She glowered at the car and then at the world in general, glancing around to make sure no one was watching her from the shadows. Satisfied, she picked up her black working bag and the shapeless oversize monster that was her current handbag and went to ring the doorbell. It was time to replace the handbag, too. The leather on this one was holding up but the lining was beginning to go, and Greta had limited patience regarding the retrieval of items from the mysterious dimension behind the lining itself.
The house to which she had been summoned was one of a row of magnificent old buildings separating Temple Gardens from the Embankment, mostly taken over by lawyers and publishing firms these days. It was a testament to this particular homeowner’s rather special powers of persuasion that nobody had succeeded in buying the house out from under him and turning it into offices for overpriced attorneys, she thought, and then had to smile at the idea of anybody dislodging Edmund Ruthven from the lair he’d inhabited these two hundred years or more. He was as much a fixture of London as Lord Nelson on his pillar, albeit less encrusted with birdlime.
“Greta,” said the fixture, opening the door. “Thanks for coming out on a Sunday. I know it’s late.”
She was just about as tall as he was, five foot five and a bit, which made it easy to look right into his eyes and be struck every single time by the fact that they were very large, so pale a grey they looked silver-white except for the dark ring at the edge of the iris, and fringed with heavy soot-black lashes of the sort you saw in advertisements for mascara. He looked tired, she thought. Tired, and older than the fortyish he usually appeared. The extreme pallor was normal, vivid against the pure slicked-back black of his hair, but the worried line between his eyebrows was not.
“It’s not Sunday night, it’s Monday morning,” she said. “No worries, Ruthven. Tell me everything; I know you didn’t go into lots of detail on the phone.”
“Of course.” He offered to take her coat. “I’ll make you some coffee.”
The entryway of the Embankment house was floored in black-and-white-checkered marble, and a large bronze ibis stood on a little side table where the mail and car keys and shopping lists were to be found. The mirror behind this reflected Greta dimly and greenly, like a woman underwater; she peered into it, making a face at herself, and tucked back her hair. It was pale Scandinavian blonde and cut like Liszt’s in an off-the-shoulder bob, fine enough to slither free of whatever she used to pull it back; today it was in the process of escaping from a thoroughly childish headband. She kept meaning to have it all chopped off and be done with it but never seemed to find the time.
Greta Helsing was thirty-four, unmarried, and had taken over her late father’s specialized medical practice after a brief stint as an internist at King’s College Hospital. For the past five years she had run a bare-bones clinic out of Wilfert Helsing’s old rooms in Harley Street, treating a patient base that to the majority of the population did not, technically, when you got right down to it, exist. It was a family thing.
There had never been much doubt which subspecialty of medicine she would pursue, once she began her training: treating the differently alive was not only more interesting than catering to the ordinary human population, it was in many ways a great deal more rewarding. She took a lot of satisfaction in being able to provide help to particularly underserved clients.
Greta’s patients could largely be classified under the heading of monstrous—in its descriptive, rather than pejorative, sense: vampires, were-creatures, mummies, banshees, ghouls, bogeymen, the occasional arthritic barrow-wight. She herself was solidly and entirely human, with no noticeable eldritch qualities or powers whatsoever, not even a flicker of metaphysical sensitivity. Some of her patients found it difficult to trust a human physician at first, but Greta had built up an extremely good reputation over the five years she had been practicing supernatural medicine, largely by word of mouth: Go to Helsing, she’s reliable.
And discreet. That was the first and fundamental tenet, after all. Keeping her patients safe meant keeping them secret, and Greta was good with secrets. She made sure the magical wards around her doorway in Harley Street were kept up properly, protecting anyone who approached from prying eyes.
Ruthven appeared in the kitchen doorway, outlined by light spilling warm over the black-and-white marble. “Greta?” he said, and she straightened up, realizing she’d been staring into the mirror without really seeing it for several minutes now. It really was late. Fatigue lapped heavily at the pilings of her mind.
“Sorry,” she said, coming to join him, and a little of that heaviness lifted as they passed through into the familiar warmth and brightness of the kitchen. It was all blue tile and blond wood, the cheerful rose-gold of polished copper pots and pans balancing the sleek chill of stainless steel, and right now it was also full of the scent of really good coffee. Ruthven’s espresso machine was a La Cimbali, and it was serious business.
He handed her a large pottery mug. She recognized it as one of the set he generally used for blood, and had to smile a little, looking down at the contents—and then abruptly had to clamp down on a wave of thoroughly inconvenient emotion. There was no reason that Ruthven doing goddamn latte art for her at half-past four in the morning should make her want to cry.
He was good at it, too, which was a little infuriating; then again she supposed that with as much free time on her hands as he had on his, and as much disposable income, she might find herself learning and polishing new skills simply to stave off the encroaching spectre of boredom. Ruthven didn’t go in for your standard-variety vampire angst, which was refreshing, but Greta knew very well he had bouts of something not unlike depression—especially in the winter—and he needed things to do.
She, however, had things to do, Greta reminded herself, taking a sip of the latte and closing her eyes for a moment. This was coffee that actually tasted as good as, if not better than, it smelled. Focus, she thought. This was not a social call. The lack of urgency in Ruthven’s manner led her to believe that the situation was not immediately dire, but she was nonetheless here to do her job.
Greta licked coffee foam from her upper lip. “So,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was—” Ruthven sighed, leaning against the counter with his arms folded. “To be honest I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs and writing nasty letters to the Times about how much I loathe these execrable skyscrapers somebody keeps allowing vandals to build all over the city. I’d got to a particularly cutting phrase about the one that sets people’s cars on fire, when somebody knocked on the door.”
The passive-aggressive-letter stage tended to indicate that his levels of ennui were reaching critical intensity. Greta just nodded, watching him.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever read an ancient penny-dreadful called Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood,” he went on.
“Ages ago,” she said. She’d read practically all the horror classics, well-known and otherwise, for research purposes rather than to enjoy their literary merit. Most of them were to some extent entertainingly wrong about the individuals they claimed to depict. “It was quite a lot funnier than your unofficial biography, but I’m not sure it was meant to be.”
Ruthven made a face. John Polidori’s The Vampyre was, he insisted, mostly libel—the very mention of the book was sufficient to bring on indignant protestations that he and the Lord Ruthven featured in the narrative shared little more than a name. “At least the authors got the spelling right, unlike bloody Polidori,” he said. “I think probably Feast of Blood is about as historically accurate as The Vampyre, which is to say not very, but it does have the taxonomy right. Varney, unlike me, is a vampyre with a y.”
“A lunar sensitive? I haven’t actually met one before,” she said, clinical interest surfacing through the fatigue. The vampires she knew were all classic draculines, like Ruthven himself and the handful of others in London. Lunar sensitives were rarer than the draculine vampires for a couple of reasons, chief among
which was the fact that they were violently—and inconveniently—allergic to the blood of anyone but virgins. They did have the handy characteristic of being resurrected by moonlight every time they got themselves killed, which presumably came as some small comfort in the process of succumbing to violent throes of gastric distress brought on by dietary indiscretion.
“Well,” Ruthven said, “now’s your chance. He showed up on my doorstep, completely unannounced, looking like thirty kinds of warmed-over hell, and collapsed in the hallway. He is at the moment sleeping on the drawing room sofa, and I want you to look at him for me. I don’t think there’s any real danger, but he’s been hurt—some maniacs apparently attacked him with a knife—and I’d feel better if you had a look.”
By James Bennett
BEN GARSTON NOVELS
Chasing Embers
Raising Fire
Praise for James Bennett and Chasing Embers
“A thrilling fusion of myth and modernity, Chasing Embers will have you rooting for dragons over humans and loving every minute of it.”
—Kevin Hearne, New York Times bestselling author of Hounded
“A superior piece of magical myth-making.”
—SFFWorld
1 Jack very rarely named specific social media sites in his books. According to his agent, Murray Chambers, this policy was his “revenge” against sites who refused to pay him for name-checking them. —Alistair
2 Jack Sparks on Drugs (Erubis Books, 2014), p.146. —Alistair
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Raising Fire Page 33
