by Jess Faraday
“Or maybe you’ve got a boyfriend up there.”
My mind registered his joking tone, but my mouth was quick and the fuse was already lit. The red fog rushed in and an unholy energy flooded my body. Cal’s letter fluttered to the ground and settled near my boot. I rounded on him.
“The fuck d’you say to me?”
Martin scrambled to his feet, hands held up, as I took a step forward.
“Say it again, you bastard. I’ll kill you.”
“Steady on, bookworm,” Martin said with a little laugh. He stood half a head taller than me and was our section’s boxing champion.
I launched myself at him, shoving him back hard against the wall. Picture frames crashed to the floor as the impact jarred them loose—glass shattered and newspaper clippings of past police heroism ground underfoot as he caught my arm and wrenched it back behind me. He swung me round and we both tumbled over the chair where he’d been sitting and hit the floor. All at once hands were around our shoulders and waists, pulling us apart, pulling us to our feet.
Breathing hard, I blinked through red haze at the astonished faces of my colleagues. Fitz held me back, his face impassive, his arms locked around me in the torso hold we used for restraining dangerous suspects.
“Constables, explain.” Sergeant Black said, looking from Martin to me. He was in his nightshirt and socks, which somehow made him seem even more imposing.
Martin sniffed and wiped a sleeve across his nose.
“It’s nothing, sir,” he said, glaring at me. “Misunderstanding between Bookworm and me.”
Black looked to me.
“That’s right,” I said.
The sergeant took a deep breath and set his jaw. “From now on, you have a misunderstanding, you lace up the gloves and work it out in the ring. Understand?” We both mumbled our yessirs. “Three days suspension for the both of you, and that table’s coming out of your pay. You know better.” He looked around at the others. “The rest of you, take a lesson. Pearce, Martin, you’ll clear this mess up in the morning.”
It would have been more satisfying if Martin had pushed past me as he left with his mates, or sworn this wasn’t the end of it. But it was the end of it for him. This was nothing. Less than nothing. And he left without a backward glance. Once he disappeared, Fitz’s arms loosened but didn’t release.
“Finished?” he asked. I nodded. He let me go. I moved toward the door, but he stepped in front of me. “What happened?”
I shook my head and tried to slip past him. Unholy energy and red fog had drained away all at once and I was desperate for my bed. He wasn’t having it.
“It was nothing.” I bent to retrieve Cal’s letter. “A stupid joke. I took it the wrong way.”
“You couldn’t have just told him to fuck himself?”
“Should have done.”
Fitz glanced down at the letter then put a hand on my chest. “This ain’t like you, Simon. You’ve got to pull yourself together. You keep fighting our own, they won’t keep you on.”
“Thank you, Mother,” I said under my breath.
“I’m trying to be a mate, mate.” He looked at me with pity, which was worse than any of the rest of it. This time I did push past.
I was asleep before my head hit the pillow, and remained so for the rest of the day. When I woke, sometime around three in the afternoon, my eyes were burning, my head pounded, and every inch of every muscle ached. I’d have felt so much better, had I simply come home after my shift and drank myself to sleep. Fitz had already left for work, which was fine. I wasn’t ready to face him yet. Cal’s letter waited, unopened, on the table beside my bed. I wasn’t ready to face it, either.
Why the hell had he written now? After enough silence, I was working hard to convince myself I no longer cared. But I cared desperately. Yet, at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to open the envelope.
Hot showers were one of the few luxuries allowed us, and, this time of day, I had the room to myself. I soaped, scrubbed, rinsed, then soaped up again, while scalding water poured over me. When the water started to run cold, I realized that the kind of cleanliness I was seeking could not be achieved with mere soap and water. So I dried off and put on a fresh uniform.
Yes, a uniform. Black had suspended me, but I needed something to do. Specifically, I needed to work, or I might go back to thinking. And that would have helped no one.
Something was wrong at the Masterson house. I was pretty sure it wasn’t vampires. But there was more to it than an unbalanced young woman and her overprotective parents. And that afternoon, I would find out what it was.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Avery, seemed surprised to see me return. She let me in nonetheless and sat me in the parlor while she fetched her mistress. While I waited I scanned the bookshelves.
The shelves held the usual fare of the aspiring middle classes: sermons disguised as novels meant to uplift and educate; a few works of ancient scholarship no doubt expurgated into uselessness to preserve delicate modern sensibilities; the odd book of vapid poems. My father, who had worked as a clerk in a bookstore, would have had a few choice words for such an unimaginative collection. Then my attention was drawn to an unevenness in the neat shelves. Something stuck behind the rows, hiding behind a censored and abridged volume of Greek philosophy, pushing it slightly outward from the others. Propriety forgotten, I eased the unread philosophical works apart and teased out the hidden book.
It was a thin volume, bound in a light-colored leather that cracked with newness. The leather was covered by an intricate painted design of jagged leaves and thorn-covered vines, whose shadows and angles struck me as slightly sinister. The vines came together in the center to form a box around the title: Semen Sanguis: Ancient Rites of Power From Wallachia and Transylvania.
Frowning, I flipped through the pages. The printer had used a Gothic font to give an impression of age, but the paper, like the leather was new. The print run had been limited—thirteen copies. How far back the rituals dated, or if they were authentic, was difficult to tell. There was a lot of this kind of hocus-pocus about. But this wasn’t your average Mystic Myrtle nonsense. The text outlined specific rituals and depicted them in stunning colored plates with shocking images of bloodletting and barbaric sexual acts.
Moreover, it beggared belief that the chief superintendent would insist on a highly censored copy of Plato’s Republic, but would leave this profanity lying about for an emotionally disturbed young person to find. Actually, it beggared belief that the Chief Superintendent of Police would have such a thing at all in his collection, as obscenity of this magnitude could have easily cost him his job plus two years.
A slip of paper fell out from between the pages. I picked it up. It was a handwritten receipt, dated the day before Masterson had taken up his new office. There was, unfortunately, neither name nor address to show where the book had come from.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. I pocketed the receipt and shoved the little grimoire back onto the shelf. As I stepped away from the bookcase, Mrs. Masterson strode into the room, followed by a much younger version of herself. Both the Missus and the Miss were tall, thin, and fair. The daughter stooped slightly, as if ashamed of her height, but her mother used hers to commanding effect. Both women wore well-made and serviceable, though not fancy, clothing.
“Constable,” the mother said, allowing me to press her hand.
“Mrs. Masterson. Miss,” I said. I bobbed a quick bow toward the girl, who gave a half-hearted curtsy, but kept her eyes on the floor. The ragged edge of a bandage peeked out from beneath the right cuff of the girl’s left sleeve. She noticed it, too, and pulled the sleeve down.
“How kind of you to check on us.”
“It is standard, following an incident. I do hope you’re feeling better, Miss.”
The young woman didn’t answer. She didn’t have the chance.
“I can assure you, Constable, that everything is exactly as it should be,” her mother answered for her.
; “Did you catch the vampire?” the young woman asked.
“Adelaide.”
“Was someone in your room last night, Miss?” I asked.
“My daughter is unwell. She has nightmares and dark fantasies.”
“As we all do from time to time.” I deliberately turned my entire body to face Miss Masterson. “What happened last night, Miss? You can tell me.”
The young woman’s mother—the Chief Superintendent’s wife, I had to remind myself—didn’t like that at all. Subtly, she tried to crowd back into the center of my field of vision, but I kept my focus on the girl.
“There was a man,” Miss Masterson said defiantly. “I felt him beside my bed. And then—”
Her mother interrupted. “There was no—”
I held up a hand and mustered a quelling look toward the woman. Too late, I realized I’d probably pay for it when word got back to the station.
“Was it your father, perhaps?” I asked. She shook her head. “A brother?”
“Miss Masterson is an only child,” her mother said.
“A servant, maybe?” I turned to the mother. “Was there anyone else present in the house last night?”
“No,” she snapped. “No visitors, and no male servants. Constable, I really must insist—”
“Did he come in through the window?” I asked. The Wakefield report had said that the bedroom window had been open.
Miss Masterson frowned. “Why would anyone leave the window open?”
Enraged past the point of civility, the mother physically moved her daughter aside and stood in front of me, her face nearly level with my own.
“This interrogation is over, Constable Pearce. You can show yourself out. And you can expect to hear from my husband about this.”
•••
As I walked down the street, the slam of the door behind me still ringing in my years, satisfaction lightened my steps. I was certain there’d been more to last night’s incident than either the chief inspector or his wife was letting on. There was no evidence of an intruder beyond the word of a purportedly unstable young woman, but now I at least knew of the obscene book.
Though it wasn’t specifically about vampires, it was about bloodletting as a spiritual and sexual practice. And the fact that both Miss Masterson and the Wakefield girl had claimed to have been attacked by vampires seemed too close to be a coincidence. I fingered the card in my pocket. The hurried slap of shoes on the pavement behind me pulled me from my thoughts.
“Constable!”
I turned. Mrs. Avery clearly hadn’t sprinted anywhere for some time. As she was catching her breath, she pressed a wad of cloth—a dishtowel, perhaps—into my hand.
“Found this…under Miss Adelaide’s bed…when I was cleaning this morning.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but it weren’t there when she went to bed last night, and I never seen such a thing before in me life.”
It was a brass device about an inch wide and a little longer than my thumb, with one end squared off, the other rounded, and a thumb-switch on one face. When I pushed it, two sharp prongs shot out from the squared end, nearly impaling my index finger. I opened my mouth to ask Mrs. Avery what she made of it, but she had gone.
That decided it. The next stop would be the antiquarian pocket of Paternoster Row. I’d been meaning to pay a visit to Fiona MacGregor, who ran the scientific bookstore where my father used to work, and now I had an excuse. MacGregor’s Scientific Books sometimes also trafficked in odd bits of laboratory equipment and other paraphernalia. Mrs. MacGregor might have some insight into the purpose of the strange device that almost cost me a finger. On top of that, I was certain I’d seen an occult book shop not far from MacGregor’s. Perhaps they could tell me about Semen Sanguis.
The disastrous night before was fading fast in my memory. Suspension or not, following this line of investigation had been exactly the right thing to do. And precious few things in the past month could have been described that way.
I glanced at my watch. It was after four. My uniform had been necessary for visiting the Mastersons. However, something told me that the clerk at the occult book shop would be more forthcoming about the little book of rituals if he thought he was speaking to a customer rather than a police constable coming to charge him with obscenity. There was just enough time to throw on a set of civilian clothes and make my way there before the shops closed for the night.
•••
Walking into MacGregor’s Scientific Books was like traveling back in time. As a child I’d whiled away countless Saturday afternoons hiding among the shelves, chipping away at exotic words and concepts while my father unloaded boxes and worked the counter. Intervening years hadn’t changed the place much. The shelves were still full but tidy, the spines of the books covered in tantalizingly complicated words in English, Greek, and Latin. Interspersed with the books, sextants, telescopes, and other devices peeked out, giving the place a laboratory feel. The air was warm and smelt of dry paper and garlic.
Mr. MacGregor was gone, now, as was my father. But MacGregor’s widow, a stout woman with thick spectacles and a thicker Scottish accent, still ran the place with a loving iron fist. As I entered, she looked up from the shelf she was dusting, and a smile creased her face.
“Simon! I’ve not seen ye in ages. How’ve ye been keeping?”
“Well, thank you, Mrs. MacGregor. And yourself?”
“It’s Fiona, lad. How many times must I tell ye?”
We were both adults, now, but she was elderly, and I wasn’t certain I’d ever be able to call her by name.
“Sorry.”
“Never ye mind. Where’ve ye been keeping yourself?”
“I’ve been in Scotland, actually. Edinburgh.”
“Och, dreadful place.” She was from Glasgow, and the enmity between the cities was famous. “But you’re home now. So, what brings ye?”
I took the towel-wrapped device out of my coat pocket, and unfolded the fabric onto the counter. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me what this is.”
She squinted through her thick spectacles. Then she looked up at me. “Is it from a case?” I smiled. She loved detective stories—Dickens, Collins, Poe—and had been thrilled when I’d joined Scotland Yard. “I suppose you cannae discuss the details.”
“No, Mrs. MacGregor,” I said.
She picked up the brass tool and held it up toward the lamp. The sun had just set, and darkness was rolling down across the city. The object gleamed dully in the light of the gas sconce.
“Mind that switch,” I said as she nudged it with her thumb. The vicious little fork flicked out. Fortunately, she seemed to know how to hold the device properly. She tucked the blade back into place and looked up at me, eyes glittering.
“That, my lad, is a pocket lancet, and an odd one at that.”
“For drawing blood?”
She nodded. “Aye. Though I’ve not seen one with two points before.” She placed the device back onto the towel and wrapped it up again.
A double-headed lancet was an intriguing development. And the fact that the Mastersons’ housekeeper had found it under Miss Masterson’s bed the night after the visit of a supposed vampire…. But Charlotte Wakefield’s “vampire” had attempted to use his teeth, not a lancet. Or so she’d said. Had she truly seen a man bite her in the dark? Or had she merely felt a puncture and assumed?
“It’s a nasty thing, that. Good luck with it.” She tutted, pushing it back toward me. Then she looked up and smiled. “Anything else I can do for ye, lad, before I close up?”
“Anything new from Dr. Bell?” I asked hopefully.
She shook her head. “Not for some time. Pity.”
“Indeed.”
I glanced around at the shelves. I wasn’t in the mood for a heavy scientific text, but I didn’t want to leave. My life felt like it was splitting in two. One side was books and friends and the work that I loved. The other was a steep, muddy, downhill slope i
nto I knew not what. Instinct told me it was best not to give it too much thought. And the bookstore, this little jewel of perfectly preserved memory, seemed a refuge from it all. But it was the refuge of a moment. Eventually I’d have to face my problems and sort them out. Mrs. MacGregor couldn’t possibly have known the nature of my conflict, but she did sense something was wrong. Her expression softened, and she said,
“Cup of tea and a blether? I’ve got your favorite tattie scones with garlic.”
My stomach growled. God, did I miss those. And a cup of tea would have been just the thing. But it would only take one home-cooked pastry to loosen my tongue and turn a blether into an inquiry about books regarding the new field of sexology, which might as well be a confession to a woman as keen as Mrs. MacGregor.
“Perhaps another time,” I said. “I’ve one more stop to make before it closes.”
“Aye? And where’s that?”
“The occult book shop down the street. Do you know the place?”
“Aye,” she said darkly. “Vincent Peters’s place. But you’ll not have to hurry. They don’t open until after dark, them.”
“What? What kind of business is that?”
“The kind what’s run by folk that don’t need the money is my guess. Strange folk. Seen ‘em once or twice. Gave me the shivers.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Aye. Ye do that.” She reached beneath the counter and produced a metal pan lined with cloth, filling the space between us with the mouthwatering smell of butter and garlic. “But take a scone, first, lad. Ye look like ye could use it.”
The scones weren’t warm, but they were fresh, and they were magnificent. I held every crumb on my tongue until it disintegrated, leaving behind its buttery, garlicky memory. As I walked down Paternoster Row, the windows of the shops and bookbinders were going dark. People were locking their doors and going home for the night. But, just as Mrs. MacGregor had said, the Vincent Peters Emporium of Occult and Antiquarian Books was open for business.
As I approached, the customer at the counter, a man in his thirties apparently finishing an unsatisfactory transaction, turned sharply on his heel and stalked to the door. We arrived at the entrance at the same time. The minute I reached for the handle, he gave the door a sharp push and stepped out, stopping briefly to glare at me with cold, black, and bottomless eyes before brushing roughly past in a cloud of expensive fabric and cologne.
