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No one knew now exactly what remained in the tunnels, and no sensible person would go down there alone – but certain esoteric subsectors of society had always gravitated to such places. As long as there was secrecy, there would be a need for holes to hide in.
For the past five years she had run a bare-bones clinic out of Wilfert Helsing’s old rooms in Harley Street, treating a patient base that to the majority of the population did not, technically, when you got right down to it, exist. It was a family thing. There had never been much doubt which subspecialty of medicine she would pursue, once she began her training: 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’d only got a glimpse before her own instincts had kicked in and got her the hell out of range of those teeth, but it would be a while before she could forget that pattern of dentition, or those mad tin-colored eyes. He covered his face with his hands, shoulders slumping, and instead of menace was now giving off an air of intense embarrassment.
“A doctor?” he asked, blinking at her. “Are you sure?” She was spared having to answer that. A moment later he squeezed his eyes shut, very faint color coming and going high on each cheek. “I really am sorry,” he said. “What a remarkably stupid question. It’s just – I tend to think of doctors as looking rather different than you.”
As a general rule Fastitocalon did his best not to read people’s minds, partly out of basic good manners and partly for his own sake – most people’s thoughts were not only banal but loud – but he knew perfectly well what Lethbridge thought of him.
Technically Edmund St. James Ruthven was an earl, not a count, and he only sort of owned a ruined castle. There had been a great deal of unpleasantness at the beginning of the seventeenth century that had done funny things to the clan succession, and in any case he was also technically dead, which complicated matters.
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.
He thought – not for the first time – about the novelty of being ordered about by the same girl who had, at six months of age, been sick all over the shoulder of his totally irreplaceable 1958 Italian topcoat, the girl he’d once delighted by turning all her plastic play blocks into brightly colored lumbering beetles, the girl he’d tutored with indifferent results in the arcane discipline of sixth-form calculus. The woman who had turned to him on a cold and awful day for what support he could provide, who had said, Fass, help, I don’t know what to do. Humans lived so fast.
“Here. And there’s a longer-acting nebulizer as well. Why didn’t you tell me you’d run out of meds? And you’ve been smoking. I intend to shout at you at considerable length about that.”
She paused and ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t have much heat there, do you?” “Oh, of course I do. It’s just that most of it escapes up the holes in the ceiling where they didn’t seal it round the drainpipes and goes to heat my upstairs neighbor’s flat instead.” “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Greta, despairingly. “What else? Have you got to crawl up the steps over broken glass both ways while carrying weights in your teeth?”
That was going to have to be Ruthven’s job; Ruthven, or one of the other people she knew who were capable of casually unscrewing somebody’s head.
and anyway no one in their right mind would want to steal the Mini. The one time it had been lifted, years ago, the thief had promptly left it just a few streets away, in apparent disgust.
“Why didn’t you say they’d done their best to cut your throat? Oh, Christ and all his little angels. Come and sit down before you fall over, and let me clean that out for you.”
“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. You are barely a decade changed and you have been reading entirely too many tiresome novels. We are not above or below the living, we are beside them, and if we want to go on existing at all we have to understand that the secrecy must be maintained for everybody’s sake. I thought the way you’re thinking, four hundred years ago and change, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that I survived that thought process. Get out
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“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. Actually the leech is probably a more accurate simile, but the mosquito tends to offer less objectionable aesthetic connotations. It doesn’t hurt; the bite wounds heal almost immediately, with only a little itching; people have no memory of the experience. I don’t take more from any single individual than they’d give in a Red Cross
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“We could not even retrieve the bodies,” he said, guttural and harsh. “They are not at rest. Their flesh is. Is wasted.” Greta closed her eyes. That was a particularly terrible insult, to the ghouls – a vicious insult, and a bone-deep sorrow. In a society that ate its own dead as a means of honoring their memories, being unable to claim the bodies of the slain meant their spirits could not be properly freed, that the grieving process could find no natural conclusion. “I’m so sorry,” she said again, knowing it was completely inadequate.
but couldn’t quite distract himself from the question of how to react to someone like Dr. Helsing. Did he try to push her away, urge her out of his sphere of influence, insist that she avoid his gaze for her own safety? Did he attempt to eat her? He simply had no basis for comparison.
The idea of venturing out into the city beyond these windows made all the little hairs rise on the back of his neck. It was not easy to be a monster. It had never been, but sometimes he simply noticed it more clearly.
He looked wretched. “This is not my field. I’m… I was an accountant, not an afterlife counselor.”
Humans, thought Varney, watching Cranswell stir another spoonful of sugar into his mug, are remarkably variable. Which made them, of course, remarkably difficult to deal with.
He looked at her closely, peculiarly intent. “It’s not nothing,” he said. “What’s the matter? I am very deliberately not reading your mind, by the way, so you have to actually tell me.”
“I can sense these things,” Fastitocalon told her solemnly, tapping his temple with a finger. “Truly my powers are vast. No, it’s just that – well, angelic, or heavenly, objects or entities are immediately recognizable to the right type of vision. They’re covered in a sort of sparkly golden dust and make me break out in hives. Demonic and infernal stuff is just as recognizable, only I’m not violently allergic to the sparkles, and they’re red rather than gold.”
Some of these thoughts must have been too loud to ignore, because Fastitocalon tipped up her chin with a thin, warm finger and looked earnestly at her. “Don’t worry,” he said, and then made a face of his own. “I mean, don’t worry unduly. I don’t think you need be concerned that the universe is going to implode, or be overrun with nameless horrors of polysyllabic description. This situation is… awkward and objectionable, but I don’t believe either Sam or Above is incapable of handling it, should matters get that far.”
She looked at him steadily, thinking, This is my friend, my father’s friend, whom I have known all my life, and he is on first-name terms with the Devil.
“How does he turn into a snake in the first place? How does Ruthven change from sixty or seventy kilos of bipedal humanoid into a few grams of regrettably adorable bat?” Fastitocalon shrugged. “It’s not a meaningful question. I could go into the metaphysics, but you complain at me when I talk about sums.”
“Other manifestations include a pretty convincing human male of astonishing physical beauty, a cloud of floating eyeballs, and a point of light about as bright as a welding arc. The androgynous wingèd creature is his default setting.” “No red socks?” “No red socks. Nor has he got a tail or cloven hooves. Or horns. A lot of demons do, you know. Really big curly ones are considered ostentatious, but a neat, well-kept set of horns is quite within the realm of respectability.”
“And you?” Ruthven’s voice had warmed back up. “No, don’t answer that. I can imagine. I’ll come and fetch you. If we fold down the Volvo’s backseat you can slide your new friend in on a stretcher and I can get all nostalgic about driving ambulances in the Blitz. Won’t that be nice?” She laughed despite herself, as he had meant her to, and had to swallow as her throat ached with a sudden wave of fondness. “You didn’t really, did you?” “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, my darling. Go and pack up what you need. I’ll be there in a little while.”
“Blue light of God,” he said with his mouth full. “Whatever it is, they’re being exposed to the source on purpose. Maybe for penance. Like hair-shirts or flagellation, you know, mortification of the flesh.” “‘O holy UV-B light source, purify me of sin’?” Greta said, looking skeptical. “I don’t think they had those back when this sect got started.”
“Religious mania is capable of prompting some pretty messed-up behavior,” Cranswell pointed out. “People do all kinds of stuff because God tells them to. Why shouldn’t God be a lightbulb? He’s already been a whirlwind and a burning bush, just to select two examples completely at random.”
“I think the transport authority would notice a bunch of crazy monk guys genuflecting to their light fixtures,” Cranswell said. “Like, even in London that’s weird.”
Greta looked mutinous, but just sighed and got up, gathering the plates. “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.”
“I suppose I’m wicked to some extent,” Greta said. “Most people are. But on the whole I rather think it’s your brethren who are workers of iniquity, if they’re the ones who have been murdering people. ‘Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out. The element of water moistens the earth,’” she added, completely unable to stop herself, “‘but blood flies upward and bedews the heavens.’”
If the terrible penny-dreadful’s account was to be believed, Varney had historically shown very little hesitation in killing people who annoyed him, or at least injuring them badly. At one point he was said to have accidentally murdered his own son in a fit of anger, and she hoped the intense stare was not an indicator of imminent violence.
Apparently Ruthven had already been preapproved for ghoullet-holding duty, Greta thought, hooking her stethoscope around her neck and reaching into her bag for the thermometer. It made sense, of course. He was well-known as one of the protectors of the city, old and powerful supernaturals to whom one might appeal in dire need. Still, it made her smile a little. She’d never seen the vampire look quite like that before.
“And I can speak four languages fluently and a fifth and sixth extremely badly, darn socks, and dance the tango, not to mention all the excitingly dangerous neck biting – and the bat thing. Do not ask me about the bat thing. I cannot, however, fly a helicopter, play the piano, or compose lyric poetry, and don’t ask me to keep houseplants alive. Ah, here’s Sir Francis back from Sainsbury’s, in fact.”
“Relax. I’m not going to do anything demonic. Just take my word for it, your soul is intact: I’m looking right at it. What is in trouble with the Lord your God is the thing that caused all this mess in the first place. I’m almost certain that 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.”
“Which is why I’m gonna be carrying these,” Cranswell said, turning to the knife block on the kitchen counter and removing a couple of Wüsthofs, which he brandished at the group. Ruthven went slightly paler. “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.” Cranswell grinned. “Thought you’d never ask,” he
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He had instinctively jerked backward, and his head bonked into the metal wall with a faint musical note. “Jesus Christ, Ruthven, how about you warn me when you’re gonna do something ridiculously creepy, okay?”
The first intimation Greta had of the Gladius Sancti’s presence was when the flaming bottle came through the bedroom window.
Samael paid her no attention, turning that blazing blue gaze down to Fastitocalon’s face. He bent closer and cupped one hand to the slack grey cheek. “Oh, Fass,” he said, again so terribly gently. “Fass, why didn’t you tell me you were this ill, why didn’t you come home and let us renovate you properly, you stubborn old reprobate, why did you let things get this bad? It’s enough to make me go all fucking despondent.”
“Sam?” he said. “Well done, that demon. Full marks for observation.” “What… happened? Why are you here?” “Because, you utter ass, you summoned me,” Samael said, with what sounded like fond exasperation. “I don’t think you actually meant to, but you did, and then you died, which was a little hard to ignore.”
“What, would you have rather they let you take your jacket off before they stabbed you?” Greta asked, sitting back on her heels. She was still furious, but the clinical fascination with what had just happened was currently eclipsing the need to shout at him. “‘One moment please, Mr. Violent Lunatic, I don’t want to get blood on my nice suit’?” “Well, yes,” he said, as if this were an obvious and rational statement. “I can be repaired, but good tailoring is very difficult to find.”
Ruthven came around fairly quickly, in time to catch Greta telling the others about the house fire, whereupon he promptly fainted again.
Varney had been right. It was astonishing how quickly things started to happen once you threw large sums of money at them; as soon as his black credit card made an appearance he became “Sir Francis” to the suddenly deferential staff of the Savoy.
“Just gone half past three,” he said. “They apparently serve breakfast whenever you want it, however, which is useful to know if you ever happen to become disgustingly rich.”
Varney was looking a trifle shell-shocked, which was not uncommon for people who found themselves accompanying Ruthven on shopping trips, especially since it was his credit card that had taken most of the damage.
He put the phone away, took her face between his hands, and kissed her firmly on the forehead. “I am going,” he said with exaggerated clarity, “to buy you whatever you need to do your job to the best of your ability, my darling infant, for the benefit of all monsterkind. Stop goggling at me, and come sit down and let me show you the rest of our haul.”
and then saw her stop dead still in her tracks and stare. Along the path at the water’s edge a third figure was walking toward them: a man, tall and thin in a pale linen suit, a straw panama tipped rakishly on his head. The figure looked up toward Ruthven and Varney and gave them a little wave, just before a ballistic Greta flung herself at him and knocked his hat off. They watched him hug her off her feet, spinning her around in a delighted circle, and then put her down, protesting, in order to shake Cranswell’s hand.
