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Her name was Lotta" Don Simon&039;s soft voice echoed queerly in the damp vaults of the tomb "She was one of" He hesi-tated fractionally, then amended, "A hatmaker, when she was alive" Asher wondered what Ysidro&039;s original description of her would have been, "In life she was a rather poor specimen of a human-cocky, disrespectful of her betters a thief, and a whore" He paused, and again Asher had the ih a jewel box of facts for the few carats&039; worth of inforood vampire"

Asher&039;s left eyebrow quirked upward, and he flashed the beam of Ysidro&039;s dark lantern around the low stone vaults above their heads Shadowed niches held coffins; here and there, on a keystone arch, a blurred coat of arh why, if Death had not been impressed by the owner&039;s station, the family expected Resurrection to be, he was at a loss to decide Highgate was not a particularly old cemetery, but it was intensely fashionable-vaults in this part started at well over a hundred guineas-and the to down froyptian uarded by its well-paid-for isolation and was, at the same time, far easier to enter than the crypt of soood vaht Ysidro would evade the question The Spaniard stood for a moment, nearly invisible in the shadows of a dark niche, his aquiline face inscrutable in its long frame of colorless hair Then he said slowly, "An attitude of mind, I suppose You must under-stand, Jaer to live, to devour life-the will not to die Those who have not that hunger, that will, that burning inside the beco continue this Unlife we lead But it can be done well or poorly To be a good vampire is to be careful, to be alert, to use all the psychic as well as the physical faculties of the vampire, and to have that fla

"Lotta, for all her vulgarity-and she was aar-was a truly attractive woman, and that flame of life in her was part of the attraction Even I felt it She truly reveled in being a vampire"

The yellow lance of the lantern bea down from the level of the avenue outside-the avenue that, even in daylight, would have been dileamed faintly on thethe place, Asher could see that the dust and occa-sional blown leaves lay far less thickly on those steps and on the sort of trodden path that led to this niche to the right of the vault It s and obviated any specific track of the one who had found her sleeping here

"I take it you knew her when she was alive?"

"No" The vaesture which barely stirred the black folds of his Inverness

In the glaring gaslights of Paddington Station Asher had seen that Ysidro had lost so alht with a sort of dark hu-mor, he had dined on the train It was more than could be said for himself While Ysidro summoned a cab from the rank of horse-drawn hansoht athe in his loo it in the cab with the vaht at his side Ysidro had offered to pay the halfpenny it had cost-Asher had simply told him to put it on account

"Then you didn&039;tmore used to the minimal flickers that passed for the vampire&039;s expressions or Ysidro had held the woman in especial contempt "No"

"Who did, then?"

"One of the other vaive me so back to Don Simon&039;s side

"I see no reason for you to knoe are and where to find us The less you know, the less danger there will be for all of us, yourself included"

Asher studied that cool, ageless face by the aht, They plan to kill ical if, as Ysidro had said, the first defense of the Undead was the disbelief of the living He wondered if they thought he was a fool or merely believed hier stirred in hier, he are of the obscure sense that he had picked up in his years of working for the Depart at two pieces of a puzzle whose edges did not quite match

He walked back to the niche, with its thick stench of fresh ashes, and raised the lantern high

The coffin that lay on the hip-high stone shelf was reasonably new, but had lost its virgin gloss Its lid had been pulled forward and lay propped longways against the wall beneath the niche itself; there were multiple scratches on the stonework, where the coffin had been pulled forward and back, of various degrees of freshness, difficult to deterht low, illuainst his wrist between shirt cuff and glove, the s kerosene acrid in his nostrils His first thought was how intense the heat must have been; it had eaten at the bones the bones of ars were attenu-ated to bulb-ended rods, the vertebrae littlesticks Metal glinted, mixed with the ash-corset stays, buttons, a cut-steel cos

"So this is what happens to vampires when the sun strikes them?"

"Yes" Ysidro&039;s noncommittal features could have been carved of alabaster for all the expression they showed, but Asher sensed the thoughts behind the its beam around the crypt close to the coffin&039;s base-et out of the coffin"

"I a would have waked her" The va down over his shoulder into the casket "Exhaustion co us until darkness once more covers the land"

From the mess in the coffin, Asher picked the stump of a half-decom-posed bone, blew sharply on it to clear away the ashes, and held it close to the light "Not even if you burst into fla into flames,&039; " Ysidro corrected in his soft, abso-lutely level voice, "It is a burning, a corrosion, a searing away of the flesh"

Asher dropped back the first bone he had found, fished about for another Given the nuht, her re does it take, first to last?"

"I have no idea, having never, you understand, been able to witness the process But I know from my own experience that its onset is instan-taneous upon contact with the sun&039;s light"

Glancing up swiftly, for an instant Asher found hi into the crystalline labyrinth that stretched into endless distance behind the colorless eyes,

Ysidro went on, without change in the timbre of his voice, "I was, as you see, able to reach shelter within a second or so-I do not kno long it would have taken me to die My hands and face were blistered for months, and the scars lasted for years" After aI had ever experienced as a living man"

Asher studied the va hters "When was this?"

The heavy eyelids lowered infinitesio"

There was a silence, broken only by the faint hiss of the hot metal lantern slide, and by Asher&039;s solitary breath Then Asher turned back, to pick again through the charred ruin of bones "Soof her coffin wouldn&039;t have wakened her, in spite of a vampire&039;s powers I&039; is undaed all around the top, she didn&039;t even try to sit up, didn&039;t even loved hand rested on the edge of the coffin near Asher&039;s down-turned face "The vampire sleep is not human sleep," he said softly "A friend of mine says she thinks it is because the mental powers that waken with the transition to the vampire state weary the mind I myself sometimes wonder whether it is not because we, even , exist day to day by the sheer effort of our oills Perhaps it a another small stump of bone from the charred nited"

The vanited," he re-marked, "Lotta had already been dead for approximent of bone up in the beam of the lamp "There&039;s not much left, but the bone&039;s scratched This is one of the cervical vertebrae-her head was severed Her arlic"

"That is customary in such cases"

"Not in 1907, it isn&039;t" He set the lantern on the corner of the coffin and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wrap the charred scraps of bone "It indicates, as, that the killer entered the tomb, closed the door, opened the coffin, severed the head, and only then reopened the door to allow daylight to destroy the flesh So he knehat to expect I take it Lotta was not the first victi expressionlessly down over Asher&039;s shoul-der as he began oncebones The saffron light picked splinters of brightness froes of charred , searched, and tossed aside, seeking for what he knew had to be there "Were the other victih the heart?"

"I have no idea The bodies, you understand, were nearly as badly decomposed as hers Is it important?"

"It would tell us-particularly the condition of the first body you found-whether the killer knew initially that he was going after vaical va in coffins"

"I see"

Asher wondered what it was hedid see, veiled behind those lowered eyelids Certainly so you for yours"

Asher&039;s s you aren&039;t telling reed evenly, and Asher sighed and abandoned that tack

"Did she play with her victie of his tone A vulgar Cockney, Asher thought, ao frothe them take her to supper-since one seldom actually watches one&039;s dinner partner eat, it is a sih illusion to maintain-or to the theater or the opera, not that she had the slightest interest in music, you under-stand She could not make of them a steady diet-like the rest of us, she subsisted chiefly upon the city&039;s poor But she enjoyed the knowledge that these silly youths were entertaining their own killer, falling in love with her It pleased her to make them do so She savored the terror in their eyes when they finally saw the fangs Many vampires do"

"Do you?"

Don Simon turned away, a flicker of tired distaste in his eyes "There was a time when I did Are we finished here?"