Strange Practice (Dr. Greta Helsing, #1)

by Vivian Shaw

As long as there was secrecy, there would be a need for holes to hide in.

treating the differently alive was not only more interesting than catering to the ordinary human population, it was in many ways a great deal more rewarding. She took a lot of satisfaction in being able to provide help to particularly underserved clients.

The passive-aggressive-letter stage tended to indicate that his levels of ennui were reaching critical intensity. Greta just nodded, watching him.

which presumably came as some small comfort in the process of succumbing to violent throes of gastric distress brought on by dietary indiscretion.

He was very much aware of the fact that he had not actually been bored for coming up on ten or eleven straight hours now, and that this was a profound relief.

Ruthven wasn’t much of a traditionalist. He didn’t even own a coffin, let alone sleep in one; there simply wasn’t room to roll over, even in the newer, wider models, and anyway the mattresses were a complete joke and played merry hell with one’s back.

The voice sounded to her as if its owner couldn’t be older than his early twenties, reciting something learned by heart, and Greta wondered who had done the teaching, and why.

Not humans attacking supernaturals and throwing the whole careful structure of secrecy into precarious imbalance. That meant supernaturals attacking both worlds at once.

“I expect,” Ruthven had told him, “that if you ever actually take the time to think clearly about what you’ve just said, you will be absolutely paralyzed with embarrassment.

“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.

She smiled, an actual honest-to-God smile that made Cranswell feel as if the world might not be spinning entirely off its proper track after all, and said, “Bacon. Lots of bacon, and at least one egg.”

The bus had arrived, had not been full of murderers, had gone where it said it was going to, and had stopped where it was promising to stop.

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.

“Balls,” said Greta. “I’m coming, too. He ruined my car, tried to cut my throat, and said a lot of things a well-bred gent ought not to say to a lady. I want to be there when you find him.”

“I’ll put on a kettle,” she said. “If we’re going to have a council of war we might as well have a nice cup of tea while we’re doing it.”

She was still furious, but the clinical fascination with what had just happened was currently eclipsing the need to shout at him.

“I find that if you dig deep enough you can almost always find something worth the effort.