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TWENTY-NINE

There were ampoules of silver nitrate in Dr Theiss’s laboratory Asher injected the nine s he found asleep in the crypt with it before he dragged theht fire at the top of the steps, without waking up, the h the door into the vestibule where the gorgeous brightness of the dawn sky gliile they were

Lydia said, ‘It isn’t fair They never haruarantee that they would not?’

She, too, see voices in the dark of the crypt and said nothem He refused Exhausted as he was himself, Asher did not like the whiteness of his wife’s lips and the way she sat down quickly on the steps When he had dragged out the last of them she said, ‘That’s only nine There were ten in the crypt’

‘I know’

‘I didn’t see Genia The girl who tried to keep the others from us She was the one who escaped and caht – who inadvertently led the others to me’

‘We need to find her,’ said Asher wearily ‘But first let’s deal with the laboratory The police will be here--’

‘Actually, they won’t,’ said Lydia ‘Petronilla was paying soht Let’s not push our luck’

It was full daylight by that ti up the equip it in the sinks Lydia poured away every phial she found – blood, serum, filtrates – and combed both the laboratory and Theiss’s little office in the chamber next door for notes These she heaped in another sink and set fire to theade to deal with,’ said Asher

Lydia didn’t ask him why By her silence, she knew

They took lamps and searched the crypt, and around noon they found Ysidro

He’d taken refuge in one of the inner cataco-deadthe walls; skulls grinned froh the torn black robe he wore, Asher could see the bullet-wound in his shoulder, black, burned-looking, and oozing, but because he had not – unlike Mada the effects of repeated exposures to sunlight in his flesh, the daold penknife rammed IE, clotted with blood, and the silver bullet he’d removed with it before sleep had clainet-ring and laid it on the stone beside his head, as if he knew they would coht

There were two syringes of silver nitrate in his jacket pocket, and he carried a hammer and tthorn stakes he had found in a lower drawer of Theiss’s desk

Where we all three of us kneould one day be

He glanced sidelong at Lydia’s face, white with exhaustion, spectacles reflecting the la whatever she felt

Were it not for Ysidro, she would be dead And with her – she had said – the child she carried

Lydia’s child My child

He tried not to hope, or to feel the delirious joy he’d felt last time and the time beforeand failed in the atte to hope

It see

He will kill when he wakes Asher looked down at the calht white eyelashes, the waxen, awful scars that nobody sahen the vampire ake to trick theirof his wound; to renew those ave hi That let hih dreams

Asher knehat needed to be done, as if he had sworn an oath to that oldstupid even as the words came out of his mouth – he asked, ‘What do we do?’

Lydia turned her face away In a saret Potton’ As if, out of so many, that mattered

‘I know’

She looked back at him, lips parted to speak, and he went on, ‘He asked me not to tell you’

She didn’t ask why, but he saw her brown eyes sith tears

‘He is what he is, Lydia He cannot be other than that More than anyone, he knows that that door is shut’

It was her turn to say, ‘I know But more than anyone – of all the va as well – I think he was the only one who understood – or would have understood – that Petronilla Ehrenberg did what she did because she was in love with a livingout ofof loyalty to the Kaiser or desire for an unlimited supply of trussed-up German Socialists or whatever the Kaiser would have paid her with Simon was the only one who knew that the way to stop her was to break the tie between her and her drea able to live with the man she loved’