Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  CHAPTER 15

  G

  reta came into the kitchen with Grisaille’s empty glass. From the doorway she could look out into St. Germain’s drawing room, full of the slant-light of early evening. The dark figure of Varney stood by the windows, out of direct sunlight, looking out at the cliffs and canyons of Paris, the distant green of the Tuileries and the Trocadéro, the arching spike of the Eiffel Tower on the far bank, away to the southwest.

  He was standing very still, but a flicker of movement caught her eye: she looked up to find her whistler hovering in a corner pretending to be a bit of curtain drapery, and had to smile. The creature had been waiting here when the whole group of them returned, limping and battered, from the tunnels under the city, and even through the exhaustion and general horror, she had been touched at how glad it had apparently been to see her. Being clung to by an invisible being wearing shredded red taffeta was among the more peculiar of her recent experiences, but by no means unpleasant.

  Since then she had coaxed Winston into trading in the ripped piece of ballgown skirt for a much nicer and more tasteful high-thread-count bedsheet in pale pearl-grey, and he looked quite respectable – if unavoidably eldritch: the classic ghost. Greta took a step into the room and the hovering monster swooped down to greet her, pressing a horrible little wrinkled cotton face into her own; she stroked him gently, and was reminded again of what she’d meant to discuss with Varney.

  Who was turning from the windows, drawn out of his reverie by the whistler – and who smiled at Greta, a kind of weary shy smile that did odd things to her insides. “Hello,” he said. “How is your patient?”

  “Mending,” said Greta, coming forward into the room, with the monster still nestled against her neck. “We did the whole where-am-I, what-happened bit, and he’s responding to my experimental concoctions most satisfactorily. What about you? How’s the arm?”

  “Also mending,” he said. “Slower than I would like, but steadily.”

  “Good. Don’t try to do too much with it yet – we can’t go anywhere until Grisaille can travel anyway; it’s going to be a few more days. I’ve given up worrying about the clinic for now: Dez and Anna and a couple other kindly souls have been wonderful and I will thank them fulsomely when I get home, but right now I’m going to worry about things I can have some effect on.”

  “Quite right,” said Varney, and his smile warmed as he looked at her and the monster. “That creature ought not to have quite as much charm as it, in fact, has.”

  “I know, it’s entirely illogical,” Greta said, and joined him by the windows. In the indirect light, the lines on his face were graven very deep, and she found herself wanting to touch them. “I did want to talk to you about something,” she said a little hurriedly, and was a bit surprised at what looked like hope in that face, just a flicker, here and then gone. “About the monsters,” Greta clarified, and watched Varney’s expression change back to mild and melancholy interest.

  “What about them?” he said.

  “So there are a lot of them. St. Germain and a couple of the other Paris supernaturals have been going through the underground to try to find the rest – there are feral tricherpetons loose in the city, and more baby wellmonsters than you could shake a historically significant femur at. They apparently did get enough warning to hide before Corvin destroyed the old house by the lake – and they need somewhere to go.” The wellmonster that had come out of the underground with her had colonized St. Germain’s bathroom sink and refused to be dislodged until they found it a large stoneware bowl in which it could lurk instead, which it had accepted with reasonable grace, still clutching the silver whistle.

  “Go on,” said Varney, sounding as if he had some idea where this was headed.

  “And – well, there’s no way I can take them, my flat’s tiny and I’m never there and it’s completely inappropriate habitat-wise, but…” She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “You’ve got quite a lot of land down in Wiltshire, haven’t you?”

  Varney’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment she thought, Oh God, this was a mistake, before a remarkably sunny and totally unpremeditated smile broke over his features: an expression quite unlike him, and so bright it dazzled Greta.

  “That I do,” he said. “There’s a great deal of room in the stable block for monster kennels. And an ornamental lake which may or may not contain skeletons. And water gardens that are frankly a mess of overgrown grottos and stagnant ponds, and I think there’s an abandoned well in the stableyard.”

  “That’s ideal,” she said, smiling back helplessly. “Are the cellars damp?”

  “Extremely,” he told her. “Heavy on the cobwebs, as well. And there’s nitre.”

  “I could not imagine anything better,” said Greta, “except this is going to be expensive, and they’re going to need to be taken care of, and that will require hiring people to do the taking-care-of, and it’s – it’s a lot to ask of you.”

  “My dear,” said Varney, “do you realize how long it has been, how abominably long, since I had a purpose other than to prey on the living and get myself chased by angry pitchfork-wielding mobs? An actual purpose, with – responsibilities, and useful tasks? A constructive use of time? Do you realize quite what you’re offering me?”

  “Not really?” she said, looking up at him. His eyes were dark silver, reflective, metallic. She could see herself in them, two tiny upturned Greta-faces, as he regarded her. “But… I offer it gladly,” she added, feeling the glittering edges of his thrall, held in check but always present, feeling as if she were stepping up to the edge of some unknowable precipice, feeling the empty space of clear air in front of her, waiting for that last and final step. “Gladly,” she repeated, softer now.

  “And gladly I accept,” said Sir Francis Varney, and took her face between his two cold hands – gently nudging the whistle-monster out of his way – and bent to kiss her lips.

  Greta was still pink and feeling as if she were floating an inch or so above the floor an hour later, when she went to knock on Emily’s door. St. Germain had done a bit of rearranging in order to accommodate them all, and Greta, Ruthven, and Varney were sleeping on various couches around the flat; it had been evident to all of them that the youngest vampire needed the privacy of a room to herself. She was trying to adjust to a crepuscular lifestyle, if not a diurnal one just yet, but it was proving difficult – and coupled with the stress from her recent experiences, Greta didn’t blame Emily for wanting to spend most of her time asleep.

  Still. She knocked again gently. “Emily?”

  There was a sound of movement from within, and a minute or so later the door opened to reveal Emily in a pair of vastly oversized borrowed sweatpants and a similarly huge T-shirt advertising Rammstein, her dyed-red hair in a messy braid over one shoulder. It was about as far as one could get from frilly underwired lace sleepwear and hairsprayed ringlets. She looked heartbreakingly young and also entirely human: the only visible signifier of her nature was the color of her eyes, the same white-silver as Ruthven’s, with the black rim to the iris.

  “Mnnh,” she said, and rubbed at those eyes. “What time is it?”

  “About six; the light’s lost most of its intensity. Do you feel up to having something to eat?”

  “Not really,” said Emily, “but I guess I have to, right?”

  “I’m afraid so. You’ll get the shakes and cold sweats if you don’t feed at least a little every twenty-four hours or so, and that’s not even slightly fun. Did you get some sleep?”

  “Kind of. I – can I talk to you about something?”

  “Of course,” said Greta. “Anything you like.”

  “Okay. Let me get dressed. I’ll be, like, two seconds.”

  She nodded, and the door shut again. Greta hadn’t spoken very much with Emily since their return from the caves under the city – mostly she’d been too busy with Grisaille and the walking wounded – but she knew the young vampire would be full of questions, and hoped she’d act
ually be able to answer some of them, now that she’d had a chance to talk to Fastitocalon.

  She hadn’t been leaning against the wall for very long when Emily emerged in a pair of jeans and a dark purple shirt, both newly purchased from quite expensive boutiques on the Champs-Élysées, as was Greta’s own clothing. Ruthven had accepted what was apparently a standing invitation to join a couple of Parisian lady vampires for an evening on the town that had involved shopping, clearly pleased at having an excuse; he’d come back with bright color in his face, a spring in his step, and an enormous number of shopping bags. As always, he’d been eerily good at judging not only size but personal taste and making decisions accordingly. Emily looked pale, beautiful, but ordinary. The whole Grand Duchess of the Body-Glittered Dead bit was nowhere to be seen.

  “Very nice,” Greta said approvingly. “Come and have some dinner and ask me whatever you like, although I can’t guarantee I’ll have an answer.”

  “It’s weird,” said Emily, but fell into step with Greta anyway. “The – having dinner in a kitchen, like – out of cups, like people, not – from a victim outside in an alleyway or during a party.”

  “It’s certainly a change,” she said. “But on the whole, this version of things works just as well. Sit down, I’ll manage.”

  Emily subsided into one of St. Germain’s kitchen chairs and watched her as she rummaged around in the fridge and came up with a swollen plastic packet of something dark and red. “Okay,” said the girl, “first question, if that’s real blood, how did you guys get that stuff? Did you, like, rob a hospital or something?”

  “‘Or something,’” Greta said, cutting the edge of the pouch open with kitchen scissors and pouring the contents into a large mug, adding a dash of wine and some spice. “St. Germain is a pretty big deal in this town, as well as being a pretty big wolf, and he knows people everywhere: there’s a couple of supers that work in various healthcare facilities around Paris and were willing to do him a favor. What you had last night was fresh, though: Ruthven went out to dinner and took a flask along.”

  “This is so weird,” Emily complained again, and there was real distress under the whine. “Before – in Corvin’s group – I had to learn to bite people, there wasn’t any other choice, and they did that thing with their eyes a lot, I don’t remember parts of it, but there wasn’t, like, blood in the fridge.”

  “Pretty much every single thing they did to you was atrocious,” Greta said, folding her arms. “I’m so sorry that you went through that, and that it is going to be unavoidably difficult to unlearn all that rubbish and learn more sustainable and sensible techniques – but Ruthven and Varney want to help, very much.”

  The microwave went ding after the manner of its kind. Greta had half hysterically expected French microwaves to make a different type of sound, the first time she’d used it, and then cursed herself for an idiot. She set the mug in front of Emily, and the rich coppery smell of warmed blood filled the kitchen almost at once. You never really did get used to that smell, although it got easier to ignore.

  She watched the rapid sequence of reactions pass across Emily’s face: first instinctive, residual disgust, and then a ravenous almost mindless need that eclipsed the revulsion completely.

  Half the mug was gone before she looked up at Greta and licked her lips. “You put something in this,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “It’s nicer this time.”

  “I did,” she said. “I thought you could probably use it. Better now?”

  “Yeah,” said Emily, and sighed, relaxing. There was color in her cheeks, faint but present; she looked much more like a living person than a dead one. “Thank you. It’s really nice of you. All this.” She waved a vague hand at the kitchen.

  “You are extremely welcome,” said Greta, and made herself a cup of tea. Shortly the others would be congregating for the evening, but she thought they had half an hour to talk in relative peace. “What did you want to ask me?”

  “Oh,” said Emily. “Right. The – in the lair. When the – those were ghosts, right? When they appeared, and then everything went white. What was that?”

  Greta sighed. “The short answer is ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ but the long one involves a friend of mine who happens to be sort of a demon. You – do you know about the reality rip, the damage Lilith was doing as she summoned all of those monsters?”

  Emily’s eyes had gone huge again. “Reality rip,” she repeated.

  “… I’ll start from the beginning.”

  In fact, it took about twenty minutes, all told, before Greta finished, and she had to admit Emily was taking it rather well; then again, the kid had had to readjust her worldview quite starkly to incorporate a number of improbable truths in the past couple of months.

  “So it’s fixed,” she said when Greta had stopped. “The hole. It’s – there’s not gonna be that weird Time Lord shit happening anymore with the flickers of the past and stuff?”

  “Yes. It’s fixed. According to Fass anyway.”

  “I still don’t really get the Hell thing,” said Emily. “It’s – it sounds like a big giant bureaucracy, not a bunch of eternal tortures.”

  “Some would say the two overlap,” Greta told her, wearily amused. “But the eternal tortures are provided for the clients, not the staff. There’s apparently all sorts of dreadful things being done to sinners as per spec, but the place is run very efficiently by – as you say – a big giant bureaucracy. What’s fascinating to me is that Fastitocalon’s got a proper job down there again, and – rather an important one actually. I’m rather proud of him, even if it does mean he’s mostly going to be spending his time Below, rather than in London. I’m definitely going to miss him – he was all the family I had for a while – but I’m happy he has a real job again and that he’s finally been allowed to come home. For a long time he couldn’t, he was sort of living in exile up here, and it must have been incredibly lonely.”

  Emily looked down into the empty mug, and Greta could see the muscles of her jaw tense for a moment. “Family,” she repeated. “Yeah. I – don’t get to have one now, do I. I’m dead. I can’t go home to my mum and dad and say Hello, I’m a vampire now, cheers, exactly.”

  “No, you can’t,” said Greta. “And that’s unfair, and I’m sorry for it, Emily. The people who did this to you took that away, but – in time, if you want, you can find yourself the beginnings of a new family.”

  “How?” Emily said bitterly. “How am I supposed to do that – look, I can’t even do normal stuff. That was the one thing they didn’t lie to me about. I don’t have a home or a family, I can’t go back to school, I can’t do anything like real people do now.”

  “Yes you can,” said a voice behind her, and both Greta and Emily looked up to see Ruthven leaning in the kitchen doorway, arms folded.

  There was something a little strange about his appearance, and after a moment Greta realized what it was: he’d done his hair differently, without the high-shine firm-hold product he normally used, and it fell in a soft black wing across his forehead. “You can in fact do almost anything you want to do,” he continued, “as long as you are willing to put in the effort and devote the necessary patience to the task. Your condition doesn’t make things impossible, just difficult.”

  He was wearing a new shirt, too, Greta noticed. Dark red with a hint of iridescence.

  “You sound like one of those stupid self-help books, all follow your dream, work hard, and you’ll get to become whatever you want to be. It’s not like that, I’m stuck, I can’t – be anything in the real world other than a fucking vampire,” Emily said, her voice rising with the threat of tears.

  Greta reached out to touch her hand, and then drew back. The girl needed to say this.

  Emily looked up at Ruthven through messy red bangs and sat up straighter, almost spitting the words at him. “I’m dead and I’m a monster and I’m always gonna be, and I can’t do anything about it.”

  “What do you want to do?” Ruthven
asked.

  His voice was calm and mildly interested, but it cut through the air of the kitchen as if he’d snapped at her. “What had you been planning on doing, before this happened?”

  “… I don’t know,” said Emily, and her shoulders slumped. “I was – gonna get my degree in English, and then – find a job, like – teaching or something, I don’t know. I don’t have special talents at anything, I’m good at writing papers, I like reading and studying stuff and that’s just – that doesn’t matter now. Nothing does. I’m not smart enough to find a way to deal with this, okay?”

  Greta and Ruthven shared a look over her head. “I think you can do more than you realize,” Greta said gently. “You kept your head in the battle, while we worked on Grisaille – you did very well in a terrifying situation, and you have managed to survive and adjust to an incredibly traumatic change without subsuming your personality into something else.”

  “That’s different,” said Emily. “In the fight, he was – I thought he was gonna die and you said hold the pressure on his wound so that’s what I did, it wasn’t difficult – what actually was that about, anyway? Why’d you need me to push so hard that it hurt him?”