Strange Practice

by Vivian Shaw

  This time there was no rekindling of the spark, but the voice remained, no longer contained behind the glass. The scream grew louder and louder, filling the sudden darkness with anger and fear and hate and all of the thousand miseries human beings are capable of visiting upon themselves, upon each other. Grew until he thought it would break the bones of his skull the way opera singers broke wineglasses, the way he himself had just shattered the envelope in which it dwelled. Grew until it blotted out all other sensation—and then just as suddenly, in a devastating flare of brilliant actinic light, cut off.

  I am having a stroke, Cranswell thought, pressing his hands over his eyes against the force of that light. In a moment I will lose consciousness entirely and then I will die, and I never even got to see my stupid museum exhibit go up.

  It occurred to him that this was not a very noble dying thought to consider, and then a moment later that he was, in fact, still around to consider it, and that the blaze of light seemed to be fading. Sure enough, when he took his hands away from his face, he could make out the edges of the room they stood in, the shapes of Ruthven and Varney, through the glaring afterimage of that first sun-bright burst of light.

  He could also, very clearly, make out the fact that they had been joined by another figure. It was just as clearly not a human. The wings were a dead giveaway, huge and snowy-white and folded neatly, arching over the newcomer’s shoulders. The wings, and the blank, pupilless red eyes. Without those it could probably have passed for a very beautiful golden-haired young man, wearing an irritated expression and a white chiton clasped at the waist with a snake-shaped girdle made of gold.

  It was holding out a hand over which the source of the brilliant light hung in midair, slowly turning. With an impatient little gesture the figure shooed the point of light up to hover near the ceiling and looked around the little room with undisguised dislike.

  “What a complete hole,” it said. “Are any of you hurt?”

  Cranswell watched as Ruthven and Varney looked at one another, and then down at the crumpled robes lying at their feet. Apparently the monks had reacted rather badly to the destruction of their idol.

  Neither vampire nor vampyre looked even close to okay, but Ruthven was visibly worse off, swaying a little, all his visible skin burned an angry red. Cranswell remembered Fastitocalon saying, I don’t care how determined you might be, Ruthven. You aren’t going to be able to do much of anything after you get in direct line of sight to that UV source. As he watched, Varney stepped over an unmoving monk foot and got an arm around Ruthven’s shoulders to steady him. “I believe you have the advantage of us,” he said, the beautiful voice seeming more incongruous than usual in these surroundings.

  “I generally do,” said the figure, and sighed. “Sorry. My name is Samael, and I promise I will do my best to explain, but there’s something rather important I’ve got to sort out first.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Greta had no idea how long they had been down here, or what might be happening in the world above, and right now she did not care in the slightest; she followed Mewleep with her teeth clenched and her hands curled into fists, still searching with grim determination for the missing touch in her mind. The rattle and clatter of trains in the tunnel above them grew louder as they went along.

  She was sore all over, every muscle aching as if it had been her and not Mewleep who had made that run in the dark, but pushed the pain away. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, not now, except Fass. And the others. But Fass most of all. He’s all I have of family without Dad. I can’t have lost him, too.

  The ghoul stopped in front of a ventilation grate let into one wall and looked at her. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “This is the way in?”

  Mewleep nodded. “The shaft splits. Take the left fork.” He sniffed. “I am not smelling blue-men-with-blades. Not living ones.”

  She did not know whether that was reassuring or not, and was about to ask what he did smell, and then just sighed. “Thank you,” she said. “Go, both of you, get the baby safe away from here. Thank you, so much, for your help.”

  Akha was bouncing her son gently on one bone-sharp hip, and pushed past Mewleep to look Greta in the face. It was difficult to hold that gaze; she was sure Akha wanted nothing more than to be shut of this entire miserable evening’s business, but the ghoul simply stood looking at her for a long moment—and then reached out to touch her cheek with a chilly claw tip.

  “Come back safe,” she said, the sibilant hissing between needle teeth. “You are … needed.”

  Greta was appalled to feel tears threatening, and blinked hard. “I will,” she said, and looked down at the little creature in Akha’s arms, patting at his mother’s chest with a small green hand and grizzling faintly. “Go now,” she said. “Don’t forget he needs his medicine right after you feed him. I will see what’s happened, and deal with it. I hope Kree-akh and the others are not hurt, and no matter what I find in there I will come back to help as soon as I can. I promise.”

  Akha nodded and looked up at Mewleep, who lifted the ventilation grate aside for Greta and then ducked his head in the brief bow she had seen some of the ghouls give Kree-akh from time to time. Then he turned, with his arm around Akha, and the sound of their footfalls retreated, leaving Greta alone again with the last of the guttering foxfire’s light.

  Air touched her face in the darkness, moving sluggishly, and somewhere nearby she could hear the faint rattling vibration of a fan. Electricity’s working, she thought. I hope that’s a good thing.

  Greta took a deep breath and crawled into the shaft. The glowing wood was all but useless. She dropped it and crept forward on both knees and one hand, reaching the other out in front of her to feel for obstacles. It took her much longer than she had expected to reach the place where the shaft forked off to the left, and she was beginning to feel the first swells of panic—I’m lost, I’m lost in the darkness and no one will come to find me—when she realized she could, in fact, see her hand in front of her face.

  The shaft was very faintly lit with red, like a darkroom’s safelight. Greta crept forward, the light brightening all around her, until she could look down through another set of air intake louvers into a proper tunnel, dimly lit with red emergency lamps.

  At first she couldn’t make out what it was she was looking at, and then she shivered as she recognized the scarring and lesions of Gladius Sancti monks tumbled in a heap of burlap robes. Nothing was moving. That was good, right? They weren’t … active.

  Greta leaned as far over as she could to try to see down the tunnel, and then went very still. She knew the wingtip shoes that were just visible lying a little farther along the floor, in a dark and sticky puddle. Knew them, and their owner.

  Shaking her head in stupid, mute negation, she thrashed around in the shaft until she could get her back against the curving wall and kick out at the grate with both feet. The noise was terrible, a clang and screech that couldn’t help drawing the attention of anything left down there, but she was a little way beyond caring about that now. It took two more kicks before the ancient metal finally gave way, spilling her out into the deep-level shelter tunnel to land in a heap not far from Fastitocalon.

  He lay on his back surrounded by a drift of inexplicable dingy-white feathers, the pool of blood around him too dark and sticky to be human. There was so much of it, Greta thought, helplessly, trying not to do calculations about blood volume in her head, trying not to think of how much someone could lose and go on breathing. She felt it soaking, thick and already cold, into the knees of her jeans as she bent over him and reached for the pulse beneath the angle of his jaw.

  Part of her had still been expecting to find one.

  He was … cool to her touch, utterly still. The tightness that had crept around Greta’s chest in the time since she had lost his mental touch sharpened suddenly, abruptly, as if a screw had been turned, a fist had clenched just under her breastbone. Her eyes burned, dry, as sh
e looked down into his face.

  In the tunnel’s red emergency lights, he was all black-and-white, no color left in him at all. The sharp contrast took away fine detail. The lines that bracketed his mouth and ruled his forehead were still there; nothing could erase those completely. But the exhausted, pinched, above all worn look was gone; the expression of someone at the very end of their strength, tired almost beyond rest but gamely hanging on because there was simply no other choice, was no longer there. His eyes were closed, the deeply grooved parallel lines between the eyebrows smoothed out. His mouth was stained with blood, but the lips curved ever so slightly in a smile.

  There was an awful and beautiful peace in that face, a quiet contentment she’d never seen there before. Never known he was capable of. It was the calm smile of an alabaster effigy, silent and still. The thought stirred up more fragments of phrase from half-forgotten texts: peace that passeth understanding.

  She had never really understood what that meant, and she still did not. All she could understand right now was that he was dead. That Fastitocalon was dead. All of everything was over, because he was dead, and gone beyond her skill, and he was—had been—all she had left.

  She couldn’t breathe; her throat closed painfully. Now, finally, the tears came, sending the world into a wavering blur. Greta knelt beside him, her hands fisted in the lapels of his jacket, as terrible raw sobs ratcheted out of her chest. She didn’t care if there were more of the blue monks coming to stick a knife in her as well; didn’t care if the tunnel caved in around them. She buried her face against his still chest and cried for everything lost, everything ruined, everything thrown away, wasted, unwanted.

  Shantih shantih shantih.

  Cranswell heard it before they even turned the corner into the main tunnel, following the brilliant hovering light: somebody crying, and crying very hard indeed.

  Samael led the way. He had turned the wings and gold-girdled chiton into an exquisitely cut suit of white silk, which was a little easier to deal with, but Cranswell was still aware of being so ludicrously far out of his depth that he couldn’t even see the shore.

  Ruthven was still leaning on Varney, his face and hands puffed and blistered, his hair hanging over his forehead in dusty tangles. Cranswell was vaguely surprised to see how long the front actually was when he hadn’t got it combed straight back. The disarray made him look somehow younger, his odd eyes huge. Varney was in slightly better case, but only slightly. Cranswell himself had the world’s worst headache and a nasty sunburn, and his hands still tingled and buzzed with the reverberation of the saber’s impact.

  The dim red glow thrown by the emergency lights was drowned out entirely by the white glare from the hovering ball of light over Samael’s shoulder. It was as bright and merciless as a floodlight at a crime scene: Cranswell could very clearly see two more dead Gladius Sancti sprawled in a heap, and a little farther onward Greta Helsing kneeling, bent over something that looked like a crumpled pile of old clothes. The sounds she was making were terrible, involuntary, violent.

  The clothes looked … very familiar. That thought drove the singular question of what the hell she was doing down here, she was supposed to be staying safely out of this from Cranswell’s immediate consciousness.

  He said something under his breath and took a step forward, aware of Ruthven and Varney doing much the same, but Samael held up one perfect hand and they halted at once. He walked closer to the woman crouched on the floor, the globe of light staying where it was, and Cranswell realized that Samael himself was actually giving off visible light. The white silk suit seemed to glow.

  “It doesn’t, you know,” he said, more gently than Cranswell would have thought possible. His voice was not loud, but somehow it cut through Greta’s choking sobs as if he’d shouted.

  She twisted around, revealing a face drawn into an ugly mask, red and wet with tears and snot, and looked up at Samael. “W-what doesn’t?” she managed, breath coming in hitches. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Peace,” he said. “It passeth not understanding. Anyone who believes that hasn’t tried hard enough.” The faint but visible nimbus of light around him faded slightly. “My name is Samael, and for the purposes of the current situation it’s probably best if you think of me as the Devil.”

  He took a step around Fastitocalon’s limp body and knelt down on his other side, the beautiful white silk trousers taking no stain from the pool of blood. Cranswell only caught the edges of the gaze he had turned on Greta, but even so he blinked and had to shake his head to try to clear it. Instead of bright red cabochons, Samael’s eyes were now the eyes of an ordinary man—except that the irises were a shade of brilliant, iridescent, shimmering butterfly-wing blue.

  “He’s dead, don’t you get it?” Greta said thickly. “Leave him alone.”

  Samael paid her no attention, turning that blazing blue gaze down to Fastitocalon’s face. He bent closer and cupped one hand to the slack grey cheek. “Oh, Fass,” he said, again so terribly gently. “Fass, why didn’t you tell me you were this ill, why didn’t you come home and let us renovate you properly, you stubborn old reprobate, why did you let things get this bad? It’s enough to make me go all fucking despondent.”

  He leaned down to kiss Fastitocalon’s forehead very lightly, leaving a brief point of light where his lips had touched. Then, with the air of someone rolling up his sleeves in preparation for a difficult and time-consuming task, Samael sat back on his heels, shut his eyes, and brought his hands together palm to palm. When he spread them slowly apart, a web of gossamer threads of light stretched between them.

  Greta drew back, wincing at the brightness, instinctively scrambling out of the way. The web of light drifted down over Fastitocalon’s body, first outlining and then appearing to sink into him, vanishing beneath clothes and skin. Samael placed his crossed hands on Fastitocalon’s chest, closing his eyes.

  There was a sense of collectively held breath, of something gathering its strength for an unknowable effort, and then there was a kind of silent thunderclap as every golden curl on the Devil’s head stood out straight in a brilliant aureole with bluish sparks dancing at the tips. Blue fire rippled over Fastitocalon’s still form. Through all the confusion Greta felt a flicker of coldness touch her spine at that blue light, but it wasn’t the bright actinic blue of the thing in the glass bulb. This was a softer, somehow kinder shade, a blue that brought to mind the shimmer of peacock feathers or the shifting glow caught in the depths of a moonstone.

  Then it was over. The light cut off abruptly, as if it had never been there, and something like the smell of burned tin filled the tunnel. Samael sat back, panting, as if he’d just run a couple of wind sprints instead of putting on a light show; when he opened his eyes they were that blank bright red again. He took his hands away and shook them briskly, with a little wince.

  And Fastitocalon opened his eyes.

  “Ow,” he said. “That … really stings.”

  “Serves you right.” Samael’s hair was rearranging itself, coiling back into its proper curls. He shook his head to settle them, looking tired. The globe of light, which had been huddling near the ceiling for the past few minutes, returned to hover over his shoulder. “Why you let matters get to this state is entirely beyond me. You were practically worn to nubbins before you used up what was left trying to free those two idiots in Benedictine drag.”

  Greta was still frozen, staring, as Fastitocalon propped himself up on his elbows and stared at the white-suited figure beside him. The terrible hollow place in her mind, like a bleeding socket, was filled again. He was back.

  “Sam?” he said.

  “Well done, that demon. Full marks for observation.”

  “What … happened? Why are you here?”

  “Because, you utter ass, you summoned me,” Samael said, with what sounded like fond exasperation. “I don’t think you actually meant to, but you did, and then you died, which was a little hard to ignore.”

  “You can’t
have been … paying attention to me. Of all the demons.”

  “It’s the falling-sparrow thing. I know where all of you are, every last one of you. Makes for an unavoidably noisy head at times.”

  “Mmh.” Fastitocalon poked at his chest, experimentally, and then seemed to become aware that they had an audience; he looked up at the three who were standing, and then over at Greta, who hadn’t moved. Her breathing was still coming in those juddering gasps, although the tears had stopped.

  “Greta,” he said. “What the hell are you doing down here? How did you get in?”

  She didn’t think she had ever been this angry. Her voice was thick and clogged, when she managed to make it work. “You … I thought you were dead, Fass, goddamn it I thought you were dead, you fucking bled out and you died and I couldn’t do anything to help you and I was all alone—”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he told her, and sat up, wincing a little, looking sheepish. “I didn’t intend to, you know. Die, I mean. I think this suit has had it.”

  “Fass,” she said, and scooted closer through the mess of feathers, close enough to take him by his shoulders and shake him violently. Samael got up, white silk knees showing no evidence of bloodstains or any other filth, and glanced over to the three observers.

  “If you would care to join me,” he said, “I think I can explain at least the outlines of what’s been going on.”

  They followed the gleaming white suit—and the floating point of light accompanying it—through an archway to another tunnel, this one still half-full of bunk bed frames from the days when this had been a shelter for ordinary people, not cultists. Cranswell sat down on a creaking, rusty bed frame and watched the Devil take out an enameled cigarette case, remove a cigarette that was an improbable shade of teal-green, and light it with a fingertip. He drew in the smoke, eyes closing, and sighed it out with the air of someone coming to grips with an unpleasant necessity.