The Kindred of Darkness (39 page)

Lydia
.

Miranda
.

It's fifteen feet to the floor. If I let go I won't land well; I'll never get up the stairs again
…

Shadow moved on the stairway. Then a hand cold and bony and strong as the Grim Reaper's locked around his wrist and dragged him up; another caught him by the back of the jacket.

‘Which way?' It was Ysidro.

‘That door—' There was blood on Ysidro's hands and clothing: it had indeed been he whom Ippolyta had fought. He looked as if he'd got the worst of it, but at least he'd slowed her down. ‘She's gone for Lydia and Miranda—'

Then he was lying alone on the edge of the gallery, Ysidro not even a wisp of smoke vanishing through the door he'd shown. Shaking, Asher crawled to where the shotgun lay, fumbled several silver-nosed bullets from his pockets before finding a shotgun shell, shoved it in the breech. Ysidro looked badly wounded, Ippolyta also …

She'll summon Damien
.

He dragged himself to the wall, used it to get to his feet. How much additional silver it would take to incapacitate the vampire queen he didn't know, but he guessed Ysidro would need every shred of advantage, and the clouds were clearing enough to give him a reasonable chance to aim. Through the black doorway where Lydia had fled with their child he could see moonlight now, and his fear was replaced by certainty. That way led to the stair that wound up the old fortalice tower. Railless stone, spiraling up floor above broken floor.

He leaned his shoulder to the wall, forced himself up a step, then two. Dizziness swamped him and he sank to his knees so as not to fall. A shadow bent over him, massive and smelling of blood – A hand like cold, clawed iron dragged him to his feet.
Damien. He must have killed Cece, to heal himself from the silver-burn
…

A flake of moonlight showed him the face of Titus Armistead.

And he saw that Titus Armistead had become vampire.

The American's eyes caught the thin light like a cat's. The grizzled hair had almost completely returned to the dark of his prime, and his skin had the white-silk smoothness of vampire flesh. Fangs gleamed wetly as he asked, ‘Where's my daughter?'

He answered the father, not the vampire.

‘Zahorec's hunting her. He'll bring her to Ippolyta alive.'

‘Ippolyta?'

‘His queen. The one who made him vampire.'

‘Where's she?'

‘Ahead …'

‘You're Wilson.' The powerful arm circled his ribs, dragged him up the narrow steps. ‘You don't look like him, except your eyes … Your flesh smells like his, your blood … And that's his clothes …'

‘I'm Wilson.' The conversation in Lincoln's Inn felt like months ago. ‘I see you found your vampire.'

‘He found me.'

‘I tried to warn you …'

The thin lip pulled back from the fangs again; Armistead smiled. ‘Oh, no. I paid him to do me. That bastard'll bring Cece to this Ippolyta?'

Asher managed to nod. Badly as Zahorec needed a kill, he couldn't imagine him disobeying his Queen. Blackness fell away to his left beyond the brink of the narrow stair. To his right, wind keened through a window-slit where the lift of the land, scattered with glacial stones, lay formless in a darkness thinning to ash.

‘Good. It takes a devil to fight a devil, Mr Wilson – if that's really your name. The book taught me that if nothing else. There was nothing else I could see to do, to save her.'

Stone rattled down from above, clattering off the broken rafters that were all that remained of the tower's floors. Miranda screamed, ‘Mama!' Armistead dragged Asher up out of shadow and on to the parapet at the tower's top, where Ysidro and the Lady Ippolyta struggled on the last yard or so of stairway against the first stains of gray in the sky. She was a queenly woman, and of a height with the Spaniard, powerful with a vampire's power. Lydia lay on the parapet just beyond them, where she had crawled in a last effort to get away from the Master of the Dinarics, Miranda clasped tight in her arms. Her dress was torn, where Ippolyta had snatched at her. Blood streaked the rips, and her face, and her tangled unbound hair.

Armistead let go of Asher's arm, and with the eerie weightless power of the vampires sprang across the gulf of the empty tower that separated them, twelve feet from the stairway to the parapet, his gray Inverness cloak billowing behind him like wings.

‘Give her to me.'

Lydia's spectacles flashed in the sinking moonlight as she looked up at him, her arms tightening around her child. Feet away, Ippolyta drove Ysidro to his knees on the parapet's edge, claws buried in the back of his neck – she'd strike Lydia next and strike with the speed of a bullet.

‘Give her—!' The fledgling vampire – the mine-owner who'd lived a lifetime by hard-headed greed – stretched down his hands, clawed and hairy and strong …

And he too, Asher knew, needed a kill. Needed two kills, if he was going to take on Ippolyta and Zahorec both, if he was going to save his own child.

Lydia shrank against the stone, clinging tight, threw one fast glance at Asher—

Dear God, I can't make this decision
—

He saw his dream again, Johanot of Valladolid reaching down to gather Miranda into his arms.

He nodded, and would have turned his face away so as not to see, but he couldn't. Miranda clinging to his neck, Armistead launched himself back across the void to the stairway, landed a few steps below Asher and set the child down.

‘Take her down,' said Armistead. ‘I'll—'

Lydia screamed, ‘Simon!' and Asher looked up, to see Ysidro writhe from his opponent's grasp. But Ippolyta was swifter than a snake, striking at him before he could catch his balance. His foot slid on the stonework, slippery with both of their blood, and he fell, down into the empty hollow of the tower. Before he was even out of sight she was across the space that separated her from the narrow ledge where Lydia crouched, caught her by the hair and bent over her.

Armistead tore the shotgun from Asher's hand, brought it up even as Ysidro, catching some broken rafter below, swung himself back up to the parapet. Ippolyta screamed, jerked her hand back from the silver on Lydia's throat, face inhuman with rage. Armistead fired, and Ysidro jerked back out of the way of the silver deer-shot that ripped through the flesh of the vampire queen's face and breast. The force knocked her out and back off the wall, and as she went over she caught Ysidro by the arms, whether to save herself or only with the intent of dragging her enemy to his doom Asher could not tell.

Lydia cried, ‘Simon!' again and grabbed for them as they tottered on the edge, but she was too late.

As they plunged down off the parapet, Damien Zahorec shrieked, ‘Ippolyta!' as if his soul were being ripped from his flesh.

He stood below them on the stair, Cece pressed against his body, one arm around her waist and his other hand closed on her throat. She was sobbing with terror, her red gown torn half off her shoulders and her creamy skin marked by claw-rips and scratches. She raised her dark eyes and wailed, ‘Daddy! Oh, Daddy—'

‘Let her go,' said Asher quietly. ‘Your lady is dead.'

Zahorec's voice cracked in wild laughter. ‘Is that all you know about us,
mein Held
? You think a fall like that will kill Ippolyta Vranica? Break her back, yes. Break her legs, yes, and all the bones of her body, so that she lies in agony looking up at the sky as it grows light … yes. But kill her? Never!'

His blue eyes pressed shut, and again his face spasmed. ‘She will have her vengeance,' he whispered. ‘I feel her in my mind, in my bones … In agony, but strong unto the end. She holds me here. Even now as the sun rises, she won't let me flee. She won't let me leave this place until I do as she commands. She will feel me drink this girl's life, ere the flame burst out on her flesh …'

From his pocket Asher took one of the silver-tipped rifle bullets, flung it full-force at the vampire's face. The silver itself would have stung him, not even penetrating the flesh, but Zahorec, exhausted already, reacted without knowing what had been thrown. Turned his head, his attention, his focus, and in that split-second Armistead struck.

Cece screamed, pulled herself free as Zahorec grappled with the American. Fell to her knees and scrambled to put her back to the stone of the wall, away from the sixty-foot drop below the stair. The two vampires grappled on the narrow steps. Had Armistead tried to wound or kill or even hurl Zahorec down as Ippolyta had been hurled, he probably could not have done so, even weakened as the older vampire was. But he only held on to his opponent, by the wrists, by the arms, by the throat, heedless of the other vampire's claws and teeth. He shouted, ‘Cece, run!' but she didn't move, only stared up at them as they writhed against the paling sky. Trapped at the top of the tower, Asher backed against the parapet, put a hand over Miranda's eyes, knowing what was going to happen.

Far below him he heard a bestial scream, and the roar of fire at the foot of the tower.

Armistead was burning, too, the oily heat of the flames beating on Asher's face. Screaming – but hanging on.

Asher didn't know whether it was the flames that sheathed Armistead that ignited Zahorec's flesh, or the still-distant sun's light suffusing the sky. Whether the older vampire would have been able to make it to shelter, had not the cleansing fire spread from the flesh of his opponent into his own. Cece screamed, ‘Daddy!' as both vampires fell to their knees, a doubled spout of flame, then tipped sideways off the stair. Plunged into the central gulf within the tower like Lucifer plunging into darkness.

Asher kept tight hold of Miranda, but Lydia crawled from the parapet where she had lain, went to the edge of the broken floor and looked down through the tangle of shattered joists at the blaze below.

It was Asher who said, ‘We'd better go.' He would have carried Miranda if he could, but it was all he could do to keep himself on his feet. The sturdy toddler held his hand, stepped carefully down each step of the long stone curve unassisted. Though it was Asher who was lamed and bleeding, it was Cece, doubled over in sobbing hysterics, whom Lydia had to assist down the steps, through the ruined upper floor of the house, down the stairs into the house's hall and – at long last – to the bench outside.

Limping far behind them, Asher paused in the hall. Through a doorway he could see into the bottom of the tower, where the two locked forms had subsided into a sullen mound of charred bone still flickering with blue flame. He doubted there would even be enough left of Titus Armistead's clothing and effects for anyone to identify. He kept his hand on his daughter's head, kept her face turned away. Then, still holding to the wall, he dragged himself around to the dining room, where the candle was guttering out on the table and the blue twilight of morning trickled through the shuttered windows, gleamed gently on the gilt trim of four old books.

Asher supported himself on the table's edge as he emptied the picnic basket Cece Armistead had left there: sandwiches, apples, a pocket flask. He opened the books one by one, briefly, and put three of them into the basket.

The fourth he concealed under his jacket.

The sandwiches in his pockets – Miranda carrying the Thermos – he made his agonized way to the door. On the bench beside it Cece wailed like a beaten child. Asher watched her impassively, feeling very detached from himself – like a very old spider, he reflected, that has been stepped on many times.

Lydia fell to her knees, crushed Miranda against her chest, shaking with shock and cold and reaction. Asher sank down on to the end of the bench, put his arms around both of them.

We're all alive
, he thought, and it was the only thought that would go through his mind.
We're all alive
…

Public-school chivalry and common decency told him he should comfort Cece but all he wanted to do – for the rest of his life, if possible – was hold his wife and his daughter against him, feel the softness of their hair against his lips.

At length Lydia asked, ‘What's in the Thermos?'

‘Probably coffee.' Smoke filled the air, and the smell of charred flesh.

Lydia unscrewed the cap, gave Cece a drink, and took one herself before returning the flask to Asher. ‘I'll be back.' She clung for a moment more to Miranda, then kissed Asher, stood up, and walked away around the corner of the house.

He rested his head against the stone of the wall behind them. Miranda, with the simple healing miracle of childhood, had fallen asleep in his lap; Asher wished he had the option of doing the same. Instead, a little awkwardly, he put his arm around Cece Armistead's heaving shoulders, patted her gently, but could find no words of comfort, no words at all. She kept sobbing, ‘Oh, my God – oh, Daddy – oh, Damien,' and turned her face to weep into Asher's chest. It had not been her fault, he understood, that Damien Zahorec had made her his target, and she would have had to be an extraordinary woman to resist his seduction. Still, he felt infinitely distant from her and from all the sweet stillness that surrounded them. Mostly all he could think of was that there was still the hill to get down, to the chaise and the horses at the bottom.

Lydia came back around the corner of the house, a long stick still in her hand. The end was charred, as if she'd used it to probe through an ash-heap.

‘There's only one skeleton there at the foot of the wall,' she said. ‘It's still burning, but the pelvis is definitely a woman's. I think the bones should be consumed,' she added, ‘by the time anyone gets here.'

I
t took three weeks for the cracked bone in Asher's ankle to heal. He spent the time quietly in his study in Holywell Street, preparing his notes for the start of Trinity term, studying fourteenth-century Spanish verb tenses, and playing finger-puppets with Miranda. He limped up the stairs to her nursery three and four times a night, but Nan Wellit – with whom, for the first week, the tiny girl insisted on sharing a bed ‘like we did downstairs' – reported neither nightmares nor disturbed sleep.