Prisoner of Midnight Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Barbara Hambly from Severn House

  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

  Footnotes

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Barbara Hambly from Severn House

  The James Asher Vampire Novels

  BLOOD MAIDENS

  THE MAGISTRATES OF HELL

  THE KINDRED OF DARKNESS

  DARKNESS ON HIS BONES

  PALE GUARDIAN

  PRISONER OF MIDNIGHT

  The Benjamin January Series

  DEAD AND BURIED

  THE SHIRT ON HIS BACK

  RAN AWAY

  GOOD MAN FRIDAY

  CRIMSON ANGEL

  DRINKING GOURD

  MURDER IN JULY

  COLD BAYOU

  PRISONER OF MIDNIGHT

  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.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2018 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

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8860-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-986-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0198-0 (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

  For Laurel

  ONE

  ‘A letter for M’sieu.’ The elderly clerk at the front desk of the Hotel St-Seurin looked up from James Asher’s signature in the register; Asher felt a sinking in his heart.

  Had he been a man inclined to panic, he would have done so. But he only thought, Something’s happened.

  Damn it.

  March 12, 1917

  Mountjoy House

  Grosvenor Street

  London

  Jamie,

  Forgive me. I do not know what is best to do. If the course I have taken – choosing not to meet you in Paris Wednesday – means that our parting a year ago was to be our last meeting, our last parting … I truly do not know what to do. Or what you would have me do.

  I cannot turn away from this. Not because of the War, but because of the greater shadow of the Undead, an unspeakable shadow that could cover the earth.

  When we parted from Don Simon Ysidro nearly two years ago, I told him never to come near me again, a request which I believe he has honorably respected. When I have dreamed of him since then – as you know I have – it has always felt NORMAL: the way I dream sometimes about Mother, or about Aunt Faith’s horrid cats, or about you. Just a dream about a person who is (or was) a part of my life.

  On the three occasions, prior to my parting from him, on which Don Simon has entered – or manipulated – my dreams, I’ve been clearly aware of the difference. I think you once mentioned that you also know when your dreams are being tampered with by the Undead. Sunday’s dream was like neither of those.

  Don Simon is a prisoner, somewhere. The dreams that I have had were unclear – uncharacteristically unclear – but I sense, I KNOW, that he is being held captive, in terrible and continuous pain. If he were not, he would not have asked for my help – as he did, as he is. His voice, crying out of darkness, was broken up, like fragments of a torn manuscript. The only words that were clear were, ‘City of Gold’.

  The American liner SS City of Gold leaves Southampton on Wednesday, for New York.

  Jamie, I don’t know what’s going on. But at the shipping office today (you can see that I’m at Aunt Louise’s town house) I encountered Captain John Palfrey, whom (if you remember) Don Simon manipulated into being his dogsbody at the Front in the first year of the War (and apparently ever since). Captain Palfrey – still unshakably convinced that Don Simon is a top-secret British agent rather than a vampire – says that he had the same ‘psychical’ (as he terms them) dreams last night: dreams of captivity, of desperation, of unbearable pain … and of the name City of Gold. He believes that ‘Colonel Simon’ has been taken prisoner by German agents and is for some reason being transported to the United States.

  You know more about German agents than I do, but it sounded like a very inefficient procedure to me. Yet I remember how representatives of the British government have tried to get hold of a vampire to use for their own purposes of warfare. Now that people are saying that America is going to enter the War, I wouldn’t put it past the Americans to attempt the same sort of thing, if they could but find some means of force or coercion.

  Maybe I would have hesitated, or thought about it longer, had not my Aunt Louise been also preparing to sail on the City of Gold. She contends that German submarines would never DARE attack an American ship

  ‘Oh, wouldn’t they just?’ Asher muttered through his teeth, and wondered what newspapers Aunt Louise had or hadn’t been reading lately.

  and has repeatedly asked me to join her. Conditions here in Britain are very bad, as I’m sure you know, shocking prices and queues going down the street and around the corner, and food crops being grown in all the public parks and allotments. Aunt Louise says that the government will soon be rationing food

  Asher reflected that if Aunt Louise thought pleas to voluntarily cut down consumption of meat and sugar were bad in Britain, she should visit Germany, where bread was being made up from sawdust and sausage meat from rat carcasses and worse. In the cold pine forests of East Prussia, where for nearly a year he had been impersonating a German officer named von Rabewasser, he had seen men cook and eat t
he leather of their boots … and the bodies of the dead.

  and that this is no place for a civilized person to live, and certainly no place to condemn a small child to grow up. She is urging me (‘commanding’ is probably a better word) that I sail with her and bring Miranda, ‘To get her out of this dreadful War.’ She has, as you doubtless recall, always been against my going off to the Front or in fact becoming a medical doctor at all. (She still blames you for that.)

  Dread smote Asher like an arrow beneath the breastbone at that, and his hand shook as he turned the paper over. He was well aware that U-boat captains were rewarded according to the tonnage of Allied shipping destroyed, not by what direction those ships were headed in. Every German Asher had talked to, from private soldiers to General von Falkenhayn himself, spoke as if the US were already officially one of the Allies. This wasn’t surprising, since over the course of the war the United States had loaned Britain (and France and Belgium) billions of dollars and was selling far more foodstuffs and weapons to Britain than it was to Germany. If she convinces Lydia to take Miranda with them …

  His eye fleeted down his wife’s spidery scrawl …

  She may in fact be right – one doesn’t know what’s going to happen here – and I have no idea what to do for the best. I took the train down from Oxford this morning and left Miranda at Peasehall Manor with Aunt Lavinnia (for which Aunt Louise has been berating me as a ‘bad mother’ ever since I arrived at her door – not that she has ever been a mother herself). Poor Miranda will miss me terribly, but I WILL NOT put her in even the smallest possibility of danger from submarines, even imaginary ones, as Aunt Louise insists that they are.

  Asher gritted his teeth again, conscious of a strong desire to slap Lydia’s aunt.

  I confess this is one reason I’m going down to Southampton tomorrow – to escape her constant harping on the subject of Lavinnia’s unfitness to look after a child. I’m also going to see if I can get a look at the baggage before it’s loaded, though I don’t hold much hope that the kidnappers would be that careless with their prisoner. Captain Palfrey goes with me. I have lent him the money to purchase a First Class berth (he was going to travel Second, all he could afford). I may need to call on his help and I don’t think Second Class passengers are permitted in the First Class areas of the ship. (The City of Gold is horrifyingly luxurious in an American fashion, all frosted-glass and black lacquer.) It is a great comfort to me to know that I’m not entirely without help in this awful matter.

  I don’t know what else to say. We sail on Wednesday at two. Jamie, I am sorry – I am so very sorry. I cared for Don Simon. I am ashamed to say that I care for him still, though I know what he is. Although he cannot help what he is, I pity him (affronted as he would be to hear me say so!). But I swear to you, to keep him from becoming a slave or a tool of whoever it is who has taken him prisoner – whoever it is who has found a way of coercing the obedience of vampires – I will kill him. As I know you would – as I know I must. I have packed the appropriate impedimenta: garlic blossoms, aconite, silver bullets, a hawthorn stake, and surgical knives. (I read up in your notes, as to what I should need.) I am still trying to devise a convincing explanation to the ship’s authorities (and to Aunt Louise) should it be discovered that I have murdered a fellow passenger. (If he is a prisoner I am not sure that he would qualify as a stowaway.)

  I wanted so much to see you – to see for myself that you are well. After a year of letters I would give anything to be able to talk to you, even for five minutes, even about nothing, about the weather or the food here … Anything, just to hear your voice. You’ll be back in the War before I return from America. I feel as if I’m cutting myself adrift from all that I know and care for, walking alone into the dark. I don’t even know where I’ll be able to write to you now. If you can, wire me at General Delivery in New York City, to at least tell me that you got this. To at least tell me that you forgive me.

  Please forgive me.

  I love you to the end of my days.

  L

  He felt cold to the heart, as if he were sickening for fever, as he folded the paper. Today. His eyes went to the clock above the desk.

  An hour from now, she would be gone.

  Maybe forever.

  He became aware of the clerk regarding him worriedly. Asher had heard himself described by Americans as possessing a ‘poker face’, but guessed that in the past three years, that white-haired old man on the other side of the counter had seen thousands of men read letters, their expressions unchanging as their worlds collapsed into irretrievable ruin around their ears. God knew, he’d seen it enough times himself.

  He took a deep breath and tucked the letter into the pocket of his uniform greatcoat. ‘Thank you, M’sieu.’

  The old man handed him his key. ‘Is there anything I can do for M’sieu?’ A requisite query about extra towels and hot water, always supposing the hotel’s coal ration were not already spent. But the clerk spoke so quietly Asher knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

  ‘Thank you, no, M’sieu.’

  As he climbed the stairs – the St-Seurin had a lift of sorts, but it was shut up and Asher guessed its operator was either at the Front or long dead in Flanders mud – Asher was aware of the man’s pitying glance upon his back.

  Part of him was cursing by every god of the ancient underworld, shouting impotently that after a year of bone-breaking cold and abyssal loneliness – of watching men he knew die (he had long since ceased to think of the troops among whom he operated as ‘the enemy’, though he knew they’d kill him if they learned who he really was) in some of the most senseless military actions he had ever heard of – he wouldn’t see Lydia after all. Wouldn’t touch her hand, hear her voice, lie in her arms for the six nights permitted him before he had to return to Hell.

  Part of him stood aghast at the thought of what she was walking into (Damn you to Hell, Don Simon! Damn you to Hell, Aunt Louise …). Adrift, as she said, from everything she knew and cared for; setting forth to kill a man whom Asher knew quite well that she loved.

  Part of him knew she was probably right.

  And if any person had come up with a way of enslaving and reliably controlling a vampire, that person could peddle the method – and the luckless vampire himself – for whatever figure he cared to name. Any government in the world – not to speak of a hundred private buyers, the owners of mines and factories eager to murder strikers and socialists with impunity – would fall over itself to acquire an unseen assassin, who could tamper with the perceptions of victims or witnesses, then vanish in a mist of illusion. He thought of American businessmen he’d met. Most of them made Attila the Hun look like a Methodist missionary.

  The result, to the people of the world, to every one of their descendants, would be, as Lydia had said, unspeakable.

  He unlocked the door of his allotted room, stepped in swiftly and shut it behind him. With pistol in hand (no sense taking chances …) he made a quick inspection of the tiny chamber, the armoire, and under the bed. For seventeen years – he had been recruited while still up at Oxford – he had served the Queen in the endless shadow war of poking into secrets, lining up local chiefs and villages in support of Britain’s goals, making maps, reading correspondence that the Abwehr and the Austrian Evidenzbureau would really rather he didn’t …

  And for another ten, he had worked with, against, and among the vampires, in shadows deeper still. His throat and forearms were tracked with bite-scars, and even among the cold pine forests of the Eastern Front he wore silver chains wrapped around his neck and wrists. He never entered a room without ascertaining who else, if anyone, was in it, and identifying immediately at least two ways out.

  He turned the key, put the threadbare rag of the bedside rug on the end of the bed – the room was freezing cold and he had no intention of taking off his boots – and lay down, still wrapped in his greatcoat, to consider the ceiling in the gray chill of the afternoon light.

  Should I feel horrified th
at it’s true, or relieved that I’m not going mad?

  For he had not been in the least surprised by Lydia’s letter.

  The dream had been three nights ago. That last night that he’d spent in the frozen darkness of those endless forests, before setting forth, ostensibly for Berlin, but actually for the point at which he would slip across the lines. Dreams of suffocation and pain. Of agony as if the skin were being eaten from his living bones. Dreams of having been buried alive, with the gnawing ghosts of every person whose life he had taken sealed with him in the tomb. Exhaustion that broke the mind almost to the point of madness, coupled with utter, naked terror. The knowledge that whatever was coming, it was going to be worse than this present hell.

  A part of him knew the dream concerned Don Simon Ysidro. The pale-haired Spanish vampire who had saved his life – who had saved Lydia’s life, and Miranda’s. The vampire he had sworn to kill. (Of course you have, Ysidro had replied calmly to Asher’s declaration of this intention. And I will endeavor not to cross your path …)

  It was Ysidro’s whispery voice – shattered with screaming – that he’d heard say the words, ‘City of Gold’.

  He’d waked to bone-breaking cold, for the snow still lay over the Pripet Marshlands, and the stink of latrines and corpses. To the shuffling of Dissel – his orderly – carrying wood to the little tin stove in his hut. He’d told himself, Only a dream. A dream born of living eye-deep in this place that was devouring him. A dream of Hell, well-deserved by a man whose machinations would very likely condemn to hideous death the men he’d been living near for months, brave men fighting in a pointless, senseless war. Men who trusted him …

  Once before, he’d quit the Foreign Office, sickened by the man he had to be in order to serve Queen and Country. In the hour of his country’s need he’d committed himself to such service again, and had found the task not one whit less dirty, ruthless, and cold than it had been back in 1901. His parson father would have assured him that he was doing the Lord’s work at the Front, but enough remained of his rectory upbringing to make him ask himself if that dream – that abyss of pain and hopelessness, that sense of being shut away utterly from even the off-chance that God would hear his screams – was himself crying out.