by Vivian Shaw
Praise for
Strange Practice
“An exceptional and delightful debut, in the tradition of Good Omens and A Night in the Lonesome October”
Elizabeth Bear
“An excellent adventure”
Fran Wilde
“Strange Practice is written with elegance, wit, and compassion. The prose is gorgeous, the wit is mordant, and the ideas are provocative. Also, there are ghouls”
Laura Amy Schlitz
“Shaw balances an agile mystery with a pitch-perfect, droll narrative and cast of lovable misfit characters. These are not your mother’s Dracula or demons… Strange Practice is a super(natural) read”
Shelf Awareness
“An appropriately dark breath of fresh air”
Booklist
“Readers will look forward to more of Greta’s adventures. An imaginative, delightfully droll debut”
Kirkus
“A book to settle into. A warm quilt of a thing that’s made for curling up with… I miss this newest Helsing already”
NPR
“This book is a joy to read, unlocking every bit of delicious promise in the premise”
B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog
BY VIVIAN SHAW
The Dr. Greta Helsing Novels
Strange Practice
Dreadful Company
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
978-0-3565-0890-0
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Vivian Shaw
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Excerpt from Chasing Embers by James Bennett
Copyright © 2016 by James Bennett
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ORBIT
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Dreadful Company
Table of Contents
Praise for Strange Practice
By Vivian Shaw
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
Plate
Plate
Plate
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
extras
For Jane Mitchell, with love and profound appreciation
CHAPTER 1
T
here was a monster in Greta Helsing’s hotel bathroom sink.
She stared at it, hands on hips, and it stared back at her. After a few moments it apparently decided she wasn’t an immediate threat, gave a froggy glup sound, and settled down in the marble basin for what looked like an extended lurk.
“What on earth are you doing out of a well?” she inquired of it. “You ought to be guarding treasure, not preventing me from brushing my teeth.”
It blinked at her – its eyes were large, also froglike, with a coppery iridescence to the irises – and then shifted a little to reveal that it was in fact guarding something: Greta’s amethyst earrings, which had been sitting beside the sink and were now clutched tightly in a clammy grey-green hand.
She sighed. “I need those, they were a present. If I get you something else pretty to hang on to, can I have them back?”
Another slow coppery blink. She went back out to the bedroom and returned in a few minutes with the watch she had been meaning to have repaired for several months now and which had not benefited from rattling around in the bottom of her handbag for the duration. It was at least still fairly shiny, even if it didn’t work, and when she held it out to the wellmonster, it reached for the watch right away, grabbing at it with both little hands, her earrings forgotten. Before it could change its mind, she reached into the sink and rescued them.
“Which still doesn’t explain what you’re doing in my bathroom,” she told it, putting the earrings on: they were only a little damp, not slimy at all. “I don’t think that was on the hotel prospectus, even for a suite this well appointed. How did you even get in here?”
It wasn’t very big, either: the size of a half-grown kitten, small enough to fit easily into the basin. The European wellmonster, Puteus incolens incolens, seldom got larger than a human toddler – and unlike the New World species, P. incolens brasiliensis, which was equipped with large pointy teeth, had few dangerous characteristics. This one looked to be in reasonably good shape, if entirely inexplicable: how had it found its way into a fourth-floor hotel bathroom without anyone noticing?
Glup, it said, and wrapped itself tighter around her broken Bulova. Greta sighed again, and reached out to stroke it gently. “All right,” she said, “you can keep that safe for me. Depositum custodi.”
The monster licked her hand.
“I don’t know,” she said that evening, looking into the same bathroom mirror as Edmund Ruthven pinned up her hair. “It was gone when I got back from the first session of the conference, taking my watch with it, I might add, and leaving no trace as to how the hell it got here in the first place – Ow.”
“If you would hold still,” said Ruthven, “this wouldn’t hurt and would also take up far less time and energy. And I will buy you a new watch, as I have been threatening to do for months; I know perfectly well you were simply never going to get around to having that one repaired.”
Greta made a face at him. She was wearing a black velvet dress she personally would not have picked out, but which she had to admit did quite remarkably nice things for both the bits of her it concealed and those it exposed. There was a certain Madame X air to the whole thing, especially when Ruthven finished with the pins and hairspray: her neck and shoulders were very white against the rich blackness, and he had somehow managed to get the majority of her hair into an elegant loose knot with several art-directed wisps escaping here and there.
The makeup was… effective. Ruthven had gone to quite a lot of trouble, and she looked not just dressed up, but something closer to transformed. He had used a whole variety of brushes to apply various things to her cheeks and eyelids, and then brought out an eyelash curler; despite her protestations that it looked like a torture instrument, she had to agree that it made something of a difference.
“I look like a high-priced courtesan,” she said, meeting his eyes in the mirror. She and Ruthven were just about the same height, and Greta knew perfectly well nobody was going to look at her when he was present: he was much prettier than she was, delicate features, black hair, and big shiny white-silver eyes with dramatic dark rings around the iris. He rolled them now and glowered back at her, almost offensively perfect in a bespoke tuxedo with tiny ruby studs winking from the starched shirtfront.
“You look,” he said, “like a very expensively soigné young woman. Which, all right, I’ll admit there is some thematic overlap. Stop making faces and put your jewelry on, we haven’t got much time, and remind me where the damn wellmonsters come from in the first place.”
“They get summ
oned,” she said, turning to get a look at the back of her head in the hand mirror. “By people who happen to need guardians for various shiny objects. It’s what they’re for: they protect treasure that’s been entrusted to them. They do breed, but very rarely; mostly you have to muck about with chanting and runes and cobwebs and frog’s blood to summon one, instead of capturing a wild specimen. The magic’s not actually difficult once you’ve got the ingredients together.”
“Cobwebs are easily come by,” Ruthven agreed, “but frog phlebotomy strikes me as a lot of effort. So somebody summoned that creature?”
“Presumably. No way of knowing who or why, or how it got in here.” The silly dress came with an even sillier purse, a tiny slip of a thing, and Greta eyed it dubiously before stuffing her wallet and phone and compact inside. She felt ridiculously naked despite the snug velvet and the matching wrap Ruthven offered her; she was used to hauling around a handbag the dimensions of a good-sized mop bucket and just about as elegant, stuffed full of everything from journal articles to mummy-bone-replacement castings, and not having that comforting weight on her shoulder was unsettling.
At least they’ll mostly be looking at him, she told herself again, fastening the ruby drops Francis Varney had given her into each earlobe. That’s pressure off me. And it’s Don Giovanni, I’ve always wanted to see that, and at the Palais Garnier. Greta scowled at herself in the mirror. So bloody well lighten up and have a nice time, Helsing, you deserve it for presenting a halfway decent supernatural-medicine conference paper on three days’ notice.
Ruthven straightened his tie in the mirror and offered her his arm. “‘Madam, will you walk?’” he quoted, and she had to smile. It was something of a relief to have Ruthven here with her: not only was he good company, but he also spoke flawless French, and hers was somewhat more in the le singe est sur la branche stage.
He’d been at loose ends just recently, having completed some home repairs that had taken months to finish, and had begun to develop the signs Greta associated with profound and pathological boredom; he didn’t go in for your standard-variety vampire angst, but he was prone to a kind of ennui that, if unchecked, was capable of developing into depression. When he’d volunteered to accompany her on this last-minute conference trip, wanting a change from London, she had accepted with alacrity.
“Yes,” she said, quoting the song, “yes, sir, I will walk, I will talk, I will walk and talk with you.”
Together they left the suite, and it was a good twenty minutes before something very hairy clambered in through the half-open window and went to hide under her bed.
The Grand Staircase of the Palais Garnier should have been an overwhelming, chaotic jumble of color and texture and shape. Every surface in the vast five-story atrium was either painted, gilded, inlaid, carved, or some combination thereof. Huge spiked candelabra jutted out from the four walls of the atrium and were thrust aloft by semi-nude bronze women posing on the newel posts of the staircase itself; the balustrades were dark red and green marble, the columns and pilasters of the atrium walls carved from two separate kinds of complicated veiny butter-colored stone, with layers of wrought-iron lacework forming balconies between them. High above, the ceiling was painted with dramatic scenes of allegories in saturated color. It should have been a cacophonous mess of design elements, and instead – somehow – it all worked. The over-the-top opulence offered the same kind of uninhibited, glittering cheer as a polished drag queen’s performance.
It was at its best when thronged with people. In the golden light each surface glowed with rich warmth, polished stone and dark bronze providing a thoroughly complementary setting for the herd of humanity passing through. Glittering jewels, bare shoulders, snowy shirtfronts brilliant against black: a moving kaleidoscope of color, accompanied by the clamor of a great many people talking all at once, being seen in the act of seeing.
From the vantage point of a fifth-floor balcony, the people on the staircase were doll-size, inconsequential. Easily blocked out by the tip of a thumb held at arm’s length.
Corvin leaned on the brass balcony railing, following the progress of two heads through the throng: one dark, one fair. The dark head was glossy, sleekly combed, with a part in it that might have been drawn with a ruler. He closed one eye a little, squinting, and gave his outstretched thumb a vicious little twist: the gesture of a man squashing some small and importunate insect.
The object of this pantomime paused for a moment on the landing, glancing around, as if Corvin’s attention had somehow registered on his senses. He was short, very pale, impeccably dressed, and even from here, Corvin could see red fire wink from his ruby shirt studs, see the pale eyes flash as he looked around. They were remarkably pale, those eyes, almost silver-white. Corvin knew them very well.
The man’s companion, a blonde in a black velvet number, had continued a few steps; now she turned to look back at him: What’s the matter?
Corvin watched as the man shook his head, dismissing whatever had caught his attention, and offered the woman his arm once more. They passed on up the staircase out of sight, and Corvin was about to detach himself from the balcony and go to find his own seat when the man and woman reappeared on a second-floor balcony across the atrium, this time holding drinks.
They seemed to be enjoying themselves.
Corvin’s fingers tightened on the railing, and there was a faint squealing sound as metal bent under his grip. Not tonight. Not tonight, but he was going to get his chance to talk to Edmund Ruthven very close up indeed —
“Ooo,” said someone directly to his left. “Varda the omi palone.”
Corvin jerked involuntarily in surprise, and swung around to glare at his lieutenant, who had silently appeared beside him, leaning on the parapet. He hated it when Grisaille did the silent-sneaking-up bit. He’d said so, multiple times. He also hated the stupid goddamn Polari gay slang, which Grisaille could turn on and off at will: not only did it sound dumb, it was four decades out of date, and it implied that he, Corvin, was also extremely gay.
“What the fuck are you doing up here?” he demanded. “You’re supposed to be back at headquarters.”
“Isn’t he pretty, though,” Grisaille said, nodding to the distant figure of Ruthven. “I can see why you want to pull his head off. It’s a nice head.”
“Grisaille,” said Corvin.
“Devout and humblest apologies, dear leader.” Grisaille sketched him a little salute. “Bad news, I’m afraid: it’s Lilith, she is throwing yet another massive wobbler for reason or reasons unknown, and I’ve been sent to fetch you home to sort it out.” He shrugged, returning his attention to Ruthven and the unknown woman on his arm. “Who’s the dolly-bird with Mistress Bona?”
Corvin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Goddamnit,” he said. “I told Lilith to lay off the junkies. And I don’t know. Some human whore.”
“Oh, not just some human whore. She must be special. Look, he’s all into her, all solicitous and caring, such a gentleman. It’s touching. In a barbaric sort of way.” He paused, as if waiting for some particular response, and then sighed. “I don’t suppose you saw what I did there.”
Corvin ignored this. “You think she’s important?”
“Could be, could be.” Grisaille seesawed a hand in the air. “Shall I make inquiry?”
“Yeah. Do that, and – keep an eye on them, damn it. I suppose I have to go and see what’s wrong with Lilith this time; I’m getting pretty tired of this shit.”
“As you wish,” said Grisaille with another little salute. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much with this opera – spoiler warning, he ends up going to Hell at the end.”
Corvin straightened up, ignoring the dents his fingers had left in the brass railing. “So do we all, Grisaille,” he said. “So do we all.”
When the curtain fell on the first act of Don Giovanni, Greta let out a breath she hadn’t actually been aware of holding, and sat back in her chair. She’d spent most of the past hour leaning on the b
ox’s red velvet balcony edge, totally spellbound.
Ruthven was watching her, amused, a little smile curving his mouth. “Having a nice time?” he asked.
“Almost every single person in this opera,” said Greta, “is behaving like a complete idiot, and I love it. Can I have more champagne?”
