Read Online The Kindred of Darkness by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online

as the hotel’s bootboy dropped a pair of shoes outside her door.

SIX
    F or two days, Lydia found herself prey to the frequent sensation of being in a dream – or, rather, of being in several dreams, traversing between them by cab rides along High Holborn.
    Six years ago, when her husband had first been blackmailed by Don Simon Ysidro into seeking out a vampire-hunter considerably more efficient than Osric Millward, she had gone into hiding in London and out of curiosity had made the attempt to read that classic of vampire fiction, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. Don Simon had little good to say of the work, which Lydia had found unreadable, but then few things compared to a good solid medical case history in her opinion. One scene, however, remained in her mind. While a prisoner in Castle Dracula, the fictional hero Jonathan Harker witnesses the arrival of a woman before the castle walls, a woman whose child the vampire count stole: she pounds upon the castle gate, crying ‘
Monster, give me my child
…’
    A scene of melodramatic horror (‘
If Dracula and all three of his wives were living on the excess population of a small mountain village
,’ Simon had remarked, ‘
I doubt he would have left it to the wolves to make a meal of her
.’), but one which returned to her now in her dreams.
    Monster, give me my child
…
    Had she known where Lionel Grippen slept in his coffin, she thought those first two nights that she would have gone there, pounded on the panels, cried to him:
Monster, give me my child
.
    And would have been killed, she reflected despairingly, by the two-legged wolves he was capable of summoning, as surely as that poor Transylvanian peasant-woman had been.
    Polybius Teazle knew whereof he spoke, when he’d warned her of the sheer volume of travelers who had entered London at the end of January burdened with a trunk large enough to conceal the body of a man. Patiently, Lydia divided those who’d come singly (
What man would endanger his family by bringing them on such an enterprise?
) from those traveling
en famille
(
And what vampire would trust three or four – some of them children – with his secret?
), and apportioned them by port of origin: Athens, Trieste, Bordeaux, Cherbourg, Amsterdam. Here again it was the names she sought. Few people (James said) had the wits to discard a perfectly good set of identity papers once they’d been used: the temptation was always to use them again. The kidnapping had brought home to her how easy it was for a vampire to utilize human helpers – like the hapless madman Renfield in
Dracula
, like her own poor companion Margaret Potton in Constantinople …
    Like Jamie
.
    Like myself
.
    She wondered who Ysidro had coerced to help him travel from Rome. And what had become of him or her upon arrival.
    Someone is watching over Miranda and Nan during daylight hours
.
    And she would wrench her mind back to the lists. She purchased a tin kettle and a cup at an Italian grocery shop in Wormwood Street, and brewed herself endless pots of tea on the room’s minuscule grate, through the gray of dawn. At ten she’d go down the hall to wash, and changed into the chintz dress she’d borrowed from Mrs Grimes, to visit her drop boxes in Finsbury Circus.
If Grippen can’t tell where Zahorec is, even, how can I be sure he isn’t aware that someone is hunting him?
    No wonder poor Jamie was driven half mad, living like this.
    There was something at once penitential and militant about the room at the Temperance Hotel, like a cell or a barracks. The tiny deal table, the single broken chair: teapot, cup, and paper bag of tea lined up at the back of the table. The locked suitcase that held the dry, softly crunching wreathes of garlic and wolfsbane … the mountain of frocks and stockings and gloves and notes and hats that heaped the narrow bed, and beside which she slept … and dreamed.
    These were the half of