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There was a monster in Greta Helsing’s hotel bathroom sink. She stared at it, hands on hips, and it stared back at her.
“Almost every single person in this opera,” said Greta, “is behaving like a complete idiot, and I love it. Can I have more champagne?” “The majority of opera plots would fall to bits if any one individual suddenly decided to act sensibly,” said Ruthven, getting up.
“Remember you are being extremely beautiful at the moment, and thus should expect to have men winking at you; unfortunately we are no longer in a century where it is acceptable to assault them with your fan in response.”
“He’s probably lying around doing algebraic geometry for fun,” Ruthven said. “Or something equally impossible. All those multivalent polynomials and things. No one should be that good at math, even if they are a fiend from Hell.”
She was using exactly the tone one might employ to coax a kitten out from hiding. This did not seem to mollify Ruthven in the slightest. “Greta,” he said, “what the hell is going on? If you’re going to wake me up at half past two with bloodcurdling shrieks when I’m already worried about you, at least have the decency to explain yourself. I gather that you are not in fact being murdered, but what are you doing?”
“I’d better make the effort if I’m going to be sparkling and vivacious in the morning. Why is it always sparkling and vivacious? Can’t one simply glitter?” Ruthven quirked an eyebrow at her. “That’s a loaded question to ask a vampire. I’m going to make us a drink, and then I’ll attempt sleep – is that thing going to let you get back into bed?”
Back then, Corvin and his coven had really been enjoying themselves, taking whatever they wanted, drinking from the city’s cup with gleeful abandon, stalking the night streets in a short but glorious reign of terror and intrigue and really stylish haircuts, and fucking Ruthven had popped up to spoil all Corvin’s fun and instruct him not to kill people.
I am going to inject Corvin with a syringeful of distilled allicin, she thought, and I don’t care if that equates to straight-up murder, he’s caused God knows how many deaths and his people have stolen this child’s life.
Francis Varney had not traveled outside the country in over a hundred years, and it had not occurred to him during his more recent interactions with the world that along with an ordinary driver’s license he ought to get himself a passport. This became a problem almost at once, and it was really only due to the urgency of the situation that he didn’t hesitate at all before fixing the ticket agent with the full force of his metallic eyes and dropping half a ton of thrall on her.
Even so, it had been better than looking at herself in the mirror and seeing a vampire who wasn’t Edmund Ruthven putting up her hair.
He looked from St. Germain to Varney and Ruthven, apparently noticing them for the first time. “Can I offer you dinner?” he said, and then went a shade of pink that clashed with his hair. “I mean. I can’t – quite – I don’t have proper, um, supplies for your specific – I’m sorry —” Ruthven had clearly been overcome by the same wave of contact embarrassment that had just engulfed Varney, and almost in unison the sanguivores offered two variants on “Please don’t go to any trouble, it’s quite all right, we’d love to stay, a little red wine is quite sufficient.”
“At least I have the grace to have my horrors somewhere other than the breakfast table,” said a voice,
Once he’d heard a miner describe what they called attacks of the weight: an occasional sudden and visceral awareness of the sheer mass of stone over their head, the heaviness of all that rock pressing down on them, the weight of it driving them into something like a panic attack. You got it a lot when you were new to the job, the miner had told him. Experienced miners, old hands, rarely felt the weight – but it was always there.
The ghosts were having a party. It was just about absurd enough to fit into the strangeness of the last several days; why shouldn’t the dead be carousing in the early-morning hours in Paris’s most famous necropolis?
“It’s the living,” said the man at the piano, the way one might say “the taxman.”
“Are you all right?” said Irazek after a moment. “No,” said Grisaille behind his hands, “although I hoped you wouldn’t notice.”
Ruthven didn’t go in for vicious murder, as a habit. And truth be told, as soon as Grisaille started telling his story, the flat blank hate had drained out of Ruthven’s mind, to be replaced with a weary, familiar kind of misery. The world was, as several of his kind had taken pains to point out, a terrible old vale of tears in which unspeakable things occurred with depressing regularity.
He wrapped his arms around her, held her close: stroked the planes and angles of her back. Too sharp, the bones too near the skin – what had they done to her, oh, he was going to kill somebody, he was going to – never mind, it didn’t matter now. The inexpressible sweetness of her face against his shoulder. He could have died a thousand times over if he only knew this could be waiting at the end of it.
Varney squeezed her a little tighter, and she clung to him, shaking in long helpless tremors. “I, for my part, am so sorry it has taken us this long to find and rescue you,” he said, and with her ear against his chest, she could both hear and feel his voice. “Only you seem to be largely self-rescuing, which does not in fact surprise me in the least. Also you appear to have a passenger,” he added as the wellmonsterlet on her shoulder glupped at him.
Irazek could very clearly tell that Edmund Ruthven wanted to pull his head off, and that Francis Varney had similar but rather more violent desires – but after Grisaille had told them his story, both the vampires had seemed to calm down from active murder into organizational mode.
Irazek had stayed behind, ostensibly to work out what was to be done next, but in point of fact he was simply stalling: he knew what was to be done next, and a significant aspect of that was going to be losing his job.
“Hang on,” said the voice. “I’ll be there shortly. Don’t do anything to reality until I get there.”
With the passage of time, he had tried and failed over and over to keep the interior au courant with fashion, until – mired in the black despair that characterized so many of his interactions with the world – he had finally given the house up to the ravages of age and weather, and retreated to the cellars to sleep.
“And – Christ, you’ve had a time of it, haven’t you – when we’re down there, we can all stand in line and take turns murdering him, to be democratic about it.”
And this is not so much a long as a bloody awful story. In her head his voice was bitter-ice cold, colder than she had ever heard him. I am going to – repair this mess with reality and then I want to go and turn all these vampires inside out, one by one, Greta, my dear —
“We go down under the city,” said Varney with awful delicacy, “and we root out the coven, and we get rid of them in a way which will not likely result in their reappearance in another city twenty years on. That would be my suggestion.” “Right,” said Ruthven. “Could not have put it better myself. Alceste, have you got any handy wooden spoons I could sharpen the handles of?”
“When this is over,” said Crepusculus, “let’s go somewhere as far away from Paris as is possible while remaining on this planet?”
“… it’s you,” Corvin rasped, clutching at the wrist of the hand that held him. “Finally. It’s you – I’ve – waited for this for so long —” Varney wondered if he knew exactly what kind of danger he was in. The platinum fang set with a ruby glittered behind Corvin’s torn lips, bent at an angle. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked Ruthven almost plaintively. The air seemed to thicken, crystallizing around them, as if something crucial was about to happen. No one else was currently bearing witness to this particular endgame; it was Varney alone who watched the awful little smile on Corvin’s face tilt
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Greta had to smile a little. “Do I want to know what happened then?” “Upon the discovery of which,” said Fastitocalon, straight-faced, “the deputy head was fired and Asmodeus himself got turned into what I understand to be a large banana slug.”
