Darkness on His Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles From Barbara Hambly

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A Selection of Recent Titles from Barbara Hambly

  The James Asher Vampire Novels

  THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT

  TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD

  BLOOD MAIDENS *

  THE MAGISTRATES OF HELL *

  THE KINDRED OF DARKNESS *

  DARKNESS ON HIS BONES *

  The Benjamin January Series

  A FREE MAN OF COLOR

  FEVER SEASON

  GRAVEYARD DUST

  SOLD DOWN THE RIVER

  DIE UPON A KISS

  WET GRAVE

  DAYS OF THE DEAD

  DEAD WATER

  DEAD AND BURIED *

  THE SHIRT ON HIS BACK *

  RAN AWAY *

  GOOD MAN FRIDAY *

  CRIMSON ANGEL *

  * available from Severn House

  DARKNESS ON HIS BONES

  A James Asher vampire novel

  Barbara Hambly

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2015 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Barbara Hambly.

  The right of Barbara Hambly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Hambly, Barbara author.

  Darkness on His Bones. – (The James Asher vampire novels)

  1. Asher, James (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Vampires–Fiction. 3. Horror tales.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8523-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-623-7 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-676-2 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Ravenna and Jaden

  ONE

  From: W.W. Streatham, Secretary for Information, British Embassy, 39 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris

  To: Mrs James Asher, 16 Holywell Street, Oxford, England

  28 July, 1914

  James Asher met with accident last night critical condition Hôpital Saint-Antoine stop come immediately stop contact me on arrival stop yours etc

  *

  Mrs James Asher

  c/o Lady Louise Mountjoy

  48c Avenue Kléber

  16ème Arrondissement

  Paris

  Don Simon Ysidro

  c/o Barclay and Company

  Rome Central Office

  Rome

  30 July, 1914

  Simon,

  Something frightful has happened to Jamie. In the middle of last month he crossed to Paris, ostensibly to attend a conference on Magyar verb forms, but in truth, I think, at the behest of some of his former colleagues in the Department. He arrived there (here?) on the 23rd. On the 28th of July I received a cable from someone in the Paris embassy. James had been found unconscious in the cemetery of the church of Sainte-Clare-Pieds-Nus, with a fractured skull, multiple puncture wounds in his throat and arms, and severe loss of blood, though no blood was found at the scene.

  He has not yet recovered consciousness.

  I have no idea where you are living to be found these days, but I beg of you, if you are in Europe and able to come to me, I am in desperate need of counsel and help.

  I am staying with my Aunt Louise in the Avenue Kléber, but mostly I can be found at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine. Please come.

  Ever,

  L. Asher

  TWO

  ‘Don Simon said you were a man of courage.’ The glow of the candles James Asher had lit all around the small salon – for the old hôtel particulier on the Rue des Trois Anges had never even been equipped for gas, let alone electricity – seemed to outline in gold the woman in the doorway, and caught twin mirrors in her eyes, like a cat’s, when she moved her head.

  If he concentrated he could see her fangs.

  But he had to concentrate. There was a sort of dreamy inattention that stole over one’s thoughts when one dealt with vampires, the forgetfulness that usually comes with being overtired or preoccupied with other matters … Asher had encountered it before. He guessed there were others somewhere beyond the dark doorways that led into the rest of the building and he’d placed his chair with some care, his back to a corner and the long windows that opened to the courtyard barely a yard from his left hand.

  It was a drop of about fifteen feet but that risk was nothing compared to the danger he was in at the moment. He also knew that there was no other way to do this.

  ‘Lady Montadour.’ He rose and bowed deeply to her without stepping out of the circle of candelabra that ringed his chair. ‘I hope you’ll forgive my rudeness. I had no idea what your arrangements here were, and I feared that a note requesting an interview would result in either your retreat or my entrapment before I have a chance to explain to you the danger you’re in.’

  (Sunk deep in darkness his dreaming self shouted to him, Run, you idiot! They’re behind you, around you … His mind groped for the recollection, like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded. Cold hands gripping his arms, the razor pain of claws tearing open his throat. Colder lips against his skin as the blood welled forth. It slipped away.)

  ‘I?’ Elysée de Montadour crossed the salon and, dreaming, he both saw her and couldn’t see her: the languourous glide of a ghost and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she was beside him in the circle of
light. One hand in his and the other holding his arm, the fingers cold as marble (she hasn’t fed … ). The mingled scents of blood and Houbigant’s Quelques Fleurs.

  She’s changed her dress, his dreaming self observed.

  Or was it on some previous occasion that he’d seen her lying in a coffin, dark curls spread around her delicate triangular face, beautiful beyond words in the light of his lantern? He couldn’t remember. But if I saw her asleep in her crypt, why didn’t I kill her?

  A murderess who deserves death a thousand times? Why warn her of danger?

  The answer was important but he couldn’t recall it.

  Did I see her in her coffin before speaking with her, or after? He couldn’t recall that, either.

  In the coffin she’d worn something white and gauzy that had clung to her rich breasts and tiny waist. Now she was dressed in a tobacco-colored Patou walking suit; its green silk trim brightened the emerald of her eyes. Lydia had one very like it. She hadn’t donned gloves yet and her inch-long claws were sharp as a cougar’s against his skin.

  ‘I hope you haven’t forgotten what happened to the vampires of Paris, the last time German armies marched into the city.’

  ‘The Boche?’ Her silvery laugh was forced, like the theatrical toss of her head. ‘Those stupid cabbage-eaters aren’t going to get within a hundred miles of Paris. The armies of France will take Lorraine before they’ve advanced two miles. They’ll be cut off, left lying in their blood—’

  ‘The armies of France are going to miss them entirely,’ replied Asher. ‘They’ll be racing east to reconquer Alsace and Lorraine while the Germans are rolling down to Paris from the north, through Belgium. They know you’re here, madame. They want you working for them.’

  Memory drowned the dream again. Memory of trying to flee in darkness, and knowing it would do him no good. I was wearing silver in Elysée’s salon … But in his dream he felt the razor gash of teeth in his throat.

  It was important to remember what had happened to the silver chains he’d worn.

  Where was that?

  Why did he remember walking down a turret stair with Elysée de Montadour carrying a branch of candles upraised behind him? Or was that part of another series of events altogether? One that might never have taken place?

  There was a chapel … A bone chapel, such as he’d visited in Spain and in Rome. The light of his lantern played across skulls, vertebrae, pelvises, radii. A man stood beside the altar and held out his hand to him, clawed fingers stained with ink. In the chalk-white face the dark eyes were filled with grief, and reflected the lantern-glow like a hunting cat’s.

  He’s here …

  ‘Jamie?’

  A voice – a woman’s. I know whose voice that is. It came from far off.

  From the land of the living.

  He understood that the chapel was the realm of the dead.

  ‘Jamie?’

  Lydia Asher touched her husband’s hand. The strong fingers were bruised and scratched, and claw gashes showed on either side of the bandages on his wrists. The windows of the ward stood open, the muggy August night suffocating. Even at this hour – and it was just after four in the morning – faint shouting drifted from the Rue Saint-Antoine, mingled with strains of ‘La Marseillaise’. Tiny as seashells clacked on a nursery table-top she heard the hooves of a milk-cart’s team; a distant taxicab hooted its horn. Vive l’Alsace! a drunken woman yelled, almost beneath the window. À bas le Boche!

  The French army was readying for war.

  And, Aunt Louise had remarked drily yesterday afternoon, it was preparing to leap eastward, to occupy the territory stolen from France in the previous war, at the first crack of a German shot which would exonerate them from the accusation that they were the ones who’d broken the peace. Leap eastward and leave Paris defended by only a handful.

  Lydia had thought her husband had stirred, unshaven lips moving in his sleep. But he lay still as death, as he had last night and, the doctors told her, the night before, when they’d brought him in. His mustache and eyebrows, threaded with gray, looked nearly black in the glare of the ward’s electric lighting. He’d had transfusions of blood but his face was still nearly as white as the bandages around his head, the dressings on his throat and arms that covered the slashes and punctures that she recognized as the marks of a vampire attack.

  Jamie, no …

  A year ago he had sworn to destroy them. Was that why he’d come to Paris? To seek them out, like a madman? Or had there been some other cause?

  On the small stand between his bed and the next, in a hospital dish, gleamed two short silver chains, which the doctors had told her had been wrapped around his hands when he was found.

  He usually wore them on his wrists. Lydia guessed they’d saved his life. The one that he habitually had around his throat was gone.

  They have to know he isn’t dead.

  She settled herself in the stiff wooden chair beside his bed.

  That means they’ll be back.

  By four thirty it was growing light. Lydia paced from her chair to the window and back, restless from the herbs she’d taken; on a journey to China two years ago, she’d had ample opportunity to investigate the curious medicines relied upon by the Chinese doctors. The physicians here – and at home in England as well – scoffed at Lydia’s observations and experiments, but she’d found, at least, several powders and tisanes that stimulated the mind and held off sleep far more effectively than any amount of café noir. Sleep was the one thing she couldn’t afford just now. Not if Jamie had been so mad as to enter into open war with those who hunted the night.

  Young Dr Moflet, the night surgeon, had smiled condescendingly when Lydia informed him that she had a degree in medicine from Oxford. ‘Indeed, I suppose the English do give out such degrees to young ladies …’ But Dr Théodule, though he’d been practicing since the Franco-Prussian War, spoke as if he expected her to understand the effects and implications of head trauma and blood loss.

  Neither man understood Lydia’s insistence upon being at her husband’s side from sundown till dawn.

  Her desperation not to sleep.

  Old M’sieu Potric in the bed across the aisle snuffled in his sleep. A few beds away, a working-man named Lecoq coughed, the gluey hack of pneumonia. Somewhere a band was still playing.

  The door at the end of the long ward opened: Dr Moflet, trim and stylish with his close-clipped fair mustache and pomaded hair; Dr Théodule, stooped, white-haired, and resembling nothing so much as a wizard who has attempted to transform himself into a goat and had the spell fail halfway. The nurse Thérèse Sabatier followed them, grizzled and disapproving in her uniform of gray and white.

  ‘Should Germany invade Belgium, I would consider it my duty to go.’ Dr Moflet’s voice was grave, and Dr Théodule sniffed.

  ‘Should, he says. Of course they’re going to invade, and be damned to their promises to respect Belgium’s neutrality. It’s the fastest route to Paris—’

  Both men bowed at the sight of Lydia, who had whipped her spectacles off at the first echo of their voices in the hall. Bad enough, she reflected, that she’d been up all night and wasn’t even wearing powder, much less the rouge and mascaro which usually mitigated her thin cheeks and unfashionable nose. There were only two people in the world she didn’t mind seeing her with her glasses – gig-lamps, the other girls at Madame Chappedelaine’s exclusive school for girls in Switzerland had called them – hanging on her face.

  One of them lay unconscious at her side.

  The other …

  The other, reflected Lydia, with a feeling of strangeness at the thought, had been dead for many years.

  ‘He has rested well, your husband?’

  Dr Moflet answered Dr Théodule’s question before Lydia could open her mouth. ‘I’m quite certain he has.’

  To Lydia, in what he clearly considered a kindly tone, he went on, ‘There is no reason for you to remain, madame. Given the extent of Professor Asher’s injur
y, it’s unreasonable to expect him to recover consciousness for at least another few days.’

  The man means well, Lydia told herself. She had to bite her lower lip in the effort not to retort, Well, I’m only here because with war coming I thought the department stores would be too noisy to go shopping. She took a deep breath and answered the older man. ‘Sometimes he’s seemed to be dreaming. To be trying to speak.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Dr Théodule nodded encouragingly. ‘Did you take his pulse at such times?’

  ‘Sixty beats at just after eleven; at two, sixty-two.’

  Dr Moflet’s chiseled mouth tightened, as if he considered a patient’s pulse the affair of the ward nurse, certainly not that of the patient’s wife.

  ‘And no other change?’ The old doctor felt Asher’s wrist as he spoke, turned back his eyelid, withdrew his stethoscope from his frock-coat pocket to listen to his chest.

  Lydia shook her head.

  ‘It’s early days, as Dr Moflet has pointed out.’ Dr Théodule straightened up. ‘If – for whatever reason – your husband fell from the tower of St Clare’s church, as I suspect he might have, it is only to be expected. I have seen many men make a full recovery from worse. Shall I have one of the orderlies fetch a cab for you, madame? You can be sure that if there is any change you will be summoned immediately.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why—’ Moflet began, and Théodule lifted one knotted old hand.

  ‘She troubles no one, Moflet. If madame will come with me …?’

  After the stink of carbolic soap, iodine, and the sickly horror of gangrene, even the smoke outside and the nearby river smelled sweet. Though her degree was in medicine, Lydia was a researcher to the marrow of her bones. She hated hospitals. Hated the sense of helplessness, the grieving desperation of the bereft.