Those Who Hunt The Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,4

and walked to Lydia 's desk.

It stood on the opposite side of the study from his own-in actual fact a Regency secretaire Lydia 's mother had once used for gilt-edged invitations and the delicately nuanced jugglings of seating arrangements at dinners. It was jammed now with Lydia 's appallingly untidy collec-tion of books, notes, and research on glands. Since she had taken her degree and begun research at the Radclyffe Infirmary, Asher had been promising to get her a proper desk. In one slim compartment her stethoscope was coiled, like an obscene snake of rubber and steel...

His hands were not quite steady as he replaced the stethoscope in its pigeonhole once more. He was suddenly extremely conscious of the beat of the blood in his veins.

His voice remained level. "What do you want?"

"Help," the vampire said,

"What?" Asher stared at the vampire, he realized-seeing the dark amusement in Ysidro's eyes-like a fool. His own mind still felt twisted out of true by what he had heard-or more properly by what he had absolutely not heard-through the stethoscope, but the fact that the shadowy predator that lurked in the legends of every culture he had ever studied did exist was in a way easier to believe than what that predator had just said.

The pale eyes held his. There was no shift in them, no expression; only a remote calm, centuries deep. Ysidro was silent for a few mo-ments as if considering how much of what he should explain. Then he moved, a kind of weightless, leisurely drifting that, like Asher's habitual stride, was as noiseless as the passage of shadow. He perched on a corner of the desk, long white hands folded on one well-tailored gray knee, regarding Asher for a moment with his head a little on one side. There was something almost hypnotic in that stillness, without nervous gesture, almost completely without movement, as if that had all been rinsed from him by the passing moons of time.

Then Don Simon said, "You are Dr. James Claudius Asher, author ofLanguage and Concepts in Eastern and Central Europe, Lecturer in Philology at New College, expert on languages and their permutations in the folklore of countries from the Balkans to Port Arthur to Preto-ria..."

Asher did not for a moment believe it coincidence that Ysidro had named three of the trouble spots of which the Foreign Office had been most desirous of obtaining maps.

"Surely, in that context, you must be familiar with the vampire."

"I am." Asher settled his weight on one curved arm of the divan where Lydia still lay, unmoving in her unnatural sleep. He felt slightly unreal, but very calm now. Whatever was happening must be dealt with on its own bizarre terms, rather than panicked over. "I don't know why I should be surprised," he went on after a moment. "I've run across legends of vampires in every civilization from China to Mexico. They crop up again and again-blood-drinking ghosts that live as long as they prey on the living. You get them from ancient Greece, ancient Rome -though I remember the classical Roman ones were supposed to bite off their victims' noses rather than drink their blood. Did they?"

"I do not know," Ysidro replied gravely, "having only become vam-pire myself in the Year of Our Lord 1555. I came to England in the train of his Majesty King Philip, you understand, when he came to marry the English queen-I did not go home again. But personally, I cannot see why anyone would trouble to do such a thing." Though his expression did not change, Asher had the momentary impression of

amusement glittering far back in those champagne-colored eyes.

"And as for the legends," the vampire went on, still oddly immobile, as if over the centuries he had eventually grown weary of any extrane-ous gesture, "one hears of fairies everywhere also, yet neither you nor I expect to encounter them at the bottom of the garden." Under the long, pale wisps of Ysidro's hair, Asher could see the earlobes had once been pierced for earrings, and there was a ring of antique gold on one of those long, white fingers. With his narrow lips closed, Ysidro's over-sized canines-twice the length of his other teeth-were hidden, but they glinted in the gaslight when he spoke.

"I want you to come with me tonight," he said after a brief pause during which Asher had the impression of some final, inner debate which never touched the milky stillness of his calm. "It is now half past seven-there