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Lydia&039;s two lodging-house rooms were, like every place else where Lydia resided for more than a day or so, aith papers, notebooks, and journals-the tedious as coe; and newspaper stories, thousands of the at the back of his neck when he saw, in addition to transcribed details of old crimes, the two accounts of the Limehouse Murders Naone through the parish rolls with a sieve, correlating property purchases and wills and co up with the names of a small but indisputable nulected to die

Traced out in those terms, he wondered why the Earls of Ernchester hadn&039;t coe and ownership splotched the faht, leased, and sold to people who never surfaced in the records again-houses which were never willed to anyone nor subse-quently sold Other discrepancies were noted-fictitious persons who bought property, but neverperiods of tie-rose paper of one as an Ordinance Survey reen-, and blue-headed drawing pins Lists of addresses Lists of names He found Anthea Farren&039;s on two of them, Lotta Harshaw&039;s, Edward Ha with raphs of Ber-tie West in football gear of Gloucester College colors, ar Dennis Blaydon, Thodon, and dozens of others, and one blurred and yellow tabloid clip of a blonde-haired woht have been Lotta herself

Like Lydia&039;s desk at ho chaos of notes, a which he found the letter he&039;d written in Ysidro&039;s cellar in Paris, forwarded from Oxford, its seals intact Beside it, likewise intact, was the telegram he had sent earlier that day, and beneath them both the London Standard, spread out to the story of the second massa-cre in the Li she had read before she left

Fear clenched the pit of his sto sensation he&039;d had in Pretoria, when he knew he&039;d been blown, and after it, cold and deadly anger

Grippen

When she hadn&039;t heard fro on her own

Lydia, no, he thought, aghast at the foolhardiness of it It was hard to ih to undertake such an expedition alone, and yet,

She had promised him, yes-but that had been before he hiun its raes For all she knew, he could have been dead in Paris-and he was, in fact, extraordinarily lucky not to be She had obviously realized that for once, unwittingly, Fleet Street hyperbole was telling nothing but the unvarnished facts; for all she knehatever she had learned or de-duced ht have been the only help the et

Like many researchers, Lydia was cold-blooded-as a rule the softer-hearted altruists went into general practice But at heart, it took a streak of self-sacrifice to enter the medical field at all He had never known Lydia to break a proht very well have believed that a daylight investigation was "safe"

What had Ysidro said? That vaenerally aware of vam-pire hunters? All it would take would be for Grippen to become aware of her, to knohom to look for in the masses of London

He made another swift survey of the roos he knew Lydia had not formerly pos-sessed-a small silver knife, a revolver loaded-he broke it open to see -with silver-nosed bullets In her bedroom she had set up a small chemical apparatus, a arlic, as well as a bottle of soarlic distillate

For all his gentles with the Departed to track the vam-pires with scholarship Lydia, the doctor, would use medical means for her defense

Medical journals stacked every horizontal surface in the room and peeked frorown used to her habit of sleeping with books Slips of note paper marked them, and the briefest perusal showed hi with either speculations on blood pathologies which could have been the source of vaically related increases in psychic abilities, or obscure blood disor-ders On the nightstand he found a hypoder ten ampoules of silver nitrate

It took hi all this meant

It meant that she had none of it with her when she left-or was taken

Quietly, Asher returned to the sitting roo around her in bafflement at the storm of papers and notes and the warlike battle ure, a few years younger than Asher, she took one look at his face and said, "I&039;ll fetch you some sherry, sir"

"Thank you" Asher sat down quietly at Lydia&039;s desk If there was any residual weakness in him, he wasn&039;t aware of it now

He had put his life back together after Pretoria, knotted up the frayed strings of whatever seventeen years with the Departo, he had loved a girl in Vienna, during the dozen orher, had betrayed her in such a way that she would be distracted fro suspicions of his he had ever done But he had hts afterward, though it had been years before he could sit through certain songs

If Lydia was dead, he did not think he would be able to undertake that patient process again

Then a bitter rictus of a smile pulled at his , "Fear nothing, rip like a ht make the whole question acadeht, with chilly calm, they would have to

Unhurriedly, he exaain

Many addresses had one star beside them; only two had two

One was Ernchester House

The other was an old townhouse near Great Portland Street, an area he diian terraces which had seen better days The house in question had been bought freehold in 1754 by soift to Dr Lionel Grippen

The sun hung above Harrow Hill, a blurred orange disk in the pall of factory soot, as his cab rattled west It was several degrees yet above the roofline-plenty of tiht He wondered if Lydia had other silver weapons, if she&039;d gone out coone out at all Grippen could just as easily have broken into the place soht and taken her How had he knoho she was and where to find her? Stop this, he told hih Hyde Park returned to his mind like an accusatory bloodstain on a carpet There&039;ll be time for this later And, just as firmly, he refused to contemplate what thatlater would constitute

The house at 17 Monck Circle, like its neighbors, wore the air of having come down in the world They were tall houses of brown stone, rising flush out of the pavement-servants&039; entrances in the back, Asher notedlike a little privacy when breaking and entering

He observed the tightly shuttered s as he strolled past it, looking for the inevitable entrance to thesince been taken down and only their rusted posts rey bricks Just within the narrow lane, a closed carriage stood, a broughaainst a possible witness or bar to a quick escape and edged past it, jingling his picklocks in his pocket He won-dered whether Grippen would be able to sense him in his sleep

If, for that matter, Grippen were here at all Charles Farren hadto which he&039;d been taken after the fiasco at Ernchester House, plus another, a few streets away; Lydia&039;s more intensive research had turned up several others owned by aliases for the saathered the Spaniard changed his sleeping place frequently-a so, even for a year, Asher knew from his own experiences abroad He wondered whether vampires did not si to be huht Brother Anthony the Minorite had gone quietlythe churchyards of St Germain? Elizabeth the Fair, who had drunk the tainted blood of Plague victims? The incalculable Rhys, who had not been seen since 1666? Or so in London until his very legend was eradicated

Until, perhaps, Calvaire had turned him up?

Asher soft-footed his way down the nearly deserted es and coach houses Many of these were long einally housed, transfors The one attached to Nu on rotted hinges, the s broken The door into the yard stood ajar

Asher&039;s hair prickled on his head as he stepped closer He could see the two stout padlocks on the inside of the gate, and beyond it, across a tiny yard cluttered with old boxes and decaying furniture, to the house Moss grew on the paving blocks, on the steps of the sunken areaway, and around the outhouse No servants had used that kitchen for de-cades, at least Above the kitchen, two sets of long French s gaped mournful and black-the rest of the ere shuttered

The rational lishman, stirred in a faint reflex of protest at the obvious conclusion, but in his heart Asher felt no doubt The place was the obvious haunt of vaha

For whohahtfully on its bit The last broken fraglinted on the bridle brasses

Did va in the afternoons?

He could think of one that hten inside of him as he slipped into the ruined and weedy yard If he and Lydia could find this place, someone else certainly could-unless, of course, Ysidro was soet about by day