Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  Greta was so lost in her own swirling, treacle-thick thoughts that she didn’t notice the darkness of the shaft slowly changing color. She almost walked into Varney when he stopped and held up a hand.

  In front of them, light outlined some kind of door. She could hear things. Sirens. The sounds of a city: people, cars.

  Varney very carefully pushed the rectangular door open a little, letting in dim greyish light that nonetheless hurt Greta’s eyes with its brightness. He peered through the crack and pushed it open all the way, then stepped through.

  She followed, and Cranswell after her. They were—she blinked, looking around—they were on a traffic island between Newgate Street and King Edward’s Road. The tower of Christ Church Greyfriars stood across the street, its spire catching what Greta realized must be the light of dawn.

  It was London. Still there. Still in one piece. Although as the three of them stared around themselves a fire engine went past with lights and sirens blaring, and the smell of smoke was heavy in the air. Greta could see two—no, three—columns of black smoke rising over the rooftops.

  They didn’t just hit Ruthven’s house with their firebombs, she thought. They must have had a busy night.

  She looked down at herself. She was covered in grime—luckily most of the blood just looked black, less alarming than it might otherwise have been. The others were just as filthy. Ruthven, still draped over Varney’s shoulder, gave a little moan, and Greta felt the jagged edges of despair opening up, threatening to swallow her. He needed to be in bed, he needed medical attention, and his house was probably a smoking ruin, and they didn’t have anywhere to go.

  “What do we do now?” asked Cranswell. Whitish dust powdered his hair, turned his dark face ashy. “Not to point out the obvious or anything, but we’re kind of in bad shape.”

  “We are going—” began Varney, straightening up with the air of one making a decision. “We are going to the Savoy.”

  Greta stared at him. Under the grime his expression was unreadable. “Where I will engage a suite of rooms suitable to accommodate the entire party,” he went on. “I believe that would be an acceptable option?”

  She and Cranswell looked at one another. “Uh,” he said, “we’re not exactly dressed for five-star hotels at the moment.”

  “One thing I have found to hold true across the centuries,” said Varney, “is that people are willing to overlook all kinds of eccentricities if you present them with enough money. This way, I think.” He nodded down the street and started to walk, still carrying Ruthven without apparent effort.

  “Is he for real?” Cranswell asked, staring after him.

  Greta shook her head slowly in wonder, finding that she was not, after all, too old and worn and battered to smile. “You know, I rather think he is.”

  Dawn had run a wash of pale rose and lemon-yellow light up the eastern sky by the time they reached the river, and despite the haze of smoke in the air—she could see another column of it rising somewhere over in Southwark—Greta thought it might possibly be the most beautiful sunrise she had ever seen. The water was a flat sheet of silver, mirror-calm. No breeze stirred the branches of the trees along the Embankment. The glass capsules of the Eye, still and unmoving, glittered like jewels on a giant’s bangle.

  She had been dreading the sight of Ruthven’s house, or what was left of it. In her mind’s eye it had been reduced to a blackened cellar hole with half-burned beams jutting out of it like broken teeth. Greta knew perfectly well that the fire was not her fault, but it felt that way nonetheless, and she could not stop worrying about Kree-akh and his people, and wondering where they were now.

  There were still fire engines parked in the street ahead, firemen striding around and doing things with hoses, and a small crowd had not yet drifted away. Greta made herself stop and look over their heads at the remains of the house, and could not breathe at all for a moment in a sudden and shocking wave of relief. It was still there.

  The roof was gone. She could see the sky through the front windows of the top floor, and the entire front of the house was blackened with smoke—but as she watched, a fireman leaned out of the second-floor windows and called something down to his colleagues on the street below. There was a second floor, then. Maybe not everything had been destroyed.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Cranswell. “Is—the monk. Halethorpe. Is he still in there?”

  She hadn’t even thought of that. “Probably. Fuck. If—if they find anything left of him, if he can be identified, Ruthven is going to have to deal with even more problems than his house burning down.”

  “Greta,” said Varney, and hoisted Ruthven higher on his shoulder. “Sufficient unto the day is the worry thereof. We will deal with the difficulty of the house and whatever and whoever it may contain after we have had a chance to recover somewhat.”

  “I hope the ghouls are safe,” she said, her voice sounding thin and small.

  “So do I, but there is nothing we can reasonably expect ourselves to do for them just now.”

  “He’s got a point,” said Cranswell, and put an arm around her. “Let’s not stand around, okay? We’re kind of noticeable.”

  In fact they were far from the only filthy and dazed refugees wandering the streets after the night’s chaos, and Greta was grateful for that as they stumbled along, Ruthven’s house left behind them. She thought she had never been so tired in her entire life, dizzy with it, grateful of Cranswell’s steadying arm.

  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.

  Ruthven had woken up a little upon being deposited in a chair so that Varney could charm check-in clerks, and he had in fact made it up to their suite under his own steam, but it was very obvious that he was feeling dreadful. Greta wished she had even her basic black bag with her—that was back in the house, or whatever remained of it—but what she had was the services of a five-star luxury hotel, and it would have to do.

  She got him into bed, and by the time she had finished carefully cleaning his burns the first of her room service requests had arrived. “There, now,” she said. “In a minute you can have a nice cocktail of extremely expensive red wine and several other useful ingredients, but before that you ought to have a couple of pints of blood. I’ll go first.”

  Ruthven blinked painfully up at her, his eyes red and glassy. Photokeratitis, she thought. The light had burned not only the skin of his face but his corneas, possibly even the retinas themselves, like a mountaineer gone snowblind. “What?” he said. “No. You can’t. I can’t. I won’t be able to stop, Greta; don’t even think of it.”

  “Yes you will,” she said. “For one thing, it’s you, and for another, there’s Sir Francis handy to detach you if you do lose control, and you need this rather badly at the moment, so shut up and bite me. Neck or wrist?”

  He closed his eyes tight. “Greta—”

  “Neck,” she said, “or wrist?”

  After a long moment, eyes still closed, Ruthven said reluctantly, “Neck.”

  She leaned over him, tilting her head to expose the great vein in her throat, and although she had been prepared for it, expected it, the sudden force with which he struck took Greta’s breath away. He held her tight in his arms; she could not have pulled away if she had wanted to.

  There was pain, at first, quite a lot of it—he wasn’t in any condition to be gentle, and she was fully conscious and unthralled—before the anesthetic in his saliva turned the pain into a spreading sensation of warmth.

  She had been bitten before, several times, but you did not ever quite get used to the feeling of your own blood not flowing out on its own but being drawn. It was a different kind of sensation than ordinary phlebotomy, and that was partly due to the sudden noticeable drop in blood volume; even half a pint was enough to make you feel decidedly peculiar.


  Greta knew roughly how fast he was drinking, and how long she could let him go on doing it, and when that time approached she said, “Ruthven,” and was not entirely surprised to receive no answer whatsoever. “Ruthven,” she repeated, sharper. “That’s enough, Ruthven. Stop.”

  Nothing. Damn; she was going to have to yell for Varney, and it was going to be embarrassing. “Ruthven. Edmund. It’s me, it’s Greta. Stop.”

  This time he shuddered, hard. She was about to start calling for help when she felt the change: the sudden pressure of his tongue against the wound in her neck, and a sharp prickle as the clotting agent he secreted went to work.

  He unwound his arms from her and raised his head, gasping, and she made herself sit up slowly to avoid passing out, blinking through a wave of sparkles. The change was remarkable, even with only about a pint’s worth in him; the angry redness of his skin was visibly fading, and as she watched several of the smaller blisters simply shrank back into the skin and disappeared.

  “Greta,” he said, sounding stricken. “I’m so sorry, I—”

  “Hush. You were fine,” she told him. “You needed it. You still do, as a matter of fact. Let me get Cranswell, and then you need to rest. We all need to rest. And shower.”

  Ruthven laughed a little, and looked surprised at himself, and then laughed some more; after a moment Greta found herself joining in. It felt surprisingly good, even if she was sore all over; it felt like incontrovertible evidence that she was, in fact, still alive.

  She got up, carefully, hanging on to the bedpost until the dizziness passed, and went to tell Cranswell it was his turn; she was glad that only one task remained to her, and that it was one she could perform without moving. It took a little while for her battered mind to dredge up Nadezhda’s number; her own phone had been lost somewhere in the tunnels between Ruthven’s house and the deep-level shelter, but Greta got it right on the second try—and was grateful that it went straight to voice mail. This was not a story she felt capable of recounting at any length just now; nor was she up for answering questions, no matter how well-intentioned. She told Dez’s answering machine about the fire, and asked her to take care of the ghouls, and left it at that. Sufficient unto the day, Varney had said, and that would have to do.

  Someone was talking, not very far away. Greta rolled over in bed and buried her head beneath the pillows for a long moment, before it occurred to her to wonder where the hell she was.

  Memory came back in shreds and snatches. She emerged from the pillows to find the slant-light of late afternoon falling in a long bar across the bed, and sat up, taking in her surroundings: a gold-and-white hotel room large enough to hold a small board meeting, with a view out over the river. Someone was still talking not very far away. In the next room.

  Greta got out of the palatial bed and stifled a string of curses. She was stiff and sore all over; everything hurt. At least she was clean, and wearing a clean hotel bathrobe. She vaguely remembered showering, having to sit down in the shower because she’d been too light-headed to trust herself not to fall; she didn’t remember actually getting into bed.

  Hobbling like a mummy, she made her way over to the half-open door, listening.

  “‘… and while the investigation is not yet complete, we are confident that the individuals responsible for last night’s multiple cases of arson are no longer a threat.’ Good news there from Scotland Yard this afternoon, Sheri.”

  “That’s right, Neil. While the Met is still not sharing many details of their investigation, sources indicate that the rash of arson fires and the Rosary Ripper murders are, in fact, related.”

  “But is this the end of the terror? Public opinion of Scotland Yard has been at an all-time low over the past six weeks. Above all, people are asking the question, Is it safe to live in London? We asked residents to share their thoughts on the string of gruesome tragedies, and we’ll have that and more when we return. For BBC News, I’m Neil Davis.”

  “You’re a prat,” said the voice of August Cranswell. She pushed the door the rest of the way open and was rewarded by the sight of Cranswell in a matching white terry-cloth robe with SAVOY on the pocket, sitting at a table and consuming room-service bacon and eggs. “Not you,” he clarified, looking over at Greta. “Him. Hairspray and nuclear-white teeth and stupid goddamn questions. How are you feeling?”

  “Old,” she said, and came over to join him. “Stiff all over. What about you?”

  Cranswell poked vaguely at the square of gauze taped to his throat, stark white against his skin. “Not bad. Still kind of woozy, but it’s getting better.”

  “Good,” she said. “Drink lots of fluids, take some vitamins, don’t try to do anything terribly energetic for a week or so. He took more from you than me, I think.” The gauze wasn’t really necessary—the little wounds made by Ruthven’s teeth healed very fast into slightly itchy bumps—but at least it stopped him scratching at them. “What else did the news say?”

  “Basically just that,” Cranswell told her. “They don’t know what the hell was going on, but they aren’t going to say so, and it seems to be over.”

  “It feels like it’s over,” Greta said. “It feels … ordinary. I didn’t know how much I missed ordinary. It’s been the longest week of my entire life. What time is it, anyway?”

  “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.”

  “I’ll remember that. Did anybody call?”

  “Yeah, while we were all still asleep,” he said. “There’s a message. I didn’t listen really close, ’cause it was for you, but your friend with the weird name has everything under control, apparently?”

  “Oh, thank God,” Greta said, and stole a piece of bacon on her way over to the desk. According to the display, Nadezhda had called a couple of hours ago. On the machine she sounded tired but in decent spirits.

  “Greta, I’m assuming you’re still asleep, after what you told me this morning. Everything’s all right—I’m at the clinic. I’ve got Hal Richthorn here to lend a hand, and all but two of the ghouls have been treated and released—burns, smoke inhalation, one broke a leg when a bit of debris fell on her, but they’re mostly in decent shape. I’ve postponed the trip to Scotland, so I’ll be here to help as long as you need. And don’t worry about Anna; they’re letting her out of hospital today and I will make damn sure she doesn’t try to come to work until she’s properly recovered.” Nadezhda paused. “Give me a call when you get a chance, okay? I want to know if you’re all right.”

  Greta put the receiver down slowly, the wave of relief making her dizzy all over again. She didn’t deserve friends like this, but she was very, very grateful for them.

  “Everything okay?” Cranswell said, looking at her inquiringly. She nodded, straightening up, and realized how hungry she actually was. The last time she’d eaten anything was … good Lord, sometime early the previous evening? And then she’d donated blood. No wonder she felt loopy.

  “Apparently so. I’ll call her back when I’ve had something to eat,” she said. “And coffee. Do you want more coffee?”

  “Of course I want more coffee,” Cranswell said. “I don’t know when the others are going to be back, they went … shopping.”

  “Shopping,” said Greta. “Ah. Yes. Ruthven likes shopping. How was he, when they left?”

  “Seemed fine, maybe a bit tired. All that sunburn actually turned into a really faint tan, that—that was kind of amazing. He went from being seriously not okay to ‘let’s go max out Varney’s credit card’ in the space of a few hours.”

  “That’s more or less what I would expect,” Greta said, picking up the phone again. “That kind of vampire healing is fast when it’s working properly. One day I’ll write a paper on comparative tissue trauma recovery rates in the classic draculine and lunar sensitive subspecies of sanguivore. Hello, room service?”

  Ruthven did, in fact, enjoy
shopping. A great deal.

  Even if it wasn’t technically his money, just at the moment, that he was spending. He had begun to say something to Varney about paying him back as soon as he got the banks to issue him replacement cards and Varney had cut him off with an expansive gesture, It’s the very least I can do after all your kindness and hospitality, and in any case I have rather more than I could easily spend on my own. It was a vampire thing, and also apparently a vampyre thing. Very long life and wise investments tended to go together.

  First, of course, they had bought him a new phone, which he had used to set in motion the tiresome and exhausting work of dealing with insurance agents, and then gone round to the banks—and then Ruthven had begun to shop in earnest. There were so many things he needed, after all. A computer, clothes, shoes—a car could wait, he would weep for the Jag later and the Volvo had probably earned its retirement anyway, but for the moment cabs would suffice for transportation—hair products, accessories, the list went on.

  By the time they returned to the Savoy that evening, laden with bags, Ruthven felt not good, exactly, but something close to himself again. 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. Ruthven made a mental note that the first thing he would do when he got the new MacBook out of its box would be to pay Varney back via online transfer, and he was briefly and vividly glad that such things were possible in the modern age.

  He was quiet as they rode up in the elevator, thinking. One week. A lot could happen in a week. A lot had happened, to him and to all of them. He was tired, but not exhausted—and almost pleasurably aware of the difference. The thought of the house still hurt, but the hurt was cushioned, insulated, behind the knowledge of the work he had set in motion to repair, to rebuild, and to replace.

  When they got to the room he only just managed to put his bags down safely before Greta—still wrapped in her hotel bathrobe, the clothes she had worn under the city having been beyond the hope of repair or rescue—hugged him so hard his ribs creaked.