Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  He was using a clean butter knife to turn the pages, rather than touching them with his fingertips, and it took a few moments for him to find the section he wanted: a double woodcut. On the left-hand page was depicted what appeared to be a somewhat standard flaming sword, of the sort wielded by angels at the gates of Eden, and on the right …

  “It is a spike,” Ruthven said. “No. It’s a stake.”

  Cranswell looked sharply at him. Ruthven’s eyes were wide and dark, the pupils swallowing up all but a fine ring of silver. After a moment he blinked hard, and they shrank smoothly back to normal. “Tell me,” he said conversationally, turning to Vasse, “what else does the book have to say about these individuals?”

  Rain spattered against the second-floor windows, blurring the streetlamps into splashes of light, turning the expanse of the Thames into a featureless black field. Through the brocade curtains of a massive four-poster bed, the blotchy light fell across Sir Francis Varney’s features, and did them no favors whatsoever.

  Varney lay with his silvering hair spread messily over the pillows, white hands twisted in the bedclothes, alternately tossing and lying deathly still as whatever he was dreaming came and went in waves. The gauze taped over his wound had been replaced not long ago, but now a dark stain was once again beginning to spread over the cloth. His fingers twitched, plucking at the covers, and slowly crept back to the dressing as if the wound beneath had begun to burn.

  Down in the street a car’s wheels spun and skidded in the wet, and the yelp of rubber was followed by the hollow bang of metal on metal as it plowed into the back of a taxi. The report was sharp and loud enough to jerk Varney out of his dreams, and he sat up with a gasp, staring into the darkness, not at all sure where he was. A bright spike of pain from his shoulder made him swear and clap a hand to the place. Then he remembered everything.

  First there had been the sudden shock of the garlic, like tear gas, blinding and choking with its acrid stink; then, reeling from that, he had only just been able to make out the forms of the attackers through streaming eyes, far too late to be able to escape them even if he hadn’t been incapacitated. Indistinct dark figures, robed and hooded, and voices chanting. Unclean, accursed, creature of the Devil, spawn of the pit. And then pain had burst and flowered in his shoulder, bright hot drilling pain, and the shock had cleared his vision enough to glimpse the ugly spike buried in his flesh before everything had gone sick-dark and cold.

  Varney could only just remember coming to, and stumbling away from the poison smeared on the walls and door, and finding his way through the night to the only place he could think of that might offer him succour in this dreadful city. Then there had been a pale man with a high forehead and strange eyes—Ruthven, Lord Ruthven, as he’d so desperately hoped, still at this address after so many years—and hot blood, proper blood, wonderfully rich and heartening, and then a strange woman with pale hair, a thin, worried face. A doctor. She had looked hardly old enough to bear the title, and he had—oh, God, he’d snarled at her, hadn’t he, it had been a couple of years now, he’d been doing so well—and then there had been a confusing kind of dizziness that made everything go away for a little while.

  He shivered, cold and hot at once, and ran a hand through his tangled hair. He was apparently wearing someone else’s pajamas, which wasn’t a reassuring realization in the slightest, and the silk felt unpleasantly damp where it clung to his shoulders and back. Too warm. He must have been sweating. That in itself was worrisome.

  It had been a very long time since Varney had been actively hunted, but one did not forget the heavy fear in one’s belly, nor the acute awareness of tiny sounds and movements. He heard soft footsteps approaching the bedroom door now and froze, knowing his legs would not support him if he did try to run, if there had been anywhere to run to.

  The knob turned almost soundlessly, and the door opened a fraction, enough to throw a bar of cheerful yellow electric light across the carpet. Varney’s pupils contracted painfully at the sudden light and he shrank back against the pillows.

  “Ah,” said a voice, and the door opened the rest of the way, silhouetting a familiar form. “You are awake. How are you feeling?”

  Varney shut his eyes, relief flooding through him, as Ruthven came over to the bed and frowned at the stain of blood on the bandages. “Somewhat improved,” he said after a moment, glad his voice sounded more or less steady. “Again, I cannot possibly thank you enough for your hospitality.”

  “Nonsense.” Ruthven sat down beside the bed. “One of the junior curators at the British Museum’s something of a friend of mine and he’s been good enough to borrow some very useful books for us. We’ve found something in one of them that looks to me as if it might be the kind of dagger used in your attack. Do you feel up to looking at a few woodcuts?”

  “Of course,” Varney said, and made an effort to sit properly upright, which shot another bolt of pain through his wound and sent glittering sparks drifting across his vision. Sound faded out for a moment or two. How long had it been since he’d died, the last time? He was decaying, that’s what it was. Decay of the system.

  “I want Greta to dress that properly again,” Ruthven was saying, his big silver eyes narrowed. He reached over to rest the back of his hand against Varney’s forehead. The touch was unexpected, and Varney blinked up at him, astonished by the chill of the hand, gentle as it was. “And you still feel awfully warm to me,” Ruthven went on. “I’ll bring the books up for you, but you mustn’t get worked up about it, all right?”

  Varney let his eyes half-close and listened to the slow beating of his own blood in his ears. It was warm in here. “Of course. I promise to behave.”

  Ruthven quirked a long eyebrow at him, but said nothing further, and after another moment the door shut behind him. Varney was left in the dimness.

  Ever since the attack he’d been fighting off a dull awareness that the words used by his assailants were accurate. He was a monster, accursed of God, unclean, a dead thing walking the earth to feed on the living; each time he had been hunted before, his hunters had a reason. In all his long existence Varney had never done anyone more good than harm, nor even wanted to.

  A vast wave of melancholy, bland and grey as tears, broke over him; it was a very familiar feeling.

  Downstairs Ruthven found Fastitocalon carefully copying out the description of the Order of the Holy Sword, or possibly Sword of Holiness, into a pocket notebook.

  According to the text, the Gladius Sancti had been considered a bit weird even by the standards of the day, and had gone around setting fire to bits of the countryside and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It had been somewhat of a relief when they apparently gave up and disbanded; they had, however, merely gone underground into full-on secret-society mode. The book mentioned in particular that they had resurfaced in the seventeenth century, at the height of witch hunting, and they had not been simply after witches: Their quarry was demons, by which they apparently meant all sorts of supernatural creatures, or in practice anybody they didn’t much like.

  Which seemed to be almost everybody. The really interesting part, to Ruthven’s mind, had been the details about their rumored possession of an actual blessed sword of some kind, like the Spear of Destiny, brought out of the Holy Land—and with it a recipe for a sacred chrism to anoint ordinary blades and render them capable of slaying demons. Ruthven didn’t know about demons, but whatever had been on the blade used to stab Varney had done him absolutely no good whatsoever.

  He was, nonetheless, finally on the mend, Ruthven reminded himself, and said as much to Fastitocalon. “Wants to see what we’ve got, apparently lucid and compos mentis, if feverish. I do hope Greta gets back soon, though. I’d be happier with a medical expert on hand.”

  Fastitocalon smiled a little. “I shouldn’t worry. She’s got every intention of attaching herself limpetlike to the household as long as you’ve got Varney tucked up in your spare room. She was fretting all afternoon about not bein
g here to keep an eye on him, in between delivering lectures for my benefit.” He coughed. “You could ring her up and tell her he’s awake; she’d probably be glad to hear it.”

  “I think I ought, yes. Look, can you take that book with the woodcuts up to Sir Francis and see whether it’s anything like the weapon he remembers?”

  “Certainly, if you’re sure he won’t be put off by having total strangers visit while he’s indisposed.” Fastitocalon looked up at Ruthven with a wry smile. “I wouldn’t blame him.”

  “I shouldn’t think he’ll mind in the least. You’ll probably do him a power of good.”

  Ruthven supposed Greta was stuck in traffic; it was not a nice night to be driving. He went through to the kitchen for his mobile, hearing Fastitocalon coughing as he climbed the stairs, and felt a twinge of worry. Probably he should have bullied Fass into bed, rather than getting him to help out with the research project du jour.

  He put on a kettle, listening to the phone ring on the other end. Most likely she was stuck in traffic and too busy driving to pick up; he’d just text her instead. He was about to end the call when her voice came on the line, uneven and thickened with tears, and he could feel his pupils contracting with surprise.

  “R-Ruthven,” she was saying, unsteadily. “I’ve seen one of them. I’ve seen one of them up close, he was in my car, he was in my goddamned car, and I don’t know how many others there might be—”

  “What happened?” he demanded. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “On the bus, all the way in the back. I wanted to be around people. With lights.”

  “I’m coming to get you,” he said, turning off the stove.

  “No,” she said, and there was real urgency in her voice. “No, don’t, stay right there. Don’t leave the house, Ruthven. They’re probably watching you right now; they know where you live.”

  “Who, for God’s sake? What happened, Greta? What the hell’s going on?”

  “He said they were the Holy something.” She sounded a little more focused now. “Dressed like a monk. Talked in—what sounded like Bible quotes, all about evil and wickedness, just like Varney’s attackers—”

  Ruthven went cold all over, the little hairs on the backs of his arms prickling as they stood erect. “The Sword of Holiness?” he interrupted her.

  “Yes,” said Greta, sounding terribly young. “Yes, that was it. He was—burned. And his eyes were—it’s not possible, but they were glowing blue, I don’t know what he was, and there’s more of them, I don’t know how many, Ruthven. It’s them. The ones who are killing people.”

  “In the name of purification,” he said, not really asking a question.

  “Yes,” she said again. “That’s right. I’m—I’m two stops away from Blackfriars. I’ll be there soon.”

  The line went dead, and Ruthven took the phone away from his ear, staring down at it, his pupils slowly expanding again. It was rare for Greta Helsing to let anyone see, or even hear, her cry. That in itself was enough to send a creeping finger of dread down his backbone, a cold, sick feeling that vast things were spinning out of control.

  He shook himself and hurried through to the hall for his coat and keys and an umbrella. Never mind her instructions not to leave the house. If he started behaving like that at his age it was only a short step to hiding in the cellar and hissing at people, and he’d spent enough time complaining about that sort of thing already.

  It was, in fact, a dark and stormy night, with a little thunder muttering in the east over the Isle of Dogs, and the people he passed on the street were hurrying to get out of it, heads burrowed down into hunched shoulders. Nobody paid him any attention as he made his way toward the Blackfriars bus stop: just another man in a dark coat, perhaps paler than most, his black hair combed straight back from a high forehead. The overall effect was slightly spoiled by the fact that dampness made his hair frizz.

  Ruthven leaned against a handy wall and made himself unnoticeable, fading into the background, just an unremarkable figure in an unremarkable location. He had a few minutes to wait before Greta’s bus arrived, and he wanted to keep a good lookout for any more people interested in damaging him and his friends. Nothing seemed to pose an obvious threat, though. While he listened to the rain beat on his umbrella and scanned the road and pavement, he considered again what they’d found out so far.

  It was not immediately evident to him why something out of the more obscure and less desirable annals of history had suddenly popped up here, in London, in the present day, but the similarities were beyond question. The people who were responsible for the attack on Varney—and now on Greta, too, which Ruthven couldn’t think about too hard just yet—had clearly been reading the same books he’d just seen, and he didn’t know if it was worse to imagine that they were following the example of the past, or that they were trying to re-create it.

  And if they were determined to cause this much of a nuisance for Ruthven and his friends, what else might they be up to? There were a large number of people in London who might fall under the broad category of undead for the purposes of persecution. He hadn’t heard of anyone else being attacked by robed assassins, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening, or hadn’t happened already.

  He looked up as the blunt snout of the bus hove into view, its windows bright and cheerful in the darkness, and detached himself from the wall. First things first, he’d get Greta home and make sure she was all right, and then he would consider the reappearance of murderous monastic orders and try to make sense of it.

  The rain intensified, pouring down the gutters and washing rubbish in clots and tangles down into the tunnels below. Greta had to wait for everyone else to shuffle down the aisle and down the bus steps before she could get out—and then half-fell into Ruthven’s waiting arms with a distinct lack of grace, burying her face against his shoulder.

  He held her close, his arms around her hard and strong as iron bars, his skin very smooth and cool and white, and the familiar smell of whatever he put on his hair was absurdly comforting: something a little like roses, sharp and faintly sweet. She could feel his heartbeat, slow and even and deep, and that steady rhythm seemed to settle her own racing pulse a little.

  She clung to Ruthven, her face pressed into his shoulder and her arms wrapped tight around his ribs, and he simply held her for a few minutes, stroking her hair, and then sighed.

  “It’s a miserable night,” he said, reasonably, “and the way our luck’s been going, one or both of us are going to come down with something if we stand around here any longer. Come on, we are going back to the house and you are going to have a very large drink. Perhaps two large drinks. I haven’t decided.”

  Greta gave a little unsteady snicker and after another moment unwound herself from him, rubbing at her face, glad it was dark. She was not one of the rare but infuriating people who could cry becomingly, which was one of the reasons she tried very hard not to do it. “All right,” she said, “but if anyone comes at us with sharp things I’m going to let you handle it. I’ve had enough of that for tonight.”

  Ruthven’s mouth thinned, but he didn’t say anything, just put his arm around her waist and let her lean on him for the brief walk back.

  In the darkness and the pouring rain, not a soul noticed the two pinpoints of blue light slowly withdrawing from a storm drain in the pavement opposite the house, or the emergence, a moment later, of several terrified rats.

  In the warmth and light of the entrance hall, he took her coat—and then stared, tipped up her chin with a finger, and swore.

  “What?” She twitched away from him. Ruthven looked uncharacteristically worried, focused intently on her. “What is it?” she repeated.

  “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.”

  Greta stared at him, then took a step toward the side table with its green mirror and pulled her scarf awa
y from her neck. Where the man’s blade had bitten, over the great vein just below the angle of her jaw, an angry red furrow marked her flesh. The tissue was puffed and shiny around it, and as the relief of being back in the safety of Ruthven’s home began to sink in, she was increasingly aware that it hurt. Well, not so much hurt as burned. It felt like lye on unprotected skin.

  “Oh,” she said, blinking at herself in the mirror, and found the floor suddenly tilting under her feet like the deck of a ship in rough seas. The familiar checkered marble of the entry hall went sparkly grey. Distantly she could hear Ruthven saying some words unfit for polite company, and then the floor gave another dizzying heave and everything went away for a little while.

  CHAPTER 5

  Greta opened her eyes and blinked, and couldn’t work out exactly what it was she was looking at. A flat surface, mostly white, and the edge of some kind of raised pattern, curly leaves and flowers twining into each other.

  After a moment or two her eyes decided to focus, and she recognized the plaster-work pattern of Ruthven’s drawing room ceiling. This revelation prompted some more blinking.

  She sat up, or rather tried to, surprised to find that the room swung dizzily around her, and had to shut her eyes very tight for a moment or two until it decided to settle back down again. Her neck hurt like hell. A brief exploration revealed that somebody had taped a gauze dressing over the cut.

  A second, slower attempt at regaining verticality met with more success. Still touching the pad of gauze, Greta looked around. She was lying on the nicer of the drawing room sofas, with Fastitocalon ensconced in an armchair nearby. He looked up as she stirred, and marked his place in the book he was reading.