Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  “Yes, of course,” said the chief curator, “I’d be happy to show you—just this way.”

  The curator led the three of them past the reconstructed Tomb of Perneb, into the smaller rooms deeper into the collection. They drew stares as they went: Ms. Van Dorne’s heels clicked briskly against the terrazzo tile of the floor, and the silver-gilt hair and the huge black shades made a noticeable impression.

  It was entirely characteristic of Leonora Irene Van Dorne, thought the curator, not only to keep her oversized Dior sunglasses on indoors, but to wear as her only visible ornament an absolutely exquisite three-thousand-year-old lapis scarab that the curator could not look at for very long without wanting to snatch it away and put it safely in a case. The last time this particular museum patron had been by to inspect the display of a donated artifact, several months ago, she’d worn a gold-and-carnelian pendant in the shape of a falcon, which the curator tentatively dated to the reign of Senusret II, 1897–1878 BCE.

  Ms. Van Dorne knew it, too. That was almost worse: she wasn’t just the kind of rich that liked to collect ancient Egyptian art and artifacts, she had studied them—on her own, of course, as far as the curator knew she’d never gotten a degree in it—and was considered something of an authority on Middle Kingdom jewelry. She knew the absolute irreplaceable importance of the pieces she was wearing, and did it anyway. They were her property: she could do whatever she liked with them, wear them to walk her dog or go grocery shopping or do whatever esoteric kind of yoga she undoubtedly did—no one that age should look that good, move that fluidly. She had to be in her late fifties at the least—the curator knew that for a fact, since the Van Dorne family was sufficiently important to have their own Wikipedia page—but she looked a hell of a lot younger than that.

  And now I’m just being catty, the curator told herself. So she looks great, so what? She’s the kind of rich that can get her everything lifted, not just her face, which means she’s the kind of rich that this place desperately needs, and she just happens to like playing the cultured philanthropist as well as the amateur scholar. You can’t argue with endowment support at that level. You have to keep her happy, that’s all that matters.

  Aloud she said, “And this is our most recently installed case. As you can see, temperature and humidity are under complete control as with all our other installations, but this particular case has certain security upgrades that we believe will meet all your requirements, Ms. Van Dorne, and set your mind at rest.”

  “You know,” said Edmund Ruthven, leaning against a handy block of two-thousand-year-old stone, “you were absolutely one hundred percent right about this.”

  He had his hands in his pockets, sleeves rolled up, dark red silk shirt open at the throat, a wing of glossy black hair drooping over his left enormous silver eye, and could have stepped directly out of a fashion editorial; looking effortlessly chic and art-directed was one of the more irritating of the classic vampire characteristics. The Roman Forum provided a particularly effective backdrop at the moment: pale tumbled stone and ruined columns against the racing clouds of an autumn sky.

  “Are you perhaps having some sort of cerebral incident?” said his companion, thinking how nice it would be if all the tiresome modern railings—and the tiresome modern human tourists—could be removed for the sake of aesthetics. “You never admit it when I’m right. What am I right about, anyway? Of the many things that come to mind just at the moment.”

  The companion’s name was Grisaille, and he, too, looked intensely stylish with a cigarette carelessly held between two dark fingers and his long black coat rippling in the breeze. Unlike Ruthven’s, his eyes had gone bright red during the change, and he didn’t bother with contacts to camouflage this fact. He favored one shoulder ever so slightly due to an injury sustained that spring, in the catacombs under Paris, and only partly did so for effect.

  “This,” said Ruthven, gesturing. Grisaille watched as he flicked the hair back, and as it slipped down over his eye once more, very black against the alabaster of his skin. “Rome. All this. I haven’t been here for centuries; I’d forgotten how much I like the place, even if it is lousy with churches. I was having a perfectly lovely time in Bavaria, but I’m glad you talked me into coming here after all.” They had been in Italy now for two lazy, self-indulgent, and absolutely wonderful days.

  “Oh, that,” said Grisaille. “I’d about had enough of the old place, anyway—it was sort of nice to go back there, to see Ingolstadt again, see where it all happened, tying up loose ends, style of thing.” He hooked two fingers in a sardonic air quote. “Closure. Consider me entirely closed. Fermé. Chiuso. And I wanted to throw sticks into the Tiber and get riotously drunk on partygoers in Trastevere and make everybody in the world die of jealousy.”

  His tone was light, as it almost always was; right now the lightness was very deliberate. About two hundred years ago he’d been peripherally involved in a very nasty situation featuring a school-friend’s attempts to resurrect the dead, and his own failure to stop this friend from trying the unthinkable had been weighing on Grisaille ever since. This spring’s events in Paris had made his life both simpler and more complicated—and introduced him to Edmund Ruthven and his big shiny silver eyes, which was an excellent complication.

  Ruthven was watching him, head tilted slightly. “Well,” he said. “We can certainly manage two out of those three, although I doubt my capability to make everyone in the world jealous. Just most of it.”

  “They will be jealous of me,” said Grisaille comfortably, “the reason being I’m the one who gets to go back to the hotel with you at the end of the night and take off all your clothes, possibly with my teeth, and they do not.”

  Very faint color came and went in Ruthven’s face. Grisaille grinned: it was always intensely rewarding to elicit that reaction. “Well,” Ruthven said, “if you put it like that. Give me one of your cigarettes and let’s move on before another herd of tourists is upon us; this place is filling up.”

  “Your wish is my command,” said Grisaille, presenting his black cigarette case with a flourish. “Back to the hotel? The sun’s beginning to get a little insistent, I think.”

  Ruthven nodded. “Back to the hotel. And… if you were particularly moved to explore the logistical difficulty of undoing buttons with your teeth, I do not believe I would desire to stop you.”

  That faint brush of color high on his cheeks was back; he smiled, and Grisaille thought all over again, as he had countless times over the past six months, I am in so much trouble here—and a moment later and I so want to be.

  CHAPTER 2

  Greta’s clinic wasn’t among the grandest and most ostentatious of the Harley Street premises: like most of the rest of the street, the first story consisted of pale rusticated stonework with a balcony running along the whole of the second floor, surmounted by an additional two stories of brickwork. Her reception and waiting area, exam room, and the surgical operatory took up most of the first floor—the equipment was so heavy, she hadn’t much wanted to risk locating it any higher up—and her office was on the second floor, along with a small conference room, a kitchen, and storage; she had set up two private bedrooms on the floor above, for the infrequent times when she really did need to keep someone for observation overnight. The upper floors were accessible not just by the stairs but by a small neat elevator; her father had put the original in at great expense when he’d bought the place, and Greta’s recent refit of the premises had included a replacement for the elevator as well as for her medical equipment: one more thing for which she had Edmund Ruthven to thank.

  In fact, it had been Ruthven who’d introduced her to several of her extremely helpful friends, some of whom were currently sitting around Greta’s conference table and drinking tea out of mismatched but cheerful mugs. Outside it continued to pour; two out of three of her guests were still a trifle damp from their travels, and the third only looked faintly smug about the fact that her hair not only didn’t seem to get wet in
the rain, but was—apparently of its own accord—absently tying and untying scarlet tendrils of itself around her hoop earrings.

  “You do know how distracting that is, right?” Greta said, watching. Nadezhda Serenskaya, jobbing witch and general eccentric, grinned. Beside her sat her girlfriend Hippolyta, and on the other side Anna Volkov, Greta’s part-rusalka nurse practitioner, who was also trying not to smile.

  “It’s easier to just let it do what it wants,” Nadezhda said, “than try to keep it contained. It likes to take hairpins out and drop them on the floor with a clatter at the most inconvenient moments—it’s got roughly the intelligence of a stunned iguana, but it’s very determined when it wants to be.”

  Prehensile hair was not a trait Greta had encountered before she’d met Nadezhda, but it was apparently linked to the particular strain of magic Nadezhda’s family had inherited; a strain which, fortuitously, seemed to work rather well with the ancient Egyptian magics involved in Class B revenant medicine. Nadezhda wasn’t as good as an actual mummy would be, of course, in terms of the pronunciation and inflections of the spells needed during procedures and when placing amulets, but she was certainly good enough to satisfy Greta’s need for the chanting side of mummy treatment.

  It was one of the reasons she had been able to agree to take over for Ed at the spa for a few months: Nadezhda, Hippolyta, and Anna were entirely capable of running the clinic in Greta’s absence. “Okay,” she said. “Technically only Anna’s supposed to be operating the equipment, if you want to get legal about it, but Dez, I know you know perfectly well how to work most of the stuff: use your best judgment. Hippolyta, you’re going to be in charge of the administrative side of things, but at least I’ve got a decent computer system these days and it’s not too excruciating to use.”

  Hippolyta Hollister was American and blonde and cheerfully sardonic and also, like Greta herself, entirely ordinary and human, without any supernatural abilities whatsoever. Greta found it somewhat refreshing not to be the only one. “I’m all over it, Greta,” Hippolyta said, “don’t worry about a thing. Your records will remain in tip-top shape, I promise.”

  “You’re good at organizing things,” said Nadezhda fondly. “Things, and sometimes people. There’s appointments to be made and supplies to order and telephones to answer and peculiar people to greet; you won’t be bored.”

  “Trust me,” said Hippolyta with a smile. “I’m looking forward to this. Only I am gonna have to insist that we get this place a decent coffeemaker, stat. I can survive only so long on Starbucks.”

  “I’ll allow it,” said Greta. “Now, all my scheduled surgeries are going to have to be taken over by Dr. Richthorn in Hounslow; I’ve talked to him already and he’s agreed to adjust his schedule to accommodate it, but all the patients need to be contacted about the change. Everything else you three can take care of here, I think, without too much difficulty, and you’ll be able to call me pretty much whenever you need to, if I’m not with a patient. Anna will handle all the prescriptions. I’ve told the staff over at the Beaumont Street pharmacy that I’ll be gone for a while and to expect a lot of scripts from NP Volkov instead.

  “With regard to explaining the change in practitioners, Dez, I think it’s probably best if you just do what you’ve been doing every time you step in for me: tell patients exactly what you are, a medically trained witch. Most of them will be absolutely fine with that, but if they’re not, no one can argue with Anna’s credentials. We’ll keep the hours the same unless there seems to be a reason to change them.”

  She sat back, looking at the three of them. “Unless anybody’s got questions, let’s go show Hippolyta the rest of the place and how the computer system works—and then I’ve got to go, Varney’s picking me up at three.”

  Nadezhda smiled. “I promise I won’t let him see the hair doing its thing this time.”

  “See that you don’t,” said Greta, pink but smiling back. Varney had not reacted terribly well to Nadezhda’s hair demonstrating its curiosity the single time they’d been seated together at Ruthven’s dinner table, for which she couldn’t really blame him, but it had still been hilarious to watch him flail at an importunate tendril trying to investigate his ear. “We’re going straight to the airport, my flight’s this evening, assuming it can take off in solid rain instead of actual air.”

  “Sun and fun in the south of France,” said Anna. “You’d better send us lots of postcards, Greta. Lots of them.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  There was something pleasantly soporific about being driven through heavy rain; the rhythmic creaking of the wipers and the steady hissing of the wheels combined to make Greta feel drowsy and content. It was also nice not to be the one who had to drive in it.

  Sir Francis Varney owned two automobiles: a small and intensely high-strung MG convertible and an elderly but dignified Mercedes CLA 250. He had only very recently reentered the world after spending a great many decades in hibernation, and the adjustment to the present day had not been easy—but once he had begun it, he had learned very fast how to pretend to be a person. She couldn’t picture how exactly he had gotten a driver’s license, or gone car shopping: Varney simply did things, quietly and unobtrusively, and at some point he had apparently determined that he should become a motorist, and proceeded to cause this to occur.

  He drove well, Greta thought, watching the long mobile hands on the wheel and shift knob as he moved in and out of traffic. Not quite as effortlessly as Ruthven, who had apparently actually driven ambulances in the Blitz, but certainly well enough for her to feel confident enough to doze.

  Which she did not want to do. It would be four months before she saw him again—that was the only real drawback to this whole business, really, the fact that she was going to miss the hell out of him—and she did not want to waste any of the time she still had in Varney’s company.

  Greta smiled at herself. It was perhaps not surprising that she should have reached her mid-thirties before experiencing actual romance; she lived a particularly strange life, in a liminal space between the mundane and the supernatural, and it had been practically impossible to find anyone with shared life experience, even if she’d had the time to spend on the search. Nor was it surprising that the person she’d happened to fall for was a vampyre: most of Greta’s friends weren’t human, one way or another. It was, however, amusing that someone as courtly and old-fashioned as Sir Francis Varney should have developed a thing for her: she was uncompromisingly modern, mostly practical, and devoid of glamour except for when Ruthven had done her makeup properly.

  “You’re very quiet,” he said, glancing over at her. His voice was the most beautiful thing about him; tall and spare, long-faced, melancholy, he lacked the effortless style of the classic draculine vampires, but the voice was absolutely lovely. “Are you all right?”

  Greta laughed. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just thinking unimportant things.”

  “Worried about the clinic?”

  “No. Not really; I know Anna and Dez between them can run it, especially with Hippolyta to back them up on the admin support—and it’s not like it’s the only supernatural-medicine care location in the metropolis.” She yawned. “I don’t particularly like Dr. Richthorn as a person, but he’s perfectly competent and he was jolly kind to agree to take my surgeries for a couple of months. It’s nice not to be the single care provider in a specialization.”

  “Speaking of which, Emily’s getting along very well,” he said. “Studying for the application to the Royal Veterinary College. Learning how to be a vet seems even more difficult than learning how to be a doctor.”

  “It absolutely is,” said Greta. “Well, harder than being a human doctor. You have to learn so many different physiologies. I sympathize.” Emily was a young vampire—very young, nineteen, and would remain nineteen for the rest of her existence—whom Varney and Greta and several other people had liberated from a bad situation in Paris earlier in the year, shortly after she’d be
en turned. Currently she was living at Varney’s country house and helping take care of the rescued monsters while she adjusted to the limits of her new existence, with Varney as a sort of guide along the way. It had done Varney good as well, Greta thought, to have someone to teach: it was a lot harder for him to slip into his usual dolorous melancholia with someone young and energetic around the place. Even when beset by ridiculous weather.

  “She is… determined,” said Varney with a little flicker of a smile. “Most determined. You should have seen her stalking around with sandbags the other day, engaged in flood mitigation.”

  “How is the place, anyway?”

  “Battered,” he said. “And partly underwater. I keep wondering if this rain is quite natural.”

  “Natural?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Non-occult in nature. It seems a little improbable that it should rain steadily for this long, without some sort of—I don’t know, sinister purpose behind it. I mean, where does all the water even come from?”

  “That’s climate change for you,” said Greta, who had in fact been thinking about arks not so long ago. “At least we aren’t having hurricanes and wildfires and fifteen feet of snow, even if everyone is going to start growing algae if it goes on much longer.”

  “Climate change,” Varney said disdainfully. “I don’t know if that’s worse or better than malign supernatural force. It seems untidy, man-made weather change. Humans shouldn’t be able to have that kind of influence; they misuse it.”

  “They do,” said Greta with a smile. Varney changed down to pass a particularly anxious driver, and she watched his hand on the gearshift, how he drove; pushing the knob down just with the fingers of his left hand, and then up into fifth again with it cupped in his half-closed palm. It was the gesture of someone entirely confident in their ability to do a thing, without having to think about it. She could clearly remember how unsure he had been of himself, back in the beginning, when they’d first met: he’d been wounded by a peculiar weapon and she had been called in to treat him, and the first thing he had done on introduction was instinctively lunge at her with his teeth bared. And then apologized profusely, in a fit of miserable embarrassment. That Sir Francis was a far cry from the one beside her, Greta thought, and then: I’m lucky.