by Vivian Shaw
Grisaille and Ruthven looked at each other. “You need—doctors who aren’t demons,” Ruthven said.
“Yes, and where d’you think I’m going to find ’em in the middle of a damn war?”
“I know where you can get at least three,” said Ruthven. “Right now. Page Fastitocalon and tell him to get hold of Greta Helsing and her clinic staff.”
Faust stared at him. And then, without a word, turned on his heel and set off toward his office at the other end of the ward, moving fast for a stocky, middle-aged man.
They had retreated to the rock-cut chambers—not because of the hail, or the rain, as both of them had passed off within half an hour of Van Dorne’s awful exit, but because the clearing night sky had been wrong. Instead of the vast scatter of diamonds she’d grown used to seeing overhead, the sky had been empty pure black from edge to edge, save only one point of light that Greta could not look at without wanting to scream. She couldn’t identify what it was about the single star that was so terrible, but all of them had felt it: being anywhere its light could reach was unspeakable, having that wrong illumination touch their skin was not to be borne: a single glaring eye in the vault of heaven.
All of the mummies were out of bed. Antjau, still wheezy but much better, and Maanakhtef, limping slightly on his repaired foot, and Nesperennub with his sterilized and pristine wrappings; Bameket, Nefrina, Mayet. Tefnakhte was wearing all his jewelry again. Some of the nurses were crying, others praying in a constant muttering undertone, rocking back and forth with rosaries dangling from their folded hands. Two of them had fled in the spa’s livery car, and Greta had no idea if they’d managed to make it down to the city, and if so, what they’d found there. She wondered vaguely what Ed Kamal was doing in Cairo, if that terrible star was looking down at him, too, shining its poisoned light over bloodstained sand dunes. If he was already gone.
She and Varney and Cranswell were sitting together, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth. Greta’s hand was twined with Varney’s; neither of them seemed to notice. Every now and then one of them would draw breath as if to speak, and then stop, and exhale: there was simply nothing more to say.
When the voice came in her head, it felt very far away, dim and faint, as if behind a wall of some deadening insulation, and it took Greta a little while to realize something was calling her name, and a little longer to care.
Go away, she thought at the voice. Leave me alone.
Greta, listen to me! It was familiar, somewhere beyond the numbness. It was a voice she knew. Greta Helena Magdelena Helsing, will you bloody well pay attention?
Go away, she said again. I don’t want you. I don’t want anything.
This isn’t about you! the voice shouted, louder now, the volume knob turning up inside her head. Have your hopeless despair fit later, if there’s a later to have it in, you are needed NOW!
Greta blinked. Fass? she asked.
Who else would it be? Faust needs your help down here right now, you and Anna and Nadezhda, we’ve got wounded angels needing treatment and half the bloody hospital staff is incapacitated, stop wallowing and do your job.
My job, she said slowly. She had thought there would simply not be anything left for her to do, that she was over, that her usefulness on the skin of the world was a thing past and completed and done with, like the rest of her, and it had felt freeing; this, now, was like being wrenched back to life. Pulled from some dim endless lake and pounded, slippery and shivering, back to life and breath and function. My job.
I’m sending someone up there to fetch you, Fastitocalon said. Call the others. Tell them to expect us.
Just like that, she was alone again inside her head. Greta sat up slowly. Beside her, Varney and Cranswell stirred.
“I think it’s not over yet,” she said. “I think there’s—something left to do.”
“Like what?” Cranswell asked.
“Fass says they need me in Hell. In the hospital. For—I don’t know what’s going on, he said something about wounded angels—”
“Angels?” said Varney. “In Hell?”
“I don’t know,” said Greta. “But… I have to go.”
She fished out her phone, which still—improbably—had over half its battery left (when had she had a chance to plug it in, what day was it, how long had this been going on?) and dialed Nadezhda in London. Under the dregs of stirring adrenaline she had begun to feel something else, a small and terrible bloom of hope, but as the ringing went on and on, it began to wilt—
“Greta?” said the voice on the other end, her friend’s voice but nothing like her friend: she’d never thought Nadezhda Serenskaya could sound so small and frightened. “Greta, is that you, is—where are you?”
“Still in France for now,” she said. “Dez, are you even slightly close to okay?”
“No,” said Nadezhda, “but—is—did it… rain there, too?”
“Yes,” she said. “Is that star—”
“Yes,” said Nadezhda. “We’re in the downstairs bathroom, it’s the only room that hasn’t got a window other than the cellar, and the cellar’s flooded—God, that light touched me and I wanted to die, Greta—”
“I know. It’s awful. But I need your help,” she said. “You and Anna. Right away. Don’t ask questions I can’t answer, but we’re all three of us needed to help out at a—field hospital.”
“What field? What—which war?”
“Possibly the last one,” said Greta. “Stay there, all right? I’ll come for you.”
“How?” Nadezhda almost wailed.
“How’s not a useful question,” Greta said. “Do you trust me?”
“… Yes,” said the witch, sounding heartbreakingly tired.
“Then trust me,” said Greta, and hung up. She slipped the phone into her pocket and went to talk to Sister Brigitte, who had managed to get most of her remaining staff to calm down a little; there was no more weeping, at least, although the constant muttering of prayer had not ceased.
“There’s no good way to say this,” she said. “I have to leave. I—I’m needed elsewhere.”
Brigitte just nodded. “I am afraid none of us can come with you.”
“I know,” said Greta, “and I would never ask that of you. Thank you so much, for all your work, throughout all of this”—she couldn’t find a word to encompass everything they’d gone through in the past few days—“throughout. It’s been a pleasure working with you and your staff.”
“Likewise, Doctor,” said Brigitte, and held out her slim dark hand exactly as she had when Greta arrived, unsure of herself and so excited to be there. “You are not as skilled as Dr. Kamal led us to believe. You are a great deal more.”
Greta felt herself blush, which was faintly surprising: she hadn’t thought she retained sufficient emotional capital. “Thank you,” she said, and shook her hand firmly. “That means a lot.”
Brigitte nodded again. “If you are needed, then go. We are—as well as we can be here, and my staff and I are capable of managing the patients.” She did not add, Not that we’ll need to for very long; she didn’t have to.
“Yes,” said Greta quietly, and turned away without saying good-bye, certain she would never see Sister Brigitte again. The others were waiting for her; they got up as she arrived.
“Varney, Cranswell,” she said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next—”
“We’re going with you, of course,” said Cranswell. The level in the whiskey bottle had substantially declined. “Fuck sitting around here waiting for locusts, or boils, or whatever’s next.”
“And to borrow a phrase, fuck not being with you,” said Varney, enunciating with exquisite clarity. He so seldom cursed that it was always effective, and Greta wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest and clung.
She didn’t let go even when the demon Fass had sent appeared to flip them; in fact, Cranswell simply wrapped his arms around the both of them, and it was noticeably less disorienting to be translocated i
n close contact with other people. Once the fizzing sparkles around the edges of her vision had died away, she found herself in the foyer of what could have been any high-end hospital on Earth; one curved wall was entirely window, looking out over a fantastical landscape she had only heard described, and she realized they must be inside one of the eight towers of Dis. Somewhere beyond all the emotional exhaustion of the past forty-eight hours, Greta was conscious of a distant but vast excitement.
She unwrapped herself from Varney and Cranswell, looking around. A few moments later another group of people popped into existence: Nadezhda, very white, the mass of her hair for once subdued in a tight knot, and Anna, short and sturdy and also pale enough for the spray of freckles to be visible over her cheeks—and Hippolyta, clinging to Nadezhda’s hand and looking as if she was about to be sick.
A moment later Greta was hugging her friend as tightly as she dared. “Dez,” she said, “Dez, thank you for coming, it’s—I’ll explain everything later. Come on, we have to find Dr. Faust—”
“This is Hell?” Nadezhda asked, her eyes still too wide.
“Nor are we out of it,” said another voice, and they all turned to see a stocky man in a surgical gown liberally spattered with what looked like gold paint. The woodcuts didn’t really do him justice. “Johann Faust. You’re Helsing?”
“I’m Helsing,” said Greta. “This is Nadezhda Serenskaya, she’s a witch, helps run my clinic, and Anna Volkov, mostly human and part rusalka, who’s my nurse practitioner.”
“Come with me,” said Dr. Faust, turning on his heel. “Your friends can wait somewhere comfortable, I’ll get someone to see to them, but I need all three of you to scrub in right away. How much did Fastitocalon tell you?”
They were hurrying to keep up as he led them back through swinging doors into what looked like any active trauma center in any major hospital Greta had ever seen, except for the—enormous white wings attached to most of the visible patients, or the gold paint splattered everywhere. “Nothing at all,” she said. “Only that you needed backup.”
“Short version: War in Heaven with a bunch of invading angels, our lot’s getting absolutely destroyed, Sam’s sent demons up to do a bit of smiting back, they’re evacking casualties down here for emergency treatment, which is a hell of a strain on our resources purely for numbers’ sake, but I’m also dealing with the compounding factor of most of my staff being extremely allergic to angels and thus not a lot of use. We’ve started to get wounded demons as well, but the majority of the casualties are angelic in origin.”
“Ah,” said Greta. He had led them back to a scrub station and was removing his soiled gown; Greta took off her somewhat bedraggled white coat as well. She looked down at the ring on her third finger, remembering how it had expanded the last time she’d had to take it off to scrub, and shrunk to fit again as soon as she put it back on; this time was no different, the metal heavy and blood-warm, feeling almost alive.
She slipped it into her pocket and began washing her hands and forearms, while Faust did the same. Beside her, Anna and Nadezhda, also scrubbing, were muttering to each other in Russian. “You really want me to do emergency surgery?” Greta said to Faust. “I have to say it’s been a long time since I did my surgical rotation; mostly what I handle is minor outpatient stuff.”
“I don’t care, you’re apparently basically competent and not violently allergic to angel dander; that’s the best I can hope for right now,” said Faust. “I have a couple of vampires doing triage and patching up the simpler cases, and what’s left of my staff is handling the rest, but I can’t do all the surgery myself and some of this trauma’s extensive. It’s all sharp-force trauma, stab and slash, nobody up there is using projectiles: they’re just hacking at each other with swords from what I can make out. Gloves and gowns,” he added to an assistant, who helped the four of them get ready.
“Doctor?” asked Anna, apparently over the initial shock of the situation. “I’m not a surgeon, I’m a nurse practitioner, I’m not qualified—”
“Do the best you can,” said Faust. “That’s all I can ask. We need all the help we can get.”
CHAPTER 16
Varney watched as Faust led the women away, past the swinging doors into the noise and clatter and chaos beyond, and thought he might have some idea what the mummies had felt like when Van Dorne did her little trick: a kind of awful drawing strengthless feeling, a heaviness in his chest threatening to pull him off balance, shot through with a leaden certainty that he would never see Greta Helsing again.
At least I gave her the ring, he thought, not really aware that he was swaying. At least I did that much.
“—Varney?” someone was saying, and there was a hand on his arm. He opened his eyes, not having been aware of closing them, and found Cranswell and the blonde woman staring at him. What the hell was her name, it was something entirely improbable for an American, he couldn’t remember—“Varney,” Cranswell said again, “you should sit down.”
“I’m fine,” he said, straightening up, despite the awful weight in his chest.
“You’re not even close to fine,” said the woman. “Fuck if I am, either, but you look awful. You went grey.”
Varney blinked at her. “… Decay of the system,” he said vaguely. “I want renovating.”
“What you want is some goddamn blood,” said the woman. “And I want a lot of scotch. I’m betting you do, too, August.”
“Yeah,” said Cranswell, without taking his hand off Varney’s arm. It felt strange, that touch. Strange, but not unwelcome. “Yeah, I was just getting started topside, with the fucking Star Wormwood and all.”
“Hey!” the woman called to a passing demon. “You, with the cool horns, where’s the nearest bar that serves virgin blood and single-malt?”
“What, together?” said the demon, who looked entirely nonplussed at being addressed by a random living human. It also clearly had places to be in a hurry, and was carrying a clipboard. “Eww. You want Grakkar’s place, first floor, Tower Two,” and it went on its way.
“There, see? You just have to ask the locals,” she said. “Lean on me.”
Varney was about to insist that he was absolutely fine and could walk unaided when some of the color washed out of the world for a few moments, dizzying. A sturdy shoulder inserted itself under his arm, and he had to admit he was grateful for it. “When’d you last have anyone to drink?” she asked as they walked to the elevator bank, Cranswell on his other side.
“I can’t remember,” he said. “I did go down to Marseille but—couldn’t find anyone suitable, at least not right away, and I didn’t want to leave Greta for very long, and how is it that you know so much about vampyres, miss?” All he really knew about her was that she was with Nadezhda Serenskaya and had been working at the clinic.
“Oh, I like reading the classics,” she said, and grinned when Varney groaned.
Grakkar’s turned out to be the equivalent of a semi-classy local bar, not very crowded—but the patrons who were there had their collective attention on the three TVs mounted around the room. The three of them got stares as they walked in, but not for long: they weren’t as interesting as whatever was on.
Varney subsided gratefully into a booth, rather than trying to find somewhere at the bar itself, and closed his eyes. “Thanks,” he said in general. “I wonder if this place takes credit cards.”
“We’ll have to find out,” said the woman, whose name he absolutely could not ask at this point—was it Athena or something?—“I’ll get the first round in.”
Varney just nodded, eyes shut. He really had pushed it too far, in the last several days: he hadn’t felt like this in centuries, the kind of exhausted and weak where standing up straight was an achievement. Nor was he actually expecting the place to have virgin blood on tap, so that when the heated glass was set down before him and the scent hit him like a blow, arousing desperate thirst, he opened his eyes and stared at it in honest puzzlement.
Dark red, re
al, warmed to living blood-heat, the real thing—he could smell it, there was a definite difference with virgin blood, this was the thing itself, and Varney took the glass in both hands and downed its contents in three huge swallows. It went down like silk and spread gorgeous, impossible warmth through his whole body, driving back the heaviness, even lessening the general despair a little. It took him a moment or two to remember his companions, and his manners, and—
“Could I have some more,” he said, and the woman and Cranswell, across from him in the booth, grinned at one another.
“Coming right up,” she said. “I suspect, actually, you can get a glass of pretty much anything in this place if you ask real nicely, including liquid nitrogen or motor oil,” and returned to the bar to order him another.
“Are you okay?” Cranswell asked, hands around his own glass. “You look way better, but—”
“I will be,” said Varney. “Thank you. So much.”
“What are friends for,” said Cranswell, “and also this is way better than sitting around in some godawful—uh, excuse me, terrible waiting room while everybody else plays M*A*S*H: Paradise Lost.”
The woman came back—Hippolyta, his mind finally supplied, all his thoughts less sluggish now with proper blood inside him—and set down a second glass. Varney sipped at this one, savoring it, warming from the inside out. “Thank you,” he said. “What—is that they’re watching on the television?”
“Looks like cable news to me,” said Cranswell. “HNN.”
In fact, it was ENN, according to the chyron at the bottom of the screen. Erebus News Network. Varney directed his attention more closely, and stared at the words scrolling across the chyron. Active combat in Heaven continues as casualties mount on both sides… still no clear explanation for the initial invasion… preliminary modeling suggests interreality rift…
“Um,” said Cranswell. “Shit. Remember Djehuty being all, like, ‘this magic is from some other universe’?”
“Was the spell trying to let something in?” Varney asked, staring at the screen. “Is that what it was for?”
