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As long as there was secrecy, there would be a need for holes to hide in.
Greta Helsing was thirty-four, unmarried, and had taken over her late father’s specialized medical practice after a brief stint as an internist at King’s College Hospital.
vampires, were-creatures, mummies, banshees, ghouls, bogeymen, the occasional arthritic barrow-wight.
Sir Francis Varney, title and all,
Fastitocalon, who had worked as a clerk for the firm for almost as long as it had been around,
“Mr. Frederick Vasse”
Fastitocalon
Technically Edmund St. James Ruthven was an earl,
August Cranswell at the British Museum,
Nadezhda Serenskaya
Anna Volkov, a part-rusalka nurse practitioner,
he’d never met a sanguivore quite so ineffably domestic, silver-screen looks and all. Ruthven ought to be wearing pearls and a frilly apron. Possibly with little bats on it.
The Sword of Holiness,
“Gladius Sancti
in point of fact gladius sancti means ‘sword of holiness.’
“Really,” Ruthven had said when the question of his nature had first (awkwardly) arisen, early in their acquaintance, “the easiest thing is to think of me as a large well-dressed mosquito, only with more developed social graces and without the disease-vector aspect.
Any vampire who kills when he or she feeds is a vampire with some rather significant impulse-control problems, plus I’m not even sure it would be comfortably possible to down that many pints of the stuff in one go.
Anna was a comfortably large lady who wore purple scrubs in the office and only very infrequently had to suppress urges to stand around in ponds and lure travelers to a watery grave.
“Which is what exactly, when it’s at home with its feet up?”
I don’t, he had said. I don’t know for a fact. But I know that I know how to do this job. I trust in my own skill and experience to help me make good decisions.
you must be able to trust yourself, before asking your patients to place their trust in you. If you cannot do that, do not pursue medicine as a career.
she had never considered people who did to be particularly foolish or misguided; it was simply a part of other people’s lives that she did not share.
to imagine what it would be like, as a believer, to hear the voice of God was something close to impossible.
‘Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out. The element of water moistens the earth,’”
“Book of Webster, Duchess of Malfi.”
‘Hypocrisy is woven of a fine small thread, subtler than Vulcan’s engine.’ Don’t you think it seems a little … backward, perhaps … to run around committing mortal sins in order to cleanse the world of sin and evil?”
“You are not human,” she said at last, “but you are people. All of you. The ghouls, the mummies, the sanguivores, the weres, the banshees, the wights, the bogeys, everyone who comes to me for help, everyone who trusts me to provide it. You are all people, and you all deserve medical care, no matter what you do or have done, and you deserve to be able to seek and receive that care without putting yourselves in jeopardy.
Stephen Halethorpe.
magic. Or mirabilic,
“Eric Whitlow.
John Arbeiter.
claiming to be the Voice of God when you are not, in fact, the Voice of God is something upon which Heaven frowns. The job’s taken, you know.”
much of a muchness.
(much) of a muchness ‹informal› very similar
don’t burst into flames in sunlight. That bit didn’t come along until Murnau in 1922.”
“Put those back,” he said. “I have had to overlook a number of personal inconveniences just lately, but I am not having you ruin the edge on my good knives by using them to chop up violent lunatics. If you insist on coming with us, go and get one of the damn swords over the dining room mantelpiece, and try not to hurt yourself with it.”
“August Cranswell, you know damn well that thing’s a jumped-up lightbulb, nothing more than a bit of engineering with ideas above its station,”
The entity is … what we call a remnant, something left over from the beginnings of the universe that does not fit anywhere within it. Mostly the remnants are inert, do nothing, cause nothing to happen, but this one must have been a leftover from the creation of something intelligent and aware, because it developed its own awareness over an eon or so.
