Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  “Don’t wallow,” snapped Ruthven.

  “What the fuck else am I supposed to do, pray tell?”

  “Practically anything more constructive. Why did you work for that creature in the first place?”

  “It —” Grisaille stopped, shoulders hunching. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “I can’t believe you,” Ruthven said, running his hands through his hair: it wasn’t even slightly fair, Grisaille thought, that the subsequent disarray didn’t look any less effective.

  No, he thought. You can’t, and I can’t explain it —

  “Look at me,” he said before he could decide this, too, was the stupidest thing he could possibly think of to do, and when Ruthven did – those black-rimmed silver eyes focused directly on his – Grisaille let his own gaze blank out in a pulse of something like the opposite of thrall: an opening.

  Let me show you, he thought, and then Ruthven was there, in his mind, cold and sharp around the edges, startled into curiosity. Grisaille reached for a sequence of images, like snapshots spread on a table, like cut-together film projected on a wall —

  Ingolstadt, snow-cold and winter-bright, friendship, carousing, studying by lamplight while the windowpanes rattled with icy wind, sitting up talking all night long, Victor’s easy laugh, the bright sparkling brown of his eyes – the gathering awareness that what his friend was talking about was not just wild theory but something worse, something edging into madness —

  — the bitter sting of snow in his face and the knowledge, now, of what he had failed to prevent, of that unspeakable project and its conclusion – what he had not done, and could not now repair – fleeing Germany, fleeing Europe – the vampire’s bite, the reshaping of the universe – and later, a series of poor decisions, leaders followed, leaders left, comrades gained – the unfamiliar thrill of faces turned to him for orders, and the sinking horror of losing them again, with no one to blame for it but his own incompetence – not again, never again, not that —

  — Corvin, in Vienna, pressing schnapps on him, saying, “What do you want to do with your life?” Saying, “Surely there’s more to existence than slumming. Join me; I could use someone like you —”

  — I could use you, and how that had been the sweetest thing in all the world just then, someone to follow and not have to think about what it was he was doing —

  — and Paris, and the things that Corvin did, hunting in Pigalle, the parties, the endless parties, carrying the bodies through the tunnels under the city when Corvin was done with them; a growing, gathering, miserable certainty that once again he’d made the wrong decision, with no other real option to speak of, and grimly hanging on until there was nothing left to hold, only the sick awareness of his own culpability, again, again – here, Ruthven, here, have it all, isn’t it nice to consider, isn’t it a lovely suite of memories to never be capable of fucking forgetting —

  “Stop,” said Ruthven, a long way away, shaky, and the connection cut off: the place where he had been inside Grisaille’s mind hurt sharply like ice on a cracked tooth, dizzying.

  When he could open his eyes again, Ruthven was still there, still quite close, still staring at him – but the expression was different. He looked ill, white around the mouth, and his eyes were too wide, but – absurdly – Grisaille thought there was a kind of recognition there that hadn’t been before. Not quite sympathy, but recognition: I see you. I see you very well. All that Grisaille was, and had been. All of it. Dimly, distantly, he was aware of the familiar flush of shame.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again without warning,” said Ruthven, sounding weary. “And – Christ, you’ve had a time of it, haven’t you – when we’re down there, we can all stand in line and take turns murdering him, to be democratic about it.”

  There was something in that voice, too, that Grisaille hadn’t heard before, something that went with being seen, and he was almost sure he wanted to hear rather more of it; he had just about made up his mind to say so when St. Germain tapped on the door.

  “There’s coffee,” said the werewolf, “and I think she’s waking up; you’d better come out here so we can talk properly.”

  Ruthven got up, only just slightly unsteady; and after a moment Grisaille, rather more unsteady, went to join him.

  CHAPTER 12

  S

  he had been somewhere very far away, dark and quiet, with no one else around. Somewhere safe and peaceful, and Greta planned to stay there for as long as humanly possible, savoring the sensation of being beyond the reach of responsibility. She floated in the blackness of deep and profound sleep —

  And abruptly, with no warning, was no longer completely alone inside her head.

  Greta?

  After months alone, it felt uncomfortably full to have two people in there: the slot where the other had rested for several years had partly closed itself up, like bone filling in the empty socket of an extracted tooth. She hadn’t expected to hear from this particular individual for some time yet.

  Fass? Her mental voice was muzzy with sleep. Fass, what are you doing back, you’re supposed to be in Hell, aren’t you?

  And you are supposed to be in England, so what on earth are you doing in Paris? In – he paused, as if trying to work out her location – in the home of a three-hundred-and-sixty-something-year-old werewolf? Good grief, I go back to Hell for a few months and everybody gets into ridiculous amounts of trouble —

  It’s a long story, said Greta, and abruptly she could feel him looking through her recent memory, flipping through the sequence of events in her mind: that wasn’t a sensation you forgot easily, even if you could get used to it, the intrusion of one mind into another. Could you maybe not do that quite so hard?

  He retreated a little. Sorry. It’s – I’ve apparently been in Hell long enough to forget my manners around humans, I do beg your pardon. And this is not so much a long as a bloody awful story. In her head his voice was bitter-ice cold, colder than she had ever heard him. I am going to – repair this mess with reality and then I want to go and turn all these vampires inside out, one by one, Greta, my dear —

  What’s wrong with reality? she demanded.

  Somebody has been playing silly buggers with it, that’s what’s wrong, summoning something without the proper care or precautions —

  Lilith, said Greta, realizing it. Lilith and her monsters. You’d probably better come over here, Fass.

  She could feel him going through the file cabinet of her memory again, a bit more gently now. Yes, he said. I think I will, and I’ll bring the others with me.

  What others?

  Acquaintances of mine, he said unhelpfully, and withdrew – most of the way. He was still there, a presence in the very back of her consciousness, but no longer an active participant in her thought process.

  Greta opened her eyes. It was no longer even slightly possible to pretend she was asleep, and she knew she wouldn’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon despite how bone-tired she still felt. She was lying curled up in a large and comfortable bed in a room that, though pleasant, was undoubtedly a spare bedroom: it lacked much by way of personality.

  She got out of bed, hanging on to the bedpost through a wave of dizziness, and by the quality of the light through the windows, judged that it was still fairly early in the day. Greta looked down at herself; she was wearing her own nightgown, rescued with the rest of her stuff from the hotel – in need of a wash, but still enormously preferable to the remains of the ballgown, which was nowhere to be seen. She hoped the werewolf had burned it.

  The whistle, however. She hurried into the bathroom to check, and was extremely glad to see that it was still there – clutched in the arms of her tiny wellmonster, which was lurking in the washbasin, looking as if it intended to stay there for the foreseeable future. She stroked its flat head with a fingertip, and squeaked a little when it let go of the whistle with one hand to grab her finger and subject it to a brief experimental gnaw.

  Greta reclaime
d her finger, after having it inspected and dismissed as possible foodstuff, and let the monster go back to guarding its prize. As she came back into the bedroom, a shadow she hadn’t noticed detached itself from the curtains and rippled over to her: a familiar piece of torn red taffeta, with a crumpled face made of wrinkles. She grinned at it, despite feeling approximately four thousand years old.

  “Hello,” she said. “Nice to see you again,” and offered her hand to the whistler – and was a little surprised when it didn’t wrap hard little cloth fingers around hers but instead swooped in closer and pressed its wrinkled face against her neck. After a moment she lifted a hand to stroke it, feeling the invisible body underneath the cloth, wondering all over again what they’d look like if you could see them properly. This one stayed pressed against her for a few more moments before slipping away to take up position just behind and above her shoulder.

  “I’d better introduce you,” she said to it. “Maybe try not to menace my friends?”

  The whistler rippled its taffeta as if to suggest that it couldn’t promise anything, and Greta laughed. It felt strange, laughing, and she realized she hadn’t done much of it for days.

  Her clothes were basically one giant wrinkle after having spent so long in the suitcase, but they fit, and they were hers, and it felt absurdly comforting to pull on a pair of jeans and a shirt that she’d worn so many times before. She ran a brush through her hair, decided it was about as presentable as it was going to get, and went to see what the surface world was up to.

  Following the sound of voices, she padded down a short hallway into a living room with huge windows looking over the white and grey mansard-roofed cliffs of Paris, and thought – briefly, disconnectedly – I was having such a nice time, before all this.

  Varney had his back to her, sitting on a grey velvet sofa, but Greta had a clear view of the others in the room: St. Germain, rumpled and large, Ruthven, and – Grisaille.

  Right there, large as life, amazing hair and all. Grisaille.

  Oh, she thought, and then, I wasn’t imagining it, back at the Opera, that he got out, but what’s he doing here? Did they capture him, or something?

  The conversation faltered as they looked up to see her standing in the doorway, and Varney got to his feet. “Greta,” he said. “Did we wake you?”

  “No,” she said, “Fass did, because he’s apparently back in my head again, which means he’s on the surface for some reason, and – not to be rude, but could someone tell me what the hell he’s doing here, please?” She nodded at Grisaille.

  He met her eyes, red to blue, and she was a little surprised when his dropped first. It occurred to her that she hadn’t ever seen this particular vampire looking quite so unhappy, and thought: Did he leave, or was he thrown out?

  “He’s been of some assistance,” said Ruthven, with a curious kind of control in his voice, “and he won’t harm you.”

  “He certainly won’t,” said Varney, heavy as lead. After a moment he sat down, and Greta came around the sofa to join him. It was simply pleasant to be near him, in a way she was not examining in any great detail: the constant anxiety of the past several days seemed to be deadened almost all the way to nothing with Varney next to her. She realized after a moment that the whistler was still hanging back in the shadows of the hallway.

  “Are you all right?” Ruthven asked, leaning forward to look intently at her.

  “No,” she said after brief consideration, “I’m not, but I don’t think there’s anything permanently the matter. You’re going to have company, by the way,” she added, turning to St. Germain. “More of it, I mean. Fass is on his way over.”

  “Fass?” inquired the werewolf.

  “Fastitocalon. He’s mostly a demon. He said something about reality being messed up.”

  “It is,” said Ruthven, “at least according to Irazek, who is also a demon, if not a very effective one. One of the unspeakable individuals who were responsible for your abduction had apparently been summoning something, Grisaille tells us, and that is apparently very bad for reality. Makes holes in it, sort of thing.”

  “Lilith,” she said, and was a little surprised to see Grisaille wince. “I found the place where she does it,” she continued after a moment. “Under the Opera. Her lair. There are – probably forty or fifty monsters down there right now.”

  “She’s not doing it anymore,” Grisaille said, sounding slightly unwell. “These were the grey things. They look like frogs. She’d also been breeding, or possibly just summoning, the hairy ones. I don’t know how many of those there were; they kept escaping, and – what in God’s name is that?”

  He pointed. Greta twisted around to see Winston the whistle-monster hovering cautiously in the doorway, and was more than a little amused to note that the whites were visible all the way round Grisaille’s eyes. “He won’t harm you,” she said, echoing Ruthven’s assurance, and beckoned to the hovering creature. “He was extremely helpful in the process of escape. Unlike you. Are you the only one of Corvin’s groupies to get out?”

  “… Yes?”

  “So you left everything behind and sauntered on up to join the forces of good, did you?”

  He hunched his shoulders, very slightly. “Yes,” he said again, and Greta watched him for a moment longer before nodding.

  “I see,” she said. “Well. Now what the hell do we do? Anyone care to suggest next steps?”

  “We go down under the city,” said Varney with awful delicacy, “and we root out the coven, and we get rid of them in a way which will not likely result in their reappearance in another city twenty years on. That would be my suggestion.”

  “Right,” said Ruthven. “Could not have put it better myself. Alceste, have you got any handy wooden spoons I could sharpen the handles of?”

  “Wait,” said Grisaille. “Wait for midday. Another hour or so. It’s – he’s bound to be sleeping then, he’ll be at his weakest, and he won’t be expecting an attack. Wait.”

  Beside her, Greta could feel Varney tense slightly, and then make himself relax. “Very well,” he said. “I suppose that’s a valid point. The four of us can hang around a little longer before we leave.”

  “Five,” said Greta. “If you think I’m going to sit around up here while the rest of you go off to battle, you are dead wrong, Varney; I’ve had enough of that, and I know my way around the lair.”

  “She does,” Grisaille confirmed. “Bits of it anyway.”

  “Greta,” said Varney, ignoring this, “under no circumstances are you to go back under the city. We only just got you out of there again —”

  “No you didn’t,” she said. “I did. Remember? And if you want to murder Corvin, then imagine how I feel. I had to put up with him and his body glitter and his skull goblet and tiresome insinuations for several nights in a row. I get a say in this, okay?”

  Varney blinked at her, his eyes flat and reflective, and then just sighed. She could tell the argument wasn’t exactly over, just put on hold, and was glad when the doorbell rang.

  “That’s probably Fass,” she said. St. Germain got to his feet, rubbing the back of his neck, and some of the tension in the air faded out a little when he went to let the newcomers in. Ruthven ran his fingers through his hair, disarranging it further than it had already been disarranged, and Greta saw him glance at Grisaille under the black curtain for just a moment before he pushed it back again. The look on his face was not one she thought she’d ever seen there before, or not quite in that configuration; there was a kind of sharp, almost resentful protectiveness she didn’t recognize, unlike his usual interest and concern for the people – like herself – whom he tended to help. As if he minded minding.

  That’s interesting, she thought in the part of her mind that wasn’t focused entirely on the situation under the city. That’s very interesting.

  At least he doesn’t look bored.

  And then everything else faded right out of her awareness, because St. Germain had returned to the living r
oom with a little group of strangers – and with Fass.

  It had been only a couple of months since she’d seen him, but it felt like forever; despite how sore and weary she was, the way every muscle seemed to be trying to out-ache every other muscle in her body, Greta practically levitated off the couch and flung herself at Fastitocalon. She had time to think, Oh my God, he looks so much better, why didn’t I insist he go to Hell before now – and then her face was buried in his neat pinstriped shoulder and his arms were around her, holding her close. He smelled faintly of sandalwood; after the days spent in a fug of cheap perfume under the city, it was extraordinarily pleasant. Under her ear the beating of his heart was steady and slow, and she couldn’t hear even the slightest rustle when he breathed.

  You’re better, she said, not bothering to use her voice.