neck and shake him, not solely from his fear of what might happen to Lydia, but from sheer annoyance at being ordered to make bricks without straw. "If I'm going to do as you ask, you're going to have to give me some-thing..."
"I will give you what I choose." The vampire did not move, but Asher sensed in him a readiness to strike and knew the blow, when it came, would be irresistible as lightning and potentially as fatal. Nothing altered in the voice, cold and inert as poison. "I warn you again-you are playing with death here. What bounds I set are as much for your own protection as for mine. Take care you do not cross them.
"Understand me, James, for I understand you. I understand that you intend to work for me only so long as it will take you to find a way to destroy me and those like me with impunity. So. I could have found a man who is venal and unintelligent, who would not even have been told who and what I am, to whom I would simply have said: Find me this; find me that; meet me with the results tonight. There are men who are too unimaginative even to ask. But it would not have answered. One does not select cottonwood to fashion a weapon to preserve, perhaps, one's life; one selects the hardest of teak. But with that hardness comes other things."
They faced each other in silence, in the silken chaos of that cluttered chamber with its stinks of ancient perfume. "I won't have you coming to Oxford again."
"No," Ysidro agreed. "I, too, understand. Whoever is behind these murders, I will not lead him to your lady. Take rooms here in this city -I will find you. For those of us who hunt the nights, that will be no great task. You might remember that, also, should it cross your mind to ally yourself with our murderer."
"I'll remember," Asher promised quietly. "But you remember this: if you and your fellow-vampires kill me, you'll still have a problem. And if you play me false, or try to take hostages, or so much as gonear my wife again, you'll have an even bigger problem. Because then you'll have to kill me and you'll still need to find someone else to do your day work for you. I'll play straight with you, but, in a sense, you've put yourself in my hands, as I am in yours. I believe in your existence now..."
"And whom would you tell who would believe you?
"It's enough that I believe," said Asher. "And I think you know that."
Four
How does one go about investigating the personal life of a woman who's done murder on a regular basis for the last hun-dred and fifty years?"
Lydia Asher paused, the handkerchief-wrapped fragments of bone in hand, and tilted her head consideringly at her husband's question. With her long red hair hanging down over nightgowned shoulders and her spectacles glinting faintly in the misty gray of the window light, she looked more like a fragile and gawky schoolgirl than a doctor. Asher stretched out his long legs to rest slippered feet on the end of the bed. "She must have hundreds of potential enemies."
"Thousands, I should say," Lydia guessed, after a moment's mental calculation. "Over fifty thousand, counting one per night times three hundred and sixty-five times a hundred and fifty..."
"Taking off a few here and there when she went on a reducing diet?" Asher's mustache quirked in his
fleet grin; only his eyes, Lydia thought, were not the same as they had been. Below them in the house, Ellen's footsteps tapped a half-heard pulse as she went from room to room, laying fires; further off, on the edge of awareness, Lydia could detect the regular clatter and tread of breakfast being prepared.
Ellen had insisted on remaining awake long enough to fix a scratch dinner, after they had all wakened mysteriously in the chilled depths of the night. Lydia had sent them all to bed as soon as possible. The last thing she'd needed was the parlor maid's unbridled imagination, the cook's self-dramatization, and the tweeny's morbid credulity to add to what she herself had found a deeply disturbing experience. That James had been home she'd deduced from the fact that the fires were built up, though why he should have taken apart his revolver and left the knife he didn't think she knew he carried in his boot among the pieces on his desk had left her somewhat at a loss. Characteristically, she had spent the remainder of the night searching through her medical journals- which she kept in boxes under the bed, as they'd overflowed the library -for references to similar occurrences, alternately outlining an article on the pathological basis for the legend of Sleeping Beauty and dozing in the tangle of lace-trimmed counterpane and issues of theLancet. But her dreams had been disturbing, and she had kept waking, expecting to find some slender stranger standing silently in the room.
"I don't think so," she said now, shaking back the clouds of her sleeve-lace and pushing up her specs. "Could a vampire go on a reduc-ing diet? There isn't any fat in blood."
Her mind scouted the thought while Asher hid his grin behind a cup of coffee, ***
She unwrapped the two vertebrae from James' handkerchief, and held them to the slowly brightening light of the window. Third and fourth cervical, badly charred and oddly decomposed, but, as James had described, the scratch on the bone was clearly visible. "There must be tissue repair of some kind, you know," she went on, wetting her finger to rub some of the soot away, "if Don Simon's burns 'took years to heal.' I wonder what causes the combustion? Though there are sto-ries of spontaneous human combustion happening in very rare instances to quite ordinary people-if theywere ordinary, of course. Did you get a look at the coffin lining? Was it burned away, too?"
Asher's thick brows pulled together as he narrowed his eyes, trying to call back the details of that silent charnel house. He hadn't had medical training, but, Lydia had found, he had the best eye for detail she had ever encountered in a world that ignored so much. He would be that way, she thought, even if his life hadn't depended on it for so many years.
"Not burned away, no," he said after a moment. "The lining at the bottom was corroded and stained, almost down to the wood; charred and stained to a few inches above where the body would come on the sides. The clothes, flesh, and hair had been entirely destroyed."
"Color of the stains?"
He shook his head. "I couldn't see by lantern light."
"Hmm." She paused in thought, then began patting and shaking the pillows, comforter, and beribboned froth of shams around her, looking for her magnifying glass-she was sure she'd been using it to peruse some dissecting-room drawings the other night in bed.
"Night stand?" Asher suggested helpfully. She fished it out to look more closely at the third cervical.
"This was done with one stroke." She held it out-he leaned across to take it and the glass and studied it in his turn. "Something very sharp, with a drawing stroke: a cleaver or a surgical knife. Something made
for cutting bone. Whoever used it knew what he was doing."
"And wasn't about to lose his nerve over severing a woman's head," Asher added thoughtfully, setting aside the bone. "He'd already killed three other vampires, of course. Presumably whatever started him on his hunt for vampires was enough to overcome his revulsion, if he felt any, the first time-and after that, he'd have proof that they do in fact exist and must be destroyed." As he spoke, he tugged gently on the faded silk ribbons of the old reticule, coaxing it open in a dry whisper of cracking silk.
"Surely the mere circumstances of their loved one's death would have proved that." When James didn't answer, she looked up from examin-ing the oddly dissolved-looking bone. What she saw in his face-in his eyes, like a burned-on reflection of things he had seen-caused the same odd little lightening within her that she'd felt when she was four and had awakened in the night to realize there was a huge rat in her room and that it was between her and the door.