“Since when are you a scrub nurse?” she asked, nodding for him to set the tray down. “I mean—thank you, this is exactly what I need, I appreciate it, and if you could hold the light for me I’d appreciate that even more.”
“De rien,” said Ruthven, and went to fetch her penlight.
A few minutes later, Greta held her breath as she carefully, carefully withdrew her forceps from Varney’s shoulder. Held between the steel tips was a piece of something hard and angular, about the size of a pea. That metallic, sharp smell was much stronger now, much more noticeable.
She turned to the tray on the table beside her, dropped the thing into the china basin with a little rat-tat sound, and straightened up. The wound was bleeding again; she pressed a gauze pad over it. The blood looked brighter now, somehow, which made no sense at all.
Ruthven clicked off the penlight, swallowing hard, and Greta looked up at him. “What is that thing?” he asked, nodding to the basin.
“I’ve no idea,” she told him. “I’ll have a look at it after I’m happier with him. He’s pushing eighty-five degrees and his pulse rate is approaching low human baseline—”
Greta cut herself off and felt the vein in Varney’s throat again. “That’s strange,” she said. “That’s very strange. It’s already coming down.”
The beat was noticeably slower. She had another look at his blood pressure; this time the reading was much more reasonable. “I’ll be damned. In a human I’d be seriously alarmed at that rapid a transient, but all bets are off with regard to hemodynamic stability in sanguivores. It’s as if that thing, whatever it is, was directly responsible for the acute inflammatory reaction.”
“And now that it’s gone, he’s starting to recover?”
“Something like that. Don’t touch it,” Greta said sharply, as Ruthven reached for the basin. “Don’t even go near it. I have no idea what it would do to you, and I don’t want to have two patients on my hands.”
Ruthven backed away a few steps. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Greta, something about this smells peculiar.”
“In more than one sense,” she said, checking the gauze. The bleeding had almost stopped. “Did he tell you how it happened?”
“Not really. Just that he’d been jumped by several people armed with a strange kind of knife.”
“Mm. A very strange kind of knife. I’ve never seen anything like this wound. He didn’t mention that these people were dressed up like monks, or that they were reciting something about unclean creatures of darkness?”
“No,” said Ruthven, flopping into a chair. “He neglected to share that tidbit with me. Monks?”
“So he said,” Greta told him. “Robes and hoods, big crosses round their necks, the whole bit. Monks. And some kind of stabby weapon. Remind you of anything?”
“The Ripper,” said Ruthven, slowly. “You think this has something to do with the murders?”
“I think it’s one hell of a coincidence if it doesn’t,” Greta said. That feeling of unease hadn’t gone away with Varney’s physical improvement. It really was impossible to ignore. She’d been too busy with the immediate work at hand to consider the similarities before, but now she couldn’t help thinking about it.
There had been a series of unsolved murders in London over the past month and a half. Eight people dead, all apparently the work of the same individual, all stabbed to death, all found with a cheap plastic rosary stuffed into their mouths. Six of the victims had been prostitutes. The killer had, inevitably, been nicknamed the Rosary Ripper.
The MO didn’t exactly match how Varney had described his attack—multiple assailants, a strange-shaped knife—but it was way the hell too close for Greta’s taste. “Unless whoever got Varney was a copycat,” she said. “Or maybe there isn’t just one Ripper. Maybe it’s a group of people running around stabbing unsuspecting citizens.”
“There was nothing on the news about the murders that mentioned weird-shaped wounds,” Ruthven said. “Although I suppose the police might be keeping that to themselves.”
The police had not apparently been able to do much of anything about the murders, and as one victim followed another with no end in sight the general confidence in Scotland Yard—never tremendously high—was plummeting. The entire city was both angry and frightened. Conspiracy theories abounded on the Internet, some less believable than others. This, however, was the first time Greta had heard anything about the Ripper branching out into supernatural victims. The garlic on the walls of Varney’s flat bothered her a great deal.
Varney shifted a little, with a faint moan, and Greta returned her attention to her patient. There was visible improvement; his vitals were stabilizing, much more satisfactory than they had been before the extraction.
“He’s beginning to come around,” she said. “We should get him into a proper bed, but I think he’s over the worst of this.”
Ruthven didn’t reply at once, and she looked over to see him tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair with a thoughtful expression. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing. Well, maybe nothing. I think I’ll call Cranswell at the Museum, see if he can look a few things up for me. I will, however, wait until the morning is a little further advanced, because I am a kind man.”
“What time is it?” Greta asked, stripping off her gloves.
“Getting on for six, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus. I need to call in—there’s no way I’m going to be able to do clinic hours today. Hopefully Anna or Nadezhda can take an extra shift if I do a bit of groveling.”
“I have faith in your ability to grovel convincingly,” Ruthven said. “Shall I go and make some more coffee?”
“Yes,” she said. Both of them knew this wasn’t over. “Yes, do precisely that thing, and you will earn my everlasting fealty.”
“I earned your everlasting fealty last time I drove you to the airport,” Ruthven said. “Or was it when I made you tiramisu a few weeks ago? I can’t keep track.”
He smiled, despite the line of worry still between his eyebrows, and Greta found herself smiling wearily in return.
By Max Wirestone
DAHLIA MOSS MYSTERIES
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss
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The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss Page 29