Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  I should hope so, too, thought Greta, staring at the radio, her eyes wide. Two more murders, one done in broad daylight? How the hell is he—or they—getting away with this?

  Before last night, before she had had any reason to suspect that there was more than one individual involved in the killings, she had thought about it only at a distance. She’d felt strongly if obscurely that whoever was doing the killing was male. Most serial killers were men; those few women who committed multiple murders tended to do it with poison, as far as Greta knew, and for monetary gain. This—whoever it was, or they were—seemed to be doing it for the sheer hell of the thing, and so far it looked like they weren’t slowing down at all.

  The unpleasant thought occurred to her that perhaps the unsatisfactory result of the attack on Varney had spurred them on to more active efforts, to make up for that particular failure. They hadn’t killed him, but hey, perhaps two humans were worth as much as one vampyre to whoever was behind this business.

  Neil the announcer was continuing: “Police have issued safety recommendations for the public, which are available on their website as well as all main news agencies. It is strongly advised that people travel in groups and stay in well-lit areas as much as possible. Remain alert and aware of your surroundings at all times.”

  “This may be the most prolific serial killer who has been active in greater London since Dennis Nilsen, often referred to as the British Jeffrey Dahmer,” his colleague put in, still with the tinge of fascinated horror in her voice. “Nilsen murdered at least twelve young men in the years between 1978 and 1983. So far it seems that the so-called Rosary Ripper’s motivation in these murders does not appear to be sexual, unlike Nilsen’s crimes, but police have declined to speculate on the real motives behind the recent spree of killings. We can be sure of one thing, Neil, I think.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “London is a frightened city.”

  Greta turned the radio off. “London,” she told the darkened dial, “contains multitudes.” The apparent presence of a lunatic or lunatics plural running around the city stabbing people to death was certainly unpleasant, but the world in which she moved was rather more complicated than that inhabited by Neil and Sheri and the majority of their listening public.

  Until now, the vicissitudes of the surface world had not impinged noticeably on the version her patients inhabited, and she liked it that way. The idea that the Ripper was responsible for the attack on Varney did not so much frighten Greta as offend her.

  And it had to be stopped. It had to be stopped for a number of very obvious reasons, but among them was the fact that such a crossover from the ordinary human world to that of the supernatural represented a clear and present danger to the rest of the supernatural community. Secrecy was safety, and a breach in one was a breach in both.

  Her first priority was Varney’s recovery. Once he was well again she could turn her attention to the problem of somehow tracking down whoever was responsible.

  Greta had no illusions about her own capacity to go up against something like this herself. That was going to have to be Ruthven’s job; Ruthven, or one of the other people she knew who were capable of casually unscrewing somebody’s head.

  Up ahead the traffic was finally beginning to thin out. Greta relaxed a little. It shouldn’t take her long to collect what she needed, and the drive back would be a lot less wearisome.

  Night had fallen completely by the time she parked across the road from her block of flats, a row of white-painted town houses labeled improbably as Grove Mansions. The driver’s-side door was being its usual recalcitrant self. Greta banged it shut without bothering with the lock and let herself into the building. She was only going to be here for a few minutes to collect some spare clothes and some more tools and books, and anyway no one in their right mind would want to steal the Mini. The one time it had been lifted, years ago, the thief had promptly left it just a few streets away, in apparent disgust.

  Her ground-floor flat was a mess, as usual, clothes hanging over chairs, books and papers stacked on every horizontal surface. It was the kind of impersonal, abstract clutter left by somebody who lived alone and didn’t use the place for much of anything other than eating or sleeping, who spent the majority of her life somewhere else. Greta’s limited housekeeping instincts were applied almost entirely to her clinic; by the time she got home at night, she didn’t have the energy to face tidying up or doing anything more complicated in the kitchen than microwaving frozen dinners. There was a certain weary sense of guilt that accompanied these solo meals, generally consumed at the kitchen table or cross-legged on the bed, hunched over whatever book she was reading at the time. Lecturing her patients on healthy eating habits always felt more than a little hypocritical.

  The prospect of staying at Ruthven’s house and eating Ruthven’s reliably excellent cooking was therefore a particularly attractive one, even if the reason for her stay was both worrisome and unpleasant. It didn’t take her long to throw a couple of changes of clothes into an overnight bag and grab her toothbrush and comb. The mental picture of the luxurious spare bedrooms at the Embankment house rose again, and Greta made a face at her thoroughly inelegant pajamas. Whenever she stayed with Ruthven, she always felt vaguely as if she ought to be draped in lace and ruffles, or possibly diaphanous peignoirs, whatever they were, in order to live up to the surroundings; and then inevitably felt rather frivolous for minding the fact that she couldn’t.

  Her phone was still blessedly silent as she headed back down the stairs. She took it out and looked at the screen, in case she’d turned off the ringer by mistake, but nobody had called or texted her. She knew that Ruthven would have gotten in touch if Sir Francis took a turn for the worse, but she couldn’t help worrying while he was still above eighty-four degrees. To be entirely honest, she couldn’t help worrying about him in general. This was not a situation she had ever seen precedent for, and she simply didn’t know what sort of clinical course to expect. And there was Fass to consider, too, although she was pretty sure this latest exacerbation wouldn’t turn into anything seriously worrisome now that he was back on his meds, if only he would be sensible about it.

  Not that he ever had been, of course. She could remember her father shouting at him twenty years ago for doing precisely the same passively self-destructive things for which she currently found herself shouting at him, with roughly similar levels of success. Fastitocalon’s attitude had appealed powerfully to Greta during her early-teen sulky rebellious stage. Now it just exasperated her, in an affectionate sort of way. It was a little strange, being the one to do the shouting, which she avoided thinking about more than she could help.

  She was still considering Fastitocalon as a role model for moody fourteen-year-olds when she got back to the car and let herself in. There was an unpleasant sharp and acrid sort of smell, sort of like something burning, and she wondered for a moment if the engine could have somehow overheated on the way up here without her noti—

  At this point her thought process cut off absolutely, because something in the backseat rustled, and something very, very cold and sharp was suddenly pressed against the side of her neck.

  Greta went completely still. The world seemed to have slowed down to half its normal speed and developed an eerie, glassy clarity. Her blood roared distantly in her ears.

  “What do you want?” she said, and was surprised to hear her voice sounding steady and calm. Whoever was holding the sharp thing against her neck was also breathing heavily, as if with effort. The sharp smell had an undertone of rancid saltiness, like something pickled that had gone fulsomely rotten in a dark cellar corner.

  “Thou hast done evil above all that were before thee, above all thy sins, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards; thou hast visited the dwellings of the wicked and given succour, thou hast wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord,” he said, and the knife pressed a little closer.

  Beyond the sound of her own heartbeat Greta was a
ware of the faint ticking of the clock in the dashboard, the sounds of traffic on the main road, a hundred yards away; it might as well have been on the moon. She was entirely alone, more alone than she had ever been in her life. There is no one who can help me, she thought, feeling herself skidding closer to the edge of some mental precipice. No one at all.

  Dimly, in another part of her mind, the thought surfaced for a moment and flicked its tail: What evil? I’m not the one holding a knife to someone’s throat.

  “This is the punishment of the sword, that ye may know there is a judgment,” the man went on. The voice sounded to her as if its owner couldn’t be older than his early twenties, reciting something learned by heart, and Greta wondered who had done the teaching, and why.

  Her hand, in the darkness, still held the bundle of keys. Now, very slowly, very slowly indeed, her fingers began to move, even as her mind raced. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, still surprised at just how calm she sounded. “Who sent you?”

  He hissed, a gust of rancid breath against her cheek, and the blade he was holding against her throat twitched. “In the name of the Lord God, the Sword of Holiness casts you from the surface of this world,” he said in her ear. “Into unending torment and the eternal fire.”

  The Sword of Holiness, she thought. The Sword of Holiness, not the Rosary Ripper, and it is a group of them, Varney’s three attackers and God knows how many more. She wondered if the ten people who had been featured on the newscast had heard those words, too, before they died—the Sword of Holiness casts you from the surface of this world—and in that moment Greta’s determination froze solid and immovable. She would not be the eleventh, if she had any say in the matter.

  Her fingers closed in the darkness around a small squat cylinder, hooked to the same ring as the keys to her house and the Harley Street premises. Her heart thudded rapidly in her chest as she turned the little cylinder between fingers and thumb, hoping desperately that it was still good after spending a year being bounced around in her purse. Everything was still so clear and so slow. Like being inside cold, thick, heavy glass.

  She had to make him lean as close as possible, if this was going to work, get his face right down next to her shoulder. “I don’t understand,” she said, and her voice was as small as she could make it. “What do you mean? What have I done?”

  Whoever it was drew in a deep breath—to explain, or condemn, or recite—and in the same instant her right hand came up holding the little can of pepper spray, pointing over her left shoulder, and pushed the button.

  After that everything happened very fast. The hiss of the spray was almost completely lost in the bellow of surprise and agony from her assailant; the blade he was holding against her neck scored a thin line of bright acid pain before it fell to the floor, forgotten in his desperate attempts to stop his face from burning. In that instant she, too, cried out, her own eyes and throat on fire from the spray mist—and scrabbled for the door handle, yanked it open, and mostly fell out of the Mini. Oh, it hurt, Jesus Christ it hurt. What had he cut her with?

  He was still thrashing around in the tiny backseat of the car and howling. Her first instinct was to run, in any direction, get as far away from here as she possibly could, but the part of Greta’s mind that had coolly objected to the accusation of evil took over. She was not in immediate danger, unless he had friends nearby; the incapacitant spray had done what it said on the tin, and she needed very much to know who and what it was that had attacked her.

  Despite the flailing she could make out that he was wearing some sort of dark garment with wide sleeves and a hood, which fell back to expose a head utterly devoid of hair and plated with ugly red and white ridges of scar tissue. Between his clawing fingers tears flowed and glistened in the car’s dome light—and then her stomach seized up again in a knot of ice, because between his fingers she could also see a bright blue glow, where no light had any business being.

  That’s not human, she thought. That’s wrong.

  That meant it wasn’t a question of crossover, as she had thought on the journey here. Not humans attacking supernaturals and throwing the whole careful structure of secrecy into precarious imbalance. That meant supernaturals attacking both worlds at once.

  She had to know more. Reluctantly—extremely reluctantly—Greta took a step back toward the car, and then another, the canister of pepper spray still clutched in her right fist. She made herself reach out to open the back door, stared at the writhing form of the man, at the rough-spun fabric of his brown woolen robe, the rope cincture round his waist, the livid scars on face and hands. Those were burn scars, and they were recent, too.

  He had dropped whatever he’d been holding to her throat when she got him with the spray, and Greta badly needed to get her hands on it—she had to know as much as possible about the weapon that had injured Varney. A glint of metal on the floor almost under the driver’s seat caught her eye. Some kind of dagger. The man was still clutching at his face—if she could just reach past him and grab it—

  Searing pain shot through her scalp as he seized a handful of her hair and wrenched her head round to look him in the face. It was not a nice face to look into. It would not have been a nice face to look into even had it not been twisted and piebald white and red, or if his eyes had not been giving off visible blue light.

  “Witch,” he choked out. “Filthy … sinful … witch. All of you will die. All of you. The world will be, will be cleansed …”

  I’m not a witch, I’m not a witch, Greta thought on a jagged hysterical wave of adrenaline. Nadezhda is the witch, and she’s quite clean already—

  She shut her eyes tight, and held her breath, and emptied the rest of the pepper spray right into his face.

  He screamed again, a high, thin animal noise, letting go of his handful of her hair, and now Greta was sobbing as she scrabbled under the seat for the weapon he’d been carrying, as she backed away from the car, heedless of the rain that had begun to fall. The lights of the main road, the blessedly ordinary sounds of traffic, beckoned to her, no longer as coldly inaccessible as the surface of the moon.

  She dropped the knife, whatever it was—she hadn’t even looked at it too closely—into her bag, and ran.

  CHAPTER 4

  August Cranswell was now on his third large scotch of the evening, and at the comfortable remove of that much twelve-year-old Macallan he was able to observe matters with rather more equanimity.

  They were in Ruthven’s kitchen, the two books he had brought with him carefully laid open on the table. Ruthven’s peculiar friend—who was grey, actually faintly grey in complexion, and who apparently was into cosplaying Edward R. Murrow, 1950s pinstripe suit and all—had turned out to be much better at Latin than Cranswell himself was, and he’d gladly yielded up the duty of translation.

  “This is all rather formulaic,” Vasse was saying. “It’s talking about the equivalent of mystery cults, secret societies, that sort of thing, and then it goes into discussing warrior monks, much more to the point.”

  “When you said that on the phone earlier, Ruthven, I kind of remembered seeing this a year or two back,” Cranswell said. “Took me a while to find it. The other book has the pictures of daggers I was talking about, but this one talks about orders of various Swords.”

  “‘The Livonian Brothers of the Sword,’” Vasse said, his fingertip not quite touching the ancient paper of the page. “Yes. Early thirteenth century, during the Northern Crusades. It says they got sort of subsumed into the Teutonic Knights, but they weren’t the only set of monks at the time who were going around armed to the teeth. The description gets quite lurid in places,” he added.

  “Right,” said Cranswell, who had managed to read most of the page in the uncertain light of the basement but was fully aware he hadn’t grasped the nuances. “Several other orders came into being around that time. One of them called itself the Order of the Holy Sword, which looks way cooler in Latin, like a lot of things.”

  “Gladius S
ancti,” said Ruthven, peering over Vasse’s shoulder. “The sword is to be taken literally, I presume, although what got Varney wasn’t a sword so much as a dagger. Or a spike. It left an X-shaped hole in him, which is not something I’ve seen before.”

  “‘Holy sword’ sounds a bit more impressive than ‘holy spike,’” said Vasse, “vallus sanctus, but in point of fact gladius sancti means ‘sword of holiness.’ Which is a bit different.”

  “The general idea gets itself across, details of grammar notwithstanding,” said Ruthven, drily. “Presumably they were running around with holy edged weapons of some description back in the thirteenth century. I still can’t really picture this thing. I’ve never seen a wound like that before, and I have seen a great many wounds in my time.”

  “It’s—look, it’s easier to just show you,” Cranswell said, and turned a few pages in the other book he had brought. Part of him, behind the pleasant insulation of whiskey, was still more than a little astonished that he’d done this deed at all, brought irreplaceable artifacts out of climate-controlled storage without any kind of authorization—taken them off museum premises, what had he been thinking—but he had been having the kind of day where really, really stupid decisions looked remarkably inviting. His first exhibit, the first one he had ever been assigned to research and put together on his own, the first opportunity he had had as a junior curator to demonstrate that he actually knew what he was doing, wouldn’t go up until the new year, but today had been an unremitting hell of logistical pitfalls regarding tiny details of the exhibit, and all in all Cranswell had needed the break. And the distraction. And now he wasn’t entirely sure he could get the damn things back safely and keep his job. The sour adrenaline from the chase through the dark was still sloshing around in his bloodstream, which didn’t help matters.