Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

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  orbitshortfiction.com

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Vivian Shaw

  Excerpt from Bad Company copyright © 2017 by Vivian Shaw

  Excerpt from Prudence copyright © 2015 by Tofa Borregaard

  Author photograph by Emilia Blaser

  Cover art and design by Will Staehle

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10104

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  Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2017.

  First Edition: July 2017

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

  The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Interior illustrations by Will Staehle

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-43460-7 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-43461-4 (ebook)

  E3-20170415-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of Bad Company

  A Preview of Prudence

  Orbit Newsletter

  For Laura Amy Schlitz, who told me not to stop.

  Under the darkened city of London, old machinery roared on. Fans the size of small rooms spun into the darkness, pushing air through dead tunnels where no trains moved; rats, used to the dull echo of the machines, preened their whiskers atop switchboxes in dim chambers all but forgotten by the bustling world above.

  In a city built on layers of itself, era after era pressed down into the dark like sedimentary rock by the march of progress, the space underground was scarcely less crowded than the daylit streets. Tunnels and conduits, pipes and cables, a man-made warren of networks, stretched from one side of the city to the other; some were in active use, some abandoned, left to the rats and the slow, inexorable seeping of water through the earth; some forgotten about entirely, used to store old paperwork. Years of secrets lay stacked on one another in moldering cardboard boxes, their identifying tags long fallen and scattered on the concrete floors in an unrelieved and endless night.

  No one knew now exactly what remained in the tunnels, and no sensible person would go down there alone—but certain esoteric subsectors of society had always gravitated to such places. As long as there was secrecy, there would be a need for holes to hide in.

  CHAPTER 1

  The sky was fading to ultramarine in the east over the Victoria Embankment when a battered Mini pulled in to the curb, not far from Blackfriars Bridge. Here and there in the maples lining the riverside walk, the morning’s first sparrows had begun to sing.

  A woman got out of the car and shut the door, swore, put down her bags, and shut the door again with more applied force; some fellow motorist had bashed into the panel at some time in the past and bent it sufficiently to make this a production every damn time. The Mini really needed to be replaced, but even with her inherited Harley Street consulting rooms Greta Helsing was not exactly drowning in cash.

  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 trainin
g: 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.”

  Ruthven had lit a fire, despite the relative mildness of the evening, and the creature lying on the sofa was covered with two blankets. Greta glanced from him to Ruthven, who shrugged a little, that line of worry between his eyebrows very visible.

  According to him, Sir Francis Varney, title and all, had come out of his faint quite quickly and perked up after some first aid and the administration of a nice hot mug of suitable and brandy-laced blood. Ruthven kept a selection of the stuff in his expensive fridge and freezer, stocked by Greta via fairly illegal supply chain management—she knew someone who knew someone who worked in a blood bank and was not above rescuing rejected units from the biohazard incinerator.

  Sir Francis had drunk the whole of the mug’s contents with every evidence of satisfaction and promptly gone to sleep as soon as Ruthven let him, whereupon Ruthven had called Greta and requested a house call. “I don’t really like the look of him,” he said now, standing in the doorway with uncharacteristic awkwardness. “He was bleeding a little—the wound’s in his left shoulder. I cleaned it up and put a dressing on, but it was still sort of oozing. Which isn’t like us.”

  “No,” Greta agreed, “it’s not. It’s possible that lunar sensitives and draculines respond differently to tissue trauma, but even so, I would have expected him to have mostly finished healing already. You were right to call me.”

  “Do you need anything?” he asked, still standing in the doorway as Greta pulled over a chair and sat down beside the sofa.

  “Possibly more coffee. Go on, Ruthven. I’ve got this; go and finish your unkind letter to the editor.”

  When he had gone she tucked back her hair and leaned over to examine her patient. He took up the entire length of the sofa, head pillowed on one armrest and one narrow foot resting on the other, half-exposed where the blankets had fallen away. She did a bit of rough calculation and guessed he must be at least six inches taller than Ruthven, possibly more.

  His hair was tangled, streaky-grey, worn dramatically long—that was aging-rock-frontman hair if Greta had ever seen it, but nothing else about him seemed to fit with the Jagger aesthetic. An old-fashioned face, almost Puritan: long, narrow nose, deeply hooded eyes under intense eyebrows, thin mouth bracketed with habitual lines of disapproval.

  Or pain, she thought. That could be pain.

  The shifting of a log in the fireplace behind G
reta made her jump a little, and she regathered the wandering edges of her concentration. With a nasty little flicker of surprise she noticed that there was a faint sheen of sweat on Varney’s visible skin. That really wasn’t right.

  “Sir Francis?” she said, gently, and leaned over to touch his shoulder through the blankets—and a moment later had retreated halfway across the room, heart racing: Varney had gone from uneasy sleep to sitting up and snarling viciously in less than a second.

  It was not unheard-of for Greta’s patients to threaten her, especially when they were in considerable pain, and on the whole she probably should have thought this out a little better. She’d only got a glimpse before her own instincts had kicked in and got her the hell out of range of those teeth, but it would be a while before she could forget that pattern of dentition, or those mad tin-colored eyes.

  He covered his face with his hands, shoulders slumping, and instead of menace was now giving off an air of intense embarrassment.

  Greta came back over to the sofa. “I’m sorry,” she said, tentatively, “I didn’t mean to startle you—”

  “I most devoutly apologize,” he said, without taking his hands away. “I do try not to do that, but I am not quite at my best just now—forgive me, I don’t believe we have been introduced.”

  He was looking at her from behind his fingers, and the eyes really were metallic. Even partly hidden she could see the room’s reflection in his irises. She wondered if that was a peculiarity of his species, or an individual phenomenon.

  “It’s all right,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the sofa, judging that he wasn’t actually about to tear her throat out just at the moment. “My name’s Greta. I’m a doctor; Ruthven called me to come and take a look at you.”

  When Varney finally took his hands away from his face, pushing the damp silvering hair back, his color was frankly terrible. He was sweating. That was not something she’d ever seen in sanguivores under any circumstance.