Barbara Hambly - Blood Maidens
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- Book:Blood Maidens
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- Publisher:Severn House
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- Year:2011
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Blood Maidens: summary, description and annotation
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The new James Asher vampire novel from the best-selling author - Its 1911. War is coming, and according to one of the vampires of St. Petersburg, the Kaiser is trying to recruit vampires. James Asher, Oxford don and formerly on His Majestys Secret Service, is forced to team up again with his vampire partner Don Simon Ysidro for a journey to the subarctic Russian capital. Are they on the trail of a rogue vampire with a plan to achieve the power to walk in daylight? Asher wonders. Or is Ysidros real agenda to seek the woman he once loved?
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A Selection of Recent Titles from Barbara Hambly
The Benjamin January Series
A FREE MAN OF COLOR
FEVER SEASON
GRAVEYARD DUST
SOLD DOWN THE RIVER
DIE UPON A KISS
WET GRAVE
DAYS OF THE DEAD
DEAD WATER
DEAD AND BURIED *
The James Asher Vampire Novels
THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT
TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD
BLOOD MAIDENS *
* available from Severn House
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2010
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
915 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright 2010 by Barbara Hambly.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hambly, Barbara.
Blood maidens.
1. VampiresFiction. 2. Saint Petersburg (Russia)
Fiction. 3. RussiaHistory1904-1914Fiction.
4. Horror tales.
I. Title
813.54-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-053-1 (ePub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6947-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-280-2 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
For Gillyflower
Special thanks to the folks on my blog for their help and advice with research directions:
Mosswing, Moondagger, Dorianegrey, ann mcn, redrose, mizkit, and shakatany.
Couldnt have done it without you.
ONE
F og muffled the sound of screaming.
James Asher lengthened his stride, keeping close to the gray wooden wall of the workers barracks. The smell of churned dust and cordite the smell of burning grated in his nostrils, drowning those other smells that told him where he was: latrines, curry, chickens... Where is the fog coming from? The answer held the key to what was happening that night, if only he could find it. The Molopo River never fogs like this ...
The ground underfoot jerked with the impact of artillery shells.
He was in a part of Mafeking hed never seen before, and he would have taken an oath he knew every block and street of that dusty mining-town. Close to the slums where the families of the Boralong workers lived, he could hear them screaming: children and women terrified by the rain of death from the night sky. I have to get there. I have to find ...
He couldnt recall what or who he had to find this time.
I have to stop them ...
He turned a corner, felt pavement underfoot. Tall brick buildings now hemmed him in: the offices of the mining companies, the first-class stores where their ladies shopped for British fashions. He wasnt sure how hed gotten there, it was nearly impossible to orient himself, but through the gritty gloom he saw buildings burning ahead. A lapdog scuttled by him, crying in terror. Another shell hit, closer, shaking the world. Fire in a window nearby showed Asher something on the pavement of the alley ahead of him: a thin glistening stream of flowing blood.
The breath seemed to lock in his lungs. Dear God, how many are dead? The coppery reek penetrated even the choke of the smoke. The blood lapped thickly against his boot toe, widening as it flowed, ruby reflections in the flame. He looked up the alleyway and saw gruesome little lakes among the fog-wet cobblestones, losing themselves in that inky canyon.
He followed, keeping to the wall. The screaming, and the earth-shaking hammer of the Boer artillery, swelled, then faded as the fog grew thicker. He could still smell the river and the smoke of the city burning, but as the alleyway narrowed around him he thought, This isnt Mafeking. This is London.
Im dreaming .
The reflection brought him no comfort. It only meant that anything could lie beyond the darkness. All the things he had seen and done, in Africa during the fight against the Boers, in the Balkans, in China in all those places where his Queen had sent him in the course of twenty years clandestine service gave him no reason to think that whatever awaited him would be anything but appalling.
In waking life hed seen blood flow down streets like this, and not in single modest gleaming ribbons barely an inch wide.
He turned a corner, his hand to the wall to guide him. This was definitely London, a small square somewhere near the Tower and the docks. Against the firelit brume he could just make out the tower of a crumbling pre-Wren church; the spire had been damaged, and he dimly descried darker night through the holes. There was a street lamp not the new electric, but the outmoded gas variety but its glass was broken, its flame quenched. Before one of the houses a candle-lantern hung on a rusted bracket, and its feeble light somehow showed him that a lake of blood extended most of the way across the square.
In the doorway of the tall and lightless house, Don Simon Ysidro stood beneath the lantern, waiting for him.
James. The vampires habitual half-whisper still came to him, clearly audible above the falling of the shells, the screams of the dying. We must speak.
Asher said, Go to hell.
His eyes opened in the dark. His face was washed in sweat and he was trembling.
Go to hell ...
He didnt even need to hear what he knew Ysidro had replied to that remark, because he knew that the dream had been the vision of exactly that.
Not the Boers shelling Mafeking. Germans bombing London. Hed seen the stately Zeppelin airships, silent as clouds above Lake Constance, and the plans to convert them to aerial transports to dump high explosives on cities. Hed seen the stockpiles of weapons those of the Germans, the Austrians, the French and the Russians and the Turks. Hed seen the Kaisers armies on review, rank after gray goose-stepping rank marching down Unter den Linden, and the way the eyes of the German officers had glittered at the thought of leading their unbeatable forces to carve themselves our proper place in Europe and the world.
The lake of blood was a puddle. The stream, only the drip of a pinprick, compared to what was coming.
I have to get there. I have to stop them. I have to find ...
He made himself draw breath; made himself let it out. For his superiors in the Department, there was always one last thing to find, so that he James Asher, New College Lecturer of Philology could stop whatever horror was next around the corner...
But somehow it always turned out to be just something that the Army thought it needed to get a few points ahead of the Germans, in that endless competition for who had the most powerful weaponry, the most enormous battleships, the most terrifying strength.
Why Ysidro?
Asher lay in the darkness, listening to the rain. As if the deafening blasts of the artillery had been real real tonight, not real twelve years ago Lydias peaceful breathing seemed loud in the stillness. She lay curled against his side like a child, her head on his shoulder, the thick braided silk of her long hair dark in the night lights tiny glow; it was red as henna in the sun. She had not resumed her nightdress after making love, in spite of the chill of the spring night, and around her bare throat glinted the links of the silver chain that she never took off.
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