Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  He held her close, vividly remembering what it had been like to hold her the night before, remembering her saying Neck or wrist, remembering her cool hands on his burned skin, and made another mental decision. She had never asked him for help, never even mentioned the idea of a loan, but he knew her practice was struggling to stay afloat, that she wanted very badly to renovate and expand the clinic, and as he stroked Greta’s hair Ruthven thought of both her and her father before her, and what they meant to the city, and wondered why it had taken him so damned long to get around to doing this.

  “What?” she demanded, when he let her go. “You’re looking smug about something, Ruthven.”

  “I have decided to take a more active philanthropic role in the life of the city,” he said—possibly smugly, she might have a point there—“or at least in one very specific aspect thereof. What do you need to fix up the clinic? New equipment, renovations, supplies?”

  “A new X-ray setup,” she said immediately. “And a proper 3-D printer to make bone replacements instead of having to sculpt them all by hand. And the roof leaks, and I’m still using a computer system from 2009, and honestly a dental operatory chair and air drill system would be perfect for the mummies, and I’d like to be able to give out more medication for free but the pharma companies just keep jacking up the price, and—oh, a solarium built on the back of the property, and—Ruthven, what are you doing?”

  “Making notes,” he said, holding up his new phone. “I don’t think I got all of that; you might need to review the list and see what else you want to add to it before we start placing orders.”

  “What?” Greta demanded, staring at him.

  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.”

  Some time later Greta closed Ruthven’s new computer and set it gently aside, rubbing at her eyes. Outside the full moon had risen, spilling a flood of silver across the city, turning the river into polished glass. Varney had drawn a chair over to the tall windows and sat basking in it with his eyes shut, paying no attention to the light in the room.

  She had been looking at medical equipment websites, and had had to stop, for a little while at least. It was overwhelming to keep realizing that she could actually buy the things she needed, new, under warranty even. She was conscious of feeling slightly light-headed with excitement as well as blood loss. The prospect of being able to actually repair all the things at the clinic that were stuck together with tape and superglue, of being able to replace her old equipment with gloriously efficient state-of-the-art versions that worked without needing to be thumped and called names, was … well, it was huge.

  She had never asked Ruthven for help before, because it had simply never occurred to her. All her life she had made do with what there was. Hand-me-down clothes, secondhand cars, used medical equipment from two decades back. It was just how things were, and always had been, and the idea of actually being able to have the things she wanted instead of just dream about them opened up such an enormous array of opportunities. Greta would finally be able to offer her patients the kind of treatment she had been wanting to provide ever since she took over the practice.

  She just wished Fastitocalon were here to see it all.

  Somewhere a cork popped, and there was murmured conversation; she paid no attention until Ruthven said, “Greta?” and she looked up to see him holding out a glass of champagne—every inch the host, even temporarily homeless and dispossessed. He had regained that irritating vampire ability to seem both entirely at home and completely in charge of the situation, and she had never been happier to see it in her life.

  She got up, taking the glass. “What’s this for?”

  “Celebrating,” he said. “Mostly the fact that we’re all still alive, to varying extents. Let us condole the knight; for lambkins, we will live. Come and be sociable.”

  Cranswell was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a drift of wrappings and boxes, playing with Ruthven’s new phone. Both he and Greta were wearing the clothes Ruthven had bought to replace their ruined things, and all in all she had to admit there was a very Christmas-morning feel to the air. The dark jeans and sweater she had on were quite a lot nicer than anything she had previously owned, and fit perfectly.

  Ruthven was pouring more wine; she picked up a second glass and drifted over to where Varney sat by the windows. He opened his eyes, blinking up at her. In the moonlight they were not just metallic, those eyes, but iridescent; she found herself thinking of black pearls, oil-slick rainbows, the sheen on a raven’s wing.

  She offered him the glass, and he took it—without breaking eye contact. Greta could feel the faint shimmery edges of his thrall, just for a moment, there and then gone again. “Thank you,” he said, and sounded as if he meant more than for this nice glass of fizzy wine.

  “You are most welcome,” she said, and sat down on the arm of his chair, and Varney caught his breath. Beyond her, Ruthven had settled into the corner of one long white and gold sofa, draping himself aesthetically against the cushions, and raised his glass.

  “If I may,” he said, drawing their attention. “I’d like to propose a toast.”

  “To what?” Cranswell wanted to know. “‘No more crazy monks—cheers’?”

  “To absent friends,” Ruthven said, mildly. “Greta, you spoke to Nadezhda earlier?”

  She nodded; she had called Dez back and spent half an hour on the phone going over case management. “Kree-akh and his people are going to be all right. A couple of them are still at the clinic, but everyone is going to pull through, and Anna’s been released from hospital.”

  “Thank God,” Varney said, and Greta looked down at him and saw that he apparently meant it. The weariness in his face was still there, but subtly lessened. He looked more … present, in the world, she thought. Less of a disinterested observer.

  She thought of him asking why do you do this job. Thought of him putting groceries away, hypnotizing Halethorpe with his eyes, bending over her hand to brush his lips lightly over her skin; thought of him lifting Ruthven over his shoulder without apparent effort. Of him saying sufficient unto the day is the worry thereof. Saying her name. No one had ever said her name quite like that, quite the way he did.

  “And I understand that Fastitocalon is in the best of hands,” Ruthven continued. “So: to absent friends, who are dearly missed but safe, and to present ones, whom I appreciate rather a lot just at the moment.”

  “That I will drink to,” said Cranswell, and leaned up to clink his glass with Ruthven’s. “Cheers.”

  “To friends,” said Varney, apparently tasting the word like an unfamiliar delicacy, and looked up at Greta. She smiled, sore but illogically happy, and touched her glass to his, and drank; for a moment absolutely nothing else needed to be said.

  It was Cranswell who broke the spell. He yawned, leaning back against the edge of the sofa, and swirled his champagne to watch the bubbles glitter and fizz. “What are you going to do now, Ruthven?” he asked. “I mean, where are you gonna live?”

  “Once my flat has been decontaminated,” Varney said, “which I expect to have to pay quite a lot to have done, you have a standing invitation to stay there as long as you see fit.”

  “Thanks,” said Ruthven. “I very much appreciate the offer, as I appreciate your current generosity”—he gestured at the suite’s elegant furnishings—“but I think I might take the opportunity to travel.”

  “What?” Greta looked up from her glass, distracted. “You’re leaving? Where?”

  “It is going to take many days for the insurance people to do their business, and many weeks for the various builders to come and go and do what they need to do in order to render the house even slightly habitable,” he said. “And whi
le I love this wretched city a great deal, for all its faults, I think I could stand to be somewhere other than London for a few weeks. I have now acquired the bare necessities to keep body and soul together, thanks to Sir Francis’s generosity.”

  “Not at all,” said Varney, eyeing a bag full of Bumble and bumble hair products with a doubtful expression.

  “And the next thing I think I shall buy,” Ruthven went on, “is a first-class plane ticket. Four, in fact, if you three would care to join me.”

  “Where?” Greta asked again. The idea of Ruthven making travel plans was something of a shock; as far as she knew he hadn’t spent much time out of the country in nearly two hundred years, not since the awkward and much-publicized business with Miss Aubrey.

  He was smiling a little, as if contemplating some private joke. It was an expression that she hadn’t seen on that face for a while now: not quite serenity, but contentment. Satisfaction. He didn’t look either anxious or angry—or bored.

  In the past week she had seen him both absolutely enchanted and coldly furious, both confident and more helplessly miserable than Greta had known he could look, but in all the terror and exhaustion of the whole miserable adventure, not once had she seen boredom cross his face. It was remarkably beautiful in its absence.

  “Well,” he said, and met her eyes, still smiling. “I’ve heard that Greece is delightful, this time of year.”

  EPILOGUE

  The afternoon sun turned the old Cretan harbor of Chania into crushed sapphire, glittering with tiny wavelets driven before a freshening wind.

  It had in fact rained three of the five days they’d been here, but at least the rain hadn’t been London rain, and had fallen vertically instead of horizontally, failing to rime everything with ice. Ruthven, philosophically, had remained indoors with the hotel’s balcony windows open and the gauze curtains blowing, filling the rooms with the smell of sea salt and petrichor.

  Crete in the off-season was refreshingly devoid of holidaymakers towing shrieking infants or getting noisily drunk. Stripped of the throngs, the island itself was revealed: an old and strong place, its bones showing, sleeping in the sun. Ruthven went around in a wide-brimmed floppy hat and enormous sunglasses, and was pleasantly aware of feeling for once very much younger than his surroundings.

  Even Varney seemed to be cheered by the change of scenery. Their hotel looked out over the harbor, the bleached-white domes of the little seventeenth-century mosque visible to the right, facing out at the lighthouse at the end of its long breakwater. He and Ruthven sat on the balcony, under the shade of an umbrella, drinking a very creditable wine and watching a speck of white out on the water beyond the lighthouse.

  “Are you sure they know what they’re doing?” Varney asked for the second time. Ruthven swirled his glass, watching the light catch and ripple, and then looked up.

  “Reasonably sure. Stop worrying,” he said. “They look like they’re having a nice time sailing the bounding main.”

  Greta and Cranswell weren’t doing too badly, although the water beyond the lighthouse was noticeably choppier. He watched them steer the rented boat in circles for a while before looking over at his companion, whose face held such a hopeless expression of longing that Ruthven had to blink and glance away quickly.

  Varney cleared his throat. “They seem to be getting on quite well together,” he said.

  It was intended to be wry, but only managed mournful. Ruthven looked back at him, measuring the expression, wondering if Varney really hadn’t seen certain of the things that were right in front of his admittedly strange eyes. “Her affections do not that way lie, my friend.”

  “What do you mean?” Varney frowned.

  “I mean,” he said, sitting back and picking up his glass again, “that among other instances I happened to notice Dr. Helsing in Athens visiting an extremely expensive boutique of the sort that purveys nightdresses. Of the frilly, diaphanous, and possibly even underwired persuasion, suitable for moonlit rendezvous.”

  “What on earth are you saying, Edmund?” The formidable brows were drawn together.

  He couldn’t help smiling. It sounded an awful lot better than Lord Ruthven. “There’s a full moon tonight,” he said. “You might consider the fact that her balcony adjoins this one.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Varney said, still frowning mightily, but there was that faint flush of color high on his cheekbones again, and the glass in his hand was not entirely steady.

  “Ah, well.” Ruthven looked complacently at the tiny ripples in the dark surface of the wine. “I think I’ll dine out tonight. Young Cranswell was going on about that retsina place he’d seen on Yelp.”

  “You’re very kind to him,” Varney said, obviously grateful for the change of subject. Out in the harbor the white speck was no longer a speck, but a boat; Ruthven could make out Greta’s pale hair tugged by the wind, Cranswell’s dark head bent close to hers as she drove.

  “His father was a good friend of mine,” he said. “I promised I’d look out for him, which, to be bracingly honest, I don’t think I have been doing very well of late.”

  “Is it really over, do you think?”

  Ruthven looked bleak for a moment, and then his smile came back, wry now, a little crooked. “No. It’s never going to be really over; as long as we exist, there will be people determined to try to remedy that condition. But this part of it is done with. Kree-akh and his people are safe back in their old home. I got an e-mail from Greta’s witch friend saying that everyone’s been released from the clinic and recovering nicely. Anna Volkov should be back at work in a couple of weeks. Even that slightly deranged kid Whitlow will be okay. He’s being cared for.”

  “‘Peace, the spell’s wound up’?” Varney said.

  “Something like that. You heard the Devil; it’s unlikely to happen again.”

  “I’m having difficulty believing any of that was real,” Varney said. “The … the Devil bit.”

  “I know.” Ruthven finished his wine, set down the glass. “But Greta said that Fass told her a little bit about Samael, about how the structure of Hell works. I gather there is a rather complicated bureaucracy keeping the place running, and sophisticated cities, and in fact a Lake Avernus Spa and Resort where demons go to take rest cures. Frankly, in a world where rebellious remnants of creation use 1940s electrical technology to broadcast their ill will upon the earth, I’m willing to believe quite a few improbable things before breakfast. And, really, I have to think that at least if I’ve been thoroughly put out and personally damaged and had my property destroyed I have at least not recently been bored.”

  “You are remarkably efficient at finding silver linings,” Varney said.

  “I find that if you dig deep enough you can almost always find something worth the effort. And, well, it is nice, to know one is not alone. Nice to have friends.”

  Varney watched the sleek white shape of the boat on the dark water, watched the little figure of Greta ready with the rope as they drifted up to the dock, watched her leap ashore. “I shall have to work at getting used to the idea,” he said.

  “Do.” Ruthven smiled at him across the table, and was pleased and only a little surprised when Varney smiled back. It changed his face, warmed the melancholy eyes, took a few years off his apparent age.

  They watched Cranswell finish tying up and join Greta, both of them walking slowly back toward the hotel—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. Even from a distance they could see the expression on his thin fa
ce. Beside Ruthven, Varney’s own smile was brighter than ever, almost the expression of a living man.

  They looked down from the balcony together at Greta and Cranswell, now wearing Fastitocalon’s hat; and watched Fastitocalon take the outstretched hands they offered him, and let them lead him home.

  The story continues in …

  BAD COMPANY

  A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel

  Keep reading for a sneak peek!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The evolution of this book has been a long story in itself, and involved the help, support, and encouragement of a great many people. In particular I would like to thank AnnaLinden Weller, best of readers and measure of my dreams; Stephen Barbara, best of agents; Kelly O’Connor, who first saw its potential, and Lindsey Hall, who brought it to fruition; Jane Mitchell, who was there almost from the very beginning, and whose character development and insight I am grateful for borrowing; Audrey, tireless beta-reader and advisor, who stuck with it for draft after draft; Melissa Bresnahan, best of cheerleaders, whose encouragement made me actually finish telling this story; Joyce Ritchie; Von Waldauer; Jesse; Julian; Roach; and everyone who ever left me a comment or took the time to tell me that they liked my stories. Thank you for coming with me this far, and I hope you stick around.

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo credit: Emilia Blaser

  VIVIAN SHAW was born in Kenya and spent her early childhood in England before relocating to the United States at the age of seven. She has a BA in art history and an MFA in creative writing, and has worked in academic publishing and development while researching everything from the history of spaceflight to supernatural physiology. In her spare time, she writes fanfiction under the name of Coldhope.