Dreadful Company

by Vivian Shaw

  “We think they’re hiding in somebody’s wine cellar,” Élise said, just as amused. “And coming out to make a nuisance of themselves.”

  “Have you met them?” Ruthven demanded.

  “Not to say meet,” Lucia said. “They’re not the sort of people one cares to acknowledge socially, you understand.”

  “I do,” he said, “although I don’t believe we have much choice, not if our friend is involved. Can you tell me where they are?”

  “Where they’re staying, I’ve no idea,” said Lucia. “But they hunt in Pigalle. Up and down and to and fro, in among the sex shops and the tourist tat. No class at all, I’m afraid; not the slightest flicker of taste. I shouldn’t bother with them if I were you, chéri. Come out with us instead.”

  “We can show you a much nicer time,” said Élise, and she and Lucia exchanged glances, laughing. “You’re one of us, after all. And you, too, of course, monsieur,” she added, looking at Varney. “Most welcome.”

  “Under other circumstances,” said Ruthven, and Varney was a little surprised at how warm his voice was, “under other circumstances I should be most pleased to accept; but at the moment I’m afraid we really do have to be going. Thank you so much for your time.”

  “Look us up when you’re finished enacting justice,” said Lucia. “Our door is always open, metaphorically speaking. And Alceste does have our phone number, if he can be bothered to remember it.”

  She got up and walked Varney and Ruthven to the door, and Varney was not surprised when she gave Ruthven the three cheek-kisses of acquaintance, nor when she turned to Varney himself with a smile and offered him her hand. Some kind of – understanding – had clearly passed between the two of them, which Varney had failed to follow.

  “One thing,” said Lucia, standing in the doorway as they set off down the hall. “They’re making more of themselves, we’re almost sure. Young ones. Very young.”

  She closed the door behind her with a final click, leaving Varney and Ruthven staring at one another with almost-identical expressions of horror.

  Vampires do dream. The sleep patterns of any given individual vary based on a number of factors; some of them make a point of sleeping like the dead, sometimes actually in a coffin, sometimes in proper beds. And they dream of many things.

  Grisaille had had this one before. He was somewhere complicated and terribly cold, with the stink of death all around him, and while he had no clear understanding of why he was there, he felt a powerful sense of oppression – of something terrible drawing nearer and nearer, and no idea which way to run. When the screaming started, he thought for a long moment that it was part of the dream; so many of his included screams, one way or another.

  He sat up, blinking in the darkness of his rock-cut bedroom, disoriented. The party had gone on for long enough that Grisaille had completely lost track of time, and had no idea how long he’d been passed out. As the last of the dream faded, the sound was still going on: something between screaming and laughter, jagged peals of it, ringing in the corridor outside.

  He was already out of bed and tying the belt of his dressing gown when he heard the unmistakable voice of Corvin bellowing “Grisaille!”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he muttered, not bothering to turn on the lights. In the corridor some of the others had already emerged from their rooms, roused by the screaming; alarmed and dazed, still half-drunk from their earlier revelry.

  The last time the group had been startled by unexpected screaming had been when the kid first woke up after being turned, and that had been an entirely different kind of scream: this one came from much closer at hand, and was laced through with a kind of hysterical laughter that was a lot worse than simple screaming might have been.

  Grisaille hurried to the ornate carved door of Corvin’s chambers, pretty sure what he was going to see before he saw it.

  Corvin was on his feet, red silk sleepwear disarranged, looking both frantic and disgusted. Lilith was writhing on the bed, shrieking, clutching at the sheets with hands curled into claws. “Grisaille,” he said, “do something, Christ, make it stop, make her stop —”

  He’d never seen Lilith this bad. Once or twice before, she’d had a kind of fit, after unwise indulgence, but this was worse than anything Grisaille had seen before: there was blood on her mouth where she’d bitten her lips, and her eyes were rolled back in her head so far that only a rim of iris showed.

  He made a decision. This was beyond his own extremely limited experience or skill, and they had someone at hand who almost certainly knew more than he did.

  There was a certain weary flicker of relief at the thought: having someone there who knew what they were doing – who could give accurate instructions – was something Grisaille hadn’t enjoyed in decades.

  Ignoring Corvin’s demands to be told what the fuck he thought he was doing, Grisaille stepped out of the bedchamber into the hallway, where five or six vampires were milling around uncertainly, and snapped his fingers at the nearest of them. “You,” he said, “go and get the human, right now, and bring her to me.”

  The tricherpetons had followed Greta when she was escorted back to her cell – two of them, gorgeous things, one glossy black and one a deep mahogany brown in loose curls. They and the collection of wellmonsters had apparently decided the cell was where they wanted to be.

  It felt like the small hours of the morning. Earlier, when Grisaille had brought her back from the party, logy with the haze of wine and whatever that incense had had in it, Greta hadn’t felt capable of doing much of anything other than sitting very still and waiting for the room to stop spinning; she’d drifted off, briefly, and had woken with a vicious headache and an equally vicious determination that she wasn’t going to spend any more time under Corvin’s roof. Ceiling. Whatever. If she was going to get out, she was going to get out now.

  Everything hinged on the whistle. If it worked – and she had no reason to believe it wouldn’t – blowing it would summon the creature; once summoned, it had to manifest in some type of cloth, and she planned to rip up the voluminous skirts of her stupid ballgown to oblige. It was a very stupid ballgown, and it made Greta look like a cabbage, and it must have cost a truly ridiculous amount of money; tearing it to bits would be satisfying on several levels at once.

  After that, she’d have to trust sheer luck, but maybe she was due some of that by now, after her recent string of misfortunes. She stood in the middle of the cell, bouncing the whistle in the palm of her hand, trying to get up the nerve to actually set the plan in motion.

  It was only because the tricherpetons both suddenly got up and started growling that she had enough time to shove the whistle back into her bodice before running footsteps in the corridor approached, and an out-of-breath vampire turned the key in the cell door’s lock. Greta vaguely remembered this one – she had purple wavy hair and went in for teal frosted lipstick and cobweb-patterned lace frills down her bodice – but right now she looked scared, which was not something Greta had seen on a vampire all that often. She grabbed Greta by the wrist and yanked her out of the cell without a word. “What’s happening?” Greta demanded.

  “Grisaille wants you,” said the vampire, and broke into a trot, spike heels or no spike heels, pulling Greta along. She realized she could hear something in the distance, something like faint screams, growing rapidly louder as they ran.

  She was being taken the same way Grisaille had escorted her on the way to his own rooms, through the same corridors, and when they got to the rock-cut chamber with the doors set into it, a different one of them was open. Whatever was screaming was in there.

  The purple-haired vampire gave her a shove and she half stumbled forward, into the room, and got a good look at what was going on; the remainder of the haze from the wine she’d drunk earlier went away in a hurry.

  Grisaille, in a dark grey dressing gown, was bending over a huge, scarlet-hung bed in which Lilith lay, quite a lot of pearl-white skin revealed. His hands were on Lilith
’s shoulders, trying to hold her still while she writhed and clawed at him, arching her back; her heels drummed against the tangled sheets. A little distance from the bed, Corvin stood in red silk pajamas that to Greta’s brief glance appeared to be encrusted with jewels at collar and cuffs, his face screwed up in an expression of disgust which she was sure he didn’t know was intensely unattractive.

  Greta pushed past Corvin and crossed the room to the bed, taffeta skirts rustling. She took one of Lilith’s flailing wrists. “What was it?” she asked Grisaille. “In the victims tonight. The humans. What were they full of?”

  “Heroin.”

  “That shouldn’t do this, especially not with a delayed onset. Did she just wake up like this?” Greta asked Corvin sharply, turning to look at him. The stink of Lilith’s perfume, artificial vanilla and violets, sickly-sweet, was almost overpowering this close up.

  “All I know is she woke me up because she’s suddenly screaming and flailing around,” he said, sounding petulant rather than grand. “She kicked me.”

  “It’s not just the heroin; she must have taken something else as well – can you thrall her?” she asked Grisaille. “I need to know what’s going on in there.”

  “I can try,” he said, not sounding particularly confident, and she moved aside so he could get a better angle. Her foot touched something under the bed that rolled away with a faint glassy clink.

  It was always odd watching a vampire thrall somebody. The rhythmic pulsing of the irises, expanding and contracting, was unnerving even if the force they exerted wasn’t directed at you. Grisaille stared intently at Lilith, his eyes working hard, for only a few seconds before he winced away and straightened up again, pressing his hands to his face. In the dark grey silk gown he looked both stark and oddly stylized, his long fingers the deep brown of patinaed bronze.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong – are you all right?”

  “I will be,” he said, muffled behind his hands. “That’s a goddamn mess – she’s seeing monsters, and I don’t mean the cutesy kind, things with claws and teeth and burning yellow eyes – the walls are liquid —”

  “Acute hallucinogenic delirium,” Greta said. “She had to have taken something else – wait. Hang on.”

  Grisaille dragged his hands down his face, ashy undertones visible in his skin, as she knelt down and felt under the bed. It didn’t take her long to close her fingers around an empty bottle: the thing she’d heard rolling away a few minutes back. Greta brought it out into the light. One look was enough to tell her exactly what was going on, and she went cold all over.

  “Shit,” she said with exquisite clarity. “She’s only sunk a bottle of undiluted absinthe; no bloody wonder she’s hallucinating. We have to get it out of her, now, before there’s permanent damage. Can one of you stick your fingers down her throat, please, because she’d bite my hand clean off if I tried.” She looked up at the pair of them, Grisaille and Corvin, everything still very cold and clear and bright.

  Absinthe was generally held to be very mildly hallucinogenic to humans, due to the presence of the chemical compound thujone, but no real research results could back that up. In sanguivores, however, it was extremely effective; one glassful of prepared, diluted absinthe could send a typical vampire witchwalking for hours, and Lilith had drunk God only knew how much of the stuff neat, on top of a heavy dose of heroin-laced blood: far more than any vampire’s accelerated healing could accommodate. Greta had no idea if she’d had enough to cause permanent neurological effects, but they had to get whatever remained out of Lilith in a hurry, and here she was without a goddamn ounce of ipecac to her name. “Now,” she repeated. “Help me, if you want her to get through this.”

  Corvin backed away. “This is disgusting,” he said. “She’s disgusting. I can’t deal with any more of it. I should have gotten rid of her weeks ago —”

  He turned on his heel and left them alone in the bedchamber. Greta looked up at Grisaille, who was still an unpleasant color, and was about to say something else along the lines of are you going to help me do this or not when he straightened up, taking a long breath.

  “This is going to be awful, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go and fetch a bucket.”

  It was, in fact, awful. Grisaille had done a great many unpleasant things in his couple of centuries, but this experience would rank very near the top of that list: once they’d got Lilith to start vomiting, she seemed thoroughly disinclined to stop. The doctor – Helsing – was sitting behind her on the bed, one arm wrapped around Lilith to support her and the other hand cupping her forehead over the bowl in her lap; the shrieking and flailing had dwindled into moans and shudders. The incongruity of the red taffeta ballgown in this particular tableau was not lost on Grisaille.

  Both of them were liberally spattered, and the bed was a disaster. “Try thralling her again,” Helsing said, grimly hanging on to Lilith through another wave of retching. “See if you can get through to her – she’s not fighting me anymore but I need you to try calming her down. What’s her real name anyway?”

  “I’m not supposed to know that,” said Grisaille, “and you absolutely aren’t, but she’s really a Samantha. Hold her still for a second.”

  He reached for Lilith’s mind – still a swirling mess of confused misery, but less terrified. Through her eyes he was no longer a faceless monster with huge claws, which was an improvement, and he could tell she at least knew where she was. He leaned a little, pushing calm and reassurance at her, and she relaxed slightly in Helsing’s arms.

  “That’s better,” said the doctor. “You’re going to be all right, Lilith, I know it’s awful but you’re doing wonderfully; just get it all up and you’ll feel much better afterward.”

  The tone of voice was just about as bizarre, in this situation, as the ballgown: she sounded brisk and sympathetic and confident, ordinary, exactly as if she weren’t being held captive underground by a bunch of vampires. Grisaille was having difficulty parsing it – and aware, too, of that little flicker of sheer relief at being told what to do by somebody competent. The comfort of authority. How long it had been since he’d been given orders by someone he could actually trust. How much of a difference it made.

  “She’s not hallucinating anymore,” he said to distract himself. “Or not as badly. I think she’ll recover.”

  “Of course she will,” said Helsing. “I imagine she’ll have a nasty day or so while she gets this out of her system, but she’ll do. Thank you, by the way. You’re being extremely helpful.”

  “It’s not exactly the first time I’ve been called upon to sort out someone in extremis.”

  “I was going to say, have you had medical training?” She looked up at him, apparently genuinely interested. Her hair was still partly caught in the updo he’d arranged what felt like a century ago.

  “Not exactly,” he said, aware again of the sense of oppression he’d felt waking from the dream. “Not proper training, anyway. I never finished my studies.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Ingolstadt,” he said without meaning to. “A long time ago.”

  — and it was all back, all at once, memories he hadn’t thought about in years: snow, the acid smell of it sharp and clear in his nose, the cold kisses of snowflakes against his face as he and Victor lurched back from the tavern, laughing at nothing, leaning on one another while the ground tried to tip them off their feet – and later standing looking out at that same snow, days later, wondering what he could have done differently, knowing what he could have done – simply left, told Victor he was mad, that the things he’d been considering were not things to be considered beyond brief blurting horror in the small hours of the morning – knowing, knowing he was complicit, that whatever Victor achieved or failed to achieve he, Grisaille, would never be free of the stain of it – and finding his old friend collapsed on the floor of that charnel house of a laboratory, burning with fever, clutching at Grisaille’
s sleeve with shaking hands and whispering, I did it, I did it, it can’t be undone —

  “Grisaille?” Helsing was saying, and she reached out as if to touch his arm and then apparently thought better of it, given the state of her hands. “What is it? Are you all right?”

  There was actual concern in her voice, and somewhere beyond the sickening slide of memories, he could find it in himself to be amused at that; and he pulled himself together, with effort, and gave her the slightly maddening little half-smile he’d perfected over the centuries. “I’m dead, my dear Doctor,” he said. “I hardly think the term applies.”

  “You are infuriating, is what you are,” Helsing said, and his smile turned real.

  “One tries, you know. One does one’s best. In fact I did try, a very long time ago, to train as a doctor, back when I was alive – but it didn’t suit me.”

  He wasn’t sure why he was talking, only that nothing felt quite real, just at the moment; that the three of them had somehow slipped out of time, that perhaps it didn’t matter what he said in this strange lacuna of reality. He found himself telling her about Ingolstadt, about the classes in the freezing lecture halls, about the one kid from Switzerland who was apparently determined to do everything better than everybody else.