On the whole they moved without sound, but it was late in the autumn, and beneath the pale stems of the beeches the brown leaves mounded thick, and dead fern and ivy rustled and whispered with the passage of unseen feet.
He stopped on the edge of the road-he'd been keeping to the shadows along the ditch in case Karolyi had patrols on the road- and took his watch from his pocket, angling it to the moonlight, then closed it with a click and, under cover of slipping it into his pocket again, unhooked the fob from his belt. A quick motion wrapped the chain twice around his middle finger, so that when he drew his hand out again-and tucked it under his armpit, as if for warmth-he carried the rounded disk of silver cradled out of sight in his palm.
It wasn't much, but it would have to do.
He sprang across the ditch, scrambled a little up the bank, wondering if they could hear the sudden heavy slamming of his heart. The Vienna Woods were thin. Beneath a summer canopy of leaves he doubted he could have navigated by night, but with the trees bare, the familiar shapes of beech and sycamore were just visible by the latticed pallor of the moon. There was no way of telling how great a force of men Karolyi had at the sanitarium. It would take only one to spread an alarm.
Provided he lived to get anywhere near the walls.
What had Anthea said? The masters among the Undead are jealous of their territories. He remembered, too, that pitiful fledgling Bully Joe Davies back in London, glancing in terror over his shoulders: They'd kill me, they would- Grippen don't want none in London but his own get, his own slaves...
Had they, too-whoever they were-read that tiny mention in the Neue Freie Presse about the dead lacemaker and known that another was hunting on their territory, killing in such a way as to rouse the suspicions of the rulers of the day?
Or did they simply recognize his heartbeat, Asher wondered, the smell of his blood, as those of an intruder who had been snooping around the walls of their palaces last night?
Asher walked as quickly as he dared, moving purposefully. Once he heard the leaves rustle, and some sound that might have been a taffeta petticoat, but his senses screamed at him that there were more than one. Like sharks they followed him, slipping unseen through the abysses between the trees.
White glimmered ahead. Black veins of ivy traced it: the rear wall of Fruhlmgzeit. Above it bulked the house's steep roofs and stuccoed walls, the golden ochre hue so characteristic of Viennese houses grubby in the dark. Most of the windows facing the woods were shuttered, but lamplight from those facing the court outlined what had been the stable, since converted into a laboratory and therapy room. Asher had always suspected that the aged cats and dogs-and the occasional Viennese businessmen-upon whom Fairport experimented showed improvement because of the therapeutic massage, good food, and careful tending that went with "magnetic induction." There was a sort of crypt under the stable, Asher remembered, where Fairport's generator was housed among stores of carbolic, ether, kerosene, and coal.
Nearer the wall he smelled the smoke of a guard's cigarette.
The trees pressed close around the back of the property. From the concealment of an oak he could see the window where he'd sat all that long ago afternoon, planning how to get himself out of Vienna and betray Francoise in the most painful possible fashion in the process.
Then he turned his head and saw a woman standing beside him.
The hair lifted on his nape. He had not heard one single sound.
She was beautiful, like something wrought of moonlight, flaxen hair piled high, but snagged and tugged by the branches until its tendrils floated around her face in a glowing halo; light eyes, gray or blue, etiolated and transparent. Her dress was moonlight, too, some oyster shade, colorless as a web, and the luster of satin flickered along its sleeve as she lifted her hands. Her eyes filled with longing and sorrow and desire.
Asher felt his mind shutting down, warm yearning for her flooding heart and thoughts and groin, even though, in the shadows of those waxen lips, he saw the curve of fangs. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that he wanted her, as desperately as he had wanted Lydia before they were married, as desperately as he had wanted the pretty shop girls of Oxford when he was a student and frantic with a boy's nascent lusts. Against his will a sort of drunkenness filled his mind and he found himself reaching for her, filled with the irrational conviction that kissing her, touching her, would not matter, that it would be all right, the way one thinks in a dream.
As if from some tremendous distance he saw himself, his mind protesting but unable to connect its thoughts with his actions. Her hands touched his face, cold even in their gloves of shell-colored kid; they slipped over his ears and down to his neck, and his own hand felt rough and cold on the taut silvery cloth of her side.
Then her mouth twisted in a snarl, wide, like an infuriated cat's. The glamour snapped away as her hands jerked back from his collar, where even through fabric and leather she felt the sear of the silver underneath. Asher gasped, waking, it seemed, to find her mouth inches from his throat, her grip already like iron on his arms. Before she could move, he struck her cheek with the silver watch palmed in his hand, twisting away from her even as she screamed-shock, pain, fury, like a cheetah's scream, or a demon's in hell.
He flung her from him, bolted for the wall. She screamed again, and from the corner of his eye he saw her collapse to her knees, clutching the side of her face, screaming over and over as she clawed at the flesh. Something-some darkness- flashed among the trees, and he felt a smothering sleepiness crush his mind like gloved iron. He thrust it from him, scrambled up and over the wall as men's voices cried out somewhere close, dropped into the rosebushes below instants before the first of Fairport's servants pounded around the side of the house. He rolled into the shadow, hiding the pale blur of his face, and they ran through the garden to the gate. The moment the last was gone, he flung himself across the narrow space of gravel and bare thorn to the door under the stair. Then other men were in the garden, calling to one another. He heard Lukas the coachman's name, and someone called something about "Herr Kapitan..." presumably Karolyi's regimental rank.
The screaming had stopped. But they'd all be busy for some time.
Ten minutes, he thought-striding down the stone-flagged passageway to the kitchen- while everyone dashed madly around the perimeter of the wall. Longer, if they had as few men as he thought they did, or if they found anything. He tripped the lever behind the scullery cupboard, slipped down the narrow stairway it revealed. More than once he'd taken Slav nationalists or Russian messengers down this way, to keep them unseen by Fairport's patients.
God, how the blond woman had screamed!
At the flea market he'd purchased wire to make another picklock; his hands shook while he winkled the lock at the bottom of the stair. It was an old-fashioned tumbler type, and he could have picked it in his sleep-he'd warned Fairport about it a dozen times...
Seventeen years with the Department, he was interested to see, had not inured him to that old chivalric voice within him that protested that there were things that a gentleman did and would not do even in defense of his life: kick a man when he was down or render what was euphemistically called a "foul blow" in a fight; shoot a man in the back; lie on sworn oath; forge another's name. Shoot a sixteen-year-old boy who trusted you.
Steal money from a woman who loved you.
Strike a beautiful girl in the face with a handful of substance that you were reasonably certain would react upon her like vitriol.