done but take the only refuge available against the coming daylight. He slumped, bracing his back against the casket, knowing he should keep watch and knowing there wasn't a hope in the nine circles of Hell of his being able to remain awake to do so.

He was asleep before the first sunlight came into the room.

Asher floated groggily to the surface from the murky depths of sleep, through a gray awareness of hands pawing at him, pulling open his collar to unfasten the protective silver chain from around his throat, stripping off his jacket to rifle the pockets. Oddly, his chief consciousness was of the sound of the man's breath, the hoarse breath of the elderly. Then, like spreading poison, the agony of his swollen arm began, shooting out a root system of pain to every nerve of his body.

In spite of himself, he groaned and opened his eyes in time to see Horace Blaydon back away from him, fumbling with a revolver in one hand while he pocketed the silver chains and knife with the other.

"Don't call out," Blaydon said quickly. "The party wall on this side's soundproofed-the house on the other side has been empty for months,"

For a long instant there was silence between the two men. Asher lay tiredly back against the coffin, blinking in the chilly daylight that flooded the room, his swollen arm in its filthy sling cradled to his chest, clothes smutched with grime and rainwater, sweat-damp hair hanging down into hard brown eyes that were not the eyes of an Oxford don. Blaydon's hand on the gun wobbled for a moment. He brought up the other to steady it, and his wide-lipped mouth pinched.

"James, I really am sorry to see you here." It was, as the Americans said, a fair-to-middling imitation of his old arrogant bark, but only fair-to-middling. "I must say I'm surprised at you-surprised and disap-pointed."

"You'resurprised atme?" Asher moved to sit up, but Blaydon scram-bled back a yard or so on his knees, gun leveled, and Asher sank down once more, gritting his teeth. The novocaine had well and truly worn off. His hand felt as if it had been pulped with a hammer, and his whole body ached with the stiffening of every muscle that had been twisted and bruised in the encounter with the vampire in Grippen's unkempt yard.

And yet, for all he must look like a bitten-up tomcat, he thought Blaydon looked worse.

Horace Blaydon had always been a healthy man, scorning the ill-nesses he studied, bluff and active despite some sixty years. He was nearly as tall as his beefy son; against his shock of white hair, his face had been ruddy with youth. That ruddiness was gone, and with it the crispness of his hair and all his former air of springy vitality; he seemed flaccid and broken. It crossed Asher's mind to wonder whether Blaydon's vampire partner had in some moment of desperation bat-tened ontoHis veins.

But no. It was more-or less-than that.

The pathologist wet his lips, "At least I've done what I've done for a good cause." He shifted the gun in his hands, as if they were damp with the sweat that Asher could see shining in the pale daylight on his gray-ish face. Had Asher had two good hands and not been in the final throes of fatigue, he would have gone for it, but there was something in the haunted nervousness of the man that told him he'd shoot without a second thought. "I-I had to do what I did, what I am doing. It's for the common good..."

"Your vampire partner murdered twenty-four people for the common good?" He was surprised at the calm of his own voice.

"They were worthless people-really worthless-the scum of the streets, prostitutes, Chinese. I told him, I instructed him specially, only to take people who were no good to anyone; bad people, wicked peo-ple."

"And- leaving aside his qualifications to judge such things-that makes it all right?"

"No, no, of course not." Blaydon's braying tone reminded him of Dennis, halfheartedly protesting at the Guards' Club that of course oneoughtn't to burn Boer farmsteads to cripple the commandos' hold on the countryside, but war was, after all, war... "But we had to do something. The vampires were going deeper and deeper into hiding, and the craving was getting worse. It used to be he could go for weeks-now within days he needs blood, and it... it seems to be accelerating still more rapidly. I'd followed up every clue from the papers I'd been able to find in Calvaire's rooms, and Hammersmith's..."

"So you gave your blessing to your partner to go hunting at large in Manchester and London?"

"He would have died!" There was genuine pain and desperation in his voice. "When he gets these cravings, he isn't responsible for what he does! I-I didn't know about Manchester 'til afterward... For a month, he's been living in Hell, and now you've made him worse."

"Me?"

"You wounded him." Blaydon's voice was low, hoarse, almost fran-tic; his hands were shaking on the gun. "You stabbed him with a knife made of silver. That silver's running through him like an infection, like gangrene and fever. I can't stop it. It's exacerbating his condition; he needs more and more blood to fight it, to even hold it at bay. Oh, I understand you were frightened by his appearance, but..."

"I was fighting for my life," Asher said dryly, "in case you weren't noticing."

"I'm sorry, James, I really am..."

Behind him, the door opened. Framed in it stood the vampire.

Blaydon was right, thought Asher. That aura of leprousness, of dis-ease, had grown-but so, it seemed, had the vampire's feverish, mon-strous power. Standing in the full sunlight, it seemed hardly human anymore. The moist white skin glinted with shiny patches of decay; most of the faded hair was gone from its peeling scalp. On the pimple-splattered jaw, the weals of the overgrown teeth were still seeping a colorless pus mixed with blood, and the creature, with incongruous daintiness, pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket of its tweed jacket to pat at the glistening runnels. Huge, blue, and glaring, its eyes fixed on Asher with bitter malice.

Still keeping his gun leveled on Asher, Blaydon asked over his shoul-der, "Any sign of others?"