His hands were not quite steady as he replaced the stethoscope in its pigeonhole once more. He was suddenly extremely conscious of the beat of the blood in his veins.
His voice remained level. "What do you want?"
"Help," the vampire said,
"What?" Asher stared at the vampire, he realized-seeing the dark amusement in Ysidro's eyes-like a fool. His own mind still felt twisted out of true by what he had heard-or more properly by what he had absolutely not heard-through the stethoscope, but the fact that the shadowy predator that lurked in the legends of every culture he had ever studied did exist was in a way easier to believe than what that predator had just said.
The pale eyes held his. There was no shift in them, no expression; only a remote calm, centuries deep. Ysidro was silent for a few mo-ments as if considering how much of what he should explain. Then he moved, a kind of weightless, leisurely drifting that, like Asher's habitual stride, was as noiseless as the passage of shadow. He perched on a corner of the desk, long white hands folded on one well-tailored gray knee, regarding Asher for a moment with his head a little on one side. There was something almost hypnotic in that stillness, without nervous gesture, almost completely without movement, as if that had all been rinsed from him by the passing moons of time.
Then Don Simon said, "You are Dr. James Claudius Asher, author ofLanguage and Concepts in Eastern and Central Europe, Lecturer in Philology at New College, expert on languages and their permutations in the folklore of countries from the Balkans to Port Arthur to Preto-ria..."