"She was in London all the time, helping me with my investigation," Asher said, and Ysidro's colorless eyebrows quirked.
"I knew she had left Oxford, of course. I did not think you would bring her here."
"It seemed a good idea at the time," Asher replied harshly. "She managed to find most of your lairs and all of your aliases before she disappeared. And if you didn't take her," he added, looking across again at Grippen, whose red face had gone redder as rage added to whatever blood he'd imbibed that evening,
"then I suspect she found the killer as well. Now tell me the truth, because it's going to have a bearing on how I conduct this investigation. Did you take her? And is she dead?"
"You waste your breath," the Master of London said slowly. "No to both your questions is the answer that'll keep you for us and not against us; I know that, and you know that, and I'm thinking you'll not believe it an I say it, but it is so. I've seen no red-headed moppet. I plight my faith on't."
Asher drew a deep breath. He was shivering slightly all over, in nervous waves, reaction setting in on him to anger, exhaustion, and pain. He'd lost his hat at some part in the proceedings, and his brown hair fell forward over his forehead, the thin face beneath hard and far less clerkish than it usually seemed.
From the corner of the cab, Ysidro's light, disinterested voice said, "Tell us about the killer."
Asher sighed, and some of the tension ebbed from his tall frame. "It was-monstrous," he said slowly. "Foul. Diseased-looking. But beyond a doubt a vampire. It was bleached, as you are, Ysidro, but its skin was leprous and peeling. It was taller than I, taller than Grippen by an inch or so, and as broad or broader. Fair hair, but not much of it; it was falling out, I think. Blue eyes. It had a human partner-I heard his footsteps running down the stairs from the attic, and later he called the thing away from me; and that's odd, when you realize the thing goes on killing rampages, taking seven or nine humans at a time. I'd certainly think twice about riding anywhere in a closed carriage with it."
" 'It,' " Simon said softly.
"It wasn't human."
"Nor are we."
The cab pulled to a halt at the top of Savoy Walk. Grippen paid off the driver, and the two vampires, their human partner between them, walked down the long tunnel of shadows to the towering, baroque blackness of Ernchester House at the end. Bands and slashes of Ma-deira-gold marked the curtained windows, and caught the thin rain in a shuddering haze: even as they mounted the soot-streaked marble of the steps, one panel of the carved doors opened to reveal the Farrens stand-ing, an arm-linked silhouette, just within.
"I fear she is truly dead." Anthea led the way up the long stair, to a small room at the back of the house which had once been used for sewing or letter writing. The dark red of her gown showed like old blood against the creamy whiteness of her bosom and face; its stiff lines and low-cut corsage whispered of some earlier era; knots and fringes of cut jet beads glinted in the lamplight like ripe blackberries. Her thick hair was piled in the modern style; against it, her face looked strained, weary, and frightened, as if her spirit were now fighting against all the pressures of those accumulated years. Ernchester, trailing close at her side, looked infinitely worse. "Decomposition isn't far advanced, but it has begun."
"That's wrong," Grippen growled. "Not cold as it is... She should bare be stiff."
"Are you speaking from your experience with human corpses?" Asher inquired, and the big man's black eyebrows pulled down over his nose in a frown. "With a vampire's, the pathology would be completely different."
Anthea had laid one of her velvet cloaks over the delicate Regency sofa in the little parlor. Against the thick, cherry-black velvet, Chloe's hair seemed nearly white. It lay in loops and coils, spilling down to brush the floor; Asher was reminded of how Lydia's had lain, unrav-eling in the study lamplight. Her eyes
and mouth had been closed. But this did not change the horrible, sunken appearance of her flesh or the ghastly waxiness of her skin. She had been, Asher remembered, abso-lutely beautiful, like a baroque pearl set in Renaissance gold. Petrified, Lydia had said, every cell individually replaced with something that was not human flesh, and a mind replaced by that which was not a human mind.
A second cloak covered her; over the years, Anthea must have col-lected hundreds of them as fashions changed. It, too, was black, niched and beaded; beneath it, Chloe's shell-pink dress shone like the slash of a fading sunset between banks of clouds. With his left hand Asher reached forward and drew the cloak aside to look at the huge puncture wounds in the throat. Then, thoughtfully, he shrugged off the remaining sleeve of his damp ulster and let the weight of it drop to the floor around him. He shook clear a few inches of wrist from the sleeve of his corduroy jacket and held it out to Anthea. "Undo the cuff, would you, please?"
She did, gingerly avoiding the silver chain which still circled that wrist. Even the fleeting grip the thing had taken on it had driven the links into the flesh with sufficient violence to leave a narrow wreath of bruises and the reddening marks of fingers.
Just below the base of Asher's thumb were two or three sets of punc-tures, scabbed over like the half dozen or so on his throat. A souvenir, he thought with wry gallows humor, of Paris. He knelt beside Chloe's body and compared the marks. They were less than a third the size of the mangled white holes in the girl's skin.
"Its fangs were huge," he said quietly. "Grotesquely so, like an ama-teurish stage vampire's; it might have been funny if it weren't so terri-fying. They grew down over the lip, cutting the flesh..." His fingers sketched the place beneath the thick brush of his mustache, and Ysidro's eyes narrowed sharply. "It hadn't callused, so it's something that came over it fairly recently."
"Any clown had told you that," Grippen grumbled. "We'd ha' known ere this, did any vampire walk that fed on other vampires."
"What happens to a vampire," Asher asked, looking up from Chloe's throat, his eyes traveling around the circle of white, unhuman faces in the amber sweetness of the lamplight, "that drinks the blood of other vampires?"
Grippen's voice was harsh. "Other vampires kill it."
"Why?"
"Why do men stone those who eat the corpses of the dead, force children, cut beasts up alive to hear 'em squeal, or play with their own dung? Because it's abominable."
'There are so few of us," Anthea added softly, her strong fingers stroking the massive jewel of jet and hematite that glittered at her bo-som, "and our lives are lived so perilously on the shadowlands of death, no traitor to our midst can be tolerated, for fear that all shall die."
"And because," Ysidro's light, disinterested voice whispered, "to drain the death of a vampire, to drink of a mind so rich, so deep, so filled with the colors of living, and so thick with the overtints of all the lives it has taken, might be the greatest temptation, the greatest intoxi-cation, of all."
There was silence-shocked, furious, and, Asher reflected grimly, not without recognition. The silken pattering of the rain pierced it faintly, muffled by the moldering brocades of the window drapes. Then
Grippen snarled, "Buggering Spanish dog- you'd think so."
Seated on a chair near the head of the couch, his ankles crossed negligently but with his usual erectness of posture, Ysidro continued, unperturbed, "But the question was not of life and death, but merely of blood. We can gain physical nourishment from drinking an animal's blood, or a human's, though we kill him not-as you yourself can attest, James." By that light, cool tone, one would never have guessed that he had fought to rescue Asher from that death in Paris, nor pro-tected him, at a certain amount of personal risk, afterward. 'To drink even a small quantity of another vampire's blood is repellent, after our own flesh has undergone the change. I am told that it often causes nausea."