Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  The sounds she made echoed unpleasantly in the dim air of the church, and seemed to go on echoing after she had finished being sick. She wanted Ruthven. She wanted Fastitocalon. She wanted her father, oh God, how she wanted her father, because Wilfert Helsing would have known what to do; he always had known what to do, her whole life, and now she was left alone with the thing slumped behind the stone pillar and it was going to be up to her to make all the decisions.

  Greta remembered being a medical student, years and years ago, and for the first time truly understanding the difference between working in a hospital, in a department run by a senior physician, under a set of rules and guidelines and frameworks, and working as a solitary GP. There were no tiresome staff meetings, no interpersonal conflicts, no bureaucratic bullshit to wade through in order to do the job—and there were also no instructions or support from superiors. No one to ask for help, advice, consultation.

  She had asked her father how he could bear the entire responsibility alone, how do you stand it, how do you know you’re not going to make mistakes with no one else there to help you, and he had laughed a little.

  I don’t, he had said. I don’t know for a fact. But I know that I know how to do this job. I trust in my own skill and experience to help me make good decisions. When it comes right down to it, you must be able to trust yourself, before asking your patients to place their trust in you. If you cannot do that, do not pursue medicine as a career.

  She had shivered. But I don’t trust myself, yet. Not entirely.

  You will get there, Gretalina. Confidence comes with practice and reinforcement of learning. You have the right kind of brain for this, and you also—he had tapped her solemnly on the chest—have the right kind of heart.

  In the church, she wiped at her face, finally straightening up. I don’t have the right kind of stomach for it, though, she thought. Still, I’m all there is, and I will have to be enough.

  She set her shoulders, took a deep breath, and began to retrace her steps.

  The thing behind the pillar wasn’t much more of a delight for the eyes—or the nose—the second time around, but now that Greta knew what to expect, she found that she was able to look at it through doctor’s eyes, and the horror was clinically acknowledged and registered in the back of her mind.

  It … he … was naked, covered in weeping burns and scars from older injuries, and what looked like the raised welts of a whip crisscrossed his back. The last time she had seen this individual he’d been dressed up like a Benedictine brother in rough brown wool, and she wondered where his habit had gone; on a day this cold and wet, she thought it unlikely that he had voluntarily taken off all his clothes.

  So someone had … stripped him naked, flogged him bloody, and … what, dumped him here? In the church? Had he crawled in here himself, seeking sanctuary? Fass had said the trail went from the tunnels to the surface and then led here.

  The clinician in her pointed out that while she was imagining possible scenarios he was continuing to lose fluids—Christ, those burns had to be getting on for eighteen percent total body surface area, plus who knows how much blood loss from the back wounds—and she needed to do something about that in a hurry. Despite the stink and the fact that his ruined, weeping eyes were glowing bright blue, Greta approached him, with her hands open and spread: I’m not a threat. She wasn’t sure if he could see her, but when he cringed away farther, she figured he at least could detect movement. That awful mewling cry came again.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, lying. She would have to hurt him a great deal just getting him out of here. “I’m a doctor. I want to help. Can you understand me?”

  “Unclean,” rasped the burned man.

  No argument there, she thought, swallowing hard against renewed nausea. “What’s your name?”

  “Anathema,” he said. “Excommunicate.” He had trouble pronouncing it, his voice thick and slurring, but struggled determinedly through the syllables.

  Greta realized that under all the wounds and scarring he couldn’t be older than his mid-twenties, and she thought again of what sort of mind it would take to hurt a person this badly and abandon them naked and bleeding and alone. She didn’t know much about excommunication, but she was pretty sure that his soul was considerably better off for dissolving ties with such a group, and changed her tack.

  “What was your name, before you met them?” He was at least not huddling back into the shadows anymore, and after another moment or two he uncurled himself from his knot with a hiss of pain.

  “Don’t … know,” he said. “Cold. Light’s gone. Light of God. Dancing. … and that sound, that sound.” He stopped, shaking his head in dumb negation of something only he could hear. Fluids spattered the floor. “In my head, all the time, humming. Voice of … of …”

  Voice of what? Greta thought, shaking her own head. “It’s all right. Never mind about that right now,” she said. “We’ve got to get you out of here. Hang on a minute.”

  They had to get him warm, first of all. She looked around. There were dusty velvet hangings in the shadows beyond him. Greta gave one a determined tug and it parted company with its rail, collapsing in heavy folds and sending up a cloud of choking dust. Not ideal, but better than nothing, she thought. Sorry, St. Michael. I hope you understand. With the velvet in her hands she knelt down beside him.

  He flinched away, covering his face with his hands, but Greta stayed put, ignoring the smell as best she could. After a moment he peered at her between his fingers.

  There were what looked like ligature marks around each wrist. They had tied him up before they whipped him.

  “I don’t mean you harm,” she said quietly, very much aware that this man had tried to kill her, had hidden in the dark and held a knife against her throat. “Will you let me help?”

  He stared at her with those terrible eyes for what felt to Greta like an awfully long time before nodding, once. She draped the velvet around his shoulders as gently as she could, knowing any contact with the wounds was painful; he hissed, but didn’t try to get away, and after a moment his fingers crept up to pull the curtain more tightly around himself. Even through the cloth she could feel the sick, unnatural heat of his skin, the sharpness of his bones. She wondered what the blue monks ate, and when they had last fed this one.

  Greta had been pushing away the question of what in blazes to do with him, but now it shouldered its way back to the forefront of her mind. She could call an ambulance, she should call an ambulance, he needed an emergency room, a burn unit, but there was the issue of the blue-glowing eyes to consider. That wasn’t a human thing. That was a definitely and incontrovertibly nonhuman thing, and that was a problem because any doctor worth their white coat would start asking questions the moment they saw it—and the answers they’d get would lead to other, more prying questions. And experiments. And, very probably, quite literal witch hunts. It would only be a matter of time before investigation into this one particular inexplicable phenomenon developed into searching for other inexplicable phenomena.

  Her entire practice—in fact most of her day-to-day life—was predicated on the fact that the majority of the ordinary world did not, and must not, know her patients existed. Their safety, their well-being, their livelihoods, their whole existence depended on their remaining firmly in the realm of fiction. Taking this … whatever he was … to the nearest hospital would be an unacceptable breach of the cardinal rule of secrecy. She didn’t need to think very hard about what it would mean for Fass, for Ruthven, for Varney, for the rest of the vampires in London—and the weres—and the mummies—and the banshees—and the ghouls …

  And even if she had personally been able to get up and walk away from this man, walk away and abandon him to whatever fate remained, she couldn’t do that, either. Eventually he would be found, and whoever found him would start asking the inevitable questions—and they’d end up with the same problem. All roads led to the pitchfork-and-torch brigade, except one.

&n
bsp; Greta cursed everything to the deepest pits of Erebus and got out her phone.

  “Fass,” she said when he answered, cutting off his hello. “I’m going to need a ride to the clinic, and I don’t think this guy can walk. Can you flip someone from inside of a church?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never tried to find out. No time like the present, I suppose.”

  The weariness—and the resigned willingness—in Fastitocalon’s voice hurt her heart, and Greta promised silently that when all this was over she’d do something, anything, to make it up to him. She didn’t look up as the church door opened, or as his footsteps approached; she kept her eyes on the shivering velvet-wrapped form of her patient until Fastitocalon reached them and held out his hand.

  She gripped it, thin and chilled and strong, and squashed her revulsion sufficiently to take the burned man’s hand as well. The moment all three of them were linked, Greta’s vision flared orange-white and she felt herself both pulled and twisted as the church around them flickered and was gone.

  Translocation under the best of circumstances was a little dizzying; translocation like this, with Fastitocalon ill and at the end of his strength, fighting the metaphysical environment, carrying two people with him, was violently disorienting. Greta had to blink through sparkly grey static for several miserably nauseated moments before she could see properly again.

  They were in her office, in the Harley Street clinic, lying on the floor. Sitting up brought on another wave of dizziness, but it passed more quickly this time, and she looked around. It was blessedly ordinary in here, warm and bright and familiar and safe, and the rain still pounding against the windows merely made the space more cozy.

  Beside her Fastitocalon was stirring, his face a peculiar shade of pale grey, and Greta only just managed to reach over to grab the rubbish bin in time for him to be sick, glad she herself had gotten that part over and done with already this afternoon.

  While he was occupied she turned to the burned monk, still wrapped in his purloined ecclesiastical curtain and deeply unconscious. The enormity of the task that lay ahead hit her in the face. He needed so much work, and she wasn’t at all sure she could manage to provide it on her own. Anna’s knock at the door a few minutes later, and her muffled inquiry if Greta was a) in there and b) all right, had never been more welcome.

  Anna put the CLOSED sign up and locked the clinic while Greta got Fastitocalon dried off and provided with hot sweet tea and something for his church-induced headache. Together she and Anna turned their attention to the job of first cleaning and then dressing the burned monk’s overlapping and extensive injuries. They got fluids into him as fast as Greta deemed advisable, both a little surprised at how stable he actually seemed to be despite the multiple burns and lacerations. It was becoming evident that whatever was making his eyes glow was also speeding along the process of healing. Even as they worked, some of the cuts were beginning to scab over, and one minor scratch completely vanished into a shiny pink line as Greta and Anna watched, mouths open.

  “That’s not right,” Anna said, pointing with a gauze pad clamped in her forceps. “That’s … vampire-level healing, but this one’s a living human. Or at least he used to be.”

  “I want Fass to have a look at him, when he can see straight. Earlier he was going on about this guy’s pneumatic signature, or something, I can’t remember—a trail only he could see. Maybe he can tell us what we’re looking at.”

  “I’ve never seen human eyes do that, either,” Anna said, going back to work. Neither had Greta; the blue light was somehow still faintly visible through his closed eyelids. She described how the eyes had looked the last time she’d seen them up close, in the backseat of the Mini: the corneas boiled-egg-opaque, a mass of tattered and ridged tissue through which he couldn’t possibly have perceived anything beyond blurry light and dark, if that, and yet he had somehow been able to see her nonetheless—see through his ruined eyes. Greta wondered if he could see through other things as well, fascination and curiosity warring with alarm in the back of her mind.

  “The whole of the eye glows, but the light’s not given off by the corneal surface,” she said. “More like … I don’t know, like the light is generated farther in, passing through the eye itself and visible only in the outside air?”

  “It must have been what the ghouls saw,” Anna said. “Blue eyes glowing in the dark.” She shivered, and Greta thought again of the way Kree-akh had held the mother and her child, in the harsh light of the cellar’s single bulb, thought of death in the darkness, sudden and swift—

  Enough, she told herself. You have a job to do. “Pass the saline, please.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Afternoon had turned into evening by the time all the monk’s burns and slashes had been cleaned and attended to, and Greta’s phone had rung and gone to voice mail several times. She had sent Anna home with fulsome thanks and a promise of overtime pay when Greta could scrape up the extra, and she was alone now with the burned monk and Fastitocalon.

  She stripped off her gloves and dropped into the exam room’s chair, closing her eyes for a long moment before taking her phone out of her pocket. It felt as if she’d been up for approximately a week; her back and neck hurt, the tension headache that had started in her temples had taken over her entire skull, and fatigue dragged at her as if gravity had been jacked up a couple of notches just in her immediate vicinity.

  There were texts waiting as well as voice mail. Oh. Right. It would probably have been a good idea if she’d called Ruthven at some point to let them know where she and Fass were, or weren’t, such as dead in a ditch somewhere.

  Guiltily she scrolled through the increasingly irate texts, considering asking Fastitocalon to be the one to call Ruthven, but she could hear him coughing monotonously from her office and thought, probably, all things considered, it would be more efficient if she did the talking.

  Ruthven picked up on the first ring. “Where the hell are you?”

  “The clinic,” she said. “Look, I’m—”

  “I was just about to go out looking. I rang Sheelagh O’Dwyer and got her and the other banshees to do a sweep and had the damn ghouls pass the word to try to catch your scent. For God’s sake, Greta, what have you been doing all day that you couldn’t bother to answer your bloody phone?”

  She winced, rubbing her temple. When he was cross he just stuck to icy sarcasm, but when he was really angry he went up half an octave and the Scots crept into his cut-glass accent.

  “I’m sorry, Ruthven, I really am. It’s my fault, I completely lost track of time, but could you maybe not shout?” She sounded exhausted even to herself. “We took care of the car thing, then Fass caught the … scent? Trail, track, whatever, of the man who attacked me. We followed it to Camden Town and, uh, long story short, I’ve got one exhausted demon and one seriously damaged mad ex-monk on my hands and I forgot to call you and I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve got one?” She could hear excited voices on the other end.

  “Yes. An exile from the ranks. He said he’d been excommunicated, presumably because he didn’t manage to kill me properly the last time we met.”

  “Can he talk?” That was Cranswell. “We can probably make him talk.”

  “Do shut up, Cranswell,” said Ruthven, and much of the anger had leached out of his voice. “What condition is he in?”

  “Terribly burned, and he’s been flogged on top of that, and God knows what pathogens he’s been exposed to—but he’s healing, amazingly well as a matter of fact. Much faster than he ought to be. He’s stable for now.”

  “Can you move him?”

  “If I have to.” The voices in the background on Ruthven’s end were raised in argument now. “Why?”

  “Interrogation,” Ruthven said. He sounded tired, too, tired and worn out with worry, and she felt another stab of guilt. “I’d say all three of us here are very definitely interested in whatever your catch can tell us about the Gladius Sancti and their plans.
Varney in particular would like a personal word with him on the subject of stab wounds.”

  “And if he doesn’t know anything? He seemed really out of it. I’m not sure he can remember much detail.”

  “Well, we’ll work out what to do with him, at least. How’s Fass?”

  “Exhausted. I want him in bed. He spent much too much time out in the cold and rain today, and then he had to flip all three of us back here. From a church, no less.” She rubbed at her temples again, wondering when she’d last been this tired.

  “And you?” Ruthven’s voice had warmed back up. “No, don’t answer that. I can imagine. I’ll come and fetch you. If we fold down the Volvo’s backseat you can slide your new friend in on a stretcher and I can get all nostalgic about driving ambulances in the Blitz. Won’t that be nice?”

  She laughed despite herself, as he had meant her to, and had to swallow as her throat ached with a sudden wave of fondness. “You didn’t really, did you?”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, my darling. Go and pack up what you need. I’ll be there in a little while.”

  It had been easier than Greta had anticipated, getting her patients stowed in Ruthven’s elderly 240 wagon (which was that particular shade of pale yellow reserved for eggnog and Volvos). The drive over had been quiet except for Fastitocalon’s cough; she had spent it sitting perfectly still with her eyes shut and savoring the experience of not being in charge of the situation. Being managed by other people was often maddening, but sometimes—like right now—Greta luxuriated in the somehow anesthetic insulation it brought. She did not have to think, and that felt like … oh, like sitting down had felt, after the hours and hours of work: a vast and crawling weight removed.