"You're not telling me everything," he said.

"Did your Foreign Office?" Ysidro inquired. "And I am telling you this, James. We will hire you, we will pay you, but if you betray us, in word or in deed, there will be no place on this earth where you or your lady Lydia will be safe from us, ever. I hope you believe that, for both your sakes."

Asher folded his hands, settled his shoulders back into the worn plush. "You hope I believe it for your own sake as well. In the night you're powerful, but by daylight you seem to be curiously easy to kill."

"So," the vampire murmured. For an instant his delicate mouth tightened; then the expression, if expression it was, smoothed away, and the pale eyes lost some of their focus, as if that ancient soul sank momentarily into its dreams. Though the whole car vibrated with the rush of the dark rails beneath their feet, Asher had a sense of terrible silence, like a monster waiting in absolute stillness for its prey.

Then he heard a hesitant step in the corridor, a woman's, though traffic up and down the narrow passage had long ceased. The compart-ment door slid open without a knock. Framed in the slot of brown oak and gaslight stood the woman who had watched over her two sleeping children on the platform, staring before her like a sleepwalker.

Ysidro said nothing; but, as if he had invited her in, the woman closed the door behind her. Stepping carefully with the swaying of the train, she came to sit on the edge of the seat at the vampire's side.

"I- I'm here," she stammered in a tiny voice, her eyes glassy under straight, thin lashes. "Who-why...

?"

"It is nothing you need trouble about,bellisima" Ysidro whispered, putting out one slim hand in its black glove to touch her face. "Nothing at all."

"No," she whispered mechanically. "Nothing at all." Her dress was of shabby red cloth, clean but very old, the fabric several times turned; she wore a flat black straw hat, and a purple scarf round her neck against the cold. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five- Lydia's age-and had once been pretty, Asher thought, before ceaseless worry had graven those petty lines around her mouth and eyes. Tersely he said, "All right, you've made your point..."