Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  “She’s still sleeping,” St. Germain told Varney. Greta had taken a shower lasting about half an hour when they’d returned to his flat, and subsequently curled up in the werewolf’s spare bedroom and passed out completely. St. Germain had pulled the blankets over her and left her to it while he made coffee and got Varney his wine. “I want to let her sleep as long as possible – but we have to do something about these people. I don’t completely trust Grisaille, but we need him to get in there and to show us the way, and for what it’s worth, he smells as if he’s telling the truth rather than waiting for an opportunity to betray us.”

  When they’d gotten back to St. Germain’s apartment, Ruthven had taken Grisaille aside to talk to him, and Varney was entirely content to let him handle that situation; he was better at extracting information than Varney himself, and now that he’d gotten over his initial response, he was probably capable of greater patience as well.

  “What about Irazek?” Varney asked.

  “Irazek is in the wrong job, I think, although he’s undoubtedly off trying to do it as best he can. But I’m honestly less worried about ripples in the fabric of reality right now than I am about a murderous group of baby vampires infesting the undercity, which is probably not the most farsightful or balanced thing I’ve ever said – but they offend me.”

  He had taken the tie out of his hair again and it fell in a tumble of grizzled gold waves to his shoulders: Varney watched as he scrubbed his hands through it, an oddly human gesture. “I know that sounds a little strange.”

  “Not at all,” said Varney, and meant it. He thought of Lucia and Élise, in their exquisite apartment, saying, They’re not the sort of people one cares to acknowledge socially, you understand… no class at all, I’m afraid; not the slightest flicker of taste. “They are – distasteful,” he said, echoing the memory. “Meddling with the proper order of things.”

  “That’s it exactly. They’re wrong, and they’re an embarrassment. I should have noticed them earlier; it’s partly my fault that things have gotten so bad, but I can worry about that after I’ve rid Paris of them properly.”

  “I have a personal desire to remove this Corvin’s horrible little head myself,” said Varney.

  “Not if I get there first,” said St. Germain, sounding hard as iron for a moment, and then sighed. “Do you know what to do with the wellmonster, by any chance? It’s in the bathroom now, sitting in the sink, wrapped around a sort of tarnished silver thing.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Varney. “She seemed to be concerned about another monster, too, something to do with a whistle?”

  “Oh, good grief, I’d forgotten.” St. Germain pushed his hands through his hair again, sitting up. “I haven’t seen one of those in ages. Well, I’ll leave a window open for it – that silver thing must be the whistle. It’ll be back sooner or later, as long as that object’s still present.” He sighed. “I’m going to go find out what the hell Edmund’s talking about with our guest.”

  Varney nodded. When St. Germain had gone, he sat there for a few minutes before hauling himself off the couch and getting himself some coffee. Wine was all very well, but he needed caffeine.

  The kitchen was, like Ruthven’s, a space designed by a person who enjoyed both cooking and entertaining. Where Ruthven’s was all blue tile and stainless steel and blonde wood, the warm rose-gold of polished copper, St. Germain’s kitchen was in shades of clear grey and pale green. There were shallots in a green glass bowl on the countertop, but no garlic was in evidence – no garlic in a French kitchen, Varney was a little impressed – and a wide turned-maple plate on the table held fresh fruit. The wine bottle stood beside it on a glass coaster. An expensive coffee machine sat and steamed to itself beside the sink.

  Glass, and ceramic, and wood, and stone. No silver. No silverware: all the knives and forks that Varney knew would be neatly stacked in one of these drawers were undoubtedly polished stainless steel. It was fascinating seeing someone else’s limitations, and the ways in which they got around those limitations, from inside; it was fascinating, too, to be aware of the little ways in which they had made a home for themselves. Despite Varney’s fatigue and the profound need to murder Corvin, he found himself thinking again about his own house, and what he wanted it to look like; what he wanted it to become, when all the work was done.

  What it had been, for so long, was – a lair, a decaying bolthole to which he’d retreated time and again from the pursuit of the living, after each iterative failure to live in the world with any grace. Ratford Abbey even in its first youth had been haphazardly decorated, full of the kinds of luxury that Varney imagined a living nobleman should possess, arranged without much thought or care. With the passage of time, he had tried and failed over and over to keep the interior au courant with fashion, until – mired in the black despair that characterized so many of his interactions with the world – he had finally given the house up to the ravages of age and weather, and retreated to the cellars to sleep.

  Bringing it back piece by piece – beginning to bring it back, anyway – had given Varney something closer to satisfaction than he had felt in a very long time. Overseeing structural repairs and imagining how the house’s rooms would look when they were finally complete felt like a purpose, in an existence that had hitherto notably lacked in such. He had been pleased with it even before all this had begun, and now – well, over the past several days he’d done more living than he had in decades, in other people’s houses, and he thought with a certainty unfamiliar to him that he wanted to keep on doing that; wanted to have a kitchen of his own in which people could be comfortable, wanted not just to repair the ruin of his house, make it beautiful again, but to make it into a home.

  If we get through this, he thought to himself, if we get through this and safely back to England, I am going to put some serious work into Dark Heart. Greta had said it on the phone, before everything went to hell: I want to see your grand works for myself.

  He could see her in the green drawing room, restored to the beauty he could only half remember, the cool green silk of the wallpaper and the banded malachite of the mantelpiece rendering her luminous by comparison. He could see her walking through the long gallery, passing through the bands of light and shadow thrown by the great windows across parquet floors polished to a mirror shine. He could see her in the library, curled in an armchair before the fire, surrounded by mellow rosewood and the scent of age, the variegated gold-stamped spines of his book collection stretching up to the ceiling all around her, warm light on her hair.

  He realized he was looking forward to that rather a great deal.

  Gervase Brightside hadn’t ever seen his partner quite this un-cheerful, at least in recent memory. Being cheeked by a bunch of ghosts wasn’t entirely unheard of, but being cheeked by a bunch of ghosts while discovering that in fact the fabric of reality was in considerably worse shape than previously understood was a little daunting.

  It had at least helped a little to deal with the vampire afterward. Both of them always felt rather better for doing their jobs, doing the thing they were for, and assisting the last vestige of the creature that had been called Lilith to a final peace was perhaps the first time in days they’d managed to be useful. There wasn’t much of her soul left, but there had been enough to hold, to comfort; they had shown her the way home, and left the retort cooling from white heat, empty again, its work completed. One thread neatly wound up; one less loose end.

  They had not spoken since leaving the crematorium, walking together through the narrow winding streets of the necropolis; they had nearly reached the cemetery gates when both of them stopped, struck by a mental wave of pressure like a distant explosion. They looked at one another.

  “Did you —” Crepusculus began.

  “I did,” Brightside told him, fingers pressing his temples. “That was a significant incursion.” Something important had come through. Something big enough for them to feel – and how many more incursions could the fabric of re
ality take, if it was as frayed as he was beginning to fear?

  Crepusculus closed his eyes for a moment, turning a little as if to follow a rolling echo of sound, and pointed. “That way. It’s – I think it’s from Hell, I can’t be sure —”

  “Irazek,” said Brightside. Crepusculus shut up and looked at him with wide dark eyes. Both of them were thinking the same thing: the situation had escalated, and now someone with rather more of the vis vires diaboli than Irazek had taken over. Which didn’t bode particularly well for the latter.

  “We’d better go and see,” he said, and a moment later both he and Crepusculus vanished with two small thunderclaps as the air collapsed in on the space where they’d been standing – and reappeared, near-instantaneously, about four miles away on the steps of Montmartre. And blinked.

  There was Irazek, all right, but he didn’t appear to be in imminent danger of anything dire; he was sitting on the steps talking animatedly to a tall man in a pale pearl-grey pinstripe suit that matched his complexion rather well.

  Crepusculus and Brightside looked at one another again – they seemed to be doing a lot of that just recently – and Brightside said, “Fastitocalon?”

  The man in the suit had looked up as soon as they popped into existence. It had been several decades since they’d encountered this particular individual, back in London, but he hadn’t changed all that much. He was thin, but not cadaverously so, and appeared to be in his mid-fifties, ruler-straight parted hair and all, and the only thing about him that belied his actual nature was the interesting point that his skin was, in fact, ever so slightly grey. He looked in some lights as if he had a mild case of argyria.

  He was also a demon. Or – Brightside thought back – had been one, until there was some sort of complicated business in the 1600s and he’d been exiled to Earth; Brightside couldn’t quite remember the details. There was no doubt that he’d just now arrived from Hell, however. His spectral signature was unmistakably infernal.

  He looked more than a little irritated, as well. “Ah,” he said, “Brightside and Dammerung, it’s been a while, hasn’t it, but I’m afraid I’m rather in the middle of something right now.”

  “The incursions,” said Crepusculus. Irazek was looking from them to Fastitocalon with a rather dazed expression, and Brightside didn’t blame Fass for being somewhat irritable with him. Come on, he thought, keep up, Irazek, make a bloody effort.

  “Yes,” said Fastitocalon. “I’m gathering that there have been rather a lot of them recently – have you two been involved in this?”

  “Peripherally,” said Brightside. “We were here to sort out some ghosts, but then we sort of got curious and hung around.”

  “They came to visit me,” said Irazek, with the air of someone wanting to make a contribution.

  “Mm,” Fastitocalon said. “What can you tell me about the situation?”

  “That a vampire had been grubbing around in a graveyard collecting spell components,” said Brightside, “we assume for summoning purposes, and had been doing so for some little time according to a group of ghosts we interviewed – she’s dead now, killed by someone calling himself the ‘king of the vampires,’ but presumably the damage has been done.”

  “Well. We can’t have that,” said Fastitocalon, looking suddenly preoccupied. “You don’t happen to know a woman called Greta Helsing, do you, either of you?”

  Beside them, Irazek opened his mouth as if to say something, but subsided anxiously. “Nope,” said Crepusculus. “Any relation to the famous one?”

  “Descendant. Damn. I have a feeling something’s gone wrong – hang on —”

  He got up, pacing a little way up the stairs from the three of them, and appeared to be having a conversation inside his own head. Crepusculus and Brightside looked at Irazek, who shrugged. “He’s – apparently he’s the interim director of M&E, which is weird – I thought he was in Budget and Finance, or had been a couple hundred years ago, but something weird’s going on with staffing Below?”

  “Good old Fass, making his way up in the world,” said Crepusculus, “or possibly down, depending on your viewpoint. I thought he was an accountant.”

  “I don’t know,” said Irazek. “I called for help, because – well, unfortunately, I can’t actually fix this on my own. And I was expecting to get someone from Asmodeus’s staff basically saying, You’re fired, and also we’re going to turn you into something nasty for a set period of time, but instead it was him. Not that I’m complaining, mind you,” he added hastily. “He hasn’t done much shouting. Yet.”

  Brightside looked back at Fastitocalon, still evidently intent on his internal conversation. The demon did look better than he remembered from years ago, less unhealthily thin, without that raspy little cough he’d never seemed to be able to shake. More determined. “You think he’ll have the power to fix this, whatever needs to be done?” he said. “I don’t really remember him being particularly strong, last time we met, but that was a while ago. Things might have changed.”

  Irazek shrugged. “I bloody well hope so,” he said. “Otherwise we’re all going to be in real trouble.”

  “Amen to that,” said Crepusculus, looking again so downcast that Brightside had an uncharacteristic urge to put an arm around his shoulders. “Worst holiday ever.”

  Beyond them, Fastitocalon straightened up, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Right,” he said, turning back to the others. “This is a mess. I need to go back to Hell to pick up some equipment, and then we’re going for a little chat with some other interested parties. I’m afraid I’ll need your help,” he added, looking at Crepusculus and Brightside. “This is going to be rather unpleasant but hopefully not for very long, but the weak point wants patching and I need all the strength I can borrow.”

  “Of course,” said Brightside, thinking of himself in the café what felt like a century ago, making the decision to investigate the site of their last case: he hadn’t wanted to, just as he didn’t particularly want to do whatever Fastitocalon had in mind, but want and need were not the same.

  “Do… you want me, too?” Irazek asked, not sounding at all sure of the answer.

  “Well, obviously,” Fastitocalon said. “You’re the assigned Paris op; this is your job, Irazek. Talk amongst yourselves for a few minutes while I fetch the things I’ll need.”

  Grisaille had felt this disconnected, cut loose from the ordinary world and flapping helplessly at the end of some long and twisting chain, once or twice before: dispossessed, all the things he had taken for granted ripped away and gone by the wayside.

  It didn’t get easier with practice. He had been astonished that the others wanted him to come with them to rescue Greta Helsing – and more astonished that she’d found her own way out despite the locks and bars and hazards of the underground; he could have slipped away then, possibly, while the others were focused entirely on Helsing and her welfare. He had, in fact, considered it briefly, and then thought: Where would I go?

  So, trailing behind, he’d followed the little party through the brightening streets, hands shoved in his pockets, barely noticing the people they passed. The others were putting some effort into not being seen – Varney, carrying the woman, Ruthven beside him, St. Germain still on all fours – but Grisaille didn’t bother, and got a few stares from the early-morning tourists taking photographs of the Église de la Madeleine. He knew what he looked like: a bedraggled Goth with bright red contacts, entirely out of place.

  The werewolf lived in a thoroughly tony apartment on the Avenue George V, the kind of place he’d probably bought a hundred years ago; it smelled of expensive furnishings and faintly of dog. Grisaille was aware that the well-swept floors had a few drifts of silvery shed hair lurking in the corners. St. Germain had turned back bipedal in order to let them into the house, and that was a little easier to deal with, a giant man rather than a giant wolf, but Grisaille was still a long way from composed when Ruthven drew him into another room and shut the door behind them.

>   Oh, thought Grisaille. We’re going to do more inquisition, aren’t we.

  Aloud he said – knowing it was stupid even as he said it – “I don’t understand how the hell she got out on her own.”

  Stupid, all right; Ruthven’s big silver eyes went noticeably colder. They were huge, those eyes, almost luminous, each iris a bright silver bowl of ice. Grisaille couldn’t help thinking of him in the Opera, back at the beginning – sleek dark head and ruby shirt studs, offensively perfect, doll-like with distance, seen from the fifth-floor balcony – and he had to look away.

  “Not with any help from you, that’s for sure,” said Ruthven. “You left her down there, sunshine.”

  Grisaille wrapped his arms around himself, sat down on the edge of a chair. “Yes,” he said. “What do you want me to say? Yes. I did. I left her there. Okay? We both clear on this point now? Do you want me to take out an ad in Paris Match saying to all the world what complete and utter scum I am in every single way, or would hiring a skywriter suffice?”