Moving among the charred ruins of what had been a small French village, a willow pole in one hand like a blind man’s cane and a lantern, sheathed down to its tiniest thread of yellow light, in the other, Asher was aware of the Undead. Since the night in 1907 when he’d come home to find the household in near-coma slumber and Don Simon Ysidro sitting at his study desk, he had dealt with enough vampires to spot them in the darkness. There were techniques of mental focus that improved one’s chances, though this didn’t always help, and he had the bite scars to prove it. Revenants were abroad, and some at least shared their vampiric cousins’ ability to go unnoticed until they were almost on top of their victims.
By what Grippen had told him in London, he guessed himself almost safe from the vampires here.
But the reeking network of old trenches, gaping cellars and shell-craters – black as the abyssal pits of hell – could conceal any number of revenants.
Still he walked, whispers of moonlight glimmering on the ruined land.
If Lydia had received ‘special orders’ to go down to Amiens – and he guessed that Amiens wasn’t her actual destination – she was almost certainly with Don Simon Ysidro, and curiously, the thought brought him comfort. He had for years watched the relationship between his wife and the vampire and was virtually certain that Ysidro would not let harm come to her. ‘I will keep her safe,’ the pale vampire had said, on the night before Lydia’s departure for France: the night Asher had waked to see a light burning in the upstairs hallway of their house on Holyrood Street, and had gone down in his dressing-gown to investigate, nearly certain what he would find.
He had been, at that time, barely three weeks recovered from his most recent relapse of pneumonia and had just begun to be up and about for a few hours a day, readying himself to begin teaching the Hilary term. The weather had turned cold at the start of November; the house was freezing. As Asher had expected, the vampire Ysidro had been sitting in Lydia’s green velvet chair before the banked ashes of the study grate.
‘Will you be going to France?’ Asher had asked him, wanting to hate him and not able to do so; and the vampire had inclined his moonlight-colored head.
‘Look after her.’ It was as if they continued a conversation already begun, and the vampire nodded again.
‘I came here tonight on purpose, James, to reassure you that I would.’
‘Have you told her this?’
Ysidro made the slight movement with his eyes that passed for a headshake, even as his nods were barely perceptible. ‘Best not. Yet I thought you would wish to know—’
Movement in one of the half-caved-in trenches; a fugitive glint of the feeble moonlight in animal eyes. The scrabble of rats among the bricks of a fallen chimney. Beyond the shattered stumps of what had been an orchard, past the makeshift bridge, the ruined country swelled, plowed by shell-fire into a sodden wasteland of darkness, barbed wire and wrecked wagons, stinking of the carcasses of horses and mules. Asher stopped, heart beating hard. Then, after a moment, moved on.
‘Promenading oneself’, Ysidro called this. Vampires did it, when newly arrived in the territory of a nest not their own, to ask permission of the master vampire to hunt on his or her grounds. Vampires always knew who walked their domains of darkness. If they wanted to speak to you, they would.
A white flicker in the bitter night.
The glint of eyes.
Asher kept walking, old instinct forbidding him to let any adversary know that he was capable of detecting them. He even made himself start when she laid a soft little clawed hand on his arm and said, ‘James!’ in a pleased voice.
‘Madame.’ He bowed. Lydia had told him she thought she had seen this woman, among the many who haunted the vicinity of the hospitals behind the lines. ‘A long way from Paris.’
Her French was modern, though it slipped now and then into the old-fashioned idiom of Napoleonic times. Moonlight made her green eyes nearly transparent. Scorning disguise, she wore a simple white dress, her black hair loosed about her shoulders in thick curls. Blood and mud spattered her hem and her sleeves, but this he only noticed later. It seemed to disappear from his consciousness as he spoke to her, even as he was only intermittently aware of her claws and fangs. She appeared to him to be the most beautiful, most desirable woman he had ever seen.
‘Dare I surmise you have come out in the hopes of a rendezvous?’
Elysée de Montadour was insatiably curious and vampires were the worst gossips in the world. She’d have accosted him if he’d had a whitethorn stake in one hand and a silver crucifix in the other.
‘The merest recollection of your name in one of my wife’s letters was enough to bring me forth.’
‘Brave soul.’ The next moment, the green eyes narrowed. ‘As for your wife, she’s gone off with Don Simon … and when you meet her again, tell her for me that spectacles never improve a woman’s appearance! Outré!’ She gave a theatrical shiver. ‘Like a great bug! Not that I mean to disparage—’
Of course you do, you witch. ‘No, no …’
‘Purely for her own good, as woman to woman—’
‘Of course.’ He kissed her hand. Warm. Even in the wasted moonlight there showed a flicker of color in her cheeks. ‘Do you know where they’ve gone? The surgeons tell me she had orders for Amiens.’
She made a sly little moue. ‘Maybe after they left Cuvé Sainte-Bride, they did. I hear that’s where Simon was seen, five nights ago, Johanna tells me … You know Johanna Falknerin, that horrid harpy from Berlin?’
‘We’ve met.’ Asher had no desire to encounter the hawk-nosed Rhineland vampire – or indeed any of the Berlin nest – again.
‘Dreadful woman! And tells tales …’ Elysée shook her head. ‘And speaks French like a goat! One can barely understand a word she says, not that one would wish to … Disgusting. But she says she saw Simon emerge from Cuvé Sainte-Bride with his minion – I presume your pretty little wife – and go off in a motorcar. So they may well have gone to Amiens for all I know.’
She shrugged, the gesture extravagant, as if playing to some far balcony packed with admirers. ‘So they’re not back yet? Only to be expected. Simon is the most extraordinary creature in his taste for the company of the living.’
‘What about the revenants?’
She startled, swung about and swept the shapeless landscape with those darkness-piercing eyes. ‘The Boche,’ she said softly. ‘Only cabbage-eaters, gone off their heads … They have to be, don’t they? Oh, I know about those awful things that are supposed to exist in Prague, but how could they get here? Even the Germans can’t be such fools as to—’
‘I doubt there’s anything,’ returned Asher, softly and from the bottom of his heart, ‘that either side in this wretched war would consider too foolish to contemplate. Have you seen them?’
‘Not close.’ She drew nearer to him, like a frightened woman seeking comfort in a male embrace; Asher retreated a step. Her glance flickered at him, half-reproachful, half-amused. ‘And not near here. South, five, perhaps six miles, towards Arras. I saw one the night before last, shambling among the shell-holes in the moonlight. Looking for wounded, I suppose. And I have seen the bodies of the wounded they have found and fed upon. Last night I came on – I don’t know, I suppose one had got himself caught in barbed wire, and the flesh burned away off his bones when the sun came up. But it could have been a living man, you know, caught too close to a bomb-blast.’
‘It could.’
‘These things …’ Elysée looked over her shoulder again, her beautiful face taut with dread. ‘I have heard – from the Prague vampires, I have heard – that they devour the Undead in their coffins. That they live in the sewers, and the crypts below old churches … I have thought of fleeing back to Paris, but what if these things come to Paris? What if they make their nests there, like rats, like wood beetles that no one can ever quite root out? Who among us would be safe?’
‘Are there any of you, left in Paris?’
She waved, as if to chase away a subject unpleasing to her. ‘There isn’t a city in Europe, where we who hunt the night linger. The cities are full of soldiers, and spies, and people looking for spies, and for what sort of pickings? And my boys – dear boys …’ She smiled at the mention of her nest of fledglings, chosen – in Ysidro’s opinion – for their looks rather than their brains. ‘On their own, without me, they’d get themselves killed inside a week.’
‘And is there another man,’ Asher asked, ‘a day ago, maybe two, who has promenaded himself as I did? A smallish man, and slender? Large nose, gray hair, dark eyes? Possibly – probably – in uniform?’
The delicate brows puckered, and again she shook her head. ‘None save you and your wife, and that little fool of an Irish nurse … Whom I haven’t seen, now that I consider it, in weeks … Did she ever meet with the Undead, do you know? Did the pretty Lydia encounter her?’
‘I sincerely hope not.’
‘And this man—’ Elysée, who had once been an actress, made a mime of mocking a man with a large nose. ‘He too is seeking us? La, so popular as we have become … Is he a friend of this Irish poule?’
‘I don’t think so,’ replied Asher. ‘But I suspect they have acquaintances in common.’
In the deep of her dreams, Lydia heard the lock click.
Simon, she thought. Simon came back for me …
She struggled to shake off sleep, to surface from a black well fathoms deep. Why can’t I wake up? I sleep so badly in this place …
To the very walls, the blanket on her cot, clung the stink of charred flesh.
I shouldn’t be asleep anyway. It’s night. It’s dangerous to sleep at night. But if Simon just unlocked the door of my cell, it HAS to be night.
It can’t be Simon, the lock is silver …
Fear jolted her awake. A bar of the laboratory’s electric glare fell across her face. The cell door stood open, about an inch.
Beyond it, the laboratory was tomb-silent. Even the constant, distant groaning and yowling of the revenants in the crypt was stilled.
Simon?
Lydia got cautiously to her feet. She was still dressed – It IS still night, I DIDN’T go to bed. Heart hammering, she tiptoed to the door and looked through the judas.
Nothing. The lab was empty. The burning-grille, steel-bright where Lemoine had scrubbed it that afternoon, gleamed under the harsh string of bulbs. The door to the corridor stood open, like this one, an inch or so.
This is a trap.
She knew it to the marrow of her bones.
But what kind of a trap? They’ve already GOT me.
A trap for Simon? She remembered Basilio screaming as the flames poured over him. Remembered Antonio crying in that thundering bass voice, ‘Oh, God, oh God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’ The look of shuddering ecstasy on Francesca’s face.
DON’T GO NEAR THAT DOOR.
Slowly, the gap in the outer door widened, and the reek of the revenants flowed into the lab.
Oh, dear God …
Even before the door opened sufficiently to reveal them Lydia knew they were there, and they were. She ducked back into her cell, looked desperately for some way to lock it from the inside – there was neither keyhole nor handle on that side of the door, and the door itself opened outward. Slowly the things shuffled into the lab, half-crouched and unbelievably hideous in the too-bright glare of the electric lights. Faces still bruised where the jaws had grown forward, mouths bloody from the unaccustomed length of new tusks. Eyes blank. The nostrils of their deformed noses flared, sniffing; heads thick with matted, uncut hair swinging back and forth; the remains of their uniforms stinking of bodily waste unregarded.
(Why on earth don’t they die of their own infections? They must after a time … CAN they die in this state?)
At the same time the other half of her mind screamed in panic NO! NO! as they suddenly turned, sniffing, toward the cell door.
NO!
Get past them? The door was narrow and there were four of them in the lab.
The cell was barely six feet by ten. I can use the cot as a shield …
She unfastened the silver chains from her wrists, wrapped them around her hands. How badly will that amount of silver burn revenants? Enough to let me get past them?
The cot weighed something over twenty pounds and she was barely aware of it as she up-ended it, flattened against the wall beside the door, holding it in front of her body. The legs are going to tangle in the door so I have to wait till they all get—
The reek smote her like a hammer as the door was yanked open. Lydia shoved the cot at them, slithered past and out the door and almost into the arms of two more revenants that had entered the lab behind the first group. She flattened back to the wall, threw a fast glance at the door …
And saw Francesca standing, smiling, against the dark of the corridor.
Lydia twisted, dodged to another corner as the revenants came at her. One of them, still more man-like than bestial, sprang at her like a panther; she looked for something loose to throw and there was nothing. If I strike at it and miss, it’ll grab me—
She dodged past and the other four emerged from the cell, surrounding her—
‘Stop this!’ Lemoine’s voice shouted from the hall. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
The revenants stopped in their tracks.
Stood swaying, scratching themselves, looking about them as if she, Lydia, had suddenly become invisible and odorless.
Francesca’s smile widened. She stepped out of the doorway, angelic eyes glittering with delight. ‘We’re only having a little test.’
Lemoine pushed past her into the laboratory, in shirtsleeves, clutching his aching arm. He must have been in bed and asleep.
Lydia began to shake so that she could barely stand. She felt as if she would vomit, as much from sheer terror as because the six revenants stood only a few feet from her – even Lemoine hesitated to approach her, his eyes darting from the creatures to the White Lady, still standing beside him in the doorway. Lydia could almost see his struggle, knowing he should stride over to her and bring her out of the circle of the things and not daring.
Meagher slipped into the lab behind him, blue eyes sparkling with the mischief of Hell. ‘And here we thought you’d be pleased,’ she teased, and Lemoine swung around to face her. This time he saw what she was, and his eyes bulged with shock.
He whispered, ‘What have you done?’
‘Well, I was hardly going to risk touching those things—’ Francesca gestured toward the revenants – ‘before I’d made sure you were paying me in genuine coin.’ She put an arm around Meagher’s shoulders, and the Irish vampire stepped into the embrace like a cat asking to be stroked. Like sisters. Like school friends. ‘And I’m pleased to say your procedure passed the test, dear man, with flying colors. You should be well pleased.’
She turned her attention – Lydia didn’t see how exactly she did it, more than just looking at the revenants – back to the creatures, and they shambled into one corner of the lab.
‘It is … an extraordinary sensation,’ the White Lady went on. ‘Feeling their minds. Look.’
She fixed them with her gaze. After a moment a huge gray rat emerged from behind the boxes in one corner of the lab, then another. They ran toward Lydia, who stepped back with a sickened cry. Lemoine said again, ‘Stop that!’ and the rats stopped.
‘Go ahead,’ said Francesca after a moment. ‘Hit one. It won’t run away.’
Lemoine stood still for a long moment, then looked around him for something to strike the rat with, but as Lydia had observed a few moments before, there was nothing loose in the lab to use for a weapon. With a laugh, Meagher stepped forward, picked up the rat – which made no move to resist – and grabbed it by head and body, and with a twist broke its neck. In the brightness of the laboratory lights, Lydia could see the rosy pinkness of the Irish girl’s face, the red of her lips: only by the reflective gleam of her eyes, by the fangs that showed when she smiled and the long claws that tipped her fingers, could anyone have said she was vampire. She’d clearly fed.
Meagher turned her mocking eyes on Lydia. ‘Why don’t you go back into your cell now, dear?’
‘They won’t hurt you,’ added Francesca, when Lydia tried to step past the revenants without touching any of them. It wasn’t possible to do, but Francesca was right: they didn’t even turn their heads when Lydia’s shoulders brushed against them as she slipped by.
‘You see,’ said the White Lady to Lemoine, as Lydia closed the cell door behind her. ‘Everything you wished to achieve. I stand ready to complete your plan.’ She curtsied elaborately.
Lemoine drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Accepting – Lydia could see the shift in his shoulders. Accepting that sometimes evil must be done that good may come …
‘I am …’ he began, and then paused. ‘This is astounding. First we must test— How many of these creatures can you control, and at what distances? Not,’ he added warningly, ‘with a test such as this, which, if you will permit me to say so, was inexcusably cruel—’
‘And I am inexcusably sorry.’ Francesca curtsied, without an atom of contrition in her voice. ‘I assure you, it will not happen again.’
Even from the judas of her cell, Lydia could see the White Lady and Meagher exchange a wink.
A wink which Lemoine didn’t even see. Isn’t he even aware that they can tinker with his perceptions? That they’re altering them – blinding him – even now? Making him see what he wants to see?
Or doesn’t he even need a vampire’s delusion for that?
‘When we have tested – when we have documented what is possible – I will inform the Ministry,’ Lemoine went on, as the revenants filed from the laboratory. ‘No one – NO ONE – knows the extent of what I have sought here: the Germans have spies everywhere. And not the Germans only,’ he added darkly. ‘Even the British poke and pry, and try to find out what isn’t their business—’
He started to follow the revenants from the lab, when Meagher touched his arm and said, ‘Lock?’
‘Ah.’ Lemoine crossed to the door of Lydia’s cell. In one quick stride Lydia was huddled in the corner, knees drawn up to her forehead, arms wrapped around her shins, shaking and sobbing.
‘Madame,’ said the French surgeon urgently, and hurried to her side. ‘Madame, be calm. You must be calm. You can see – you have seen – that these creatures are now completely under control. Believe me, I swear to you that what we do here, shocking as it may seem to you, is necessary, for the defeat of Germany and the salvation of France … and of your own country, of course.’
He knelt on the floor before her, grasped her hand in his. ‘Sometimes one must use shocking methods, to bring about the good of all,’ he said. ‘Germany must be defeated. France – the French people – must prevail. Once this war is won, these things will be utterly destroyed, never to be used again—’
If I go on shuddering like this he’ll give me a sedative.
And does he actually believe that seeing what I have seen, the French government is going to let me go and tell people about all this?
Lydia looked up and straightened her glasses, and tried to give him an expression of dewy-eyed trust. ‘Do you … do you swear it?’ she managed to whisper – Not bad, she thought, considering how badly she wanted to scream YOU IRRESPONSIBLE WRETCHED IDIOT!!!
‘Upon my honor, Madame,’ said Lemoine. ‘And upon my honor, as soon as it is safe to do so, you will be released …’
Lydia gave a sniffle or two (Do NOT scream …) and, a little to her own surprise, succeeded in forcing herself to her feet, and crossing the cell to pick up and right her cot. ‘I just want to go home,’ she whispered, like a beaten woman, and, spreading pillow and blanket back into place, lay down with her back to the door. ‘I just want to go home.’
She heard the click of the silver padlock, and the creak of the laboratory door.
Rising swiftly, she crossed to the judas in time to see Francesca leave the lab in Lemoine’s wake. Meagher turned, and with a casually savage stomp, broke the back of the surviving rat that still sat in the midst of the laboratory floor.