"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

creeping sensation of the skin on the back of his neck, an uneasy sense of having thought he was
descending a stair and, instead, stepping from the edge of a cliff . . .

The name was SpanishтАФthe young man's bleached fairness might well hail from the northern provinces
where the Moors had never gone calling. Around the thin, high-nosed hidalgo face, his colorless hair hung
like spider silk, fine as cobweb and longer than men wore it these days. The eyes were scarcely darker, a
pale, yellowish amber, flecked here and there with pleats of faded brown or grayтАФeyes which should
have seemed catlike, but didn't. There was an odd luminosity to them, an unplaceable glittering quality,
even in the gaslight, that troubled Asher. Their very paleness, contrasting with the moleskin-soft black
velvet of the man's coat collar, pointed up the absolute pallor of the delicate features far more like a
corpse's than a living man's, save for their mobile softness.

From his own experiences in Germany and Russia, Asher knew how easy such a pallor was to fake,
particularly by gaslight. And it might simply be madness or drugs that glittered at him from those grave
yellow eyes. Yet there was an eerie quality to Don Simon Ysidro, an immobility so total it was as if he
had been there behind the desk for hundreds of years, waiting . . .

As Asher knelt beside Lydia to feel her pulse, he kept his eyes on the Spaniard, sensing the danger in the
man. And even as his mind at last identified the underlying inflections of speech, he realized, with an odd,
sinking chill, whence that dreadful sense of stillness stemmed.

The tonal shift in a few of his word endings was characteristic of those areas which had been linguistically
isolated since the end of the sixteenth century.

And except when he spoke, Don Simon Ysidro did not appear to be breathing.

The carving knife still in his left hand, Asher got to his feet and said, "Come here."

Ysidro did not move. His slender hands remained exactly as they had been, dead white against the blued
steel of the dissected gun, but no more inert than the spider who awaits the slightest vibration of the
blundering fly.

"You understand, it is not always easy to conceal what we are, partic-ularly if we have not fed," he
explained in his low, light voice. Heavy lids gave his eyes an almost sleepy expression, not quite
concealing cynicism and mockery, not quite concealing that odd gleam. "Up until ninety years ago, it was
a simple matter, for no one looks quite normal by candlelight. Now that they are lighting houses by
electricity, I know not what we shah" do."

Ysidro must have moved. The terrifying thing was that Asher did not see the man do it, was notтАФfor a
span of what must have been several secondsтАФconscious of anything, as if he had literally slipped into a
trance on his feet. One second he was standing, knife in hand, between Lydia's sleeping form and the
desk where the slim intruder sat; the next, it seemed, he came to himself with a start to find the iciness of
Ysidro's fingers still chilling his hand, and the knife gone.

Shock and disorientation doused him like cold water. Don Simon tossed the knife onto the desk among
the scattered pieces of the useless revolver and turned back, with an ironic smile, to offer his bared wrist
to Asher.

Asher shook his head, his mouth dry. He'd faked his own death once, on a German archaeological
expedition to the Congo, by means of a tourniquet, and he'd seen fakirs in India who didn't even need