Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  Then again, he thought drily, she’s not exactly in a pleasant situation to begin with, and wondered what Corvin did plan on doing with her. Not that there was really very much doubt on that particular score.

  Corvin’s people went out to eat most nights, but when they ordered in, somebody had to dispose of the leftovers. More than once, Grisaille himself had been tasked with hauling bodies; the undercity was honeycombed with tunnels and passageways, and they had long ago found a way into the ancient sewer system from the quarry network useful for disposing of remains. He had a sudden very vivid mental image of pale hair disappearing into the darkness, black noisome water closing over a pointed, intense little face.

  Grisaille shivered once, hard, and reapplied his gently mocking half-smile, which had slipped off his face entirely. He had escorted the doctor back to her cell and locked her safely inside, and it was not his problem; nothing, in fact, was his problem other than following Corvin’s orders, and that was how it ought to be. Grisaille had no desire to be the one in charge. That came with far too much responsibility.

  Or at least it should, he thought, if the leader is one who’s actually worth following. I should know; I wasn’t.

  The only good thing that had come out of his own brief abortive attempt to gather a small group of vampires under his command was the sure and certain lesson that he wasn’t cut out for it; but Grisaille had never been any good at being alone for very long, even when he’d been alive. Even a suboptimal position in an organization like Corvin’s was better than facing the world on his own; at least here he had a role, things to do, commands to follow, instead of having to make all his own decisions.

  He took a long, deep breath before returning to the party; and when he got there, he drank four Bloody Marys in rapid succession, heavy on the vodka and light on the blood.

  The scene was already fairly well advanced: one of the humans was dead, and the other two would be joining her shortly. Grisaille watched with some distaste, noticing the youngest of their little group fastened on to one of the victims, and looked away – and saw Lilith with three others busily at work on a second. There was something repellent about a flock of vampires all feeding from the same victim at once, two from the throat, one from the wrist, one from the femoral artery. It reminded him of the clusters of rubbery parasites attached to the legs of a leech-gatherer: something Grisaille hadn’t had cause to think about in nearly two hundred years.

  As he watched, Lilith – who had gone for the right side of the throat, as usual, her favorite site – raised her face to snarl at the others. She said something he didn’t catch, but the import was clear; reluctantly they disengaged, leaving Lilith with the human all to herself. She pulled the naked body into her lap. It was one of the young men, her preferred type of snack, and there wasn’t much left in him, but Grisaille saw him move a little with a faint choked moan.

  He wondered how much dope they’d given him. All three of the humans had been pretty much drugged insensible.

  Not my problem, Grisaille thought again, and made himself another drink.

  Varney had forgotten exactly how long it had been since he’d done any sleeping. It felt like days, but he checked his phone and found it was still the same day – or the night of the same day – he’d begun by waking early to get to the airport to meet Greta. There had just been rather a lot happening between then and now.

  After St. Germain had led them around the Paris streets in a widening gyre beginning in the Place de la Sorbonne, finding only that Greta had been there at some point and that her tracks abruptly ended with no clear explanation of where she had subsequently vanished to – after that, the werewolf had said with what Varney considered an unnecessary level of drama that he was going to ring up Hell to ask for further instructions.

  Varney had leaned against a convenient wall while St. Germain, once again bipedal and only slightly disheveled, talked on his phone; it turned out that the particular demon he was asking for assistance was located north of the river, and they’d have to either walk or take a cab. Tiredness washed over him in low, long comber-rolls like a tide beginning to come in —

  “Varney?” Ruthven was saying at his elbow. “Varney, are you all right?”

  He looked down at the rose in his buttonhole, drooped in an art-nouveau curve. “I don’t know,” he said honestly, and then straightened up. “But I will have to be; so lead on.”

  Ruthven gave him an uncertain look but didn’t protest further; and the three of them walked on two legs each across the Pont au Change, pausing only briefly in the center of the span because of a brief chilly sensation Varney associated with ghosts.

  Who died there? he thought, following the others. Who died there, that in dying left a stain on reality?

  It was probably for the best, given Varney’s already upset state of mind, that he did not look back from the Place du Châtelet to see a figure in a dark blue greatcoat and an official hat climb to the parapet of the bridge and stare down into the river, particularly since this figure faded back out of existence just at the moment when he took that first heavy-booted step out into nothingness, accompanied by a faint and unplaceable snatch of bright music.

  Varney didn’t remember a great deal of that brief walk; at some point St. Germain led them to a building on the corner between two streets, leaned on the buzzer and talked rapidly in French to someone on the other end, and then shepherded him and Ruthven up three flights of stairs. That exertion was enough to shake Varney out of his vagueness, and he was blinking but present once again when a short orange-haired individual opened the apartment door to let them in.

  “Alceste,” said this person, looking up at St. Germain. “I’m so very glad you’ve come. Can I possibly offer you dinner?”

  “This isn’t a social call,” said St. Germain. “Irazek, what’s going on? These gentlemen are trying to locate a friend of theirs who’s mysteriously gone missing, and I’ve had reports of all sorts of uncanny things —”

  “I know,” said Irazek wretchedly. Varney noticed that he actually did have a pair of tiny horns, as carroty-orange as his hair. They resembled carrots, in fact. “I do know. There’s – I have to do so many calculations – the esso traces – I don’t know where Mr. Brightside and his friend are, I haven’t seen them since this afternoon, I do hope nothing’s happened to them —”

  He looked from St. Germain to Varney and Ruthven, apparently noticing them for the first time. “Can I offer you dinner?” he said, and then went a shade of pink that clashed with his hair. “I mean. I can’t – quite – I don’t have proper, um, supplies for your specific – I’m sorry —”

  Ruthven had clearly been overcome by the same wave of contact embarrassment that had just engulfed Varney, and almost in unison the sanguivores offered two variants on “Please don’t go to any trouble, it’s quite all right, we’d love to stay, a little red wine is quite sufficient.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Irazek, looking uncertain.

  “Quite sure. Although I should love to see your kitchen if that would be all right. I’m still remodeling mine – it’s so difficult to work out which built-ins I absolutely can’t do without,” said Ruthven smoothly, stepping forward. Varney envied him the ease and speed with which he’d recovered from the embarrassment. “Show me?”

  If he hadn’t been so tired and cross and miserable, Varney might have been touched at the simple, guileless, sheer pleasure on Irazek’s face. He stood aside so that Ruthven could follow Irazek into his kitchen and rhapsodize about equipment, or space, or whatever it was people who cooked actual food liked to have available to them.

  He looked up at St. Germain, who gave him a look that communicated quite clearly his own lack of clues on the subject. “Um,” he said.

  “Would you like a drink?” asked the werewolf. “It’s too bad of me to commandeer Irazek’s whiskey but I think we might both be due a little something.”

  Varney hadn’t had anything at all since the glass of brandy on the
flight over, and he really ought to protest, but the idea of a little bit of something to take his mind off the universe was awfully tempting. “My thanks,” he said. “I’m – going to use my status as a stranger in a strange land to bypass the usual tempora et mores.”

  That made St. Germain smile, a sudden and intensely warm expression that lit his eyes, made him look years younger. “Well said. Here.”

  Varney took the cut-crystal glass with a shallow amber flare in its depths and, for the first time since he’d discovered Greta was missing, felt somewhat as if things might possibly be all right after all.

  CHAPTER 7

  T

  he Scotch had helped; having something to do helped more.

  They’d discussed the situation, in Irazek’s kitchen, and Varney and Ruthven had been delegated to go out into the city and talk with the established vampires while Irazek and St. Germain looked at the strips of paper marked with squiggly lines, which apparently had some particular significance. He wasn’t entirely clear on what the squiggles indicated, only that it was worrisome, and Varney had never been very good at sitting around patiently while people discussed something he couldn’t understand.

  Some of the fatigue had lifted, or perhaps he had simply stopped noticing it so much; the moonlight helped a little, and the night air was pleasantly cool against his face.

  He had no idea what to expect. St. Germain had told them that Lucia and Élise were as much fixtures of Paris as he himself; they’d been in the city for several hundred years now, behaving themselves, keeping under the radar. If there had been a recent uptick in vampire activity, they were almost certainly not to blame for it – but they might know more than St. Germain had been able to find out thus far.

  The address was in the Avenue Montaigne. Varney didn’t have a good handle on property values in Paris, but even he could tell that this was seven- or eight-figure territory; the ground floors of the buildings were taken up with Versace and Chanel boutiques, Harry Winston diamond showrooms, the kind of restaurant that styled its name in lowercase sans serif. It reminded him of Mayfair – only the people window-shopping or stalking along on their own business had the sort of style that Varney had come to identify as innately Parisian. Everyone looked as if they’d just stepped out of a magazine editorial, except Varney himself; Ruthven fit in much more easily.

  He stood watching the traffic come and go while Ruthven rang the bell of an immeuble sandwiched between Chanel and Ferragamo storefronts. There was a pause, and a woman’s voice said, “Allô?”

  “Mademoiselle de Favand?” Ruthven said, his accent pitch-perfect Parisian. “So sorry to bother you, but I’m a friend of Alceste St. Germain and he suggested you might be kind enough to lend us a few minutes of your time.”

  Another pause, and then the voice, sounding amused: “It’s Madame, in fact; and tell Alceste we are capable of operating the telephone; he could simply have called us rather than sending his friends on quests through the Paris streets. Do come up, Monsieur…?”

  “Ruthven,” said Ruthven. “And my colleague Sir Francis Varney.”

  “Lord Ruthven?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said, glancing sideways at Varney.

  “Our household is honored,” said the voice, and a moment later the door unlocked itself with a click.

  Inside, the building was classic Deco. The elevator had been modernized, but everything else looked to Varney as if it had been preserved perfectly in its original form. “You don’t know these people, do you?” he asked Ruthven on the way up.

  “Not as far as I’m aware,” said Ruthven. “It’s entirely possible they might have read that godawful Polidori book; in which case this will be extremely embarrassing.”

  “Not as embarrassing as Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood,” said Varney drily. “Practically nothing is as embarrassing as that. Polidori at least wasn’t being paid by the word.”

  Ruthven sighed as the elevator came to a halt. The apartment was on the sixth floor. “Let’s get this over with,” he said. “I have no idea what to expect.”

  Neither did Varney. The vision that greeted them in the doorway was impressive: a tall woman, as tall as Varney himself, wearing something draped out of chestnut satin, a long cigarette holder poised between her fingers. Her hair was cut in a short twenties-style bob, so deep a red it looked almost black, stark against her marble pallor; it matched her lipstick.

  She looked them up and down for a long moment, pale eyes giving nothing away, and then the dark red lips curved in an amused little smile, as if she had come to some conclusion. “Welcome to Paris, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m Lucia de Favand. Won’t you come in?”

  Varney and Ruthven exchanged a glance – there was a certain undeniable step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly aspect to the situation. She moved aside to let them pass, and Varney thought about the old vampire trope of needing to be invited in order to enter a dwelling.

  Inside, the apartment was gorgeous even by Parisian standards. Lucia took them into an elegant living room overlooking the avenue, three tall windows opening to a balcony that ran the entire width of the building. He could see the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the river; the same angle as the London Eye seen from Ruthven’s home on the Embankment. “Do sit down,” she said. “Élise will be along shortly; I’m afraid we’re extremely late risers.”

  “I’m terribly sorry —” Ruthven began, but she waved the cigarette holder at him.

  “Nonsense. Always a pleasure to make the acquaintance of nobility.”

  Varney watched Ruthven go faintly pink for a moment. He was sensitive about the Lord thing, which Varney had never been able to understand: his own title was simply a part of his name, his history, nothing he had to be particularly proud of or embarrassed by. “This is a beautiful apartment,” he said, moved by an obscure urge to take the woman’s attention off Ruthven for a moment or two: it felt a little bit like a searchlight when Lucia turned to him.

  “And you would be Sir Francis Varney,” she purred. “A vampyre. How fascinating; I don’t believe I’ve met one in half a century. May we offer you some refreshment?”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself,” he said. He could hear the leaden weight of his accent, although his French vocabulary had come back without a great deal of difficulty. “We won’t take up much of your time, Mademoiselle —”

  “Madame,” she corrected again, and turned to look over her shoulder, where another woman had just come into the room. This one made Varney think immediately of an 1851 Cordier bronze bust he’d seen once: a young woman with tightly curled hair in a short waterfall of locks, the burnished planes and angles of her face, neck, and shoulders both defiant and graceful. African Venus, it had been called, and although this woman was wearing a silk robe and slippers rather than a strapless gown and half a ton of jewels, the effect was just the same.

  Lucia held out a hand to her, and the woman’s patrician face warmed in a smile as she came forward into the room, perching on the arm of Lucia’s chair. “My wife, Élise,” said Lucia, smiling up at her, and Varney knew he was staring and found it extremely difficult to stop.

  “Enchanté,” said Ruthven beside him – his self-possession had come back with that odd frictionless ease. “Madame and Madame. I am truly sorry for bothering you so early in the night.”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Élise. “Has Lucia offered you a drink?”

  “Of course I did. These gentlemen are friends of Alceste’s; he’s sent them over here to talk to us about something terribly mysterious.”

  “What does Alceste have on his mind that’s so particularly pressing?”

  “Well,” Ruthven began. He was entirely over his embarrassment, Varney saw; he was doing the slightly infuriating ineffable-style thing once more, completely at home in these surroundings. “He thinks there may be a new vampire group in town. A – coven.”

  The distaste with which he pronounced the word would have amused Varney in o
ther circumstances. He was still trying not to stare at the women – Élise had her hand on Lucia’s shoulder, casual easy intimacy – and redirected his gaze at the collection of extremely beautiful celadon ware on the coffee table instead. “There have been deaths,” Ruthven continued, “bodies drained of blood floating in the Seine, and apparently a strange vampire was sniffing around in ghoul territory – and a friend of ours has disappeared. St. Germain suggested we ask you for help.”

  “A coven,” repeated Lucia, evidently amused. “Is that what they’re calling themselves. Well. Poor Alceste, he’s been so distracted just recently – he’s writing a book, did you know, of all the things – it’s no wonder he hasn’t had time to keep a closer eye on the baby-vamps.”

  “Then there is a group?” Varney said.

  “Oh, absolutely. They’ve been here for – how long, darling? Several months at least.”