Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  “I’ll go and pick that up as soon as it’s ready,” she said, “or send Anna, if she’s not in the middle of something. In the meantime, can you tell me what happened? I don’t … want to pry, but there have been some strange and rather awful things going on, people on the surface being attacked by a group of madmen dressed up as monks—”

  Kree-akh hissed, sitting up straight, his eyes glowing brighter in the dimness of her office. “Monks,” he said. “It was monks did it. Humans, but not—ordinary humans, they smelled wrong.”

  “Did what?”

  “We were … taken by surprise,” he said, looking both furious and somehow embarrassed. “My sentries were overcome, it was—most of us were asleep, and there were many of them, fast and strong, and they could see in the dark as well as we can. I lost two young ones. The rest of us escaped.”

  “Leaving behind everything,” Greta said, slowly, realizing it. “Including your meds. I am … so sorry, Kree-akh. I don’t know what’s happening, or what to do about it—”

  “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.

  When she looked back at him Kree-akh was watching her steadily, and it was not at all easy to hold that gaze—red light, in dark hollows—but she did it anyway. For a long moment he simply looked at her, and then spoke a sentence or two in ghoulish. Greta only caught a little of it: something about respect, or earned trust, she wasn’t sure. One day she really would get around to properly studying the languages her patients spoke.

  He sighed, and passed a hand over his face, and looked—briefly—very human indeed. “Yes,” he said in English. “You are sorry, Doctor, for dead who are not your own, or even your own kind. That is … rare, I think.”

  “There isn’t much I can really do to help, I know,” she said, “but if there is anything, please will you tell me? And—are the rest of you safe?”

  “For now, yes. We have moved away from the tunnels they invaded. There are other places in the undercity to make a home; and when my people have settled there will be time to observe these monk-men and find their weakness.”

  Kree-akh didn’t need to add and avenge our dead. The combination of needle-teeth and red eyes was suddenly very frightening indeed. “They attacked a friend of mine,” she told him, looking away from the teeth. “Or a friend of a friend, at any rate. And one of them had a go at me. If they’re the same people, and I cannot think there are two groups of homicidal monks with glowing blue eyes roaming London at the same time.”

  “Blue eyes,” he repeated. “Yes. They saw in the dark, with blue eyes. Blue flames. Like—” He waved a clawed hand irritably, searching for the word. “Gas. Like gas burns blue.”

  “They look burned,” Greta said. “At least the one who attacked me was covered in what I think were fresh burn scars. I wish I knew who they were.” Too many bits of information were swirling in her head—too many questions and answers that she couldn’t clearly piece together. “Or what they were. Because they aren’t human, or at least not entirely human, anymore.”

  Kree-akh hissed to himself, and clittered his claws together: an unconscious gesture, like lashing a tail. “They tried to harm you?” he said.

  “Tried,” she told him, and pulled down the collar of her sweater to show him the pad of gauze. He hissed again, looking rather terrible, and she hastened to add, “It’s okay, I’m all right, I wasn’t badly hurt. And I’m staying with Ruthven. Where it’s safe.”

  He nodded, and the terrible look passed off into an aching kind of tiredness. Greta tucked back her hair and said, rather tentatively, “I’m pretty sure you could, too. Stay there, I mean. You and your people. In the cellar of the Embankment house, if you truly ever are in need of a safe place to hide beyond the tunnels.” It wasn’t her cellar she was volunteering, but she knew Ruthven would almost certainly agree. Almost.

  “I will remember,” Kree-akh said, and got up, steadying himself on the edge of the desk. “That is better. I feel almost well.”

  “Good.” Greta got up, too, reaching for her phone and tucking it into her pocket. “I’ll go round the corner and collect your medicine, shouldn’t be very long. You can wait in here or go out to the waiting room, whichever you prefer.”

  “Here,” he said. “Here is … safe. Everywhere else is too bright.”

  It was obscurely gratifying to have her office labeled safe. Greta smiled at him and went out to tell Anna she would be right back.

  Her phone buzzed as she was about to leave, and she paused at the door to read the text. Harry had come through for her after all: Hey, Helsing. Got your mass spec results. Whatever you’re into is some fascinatingly weird shit. Emailed you the numbers.

  Greta thought fascinatingly weird shit was the understatement of the century.

  On an ordinary map of London it would be difficult to make out the precise route taken by the creature that had visited Crouch End the night before. Some of the roads he had taken did not follow anything written down for the general public to see.

  He was aware that he had failed in his mission and that God was displeased with him; but God surely knew he had tried, and at least he had wounded the woman—even if he had lost the sacred blade in the attempt. When he got back to his brothers he would tell them about it, and do his penance for failing to complete his mission. There would be more vigil in front of the blue light; he longed for it, in a cloudy, indistinct way, even as he feared the pain it would bring.

  Not terribly far away, in a different tunnel, another pair of pinpoints of light paused, blinked on and off, tilted, as their owner listened to blue-lit words that echoed inside its head. It had been heading north to evict a couple of ghouls from their refuge in an overflow chamber. Now it turned, retraced its steps through bobbing debris. It had something more important to do than chase off the unclean eaters-of-flesh from the underground passageways that now belonged to its Order; it was charged with intercepting anathema.

  In its glass prison, the jumping spark of the light-of-God hissed and crackled and flung deadly light across the walls of its little room. Under the steady atonal humming, another sound rose and fell in electrical singsong, almost like words; a faint sibilant voice, muttering to itself in the blue heart of the glow.

  CHAPTER 8

  Above, in the city, it was raining again: that slow but insistent icy rain that characterizes London for much of the winter. Not quite cold enough to be actually frozen; certainly cold enough to be utterly miserable for anyone unlucky enough to be out in it.

  Varney was, despite Greta’s instructions, out of bed. He’d been anxious and irritable all day, ever since the doctor had left against sanguivorous advice to go and … do whatever it was she did, presumably dose other monsters for the grippe and sew up holes in their hides. Wrapped in a borrowed and very beautiful dressing gown that was considerably too short in the sleeves and hem, the vampyre stood at his bedroom window and glowered out at the afternoon.

  It had been a very long time since Francis Varney had come across any humans so matter-of-factly involved with the world of the supernatural—perhaps because he took pains to avoid getting to know humans at all. That she was so unafraid of him troubled Varney. He was not sure what to make of it. Or of her.

  Varney’s hand crept to the dressing taped over the wound. His memory of recent events had come back to him with rather more clarity than he would have liked, as the fever receded, and he couldn’t help replaying certain aspects of that evening in his mind.

  What he had told Greta was true. He did try to minimiz
e the number of occasions on which he lunged at somebody, fangs bared, upon being woken unexpectedly, but it was … still an instinct he could not completely quell. The mortification upon realizing what he had just done—to a total stranger—had been rather worse than the physical effects of his wound, for a moment or two.

  Then he’d said something stupid, he couldn’t quite recall what, and after that things went first blurry and then blank behind a haze of sickening, vertiginous misery. He could just about remember cool hands on his face, a delicate touch on his skin, in the middle of all that pain.

  When he’d next become aware of the world he had felt different somehow. The wound still hurt dreadfully, but it was a kind of hurt he knew, could recognize, from countless other injuries. Between them Ruthven and Greta had helped him up the stairs, and Varney neither remembered nor wished to know which of them had been responsible for undressing him—

  He winced away from the thought, and went back to staring out of the window, 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.

  Perhaps it was just decay of the system affecting his mind, or the fact that he’d been practically in hibernation on and off for several decades now and had not had a great many recent encounters with women, but Varney was finding it increasingly and extremely difficult to avoid thinking about her. He could feel the beginnings of the same inappropriate fixation that he’d had on Flora Bannerworth, all those centuries ago.

  She wasn’t anything like Flora, or any of the other maidens he had pursued with such single-minded devotion—none of them would have countenanced the prospect of becoming a physician, to be sure, and he didn’t know if he actually approved of it as a career for a lady—but she was not unattractive, in a pale, pointed fashion.

  Ugh, he thought. Shall I never be free of unseemly desire?

  It wasn’t simply desire, either. There was a kind of miserable fascination in this, Varney’s mind trying to fit Greta Helsing into any of the available preshaped settings in his view of the world and failing completely. She was odd, and he could not work out quite why she did what she was doing, or why anyone would want to. He could more or less understand the desire to repair things that were broken, but the effort, and time, and energy, a human would have to put into first studying and then qualifying and then maintaining a medical practice for the undead seemed to him utterly incomprehensible. Not only the job she did but the lengths to which she must have to go in order to keep that job, and her livelihood, secret from the waking world. It was so strange. Everything was strange, and nothing he knew seemed to make any kind of sense, and this house was the only place just at the moment where Varney felt even slightly safe or secure. 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.

  Oh, but the world is a cold place, he thought.

  A suitably cold one, of course. Varney couldn’t possibly object on moral grounds to being disliked and disenfranchised—he was dead, he fed on the life of the innocent, the blue-eyed creatures who had wounded him were actually quite right in claiming to do the work of God, but … it was cold, for all that. He shivered, leaning against the window frame and watching the distant scurrying of pedestrians, the beetle-black cabs making their way along the Embankment. Were they, too, aware of the icy and uncaring nature of the universe? They were his prey—or, well, certain among them were—and he himself was now prey of a subtly different kind.

  Absently Varney rubbed again at the dressing over his cross-shaped wound. It ached now, rather than that awful dizzying burn, and the ache was accompanied by an increasingly maddening itch.

  “You oughtn’t to be up,” said a voice from behind him, and Varney was sufficiently far gone in his familiar unhappy reverie that he jerked in surprise and turned to find Ruthven watching him from the doorway. His host’s sleeves were rolled up and his tie loosened, but the hair remained neatly combed back. “Not that I can blame you,” Ruthven went on. “Lying around all day is intensely boring. Do you feel any better?”

  Varney almost guiltily dropped his hand from the dressing. “Er,” he said. “Yes, thank you. Quite improved.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Since you are out of bed, would you like to come downstairs and keep me company for a while?”

  His immediate instinct was to demur—no, really, he was always better off alone, Ruthven didn’t need his melancholy presence—but something about the way Ruthven was looking at him seemed to change his mind. “If you’re quite sure …?”

  “I am.” Ruthven gave him a rueful smile. “And I’m sure I’ve got some dressing gowns somewhere that are proportioned for ordinary people. You needn’t put up with mine.”

  Varney felt his face go ever so slightly warm in embarrassment.

  Downstairs in the drawing room Ruthven had lit a fire and pulled most of the curtains shut to block out the greyness of the afternoon. “Look, I don’t suppose you particularly want to think about this all that much,” he said, “but I’ve been messing about plotting all the recent attacks on a map of the city, and I wondered if you’d have a look at it and tell me if anything strikes you as corresponding to a pattern.”

  Varney settled in an armchair by the fire. “Please? I’m … it’s so wearying to feel completely useless.”

  “Don’t I know it. All right, back in a minute.”

  Rain spattered against the tall windows, and the applewood of the fire crackled. Varney was conscious of the sheer comfort of the juxtaposition and sat up a little straighter, for once not tempted to rub at the hole in his chest. It really was a nice room, he reflected. He’d not been in any condition to appreciate its harmonious proportions before. Old Turkish rugs, a huge mahogany sideboard clustered with big crystal decanters and stacks of National Geographic back issues; books stacked on the floor, books on desks and tables, books packed on built-in bookshelves up to the high ceiling, with an antique set of library steps resting against the highest shelf. There was a comfortably beat-up globe in one corner. The furniture was a disorganized mixture of baroque Victorian pieces, including what appeared to be a genuine horsehair chaise longue, and more comfortable and contemporary sofas and armchairs. A large flat-screen TV lurked in one corner, atop an unobtrusive cabinet containing an entertainment system. It fit Ruthven quite well, Varney thought. A mixture of ages.

  Ruthven came back with a laptop, setting it down on an exquisite little inlaid eighteenth-century table, and turned it so Varney could see the screen: it showed a shot of central London on Google Maps. Ruthven had put in little pushpins at the location of each of the “Rosary Ripper” murders, and a further set of markers for the attacks on his friends. Kensington, Crouch End. The path Cranswell had taken from the British Museum was marked in small blue dots.

  Varney peered at the computer, and his eyes widened. “My God, there’s been … eleven murders now?”

  “It seems to be speeding up,” Ruthven said. “Multiple killings in one day. And they’ve found the same sort of cheap plastic rosary at each scene.”

  Varney squinted at the screen and adjusted the angle. “They must have some way of getting around the city, quickly and easily, without being seen. I doubt they have invisibility cloaks, or a group of very sympathetic cabbie friends, and dressed up like Benedictines they would not escape notice.”

  “The Underground,” said Ruthven. “Right? They’re using the tube tunnels. Have to be.”

  “It does seem likely.” Varney turned the laptop back to him. “Although I don’t know how easy it would truly be to creep around in the tunnels without being caught.”

  “Transport for London does get awfully intense about people wandering around restricted areas,” Ruthven said, t
houghtfully. “Especially since the bombings back in 2005, and the attacks in Europe. I’d imagine they’re being extremely vigilant with their security cameras and patrols and so on. Maybe the disused stations … or there’s some other tunnels, must be, for power cables and steam …”

  Varney sat back in his armchair, thinking. “What I find unsettling is the … the uncertainty of the nature of these creatures. These people. They are human, or they are so close as to be able to pass for human, and yet the blue eyes are very much not.”

  “I know,” said Ruthven. “In the book Cranswell found, the Gladius Sancti were just people, humans like any other order of rather obsessive zealots who took things too far in the name of God. It didn’t mention blue-glowing eyes. I have a feeling that would have been included.”

  “And why is this happening now?” Varney said. “I have been in and out of London for centuries, as have you and, I gather, several other creatures of our kind; why are madmen, human or otherwise, suddenly objecting to our presence now?”

  “Why would a secret society like the Gladius Sancti surface in the modern world at all, for that matter, and where the hell did they get those spikes and the magic stuff to put on them, is what I want to know.” Ruthven sighed. “They were supposed to have brought the recipe for their demon-slaying poison out of the Holy Land back in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but the book didn’t mention what they did with it after that. Or what it actually contained.”

  “Do you suppose,” said Varney, slowly, the idea coming to him like something large and unpleasant rising to the surface of still water, “do you suppose that someone has actually found it?”

  Ruthven sat back, looking at him. “The recipe?”

  “And the knives. And their … particular scripture. The verses that tell them what to do.” Varney could recall only snatches of it, but it had sounded very biblical indeed—but no part of the King James he could remember specifically covered the hunting of demons.