by Vivian Shaw
Greta’s desire to see something extremely unpleasant happen to Corvin rose another several points. To Corvin, and to his people; this was exactly the kind of stupid, vicious, irresponsible predatory behavior that gave the entire sanguivorous community such a shit name.
“And I was, like… okay, did he rape me?” Sofiria said, and looked up at Greta, her kohl-lined eyes huge and terribly young. “Because everything hurt. Like I’d been beaten up or something, everything hurt, and I felt really sick and thirsty at the same time, and my vision was all weird, and that was when I realized I was lying in an actual coffin, and I freaked out.”
“No wonder,” said Greta. “They left you alone in a goddamn coffin after the change with nobody there to help, that’s thirty kinds of not okay, Sofiria. You should never have had to go through any of this, you should never have been turned without consent in the first place, but the least they could do having done the thing to you is to provide a single solitary crumb of reassurance or support. I’m so sorry.”
Sofiria stared at her, looking rather heartbreakingly confused. “You are?”
“Yes. I’ve met a lot of vampires, and this kind of bullshit is roundly condemned among the sensible members of that community. Turning someone without their active and enthusiastic consent is just not done, except in a life-or-death situation, and even then it’s iffy. And leaving you alone afterward – even a voluntarily turned vampire needs help after the change; there are so many physiological effects that you have to get used to, so many things that need to be explained, things you need to be taught. Corvin should be tied up in knots and roasted.”
The girl let out a startled laugh. “It wasn’t him who – did it to me, actually; it was one of the others. Yves. He has this amazing asymmetrical haircut?”
“I expand my statement to include Corvin and his goons,” said Greta, “haircut and all. Tell me what happened after you woke up.”
“I didn’t know where I was,” she said, “just that I was in some kind of underground chamber, in a coffin, and I freaked out and screamed and then somebody did come, one of the other women, and she did something with her eyes and that kind of chilled me out, I don’t know how it works – can I do that now? Is that something I can do?”
“Yes,” said Greta. “It’s called thrall, and every vampire has some capability for it. Varies with the individual and with the subspecies, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to have that power.”
“Okay, that’s… actually cool,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “What other stuff can I do?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” said Greta, “but I want to know what they did after that. Did you get officially inducted or something, or did they just say, You’re a vampire now, oh, and here’s your lord and master, do what he says?”
“Kind of both? It’s pretty hazy, to be honest. I just felt so gross and everything hurt, my bones hurt, and I kept having these… panic attacks, or something, and then one of the others would do the eye thing and that made me feel better for a while. I don’t know how long that actually took before I kind of… got over it.”
“Did they make you go hunting with them?”
“Yeah. Well, first they brought some… some humans, that’s so weird to say, humans, like a category… some people down and showed me how to, um. How to bite them. Like where to bite, that kind of stuff. They had to do the eye thing on me – what’s it called again? – before I could deal with that, but once I started, it got easier.”
“Thrall,” said Greta. “And I’m not surprised, either at the difficulty or the easiness: you have physical instincts now which will help you do the things you need to do.”
“Sometimes it’s like I just know what to do,” Sofiria agreed. “Other times I’m, like, what the fuck am I supposed to be doing here, and then I feel really dumb for not getting it. There’s… can I ask you a gross question?” Very faint color was shading her cheeks palest pink under the glitter.
“Of course,” Greta said. I am going to inject Corvin with a syringeful of distilled allicin, she thought, and I don’t care if that equates to straight-up murder, he’s caused God knows how many deaths and his people have stolen this child’s life. Out loud she said, “I’ve heard loads of gross things in my time, don’t worry.”
Sofiria looked away, still pale pink. “So I kind of don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore. I did at first, but then it just kind of got less and less. Sometimes if I drink a lot, I’ll have to go, but it’s never much. Is – like, is that normal or is there something wrong with me?”
“That’s perfectly normal,” Greta said. “The type of vampire you’ve become is known as the classic draculine in modern terminology, after the obvious example of Vlad Ţepeş. This subspecies —”
“There’s species?” Sofiria interrupted. “And Dracula is real?”
“Very real, but he’s a recluse; he and his wife rarely leave their castle. And yes: three main subspecies, the classic draculine like you, the lunar sensitive, and the nosferatu.”
“Have you met him?”
“I have not. I know a vampire who did meet him, ages ago now, but I doubt I’ll ever get to encounter Dracula in person. I gather he no longer rides around town putting babies on spikes, however.”
Sofiria gave that startled laugh again. “Okay, wow. Um. So I’m this classic kind?”
“Yes. I can tell for two reasons: one, your teeth and eyes, and two, you’ve almost certainly drunk blood from non-virgins and not had a violent negative reaction.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Wait, what? That’s a thing?”
“It is a very well-documented thing. The lunar sensitive vampire is actually spelled with a y, vampyre, and they need to feed much less frequently, but they can’t drink from anyone but a virgin unless they want to spend several hours being extraordinarily sick. They can, however, be revived by moonlight if they get killed, and moonlight helps them recover from illness or injury. You, on the other hand, should probably try to avoid looking at the full moon: it won’t hurt you but it may sort of hypnotize you into standing there and staring at it. Incidentally, your eyes have gone silver-white – it’s either that or red, generally – and only your upper canines have lengthened; if you’d been a lunar sensitive, the eyes would have been metallic grey and the upper lateral incisors would be lengthened along with the canines.”
Greta was conscious of a kind of bone-deep relief, like putting down something incredibly heavy: it was so very pleasant to be herself again, even temporarily, to be who and what she was, to be a doctor instead of a prisoner, a woman locked up in an underground cell. To be useful. To have a purpose, other than simply staying alive.
“I kind of want to take notes,” said Sofiria. “Nobody told me any of this.”
“That’s because they’re terrible. About the bathroom thing: your digestion has radically altered itself to suit your new dietary requirements, and your stomach is capable of breaking down blood extremely efficiently, so much so that there’s little if any residue. Your intestines are basically off duty at this point. Your kidneys do still work, but there’s much less for them to do: you’re not producing anywhere near as much by way of toxic metabolites that need filtering out. When you drink a great deal all at once, your circulating blood volume increases, and the kidneys filter out the excess fluid, so you have to urinate – rarely, and never very much.”
“How do I still have a heartbeat and kidneys and stuff if I’m dead?”
“You’re technically dead in that you have died,” Greta said. “That was a temporary state you passed through on your way from mortal human to near-immortal vampire. Don’t ask me about the magic aspects of it, that’s beyond my frame of reference – but you are differently alive, if it helps to think of it that way. Your body’s still functioning, it’s just doing it differently now.”
“Can I still eat stuff?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. You can have liquids – coffee, tea, fizzy drinks, alcohol are all fine
in moderation, although you will need to pee after that because of the extra chemicals you’re taking in. Solids you pretty much can’t digest, and you’ll just feel terrible until you throw up and get rid of whatever it is. You can take most drugs, which is handy, but your tolerance has been drastically altered, so they won’t actually do all that much good except in truly enormous doses. What you absolutely cannot do is consume garlic or garlic compounds.”
“What happens if I eat garlic?”
“Not just eat: touch, inhale fumes, get close to. You’ll go into anaphylaxis. You now have an extremely severe allergy, which you are going to have to take seriously, and it will be difficult at first to predict what is likely to have garlic or garlic products in it. Do you know anyone who has a serious nut allergy?”
“One of my cousins can’t have peanuts,” Sofiria said. “At all, like, he can’t touch anything someone else has touched if they just ate a peanut. He has to carry one of those stabby pen things in case he has a reaction.”
“The pen thing is a dose of adrenaline, which makes the reaction ease off. In humans, anaphylactic shock can be fatal; in sanguivores, it’s less dangerous but still extraordinarily unpleasant. Garlic is to you as peanuts are to your cousin; I cannot overemphasize the importance of this – and it’s not just garlic, it’s several other members of the allium family to lesser extents.”
“France is full of garlic,” said Sofiria, looking resentful. “What’s a sang-whatever?”
“Sanguivore just means ‘eater of blood,’” Greta told her. “The older term was hemophagous, but these days all creatures who feed on blood are known as sanguivorous.”
“What about crosses, or religious stuff? Does that do bad things?”
“To some extent. The crucifix on its own won’t do much to you just by looking at it, although there’s mention in the literature of the ankh giving vampires a nasty headache. Don’t touch anything that’s been recently blessed; you’ll get a mild burn, as if you’ve touched something hot or caustic.”
Sofiria sat back on her heels. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I’ve studied it,” said Greta. “There’s a whole discipline of supernatural medicine which most people do not and should not know about – that’s another thing, you have to not be noticed. This is one of the things Corvin is doing wrong. Running around killing people is the kind of thing that gets you noticed, and when you get noticed, you get people after you with stakes and garlic and so on. It puts the rest of the supernatural community in jeopardy. Stay secret for your own sake and for everybody else’s. Ruthven gets extremely cross about this sort of behavior.”
“Ruthven is that guy Corvin’s obsessed with, right?”
“Is he? First I’ve heard of it,” Greta said. “But if Corvin’s been doing this sort of thing where Ruthven could see it, he’d definitely have stepped in to put a stop to the whole mess.”
“What’s he like?”
Greta leaned her head back against the wall, ran a hand through her hair. “What’s Ruthven like,” she repeated. “Let me tell you about Edmund Ruthven.”
“Are you guys friends?”
“We are,” she said. “Ruthven is a helper. I think Mister Rogers once said that: after any disaster, look for the helpers, look for the people who step in to try to make things better. I owe a lot of my clinic equipment to his generosity. He’s extremely rich, and extremely hospitable, and something like four hundred and sixty years old. And he used to drive a Volvo, which I find illogically charming.”
Sofiria looked as if she could not conceive of a situation in which vampires and Volvos could coincide. “Does he – um.” She looked down at herself, shedding glitter. “Does he sparkle?”
Greta had to laugh, and it felt surprisingly good; the little monster clinging to her shoulder glupped as it had to hang on tight against the sudden jolting. “Oh God. No, he doesn’t sparkle. Vampires don’t, you know. Not naturally.”
“I thought they did,” said Sofiria. “Like – I wasn’t sparkly because I was too new or something, so I kind of cheated?”
“The rest of them are cheating, too,” Greta told her. “I guarantee it. Nobody down here glitters without the aid of something from a tube, and – I would suggest easing off on it a little.”
“It looks dumb,” said the girl, and sighed. “This whole thing is just so stupid.”
“It is incredibly stupid and you should never have had to experience any of it,” said Greta. “It was not your fault that you were out at the club having a nice time and caught the eye of some unscrupulous scumbag with sharp teeth; nothing you did means that you deserve this. You deserved to be able to enjoy yourself safely without being attacked by vampires.”
Sofiria didn’t reply, and Greta looked at her more closely, and was a little appalled to see her eyes brimming with red-tinged tears.
This must be the first time anybody’s told her that, she realized, since it happened; she must have been thinking that it was her fault. Aloud she said, “This should not have happened to you, and I’m sorry that it did, but – you don’t have to deal with it like this, down here among the edgelords and the murderers. You can leave, Sofiria, you can escape from Corvin, you can get help and support and shelter from someone who’s competent and not a complete twit. There are sensible vampires out there. I know several of them.”
“Emily,” said the girl, almost too softly to hear.
“What?”
“My name’s Emily,” she said, and a tear brimmed over and spilled down one cheek. “They changed it, when I – when I got here.”
Greta detached herself from the wall, pulling herself close to the bars, and reached between them to touch the girl’s shoulder, a little encouraged when she didn’t pull away. “Emily,” she said. “That’s a much better name. Listen – next time they take you topside to hunt, tell them you want to do it on your own, you want to prove to Corvin you are a vicious and capable hunter all by yourself, some rubbish like that, and then leg it. Get as far away as you can.”
“They’ll catch me,” she said. “They’ll come after me and catch me and then I’ll be – either in a cell like you, or dead. Properly dead, for good. I don’t know what to do on my own; I can’t make it without these guys.”
“Not necessarily,” said Greta. “You’re a lot stronger than you think you are, and Paris is not without resources. Find a phone and call a man named Alceste St. Germain. He’s a werewolf, a friend of Ruthven’s, and he will help you.” She sighed. “And possibly rescue me.”
“I can’t,” said Emily, sounding miserable. “I can’t, I’m too scared – shit, someone’s coming…” She wiped at her face. “Is my eyeliner smudged?”
“No. Just smoky,” Greta said. “You look fine.”
Now she could hear voices from down the corridor, and Emily got to her feet in a hurry, brushing rock dust from her velvet skirt. The effort with which she slid back into the vampire sneer was evident, but once she’d got there, it was thoroughly convincing – even when she said, quickly and quietly, “Thank you – I’m sorry – thank you —” and turned to stalk away.
It was both facile and useless, after the fact, to say things like I knew something was wrong or I had a feeling something was going to happen, when in fact he hadn’t: he’d been blithely unaware of the gathering shadows underneath the city. Even if he had been paying more attention, St. Germain was just a wolf, not a clairvoyant or a metatemporal perceptive. It also didn’t help to dwell on the fact that he could have rescheduled the appointment for which he’d been about to leave when Greta Helsing had called him. He could kick himself now for not having taken the time to speak with her properly; she might have been safe and sound right now if he’d stopped to listen to what she had to say.
She’d mentioned a couple of peculiar things she’d seen. Peculiar things I’m told you ought to be informed about.
And she still wasn’t answering her phone.
He had gone back to the place where Greta Helsi
ng had claimed to be calling him from, yesterday afternoon. He’d spent quite a long time sniffing around the Place de la Sorbonne, and nothing out of the ordinary had pinged any of his senses. Thousands of people had come and gone, their scents overlaying one another in his nasal vision, trails crisscrossing one another, brighter here and there with the sharpness that meant emotional intensity, but nothing St. Germain could really consider out of the ordinary. There’d been a hint of vampire, faintly, lingering on the air, but which vampire he couldn’t tell, and there were at least two relatively blameless sanguivores known to St. Germain personally who might well have passed through this space in the past twenty-four hours. And no blood. That he wouldn’t have been able to miss if he’d been trying: blood was vivid and unmistakable even after considerable time had gone by.
Peculiar things, she had said.
