by Vivian Shaw
“You want to go back there?” Crepusculus was asking, dubious.
“No, I don’t particularly want to, but I think we ought. There’s something I’m missing.”
“What sort of something? Wait.” Brightside watched him tap his fingers on the stone parapet, thinking. “There’s got to be a reason they showed up now. Right? Some factor we didn’t take into account?”
“It can’t just be disturbance of the bones,” Brightside said. “If that was the only cause, one or both of us would probably have been here several times by now. There has to be something else, something I didn’t notice while we were working, and I don’t like missing pieces.”
As soon as the vampire’s footsteps had died away, Greta pulled at the rope binding her wrists together, testing the tension. There was some give: not a lot, but probably enough; enough that she thought it was worth trying to get free.
She bent double, arms stretched behind her, straining the rope between her wrists as far as she could manage – and, fingers rapidly going numb, managed to get one foot and then the other backward over the rope. It hurt like hell, her shoulders and wrists on fire, but when she straightened up in the dimness, her hands were bound in front of her.
At least it wasn’t completely dark in here.
She could have borne that for a while, but only a while. Now, with the faint light from the corridor falling into her cell, she was at least aware that the space around her was not closing in, that nothing was about to creep up on her in the blackness and tear off her head. At least, not without her getting a look at it first.
She peered at the knots in the dimness, once the pain had died down a little. Whoever had bound her wasn’t going to win any prizes for their technique. She’d have at the very least used a surgeon’s knot rather than a granny, or bothered to do a couple more throws; as it was, a few minutes of picking and twisting had the rope freed. Greta rubbed at her wrists, marked by red bracelets that were probably going to come up in spectacular bruise colors, and stretched, popping various things in her shoulders and back that had gone wooden-stiff. She hurt all over. The wrists were the worst of it, an ache like a rotten tooth.
How long was I under thrall? she thought. How long have I been down here? What time is it?
She had nothing in her pockets. Her handbag and phone were, of course, long gone, even if she could have found any signal underground. She couldn’t even reach Fastitocalon for help: in Hell, he was far out of range of their tenuous connection. There was no way to contact anyone. She had, very effectively, been disappeared.
She was trying to think clearly, through the sour adrenaline and the background terror, and it wasn’t working. Once before she had been lost in the darkness, with no one to find her, and it struck Greta as vaguely hilarious that she should be doing it all over again. At least this time there weren’t mad monks with poisoned knives running around looking for her.
This time there was just a vampire coven.
She hadn’t actually encountered one before; not like this. The sanguivores she’d treated tended to be singletons, for the very good reason that the larger the number of vampires in any given area, the greater the likelihood that someone would notice them. It was good sense to maintain a separation of territory, but the ones who had kidnapped her didn’t seem to be long on sensibility.
That ridiculously oversized ring their leader was wearing, for example, and the body glitter. Really? And the leather pants. Unironically, leather pants, with a velvet shirt. Not to mention Lilith’s whole Queen of the Undead outfit, which Greta thought you could probably buy online at the kind of shop that sold coffin-shaped handbags for fifty quid. And there must have been a good sixteen or seventeen vampires in that cave, which meant that Paris must be experiencing a noticeable rise in the incidence of acute idiopathic anemia. She was absolutely sure that this lot didn’t go in for the conscientious catch-and-release kind of feeding, either. There had to have been deaths.
Greta thought again of St. Germain, and wondered what other problems he might be aware of, and how long he’d waited for her at the bar before realizing she wasn’t going to show up.
He had her number, though. Her phone was probably in some storm drain somewhere, completely dead, but he had her number, and maybe when he couldn’t reach her, he might try calling Ruthven; they were friends, she’d mentioned his name —
And the hotel, the hotel would absolutely try Ruthven, assuming they could even reach him out in the wilds of Perthshire; it was his black credit card that had reserved the suite for them. It would be his problem if his party failed to check out at the required hour, but that wouldn’t be until Monday morning; she was booked through the weekend. What time was it, how long had she been down here already, was it still Saturday night? Had she been out for a few hours, or more than a day?
Greta made herself take a deep breath, fighting off the first bubbles of panic. She knew the symptoms that would accompany having fasted for a significant length of time, and she didn’t have them yet: no cold sweat, no watery weakness in the knees, no nausea or tremors, just a distant ordinary hunger. She couldn’t have been out for very long.
The hotel would absolutely be able to reach Ruthven; it was simply a question of when. She could hope that St. Germain might try to get in touch with him first. It was possible. Someone would get hold of Ruthven one way or another; and when they did, he would just as absolutely be on his way back over here to try to track her down. It was up to her to stay alive until he did.
She straightened up. She was good at staying alive. She’d had almost thirty-five years of practice. There was nothing to do, nothing useful she could achieve at the moment, except perhaps to get a better idea of where exactly she was being held.
Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and she could make out that it was a roughly rectangular chamber, deeper than it was wide. The side walls were carved right out of the white limestone, but at the back of the chamber —
The sound of footsteps startled her, and she turned, expecting to see the vampire with the dreadlocks coming back – he would undoubtedly tie her up again, and she had a feeling he’d be better at tying knots than whoever had done it the first time – but these were the sharp tap-tap of a woman’s heels on stone.
Greta stayed where she was, watching; and it was a little surprising to recognize the youngest-looking of Corvin’s coven. She could remember this one from when she’d woken up from thrall on her knees in front of Corvin’s throne, with all the vampires standing around watching; she’d noticed her simply because of her apparent youth. Can’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen when she died, Greta thought again, looking at the girl. And when was that?
She was wearing a black velvet mermaid skirt and vinyl corset, opera gloves, and more glitter than might strictly have been advised. Her hair was the particular shade of burgundy-red that you got out of a bottle, and her eye makeup called to mind Tutankhamun’s golden mummy mask, only a bit less tasteful. And she was standing there, staring at Greta, shifting her weight from one patent leather platform six-inch heel to the other.
“Can I help you?” Greta said after a moment. At least it didn’t appear that she was about to be tied up again. That was a small flicker of relief.
The girl went on staring at her for a little while longer before saying, too fast, all at once, “Are you really a doctor?”
Her accent wasn’t Sheffield, but neither was it Parisian; she sounded like a thoroughly ordinary upper-middle-class Londoner. “I am,” said Greta. “Why?”
“You’re a vampire doctor?”
“Among other things. I treat anyone who needs my help, no matter what species they happen to be.” Greta tilted her head, looking at the girl, her curiosity piqued – and thought to herself that she had seldom seen anyone look quite so uncomfortable in her life.
“Is —” the girl began, not meeting her eyes, very obviously making herself ask something she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to ask, but just then both of th
em heard voices down the hall, and she took a sharp step back away from the bars.
“Sofiria?” said somebody. “What are you doing out here?”
“I came to look at the human,” said the girl. “Lilith’s right, she’s terribly ugly.”
“Come away from the nasty mortal, chérie, we have work to do; Corvin’s asking for you.”
Greta caught her very brief and fleeting glance, before she turned and stalked away down the tunnel, her boots clicking and tapping on the stone floor. That one’s new, she thought to herself. That one is very new.
And perhaps still reachable. If I’m clever about it. If I’m careful.
She thought of Ruthven, bleak in the brightness of his kitchen back home in London, telling her about the baby vampires he’d found over the centuries, how he himself had been turned without the perpetrator sticking around to help him through the misery of the transition. How he’d been half mad with it, killing indiscriminately, and survived only by sheer luck and the kindness of strangers.
She imagined what he would say, having seen Sofiria and her eyeliner.
I have to try.
She had no idea how, or if she’d have an opportunity to make the attempt, and thinking about it threatened to bring on shaky hopeless despair – so Greta very firmly redirected her thoughts to her immediate surroundings. When there was no longer even an echo of footfalls, she turned again to the corner of the cell that had caught her attention.
Greta moved nearer, eyes wide, straining for every bit of light there was. She couldn’t make out details, but the wall wasn’t a solid face of rock. Running her fingers over the stone, she could trace the edges of individual blocks, irregular in shape, resting tightly on one another.
She bent closer to the stones, and could feel a very faint touch of air on her face. Cool air, damp and dank – there was a space behind this wall. The stones were not cemented together with mortar, just stacked, an underground dry-stone wall – good fences make good neighbors, her mind popped up, with a kind of unsteady amusement. If there was a space, that meant she might be able to get out of here – but what lay beyond was completely unknown, and she had no light, no way of making light, and who knew when the vampires were going to come back to find her digging away in the traditional and time-honored fashion of prisoners in durance vile? Greta was absolutely sure that Corvin would not look with favor on escape attempts.
She turned to rest her back against the wall and slid down it to sit on the floor, eyes shut, trying very hard not to despair. She could feel the edges of her self-control beginning to craze and splinter, threatening to bubble up with mindless acid panic, and made herself breathe deeply until she had some control back.
That faint breath of cool air touched her face again, and suddenly over the slowing thud of her own heartbeat, she could hear something else on the other side. Something like movement. Like rattling.
A hollow, scraping kind of sound, where no sound should be.
It slipped a finger of ice all the way down Greta’s spine. She had thought she was too tired and sore and miserable to move quickly at all, but that faint hollow rattle coming from behind the wall was enough to get her on her feet and stumbling all the way across the cell to the farthest corner, near the door, where the light from the passageway actually fell on her face.
Greta tucked herself as tightly as she could into the corner, her back wedged against solid stone; drew her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, buried her face against the dusty fabric of her once-respectable conference-attendee suit. Whatever was behind the wall would have to come all the way over here to get her, into the light, and she thought it would probably take long enough to get through that she would have time to scream for help. She might even receive it.
That thought was enough to let her relax despite her physical discomfort, and she found herself falling helplessly, headlong, into shocked and exhausted sleep.
The Place Joachim-du-Bellay was ostensibly a perfectly normal city square, with two rows of trees planted at its edges and a monumental fountain tinkling away to itself in the center. Only the name of the fountain, and the name of one of the streets bordering it, hinted at the original use for the space: the Cimetière des Innocents, one of the most notorious hazards to public health in eighteenth-century Paris. It was the oldest cemetery in the city, dating from the twelfth century, and had been used for mass graves almost since its beginning; when they started running out of room to put dead people in, the bones of previously buried individuals were excavated and stored in charnel houses built along the cemetery’s walls to free up space.
Conditions had steadily deteriorated, as one might expect with what amounted to a series of semi-open pits full of decomposing corpses, and businesses in the streets nearby had suffered as a result. There were accounts of dyed cloth changing color if exposed to the putrid air for prolonged periods; wine merchants’ wares, stored in cellars close to the cemetery, turned to vinegar. Finally, after an unusually rainy spring in 1780, a cellar wall in an adjoining building collapsed and an unspeakable torrent of mud and decaying flesh filled the room. Later that year further burials in Les Innocents were forbidden – but it took another six years before remediation, in the form of exhuming bodies and moving the bones to the old disused gypsum mines under the city, took place.
Once it had been cleaned up, the space was paved over and used for a market; and today it was a pleasant, quiet place, the trees and fountain providing a restful atmosphere, with no hint of the horrors that had once festered there. No obvious hint, at least. Even the psychically sensitive didn’t report perceiving any distress while present in the square, and – somewhat improbably – no recorded episodes of ectoplasmic manifestation were known to have occurred.
Until now.
Crepusculus and Brightside strolled around the perimeter of the square as the last of the twilight faded into full dark, the stars bright above them. Brightside was smoking a Dunhill in a holder, and the burning tip of the cigarette’s glow and fade was like a slow-blinking orange eye. He didn’t need light to see by; neither of them did. Nor were their presences remarked upon by any of the evening’s human passersby; as soon as they’d stepped into the square, both of them had made themselves unnoticeable. The effect did not render them completely invisible – but nobody who did see them would be able to remember having done so. It was the most common of the tricks they used in passing through the ordinary world.
“They were over by the Rue Berger side last time,” he said. When they were here last, the ghosts – there had been about thirty of them, all told, counting all the missing bits – had been milling around, plaintively demanding where their legs or arms or heads had gone; the lack of a head did not much incommode a ghost’s ability to complain. Luckily it had been about three in the morning, and the few people who were out and about at that hour tended not to be in any frame of mind to give credence to occult manifestations.
“Yup,” said Crepusculus. “Mostly. One of them was wandering around – or through, actually – the fountain. I had to go and fetch her separately, but that was an easy job. Hardly had to exert any energy at all, as I remember: I just sort of – nudged a bit, and they slipped right on through to the great beyond.”
“I am wondering,” said Brightside, “if it wasn’t too easy.” They didn’t generally have to work very hard at their jobs, but he, too, remembered how little effort it had taken with each ghost: one by one, taking them in his arms, leaning on the cobweb-tangle of metaphysical field lines surrounding the dead until they parted and let the soul slip between planes. Sometimes the tangle was difficult to unsnarl. These… hadn’t been.
And why now?
“That doesn’t sound ominous in the least,” said Crepusculus, and looked down at the stones under his feet, taking a deliberate step and then another one, and another – and stopping.
“What is it?” Brightside asked.
“Come here and feel this.”
Brightside sighed and went t
o join him, and he, too, stopped suddenly. It was like walking into a cold room all of a sudden: the air felt different, and there was something like the faint creak and squeal of rock heard in a tunnel where the ground was uneasy, although Brightside wasn’t exactly perceiving it with his ears.
“Sour ground,” said Crepusculus. It was an apt descriptor, often used of places that had seen bad deaths and hasty burials; you got sour ground surrounding abandoned gallows, and patches of it all over battlefields. “This must have been the location of one of the mass graves,” he went on, shivering. “I didn’t notice it last time. Did you?”
“No. Emphatically not. I would have remembered.” Brightside took another measured step forward, and the smell hit, unmistakable and familiar: rotting flesh. He made a face, but kept going, and after about eight more steps the smell and that uneasy faint squealing sound faded out again like a radio signal beyond its transmitter’s range.
