Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

"Come in."

She stepped back from the door, gestured him to a salon whose pilastered archway opened to the right of the hall. Her voice was low and very sweet, without seductiveness or artifice of any kind. As he followed her, Asher was acutely conscious of the thudding of his own heart. He wondered if she was, too.

The salon was large, perfectly orderly, but had a chilled air of long neglect. One dim oil lamp on the corner of a curlicued Baroque mantelpiece picked out the edges of the furnishings nearest it graceful Hepplewhite chairs, the curve of a bow front cabinet, and the claret red gleam of carved mahogany in a thick archaic style. Asher wondered who would dust the place and brickbat that dingy front step, now that Danny King was dead.

Mrs. Farren said, "I've heard of you, Dr. Asher." As in Ysidro's, there was neither commitment nor emotion in her voice.

Standing before her in the small pool of lamplight, he could see the gleam of her protruding fangs, and the fact that, except when she spoke, the creamy thickness of her breasts did not rise or fall.

"My apologies for intruding," he said, with a slight bow. "If you've heard of me you know I'm seeking information and if you know Don Simon Ysidro, you probably know I'm not getting much. Was Daniel King your servant?"

"Yes." She nodded once. Unlike Ysidro, though her voice was absolutely neutral, there was a world of brightness, of watchfulness, of feeling in her large, golden brown eyes. "He was my husband's," she added after a moment, and inwardly Asher sighed with relief he'd been afraid for a moment that all vampires were as utterly uncommunicative as Don Simon. "His carriage groom a tiger, they used to call them. That was during our last . . ." She hunted for the word for a moment, dark brows flinching slightly together, and suddenly seemed infinitely more human. "Our last period of being of the world, I suppose you could say. We had a number of servants. In those days such extravagant eccentricities as barring a whole wing of the house and leading an utterly nocturnal existence were more accepted by servants than they are now. But Danny guessed."

She stood with her back to the mantelpiece, her hands clasped lightly before her slender waist, in an attitude regal and slightly archaic, like a stiffly painted Restoration portrait. In life, Asher guessed, she had been a little plump, but that was all smoothed away now, like any trace of archaism in her speech. Her gown with its flared tulip skirt was modern, but the baroque pearls she wore in her ears could only have been so extravagantly set in the days of the last of the Stuart kings.

When she moved, it had the same unexpectedness Ysidro's movements did, that momentary inattention, and then finding her at his side. But she only said, "I suppose now that he's gone, it's I who must take your coat . .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.