The cold eyes seemed to widen and harden, the long, thin nostrils flared. "Hewhat? "
"He created a fledgling," Asher said.
"How do you know this?"
"I've spoken to him," Asher said, "A man named Bully Joe Davies, from Lambeth or thereabouts-he said he'd break my neck if I told anyone of it, particularly yourself. You seem," he added dryly, "to enjoy a certain reputation among your peers."
"Do you refer," the vampire asked coldly, "to that rabble of steve-dores, sluts, and tradesmen as my peers? The Farrenscome close, but, when all's said, his grandfather was no more than a jumped-up baron..."
"Your fellows, then," Asher amended. "And in any case, I trust you'll protect me. He says he's being followed-stalked. I'm supposed to meet him later tonight, to go to another of Calvaire's safe houses."
Ysidro nodded; Asher could see the thought moving in the pale laby-rinth of his eyes.
He walked over to the cabinet again, ran a finger, idly questing, through its emptied pigeonholes, every scrap of evidence of contacts burned by the cautious Grippen lest any should do what Asher had done-trace a name, a shop, an address, that would lead him to another cellar where a vampire might sleep. He glanced back at the vampire, standing quietly in the molten halo of the lamplight.
"I hadn't intended on telling you that," he went on after a moment. "But I've been finding out some things tonight about Calvaire, a little, and about vampires. I understand now why you've been lying to me all along. In a way, Grippen is right. You'd be an absolute fool to hire a human to track down your killer, much less tell him who and what you are-if your killer is human. But you don't think he is,
"In fact, you think the killer is another vampire."
Nine
I don't see how that could be." As she walked, Lydia folded her arms across her chest against the chill that dampened even the change-able sunlight of the autumn forenoon. Beside the dull purple-brown of her coat, her red hair, pinned under the only unobtrusive hat in her vast collection, seemed blazingly bright; her spectacles winked like a he-liograph when she turned her head. In spite of them, she looked ab-surdly young, with a delicate prettiness which would have seemed touchingly vulnerable to anyone who had never seen her in the dissec-tion rooms.
Asher, at her side, kept a weather eye out across the sepia vistas of lawn and copse to both sides of the walk, but saw few other strollers. It had rained late in the night, and Hyde Park bore a slightly dispirited air; scudding clouds were collecting again overhead. A few black-clothed nannies hustled then- charges at double time through a rapid constitutional before the rain should commence again; that was all.
"Neither does Ysidro," Asher said. "But he suspected all along that the killer wasn't human. It's why he had to hire a human and, more-over, find one who could or would believe in vampires, who could operate to some degree independently-why he had to tell me what he was, in spite of the opposition from the other vampires. I think the others might have suspected they were dealing with a vampire, too. No human could stalk a vampire unseen-a human would be lucky to see one in the first place, let alone either recognize it for what it is or keep it in sight."
"You did," she pointed out.
Asher shook his head. "A fledgling, and an untrained one, at that," His glance skimmed the borders of the trees that half hid the steely gleam of the Serpentine, off to their left. Like Bully Joe Davies, he found himself wondering all the time now about shadows, noises, bent blades of grass...
"Did Bully Joe Davies ever turn up?"
"No. Ysidro and I waited until almost dawn. He just might have seen Ysidro and sheered off, but I doubt it. However, I think we'll be able to locate Calvaire's rooms in Lambeth-if he has them, and I'm virtually certain he does-by tracking property purchases since February, which was when Calvaire came here from Paris. If Calvaire was attempting to establish a power base in London-which he seems to have been doing, since he made a fledgling-he'd have bought property. Since Grippen didn't know about it, either, we may find something there."
They walked in silence for a time, the wind tugging now and then at the ends of Asher's scarf and at Lydia's skirts and coat.
Lydia nodded. "I'm wondering whether all vampires fall asleep at the same time-into the deep sleep. For, of course, just because the win-dows were opened to let in the sunlight doesn't mean that it was done while the sun was in the sky."
"I suppose, if the killer were a vampire, he might have-oh, a half-hour or so-to get to safety," Asher said, "More than enough, in Lon-don. And it would certainly solve the question of why he believed in vampires in the first place, let alone knew where to look."
"In all the books, the vampire hunter drives a stake through the vampire's heart," Lydia remarked thoughtfully. "If this one did, every-thing's been too charred to tell, but Lotta's head was certainly severed. If the sun weren't yet in the sky, I wonder if that would wake a sleeping vampire?-for that matter, if the mere opening of the coffin would do so? Are you sure I can't put my hand in your pocket?"
"Quite sure," Asher said, fighting his own inclination to walk closer to her, to hold out his arm to hers, or to have some kind of physical contact with this woman. "In spite of the evidence that the killer is a vampire, I still don't feel safe meeting you, even by daylight..."
She widened her brown eyes at him behind the schoolgirl specs. "Per-haps I could disguise myself as a pickpocket? Or if I tripped and stum-bled, and you caught me? Or fainted?" She put a gloved hand dramati-cally to her brow. "I feel an attack of the vapors coining on now..."
"No," Asher said firmly, grinning,
She frowned and tucked her hands primly into her muff. "Very well, but the next time Uncle Ambrose goes on about Plato and Platonic friendship, I'll have a few words to say to him. No wonder Don Simon didn't seem to worry too much about your allying yourself with the killer, as you'd originally thought you might. Do you still plan to do that, by the way?"
"I don't know," Asher said. "It isn't out of court entirely, but I'd have to know a good deal more than I do now. The fact that he's destroying them for reasons of his-or her-own doesn't mean he wouldn't destroy me with just as much alacrity." Or you, he added to himself, looking at that slim figure beside him, like a heroine of legend lying beside the hero, separated by a drawn sword.
Lydia nodded, accepting the change in a situation upon which her life depended with her usual calm trust. They walked along for a time, Lydia apparently sunk in her own trains of thought; Asher was content-almost-only to be with her, the dun gravel of the damp path scrunching faintly under their feet. Off across the gray lawns, a dog barked, the sound carrying fantastically in the cold air.
"Have you any idea how much light it takes to destroy their flesh?"
Asher shook his head. "I asked Ysidro last night. I've been trying to work that out, too-that half-hour or so of leeway. That's what's puz-zling me. Ysidro was caught at dawn on the second morning of the Great Fire of 1666. He says the thinnest gray light before sunrise burned his face and hands as if he'd stuck them into a furnace-more than that, his arms, chest, and parts of his legs and back beneath his clothes were scarred and blistered as well. According to Lady Ernchester, it was nearly fifty years before the scars went away."
"But they did go away," Lydia murmured thoughtfully. "So vampire fl eshdoes regenerate..." Her dark brows pulled even deeper, an edge of thought hardening her brown eyes, as if she looked past the piled whites and grays of the late-morning sky to some arcane laboratory of the mind beyond.
"Pseudoflesh, he called it," Asher said.
"Interesting." She reached up to unsnag a long strand of hair from the braided trim of her collar-Asher