Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

Blaydon wiped his mouth nervously with the hand that wasn't hold-ing the gun. He was still wearing the rather countrified tweed suit he'd had on that morning-that he'd had on for days, by the smell of it. Not, Asher reflected, that he or Ysidro could have passed for dandies either, both in shirt sleeves, himself unshaven and splotched with soot stains from climbing the wall last night. At least they'd slept, albeit uncom-fortably. Once, when he'd wakened in the afternoon, there had been a tray of food there, undoubtedly brought by Dennis-an unsettling thought. He'd eaten it and searched the room again, but it had yielded nothing but reinforced brick walls and door and Sheffield silver-plated steel window bars.

Blaydon waved his pistol at Ysidro. "Don't get any ideas, my friend. While you're in this room with me, you're safe. Dennis would pull you down before you got out of the house, as easily as he brought you here in the first place."

There was an annoyed glitter behind Ysidro's hooded eyelids-a grandee, Asher thought, who did not care to be reminded that he'd been overpowered and manhandled by the hoi polloi. But he only regarded Blaydon levelly for a moment and asked, "Do you really believe that any of this will do you any good?"

"I'll be the judge of that," the pathologist said, rather sharply. "Go on with what you were saying. If you forced James...?"

"To drink my blood," Ysidro said slowly, unwillingly, his champagne gaze fixed upon Blaydon's face. "That is how it is done-the physical part, at least. But the-perhaps you would say mental, but I think spiritual would be a better term, though these days it is an unfashion-able one-"

"Let us say psychic," Blaydon put in. "That's what we're really talk-ing about, aren't we?"

"Perhaps." That faint, wry flick of a smile touched Ysidro's narrow-lipped mouth. "In any case, it is the giving of his spirit, his self, his conscious, and what Herr Freud politely terms his unconscious into the embrace of mine, for me to show him the way over that abyss. It is the yielding of all secrets, the giving of all trust, the admission of another into the most secret chambers of the heart. Most do not even join so close with those they deeply love. To do this, you understand, requires an act of the most desperate will, the all-consuming desire to continue in consciousness at whatever the cost." The shadow flung by the lamp on the wall behind him, huge and dark, echoed the slight movement of his white hand. "Under this set of circumstances, I think James would find no point in making so desperate an effort at survival, though I suspect that under others he might."

You will never know,Brother Anthony had whispered, deathlessly sorting bones in the crypts below Paris. Asher shook his head and said quietly, "No."

Ysidro turned his head to look down at him, without any expression in his eyes. "And they say that faith in God is dead," he commented. "I should think that your conscience, more than another man's, might make of you a coward,.," He turned back to regard his captor. "Whether or not James has that will to live, how many of those scum of the gutters whom you purpose to bring for me to transform into others

like me would be capable of it? When a master vampire creates a fledgling, it is in part the master's will and in part the fledgling's trust which act. I do not believe myself capable of creating fodder, even did I consent to try. I certainly do not believe that one person in a hundred, or a thousand, has that will to survive."

"That's balderdash," Blaydon said uneasily. "All this talk of the will and the spirit..."

"And if you did get lucky," Asher put in, trying to shift his shoulders to take some of the pressure from his throbbing right arm, "what then? Are you really going to stay in a house with two, three, or four fledgling vampires? Fledglings whose wills are entirely subservient to their mas-ter's? The start of this whole affair-Calvaire-was a careless choice on the part of the woman who made him. Are you going to be choosier? Especially if you're giving Dennis specific orders to bring in none but the unfit, the socially useless, and the wicked?"

"You let me worry about that," Blaydon's voice had an edge like flint now, his eyes showing their old stubborn glint. "It's only a temporary measure..."

"Like the income tax?"

"In any case Ihave no choice. Dennis' condition is deteriorating. You've seen that. He needs blood, the blood of vampires, to arrest the symptoms. If you, Ysidro, refuse to help me..."

"It is not simply a matter of refusal,"

"Lying won't help you, you know..."

"No more than lying to yourself helps you, Professor." Behind that unemotional tone, Asher detected the faintest echo of a human sigh. Blaydon backed a few steps away, brandishing his gun.

"But if that is your choice, I shall have to take what measures I can...'*

"More humans?" Asher inquired. "More of those you consider un-fit?"

"It's to save my son!" The old man's voice cracked with desperation, and he fought to bring it to normal again. Rather shakily, he added, "And also for the good of the country. Once we have the experiment under control..."

"Good God, man, you don't mean you're going on with it!" Truly angry, Asher jerked himself to a sitting position, his back to the planed mahogany of the coffin. "Because of your failure, your own son is rot-ting to pieces under your eyes and you propose togo on with it?"

Blaydon strode forward and struck Asher across the face with the barrel of the gun, knocking him sprawling. Ysidro, impassive, merely moved his foot aside so that Asher wouldn't fall across it and watched the enraged pathologist with only the mildest of interest as he stepped back and picked up the lamp.

"I'm sorry you feel that way about it," Blaydon said quietly, the lamplight jerking with the angry trembling of his hands. "You, Don Simon, because I'm going to have to keep you fed and healthy while I take your blood for experiments, until I can locate another vampire more compliant. You, James, because I think I'm going to have to force either you or your wife to tell me where her rooms were in the city-she refused to do so, and, of course, Dennis wouldn't hear of me forcing her -so that I can find her notes on

her researches..."

"Don't be naive," Ysidro sighed. "Grippen put them all on the fire before he left Lydia's rooms last night."

"Then I shall have to get Mrs. Asher to tell me herself," Blaydon said. "Now that I have James here, that shouldn't be too difficult. I think Dennis will even rather enjoy it."

Keeping his gun trained on Ysidro, he backed out the door.

"Don't trip over your son on the way out," the vampire remarked derisively as the door closed upon the amber radiance of the lamplight and the bolts slid home.

A west wind had been blowing all day, and the night outside was clear. Leaky white moonlight added somewhat to the faint glow of the gas lamps visible beyond the garden wall. With his usual languid grace, Ysidro unfolded his thin legs and rose from the coffin lid, knelt beside Asher, and stooped to bite through the ropes that bound his wrists. Asher felt the cold touch of bloodless lips against the veins of his left wrist and the scrape of teeth. Then the ropes were pulled away. The pain in his right arm almost made him sick as Ysidro brought it gently around and installed it in its sling again.

"You think he was listening?"

"Of course he was listening." The vampire twisted the slack of the ankle ropes between his white hands, and the strands parted with a snap. "He was right outside the door; he never even went into the garden, though a vampire of his abilities certainly could have heard us from there, had he chosen to listen, soundproofing or no soundproof-ing."

With light strength, he helped Asher to sit on the coffin lid, while he prowled like a faded tomcat to the room's single window, keeping a wary distance from the silver bars. "Triple glazed," he remarked briefly. "Wired glass, too. We might wrench the lock free, could we get past the bars to get some kind of purchase on it..."