Ysidro had been gone long before the fire began to sink. By the time the police arrived, drawn by a shepherd's report of the blaze, it was sunup, and Asher and Lydia were far down the road to Prince's Ris-borough, looking like a couple of tinkers and walking the motorcycle Dennis had disabled between them, the grimy brown ulster thrown round both their shoulders for warmth. The fire had been reported in a minor article on a back page in that afternoon' sDaily Mail, There was no mention of human remains in the blaze.
"In any case," Lydia went on after a moment, turning back from gazing rather abstractedly out at the sunset maze of rooftops and chim-neys, "if the positions had been reversed, Dennis would have told me nothing of what was going on-merely not to worry myself about such things. And it wouldn't have answered. Because the killer, the day stalker-Dennis-knew me, and wanted me. He did see me once, while he was stalking Bully Joe Davies. And he'd been-calling me, tracking me-in my dreams. He wasn't as good as the other vampires were at it, but... And then again, sooner or later, whether you or I or anyone did anything about it or not, he would have learned somehow about how to make another vampire like himself and he would have come after me." She wiped her eyes almost surreptitiously and shoved her spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose. "My going to snoop about Blaydon's place in Queen Anne Street only speeded things up."
She picked up his coat from the bed and came over to help him on with it again. By the time they'd waked up after their return from the Peaks, the short autumn afternoon had been far advanced, and a goodly portion of what remained had been spent at Middlesex Hospital, getting Asher's battered arm reset. He could cheerfully have gone back to bed now and slept the clock round, but there remained one thing yet to do.
"Are you sure you want to?" Lydia asked.
Asher glanced past her at his own reflection in the mirror. Shaved and bathed, he no longer looked like a tramp, but his face had a drawn, exhausted look he hadn't seen there in years. He knew it, however, from his missions abroad-the familiar, soul-deep ache he associated with climbing tiredly onto the boat train for home.
"No," he said. "But with Dennis gone, I don't think there's any danger. And someone has to tell him. Just promise me you'll stay here -stay indoors-'til I come back. All right?"
She nodded. Asher cast one last glance at the sky, visible through the windows, satisfying himself that, before full dark fell, he would be well away from these rooms. Grippen knew about Lydia's rooms in Bruton Place, but he didn't-or at least Asher thought he didn't-know about 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade,
Unless, of course, Ysidro had told him.
While the doctors at Middlesex had beentushing and fussing over his arm, he'd sent Lydia out to Lambert's to buy five more silver chains; he was conscious of the two around his throat and left wrist as he de-scended the lodging-house steps and began his unhurried walk toward Oxford Street. The gas lamps were lighted, soft and primrose in the dusk. He had made sure Lydia was wearing hers, though he privately suspected they wouldn't do either of them much good, if the vampires were really determined to let no one who knew of their existence sur-vive.
His term of service to Ysidro was over.
And in the meantime, someone had to tell Blaydon... And some-one had to make sure that there weren't going to be any more experi-ments "for the good of the country."
The other thing Lydia had bought on her shopping trip had been a revolver, though he hadn't told her who it was for. He suspected he wouldn't have needed to.
In the deep twilight, Queen Anne Street had a placid air, the win-dows of its tall, narrow houses bright with lights. Occasionally Asher could see into one of them, through the shams of curtain lace: two friends playing chess beside a parlor fire; a dark woman standing dreaming in a window, her arm around the tall form of an androgynous youth. Were he a vampire, Asher thought, he could have heard their every word.
There was a light on in Blaydon's house, in the room he guessed was the study on the same floor as the laboratory and the little prison. He rapped sharply at the front door, and it gave back beneath his knuckles.
"Blaydon?"
He didn't raise his voice much. The shadows of the stairwell swal-lowed the echoes of his words; for an instant, he seemed to be back in Oxford again, listening to the ominous stillness of a house he knew was not empty.
Then, like a whisper more within his skull than without, he heard Ysidro say, "Up here."
He climbed the stairs, knowing already what he would find.
Ysidro sat in the study at Blaydon's inlaid Persian desk, sorting pa-pers-they spilled down in drifts and covered the carpet for a yard around. The vampire himself was as Asher had first seen him, a delicate thing of alabaster and peeled ivory, cobweb hair falling to the shoulders of his gray Bond Street suit-a displaced grandee, a nobleman in exile from another age, who had once danced with the Virgin Queen, with every cell petrified as it had been, and with his soul trapped somewhere among them like a mantis in amber. Asher wondered with what study or pastime Ysidro had beguiled those passing centuries; he had never even found that out.
Pale as brimstone or the clearest champagne, the calm eyes lifted to meet Asher's.
"You will find him in his laboratory," he said quietly. "His neck is broken. He was working on another batch of serum, taken from the last of Chloe's blood."
"Did he know about Dennis?"
"There was a telegram there from the Buckinghamshire police, say-ing that there had been a mysterious fire at the Peaks. The metal but-tons of a man's trousers had been found in the ashes, along with a few
cracked glass beads, a steel crucifix, and some unidentifiable bones."
Asher was silent. Ysidro upended another folder of notes over the general mess. They slithered across the top of the pile before him and swooped like awkward birds to the floor.
"Would you have done it?"
Asher sighed. He had done worse than kill Blaydon, and for slighter cause. He knew if he'd been caught he could always have pleaded his Foreign Office connections, and might even have been backed up by friends in the Department. The pistol weighed heavily in his ulster pocket. "Yes."
"I thought you would have." Simon smiled, wry and yet oddly sweet, and Asher had the impression-as he had fleetingly during the dark horrors of the previous night-of dealing with the man Ysidro had once been, before he had become a vampire. "I wished to spare you awk-wardness."
"You wished to spare me a discussion with the police on the subject of Blaydon's experiments."
That faint, cynical smile widened and, for the first time, warmed Ysidro's chilly eyes. "That, too."
Asher came over and stood beside the desk, looking down at the slender form of white and gray. If the gouges left in Ysidro's flesh by Dennis' fangs still pained him, as Asher's broken arm throbbed dully beneath its shroud of novocaine, he gave no sign. His slender hands were neatly bandaged. Asher wondered if Grippen had done that.
"You realize," Asher said slowly, "that not only was Brother An-thony the only vampire who could have killed Dennis-the only vam-pire who physically could have survived that much silver in his system for even the minute or so it took for Dennis to drink his blood-but he was the only one who would have. He was the only vampire who valued the redemption of his soul above the continuation of his existence."