Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

Pale as brimstone or the clearest champagne, the calm eyes lifted to meet Asher's.

"You will find him in his laboratory," he said quietly. "His neck is broken. He was working on another batch of serum, taken from the last of Chloe's blood."

"Did he know about Dennis?"

"There was a telegram there from the Buckinghamshire police, say-ing that there had been a mysterious fire at the Peaks. The metal but-tons of a man's trousers had been found in the ashes, along with a few

cracked glass beads, a steel crucifix, and some unidentifiable bones."

Asher was silent. Ysidro upended another folder of notes over the general mess. They slithered across the top of the pile before him and swooped like awkward birds to the floor.

"Would you have done it?"

Asher sighed. He had done worse than kill Blaydon, and for slighter cause. He knew if he'd been caught he could always have pleaded his Foreign Office connections, and might even have been backed up by friends in the Department. The pistol weighed heavily in his ulster pocket. "Yes."

"I thought you would have." Simon smiled, wry and yet oddly sweet, and Asher had the impression-as he had fleetingly during the dark horrors of the previous night-of dealing with the man Ysidro had once been, before he had become a vampire. "I wished to spare you awk-wardness."

"You wished to spare me a discussion with the police on the subject of Blaydon's experiments."

That faint, cynical smile widened and, for the first time, warmed Ysidro's chilly eyes. "That, too."

Asher came over and stood beside the desk, looking down at the slender form of white and gray. If the gouges left in Ysidro's flesh by Dennis' fangs still pained him, as Asher's broken arm throbbed dully beneath its shroud of novocaine, he gave no sign. His slender hands were neatly bandaged. Asher wondered if Grippen had done that.

"You realize," Asher said slowly, "that not only was Brother An-thony the only vampire who could have killed Dennis-the only vam-pire who physically could have survived that much silver in his system for even the minute or so it took for Dennis to drink his blood-but he was the only one who would have. He was the only vampire who valued the redemption of his soul above the continuation of his existence."

A stray gust of wind shook the trees in the back garden, knocking bonily against the windows; distantly, a church clock chimed six. Ysidro's long fingers lay unmoving in the jumbled leaves of notes before him, the pale gold of his ring shining faintly in the gaslight. "Do you think he achieved it?" he asked at last.

"Are you familiar with the legend of Tannha'user?"

The vampire smiled slightly. "The sinner who came to the Pope of Rome and made confession of such frightful deeds that the Holy Father drove him forth, saying, 'There is more likelihood of my staff putting forth flowers, than there is of God forgiving such wickedness as yours.' Tannha'user despaired and departed from Rome, to return to his life of sin, and three days later the Pope found his staff standing in a corner where he had left it, covered in living blossom. Yes." The gaslight ech-oed itself softly in a thousand tiny flickers in the endless labyrinth of his eyes. "But as Brother Anthony himself said, I will never know."

A faint sound behind him caused Asher to turn. In the doorway at his back stood Anthea Farren and Lionel Grippen, the woman weary and pinched-looking, the doctor a massive form of inexhaustible, ruddy-faced evil, his fangs bright against the stolen redness of his lips.

Ysidro went on softly, "I don't think it would even have occurred to any of us that such sacrifice was conceivable. Certainly I don't think it occurred to Brother Anthony until he encountered you, a mortal man, in the catacombs, and you spoke of God's eternal willingness to forgive and that there might be, for such as he, a way out."

"If that's what he chose to fool himself into thinking, that was his affair," Grippen grunted. "A man casting about for a polite excuse to leave the table in the midst of a feast he'd no stomach for, that is all."

And Anthea tipped her head slightly to the side and agreed softly, "It was a mortal thing to do."

"Huh," Grippen said. "He found it mortal enough."

For a moment Asher studied the woman's smooth white face framed in the woody black of her hair, gazing into those immense brown eyes. "Yes," he said. "It was the act of a man and not of a vampire."

"And in any case, it has fulfilled the bargain between us," Ysidro said, without rising from the desk. "And so you are free to go."

"Go?" Asher glanced back at him, then to the two vampires who stood behind him, Grippen on his right, and the Countess of Ernchester on his left, cold and strong and old, the gaslight playing softly over those faces of white nacre in which burned living eyes.

"Go," Ysidro's gentle, whispering voice repeated. "Oh, I dare say you could, if you would, turn vampire-hunter and run the last of us to earth, or at least such of us as you personally dislike. Or all of us, since you are at least in part still a man of principle, albeit somewhat eroded principle.

"Yet I think that unlikely. We know how you and Mistress Lydia tracked us-we have been repairing omissions made, finding new lairs under 'cover,' as you call it, which will better bear scrutiny in the modern world. You could hunt us down eventually, I dare say, were you willing to put the time into it, to give your soul to it, to become obsessed, as all vampire-hunters must be obsessed with their prey. But it would still take years. Are you willing to give it years?"

Asher gazed at him, saying nothing, while those pale, unhuman eyes looked without mockery into his. It was ethically wrong, be knew.

Poor, stupid Dennis had killed twenty-four men and women, blindly, feverishly, in the grip of a craving that amounted to madness; Ysidro's coolly executed murders totaled in the tens of thousands at least. Ethi-cally it was his duty to hunt them down and to destroy them before they could kill again or create other killers like themselves, in a widening pool of blood.

But in his heart he knew Ysidro was right. It would take obsession to track them now, and the obsession with abstract "shoulds" had burned out of him six years ago, when he'd blown out the brains of a boy who had been his friend, simply because his duty demanded that he ought. He felt suddenly weary of this, bitterly weary of it all, knowing that he was simply not up to it anymore.

"We will stay away from you and yours," the vampire went on. "What more can you ask? This is not payment-it is simply prudence on our part. A man whose own ox has not been gored seldom makes a persistent hunter. To hunt us would be to hunt smoke, James, for we have what you do not have. We have time. The days and hours of your happiness are precious to you, and you know how few they are. But we have all the time there is-or at least," he smiled ironically, "all of it that we want."

Something-a sense of danger, the tug of the vampire's psychic glam-our at his mind-made Asher turn, sensing a trap, ready to defend himself... But Grippen and Anthea were gone,

He turned back to the desk, and saw it empty.

His footfalls echoed softly in the empty house as he left. When he was halfway down the street, he saw the gold leap of flame in the study window and the gray curl of smoke, but he kept on walking. People were running past him, shouting as they, too, saw the fire spreading in the house. With the papers scattered everywhere, the whole place would go quickly.

At the corner of Harley Street, he hailed a cab to return him to his lodgings in Prince of Wales Colonnade, where Lydia would be curled up in bed, her red hair lying in swathes over the lace of her shoulders, reading a medical journal and waiting for his return.