Blood Maidens by Barbara Hambly Page B

sorting through the last of the information to prepare her report. ‘You know Mr James’s starts. He’ll find this cousin of his, never fear.’ That was the story they had given her. It had had to be a good one, for Asher to leave this close to the end of term. ‘No need to starve and worry yourself into a thread paper.’
    ‘No,’ agreed Lydia. ‘Of course not.’
    ‘I just wish that cousin – what was his name?’
    Lydia shook her head. She hadn’t her husband’s ability to keep track of long, consistent lies, and she knew better than to pull a name out of the air. Ellen’s memory was surprisingly good, and she was more observant than she seemed. ‘He told me, and I simply can’t remember right now.’
    ‘Harold, I think he said,’ provided Ellen, straightening up. ‘I just wish this Harold person hadn’t gone to some Godforsaken corner of the world . . . You remember how ill Mr James was, when he came back from Constantinople of all places . . . And as cold as it is, too. May I take that to the post for you, ma’am?’
    Lydia obediently handed her the letter and settled by the new-made fire, grateful for its warmth. Without her spectacles the blaze had a gently blurred light, comforting as the gray afternoon drew in.
    She remembered how ill Mr James had been when they’d come home from Constantinople, after the horrors of that city: after the death of the Master of Constantinople, and of the vampire couple who had been James’s friends.
    Get you killed  . . .
    She closed her eyes again. Saw Don Simon as she’d seen him first, in the dark of Horace Blaydon’s bricked-up cellar, a cool disheveled rescuer bending down to kiss her hand. I am at your service, Madame . . .
    And later, when James had gone off into what she had belatedly realized was a trap, and she’d sought out the vampire in his crypt beneath his London house . . . The light of her lamp falling through the crypt bars, illuminating his long hand with its gold signet-ring in the shadows as he slept.
    She loved James, as strongly and fiercely as ever. James was real – the man in whose arms she lay at night. The father of the child she hadn’t borne. The man who’d wept beside her in that awful darkness of loss, when she herself had not been able to weep.
    Simon  . . .
    What I feel for him isn’t love  . . .
    Then why does it hurt so much?
    Both James and Don Simon had told her that vampires could tamper with the minds of their victims, with their perceptions and their dreams. She had seen how Ysidro – the oldest and strongest of the London vampires – had searched the dreams of that great city, when he had found himself seeking a female companion for Lydia who would be willing to drop her livelihood and her hopes of ever finding another position, at twenty-four hours’ notice, and leave the country to meet in Paris a woman she didn’t know . . .
    She had seen how he had insinuated himself into Margaret Potton’s dreams, not asking her, but making her believe that it was a sacrifice she wished to make.
    Because Margaret Potton loved him.
    Because he made her love him . He had seen the image of romance in her dreams and had clothed himself in those garish melodramatic hues.
    For three nights now – since Jamie had gone away – Lydia had dug through her medical journals, checking names, checking facts, checking letter columns for addresses . . . only so that she would not dream of Margaret Potton lying dead and bloodless on her bed.
    Or at least cut down the number of hours per night that she did.
    Her heart had screamed at him, across Margaret’s body, How could you? But her mind told her, with simple matter-of-factness, How could he not?
    He was a vampire. Because she, Lydia, had insisted that she would not accept his protection unless he abstained from killing – abstained from the psychic feeding on his victims’ death from which he derived his own mental powers of illusion – he had been