Slowly he said, "If that's the reason behind the killings, yes. But I think there's more to it than that-and I don't know what. If Ysidro's telling the truth, vampires can generally see ordinary mortals coming," if he was telling the truth. It might have been a lie to make you keep your distance, you know." She shook one long, delicate finger at him and mimicked, " 'Don't you try nuthin' wi' me, bucko, 'cos we'll see you comin',' "
"You haven't seen him in action." The somberness fled from his eyes as he grinned at himself. "That's the whole point, I suppose: nobody sees them in action. But no. I believe him. His senses are preternaturally sharp-he can count the people in a train coach by the sound of their breathing, see in the dark... Yet the whole time I was with him, I could feel him listening to the wind. I've seen men do that when they think they're being followed, but can't be sure. He hides it well, but he's afraid."
"Well, it does serve him right," Lydia observed. She hesitated, turn-ing the vertebra over and over in her fingers, not looking at it now any more than she looked at the grass stems she plucked when she was nervous. She swallowed hard, trying to sound casual and not suc-ceeding. "How much danger am I in?"
"Quite a lot, I think." He got up and came around to sit on the pillows beside her; his arm in its white shirt sleeve was sinewy and strong around her shoulders. Her mother's anxious coddling-not to mention the overwhelming chivalry of a number of young men who seemed to believe that, because they found her pretty, she would auto-matically think them fascinating-had given Lydia a horror of clinginess. But it was good to lean into James' strength, to feel the warmth of his flesh through the shirt sleeve, the muscle and rib beneath that non-descript tweed waistcoat, and to smell ink and book dust and Macassar oil. Though she knew objectively that he was no more able to defend either of them against this supernatural danger than she was, she cher-ished the momentary illusion that he would not let her come to harm. His lips brushed her hair. "I'm going to have to go down to London again," he said after a few minutes, "to search for the murderer and to pursue investigations as to the whereabouts of the other vampires in London. If I can locate where they sleep, where they store their things, where they hunt, it should give me a weapon to use against them. It's probably best that you leave Oxford as well..."
"Well, of course!" She turned abruptly in the circle of his arm, the fragile suspension of disbelief dissolving like a cigarette genie with the opening of a door. "I'll come down to London with you. Not to stay with you," she added hastily, as his mouth opened in a protest he was momentarily too shocked to voice. "I know that would put me in dan-ger, if they saw us together. But to take rooms near yours, to be close enough to help you, if you need it..."
" Lydia...!"
Their eyes met. She fought to keep hers from say in gDon't leave me, fought even to keep herself from thinking it or from admitting to a fear that would only make things harder for him. She squared her pointed little chin. "And you will need it," she said reasonably. "If you're going to be investigating the vampire murders, you won't have time to go hunting through the public records for evidence of where the vampires themselves might be living, not if Don Simon wants to see results quickly. And we could meet in the daytime, when- whenthey can't see us. If what you say about them is true, I'd be in no more danger in London than I would be in Oxford -or anywhere else, really. And in London you would be closer, in case of..." She shied away from saying it. "Just in case."
He looked away from her, saying nothing for a time, just running the dry ribbons of the vampire's reticule through the fingers of his free hand. "Maybe," he said after a time. "And it's true I'll need a re-searcher who believes.,. Youdo believe they're really vampires, don't you?" His eyes came back to hers. She thought about it, turning that odd, anomalous chunk of bone over and over in her lap. James was one of the few men to whom she knew she could say anything without fear of either shock, uncertain laughter, or-worse-that blankly incomprehending stare that young men gave her when she made some straight-faced joke.
"Probably as much as you do," she said at last. "That is, there's a lot of me that says, "This is silly, there's no such thing.' But up until a year or so ago, nobody believed there was such a thing as viruses, you know. We still don't know what they are, but we do know now they exist, and more and more are being discovered... A hundred years ago, they would have said it was silly to believe that diseases were caused by little animals too small to see, instead of either evil spirits or an imbalance of bodily humors-which really are more logical explanations, when you think of it. And there's something definitely odd about this bone."
She took a deep breath and relaxed as her worst fear-the fear of being left alone while her fate was decided elsewhere and by others- receded into darkness. James, evidently resigned to his fate, took his arm from around her shoulders and began picking out the reticule's contents, laying them on the lace of the counterpane-yellowing bills, old theater programmes folded small, appointment cards, invitations- in his neat, scholarly way.
"Are you going to get in touch with the killer?"
"I certainly intend to try." He held up an extremely faded calling card to the light. "But I'll have to go very carefully. The vampires will know it's a logical alliance to make... What is it?"
Against his side, through the bed, he had felt her start.
Lydia dropped the card she had been looking at, her hand shaking a little with an odd sort of shock, as if she'd seen someone she knew... Which, she reflected, was in a way exactly what had happened. She didn't know what to say, how to define that sense of helpless hurt, as if she'd just seen a very brainless cat walk straight into the savaging jaws of a dog.
He had already picked up the card and was reading the assignation on the back. Then he flipped it over to see the front, where the name of the Honorable Albert Westmoreland was printed in meticulous copper-plate.
"I knew him," Lydia explained, a little shakily. "Not well-he was one of Uncle Ambrose's students when I was still in school. His father was a friend of Papa's in the City."
"One of your suitors?" The teasing note he sometimes had when speaking of her suitors was absent. She
had had flocks of them, due in pan to the Willoughby fortune, which had paid for this house and everything in it, and in part to her waiflike charm. After being told for years that she was ugly, she enjoyed their attentions and enjoyed flirting with them-though not as much as she enjoyed a good, solid analysis of nervous lesions-and charming people had become second nature to her. A just girl, she didn't hold it against those earnest young men that they'd frequently bored her to death, but the distinction was something her father had never been able to grasp. With Baptista-like faith in man's ability to change a woman's personality, he had encouraged them all, never, until the last, losing his touching hope that he'd see his wayward daughter marry her way into the peerage,
She smiled a little, mostly at the recollection of her father's face when she'd announced her intention to marry a middle-aged Lecturer in Phi-lology without an "Honorable" to his name, and shook her head. "He was already engaged to Lord Carringford's daughter. But he was in their set. So I saw him a good deal. I knew-well, nobody spoke of it before me, of course, and Nanna would have killed them if they had, but I guessed that when they went larking about in town it wasn't with girls like me. I remember Dennis Blaydon coming round and telling me Bertie had died."