"How long can the three of us hold him off?"
"Long enough for the silver poisoning to take effect on him?" Lydia came up beside them, the flickering brand in her hand making her spectacle lenses seem like rounds of fire.
"No." The vampire's light hand tightened over Asher's shoulder, "It has only made him more frantic than ever for my blood. He has a great deal of strength still. It will be days, maybe weeks... If he takes me or another vampire or sufficient human lives, he may prolong his life indefinitely. In any case, it will be dawn soon."
She pushed her spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose. "The room where I was kept had no windows," she said. "If we can make it back to the house we can guard you..."
"You'd never even see him strike." The vampire straightened slowly away from Asher's grip, removed his hand from the wound in his neck; the thin fingers were dark with gore, and the handkerchief that
bound the silver burns saturated and dripping. His voice was expressionless, "The dawnlight will kill me-and then he will have you..."
Lydia whirled sharply, raising her torch. "What's that?"
Something white flickered and moved among the tombstones.
Threads of milky hair caught the lift of the night wind. There was a fluttering tangle of black over limbs colorless as bone, like dead ivy cloaking marble. The unearthly, unmistakable gleam of vampire eyes showed.
Asher breathed, "Anthony,.."
Tiny, skeletal-white hands lifted to the cloud-patched sky. Asher had a glimpse of a white skull-face, the tonsure framed in pouring streams of filthy white mane; he seemed to hear on the night wind the whispered cry: "In Nomine Patris, et Filti, et Spirtius Sancti.. ."
Ysidro shouted, "Antonius, non!" as the dark shape of Dennis rushed out of the night and fell like storm cloud upon that lonely, fragile shape among the tombstones.
If the little monk could have avoided his attacker or fought him, he did not-it did not even seem that he tried. Dennis caught him up like a snake seizing a bird, even as Asher plunged out of the safety of the chapel ruin, pain jarring his broken hand with every step on the uneven ground. He heard Lydia call his name, Ysidro shout, "You fool...!" A deep, sticky groan of satiation broke from Dennis, and somewhere he thought he heard, perhaps only in his mind, a frail drift of voice: "In manus tuas, Domini ..." as the two vampires locked together in the obscene parody of a kiss.
Then Dennis flung the broken body aside and turned, blood running down his fangs, swollen lips, and rutted chin. With a bestial snarl, he fell upon Asher like a charging bear.
Asher knew it was blood frenzy beyond caution and swung the silver bar with all the strength he had. But Dennis' weight smashed into him with full force, throwing him backward. He had a confused glimpse of the bloody mouth gaping wider and wider, the blue eyes suffused, not with hatred, but with astonishment and agony. In the split second as they collided, Asher realized that Dennis died even as he sprang.
The impact of the corpse knocked the breath out of him as they hit the ground; the broken edge of an imitation tombstone gouged him in the back. He lay for a moment stunned, under the stinking and inert mass of infected flesh that had been Dennis, and in that moment it came to him what must have killed him.
Painfully, he rolled out from under the body. Torchlight splashed jerkily over him; he heard the swish of Lydia's skirt in the long weeds and Ysidro's voice saying, "James...?" For a moment, he stood swaying over the monster carcass, the silver bar dangling uselessly from his hand. Then he dropped it and stumbled a few feet away to the body of Brother Anthony, like a broken marionette among the frilled Victo-rian gothic of the pinchbeck tombs.
The little Minorite lay crumpled together, a shrunken tangle of old bones, rotting robes, and white hair bound together with a filthy rosary, clotted with his own blood and that of six centuries of kills. His bare feet were scratched and bloody. The big veins of his throat had been ripped open by the violence of Dennis' attack, not merely punctured- there was very little blood left. Though sunken and fallen in upon the skull, his face wore a look of strange serenity and the faintest hint of a smile.
Behind him, Lydia and Ysidro were silent, Asher raised the dead vampire's left arm and pushed back the decayed shreds of the sleeve. The torchlight showed clearly the line of dark-stained punctures that tracked the big vein. Rising to his feet, he stepped around behind the tombstone to the place where he had first thought he'd seen movement.
His own ulster lay there, its nubby brown tweed still flecked with the hay from the bales in the Queen Anne mews where he'd left it with Ysidro's cloak. On top of it lay the velvet box that had contained the hypodermic needle and its ten ampoules of silver nitrate.
The ampoules were all empty.
Twenty- two
"He was the only vampire who could have done it." Pausing in the act of trying to do up shirt buttons one-handed-as he had paused already half a dozen times that afternoon-Asher looked again at the brown velvet box where it lay on a corner of the dressing table, with its empty ampoules and its bloodstained needle. "I don't think a living man, much less a younger vampire, would have survived to inject himself a second time."
Lydia shook her head. "How did he know?" Frowning with concen-tration, she stood before Asher's shaving mirror to construct a running Windsor knot in one of his ties around her own neck. The last of the evening sunlight, falling through the cheap lace curtains of Asher's rooms on Prince of Wales Colonnade, sprinkled the ghosts of shadow flowers over her white shirtwaist and freckled her auburn hair with gold.
"About the ampoules themselves? If he'd been following us from Paris, he could easily have listened through the windows of your room when Ysidro and I spoke of it. Ysidro tells me vampires often listen for days to the conversations of their prey. And he wasn't unfamiliar with the activities and technology of modern men, you know-merely apart from them, as the other vampires, the so-called 'good' vampires, were not. If he was following me the day Dennis attacked me at Grippen's house, he would have seen Dennis and guessed that only something as -as heroic as the measures he took-would have served."
"Poor Dennis." Lydia loosened the tie, stood for a moment, looking into Asher's eyes in the mirror before them. "He used to say the most horrid things about the other girls at Somerville-about them wanting to act like men because they couldn't get men-absolutely without thinking. And whenever I'd point out it was what I was doing, he'd be so patronizing, as if I were only at University until I could find a husband and a home and have children. 'You're different,' he'd say... He could be so sweet to me, so kind, and yet..."
She shook her head. Removing the tie from her own neck, she turned to slip it over Asher's head. "He wanted so much to be a hero, but the fact is that I never took him seriously at all."
He took her wrist in the fingers of his good hand as she adjusted his collar. "You have to admit that, in my place, he never would have let you endanger yourself by coming to London."
"I know." The expression of sorrow that was more pity than grief faded; she smiled ruefully up into his eyes. "That's why I never took him seriously. He couldn't conceive of anyone being able to save a situation but himself." She sighed and fixed her attention for a few moments on the placing of his stickpin and the minute adjustments in the set of his tie. "The awful thing is that I'm sure that's why he injected
himself with his father's serum-because he couldn't stand the thought of such powers as Calvaire had going to anyone but him."
They had burned Brother Anthony's body before the coming of dawn on a pyre hastily assembled from the Peaks' woodshed-Anthony's, and Dennis' with him. The flames were searingly hot and blue, and Asher had been wryly amused to see Lydia studying the atypical blaze with interest, clearly taking notes in her head. But she hadn't, he no-ticed, suggested preserving either of the vampires for further experimen-tation. Whatever alien pathologies lingered in their tainted blood, she had no desire to permit them further existence, even in the allegedly controlled conditions of a laboratory.