Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  “The majority of opera plots would fall to bits if any one individual suddenly decided to act sensibly,” said Ruthven, getting up. “Yes, of course. I’ll be back in a minute. Amuse yourself by working out which one of the boxes belongs to the phantom.”

  “The what?” she asked, and then made a face. “Is there a phantom?”

  “Very probably,” he said, and patted her shoulder. “You’re going to get ghosts in a place like this; it’s like having rats, it’s unavoidable. I shouldn’t worry, though: nobody’s disappeared through a trapdoor recently, and the chandelier appears to be secure.”

  She turned back to the hot, glittering open space of the auditorium, like a gilded cave – very aware of the huge brass-and-crystal wedding cake of a chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling – and tried to remember the book. She’d read it, of course, along with all the other classic horror novels, for research purposes – not that it was necessarily true. The account of Ruthven’s own activities as portrayed by John Polidori were, as Ruthven was fond of pointing out, about ninety percent pure libel, and half of what was in Rymer and Prest’s Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood was completely inaccurate. Nevertheless there were crumbs of truth in most of the classics, enough to make them worth the bother of reading, and Greta dredged up distant memories of paging through Leroux. It was First-Tier Box 5, wasn’t it, that the ghost had required for his personal use?

  Ruthven had secured Second-Tier Box 30 for them – the whole thing, at great expense; they weren’t sharing the space with any other spectators, which she appreciated. They were facing almost directly across at the huge stone-and-gold columns flanking the boxes next to the stage on the left side. There was no one in the really stupendously over-the-top box with curtains, nor the one next to it; but she saw a flicker of movement in the next one along.

  Whoever was in there had a carved stone column to their left, but was separated from the next box to the right only by the normal red brocade-and-velvet dividing wall.

  Greta thought she could remember something about the column – someone hiding inside it, perhaps – and it certainly looked big enough to contain a person, if it happened to be hollow. That was it. That was First-Tier Box 5.

  There was the flicker of movement again, and a man came into view, settling lazily into a chair at the front of the box. He wasn’t wearing evening dress, like most of the patrons: his jacket was charcoal velvet and his shirt a deep blood-red.

  Also, unlike most of the patrons, he had narrow silvering dreadlocks falling over his shoulders and halfway down his back. Greta decided that was why she was staring: that was some hair, all right, by Jove —

  — but it wasn’t just the man’s hair that had caught her eye; and just as the thought crossed her mind, he turned, looked directly at Greta, eyes large and very bright in his dark face, and winked.

  It was very quick. He returned his attention to the closed curtain, to the people moving in the auditorium below, but for a fraction of a moment he had looked right at her as if he knew she would be there.

  Also, he was definitely a vampire. She couldn’t tell the color of his eyes from this distance, but she hadn’t needed to. The instant of eye contact had given her a familiar kind of mental tingle that Greta had long ago learned to recognize, a feeling like being momentarily and pleasantly drunk. It wasn’t exactly thrall, but it said very clearly that the person looking at her was capable of thrall, should they choose to use it.

  Encountering another classic draculine wasn’t in itself all that surprising – it was a big city, there were bound to be some of them about, and attending the opera was such a vampire thing to do – but it felt somehow unsettling nonetheless.

  Ruthven came back with two glasses of champagne, and frowned at her, sitting down. “What’s the matter?”

  “I think I know which box it is,” she said, and pointed. “The one with the long-haired guy wearing a velvet jacket.”

  He followed her pointing finger, and for a moment he stiffened, as if unpleasantly surprised – the way he had earlier, on the staircase. Only for a moment.

  “Spot on,” he said. “The one containing a vampire. How very apt.”

  “He looked at me,” said Greta, and took a swig of champagne. “Right at me, and winked. Do you know him?”

  “Never seen him before in my life,” Ruthven said, shrugging. “Remember you are being extremely beautiful at the moment, and thus should expect to have men winking at you; unfortunately we are no longer in a century where it is acceptable to assault them with your fan in response.”

  “‘La, sir,’” Greta deadpanned at him, and he grinned.

  “Just so. Shh, they’re getting ready to start again.”

  Greta leaned her shoulder against his, watching as the conductor reappeared and a hush began to spread over the auditorium. She was focusing her attention directly on the stage as the house lights faded to black – but couldn’t quite stop herself glancing over to the darkened Box 5.

  She was not entirely surprised to find there were two red pinpoints of light looking back at her, steadily, just for a moment – and then they vanished as he, too, turned to look at the stage.

  “I thought the demons were very good,” Greta said later in the hotel, “although I expect Fastitocalon would go on at length about stereotyping and the importance of remembering that not every demon actually possesses horns and leathery bat wings and a tail. How many pins did you put in here?”

  She had taken off the Madame X gown, which had left pink marks all over her where various bones or seams had pressed, and was standing in her dressing gown undoing Ruthven’s careful work on her hair.

  “A sufficiency,” said Ruthven, leaning in the bathroom doorway, still pristine in evening dress. “And yes, Fass would absolutely feel the need to lecture, which is why I wouldn’t in a million years dream of taking him to an opera such as this one. I don’t know if demons even like opera. Do they have them in Hell?”

  “You know, I could make so many arts-and-culture jokes based on that question? Yes, there’s an opera house in Dis, apparently, although he’s never told me much about it. I hope he’s having a nice time down there, even if being stuck at the health spa must be rather dull.”

  Fastitocalon was an old friend of Greta’s family who happened to be mostly a demon, much the same way Ruthven was a friend who just happened to be a vampire, and had taken it upon himself to watch over Greta after her father’s death. Banished from Hell in the sixteenth century due to a complex management shakeup in the infernal civil service, he had spent several hundred years in exile on Earth as a metaphysically defective creature – and in chronic ill-health, due to the banishment having stripped away much of his power and strength. However, an official rapprochement between Fastitocalon and Hell had been achieved the previous winter, and Greta had finally convinced him to stop being stubbornly self-destructive and bloody well take himself Below to the Lake Avernus spa and get himself properly all the way fixed. It had been difficult to adjust to not having the constant faint mental presence of Fass hanging around in the back of her mind, but at least she knew his absence was simply a function of being out of range. He’d scared her badly once by vanishing abruptly, and while she missed him, it was a small comfort to know he wasn’t permanently gone.

  “He’s probably lying around doing algebraic geometry for fun,” Ruthven said. “Or something equally impossible. All those multivalent polynomials and things. No one should be that good at math, even if they are a fiend from Hell.”

  “You’re just bitter because you have to have somebody else do your taxes for you,” Greta said mildly, finishing with the pins and beginning to brush the hairspray out. “Fass can’t do latte art or use an eyelash curler worth a damn; let him keep the realm of truly alarming mathematics.”

  “I suppose,” said Ruthven, and yawned ever so slightly ostentatiously. Greta got a good look at his teeth, and had to smile: yes, those were some impressive, if neat and proportionate,
fangs.

  Her hair was more or less back to normal; now she began to take off her makeup, which was rather a relief. With the hair down and without the foundation and contouring, she was beginning to look like herself again in the mirror, rather than the strange if undeniably beautiful other-self Ruthven had created.

  He really did know makeup to a somewhat alarming degree. Greta wasn’t completely ignorant of the art; she had to wear mascara to make her pale eyelashes visible, maybe a bit of shadow, concealer – more concealer if the sleep debt was really beginning to show – but that was about the extent of her experience. Ruthven, however, was good. She’d agreed to let him do this little mini-makeover for the evening, partly because he so clearly wanted to get a chance to play, and partly because she’d been kind of curious as to what he could actually achieve with the various specialized substances in his large black bag – but it was nice to get back to being herself.

  It was almost midnight and she had to be at the Sorbonne at eight in the morning, awake and functional and caffeinated and dressed appropriately, and the extent to which Greta did not wish to do this was both significant and profound. This wasn’t one of the conferences she had planned on attending – she hadn’t even gone to this particular event in the past three years, and there were a hell of a lot of things at home she’d rather be doing than listening to her colleagues arguing about nomenclature. But there hadn’t been anybody else around who could fill in for her friend on his conference panel on short notice, so here she was: preparing to give her own paper on osteoarthritis in the barrow-wight in place of the ailing Dr. Richard Byrne’s.

  Because I’m nice, she thought sourly, not at all pleased to find that the mascara was the waterproof kind and stubbornly resisted her attempts to remove it. At least she was only on the one panel, first thing in the morning; after that, all she had to do was pick and choose which of her colleagues’ presentations she wanted to attend, which she might even enjoy, and do the obligatory round of professional social activities that were part and parcel of any conference, which she would not.

  She’d have the hotel suite all to herself for two more nights; Ruthven was leaving for Scotland in the morning, to sort out something tiresome to do with the ancestral pile. He’d planned to stay throughout the conference, enjoying a nice little weekend holiday in Paris, but apparently another part of Huntingtower’s roof had taken this particular moment to collapse and the agents had summoned him to come and deal with it.

  “You need the oil-based remover for that, not the ordinary sort,” Ruthven said after she’d spent several moments struggling with the recalcitrant mascara.

  He sounded odd. Greta turned from the mirror to look at him, one eye partially denuded. “Great, now you tell me… look, are you all right? You were acting a bit strange earlier.”

  “Of course I wasn’t,” he said. There was a faint line of worry between his long inkstroke eyebrows.

  “You were. On the stairs, when we got there, you just stopped dead for a moment and looked all faraway and preoccupied, like you’d just remembered you’d left the oven on or something, and then when we saw that other vampire with the long hair – are you sure you didn’t recognize him?”

  “Extremely sure. I would have remembered that one.” There was a flicker of wry admiration in his voice. “I don’t know, Greta. Something doesn’t feel right here. It’s not just the completely inexplicable monster in the sink, or the sense that I had on the stairs of being watched, or the handsome stranger winking at you. I can’t put my finger on it and I do so hate to claim vague forebodings but I’m afraid that’s what I’ve got just now…”

  He paused, straightening up, and came into the bathroom. “Stand still and let me do that; you’ll poke your eye out.”

  Greta gladly abandoned her attempts and shut her eyes for him; it felt kind of nice having someone else do it, little careful touches on her eyelids, the sense of someone’s face close to her own. “You’ve had vague forebodings a lot recently, though,” she said after a moment, picking up the thread of the conversation, eyes still shut. “And they almost never turn out to be justified. There was the time a month ago when you kept worrying about Things Happening to Cranswell for no reason, and the only Thing that actually Happened was he got a parking ticket, remember?”

  “Vividly,” said Ruthven. “There, you’re done; wash your face and no trace will remain of the night’s adventures. And – okay, fine, I admit you’re probably right and it’s nothing. I just hate to leave you alone here, Greta. Are you sure you have to do the rest of it?”

  “Yes,” she said, and bent over the basin. It took a minute or two for her to wash the oil from her face, and all the time she was conscious of Ruthven looking at her, silver eyes under black eyebrows, with that little worry-line that should not be there at all. When she straightened up again, she turned to him, leaning against the marble counter. “It’s not that I’m super chuffed about spending the rest of the weekend doing this, either. I wasn’t planning on coming to this thing at all, I’ve got so much going on at work, but now that I am here, I have to do what’s expected of me. Richard absolutely owes me a drink, though.”

  She remembered how apologetic Richard had been on the phone, even though she could tell from his tone that he was in fact in quite a lot of pain. Diagnosis of appendicitis: surgery required at once; recovery period measured in weeks. Chance that patient would be traveling to, and presenting a paper at, an international conference in three days’ time: nil. It hadn’t been Richard’s fault, but he still owed her one, and he’d been lucky she was available: there weren’t all that many clinicians working with barrow-wights at all, let alone ones who could present on the topic.

  “He does indeed,” said Ruthven. “Many drinks. Just call me, will you, when you get a chance to? I will fret much less with reassurances.”

  “I will call you, and tell you enthusiastically in graphic detail about all the gruesome content of the papers being given, okay? I promise. And I’ve already told Varney I’d ring him up when I am not likely to be disturbed by people asking me for my opinion on lunar affective disorder in were-hedgehogs.”

  “Good lord,” said Ruthven, but he was smiling a little. “I had no idea you were considered an expert in that particular specialization.”

  “World-class authority,” Greta told him, straight-faced, and that got an actual laugh. “Written several pounds of literature on the subject, don’t you know. Look, it’s okay, Ruthven. I’m going to be just fine. I can take care of myself in the big scary foreign city for a couple of days without supervision.”

  “I didn’t – that’s – damn. Not what I meant. I know you can, you’re perfectly capable, even if your French isn’t exactly what one might call idiomatic. It’s just my forebodings, that’s all. I’ll get over myself,” said Ruthven, faintly flushed high on his cheekbones. “Sorry if – I’m being overbearing, aren’t I?”

  “No, you’re being fretful and mother-hennish,” Greta told him, and impulsively reached out to wrap her arms around him, pull him into a hug. “I’ll be fine. I’ll be in touch when I can, and I’ll call you if anything goes wrong and I turn out to require assistance.”

  He hugged her back after a moment, and she could feel some of the tension in his shoulders relax. “And with that I shall be content,” he said, and sighed, but the faint line of worry between his eyebrows had smoothed out a little. “I think I’ll go out to eat. Leave the sitting room windows open a little for me when you go to bed, in case mine blow shut again?”

  “Of course,” she said. His bedroom was on the other side of the luxuriously appointed sitting room from her own. “I don’t suppose you’d let me see you do the bat thing —”

  “No.”

  “Worth a try,” said Greta, smiling at him. “Good night, Ruthven. Have a nice dinner – and thank you, for tonight. For everything. I had a lovely time.”

  “So did I,” he told her, and smiled back.

  She’d taken her phone out of the
silly clutch purse and returned it to her proper handbag when they got back, pleased with herself for remembering to do so, but had not remembered to get it out again and put it within easy reach for alarm clock purposes.

  When it rang a little past two in the morning, it woke her out of a sound sleep – but for a moment she couldn’t work out why it was ringing on the floor, disoriented in the dark.

  You left it in your bag, idiot, she thought, and sighed, rolling over to reach out an arm. Her fingers had just brushed the worn leather when something warm and solid covered in hair nudged itself firmly under her hand: something very like a head.

  Greta’s scream hit, and sustained, high C.

  CHAPTER 2

  B

  y the time Ruthven – hair sleep-mussed, wearing charcoal silk pajamas and still somehow managing to look elegant – rushed into the room, she had the lights on and was kneeling down beside the bed to peer underneath it.

  “Greta?” he demanded.

  “Shh.” She looked briefly over her shoulder at him and then returned her attention to the darkness beneath the bed. “It’s okay, I’m sorry I scared you, that was very silly of me, wasn’t it? Come on out, I promise it’s safe, no one’s going to hurt you.”