Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  Brightside sat down on a folding chair, rubbing his hands together to get the sensation in his fingers back, and thought on a much narrower band to Crepusculus: Let’s go. Somewhere a long way away, that hasn’t had any monster incursions in recent history. I’m open to suggestion. New Zealand or somewhere in Micronesia or the very tip-top of Everest. You pick. And you do not get to snipe at me for drinking Pernod for breakfast, are we clear on this point, Dammerung?

  Some little distance away Fastitocalon had his arm around Irazek, and they popped out of existence with dual tiny thunderclaps – leaving Crepusculus and Brightside alone together in the orchestra pit. They looked at one another, up at the chandelier, back again.

  Crepusculus sent him a flicker of imagery: a beach somewhere in the antipodes, green-blue surf and pale sand, a complicated drink with a little umbrella stuck in it. On the umbrella was a clock face, with the hours set at 8:45 a.m., and beside that a tiny sign on a separate stick: NO PHANTOMS ALLOWED.

  Brightside found, to his considerable surprise, that he still remembered how to smile.

  Returning to St. Germain’s apartment this time had felt like coming home, in an odd way. Greta realized, as they limped about the process of getting themselves cleaned up and bandaged properly, that she thought about the werewolf’s flat much the same way she felt about Ruthven’s Embankment house, and for similar reasons: safe haven.

  She’d said as much to him, eating delivery sushi in his kitchen, once the others were in bed. Grisaille was the worst of the casualties, of course, but Ruthven had at some point managed to crack a rib and had a couple of lacerations down his side, and Varney’s arm was a mess. St. Germain’s injuries were less severe, and he healed faster than an exhausted vampire could; he’d helped her with the others, and then suggested they eat something. Something, he hastily qualified, that didn’t require him to cook.

  “I really am sorry about standing you up,” she said, a piece of tuna roll in her chopsticks. “In the beginning, I mean. That’s been bothering me.”

  St. Germain’s gaze went from the sushi to her face, and she had to smile at the are you actually serious expression. “You’d been kidnapped,” he said. “By vampires. I can’t think of a more cast-iron excuse for missing an appointment, except maybe having a meteorite land on you, and you’re going to drop that tuna if you keep waving it about like that.”

  Greta rolled her eyes at him, but ate the sushi. It was something close to transcendent after having spent several days subsisting on nothing but mediocre coffee and chocolate pastries: she’d never really understood how sublime raw fish could taste. “I do feel bad about it,” she said, “even if I couldn’t actually help it. It would have been preferable to meet you properly in a civilized fashion before basically taking over your house, and you’ve been rather amazing through all this, so thank you.”

  St. Germain went red. “Well, if I’d been doing my duty and actually keeping an eye on the city, this might never have had a chance to happen in the first place, so – anything I can possibly do to help, I want to do.”

  “Fair enough,” said Greta. “Buying me dinner counts. And helping with the others. I don’t actually know what happened with Fastitocalon and Irazek and those people with the odd names, but I’ll find out as soon as I can.”

  “I hope they’re all right,” said St. Germain.

  “So do I. But Fass is back in my head, at least, so wherever he is, he’s probably going to be fine.” She’d realized his presence was back soon after waking in the chamber, in Varney’s lap, right after the final violent timeslip: very distant, very faint, but definitely there. It had been an enormous reassurance. “I don’t know about Irazek or the other two.”

  “Irazek,” said St. Germain, “is probably in Hell right now, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the others can take care of themselves.” He yawned enormously. “I’m sorry. I think I may be reaching the end of my usefulness for now.”

  “It’s all right,” said Greta. “Go sleep. I’m going to spend the night in Grisaille’s room; I want to be there in case he needs anything in a hurry.”

  She had flipped over the sleep-deprivation edge point where it was now difficult to fall asleep, and she knew it would catch up with her but didn’t care: right now she could still make use of it.

  Sitting up beside Grisaille while the world turned toward morning, she had reached for Fastitocalon, and after a long while he had replied, sounding weary and rough but in acceptable spirits. Greta had demanded that he tell her the whole story. Had, in fact, demanded that he show up in person and tell her all about it, but it hadn’t been until halfway through the next day that he arrived – still visibly exhausted, but apparently in one piece, wearing a different but equally beautiful grey three-piece suit. They were new, the suits. Cut by the Devil’s favorite tailor, on Plutus Boulevard, in the fancy part of Dis.

  Over glasses of St. Germain’s sherry, Fastitocalon explained an outline of recent events Below that had resulted in his promotion. “Asmodeus had been skating on increasingly thin metaphorical ice for – oh, ages now,” he said. “Several decades at least. See, for example, the fact that nobody had ever bothered to assign a second operative to the Paris station to help that rather ineffective ginger chap do the job, which in some part undoubtedly contributed to the current issues. There’s also some concern that the poor performance of M&E might have camouflaged signs that something larger is going on that’s buggering up reality, but we don’t have a lot of hard evidence for that – the angels aren’t being forthcoming about their own situation, which isn’t new, but it’s yet another thing to worry about. I’ve been tasked with working out what we know and don’t know, which will take a while. The mess last autumn with the M&E department not catching any hint of that hostile entity’s presence or activity was just too much for Sam to ignore.”

  She’d met Samael only once, briefly, but she would never be able to forget the sensation of the Devil’s butterfly-blue eyes looking all the way through her like an arc-lamp searchlight, reading what was written on the inside of her skull. He was terrifying, but he did seem to have Fastitocalon’s best interests at heart.

  “What did he do?” she asked.

  “Gave him a leave of absence,” Fastitocalon said, looking rueful. “Called it a black sabbatical, not a suspension, to let Asmodeus save face – at first Sam was still willing to allow that – but the deputy head of M&E who took over was completely Asmodeus’s creature and absolutely nothing changed practice-wise at all. Same lack of oversight, same approach to quality control and performance management, same laissez-faire attitude toward paperwork.” He rolled his eyes. “Classic Asmodeus. That lasted a month or two before Sam discovered that Asmodeus was still running the department by proxy from his nice dacha on the banks of the Cocytus.”

  Greta had to smile a little. “Do I want to know what happened then?”

  “Upon the discovery of which,” said Fastitocalon, straight-faced, “the deputy head was fired and Asmodeus himself got turned into what I understand to be a large banana slug.”

  “A banana slug?”

  “A large one. About so big,” he said, holding his hands eight inches apart. “Bright yellow. In which form he will be forced to stay for a term of no less than one hundred years, although I do gather he will be allowed to retain the right to wear a crown or crowns of his choosing, presumably scaled down to fit.”

  Greta started to say something and then shook her head. “No, I don’t want clarification on how slugs wear crowns, I think.”

  “Probably best not to inquire,” he agreed, still solemn and straight-faced. “I don’t imagine he’ll be making many public appearances, crowned or otherwise. It could have been worse; Sam could have turned him into something completely without charm, such as a giant cockroach.”

  “When you put it like that, I suppose the banana slug is merciful,” she said. “But what about you? That’s what I’m curious about. The rest cure seems to have worked. You’re
in remarkable shape, even after whatever it was you had to do to fix that rip in the world. What exactly did they have you doing down there?”

  “Lying around and being intensely bored,” said Fastitocalon. “And… all right, fine, some tiresome experimental treatments with the mirabilic resonance scanner, which isn’t supposed to treat so much as diagnose, and which I’ve grown to cordially detest. Although it has apparently done some good.”

  “Mirabilic resonance scanner,” Greta repeated, wide-eyed, and took him by the shoulders, shaking him gently. “I have to get to talk to your doctor, that’s – I can sort of imagine how it might actually work, Fass, that’s – do you know how cool that is?”

  He smiled at her, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I might have some idea,” he said. “Exposure to very strong and highly polarized mirabilic fields in rapid sequence having some effect in resetting a damaged pneumic signature. You could write a paper about it, if anyone up here would believe you. Incidentally I did mention to Sam that you’d been agitating to have a chat with Dr. Faust, and he says he’ll see if something can be arranged.”

  Greta was totally unable to squash a huge, excited grin. “You’re wonderful,” she told him. “How’d you get to be interim Not-Asmodeus, though?”

  “Well, I’d been sitting around twiddling my thumbs in between sessions in the high-energy mirabilics lab, and after the fiasco with Asmodeus’s successor, Sam came to see me and said effectively congrats on your promotion, I need someone who knows what the hell they’re doing, go and put some proper clothes on and meet me in tower six in twenty minutes.”

  “I can picture that so clearly,” said Greta, smiling. “Oh, Fass. I’m glad for you. My father would be very glad for you, and it sounds like the place sorely needs a sane person to keep it running – and deal with angels, and do longitudinal studies on the state of reality – but you’d better not let it wear you out or I will come down there myself to shout at you. I just wish Dad could have been around to see this, you know?”

  “I know,” he said, and curled his arms around her, and when she rested her cheek against his chest, the easy effortless sound of his breathing was a lovely thing to hear.

  The rest of that day, and most of the next two, passed without Grisaille’s conscious awareness. He had no idea how much time had gone by when he woke out of slow, complicated dreams to find himself lying in a bed that was not his own, looking at a white ceiling that was not chiseled out of limestone, in a room full of cool green light: sunlight through blinds.

  The last thing he could clearly remember was the chaos underground, a determined little face thrust close to his own, someone saying, You can’t die: either he had, and this was a particularly specific version of Hell, or he hadn’t, and —

  He turned his head on the pillows: it hurt, everything hurt, moving at all woke a stab of quite remarkable pain in his back and chest, but his curiosity outweighed the physical discomfort. It was not exactly a surprise to find that Greta Helsing was sitting by the bed.

  It probably should be, he thought to himself. Maybe I’ve run out of the capacity for surprise.

  She put down her book, smiling a little. “Back with us?” she said. “You’re going to be all right, even if it was a bit touch-and-go at first. Don’t try to sit up,” and he abandoned the attempt, blinking at her. “Not until after you’ve had something for the pain. You’ve lost a great deal of your own blood, and we gave you lots of someone else’s but it’s still going to take you a while to get over a knife through the lung.”

  “Corvin,” said Grisaille, his voice rusty. “Stabbed me in the back. In the actual back.”

  Greta rolled her eyes. “Christ. Of course he did. I should have worked that out myself, it’s so completely Corvin. He didn’t do a very good job of it, at least; anyone with even rudimentary anatomical knowledge could have done you much more damage. Didn’t even chip a rib.”

  “What… happened?”

  “Fastitocalon happened. And before that, so did a lot of ghosts. Here.” She offered him a glass of something dark red with a bendy straw in it. “Managing pain for sanguivores is a complicated business; you metabolize everything fast and hard and you don’t respond to opioids except in highly recreational doses, but I’ve been working on some experimental compounds and this ought to help at least a bit.”

  Grisaille took the glass, a little appalled at how unsteady his hands felt, and was both irritated by and grateful for the convenience of the straw. The glass’s contents were mostly fortified wine, with a hit of something bitter underneath it and a faint anise-like numbness on the tongue; it wasn’t unpleasant. He found he was desperately thirsty about two sips in, and finished half the glass before looking back up at Greta.

  Now that he was a little more awake, he could pay attention to detail. She looked somewhat battered, a bruise across one cheek and a couple of steri-strips holding together a cut on her forehead, and the stains under each eye spoke of a sleep debt that wasn’t even close to being paid – but she also looked calm, back in her element, doing her job. She was wearing fresh clothes, which made a difference; fresh, and to Grisaille’s admittedly discerning eye, quietly expensive.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “St. Germain’s flat. He has very kindly allowed us to stay here as long as we need, which is probably going to be at least another couple of days before you can travel.”

  “Travel where?”

  “England,” she said. “Unless you have a burning desire to stick around here for old times’ sake. Ruthven says you can stay with him while you heal, which I do recommend you take him up on: he’s got a magnificent house on the Embankment and a serious-business espresso machine.”

  Grisaille blinked at her. He felt rather as if he’d missed a page in the script – namely the bit where these weird and apparently friendly and affectionate people without question took him in, when all he’d ever done for them was imprison one and act as occasional guide and general source of irritation for several others.

  “You don’t have to,” Greta said, apparently mistaking his silence for something other than surprise. “I mean, it’s entirely up to you, whatever you end up doing, but I do suggest you give the vampire-coven-lieutenant gig a rest for a couple of decades. It’s not a good look on you. Doesn’t do you any favors.”

  He laughed without meaning to, and she had to steady his hand around the glass while he got his breathing back under control: that had hurt, hurt like being struck all over again with something pointy. Greta was looking somewhat contrite.

  “Anyway,” she said. “You don’t have to decide now. Finish that, and get some more sleep. You’re safe here, I can promise that.”

  “What about – the others,” he said, breathless.

  “Varney’s arm is a mess, he’ll be in a sling for another week or so, and Ruthven has managed somehow to evade damage to his pretty face but he’s banged up as well. St. Germain’s in better shape. And Emily’s all right, even if she’s having trouble adjusting to the diurnal cycle.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Oh yes. We got you both out, at the end of it all. She’s under Ruthven and Varney’s protection, which is practically the best possible situation for a kid in her position; they’ll make sure she gets whatever help she needs, and they can tell her how to be a vampire in a more sustainable and less self-destructive sort of way.”

  He nodded, subsiding. Thought about Corvin at the beginning of all this, standing at the Opera balcony looking down at Ruthven and Greta moving through the crowd. Thought about himself, sidling up to his leader, looking down as well. Thought about how much he’d wanted, even then, before all of this, to have someone else in charge.

  I can see why you want to pull his head off, he had said. It’s a nice head.

  Grisaille was glad, in a forceful if formless sort of way, that Corvin hadn’t succeeded in that particular task.

  Greta took the glass back, and reached down to rest a hand gently against his foreh
ead. “Good,” she said, “you’re making excellent progress, I’m very pleased. Does it hurt any less?”

  He realized that it did. The pain was still there, but it had been blunted, overlaid with some kind of insulating factor, or perhaps he simply didn’t care about it quite so much. “Yes,” he said, and was rewarded with a bright and genuine smile.

  “I had hoped for that. Get some rest, Grisaille. Today —”

  “Is the first day of the rest of my unlife?” he drawled, raising an eyebrow. She nodded, mock-solemn.

  “You are not a number,” she informed him, “you are a free man.”

  “You know, I cannot believe you missed the opportunity to tell me I was in the Village when I woke up,” said Grisaille, but he was smiling helplessly. It had been a small but pleasant surprise to find that his prisoner had a sense of humor, back in the tunnels under the city.

  “To be honest,” said Greta, rueful, “neither can I.”