Free James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead by Barbara Hambly Page A

me…”
    “Advice will gain you little against either Karolyi or Ernchester. If you wish to warn your husband of his danger, you must travel with me—and travel I will, to prevent Charles from doing this thing, whatever his motives.”
    Lydia
    
    
     was silent for a moment, unnerved beyond words at the thought of such a journey but remembering how utterly unprepared she had been to encounter him in the crypt. “If you must,” she said slowly, her dream of fanged white faces returning to her. “Thank you… but I am not taking my maid into the situation she’d face if we meet Ernchester, and I’m not exposing her to the chance of finding out inconvenient things about you. Which she’d do,” added Lydia. “Ellen’s got an inquisitive streak, and she’s smarter than she appears. I won’t do that to her.”
    “Hire one for the journey, then.”
    “So that you can kill her when the journey is done? And kill me, too, for that matter?” she added, her mind making a tardy leap to the ultimate danger of traveling with the dead. She knew too much already—even her admission of knowing where his lairs lay had violated the lines so carefully drawn when James and Ysidro had parted a year ago in the burning house on Harley Street.
    He needs a human companion, she thought, in his search for Ernchester, someone who could deal with such problems as might overtake him when daylight was near; and he needs someone who knows James well enough to track him, to guess his movements, and through him, Karolyi and Ernchester.
    She’d told Ellen and Mrs. Grimes she was visiting her cousins in Maida Vale. It would be weeks before she was even missed.
    She kept her eyes on his, positive she resembled nothing so much as a myopic rabbit attempting to stare down a dragon.
    Slowly, the vampire said, “You need have no fear of me, mistress. Nor will your woman, so long as she keeps from asking about that which does not concern her.”
    “No.”
    James had told her of the vampire ability to touch living minds, a cold grip, the dreadful sensation of steely will. But his power extended to blanking and smothering thought, to diverting attention… not to changing resolve. It was a predator’s power, a spy’s and a fugitive’s, not that of one who must negotiate with humankind. She saw that realization dawn in his eyes, and his mouth tightened with annoyance.
    “If we are to be companions in this enterprise, I will not have you traveling alone abroad like a jauntering slut,” he said. “I think your husband would agree with me in that.”
    “What my husband thinks is my husband’s business, and neither yours nor mine,” said Lydia. “And I would rather be taken for a jauntering slut than betray a woman who’s dependent on me. And if it doesn’t suit you, I’ll travel by myself.”
    Ysidro bent and kissed her hand, his lips like silk left outside on a dry night of hard frost. “Bon voyage, then, mistress. And bonne chance in your dealings with the Undead.”
    With a sensation like waking up, Lydia found herself alone.
    It was not, in fact, terribly late to be abandoned in a completely unfamiliar part of London. Though the fog had thickened and the night was growing colder, the streets were still populous, albeit with foreign laborers from the sweatshops that abounded in the neighborhood and with sailors who seemed to accept Ysidro’s outdated presumption that a woman on her own was a jauntering slut, at least as far as Lydia could understand their idiomatic references to Master John Thursday and pintle jigs. Evidently, Josetta’s suffragist doctrines had yet to penetrate this far. Lydia made a mental note to let her know.
    As she had guessed, she wasn’t far from the river, and on the broad, electric lit thoroughfare of the Embankment, she had no trouble in finding a cab to take her back to the small hotel near the museum where she had left her luggage.
    Taken in the balance, she thought—removing her gloves and unpinning