Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  They had picked out a lot of the smaller chips of stone wedged between the blocks, and that faint breath of cold air was stronger now. The monster in her hand reached out toward the wall, and Greta held it closer – and watched as it stuck one tiny arm into a crack, as far as it could reach. Glup, it said, with clear overtones of want.

  That cold air. Like a long, invisible finger touching her face.

  “Oh-kay,” she said on a sigh. “It can’t be worse than edgelord vampires from fucking Yorkshire, whatever’s behind there,” and she set the littlest wellmonster gently down and began to pull pieces of stone out of the wall with both hands.

  It was hard work. Despite the cave-chill in the air, Greta took off her suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. She had broken two nails and scraped the skin off several knuckles by the time she had loosened the fill enough to start wiggling one small block of stone free. It came loose in her hands after an initial resistance, revealing a square of complete blackness through which chilly air flowed in a steady stream.

  Funny how captivity changes your perspective, she thought. When the vampire with the dreadlocks had first brought her to the cell, she’d been too scared even to attempt investigating the integrity of this part of the wall lest someone catch her trying to escape; her risk tolerance had gone up considerably with the interminable hours of enforced boredom.

  There didn’t seem to be any ravening horrors in the darkness, at least. Nothing was looking back at her with little yellow eyes, or reaching a claw through the hole to pull her head off. Greta set down the block of stone and pulled its neighbor free, conscious of a shift in the rest of the stonework: she couldn’t take more out without risking the collapse of the entire wall. Maybe she wouldn’t need to.

  As soon as the hole was revealed, the wellmonsters gathered around it, and Greta wasn’t quite in time to catch the smallest one before it clambered into the opening. “Hey —” she said, “don’t – you don’t know what’s back there —” but the monster didn’t even give her a look before hopping, like a toad, into the space behind the wall.

  There was a thud, as of something hitting a flat surface, and then the rattle came again. The same noise that had sent Greta scrabbling across the cell to the farthest point from the wall. It was – metallic. Something metal, rattling as it moved over stone.

  The other wellmonsters were still clustered around the opening. They were glupping to one another in a combination of tones that Greta would, under other circumstances, have been fascinated to listen to – no one knew much about how P. incolens communicated – but they did not seem alarmed by the disappearance of the smallest monster, even after several minutes had gone by.

  God, I wish I had my penlight, Greta thought uselessly. She wished she had her bag, with all its myriad useful contents. Wished she had her phone. Wished she weren’t here.

  She was still engaged in this pointless activity when the rattle came again, closer now, and after a moment or two the smallest wellmonster appeared out of the darkness, dragging something with it. A metal object.

  A tube, about four inches long, which appeared to be of considerable age. There was an inscription down one side, almost illegible under the tarnish: QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT.

  Greta stared at it – at the monster clutching it, looking terribly satisfied with itself – and sat back on her heels, pushing hair out of her face. “I’ll be damned,” she said, an enormous tide of relief washing over her. “Is that all it was? A summoning whistle?”

  Egredior sibilus, colloquially the whistle-monster, or simply “whistler,” was a fascinating creature. It was a classic object-linked apparition, which had at one point been considered nothing more than the partial manifestation of a larger curse, but in the early twentieth century further research had determined it to possess individual agency.

  They were completely invisible by themselves, but they manifested by inhabiting large pieces of fabric – bedsheets were ideal, but curtains would do, or even towels – whereupon they could manipulate physical objects. Summoning one was easy: all you had to do was blow its whistle.

  (There were the inevitable You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow jokes in almost every single write-up of E. sibilus, and sometimes Greta despaired of the lugubrious sense of humor common to academicians.) As long as you possessed the whistle, the monster would stay with you once summoned, whether you liked it or not.

  The wellmonster in her hand, still clutching the whistle with all four little limbs, blinked slowly up at her.

  You know how to whistle, don’t you, she thought. And then: I could use some help here. She’d be missed by now in the world above, but she couldn’t count on anyone actually finding her.

  Sometimes you have to make your own luck.

  Gently setting the monster down in her lap, Greta felt at her ears – thank God, the aquamarine drops she’d put in Saturday morning, a hundred years ago, were still there. She took them out, and – as she had before, back in the hotel, offered to trade the wellmonster’s treasure for a shinier object. This time it took a little longer to convince the monster to relinquish its prize, but eventually it did unwrap itself from the silver whistle and grab for her earrings, clutching them tight in small grey hands, and Greta slipped the whistle into her pocket —

  And heard, coming down the corridor, unmistakably, footsteps.

  She had just enough time to wedge the stones back into the wall and settle down again, manufacturing a bored expression, before the vampire with the dreadlocks appeared.

  Who are you, she thought again. The answer to that in the old TV show intro was the new Number Two, and Greta imagined that much to be fairly accurate: Corvin’s lieutenant, his second-in-command.

  “Getting comfortable?” he inquired, looking at her rolled-up shirtsleeves. The medium-sized monster was clinging to her knee, and the smallest one sat in her hands, gumming one of her aquamarine earrings industriously. “He’ll be so pleased. Your presence is required at dinner; I’ve been sent to dress you up in suitably gildy clobber.”

  Greta stared at him, and renewed cold dread dropped into her guts, the brief gains of the past half an hour completely forgotten. “He’s… going to eat me,” she said, not a question.

  He smiled a little, a flash of white teeth. “No. An easy conclusion, I agree, but in fact you’re off the menu for tonight. He simply wishes to extend his hospitality to his much-valued guest.”

  “Hostage.”

  “Semantics,” said the vampire, seesawing a hand in the air. “And that outfit is completely, but completely naff, my dear. You can’t possibly show up to Corvin’s table dressed like that. What size ballgown do you wear?”

  It was different for St. Germain, trying to track a missing person, with the chemical signature of Greta Helsing’s scent fixed in his mind. Less hopeless. He thought he would be able to follow that particular scent even after considerable time had passed.

  She smelled of L’Occitâne hotel soap, some kind of faint old-fashioned green-sharp perfume St. Germain identified after a moment as Ma Griffe, bad coffee, and a variant on the concerto of chemicals that was human sweat – nobody’s scent was a single note but a particular combination of notes, contingent on their emotional and physical health and what they’d been up to, and the development and change of that combination as time went by left a pretty good temporal record of how long it had been since the person had left the trace.

  St. Germain couldn’t stand perfume counters in shops, the chaotic barrage of combined scents all at once tended to hit him like a blast of migraine static, but he had read rather a lot of literature on the process by which humans developed individual commercial fragrances. The descriptions of the multiple elements of a perfume crossed over fairly well to werewolf olfactory experience. Top notes, heart notes, base notes: it felt a little easier to talk about his perceptions in a terminology already understood. The synesthetic aspect was a lot more difficult to explain: sometimes scents
were sharply colored in his mind, but not consistently.

  From the hotel they had gone straight to the Sorbonne, where she’d last been located according to Varney’s and St. Germain’s phone conversations with her; he hadn’t found anything the first time he’d searched the Place de la Sorbonne, but he had her scent now, and St. Germain had left the others standing out of the way while he made a slow careful circuit – and picked up something almost at once.

  Traces. Faint but present traces. It was clearest and strongest near the building itself, where she would have come and gone multiple times per day, but —

  “I can’t get more than traces unless I change,” he said, tight and apologetic. “There’s no spike in the traces that indicates anything like fear or anxiety, but the wolf has better nasal acuity.”

  “Can you? During the day, in public?” said Ruthven, paler than usual, dark under the eyes. He was fiddling with the lapel of his coat, and the stink of anxious vampire was threatening to blank out St. Germain’s nose completely. In stereo: the other vamp, the one he’d not met before, taller than Ruthven and cadaverously thin, radiating social awkwardness on a wide bandwidth, was just as anxious about Greta Helsing – in a subtly different way.

  Sits the wind in that quarter, thought St. Germain, registering a particular sequence of chemical signatures, and sighed. He’s not just gone for her, he has no idea what to do about it. “Yes,” he said, “I can, just – it’d be easier if you went over to the other side of the square and had a noisy argument, or something equally distracting, while I find a convenient alleyway.”

  Ruthven looked at Varney, who nodded, and the two of them set off toward the benches on one side of the square, beginning to talk loudly in English about something to do with the financing of some house refurbishment or other; St. Germain neither knew nor cared. He took advantage of the distraction by slipping into the Rue Champollion, narrow and shadowed as the afternoon drew into evening, and found a convenient doorway to shelter in while he did what needed to be done.

  You never really got used to it, the change. You just stopped minding how much it hurt. St. Germain had heard it described as a full-body sneeze; for him it was what he imagined a brief but powerful convulsion might feel like, an instant of flaring pain as his bones changed shape and the tendons and ligaments and muscles re-formed themselves accordingly. During his time he couldn’t control the change at all if he was exposed to moonlight, nor could he change back to his bipedal form as long as that silver light was touching him. It was mostly a voluntary decision for the rest of the month, except in situations of extreme stress, when his body would shift into the less vulnerable of its two available options.

  He had never quite understood the process by which his clothing seemed to stay with the one form while he changed to the other, but that was the kind of metaphysical stuff that gave him a headache; he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. Now, in the shelter of the doorway, St. Germain hunched over and leaned on an internal switch, and felt the stretching somehow fibrous pain as the change began.

  About three minutes later, a wolf that stood approximately four foot five at the shoulder trotted out of the Rue Champollion, yellow eyes bright in the gathering dusk – and appeared to the humans present as simply a very large dog, possibly a husky mix, that had unaccountably lost its collar. In this form the nasal chaos that had been perceptible before was almost overwhelming until he managed to step down his mental gain – but he could definitely perceive the traces of Helsing’s scent much more clearly.

  He rejoined Ruthven and Varney, sitting down like a well-trained service animal, and said without opening his mouth all the way, “I think I have something. Follow me – one of you ought to look like my handler for appearance’s sake. Edmund, you’re shorter and more delicate-looking, you do it. Keep a hand in my ruff as if I’m leading you.”

  “Thank you, I’m sure,” said Ruthven, faintly pink for a moment, and glanced over at Varney, who shrugged. St. Germain could pick up the anxiety plus the emotional lability even more in this form, but Varney simply fell in behind them without a word. Ruthven’s pale fingers worked their way into the heavy fur at St. Germain’s shoulder – steady, even through the stress hormones coming off him like faint curls of steam.

  St. Germain led the vampires in the direction that Helsing’s signature felt strongest. It was a pale greenish-blue, like aquamarine, faint but present, sharp-acrid-sweet all at once. She’d left the Place de la Sorbonne, he thought, padding along with his nose close to the ground, head swaying side to side as he sniffed.

  She’d been on her way to come and meet with him. This was the easiest way from the Sorbonne to the bar he’d suggested. There were still clear if fading marks of her, tracks he could follow on the pavement now that his nose was close enough to make out details. She’d been on her way, and —

  Ruthven’s fingers tightened in his ruff as St. Germain stopped. “What is it?” he demanded.

  “It ends,” St. Germain said. “Ends right here. She’s still incredibly faintly in the air but I have nothing on the ground at all: she’s – either vanished completely, or something has picked her up and is now carrying her.”

  “What kind of something?” Varney said, sharp.

  “Not sure. There are vampire tracks here, but they’ve faded, and – no offense, but fresh vampire scent tends to block out older vampire traces that might have been present.”

  “So what do we do?” Varney asked.

  “I wish I knew,” said St. Germain with a doggy sigh. “I don’t. I think – maybe we ought to ask for help.”

  “From whom?” That was Ruthven.

  “From Hell, of course,” said St. Germain, and shook himself so that silvery hairs raftered everywhere. “The obvious last resort.”

  Corvin’s soirées were famous for good reason. Usually, Lilith thoroughly looked forward to the opportunity to wear her loveliest gowns and graciously welcome her subjects, sitting at her lord’s right hand – welcome them, and also their guests, hand-picked humans of particular beauty and appeal. It was a charming little game, playing host and hostess, everyone on their most sophisticated and polite behavior, just as if they were humans themselves at a formal dinner party, as if they weren’t about to fall upon their living companions with teeth bared and drink them dry; and Lilith particularly enjoyed the part after the dinner party, when the clothes came off and the music was turned all the way up. This time, though…

  This time, she couldn’t stop thinking of how much she’d rather be in her circle, in her secret place, alone with the words and the candle flames and the acrid smell like burned metal that seemed to be the scent of magic. This time, it was with uncharacteristic impatience that she went through her beauty rituals, knowing perfectly well that she wouldn’t have a chance to go back to her spells until the following night.

  Lilith swept violet glitter shadow over her eyelids, shading to silver in the inner corners; blended smoky black into the crease; drew a perfect even wing with black eyeliner along one lash line and then the other, businesslike and quick. Usually she spent at least an hour lovingly painting her face before one of these parties, and another hour on her hair; this time it took her no more than forty-five minutes to finish both. The impatience was unfamiliar, a little uneasy; the idea that she’d rather be doing something else than making herself beautiful was not native to Lilith’s worldview.

  Much earlier than usual, she left her boudoir – she was almost always ready just when Corvin called for her to join him – and nearly ran into Yves’s newest acquisition in the hallway. The girl shrank away – God, she couldn’t even move right, she had no grace at all – and Lilith glared at her. And then stared at her.

  She’d apparently put her makeup on in the dark, or possibly tried using her toes to apply it. The red shadow was uneven, with a drift of fallout smudging her cheek; one eyeliner’s wing wobbled and the other was twice as thick. And she looked as if she was about to burst into tears, which would empha
tically not improve the situation.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lilith demanded. “You can’t intend to show up to Corvin’s party with your face looking like that. Tell me you’re not that stupid, what’s-your-name.”

  “Sofiria?” said the girl, looking as if she’d had to remember it herself. “I’m sorry, Lilith, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just – can’t get the eyeliner right tonight?”

  “Don’t be so wet,” snapped Lilith, and grabbed her wrist, ignoring Sofiria’s startled yelp. She half-dragged the girl into her own boudoir, propelled her across the room, and sat her down on the satin stool facing the dressing table. “I cannot stand pathetic baby vampires. It’s not your fault that useless idiot Yves turned you and then didn’t bother to teach you the first bloody thing, but you could take some initiative about it, couldn’t you? Hold still and close your eyes.”

  She soaked a cotton ball in makeup remover and took Sofiria’s wretched attempt at eyeliner off with a few brisk ungentle strokes. It flaked and smudged in a way Lilith hadn’t seen in a long time, not since she’d had to buy the cheap stuff, and that was exasperating as well: didn’t this kid know they could take whatever they wanted?