by Vivian Shaw
“Look, I appreciate the concern,” she had said for the fourth time. “I do. Believe me. But they’re vulnerable to very basic self-defense equipment, and I have a job to do that needs doing. I don’t intend to stay out very late and I’m not going to be wandering alone down any alleyways.”
Ruthven and Fastitocalon had shared a look with Varney, whose advice they had sought after Greta refused to be cowed by either of them, singly or in concert. It was a look she had seen God knew how many times on the faces of parents dealing with irrational and exasperating teenagers, and it gave her a lovely warm sense of righteous resentment that kept her going all the way to the bus stop. At which point, of course, trepidation had set back in, and she had found herself alternately looking in all directions for people in brown woolen robes and saying lots of bad words under her breath.
The bus had arrived, had not been full of murderers, had gone where it said it was going to, and had stopped where it was promising to stop. Greta decided against calling up Ruthven to inform him she’d arrived in one piece after all.
Her clinic occupied one of the less grand of the houses that lined Harley Street: the ground floor was white-painted stonework with brick above it like most of her neighbors’, but the second- and third-floor windows lacked pediments, and Greta tried not to notice just how badly the door needed repainting. Or how dusty the panes of the fanlight above it were. Her brass plate by the door was kept polished, however, and she gave it a rub with her sleeve before letting herself in: She could see her face reflected behind the letters: GRETA HELSING, MD, FRCP.
The friends Greta had prevailed upon to keep the clinic running had been managing between them in her absence. Greta’s patients were used to seeing them in the clinic; Nadezhda did a lot of helping out with the magical aspect of some of the mummy cases, as well as maintaining the wards on the front door that prevented ordinary people from getting a close look at her patients as they came and went, and Anna was often there to assist Greta with minor surgical procedures. Today Anna was in charge.
So far Greta had not mentioned anything about the nature of her sudden and enforced absence from work, and if they could only work out a way to deal with the situation sooner rather than later, hopefully her colleagues would never need to know.
She was going to buy both of them a very, very large drink when this was over. Knowing that her practice was in good hands was—well. It was important to Greta.
There were only two walk-in patients in the waiting room when she arrived, and Anna was escorting a glum-looking banshee in a scarf back from the examination room.
“Hello, Anna,” she said, “and hello, Mr. O’Connor. I hope the strain’s getting better? Excellent. Have a happy Christmas. Sorry—I’d meant to get back before now. Has it been crazy?”
Anna was a comfortably large lady who wore purple scrubs in the office and only very infrequently had to suppress urges to stand around in ponds and lure travelers to a watery grave. She gave Greta a hug. “Good to see you, love. No, it’s not been too bad, couple of cases of the flu, one or two of that GI bug, poor Mr. O’Connor’s vocal strain. Mr. Renenutet did call and I told him you weren’t in the office at the moment but you’d give him a ring about his feet when you got in.”
Greta nodded, hanging up her jacket and getting into a white coat. “Right, I’ll do that once I’ve seen these two. I’m afraid I can’t stay the whole day—you haven’t scheduled any appointments?”
“Lord no. No, and people who need to be seen right away I’ve sent over to Richthorn. I rang him up and he’s happy to help out. I’ll get you a cup of tea, love.”
“You are a gem,” Greta told her, and went out to the waiting room to check the sign-in sheet.
Time always went faster while she was working. Once she’d seen her patients—a young were-cat in search of birth control and a thin creature of indeterminate species with strep throat—she rang up the mummy Renenutet to discuss replacing three of the bones in his left foot. She did a lot of restorative and maintenance work on mummies, and kept meaning to find time and money to actually go visit the exclusive—and necessarily secret—Oasis Natrun spa and resort, just outside Marseilles.
Her mummy cases had been among the most rewarding of her medical career. There was nothing in the world like the feeling of knowing you had personally undone the damage of a couple millennia of entropy. Whenever she got particularly depressed Greta would remind herself how lucky she was to be able to do things like drastically improving a patient’s quality of life with a few hours of work and some extremely basic supplies, and the clouds would lift a bit. She loved what she did in general, of course, she always had, ever since she took over her father’s practice, or she wouldn’t be here—but sometimes she really loved doing it.
“We’ve been putting this off,” she was saying, drawing little metatarsal bones on her desk blotter, planning how she would shape and refine the lightweight nylon replacements. If she ever won the lottery she would set up a 3-D printer to make exact replicas of her patients’ bones, but at the moment hand-carved prosthetics were about the best she could do. For some very fiddly procedures she had consulted the one underworld dentist she knew who did veneer and implant work on vampires; Renenutet’s feet were less delicate a job. “The longer you put weight and strain on those, the more difficult it’s going to be to replace them. I know the prospect of being off your feet entirely for a couple of days while the resins have time to properly cure is not all that appealing, but you really will be much better afterward. Able to lurch around without a cane.”
“Do you really think so? It’s been ages since I could do any real lurching,” he said wistfully. “Mentuhotep did say you did wonders on his back, and of course Ibi’s actually able to move again, poor man—”
“I’m sure of it. Look, come in next week and we’ll have another X-ray and plan out the surgery properly.” She was already picturing the technical challenge of the repair work, the subject of burned monks entirely driven out of her head. “You’ll be up and about again by Christmas; I ought to have done this in the first place instead of trying to reinforce them in situ, but it won’t take me long to extract the damaged bones and replace them with the plastic prosthetics.”
The difficult part would be attaching the prosthetic tendons and ligaments—woven elastic strapping—to the existing bone, but Greta had pioneered a couple of techniques for exactly this type of procedure, including dual-cure resin compounds and very tiny titanium screws. “I think you’ll find your pain levels will drop significantly once you have the replacements in place, and you’ll have a lot more stability. Then we can start thinking about your back.”
“It would be awfully nice,” Renenutet said, “not to sort of feel them grinding when I walk, if you know what I mean.”
Greta winced. “I can just about imagine. All right, things are … a bit hairy just at the moment but if you make an appointment next week we ought to be able to get started. Do you have any questions?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Oh—when you do the surgery, can you have someone say the proper spells over the new bones before you put them in? It really does help.”
“Of course I will. I’m still not good enough at pronunciation to try doing it myself but I’ll have Nadezhda do it if no actual mummies are available.” She kept meaning to get better at Egyptian but never seemed to have the time. Nadezhda wasn’t completely fluent, either—but then again she was a witch, and her magic and that of the Egyptian spells seemed to be compatible.
“Thank you so much,” he said at the same time as a tap came on her office door and Anna stuck her head in.
“You’re very welcome,” she told Renenutet. “I’ve got to go, I’m afraid, but call up to make the appointment next week, all right?” She hung up, and hoped very much that she would be able to see him next week. That there would be a next week for everyone.
The thought that there might not be made her shiver, and she pushed it away as hard as she coul
d.
Anna was looking apologetic. “Sorry,” she said, “but it’s a bit urgent. There’s a ghoul who says he needs to speak to you in private right away.”
“Which ghoul?”
“I didn’t catch his name, but he’s wearing a sort of cloak thing made out of what looks like rat pelts,” Anna said. “He doesn’t look very well, but then they never do, do they?”
“That’s Kree-akh,” Greta said, getting up. “He’s the chieftain of the northern city clans. Tell him to come in.”
Fastitocalon kept his hand on Cranswell’s shoulder, trying not to draw more energy from the contact than he could help—it was difficult not to, but thoroughly impolite, like taking a sip of someone else’s drink.
He could see the way quite clearly in Cranswell’s thoughts. They threaded their way through the people sitting on the museum steps, not bothering very much about avoiding brushing into anyone just yet. Up the steps to the Great Russell Street entrance, and inside, into the pale-green-painted lobby with the suggested donation box; Fastitocalon told himself he’d come back when visible and actually part with a fiver, but right now he had more important things to do. And then they were in a vast white echoing space with a glass ceiling, surrounding a central chamber: what had been the British Museum Reading Room the last time he’d been in here and was now apparently used for various other exhibits.
Cranswell led them to the left, into the Egyptian exhibit hall, and Fastitocalon remembered why he didn’t spend much time in places like this: the intense, knotted, crisscrossing trails of time and metaphysical significance that hung around collections of antiquities were exhausting to experience, and the older the object the heavier its weight on reality. The things in here were old.
They skirted around the group of people looking at the Rosetta Stone and moved on, past Old Kingdom sarcophagi, past statues of Bast, through the Assyrian section, into the Greek statuary. The way was still very clear in Cranswell’s head, which made it a bit easier to withstand all the intense and complicated input, and—
Fastitocalon really did try not to read people’s minds, because it was rude, but this was barely reading so much as being unable not to overhear: Cranswell was both fiercely proud of this place and his privilege to be part of it, and profoundly afraid that he had fucked the latter up beyond repair by doing this stupid, impulsive, uncharacteristic thing that he and Fastitocalon were now here to remedy. Taking the books had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, prompted by frustration and stress, not a deliberate, premeditated choice.
Fastitocalon could not say anything aloud, even if he had wanted to let on that he knew what Cranswell was thinking, but he squeezed Cranswell’s shoulder again, lightly, as if to say, Don’t worry. I’ve got you. This will be all right.
In each of the galleries there had been several discreet security cameras, none of which were registering anything at all out of the ordinary. They passed through more rooms, down a flight of stairs into a rather dated section with worn 1970s-era linoleum on the floor, and Cranswell led him to a door marked STAFF ACCESS ONLY between signs describing Early Greek Inscriptions and Athenian Public Documents. Fastitocalon stood patiently beside him, keeping the contact as he shifted the books he was carrying to balance on one hip and fished out a set of keys from his pocket. The keys jingled, but dully, as if even that little sound could not make it out of the bubble Fastitocalon was maintaining around them.
The door opened onto a dim hallway, and as it closed behind them, leaving the public space behind, Fastitocalon could feel the difference in the atmosphere. There had been something here other than people, and it had been here recently.
“This way,” Cranswell whispered, unnecessarily, and led Fastitocalon down another narrow flight of stairs. The lights here were fluorescent, yellowish, buzzing, and the temperature had gone up. More doors to unlock, and then they were in a long, low room with cabinets arranged in rows, like stacks in a library. The traces of something not entirely human were much, much stronger here. He could almost smell them.
Cranswell hurried along the rows of cabinets, glancing around with the furtive air of someone trying not to be noticed. In here, though, there were no security cameras to worry about, and Fastitocalon let go of him and leaned against the wall for a moment or two, breathing hard.
As Cranswell unwrapped the books from their protective plastic and very, very carefully returned each of them to its proper place, Fastitocalon looked around—not quite seeing what an ordinary person might see. To his eyes, which were now noticeably if faintly lit with orange, there were crisscrossing trails left by everyone who had been down here in the past several days—he could easily make out Cranswell’s earlier track, when he had come down to take the books in the first place—and most of them were human, but some of them were not. Three of them, in fact.
They had come quite close to Cranswell, last night. Stood there, watching him.
Fastitocalon shivered suddenly, in the warmth of the underground chamber.
The creature Anna escorted into Greta’s office would not have won any beauty contests on a good day, which this rather obviously wasn’t. She turned the lights down a little, coming around the desk, and offered him a hand. The way Kree-akh was moving, as if the air itself was too heavy and the floor beneath his feet uncertain, spoke volumes; the fact that he took her hand and let her steady him, help him to a chair, was worse.
Ghouls never did look well. Anna had been quite right about that. Almost skeletally thin, wiry ropes of muscle and tendon holding bone to bone under their greenish-grey skin, they gave off a distinct air of the grave. Most of them didn’t have much hair, and what they did have was stringy and knotted, clinging like seaweed to their skulls. They were built for moving quite fast through low tunnels, their backs bent and long arms dangling, and even when standing upright the tallest adults were only just about Greta’s own height. Their skin was slick and damp, dappled like a frog’s, and mostly they wore nothing but necklaces and a kind of loincloth stitched together out of hides whose origin did not bear close contemplation; this one, however, had a long grey-brown fur cloak draped around his shoulders. Whoever made it had not removed the individual rats’ tails before sewing the pelts together, and the rows of shriveled dangling tails offered an interesting textural counterpoint to the velvety fur.
In the dimness of her office she could easily see his eyeshine, two points of red light that winked off as he squeezed his eyes shut. He was leaning a little sideways in the chair, hanging on to it with clawed fingers, visibly fighting off dizziness. Greta sat on the edge of her desk, looking closely at him. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “What happened?”
“I need more medicine,” he said. Or rather hissed. Ghoul dentition brought to mind the more alarming types of deep-sea anglerfish; their own language was ideally suited to a mouthful of needle-teeth, but pronouncing standard English presented a bit of a challenge. Kree-akh was something close to fluent in it, which was an impressive achievement. “I—ran out,” he said. “Two days ago.”
“More Effexor?” Greta said, nonplussed. “You should have had at least another two weeks worth on that refill. How did you manage to run out so quickly?”
There wasn’t a lot in the literature about the use of antidepressants in ghouls. Greta and Kree-akh had gone through three different medications before they found one that treated his symptoms, which was more or less the same process as she would expect to go through with a human patient, and she had been toying with the idea of writing a case study simply to establish precedent. He had been on venlafaxine for three months now, and they had settled into a regular routine of visits for her to monitor his progress and provide him with the prescription refills, since he could hardly be expected to go to the pharmacy himself. Which was all well and good, except for the part where suddenly stopping venlafaxine brought on really nasty side effects.
“I … lost the bottle,” Kree-akh said, and she could hear the lie very clearly.
This e
ntire business had been extremely difficult for him, and Greta was still impressed by the bravery it had taken to visit her in the first place asking for help. Ghoul chieftains were not supposed to suffer from anything so pathetic—and human—as depression, but he was what she might term a progressive example of the species. Being responsible for three separate ghoul clans in a kind of extended tribe was a hell of a difficult job, made more so by the fact that Kree-akh’s rule did not rely on vicious brute force so much as reasoned authority. He had come to her—and Greta was very much aware of the level of trust this had implied—initially complaining of headaches, and then admitted that he had heard there were medicines that might do something for exhausting, anxious misery.
He was still leaning sideways in the chair, eyes shut, greener than usual with nausea and dizziness. “Stay there,” Greta said, unnecessarily. “I’ll be right back.”
She went to look through her store of drug samples, wondering how exactly he had come to lose the pill bottle; ghouls were scavengers, notorious for hanging on to things, even when those things weren’t of paramount pharmacological importance.
That made Greta think of the stuff on the crossblade, and its pharmacological importance; and that made her wonder if the people who had attacked her and Varney could be going after the ghouls as well. It wasn’t a nice thought, even though Greta was more confident in ghouls’ ability to defend themselves than her own.
After a few minutes she found what she was looking for, and brought him a couple of pills and a glass of water. “Here. Effexor, and meclizine for the nausea.”
“Thank you,” Kree-akh said, and gave her a very horrible attempt at a smile. Greta smiled back and reached for the phone to call in a new prescription to the nearby pharmacy on Beaumont Street. By the time she’d finished dealing with the pharmacist, he was sitting a little more upright and looked somewhat less miserable.