Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

Asher brought the silver bar down with all his strength on Dennis' wrist, even as the mutant fledgling ripped at Ysidro's throat. From the tail of his eye, Asher caught the black glitter of blood. It streamed down from Dennis' fangs as he drew back with a glottal roar of pain, and Asher backhanded him with the bar across the face, hearing as well as feeling the facial bones crunch. Dennis screamed. Blood splattered Asher's face like gouts of hot syrup. Then the vampire was gone, and Lydia and Ysidro, blood streaming from his torn shoulder, were drag-ging Asher, stumbling, across the open lawn toward the woods. Behind them, the dropped lamp was guttering erratically in a pool of kerosene-

"Chapel ruins!" Lydia gasped. "Shelter without being closed in!" Blood was splattered liberally over one side of her white shirtwaist and the sweater, droplets of it beading even on her spectacle lenses; it cov-ered the first four inches of the silver hatpin still in her hand. She must have stabbed Dennis from the other side. Ysidro's shoulder had been opened to halfway down his back, a dark stain spreading with terrible speed over the torn rags of his shirt.

Long weeds tangled at their knees as they cut through the overgrown garden. Their feet skidded on mud and wet leaves. Behind them as they ran, Asher could hear Dennis shrieking in pain, as if the impact of the silver still burned. On his right, Ysidro's bony grip on his swollen arm was excruciating, but he hardly cared. They had to reach shelter of some kind, a wall or enclosure at their backs, or they were dead.

The chapel ruin stood in a little dell perhaps a hundred yards from the house, its ivy-draped walls sheltered by a sizable copse of beeches. It offered, as Lydia had said, ideal shelter without the potential imprison-ment of the house, the roofless chancel providing cover on most of three sides and greatly narrowing the potential field of attack.

"What about the crypt?" Ysidro leaned against the stump of a broken pillar, half doubled-over with pain and dizziness, as Lydia worked a birch sapling loose from among the fallen stones. With an effort, the vampire straightened and cast a quick glance to the moss-covered altar behind them. "If there's another

way in, he can..."

"There isn't a crypt." Lydia hauled her skirt to untie one of her several petticoats. The lowest flounce was saturated from the grass but the one above it was dry. With unsteady fingers Ysidro ripped it free and bound it around the wood as a makeshift torch. Never taking his eyes from the rough expanse of hillside that lay between chapel and lawn, Asher tossed them the box of lucifer matches he always kept in his jacket pocket; there was the sharp hiss of sulphur, and the fabric licked into flame. "Dennis' grandfather had the whole ruin put up at the same time as the house was built-an architect from Birmingham designed it. It's desperately picturesque in the daylight. This wall, those arches over there, and the tombstones on the hillside are all of it there is."

Ysidro laughed, his fangs flashing white in the glare of the flame. Lydia came over to them, a second firebrand in one hand and her silver hatpin in the other. The ruddy glow illuminated the weed-curtained stone of the walls, the spurious Gothic corbels, and the shadows of the altar. Behind her spectacles, her face was scratched like an urchin's, smudged with dirt, and spotted with Dennis' blood. To Asher's eyes she was utterly beautiful.

She tucked the matches back into his jacket pocket. Quietly, she asked, "Are you more or less all right?"

Dennis' screams of pain and fury had ceased; the wind had fallen. The naked beeches and the thick clumps of elder and hawthorn around the walls seemed, like themselves, to be waiting. The silence was worse now than any sound.

"You mean, aside from a broken hand and assorted bites, contusions, and abrasions, and a mutant vampire fifty feet away who's going to kill us all?"

Her lips twitched. "Aside from that, yes."

"Yes."

"I was worried." Her voice sounded very small; he knew she could see the half-healed red bites that tracked his jugular from ear to collar-bone. In the torchlight, her breath blew as a tiny puff of gold.

"Not as worried as I was, believe me."

There was a moment's silence. Then: "Was that... that thing we saw... Was that Dennis?"

She'd told him once that Dennis had proposed marriage to her for the first time here at the Peaks. Dennis had never gotten it through his head that she could actually not want to be his wife. It occurred to Asher that Dennis had undoubtedly done so here in the ruins. In the slanting light of a summer's evening, there would be no more romantic spot in twenty square miles. He sighed and said, "Yes."

Ysidro moved closer to them, holding his torch aloft. "Can you feel it?" Through the rip in his shirt, Asher could see the wound in his shoulder, still tracking a sluggish trickle of dark blood. A mortal man would have been in shock. The vampire was only shivering as if with deadly cold, his face strained and sunken-looking. The mark of Dennis' grip was visible on his arm between the rolled-up shirt sleeve and the wrappings on his hands, blackening bruises and five claw rakes where the nails had ripped the colorless flesh. "There's movement out there, on the lawn. I can't see exactly..."

For a moment there was nothing, the whole night holding its breath.

Then Dennis was there, appearing with terrible suddenness just be-yond range of the torch's light, as, long ago in the dark of the cata-combs, Brother Anthony had seemed to fade into existence from the grinning shadows of the bones.

Beside him, Asher heard Lydia's breath hiss in pity and horror.

Dennis Blaydon had always been of heroic build and proportion; a golden Hercules in cricket whites. Now his size seemed monstrous, the breadth of his shoulders and chest, visible through his ripped and open shirt, like some maddened bull's. Blood tracked down his side and blot-ted his shirt above his ribs-had it been anyone but a vampire, the puncture wound administered by Lydia's hatpin would have been a serious matter-and where the bar had struck his face the flesh had puffed up like rotting meat. He was barely recognizable; the straight nose was flattened and spread now. Drool and blood dripped from the outsize fangs; the leprous skin gleamed like a snake's back in the moon-light. The glaring blue eyes were no longer even remotely human.

"Professor Asher," he whispered, in a sticky decay of a voice. "Lydia, get away from him. I won't harm you, I swear it. You know I'd never harm you, Lydia; I kept Dad from harming you..."

"Only because you wanted her for yourself!" Asher called into the flickering darkness. "Because you wanted to make her like yourself, infect her with that foul malady in your veins, so she'd be yours for-ever."

"That isn't true!" Dennis' glaring eyes widened with hate. "Dad will find a cure-Dad will make me better! And why shouldn't I have her? She should have been mine. Now she'll be mine forever. I'll make her love me! It's him I want-the vampire. I need him. I need him! "

"Since we're easy prey without him," Asher said quietly, "I'm afraid we need him, too."

Then he blinked, trying to keep the vampire in sight-trying to focus his mind on where he had last been. But Dennis was no longer-quite- visible. Asher had the impression he would still be able to see him if he knew where to look, but he could not find him now. A breath of move-ment stirred the ragged clumps of thorn and elder, catching now here. now there-the whole night seemed to quiver, shifting as soon as he moved his eyes from any given spot.

"He's a killer, Professor Asher," a voice breathed out of that dark-ness. "Killed women, killed sweet little children-he'll kill Lydia if you'll let him. You know he's killed..."