Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  “And someone came out of nowhere, she says, came up behind her and just attacked her. He didn’t even try to steal her handbag. Just went after her with a knife. She has some pretty nasty lacerations.”

  Greta could imagine that, too. “Did he say anything?”

  “Actually yes,” Nadezhda said, after a moment. “She says he was reciting something, maybe saying some kind of prayer, but she couldn’t make out what it was. It makes no sense. I can’t see why anyone would want to stab Anna Volkov.”

  Greta knew the exact reason, and it was none other than Greta Helsing, MD, FRCP. If Anna had not been standing in for her, helping out at the clinic, she would almost certainly not have been targeted by the Gladius Sancti.

  She closed her eyes, covered them with her hand, sick and dizzy as she had been when this selfsame checkered floor tilted under her feet and tipped her into unconsciousness.

  Everyone I know is in danger, because of me, and all I can do is sit here and wait until something happens. I cannot leave Halethorpe. I cannot go to be with my hurt friend in the hospital, hurt on my account, because there is no one else to take my place—and who knows what I might bring with me if I did go. I’m the target. They want to kill monsters and I’m getting in their way because I’m the one who repairs them …

  “Greta?” Nadezhda was saying. “Greta, are you all right?”

  “I’m just fine,” she said, not entirely steadily, pushing away the spiral of useless reflection. “I’m glad they called you, to be with her.”

  “They tried you first, but the only number they had for you was the clinic landline, or something—whatever, they couldn’t get hold of you—but Anna was able to tell them to call me instead. I’m going to spend the night here.”

  “She’s not in danger, right?”

  “No. Lost a lot of blood, and the wounds are nasty but they’ve cleaned them out and done as neat a job of stitching as I’ve seen in years. There’s a lot of inflammation—they think there might have been something noxious on the knife—but that started to go down almost as soon as they began to irrigate and is continuing to resolve. She’s about as comfortable as you can be under the circumstances.”

  “Did they find the knife?”

  “No. Whoever attacked her must have thought she was dead, or dying, and run off again. I wondered if it could be the Ripper, but the Ripper murders have all been—well, completed, and there was no sign of that goddamn rosary anywhere. It’s a damn good thing she’s part rusalka,” Nadezhda said. “I think that may have made a difference.”

  So did Greta, in the other direction. Ordinary humans did not have advanced healing powers, but then again they were also not directly vulnerable to the magical properties of the stuff smeared on the Gladius Sancti blades. She didn’t know what the white-magic cocktail would have done to a full-blood rusalka, and she didn’t want to know.

  “Tell her I’m so fucking sorry this happened,” she said. “And that I’ll be there as soon as I can—which is not going to be tonight. If there was any way at all that I could get there tonight I’d already be halfway there by now.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” said Nadezhda, sounding faintly taken aback. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m fine,” she said again, squashing a totally unfunny little laugh. “And—I’ll tell you once it’s over. I’m sorry I can’t do better than that right now, Dez, but it’s—this is complicated.”

  “Okay,” said Nadezhda, simply, and Greta had rarely been more grateful to her for understanding. Dez was half-in, half-out of the ordinary world in a different way than she herself was, but the overlap was significant, and both of them knew that there were times like now when not asking questions was the kindest action one could take. “Do you want me to open for you tomorrow?”

  “No,” said Greta. “I’m not having you put in danger as well. The clinic can close for a few days and the world will go on turning, I’m fairly convinced.” She hated the idea of closing, but she also—and more immediately—hated the idea of any more of her friends coming to harm. It was bad enough that the others were off facing God knew what horrors under the city, and Anna was in the hospital seriously wounded because of her.

  “All right. But give me a call if you change your mind, okay?”

  “I will,” she said. “Thank you. For a lot of things, Dez.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Nadezhda. “Look, be careful, whatever it is you’re doing. Take care of yourself. I mean it.”

  “I will,” she said again, not sure if she meant it. “Good-bye. Call me if there’s—if anything changes with Anna.”

  “I promise.”

  Greta hung up. Her ear felt suddenly cold where she’d had the phone pressed to it, and her throat was tight and aching with the threat of stupid, helpless tears.

  Being stuck here, now, alone and useless, was probably the worst thing Greta had ever gone through other than her father’s death. Even then she had had the support of Ruthven and Fastitocalon and Nadezhda and the rest of them, and it had not been her fault; it had been terrible but it had been a thing that happened to her, and not a thing she had directly participated in causing.

  (She wanted her father more than ever. If he were here he could be the one to stay with Halethorpe, safely out of the action, while she actually tried to do something useful.)

  Greta leaned her head back against the door and took a long, unsteady breath. He was not here; no one was here but her, and in fact she did have something useful to do. Even if it was so far from the action.

  She thought of Ruthven saying the city needs you, of Varney asking why do you do this. Of trying to explain it to him. What it meant to be needed, and to deliberately accept the responsibility of trying to meet that need.

  I can do something useful, she thought. I can do my job.

  Greta got up, laboriously, using the doorknob to pull herself to her feet, and started up the stairs toward her solitary patient.

  It was not a long walk from Ruthven’s house to St. Paul’s any way you decided to take it, barely a mile’s distance. At this time of night there were not many people on the streets paying attention to their fellow pedestrians. Despite what he’d told Cranswell, Fastitocalon was expending energy he did not really have to spare in a very slight don’t-notice-me field around the group, and as he did so he could feel both Ruthven and Varney also either instinctively or deliberately making themselves unremarkable. The way they did it was slightly different, and if Fastitocalon hadn’t had other things on his mind he would have been interested to note more carefully the individual flavors of influence the vampire and the vampyre were exerting.

  The vast bulk of the cathedral was having its own effect, bending the background mirabilic field lines around itself like a weight on a rubber sheet. As they drew nearer, Fastitocalon began to pick up the characteristic cyan traces of the monks’ signatures beneath the city streets, and at the turn from Creed Lane onto Ludgate Hill, facing the cathedral’s huge west front, he stopped to try to mark how many of them there were. He drew in his breath sharply.

  “What is it?” Varney asked. Fastitocalon shook his head—give me a moment—and closed his eyes. At least two current traces, lots of older, fading ones, and something much more intense, much more powerful than any of the individuals. That one hadn’t moved. That one had stayed right where it was.

  “It’s down there, all right,” Fastitocalon said, starting to walk again. “Maybe a hundred feet down. Could be deeper; it’s hard to tell with the cathedral distorting the fields. It’s … it must have grown stronger just recently. I’ve passed by here I don’t know how many times and felt nothing but the church. If it can drown that out, it’s definitely gathering strength.”

  “Does it know we’re here?” Cranswell asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m doing my best to make sure it won’t until we’re a great deal closer.” Already the strain was audible in his voice. “There’s just two of them down there at the moment; it
could be worse.”

  “We’ll have to take the lift-shaft stairs down,” Ruthven said. “If it’s anything like the shelters at Belsize Park and Clapham there will be a separate direct surface access shaft as well as the entrance from the tube station. Fass, can you tell—”

  He had his eyes closed again, feeling for the shape of the spaces under the earth, reaching out with his mind as much as he dared without alerting anything to their presence. “Ventilation ducts,” he said, eyes still shut, and turned a little to point. “In the traffic island between Newgate Street and King Edward’s Road. That way. Opens on a deep shaft. I can’t see clearly but that’s got to be it.”

  Cranswell was trembling slightly with excitement. “How are people not gonna notice us prying open the gratings and climbing inside?”

  “You’re going to do it very quickly,” said Fastitocalon, “and since both Ruthven and Sir Francis can make themselves unnoticeable, you’ll stay very close together.”

  “What about you?” Cranswell asked.

  “I’m going to be giving the Gladius Sancti chappies a bit of a surprise,” he said, feeling the edges of his strength, trying to determine if he could actually do what he planned to attempt. Maybe. Probably. It wasn’t as if there was much choice. “At least I hope I am. We’ll find out in a hurry, either way.”

  In fact it took surprisingly little time to get into the shaft. They timed it carefully, watching the traffic, and Cranswell stuck close to Ruthven as advised. The shaft rose up like a brick pillar—or a chimney—aboveground; there was an access door in the brick wall, fastened with a padlock that Ruthven twisted open as if it had been made of chewing gum. Inside, metal steps led down into the dark.

  Into the complete dark. It was like walking into a cave. “I can’t see,” Cranswell hissed once they were all inside; he clutched the hilt of the saber at his hip and flattened himself to the invisible wall of the shaft.

  “Yes, but we can,” Ruthven said, and sighed irritably. Cranswell stared as two pinpoints of red appeared in the darkness, brightening rapidly, and blinked themselves at him. “There. Is that better?”

  He had instinctively jerked backward, and his head bonked into the metal wall with a faint musical note. “Jesus Christ, Ruthven, how about you warn me when you’re gonna do something ridiculously creepy, okay?”

  The points of light rolled upward in exasperation and then vanished as their owner turned to face the other way, but the dim red glow they cast was still enough for Cranswell to make out the swells of rivets in the curved wall of the shaft, and the steps leading downward in a spiral around the narrow circular hoistway of the old lift. The cables were so rusty they looked as if a good tug would snap them in two.

  Ruthven led the way down the staircase and Varney followed, and, after a moment, so did Cranswell, hand tight around the hilt of the saber. It was actually easier going than he had feared. With the red glow to see by, his night vision was just about up to the task.

  “Assuming it was designed the same way as the other deep-level shelters,” Ruthven said in an undertone, “this ought to lead down to one end of the shelter tunnel complex, which is probably directly underneath the tube station. The rectifier is probably located not very far away from the bottom of the shaft, because it and the transformer and rheostats run the lift and the fan machinery. I don’t know which direction it will be, but we’ll find out.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t find out that it’s guarded by a brace of armed lunatics,” Varney said sourly.

  Cranswell was conscious of a certain gathering conviction, as they descended the staircase, that perhaps his insistence on coming along with the others might not have been his wisest-ever move. The hilt of Ruthven’s sword was slick with sweat and felt entirely alien to his hand, weighing heavily on its belt, and he wished fervently that he hadn’t eaten quite so much at dinner.

  “Stop,” Ruthven said softly. All three of them halted, listening intently for any sound from below.

  “What is it?” Cranswell whispered.

  “You. You reek of fear. I did tell you you shouldn’t have come, didn’t I?” A sigh, and then Ruthven came back up the steps past Varney to look him in the face. It wasn’t any nicer looking at the red-glowing eyes close-up, Cranswell thought. In fact it was really kind of horrible, and he took another instinctive step backward. “Too late to go back now,” Ruthven said. “Hold still, August.”

  “What—” he said, and then shut up, because Ruthven had taken his face between cold hands and the red eyes were … pulsing somehow, their light waxing and waning, and Cranswell was first dizzy and then warm all through, the weight of fear in his chest and stomach beginning to let go.

  “You are going to be quite all right,” Ruthven said firmly, somewhere a long way away. “I promised your father I’d look after you, and this whole mess is probably not exactly the best example of that, but never mind. You are going to be fine, and this will soon be over.”

  “Fine,” he agreed, floating in the pale red light. “Over.”

  Ruthven said something else he didn’t catch, something complicated that seemed to soar over his head, and then the pulsing slowed and stopped entirely. Cranswell let out his breath in a long sigh, feeling … really quite good about everything, as a matter of fact.

  “Right,” said Ruthven, with a searching look, and then just nodded and let him go. They crept farther down the stairs, slower now, as silently as possible.

  The first intimation Greta had of the Gladius Sancti’s presence was when the flaming bottle came through the bedroom window.

  Fastitocalon had been right. It was only a matter of time. Even without an EKG she knew perfectly well that Halethorpe’s heart was failing; would fail whether or not she got his fever down, and so far nothing she had done had had the slightest effect on that. She could hear the telltale crackles in his chest that meant fluid was beginning to collect in his lungs; several of the burns were unmistakably infected; the extent of the corneal ulceration had markedly spread. There was just too much damage. All she could do was try to keep him comfortable and wait for the end, and try not to think about what might be happening under the city.

  Greta had been trying to read a book earlier, and found her mind skating over the words without taking any of them in, and given up in favor of mentally running through the surgery she was planning for Renenutet. She’d gotten to quite a complicated stage when the splintering crash of the windowpane and bright orange billow of flame made her scream.

  In the bed Halethorpe’s blind eyes opened. Greta seemed to be frozen in place, a dizzying flood of adrenaline pouring through her, for a matter of seconds; then he said something—cried out something, in Latin—and suddenly she could move again, her heart pounding, cold with thrumming shock. Everything went glass-clear and slow, as it had been once before in this man’s company.

  “Go,” he rasped. Dancing ruffles of flame were beginning to climb the curtains. “Go, it’s them, it’s the end of everything, they’ll, they’ll kill you, get away, get far away—”

  “Not without you!” She reached for his IV lines; it seemed as if he could see again, at least a little, because he caught her hand in his without a moment of hesitation and pushed her away. Both of them were coughing now, black smoke beginning to gather under the ceiling. The glassy clarity was beginning to splinter into bright shards of panic.

  “Go,” Halethorpe said again, more strongly, more strongly than she would have thought he could speak—and somehow he sat up, curled a hand around the tubes, and yanked them free. Blood spattered. “They … will have the house surrounded,” he said, with visible effort behind each word. “Go … underground. Cellars. There are … things down there … who will shelter you.”

  Greta was crying, half with shock and fear and half with the acrid smoke. He turned his horrible piebald face to her. “Go,” he said one more time as the flames leaped up, and gave her a little shove toward the doorway.

  Greta went.

  He was ri
ght. The house was surrounded; as she ran down the stairs, another flaming bottle, this one thrown from the back garden, smashed through a window. Ruthven’s house, she thought, nearly tripping on the stair carpet, breath sobbing in her throat. All his things. Oh God. All of everything.

  Then there were voices and footsteps inside the house and Greta stopped thinking completely and scrabbled for the doorway to the cellar, half-fell inside, and slammed it shut.

  A constellation of red pinpoints blinked at her, and then the light clicked on. Some of Kree-akh’s people had been sleeping; they scrambled to their feet. She stumbled down the stairs, her knees threatening to give out, and a ghoul caught and steadied her as she reached the bottom. “The house … the house is on fire,” she gasped. “There are things out there trying to get in. There’s a man upstairs who’s probably dying, or dead …”

  They all spoke at once—or hissed—and then Kree-akh rattled off a rapid stream of ghoulish she couldn’t catch at all, coming over to join Greta at the foot of the stairs. He took her by the shoulders, cold, hard hands digging into her flesh. “Are you hurt?” he demanded.

  “No,” she said, still dazed, glad of the support. “No, but Halethorpe—and the house, Ruthven’s house, all his things, all his books—”

  “Where are the others? Are you alone?”

  “They’re gone,” she said. “They’re—they’ve gone to break the thing, the rectifier, the electrical thing that makes the blue light, they know where it is now—”

  “Blue light,” another ghoul hissed—younger than Kree-akh, almost certainly his son judging by the bone structure—“blue fire,” and Greta blinked at him.

  “It’s a spark,” she said, “or kind of a spark, in a glass bulb. It’s in some kind of old air-raid shelter under St. Paul’s tube station. That’s not important now. The house—”

  The ghouls spoke rapidly to one another. “I think you are wrong,” Kree-akh said after a moment. “I think it is very important. Mewleep, take her and Akha and the young one, get them safely away, and tell Dr. Helsing what you have seen. We—the rest of us—will hold Lord Ruthven’s house.”