Vivian Shaw

Bitter Waters

For my parents, with all my love.

We must pass through the bitter waters to reach the sweet.

— Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula

CHAPTER 1

Evening at Dark Heart: soft and slow, blue dusk rising out of the parkland little by little, drawing color out of the world. The long avenue of copper beeches that gave the house its name turning from deepest purple to black; over the ornamental lake a faint haze of mist, drifting on the slow night breeze.

Greta Helsing had been down at Dark Heart for a week now, and had spent every evening sitting on the parterre with a drink, watching the slow changing twilight, enchanted by it every single time. Nightfall in London just happened: here it was a process, a kind of tide one could observe going out, and the old parklands were at their most beautiful in the blue deepening dusk.

It was late spring, and still chilly enough once night had properly fallen to send her inside, shivering, to warmth and light and the welcoming scent of a cheerful applewood fire. Sir Francis Varney, draped in a chair by the hearth with a couple of hairmonsters at his feet, looked up and smiled. “Still satisfactory?” he asked.

“Deeply,” said Greta, and set down her empty sherry glass. Stacks of veterinary textbooks everywhere indicated that Varney’s unofficial ward, the young vampire Emily, was studying hard for her latest exams; Greta carefully moved several out of the way to sit on the arm of his chair. “I could watch that every night for a year and not get bored. It’s so — peaceful.”

“There are certain advantages to having a country house,” said Varney. “One cannot order takeout at all hours of the night, nor nip round the corner shop for a packet of fags, but there are nevertheless certain advantages.” He curled an arm around her waist. “You’re not missing the city too much?”

“The only thing I miss is the clinic,” Greta said. “And that is in good hands while I’m down here. I keep meaning to do something about my flat in Crouch End and I keep not getting around to it.”

“Such as moving out,” said Varney. “I can’t think why you lived there to begin with; it’s a wretched place and a long way from your work.”

“Money,” Greta said, wry. “Up until recently I didn’t have any of it, and trying to find a flat anywhere near Harley Street is a thing that normal people cannot actually do — but I’m staying with Ruthven and Grisaille so much of the time now that keeping the Crouch End place is getting a little ridiculous.”

“You know you have access to all the money you want, darling,” said Varney, giving her a little squeeze. “Along with a somewhat absurd but genuine title that you are entirely allowed to use.”

“I’d have to have the brass plate redone,” she said. “Greta Helsing, MD, FRCP, Lady Varney. The idiom’s just wrong.”

“I don’t know, I think it has a ring to it,” said Varney, and leaned up to draw her into a kiss. This was sufficiently distracting that Greta didn’t notice Emily come through from the library with yet another stack of books until she shrieked and dropped them on the floor.

Greta startled, turning to see Emily staring at the French doors onto the terrace with wide horrified eyes. “What the fuck is that?” the girl demanded.

“Good God,” Varney said, following her gaze, and Greta had to admit she might have lost her grip on the books as well. Standing on the other side of the glass was the figure of a woman, skeletally — almost ghoulishly — thin and pale, long hair in green-gold braids hanging over her shoulders, her eyes nothing more than two cold points of greenish light in hollow dark pits. She held in her arms the limp figure of something bundled up in blankets, the size of a child.

“What is it?” Emily demanded, still frozen in place, and that was enough to get Greta moving; she stepped over the fallen books and went to unlock the doors and let the barrow-wight inside.

“Thank you,” said the wight, in a voice like cold stone echoes in the dark. This close, the chill she was giving off was enough to make Greta shiver despite the warmth of the room. “I’m so sorry to barge in like this, but I didn’t know where else to go.”

“What’s — what happened?” said Greta, and the wight pulled aside a fold of cloth to show her what it was she was carrying. Varney was beside them now, and both he and Greta sucked in their breath at the sight.

A child. A young child, no more than ten or eleven. Asleep, or unconscious.

And very definitely a vampire.

“I found her wandering in the fields,” said the wight, whose name was Sigyn, sitting by the fire with a glass of syrup-cold vodka in her hands: frost was forming on the outside. “My barrow’s a few miles from here. We have a lot of — well, sort of ward-spells woven around each individual barrow, to warn us if someone’s trespassing, and ours went off. I thought it had to be teenagers on a dare, but when I came out to run them off, I found this little girl just sitting on the barrow, crying.”

The child had been wrapped up in warm blankets and laid on the couch, still unconscious; after a brief exam, there was nothing physically wrong with her that Greta could discern other than the puffy eyes from her earlier tears — and of course, the single greatest and most irrevocable problem of her new nature.

“I knew this house was here,” Sigyn continued, “and — that it was owned by a vampyre, so I thought it might be possible to take her here for help. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and she couldn’t stay in the barrow, she’d freeze to death—” She stopped, winced. “Not to death. But—”

“I know,” said Greta. “I’m glad we were here, and that you thought to bring her to us. Did she say anything about what happened to her?”

“Not much that made any sense,” said Sigyn, looking over at the couch. Emily was sitting on the arm of it with a totally unreadable expression on her face. “She cried herself sick and said something about getting separated from a school group and a stranger talking to her, and then waking up in the darkness alone like — well, like this.”

Greta reached out sharply to put a hand on Varney’s arm, just in time; he made himself not snarl viciously with all his teeth bared. She knew this was the thing he hated most, that Ruthven hated most: the unethical, nonconsensual, irresponsible, and effectively homicidal turning of a human. It had been bad enough when they first encountered Emily, and she’d been nineteen when she was turned: this little girl’s entire life had been stolen from her, childhood and all.

“I am going to find who did this,” Varney said very carefully. Greta could feel the fine tremor running through him, the effort he was putting into keeping his rage in check. “I am going to find who did this, and I am going to end them.”

“What can I do to help?” said the wight, staring at him with her cold-glowing eyes, and the deathly chill in her voice — frozen stone echoes, deep underground — made Greta shiver all over again.

Her name was Lucy Ashton, it turned out, and she was just short of eleven years old.

After Varney and Sigyn had departed in search of the creature responsible for her condition, she’d woken up and immediately burst into tears all over again, terrified and in shock, and it had taken a while for Greta to calm her down enough to give her name and age. Her vitals weren’t settled into normal range for a classic draculine yet, and Greta knew perfectly well that the worst physical effects of the rapid transition were still to come.

Huddled on the couch, still wrapped in blankets and sniffling miserably, she was still not making eye contact. Greta was using all her encouraging and reassuring bedside manner, kneeling in front of the couch and looking up at her, and it was slow going.

“Sigyn said you’d been on a school trip,” she said gently. “Where was the group going?”

“S-Stonehenge,” said Lucy. Greta winced: that was miles away. Either she’d walked all that way herself in the dark, or whoever had done it had carried her.

“And you got separated from the others?”

“I wanted to see closer.” She sniffled. “When the teacher wasn’t looking, I — sneaked away and hid behind a stone.”

Greta had to wonder why the whole of Wiltshire wasn’t crawling with police searching for a missing child, and speculated darkly on the capabilities of the teacher involved. “The stones are really interesting,” she said. “I’ve often wanted to go see them close up myself.”

“How did they get there?” Lucy said, for a moment sounding like an ordinary curious kid, and Greta’s chest hurt sharply.

“People dragged them a very long way,” she said. “Very clever engineering. So you were inside the stone circle? What happened next?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, and broke into fresh tears. Through the sobs she added, “It was — there was a man — he seemed nice, he asked if I was lost and — and said he’d help me f-find the others and then it’s just—”

She was crying too hard to speak, and Greta simply put her arms around the girl and held her close, only briefly surprised at Lucy’s strength when she clung and buried her face in Greta’s shoulder. None of the things she wanted to say were true: It’s okay, you’ll be all right now, you’re safe, it’s over. The worst was very much still to come.

“I’ve got you,” she said instead. “I’ve got you, I’m going to help you, Lucy, I’m so sorry this happened to you but we’re going to help.”

“W-what did happen?” Lucy asked when the sobs let go somewhat. “I don’t — know what he did to me.”

Christ, Greta thought, shutting her eyes tight. At least there was absolutely no sign the attack had been sexual in nature. “Well,” she said, “he did something bad to you, but it wasn’t — the sort of bad thing kids get warned about in school.”

“I don’t… it doesn’t hurt,” said Lucy, sounding uncertain. “Not there, anyway, but my neck hurts?”

“That’s because I’m afraid he…” Greta swallowed. “He bit you.”

“He bit me?” Lucy uncurled enough to stare at Greta, eyes huge in her tearstained face.

“Yes. And the bite has done some things to you.”

“Do I have AIDS?” she asked without hesitation.

“No. You don’t. You do have a — a sort of disease, however.” Fuck, she wished Ruthven were here, he could do this so much better, he could thrall her into understanding—

No. Not thrall. This kid had had enough of being mind-controlled for a damn long while.

“What kind of disease?” Lucy insisted.

“It’s rare and inconvenient, but you can learn to live with it. What happened when you met Sigyn? Were you afraid of her?”

Lucy blinked at the sudden change of subject. “Y-yes? Her eyes glowed?”

“But you let her help you?”

“She was — nice,” Lucy said. “I was too tired to run away and she talked to me, and she wasn’t — like—trying to scare me? And she was wearing a sweater and jeans like a normal person even though her eyes were weird?”

“That’s right,” said Greta. “She’s a special type of person, but she’s just a person. She’s actually a barrow-wight. Do you know what they are?”

Lucy stared at her.

“They get a bad rap because an author called Tolkien wrote about them being horrible ghost creatures that want to hurt people, but really all they are is a sort of very old magic being that lives inside barrows. That’s why she has the funny glowing eyes and why she’s so cold.”

Lucy blinked. “I know who Tolkien is, everybody knows that, but — barrow-wights aren’t real. Magic isn’t real.”

“That’s what most people think,” said Greta, letting a hint of conspiracy into her voice. “Most people don’t know that it’s been real all the time, all around them.”

Lucy paused, and then, hesitantly, said “Like in Harry Potter?”

“That’s right,” said Greta, enormously relieved. “Like how the Muggles have no idea about the magic world, but it’s right there nonetheless.”

Lucy pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, taking some time to process that. “Are you a witch?” she asked after a while, looking up at Greta.

“Nope,” she said. “I’m absolutely bog-standard ordinary human. No magical powers at all. I’m a doctor who treats magical people, and I have friends who are witches, but I’m not one of them.”

“What kind of magical people?”

“All kinds. Mummies, bogeymen, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, you name it.”

Lucy narrowed her eyes. “Those are all real?”

“Every last one of them,” said Greta. “I know, it’s a lot to take in, especially when you’re scared and feeling awful, and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.”

“But what’s happening?” Lucy asked. “Is it gonna get worse?”

“For a bit, yes, but once that part’s over, you’ll feel much better. When the bad person bit you,” Greta said with a sigh, “he turned you into a type of magical person, which he should not have done at all to someone your age, but certainly not without your fully informed consent. That means that you would have known about it, wanted it to happen, and asked him to do it, none of which are true.”

Lucy’s hand rose to the wound on her throat. “Oh my God,” she said, sounding both terrified and fascinated. “Am I gonna be a werewolf?”

Greta had to laugh a little. “No,” she said. “You’re going to be a vampire.”

The girl’s eyes went wider still. From behind Greta another voice said, wry, “It’s a lot to get used to, but it’s not all bad. I promise.”

“That’s Emily,” said Greta, turning to see the vampire leaning in the doorway, wearing a Royal Veterinary College sweatshirt. “She got turned into one by a stranger, just like you. She might be able to answer some of your questions.”

Emily came over and knelt down by the couch. “Hey,” she said. “I know how gross and scared you feel right now, but it does get better, and these people will help. The really hard part is that you kind of can’t really go back to live with your mum and dad anymore.”

“I don’t have a mum or a dad,” Lucy said. “They died when I was two. I’m a foster.”

Emily and Greta shared a look of profound relief.

It was dawn when Varney returned, disheveled and disgruntled in equal parts: the mist that had come up in the night revealed him stepping out of grey invisibility all at once. In the dew-wet grass the tracks he and the barrow-wight had left on their departure were still faintly marked.

Greta, in her dressing-gown, was watching from an upper window. She was in time to help him off with his wet coat and ruined shoes in the little mud-room off the kitchen before going to make him a cup of hot spiced blood: he looked grey. It was very evident from his expression that the hunt had not been successful, and she was not about to ask stupid questions.

Varney sat down heavily at the kitchen table and gave her a wan smile when she set the cup down in front of him. “Thanks,” he said. “I wish to God I had a werewolf’s nose, Greta.”

“Was there any trail at all?” she asked, sitting down across from him with her own cup of tea.

“Intermittent, either to or from the northeast. Thanks to Sigyn, I didn’t just end up going in circles all bloody night — I’ve got to remember to send her a bottle of something, she was an enormous help — but we’re no closer to finding this creature.”

“Lucy says she was attacked inside Stonehenge,” Greta said. “That she met a strange man who asked if she was lost and offered to help her. That’s all she remembers before waking up alone, at night, out in the fields, freshly turned. Pretty classic hunting thrall technique, but I’ve never heard of anyone turning a victim that fast and then abandoning them.”

Vampire thrall was a highly effective method of mind control. It had happened to her, in Paris; she thought she would probably never be able to forget that mental jump-cut, from turning to face a stranger—Excuse me, miss, I wonder if you could help me—and finding herself bound and on her knees in the catacombs underneath the city, a literal prisoner of vampires.

“It’s the abandonment thing I don’t get,” she added. “When vampires go noncon and turn people right away, without the slow-burn victim model, they tend to want to recruit them for their what, covens? Courts? Hunts?”

“Mostly,” said Varney, and took a long swallow of blood. Some color was coming back to him, but he still looked greyish. “Some vampires just like leaving a trail of ruined lives behind. He could simply have killed the girl — someone that size doesn’t have very much blood volume compared to an adult; it’s possible that a very thirsty vampire might be able to drink the lot in one go — but he deliberately drained her and then turned her, which is bad enough, and then left her.” His voice had been growing distinctly colder as he spoke: now ice crystallized on it. “It’s not unheard-of, but it is thankfully rare — among adults. To do this to a child is a cardinal sin.”

“It’s possible that Lucy might be able to give us more information about her attacker,” Greta said. “Unfortunately the easiest way to do that is to hypnotize her, and I very much do not want to contribute to the general mind-control trauma at the moment. What I can do is call Ruthven and have him pass the word that someone is out there doing this; he’s got the biggest network of any of us without involving the London infernal surface op.”

“Ruthven is going to be furious when he hears about this,” said Varney, and swallowed the rest of his blood. “Utterly furious.”

“I think we all are.” Greta did not actually mean to sound as tired as she did. It had been an extremely long and very unpleasant night for all of them, and she’d been very glad of Emily’s help both in terms of reassurance and simply as another pair of at least partly medically-trained hands: the physiological effects of a very rapid sanguivorous transition were unavoidably traumatic.

Varney looked at her, and then reached across the table to cover her hand with his. “I’m sorry about this,” he said. “You’re meant to be on holiday, not dealing with new crises.”

“I’m glad I was here,” she said simply, and made a face at the drops of dried blood staining her dressing-gown sleeve. “She’ll do, although she had a bad night of it; I’ve never seen a rapid transition in someone so young and psychologically ill-prepared. With the ordinary sequence, the patient at least knows what’s happening to them, and can be reassured that the physical suffering won’t last long, but with something like this, it’s just bad. The part where they both desperately crave blood and can’t keep it down is — terrible, no matter who you are, and a little kid just isn’t able to deal with that kind of misery. I did what I could with IV anxiolytics and ondansetron, but I think just being held and cuddled probably had about as much effect.”

Varney winced. “Thank God it’s been so long I can’t remember it myself,” he said. “Although I’ve witnessed it a couple of times. Poor child. Her name is Lucy?”

“Lucy Ashton,” said Greta. “Orphan. Been bouncing around the foster system since age two, has no real worldly attachments, is probably going to be reported missing and then presumed dead — but we have to work out what the hell to do with her.”

“Ruthven will know,” said Varney, with a confidence Greta wished she could share.

It turned out that what Ruthven did know was how to say a very great many bad words in Scottish Gaelic, loudly. Greta held the phone away from her ear while he got on with it.

“—Right,” he said, eventually, catching his breath. “I’m on my way down there. How bad’s her condition?”

“Not great, but she’ll be okay now the crisis is past; the change is progressing normally. If you have any plasma units lying around, can you bring me some? I think it’d be easier for her to digest at this stage.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’ll be down there in — a couple of hours at the most.” In the distance Greta heard another voice say We, and had to smile. “All right, we’ll be down there in a couple of hours. I apologize to Varney for taking up his guest rooms.”

Click.

“Who was that?” said a small voice from behind Greta, and she turned to see Lucy — pallid, her hair a stringy tangled mess, dark circles under her eyes — standing in the doorway.

Greta thought, God damn it, and put down her phone. “That was an old friend of mine called Edmund Ruthven,” she said. “He’s a vampire, too. He’s coming down from London to see if he can help you. Are you feeling any better?”

“Maybe?” said Lucy, and squinted at the kitchen window. “Why’s it so bright outside?”

“Because your eyes have gotten more sensitive,” Greta said. They’d been brown: they were filling in bright red. If she’d started off with pale eyes, they would have gone silver with a dark ring around the iris, like Ruthven’s. “You can see much better in the dark than you were able to before, but it does mean that daylight’s brighter than you’re used to.” At least it was a grey and gloomy day, with no direct sunlight to hurt the girl’s eyes or burn her fragile skin.

“Oh.” Lucy trailed into the kitchen, looking around. “Is this a real stately home?” she asked after a moment, looking at the huge, ancient soot-stained fireplace that dominated the room, the rows of copper pans hung on the walls.

“It is,” said Greta. “It’s really called Ratford Abbey, which is not a very nice name, so everybody calls it Dark Heart House instead.”

“Do you live here?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m here on holiday, I work in London, but the house belongs to my husband Varney. Who is also a vampyre, a slightly different sort than you and Emily and Ruthven.”

“There’s more than one kind?” Lucy asked, climbing up onto one of the chairs. Even for her age she was small, Greta thought: fragile, all the bones too near the surface. The patchwork effect of the eyes was both striking and slightly horrible.

“There’s three, in fact,” Greta said. “Three main sorts. There’s the classic draculine, which is the kind you are; there’s the vampyre-with-a-Y, the lunar sensitive subtype, like Varney; and the third is the nosferatu, which is only found in parts of Eastern Europe. There’s others as well, but those are the most common.”

Lucy was watching her intently, the brown-and-scarlet eyes very focused on her face. “How do you know all this?”

“I’ve spent a very long time learning it,” said Greta. “My father taught me. He was a doctor, too. I took over from him when he retired. Do you think you could try some breakfast?”

Lucy shook her head vehemently. “My stomach still hurts.”

“I know,” Greta said, “I’m sorry. But it’ll get better soon, I promise.” She hoped very much that the plasma Ruthven promised to bring would help; she’d used it before in sanguivores with severe gastric irritation as a lighter, easier-to-stomach substitute for blood.

The girl looked utterly miserable, and also bored, which Greta knew was a misery in itself. “—Do you like to read?” she asked.

Lucy looked up, a brief expression of hope passing over her face. “Yes?” she said. “We didn’t… have many books, where I was living.”

Where I was living, not at home, Greta noted. “Well, this house is big enough to have its own library,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Yes please.” Lucy got off the chair, and for the first time since the barrow-wight had carried her over the threshold the night before, she looked something close to happy.

CHAPTER 2

“You know, I cannot get over the names here,” said Grisaille, looking over his shoulder at the village sign they’d just passed. “Someone literally named this place ‘Nether Wallop’ and nobody thought that was weird?”

Edmund Ruthven changed down for Nether Wallop’s 30-limit zone, his Aston Martin’s engine protesting. “See also Middle Wallop and Over Wallop,” he said. “English villages tend to lack imagination in nomenclature. There’s any number of Something Magnas and Something Parvas right next to each other, not to mention Something Minster or Something Abbas if it’s got the right sort of church in it. I will admit ‘Wallop’ leaves much to be desired.”

“Wild,” said Grisaille, leaning back in the seat. “So just to make sure I know what to expect: what are you actually planning to do when we get there?”

“I wish I knew,” said Ruthven, wry. “Other than try to help the kid get over the shock as much as possible. It’s never fun but I can barely imagine how traumatic being turned like that must have been. Did you have — help, after it, or did you have to bear it alone?”

“I had help, for a certain value of help,” Grisaille said, seesawing a hand in the air. “The vampire who turned me didn’t dine and dash, as it were: he wasn’t what you might call the sensitive nurturing type, but he did stick around to tell me what I was and taught me basic hunting technique. I think he’d intended to have me as a companion, but we didn’t exactly mesh, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,” said Ruthven. “That’s not great, but at least you had some support after the fact.” He let the car speed up again as they regained the open road. Grisaille glanced over at him.

“You never told me your origin story,” he said. “Was it dramatic and terrible?”

“Not exactly,” said Ruthven. “Unpleasant and lengthy is more accurate. I had the long-form version; it took the thing that turned me about a month from its initial visit to finish the job, after which it split the scene and left me as a brand-new vampire with no useful self-protective instincts, guidance, or mentorship, in the wilds of bloody Perthshire. I didn’t do very well.”

He tried not to think about it too often, those early terrible days; first the drowning, terrible, feverish dreams as he grew weaker and weaker and the nightly visits of the thing with the red eyes drained more and more life from his wasted veins, and then the hole of black madness that had followed his death and his subsequent awakening.

“I escaped to the Continent,” he continued, “and found some — friends is the wrong word, associates, and eventually learned how to be a person again, but it was a long damn process.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grisaille, with unaccustomed simplicity. Ruthven glanced over, gave him a wry smile.

“It’s all right. Was a long time ago, end of the fifteen-nineties. But you see why I have rather a strong reaction to people going around turning innocent victims without consent.”

“So does Varney,” Grisaille said. “I gather he goes all murderous about it.”

“He does.” Ruthven sighed. “I don’t actually know his story, come to think of it; the version in that penny-dreadful is both incoherent and inconsistent, but either way it’s probably safe to say he didn’t have a choice in the matter any more than I did.”

“Did you ever meet anyone who did?” Grisaille asked. “Someone who asked for it?”

“Oh, yes. Infrequently, but yes. And before you ask, yes, I have turned a couple of people in my existence, reluctantly, and I still don’t like thinking about it. One of them begged me for months and months and the other was going to die right there unless I did something.” He tried very hard, and mostly successfully, not to remember the circumstances surrounding the latter; it had been at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

“Three,” said Grisaille after a moment. “Two I regret, one I don’t.”

Ruthven looked over again. “You don’t have to tell me about it.”

“I know,” said Grisaille, and gave him half a smile. “Maybe someday I will. What’s — actually going to happen to this kid?”

“Physically or in general?” Ruthven said, speeding up to pass a caravan, grateful for the change of subject. “The effects of the transition will settle down, she’ll feel better, start to get used to the changes and her new abilities and disabilities. Mentally, God knows. But she needs a home, someone who can take care of her and who is entirely aware of what she is and what that means, who can give her the support she needs.”

“Which is probably not Greta and Varney,” Grisaille said.

“Unlikely. Varney’s not what I’d consider good with children and Greta works all the time. And it’s not us, either, although I’m certainly willing to take her on a temporary basis if you’re all right with that. She needs somewhere that’s stable and permanent.”

“How many stable vampire households do you think there are in England?” Grisaille said, bone-dry. “We’re not exactly thick on the ground.”

“I—” Ruthven began, and then shut up, looking thoughtful. His pupils expanded and contracted once, a single wave.

“You what?” Grisaille asked.

“Shh, I’m thinking.” He tapped his fingers on the Aston Martin’s wheel. “It’s a very long shot, but — I spoke with the Voivode a couple of weeks ago, remember? On the phone?”

“About that rogue vamp St. Germain caught in Paris coming off the Eurostar,” Grisaille said. “Right? He wanted you to keep an eye out for any other possible UK troublemakers headed to the Continent.”

“He monitors that sort of thing, extremely remotely but he does pay attention,” said Ruthven. “It’s been a while since I had a conversation with him — not since the last time I caught anybody with sharp teeth doing naughty things — but he sounded a bit different than usual. More interested in people rather than miscreants. Asked after the house, if all the repairs and renovations after the fire were satisfactory, that sort of thing. It wasn’t really the kind of conversation I’d expect from him, to be honest; I’m not the level of important he’d usually bother with — but the thought occurs that he might possibly take an interest in the case, or know someone who could take her.”

“Oho.” Grisaille laced his fingers behind his head, leaning back in the seat. “Count Dracula, Outreach Coordinator of the Undead? Catchy!”

“Sometimes I wonder why the hell I didn’t leave you in Paris,” said Ruthven sourly. Grisaille beamed at him.

“Because of my intense aesthetic value, ducks,” he said, and Ruthven tried quite hard, and failed, not to smile.

It had come on to rain as Ruthven turned the A-M down the long avenue of copper beeches that gave Dark Heart House its nickname, and the drifting veils of grey lent the old manor a kind of melancholy grace that suited both it and its owner. The house was pale golden stone, set in rolling parklands with an ornamental lake, and always reminded him of a much smaller and less grand version of Chatsworth. When Sir Francis Varney had awoken from his decades-long slumber deep in the cellar among the nitre and the cobwebs, the house had been close to derelict, falling apart; it was only after he’d survived a highly eventful visit to London some years ago that he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into renovating the place.

Ruthven had to admit he’d done a bang-up job. Country Life, among other glossies, had asked several times to do a spread on Dark Heart, and Varney and Greta had had a lot of fun writing various notes on the general theme of “no.”

He parked in the stable-yard. By the time he and Grisaille had taken their bags out of the car, Greta Helsing Varney had come out to meet them, looking tired and worried and very ordinary indeed, despite the surroundings.

“Edmund,” she said, and hugged him. “Thanks for coming. You too, Grisaille. Maybe you can stop Francis from going back out to find whoever did this and unscrew their head.”

Ruthven winced. “That sounds like him,” he admitted. “How’s the child?”

“About as well as you’d expect after a miserable night,” said Greta. “She’s holed up in the library reading The Hobbit and giving off waves of highly justifiable mistrust.”

He nodded. “I’d better see her.”

“This way,” said Greta. “Did you bring the plasma?”

“In my bag. Heat it up with a bit of ginger in it; that ought to help.”

Inside, she took their coats and Ruthven’s bag, and he headed to the library, leaving Grisaille with Greta in the kitchen. He stood for a moment in the half-open doorway, taking in the small curled-up form in the huge armchair by the hearth, and then knocked gently.

He was expecting the flinch response; he was slightly impressed at just how fast that reflex was, the spooky vampire quickness already well-developed. “Hello,” he said, keeping his voice as mild and gentle as he could. “You must be Lucy. My name’s Edmund Ruthven, I’m a friend of Greta’s; she asked me to come down and see if I can help. May I come in?”

She stared at him with patchwork red-and-brown eyes, huge in her thin and expressionless face. He could almost hear her weighing potential responses: if she said no, would he go away, could she say no, did she have any choice — and thus stayed exactly where he was, leaning in the doorway, hands in his pockets. Eventually long-ago ground-in manners won, and Lucy nodded, once.

Ruthven detached himself from the doorway and came over, stopping a good ten feet away and sitting on an ottoman.

“Are you a social worker?” she asked after a moment, still staring at him.

“That is exactly what I am not, in every possible sense,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever accused me of social work before. I’m just a very rich vampire, that’s all.”

“Do you bite people?” she asked, one hand going to the gauze pad taped over the healed punctures in her throat; he knew they must still itch like fire.

“Infrequently,” he said. “And I never take more from anyone than they would give in a blood drive. Mostly I get by on bagged blood.”

“You don’t kill them when you bite?”

“Absolutely not. Murdering people is not only unethical, it’s untidy, and in any case neither I nor any other vampire can possibly drink all of a grown-up person’s blood in one go. It wouldn’t fit.”

Lucy gave an unsteady hiccup of laughter at that, and Ruthven smiled a little. “Almost all of the stories about vampires are a load of old rubbish,” he said. “I don’t burst into flames in sunlight, I show up in mirrors, I don’t wear evening dress and a cloak all the time, I do drink wine, and I don’t go around biting people’s necks all willy-nilly and sucking out all of their blood.”

“Can you turn into a bat?” she asked.

“I can indeed turn into a bat. About this big. Also mist, although I try not to do that one in case people breathe part of me in. Some of us can turn into other things as well, like a wolf or an eagle, but it’s rarer.”

“People breathe you in?”

“It’s extremely awkward and uncomfortable. Mist is handy for getting into and out of places, though I haven’t used it for several hundred years.”

“How old are you?” she asked, and he noticed she was beginning, ever so slightly, to uncurl.

“Four hundred and forty-nine,” he said. “Until next month, anyway, when I will be four hundred and fifty years old, which is a nice round number.”

“Do you have fangs?”

“Right here,” he said, and tapped his right eyetooth. They were very white and very even and only slightly longer than a human’s. “The sharp bit’s on the inside where nobody can really see it. New vampires tend to bite their tongues a lot until they get used to the teeth.”

She went very faintly pink. “I’ve been doing that.”

“Everybody does when they’re new.” Good, he thought: a relatively easy transition from discussing his attributes as a vampire to discussing vampire attributes in general. “Luckily, we also heal very fast. The only thing we’re really vulnerable to, other than lots of UV light, is garlic. That part’s absolutely true. And holy objects don’t do us much good, either.”

“And stakes?”

“Those too,” said Ruthven. “But other than that, we’re pretty tough.” He smiled at her, and was satisfied to get a little hesitant smile in return. “Now: being turned is a hell of a difficult thing for anyone to go through, and I’m very sorry you’re having to deal with it, particularly like this, but you really will feel lots better if you have something to eat.”

She shook her head violently, curling back up. “No, I don’t want anything. I threw up so much and my stomach hurts.”

“I know, it’s miserable,” said Ruthven gently, “and I’ve got something a lot easier on the insides for you to try. It really will help, I promise. I make it for myself when I’m not feeling quite the thing.”

“What’s in it?” She tilted her head at him.

“Ginger,” he said, “mostly,” and got up. “Tell you what, I’ll heat some up for you and you can try it, and if you don’t like it, you needn’t have the rest.”

She eyed him for a moment longer, and then nodded slightly.

When Ruthven returned, carrying a cup and saucer — Sèvres porcelain, since apparently Varney’s household did not run to the plebeian ceramic mug — he was pleased to see that the girl had uncurled again from her tight protective knot. When she looked up, he could see her pupils contract and expand once, sharply, as the scent of the cup’s contents hit her, a totally involuntary reflex.

“Here,” he said, and set it on the table beside her chair, and was only a little amused at how rapidly she grabbed for it with both hands. “Try it slowly; don’t drink the whole cup at once.”

“What is this, it smells amazing,” she said, and then took a sip — and Ruthven could see the effort with which she was trying to follow his instructions. He could remember it himself from God knew how many instances over his experience: plasma smelled enough like blood to wake dormant hunger, without the rich heaviness of blood on an outraged stomach. The ginger helped, warming and soothing at once, but the plasma was the best way to get a starving vampire on the road to recovery. It was also a lot less upsetting for very new vampires to drink something that didn’t look like blood.

By the time Lucy had finished the cup’s contents, she had color in her face, and the worst of the pinched, miserable expression had faded. Ruthven had reclaimed his ottoman, giving her space, and when she set the cup down she gave him the beginnings of a smile.

“Better?” he said, and she nodded. “Good. There’s quite a lot more of it, so you can have another cup in a while.”

“It’s nice,” she said. “I’m — I don’t feel hungry and sick at the same time now?”

“Splendid,” said Ruthven. “I expect you’re a bit less anxious and miserable, too; it works quite quickly.”

Another nod. She was sitting a little forward in the chair, looking at him. “I don’t remember what happened,” she said after a while. “Why can’t I remember it?”

“Ah,” said Ruthven. “That’s because when the attacker bit you, he — sort of hypnotized you first, so you wouldn’t remember. It’s called thrall. Vampires do it with their eyes.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes. All vampires can, although some are more effective than others.”

“All vampires?”

“All vampires. Including you. Controlling and using it takes a lot of practice, but once you’ve learned how, yes, you will absolutely be able to thrall people. Incidentally, it is a lot harder to thrall a vampire than a human, which means—”

“He can’t do it again,” Lucy said. “That man. He can’t do it to me ever again. Because I’m a vampire.”

He watched a series of clear emotions pass over the narrow little face, watched tears glitter in her eyes. She’s not even eleven years old, he thought, with a sharp pang through his chest.

“I’m a vampire,” she said again, deliberately, and one tear spilled over.

“Yes,” said Ruthven. “And you don’t have to be alone, unless you want to be. Not ever again.”

Some time later he stopped in the doorway to the blue drawing-room, leaning against the doorframe, and folded his arms. “Enjoying yourselves?”

Greta, Grisaille, and Emily were sitting in the middle of the floor playing what looked like poker. A couple of enormous hairmonsters were sprawled out on the hearthrugs, and one raised its head and wuffled in his direction briefly.

“Hello, dear heart,” said Grisaille with a yawn. “Has she fallen in love with you yet?”

Ruthven did not dignify this with a reply. “Where’s Varney?” he asked.

“Out on the wolds, striding around trying to find the guilty party,” said Greta. “At least he left the shotguns behind. It — when he’s like this there’s no talking to him. He just has to get it out of his system one way or another, and hey, maybe he might actually find some trace of Lucy’s attacker.”

“Nothing on the news about a missing child,” said Emily. “I went looking all over the local newspapers’ sites and there’s just nothing. How could there be nothing?”

“She’s an orphan,” said Ruthven, “and from what I gathered, there is no love lost between her and her current foster family. I expect she has merely been assumed to have run away.”

“Still,” said Emily. “Wouldn’t someone have reported it to the police?”

“In an ideal world,” said Grisaille, “which a sensible creature such as yourself should know does not actually exist. What exactly is happening with the infant?”

“She’s napping on the library couch,” Ruthven said, “since I understand she didn’t get much sleep last night, like everyone else. The plasma went over well.”

“Good,” said Greta. “I thought it would, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have taken it from me. Not after the night in question.” She looked rueful.

“It’s not your fault,” said Ruthven. “She should probably stick to that for the day, and try actual blood tomorrow, but it’s definitely done her some good. She asked a lot of useful questions. I think she’s accepted that this is real, this is her new reality, which is a good sign.”

“It took me a while,” said Emily.

“Then again you were a prisoner of a bunch of edgelord idiot vamps wearing Hot Topic in holes under the ground,” said Greta, with acid, “so it is understandable that you should have had trouble adjusting.”

“Brava,” said Grisaille, golf-clapping. “Is there any actual blood available for the grown-ups in the party? One feels a trifle peckish.”

CHAPTER 3

Sir Francis Varney could see quite well in the dark.

He could also, like Ruthven, turn into a bat, although it was a slightly more difficult experience and he rarely had to resort to it; he could not make himself into mist, but on the other hand, his thrall was exponentially more powerful than that of his friend. What he very certainly could not do was track scent the way a werewolf could.

What he had picked up the previous night, with the barrow-wight Sigyn by his side, had definitely been a vampire. Had been a vampire who had fed well very recently, and was wearing a distinctive if not sophisticated cologne Varney could almost recognize. Other than that, he had very little to go on, and his ability to follow the scent simply died out after a few miles.

He sat down on a stile between two fields and turned his face up to the moon, which had come out at last, after a slow grey rainy day. As always, the touch of its light soothed him, taking away some of the dull aches in his back and knees from hours trekking through the countryside. It was evident that he was completely insufficient to handle the problem, and he pushed away the mental as usual that appended itself to the thought.

After a moment or two the cool touch of moonlight woke a different thought entirely, and Varney fished out his phone from his coat pocket and had a look through his emails.

Ah. There.

He had sent out a fairly dramatic request the previous night, and now had a response: an old friend of his in Oxford whom he hadn’t spoken to in months.

Varney: if it’s what you say, I will do what I can to help, although you owe me all the drinks and possibly more. Buy me a hotel room for the night or let me stay in your enormous mansion, if I won’t scare the child too terribly.

J.

He had to smile, still not a familiar expression.

Dear Joanna,

I appreciate it more than I can say. Of course you must stay at Dark Heart. I will provide directions.

I remain

Yours sincerely

F. Varney

He hit Send and looked back up at the sky, and something about the touch of the moon on his face felt a little like yes.

He came back to Dark Heart at eleven o’clock, the moon riding rafts of tattered cloud, throwing irregular silver light over the chalk downlands and catching in the upturned leaves of ash and birch, hawthorn and chestnut. He stood for a while just at the edge of the valley that held Dark Heart in its cupped hand, looking down at the house — tiny with distance, a forgotten jewel lost in a crumpled velvet spill, its windows bright and warm with living light.

Sigyn must have stood here, the night before: stood here with the unconscious body of the child in her arms, looking down at that distant warmth and light, hoping that it meant safety.

Varney pulled his coat tighter around himself and walked a little faster.

“Her name is Joanna Winters,” he told Greta, some time later, lying in bed propped up against his pillows; he hadn’t felt equal to the task of being sociable, let alone hospitable, and crept up the back stairs to avoid what sounded like a fairly merry impromptu gathering in the dining room. She had heard him come in, of course, and once their other guests had been packed off to bed, she had brought Varney a tray of hot spiced blood and a tiny glass of the anise liqueur he particularly favored. “She’s a professor of botany at Magdalen, or plant sciences or whatever they call it these days. I’ve no idea how old she actually is, or how she got turned, or any of that sort of thing: we’re not exactly the sort of friends who share that kind of information. But I know she’s easily as good as St. Germain at tracking and she’s doing this as a favor to me.”

“I’ll make up the blue bedroom,” said Greta, already in her nightgown, brushing her hair at the dressing-table. “Ruthven and Grisaille were in raptures over the bed-hangings in their room, by the way. Eighteenth-century Chinese embroidered silk?”

“Found it in a chest in the attics during the renovation,” he said. “I must have bought it ages ago and never bothered to open it, but I’m glad it pleases. I really am so sorry about all this, Greta. I know you were hoping to have a rest, coming down here.”

“Nonsense,” she said, ruining it with a yawn. “I’ve got Lucy at least comfortably settled in bed — a different bed, I thought it might be a good idea — and she’s taken another two cups of plasma without complaint, so we’re definitely in better shape there. I think tomorrow we can try a little blood. Ruthven’s clearly had a good effect on her.”

“He’s apparently good with children,” said Varney. “Ghoul or otherwise. I envy the facility, I suppose.”

“So do I, honestly,” she said, finishing with the hairbrush and coming over to join him in the bed. “But I’m glad he’s here to help, and I’ll be even gladder when your werewolf friend arrives. Do we know when to expect her?”

“She didn’t say, but knowing Joanna, it’ll be close to midday.” Varney turned on his side, reached for her; as always, the sensation of holding a warm living body in his arms was astonishing and delightful all at once.

“Then I won’t get up very early to be domestic,” said Greta with another enormous yawn, and curled into his arms. “Just early. Not very.”

“I promise to wake you,” said Varney, and kissed her hair.

In fact, Professor Winters’s mud-spattered Land Rover pulled up in the stable-yards at half past eleven. Varney went out to meet her, thinking absently that Country Life would have been in raptures: she was the absolute acme of the shabby-tweed country-house peer in Wellington boots. She was stocky, middle-aged — appearing middle-aged, anyway — and her greying curly hair was cut sensibly short and utterly without style.

“Varney.” She shook his hand briskly. “Like what you’ve done with the place. What on earth have you got hanging around here that smells like dank stone and dog?”

“Ah,” he said. “That would be the wellmonsters and the hairmonsters, I believe. Rather a long story. Come inside and have some tea?”

“All right, another half an hour won’t make much difference to the scent trail. Lead on, Macduff.”

Greta was in the kitchen when they came in, already setting out tea-things. Varney watched the werewolf’s reaction to the sight of her, and was more pleased than he’d expected to be when Joanna gave one of her rare smiles. “Dr. Helsing,” she said. “Pleased to meet you. That paper on spectrum-calibrated artificial light and prephase syndrome in classic lunar bimorphs was fascinating.”

Greta smiled back. “Thanks,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of potential in light therapy, especially in recently turned weres, and a lot of the individuals in my study reported considerable reduction in cluster headaches — not significant enough to make its way into the paper, but an encouraging bit of anecdotal evidence. Sugar?”

“Just milk,” said Joanna, and took the cup Greta handed her. “And I need to meet this little vampire girl, if I’m to track down the bastard responsible.”

“This way,” Greta said.

Varney had hung back while Professor Winters was introduced to Lucy, for a number of reasons; he was still not quite over his instinctive episodes of rage every time he thought about what had happened to the child, and he was absolutely no good with children at the best of times. Unlike Ruthven, who won people’s confidence immediately through a combination of extraordinary good looks and a kind of brisk sympathetic sensibility, Varney’s face wouldn’t have launched a single ship, and his manners were courtly and distant rather than compelling. He had observed, however, and noted the simple relief evident in the child’s expression and bearing at the sight of someone so reassuringly ordinary.

“Are you really a werewolf?” Lucy had asked.

“I really am,” said Winters. “And I teach botany at Oxford, all at the same time. It’s a bit inconvenient, but one can manage.”

“Botany’s — plants and leaves and stuff, right?”

“That’s right. And no, I’m not a vegetarian.”

“Do you bite people?”

“Nope. Don’t eat them, don’t turn them. The world’s too complicated already without making new werewolves all over the place.”

Lucy had looked thoughtful, and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Are you going to find the man who hurt me?”

“I’m going to have a damn good try,” Winters told her, getting up.

She had spent a few minutes with her eyes shut, sniffing the ragged sweater Lucy had been wearing when Sigyn first brought her to Dark Heart, and then quite rapidly — with her eyes still partly closed — stalked through the drawing-room and out onto the terrace before shifting.

Varney had seen it before, of course, but one never really got used to the sight: it was both bizarre and extremely unsettling to watch. The middle-aged woman and the large grey wolf were both fine to look at, but the bit in between was not something one wished to observe for very long.

Winters looked back over her shoulder, yellow eyes lambent in the grey dimness of a cloudy afternoon, and Varney hurried to join her. “Do you have it?” he asked.

“Of course I have it,” said the wolf. “I have it, and you, and something that smells like cold stone, which I assume is your barrow-wight. Much coming and going.”

“I tried to follow it myself,” he said bitterly. “The night it happened.”

“No doubt,” said Winters. “But as impressive as you are as a vampyre, Varney, your nose is not exactly a marvel of olfactory precision. I can practically smell what this wretched creature looked like, based just on the traces he left on the child’s clothing. I certainly know he was wearing much too much Acqua di Gio, which is to say any Acqua di Gio. Follow me.”

She broke into a trot, moving silently up the hillside, and Varney had to hurry to keep up.

Dark Heart and its grounds lay in the cup of a valley about ten miles west-southwest from Stonehenge as the crow flies; if the vampire who had attacked Lucy had been on foot, it would have taken him perhaps two hours at a fast walk to reach the cluster of barrows where Sigyn had found her wandering. When Varney and Sigyn had tried to follow the track, he had lost it scarcely a mile out, but Joanna Winters trotted confidently along without bothering to sniff the ground.

At the edge of a patch of woodland just past the barrows, she stopped, eyes shut, the delicate black rims of the wolf’s nostrils flaring a little. “This is where she was dumped, all right,” she said after a moment. “We’ve left the barrow-wight behind, which is what we’ve been following up till now, but here I’ve got just the child and the thing that had been carrying her: it splits off here. I can pick up two tracks, him alone and him carrying the child.”

“We know he started at Stonehenge,” said Varney, trying not to sniff the air to see if he could pick up any hint of anything other than damp grass and distant agriculture. “What I want to know is where he went after leaving Lucy here. The track that’s just him.”

“Right-o,” said Winters, and set off again. “He wasn’t a happy vampire, by the way.”

Varney hurried to keep up. “What do you mean?”

“Lots of anxiety. Anxious vampire stinks; it’s impossible to miss. He was anxious before he dumped the kid: he’s still anxious now on his way back to wherever, but less now. His mind’s been eased a bit.”

“By leaving Lucy behind?”

“Wouldn’t you be happier if you’d found a place to dump the body?” Winters said drily. The tone was a little strange coming from a wolf. “He was in a hurry, but it’s less urgent now that he’s not got the girl to deal with.”

“Anxious,” Varney said almost to himself. “Why the hell would somebody who would do this feel anxious about it?”

“Maybe he didn’t know what to do next,” she said, sniffing. “Doesn’t seem to have been exactly a world-class intellect. — Wait.”

She stopped, head raised and eyes closed. “A few yards to your right, about shoulder height. Probably a sharp bit of a branch. Blood.”

“His blood?” Varney sniffed, too: he could pick up a faint metallic trace.

“No,” said Winters with awful sarcasm, “the Queen of Sheba’s. Over there. I can nearly see it with my nose.”

He glowered, but followed where her muzzle was pointing. After a moment he found a hawthorn twig with a faint dark trace on one of its thorns; giving it a close sniff cored out his head for an instant with sheer atavistic instinct, blood, blood of my kind, the blood is the life, followed sharply by the remains of anxiety and much too much cologne.

“You have it yet?”

“I have it,” he said, stepping back from the tiny stain, his voice leaden. It was entirely possible he’d never forget that particular scent. “You were right, he’s afraid of something. I don’t know what.”

He would like it, Varney thought, if the vampire were afraid of him.

They followed the trail not to Stonehenge itself but into another little patch of woods, to a lay-by on the little road that led from the visitor center to the stones. Winters sat down with a doggy sigh. “Here’s where it ends,” she said.

Varney could just make out tire tracks in the chalky soil. “He parked here?”

“Must have done,” she said. “Left his car here, as if he’d broken down, and gone to lurk in the stone circle to find someone to eat — which is bizarre, by the way — and then instead of leaving her there, panicked and ran off to find somewhere to dump the body a long way from Stonehenge? It makes no sense.”

“And came back here afterwards, and drove off,” said Varney. “Nothing about this makes much sense. Can you tell anything about the car? Anything at all?”

She gave him a yellow-eyed look, but just bent down to sniff the faint tire markings. “New,” she said after a moment or two. “Still smells new, lots of plastic. No sign of oil leaks, no fluids, nothing indicating there was much wear on the car. Tire prints are clear.”

“So he just bought a brand-new car,” said Varney, “and drove it here to kill someone and turn them into a vampire.”

“Not one of Nature’s more brilliant individuals,” said Winters, and sat down again. “And now you owe me a great many drinks.”

“Of course,” said Varney distractedly. “What if it’s not his car? What if he rented it?”

“Then you can probably go thrall the staff at all the car-rental places around here and ask about their recent clientele, particularly gents wearing too much cologne.”

“… You are absolutely right,” he said, and smiled a very unbeautiful smile.

“You look like you’re about to happen to somebody,” said Winters. “And I rather want to be there when you do, Varney, which is not a thing I anticipated saying. This isn’t just about the child any more, is it?”

“It is not,” said Varney. “I mean — yes, of course it is, the reason I want to track down this person in the first place is because of what they did to Lucy, but…”

“Quite,” said Winters. “About those drinks, I am incidentally partial to the more complex Islay single-malts, by the way.”

“In this matter I believe I can oblige,” said Varney, ignoring how odd it sounded coming from a wolf, and — despite the worry, despite the anger and frustration and thwarted desire to wrap his hands around somebody’s neck and squeeze—he was aware of feeling better than he had in quite a long time.

CHAPTER 4

Grisaille had been around, one way or another, since the late eighteenth century, and had met a great many vampires, some more famous than others. The ones he’d most recently spent a few years with had been trying to be infamous, which hadn’t worked out too terribly well for everyone concerned, but up until now, Lord Ruthven and Sir Francis Varney had been at the top of Grisaille’s list of vampire celebrities.

He hadn’t actually known that Count Dracula was real. Or that he actually dwelled in a castle in Romania that had oubliettes, even if it wasn’t one of the three famous ones associated with the legend. Or that Ruthven occasionally chatted with him on the phone.

Grisaille wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. He just wasn’t trying not to.

They’d driven back to London the previous afternoon, with Lucy tucked into the Aston Martin’s hilarious excuse for a back seat. He was glad to be home, even if staying at Dark Heart had been a little like sleeping in a National Trust property; Varney wasn’t the most scintillating conversationalist at the best of times, and right now he was obsessed with trying to find whoever had done this to the kid. Grisaille didn’t envy him the job of thralling every single car-rental clerk in Salisbury to ask if they’d recently rented a vehicle to someone wearing a ton of cologne. Joanna Winters had returned to Oxford and botany, and now that Lucy was more or less over the physical trauma of the transition, it was clear that Dark Heart wasn’t exactly the best environment for her.

Well, that, and the fact she’d clearly imprinted on Ruthven, or fallen in love with him, or whatever it was that people invariably did when bombarded by the full force of his charisma and his big shiny silver eyes, Grisaille thought. Taking her to London with them had been obvious.

He was stretched out on the drawing-room sofa with his eyes shut, listening. In the kitchen Ruthven was pacing as he talked on the phone.

“… as soon as Varney knows anything about the person responsible, I’ll pass it on,” he was saying. “I realize it’s not exactly helpful to report the crime without any indication of who perpetrated it other than that they wear Acqua di Gio and have the morals of a hagfish. They’d have been best friends with that wretched coven in Paris.” He sighed. “At least she’s doing better. She’s in London with us at the moment.”

He was right, Grisaille thought: whoever had turned Lucy would have fit right in with his former colleagues, one of whom had turned Emily at the age of nineteen. Not smart, ducky, he had told that particular vampire at the time. Not smart at all.

Ruthven was still talking. Not for the first time Grisaille wondered exactly why it was so important to report malfeasance on the part of vampires to Count Dracula, or why Ruthven never referred to him by name. Or how Ruthven knew him in the first place. Or why he was—weird about it, both deferential and stiff at once.

(There were so many things he didn’t know about Ruthven. Sometimes the scope of that extra century’s worth of experience felt overwhelming; sometimes it tickled Grisaille enormously that he was going to get to find out. That — hopefully — he would have time to do so.)

“Who’s he talking to?” said a voice quite close by, and Grisaille realized that either he himself was more distracted than he’d thought, or the kid had apparently mastered the vampiric don’t-notice-me effect absurdly early; he hadn’t sensed her entering the room. He cracked open one eye and observed her.

Ruthven’s gift for shopping for other people was uncanny: he could judge size, style, fit, even color preference at a glance, and selected garments accordingly. Lucy was wearing new jeans and a dark purple sweater, and had actually brushed her hair; the bedraggled-waif quotient had dropped substantially.

“He is deep in conversation with Count Dracula,” said Grisaille, and sat up. “About whoever turned you. I don’t actually know what Dracula intends to do about it, now that he’s been apprised of the situation. Perhaps he has a secret army of vampire goons to send after our mystery man.”

Lucy snickered at vampire goons. “Count Dracula’s actually real. It’s kind of — hard to believe?”

“Oh, I quite agree,” said Grisaille. “Can’t wrap the old bean around the idea myself. But he and Ruthven apparently have a natter every now and then.”

She was watching him. Grisaille noticed that the brown was almost completely gone from her eyes; they were the same bright scarlet as his own. “Is Grisaille your first or last name?” she asked, and he had to blink.

“It’s my only name,” he said. “It’s not the one I was born with, because that one was rubbish, but it’s been my name since I got turned. My nom de vampire. Pretentious as all hell.”

Lucy was still watching him. “Is Ruthven his real name?”

“It is indeed. Edmund St. James Ruthven.” Grisaille widened his eyes slightly and lowered his voice. “Don’t tell anyone, but he’s an earl.”

“Really?”

“Really. He’s got a ruined castle up in Scotland and everything.”

“Are you married to him?”

Grisaille raised an eyebrow. “Do you always ask this many questions? No, as it happens, I’m not.” He thought briefly that the world really had moved on; that query would have been unthinkable for a child even twenty years ago. “And before you add, Do you want to be, I’m going to change the subject.”

“Okay,” she said, reasonably enough. “Tell me more about vampire stuff. Like how to turn into a bat or hypnotize somebody with your eyes.”

Grisaille sighed internally: this was so very much more Ruthven’s area of expertise than his own. Ruthven liked teaching people. “The eye thing’s called thrall,” he said. “I think Ruthven told you a bit about it down at Dark Heart.”

“He said it’s harder to thrall a vampire than a human,” said Lucy. “Could you do it to me?”

Up went the eyebrow again. “Why on earth would you want me to?”

“Because I can’t remember anything about the man at Stonehenge, and if I could, Mr. Varney wouldn’t have to keep doing all that stupid stuff to try to find him.”

“There’s no guarantee you’d be able to recall it even in a state of thrall,” Grisaille said, slightly impressed. “And it could be — traumatic for you.”

“What could be?” said another voice. Grisaille turned to see Ruthven standing in the doorway, still holding his phone.

“The magic eye thrall thing,” said Lucy. “To make me remember stuff.”

“That’s bold,” said a voice from Ruthven’s phone, on speaker: one Grisaille had never heard before, deep and resonant and slightly accented — but only slightly. It wasn’t as beautiful as Varney’s, but he thought he could easily imagine how compelling it could be when it wanted to. “The girl has courage.”

“That she does,” said Ruthven, sounding a little rueful. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea, Lucy. Voivode, I’ve used up quite a lot of your time already—”

“Nonsense,” said the voice. “Introduce me.”

Grisaille and Ruthven exchanged equally startled looks. “Um,” said Ruthven. “Lucy Ashton, this is the Voivode Vlad Dracul the Third. Voivode, Lucy Ashton, recently a vampire.”

“Pleased to meet you?” said Lucy, rapidly enough that Grisaille knew it was a trained good-manners response, like please and thank you.

“It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance,” said Dracula. “What a particularly lovely, and familiar, name. And if you are willing to undergo voluntary thrall in hopes of retrieving further information, I believe the experiment is worth the risk.”

“Are you sure?” said Ruthven, sounding unconvinced.

“I am not in the habit of making statements that lack conviction, Lord Ruthven.” Grisaille caught the faint wince. “Furthermore,” Dracula continued, “I should be the one to perform it.”

Grisaille had to admit it was probably not a bad idea to have the vampire with the greatest power and control over their thrall running this little show — but there was the little matter of geographic location in the way. “Um,” he said. “It’s going to take some time for us to get there?”

“Who are you?” said Dracula’s voice.

“Grisaille, your worship, I’m Ruthven’s — partner?”

“‘Voivode’ will do,” said the voice, and now it was faintly warm, tinged with amusement. “And I cannot imagine in this modern age that between you two there is not at least one computer capable of displaying video.”

“You want to thrall Lucy over FaceTime?” said Ruthven, at the same time as Lucy said “Cool!”

Grisaille was enormously surprised.

He had expected — what had he expected, Bela fucking Lugosi, an older version of Ruthven with the slicked-back hair and inkstroke eyebrows, Max Schreck with his bunny fangs, all in dusty black?

But the face on the screen was narrow, intense, olive-skinned rather than the porcelain pallor of the movie vampires: the nose long and thin above a generous mouth, the chin pointed. Dracula’s irises must have been dark to begin with, like Grisaille’s and Lucy’s: the eyes watching them from beneath heavy eyebrows were the bright scarlet of arterial blood.

Grisaille thought he could remember a bit of the history: hadn’t he been ruler of Wallachia several different times in between being captured and held prisoner by various individuals? He had died in the late fifteenth century, or at least officially died, and he must have been in his forties: he looked forty-something now, just the faintest hint of silver beginning at his temples, bright against the dark hair. Which was cut like a businessman’s, elegant and neatly under control. He looked like a businessman, Grisaille thought: someone with a couple hundred million to throw around, drinking expensive drinks on a bright white yacht in Monaco — but there were lines in that face, bracketing the mouth, radiating from the eyes. Lines that could have been graven there by pain or worry or anger.

Or responsibility.

They were all on the sofa, gathered around the computer, set on a stack of books on the coffee-table: Lucy in the middle, with Ruthven and Grisaille on either side. Presumably it was acceptable to the Voivode, who simply nodded and said, “If you are ready, let us begin.”

“What do I do?” said Lucy, and her voice was almost steady.

“Sit still and look straight into my eyes,” said Dracula. “And you two, look away. This is not for you.”

Grisaille knew that, knew he and Ruthven had to stay out of the influence of those scarlet eyes, but he was so curious, god damn everything to hell. How often did you get to see Vlad the Impaler thralling somebody via a goddamn MacBook Air?

“Relax,” said the voice, deep and smooth. “Take deep breaths, don’t be afraid. I have you, Lucy Ashton. I will not let you come to harm.”

Without looking, Grisaille could feel the kid next to him first tense up and then relax completely as the Voivode’s thrall took hold. He could picture what she was seeing: the pupils in the center of those bright red irises beginning to dilate and contract, dilate and contract, pulsing gently like the beating of a heart, growing to fill her vision, her entire world. Every vampire’s thrall was different, he knew that — Ruthven’s tended to make the subject feel as if their head were full of fluffy pink clouds and nothing mattered in the slightest; Varney’s was cold, antiseptic, a hall of turning mirrors reflecting in on themselves. Grisaille had no idea what Dracula’s thrall would feel like. It was so very hard to keep his gaze on the globe in the corner of the drawing-room, to not peek at the screen.

“Good,” said Dracula gently, softly, drawing out the word. “That is good, Lucy: I have you. You are safe.”

“Safe,” she repeated, sounding very far away.

“I want you to think back to six days ago,” he said. “To Stonehenge. Take yourself back to Stonehenge. Can you see it?”

A shiver ran through her: Grisaille could feel it. “I’m there. I’m in the circle.”

“What do you see?”

“Stones,” she said, “grass, blue sky, white clouds — the stones are so big—” The words cut off with a strangled gasp. “I can’t — I can’t see—”

They were in the part of her memory that had been scrambled, the part that would be difficult to restore. “I have you,” Dracula said again, deep and soothing. “You can see and you can hear. You are not in danger.”

“… I see a man,” she said, and now there was the promise of tears in her voice.

“Tell me about the man. What does he look like? What is he wearing?”

“I see — a tan jacket, like a windbreaker? A white shirt. Dark pants. And something black around his neck. A camera. I see a camera. And some kind of — shopping bag? White, with letters on it?”

“Tell me about his face. Can you see his face?”

“He’s — pale,” Lucy said, and Grisaille did not need to look at her to know tears were sliding down her cheeks. “But he’s pink, like sunburn — he has those shiny mirror sunglasses on—”

“What color is his hair?”

“Dark, I think, he’s wearing a hat—”

“Is he speaking to you?” said Dracula softly.

Grisaille could feel her stiffen again, hated that they had to drag this out, make her relive it, hated the necessity. “He says — am I lost, do I need help — he says he’ll walk me back to the school group—”

“Did he say it just like that?” said Dracula, and for the first time there was the hint of urgency in the smooth voice. “Can you tell us how it sounded?”

Lucy repeated the lines. In a pitch-perfect, vocal-coach-precise Pittsburgh accent, chillingly clear.

“—and then he takes off his sunglasses,” she said in her own voice, “and then — I can’t see, I can’t, please don’t make me—”

“Enough,” Ruthven said through his teeth even as Dracula said, “No, you don’t have to. You are safe, Lucy, it’s over, it will never happen again. You are safe, and in fifteen minutes you will wake up, and none of this will hurt any longer.”

Grisaille felt it as the thrall command took hold: her breathing slowed, deepened, and the wire-taut tension drained away.

“The two of you may turn back,” said Dracula. “It is safe now.”

He was not even slightly surprised to see that Ruthven had his arm around the girl. On the screen Dracula looked — tired, Grisaille thought. And no wonder: that was a lot of thrall, at a ridiculous distance. “Did you — get enough?” he said. “Did you get what you needed?”

“We have enough to narrow it down considerably,” said Dracula. “And what I said earlier is true: that child has courage.”

“Will she be all right?” Ruthven asked.

“She will be fine, other than a headache. She should rest, however.”

“I’ll put her to bed,” and Ruthven lifted her into his arms very gently and carried her from the room. Grisaille was left looking awkwardly at the screen.

“So we know he was American,” he said after a moment. “And we have a vague description. What would a random American vampire be doing hanging out at fucking Stonehenge waiting for some kid to come by? It makes no sense.”

“So far it does not appear to,” said Dracula. “But patterns become evident as further information is gathered. I have many questions to ask of many people; I will take my leave.”

“… Okay,” said Grisaille. “Um. Thanks? For doing this?”

“Do not thank me,” said Dracula. “Thank the child.”

The screen went black.

CHAPTER 5

Edmund Ruthven looked down at the pale closed face on the pillows and wished, not for the first time, that he had never complained so vociferously about being bored.

Before the whole business with the Gladius Sancti and the rectifier in the tunnels beneath the city, he had been at a loss as to what to do with himself to pass the time. Looking back over the past several years of nearly nonstop peril and general activity, he thought now that the idea of boredom held an undeniable appeal. Things seemed to happen to him (and his friends, to be fair) with regularity.

Mostly what Ruthven had done to amuse himself in the recent past was shopping, or more accurately spending money, of which he had truly disgusting amounts — like many people with a couple of centuries under their belts — and he had always known the underlying pleasure of that was in the simple act of caring for other people: of providing aid. He’d refitted Greta’s clinic after the Gladius Sancti business; he’d paid off people’s debts and financed their start-ups; he’d made large anonymous donations to various causes around the city. Ruthven’s basic philosophy, once he’d taught himself to be a person again, was and always had been if you are in a position to provide aid, and aid is needed, you provide it. Since he was by nature a large and somewhat problematic parasite, albeit a polite one, he tried where he could to do helpful things in the world to balance out the predation.

Right now all he wanted was predation.

Like Varney, he was furiously angry at the vampire who had done this to the child; unlike Dracula, he didn’t think there was any real hope of finding that particular individual. An American who had rented a car. He had no idea how many Americans in rental cars were lurching around the wrong side of the nation’s roadways at any given moment. The vicious desire to find and to end whoever was responsible was just going to… go on and on, with no way to satisfy it.

She doesn’t need that right now, he told himself, acid-sharp. She doesn’t need you seething over impossible revenge fantasies; she needs your help, so bloody well get over it.

He and Grisaille had both felt the sheer power of the Voivode’s thrall even facing away from it; he was more than a little worried about what that much force would have done to a young, traumatized, vulnerable mind. Whether Lucy would wake entirely the same person she’d been before the thrall. What they were going to do about any of this. He wasn’t any good at not knowing what to do. At being powerless, after so long. At not being able to help, to do the thing he was for, the thing he was meant to provide.

He got up, went to the window. Looked out over the river. It was raining: not hard, not the kind of rain that felt actively malicious, but endless drifting veils of grey, like someone crying who had forgotten how to stop. Below, black-beetle taxis and the mismatched domes of umbrellas trundled up and down Victoria Embankment. Ruthven shut his eyes against a vast, terrible wave of grey despair: at the world, at the ordinariness of the world, at its cold and impartial lack of care, at his own inability to change it. At everything. It poured over him with almost physical force: his hands on the windowsill were white with effort, in another minute he was going to splinter the wood—

“Mr. Ruthven?” said a small voice from behind him, and the despair retreated. Didn’t vanish, but retreated: a tide gone out in the blink of an eye. He straightened up, turned to see Lucy lying against the pillows with her hands pressed over her eyes, and drew the curtains to block out the worst of the light.

“I’m here,” he said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. “How do you feel?”

“My head hurts,” she said, without taking her hands away. “Inside. It feels bruised.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Ruthven gently. “You did some very hard work. I’ll get you something for the headache, but other than that, how are you feeling?”

“Tired,” she told him, and now she did take her hands away to look up at him, and Ruthven was more reassured than he would have liked that her pupils were even. “I didn’t even do anything; why does it feel like I just ran a hundred miles?”

“You did do things,” he said. “Inside your head. It’s still effort and it’s still tiring. No nausea, dizziness, numbness anywhere?”

“No,” she said. “Just my headache. Did — did it work, then? Did I get anything useful?”

“It worked,” said Ruthven. “You got us a description of the man and — importantly — his accent. He wasn’t English; he was American, or doing a really good imitation of one. The Voivode is going to use that to try to find him.” He thought, anyway. He had no idea exactly what Dracula was going to do, and he was not about to ask; asking would, quite obviously, point out that he couldn’t work it out on his own. The thought made his face go very briefly warm. “I’ll get you that aspirin.”

Downstairs he found Grisaille in the kitchen, microwaving blood, and some of his thoughts must have showed on his face because Grisaille took one look at him and came over to wrap Ruthven in a bone-creaking hug. “You look horrendous,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, just garden-variety existential despair,” said Ruthven, muffled in his shoulder. “She’s awake, doesn’t seem to demonstrate any symptoms of neurological injury. Also doesn’t remember what she saw and said.”

“You think that’s trauma, or on purpose?” said Grisaille. “That Dracula put a block on it after she gave us the info?”

“I have no idea,” said Ruthven, and he could hear the misery in his own voice. Grisaille held him closer, one hand cupping the back of his neck. He wasn’t used to not knowing things, or to fits of dread regarding the fact that he didn’t know them, and it was remarkably unpleasant.

“What you need,” said Grisaille, “is some nice hot blood with quite a lot of expensive whiskey in it, and I will go fetch our young guest some aspirin.”

“… All right,” said Ruthven, capitulating much too quickly, and as always, being told what to do came as a small but present relief: being someone else’s problem rather than his own.

“He did what?”

“Walked her through the scrambled portion of the memory,” said Ruthven into the phone. “It wasn’t a lot of fun for anyone, but we did get the information. And yes, he did it over FaceTime, because Romania is a long damn way away.”

“That worked?” Greta Helsing demanded. “—Never mind, obviously it did or you wouldn’t be telling me this, but that’s fascinating. I wonder if the effect is attenuated over a video link or if it’s exactly as efficient as in-person thrall? No one’s studied this, as far as I know. There’s got to be at least one thesis in there.”

“Doubtless,” said Ruthven. “The point is, the vampire who attacked Lucy was an American, probably from Pittsburgh, based on the accent, and we have a rough physical description of him. I don’t know exactly how much good that does us.”

“Quite a lot,” said Greta. “For one thing, that narrows it down at the car-rental places. What did Dracula say?”

“Not a great deal. I gather he is going to reach out to other acquaintances of his with this information, but beyond that, I am entirely in the dark. Greta — I think we should consider giving up this detective nonsense. We’re not getting anywhere. It makes no difference who did it to her: the point is that someone did it, and we have to deal with the consequences. Finding the man won’t turn her back again.”

“It’d be really nice to make sure he doesn’t do it to anybody else,” said Greta. “And find out if he’s got any friends with similar intentions, and have a word with them. You sound a bit off, Edmund, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, more sharply than he’d meant. “I just think this is — not the most constructive use of everybody’s time, that’s all.”

“It’s at least giving Francis something to do instead of sitting around seething with impotent fury,” said Greta, dry. “Which is rather important in terms of keeping the household atmosphere bearable, as I’m sure you will agree. Listen, I’m coming up on the five twenty-one from Salisbury tonight; can you come and collect me?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’d definitely like you to look at her and see if there’s been any… aftereffects. She woke up with a nasty headache but says she feels okay apart from that, if exhausted.”

“Pretty standard,” said Greta, “but yes, I’ll have a look. Cheer up, Ruthven, at least you can’t say you’re currently bored.”

She hung up, and Ruthven sat staring at the phone screen for quite a long time, not seeing anything at all.

It was still raining hours later, when he left the house to meet Greta at Waterloo: raining, but not unpleasantly so, and he decided to walk.

He could clearly remember the year he’d come to London: 1818, grey winter clinging to the city like a cloak. It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank…

He stopped, leaning on the white-metal railing of Waterloo Bridge, looking down into the river and seeing not dark rushing water but the bright tinkling illumination of crystal chandeliers, white-and-gold paneling, everywhere the babble and murmur of people talking, laughing, dancing, living: a ball, two hundred years gone and forgotten. It had been so long since Ruthven had thought of that world, or of what it had been like to move through it, a predator with faultless manners selecting his prey as a man might choose a particular wine at dinner.

Polidori had managed to get the edges of it straight, but that was just about all: he had made a sensation in society, and women — and a few, carefully circumspect men — had thrown themselves at him; he had gone abroad with young Aubrey as a companion and met with misadventure in Greece, but on returning to London, had by no means sought out Aubrey’s sister as his particular victim. Nor had he been killed and resurrected by the touch of the moon’s rays, although at the time he would have welcomed such intervention; he had been very badly wounded indeed, badly enough to convince Aubrey he was dying, and it had taken a long time for him to regain his strength. It was on the way back from Greece that he had stayed in Paris and encountered St. Germain the wolf for the first time, and had the conversation that would change his life.

“It’s not official,” St. Germain said, leaning on the wrought-iron balcony looking out over the Tuileries. “Nothing is official, exactly; there is no office to regulate any such arrangement. But I keep an eye on things.”

“How can you possibly keep track of what’s going on all over the city?” Ruthven wanted to know. “And — why would you take on such a responsibility, if you didn’t have to?” The idea of doing the amount of work it would take to act as a city’s guardian — official or unofficial — made him slightly dizzy.

“Because it needs to be done,” said the wolf, looking at him with deceptively bland amber eyes. “Because I can, in fact, do it, and there is no reason why I should not; and I don’t act alone, I have a network of people all over the city who get in touch with me when something happens that I ought to know about. Word gets around. It’s quite efficient.”

“Word that the city’s being watched over by something terrifying,” Ruthven said, thoughtfully. “How did you — take up the role?”

“I was turned in the seventeen-sixties,” said St. Germain, “by what turned out to be rather a famous example of the species — I was a blacksmith in a little town far from the metropolis, and met the thing one night in the woods. I don’t clearly remember much of the next several months, but I slowly regained my wits. And came to terms with what I had become.”

“It was like that for me,” said Ruthven. “Black madness and near-death escapes, and then sanity coming creeping back, like ground-fog.”

“Yes,” said St. Germain. “And I realized three things: I couldn’t stay in the country, I certainly couldn’t go back to work as a smith, and I could bite through somebody’s femur without so much as loosening a tooth.”

Ruthven snickered. “So you went to the big city to seek your fortune?”

“Something like that. I found work here and there, but it wasn’t until the revolution that I began to try to use my condition as an asset rather than an inconvenient personal failing. There are a lot more ways to be useful as a werewolf than as a man with a powerful silver allergy.”

“That there are,” said Ruthven. And then, after a moment, “Do you like it? The responsibility?”

“It’s what I’m for,” said St. Germain. “When you find that — and you have not, not yet — you will know, and once you find it, you will want to do nothing else.”

He had been right. Ruthven was to learn over the following centuries that St. Germain was almost always right.

The hardest thing was not convincing other monsters they ought to listen to him and behave themselves. The hardest thing was and always had been convincing himself he was capable of telling others what to do and being right about it. His entire life, in both phases, had been largely pointless: first as the secondborn son of a minor Scottish earl, then as a fascinating but ultimately dilettantish predator with good cheekbones and compelling eyes. Ruthven had never been in a position to consider what he might be for, what his purpose on earth might be, and never thought to wonder; after that conversation in Paris, he had found it very difficult to think about anything else.

And it worked. Slowly, it worked. He settled down in the Embankment house and began to build a network of friends and spies and agents throughout the city who kept him informed as to what was going on; he stepped in to interfere or mediate where he thought necessary; and by the third year of his self-imposed guardianship of London, the violent crime and murder rate among supernatural creatures had dropped considerably.

It wasn’t what he was for. It was one of the things he was good at.

The first time he took someone in, out of the cold, and gave them food and medicine and a safe place to sleep — the first time he’d felt that astonishing wash of care flood through him, warm and real and heartening — he thought immediately of St. Germain and Paris, and the iron balcony-rail under their hands. Thank you, he had said silently. Thank you for telling me it was there to be found.

The bridge-railing under his hands was as cold and real as that iron had been, all those years ago, and Ruthven straightened up, dazed for a moment with the force and tide of memory.

He knew what he was for. And right now, that meant meeting Greta Helsing at the train station, and getting on with it.

CHAPTER 6

Waterloo was chaotic, as always; Greta was put in mind of a kicked anthill, swarms of people scurrying in all directions with their luggage in tow. The train had been late out of Salisbury: she’d texted Ruthven, but nonetheless felt uselessly guilty at making him wait for her. He’d sounded a little strange on the phone earlier, and she was not entirely surprised to see that he looked a little strange when she finally met him on the platform: faraway, distracted.

“Are you all right?” she demanded before dropping her suitcase and wrapping him in a tight hug.

He hugged her back, a brief and careful squeeze. She was just about as tall as he was, five foot six and a bit, but she knew perfectly well he could have picked her up with one hand. “I’m fine,” he said, “and we’re in the way. Give me your bags.”

“I’ve only got the one case, I didn’t bring much down to Dark Heart,” she said, but let him claim it anyway. “I’ve started leaving stuff there. Nightgowns and so on.”

“Slippery slope,” said Ruthven, threading his way through the crowd. “Soon you’ll have a whole underwear drawer of your own in Varney’s bureau, and you will have to start using the title after all, as mistress of Dark Heart. — You’re staying at the house, of course.”

She had been rather dreading the prospect of making her way up to her tiny flat in Crouch End. “Thank you,” she said simply, doing him the courtesy of not arguing. “I’d love to.”

“I want you to look at Lucy, anyway,” said Ruthven. “I’ve made up the green room for you. How go things in Wiltshire?”

Greta had to smile: she’d always loved the green room best, with its magnificent four-poster and malachite-inlaid mantelpiece. “Varney’s busy checking all the car-rental places for Americans who might have passed through recently, which at least gives him something to do. I told him about the thrall business and he was somewhat astonished.”

“So was I,” said Ruthven, rueful. “I seem to be in a constant state of astonishment about this entire wretched situation.” They had made their way out to the taxi rank; he waved a cab over. “I’m not — exactly good at astonishment. At not knowing things.”

“No one is,” said Greta, making a mental note to have a conversation with Grisaille about his boyfriend’s state of mind. “We manage, nevertheless.” She settled into the back of the cab, with Ruthven beside her, and the silence was companionable.

Grisaille had lit a fire, and coming into the warm familiarity of the Embankment house’s drawing-room after the cold rain outside was as heartening as a shot of brandy.

She could remember the first time she’d ever encountered Francis, lying on the sofa currently occupied by Grisaille. At the time he had been very far from well, and had in fact lunged for her throat, teeth bared, but subsequent events had gentled his condition.

That autumn they’d spent a lot of time in this room, one way or another.

Grisaille sat up when they came in. “That took forever,” he said. “And there’s nothing, but nothing, on TV. I was going to die of boredom if you hadn’t showed up.”

“Hi to you too, Grisaille,” said Greta, slipping out of her coat. “Blame the BBC, not Ruthven. I take it nothing interesting’s happened here?”

“Nothing. Not a sausage,” said Grisaille. “Not even one of those horrible little cocktail sausages they impale on poles at parties. Why, what did you want to have happen?”

“The appearance of miraculous beings who could tell us what the hell we ought to be doing?” said Ruthven, dry. “I could do with some divine or infernal guidance right about now.” He crossed to the sideboard and splashed whiskey into three glasses. “Lucy seemed to be all right earlier,” he added, “but I’d still like you to look in on her, Greta.”

“Of course,” she said, sitting on the arm of the sofa and taking the glass he handed her. “I’ll do that first, and then make myself a sandwich or something, if you don’t mind.”

“Perish the thought,” said Grisaille. “I’ve been waiting for a captive audience to show off my recently-acquired culinary skills.” He grinned at her, an infectious expression.

“He can scramble an egg,” said Ruthven. “And with some encouragement and guidance sauté things. He’s been watching videos.”

“Then I anticipate scrambled eggs with profound personal satisfaction,” said Greta mildly, and let herself slide off the arm of the sofa to settle against the cushions with her drink.

Lucy was awake when Greta peered into her room. “May I come in?” Greta asked, and was granted a nod.

“I’m staying the night, and Ruthven asked if I’d look in on you, after that thrall session you had earlier,” she said, coming over to the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“I wish everyone would stop asking me,” said Lucy. “I’m fine. My head doesn’t even hurt any more, and I still don’t have any of the other stuff.”

“Nausea, photophobia, dizziness, weakness, tingling in the extremities,” said Greta, counting on her fingers. “I think that’s the lot of them. Can you tell me what Dracula’s thrall felt like? Every vampire’s is different.”

Lucy wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees and looked thoughtful. “It was sort of like when I had to go to the dentist and they made me breathe gas, and then there just wasn’t anything until I woke up here. I don’t even really remember what he looked like, just that he had red eyes like I do now and they were doing a weird pulse-y thing, then nothing.”

“Absolutely classic,” said Greta. “Well, I think if you persist in being just fine despite Ruthven fretting about it, you are in fact just fine and can get up tomorrow and resume normal activity. Are you hungry?”

Lucy nodded. “I wasn’t before, but I think I slept for a while and now I’m starving.”

“I’ll have one of them bring you dinner,” she said, getting up to leave. She had reached the door when Lucy spoke again.

“Dr. Helsing?”

“Hmm?”

“Is Mr. Varney going to find the man from Stonehenge?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s certainly going to try.”

“What’s going to happen to him then?”

“That’s up to Count Dracula, I’m afraid,” said Greta. “Entirely above my pay grade.” She couldn’t make out any particular emotional baggage attached to the question; it was very hard to tell what this kid was thinking.

“Okay,” said Lucy after a moment, sounding like any exhausted ten-year-old, and lay back against the pillows. “Can I have dinner now?”

In fact Grisaille turned out to be able to produce quite a creditable stir-fry, and for an hour or so the house felt quite ordinary: as if nothing peculiar were going on, as if none of them had any particular cares in the world. Greta was enjoying it immensely when her phone rang.

She sighed and thumbed the screen. “Hello, Francis,” she said. “Any luck with the car-hire places?”

“Finally, yes,” he said. Greta put the phone on speaker and set it on the table. “A Hertz branch in the Churchfield industrial estate rented a Vauxhall Astra to one Mr. Harold Baumann of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was dropped off at Heathrow the night Lucy was attacked.”

“He didn’t take it back to Salisbury,” said Greta. “He wanted to get the hell out of England as soon as he was done here.”

“The rental people were a little miffed about that,” said Varney. “They couldn’t give me much more than his name and address, and that he’d specifically requested an automatic rather than a manual, but that’s a damn sight better than nothing.”

“Enormously,” said Ruthven. “Thank you so much, Varney. I know how — difficult this has been for you.”

“I’m just glad I was able to get somewhere,” said Varney. “What happens now?”

“Lemme guess,” said Grisaille, chin in hands. “We call Dracula back?”

“Yes,” said Ruthven, his voice unreadable.

“… I’ll let you get on with that,” said Varney. “Ring me if there’s anything I can do? Good night, Greta.”

“Good night,” she said, and hung up.

“Harold Baumann. Not a name I’d have associated with a vampire,” said Grisaille. “Then again most of the vamps I’ve been hanging out with for the past decade named themselves shit like Aurelien or Demone and bought all their clothes from the grown-up version of Hot Topic, so I guess I’m not the one to ask.”

“What the hell does some random vampire named Harold Baumann get out of flying to England, taking the train to Salisbury, renting a car, hanging out in Stonehenge, turning a little girl, and then running away again?” said Greta. “It’s bizarre.”

“It’s ridiculous,” said Ruthven, and that strangeness was back in his voice: flat, faraway. As if he was not so much upset by the situation as offended by it.

“Totes ridic,” said Grisaille solemnly. “What’s Dracula’s mobile number, anyway?”

It sounded perfectly ordinary. Greta didn’t know what she’d expected — organ music, perhaps, or bells tolling — but the phone just rang like any other phone: four rings, five. Were they going to have to leave Count Dracula voicemail, she thought, right before there was a click and a woman’s voice came on the line. “Lord Ruthven?” she said, pleasantly enough. It was a rich, deep voice with a slight but noticeable German accent.

“Your ladyship,” said Ruthven stiffly. “I apologize for the intrusion—”

“Nonsense,” said the woman. “And I told you, call me Sofiria. Did you want Vlad? He’s on the other line, but I think he’s nearly finished.”

Sofiria, thought Greta. Countess Dolingen of Graz in Styria, sought and found death 1801; Dracula’s bride. Coincidentally, when she’d been part of the vampire coven in Paris, Emily had been given the nom de vampire Sofiria. It was a small afterlife; after all, the dead traveled fast.

“It’s just that we’ve been given a name and address for the vampire who attacked the little girl,” said Ruthven. “I thought the Voivode would like to know as soon as possible.”

“Just a moment.” There was a click as she set down the phone. Distantly, they heard her talking rapidly in another language, and then the deeper sound of a man’s voice replying.

“Romanian,” murmured Ruthven. “Some vampires make a business of learning it, as a sort of homage, but I never saw the point.”

Greta raised an eyebrow, and was about to ask for more information when the man’s voice — in English this time, and only faintly accented — came on the line. “Lord Ruthven, you have information for me?”

“I do, Voivode,” Ruthven said. “Sir Francis Varney managed to get a name and address from the car rental people, using the information gained during your thrall session.”

“Excellent,” said Dracula. Greta listened with her chin in her hands while Ruthven rattled off the information from the American’s driver’s license; it was still somewhat surreal to consider that they were talking to the actual Count Dracula, if she stopped to think about it.

“—and the car was left at Heathrow that same night,” Ruthven finished. “That’s all we have.”

“That is a very great deal,” said Dracula. “You and your associates have been extremely helpful in this matter, Lord Ruthven. I won’t forget what you have done.”

Greta watched pale color come and go high on Ruthven’s patrician cheekbones. “It was nothing,” he said. “The bare minimum of decent behavior — I just wish very much that it hadn’t been necessary. That poor child—”

“Will do nicely,” said Dracula, brisk. “I’ve seen inside her mind. There is no use, Lord Ruthven, in bemoaning that which cannot be undone; the only thing to do is go forward. One regroups and alters strategy rather than mourning the past.”

“What is the strategy, though?” Greta asked, and then went pink. “Er. Sorry, Voivode, I’m Greta Helsing, one of Ruthven’s friends. It’s an honor to speak to you.”

“Helsing,” said Dracula thoughtfully.

“A descendant. I’m a doctor, not a vigilante.”

“Her family have always been great friends to me,” said Ruthven. “I trust her with my life.”

Greta blinked at him across the table, just as Dracula said, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Doctor. To answer your question, the current strategy is twofold: this American vampire must be dealt with, and a safe and suitable home must be found for… Lucy.”

She heard the faint, infinitesimal pause before the name, and wondered whether the memories it must evoke for him were pleasant ones. “The first will be astronomically easier to achieve,” he concluded.

“She can stay here until we find someone to take her, of course,” said Ruthven.

“Of course,” said Dracula, “but again: I have seen inside her mind, seen her thoughts, and she needs — somewhere she can explore, run and climb and investigate; someone who can teach her our history and our ways; someone to care for her and give her the attention, the love, she has never had and therefore does not know to want…” He trailed off and then, sounding slightly embarrassed, added, “… which she is unfortunately unlikely to find in a sophisticated London townhouse with a couple of cosmopolitan travelers who have little experience with children.”

Greta reflected that this man’s leadership experience had clearly provided him with diplomatic skills, even as she avoided looking at Ruthven and Grisaille.

“What does she look like?” said the voice of the Countess, sounding faintly plaintive. “Vlad hasn’t described her at all.”

He just did, Greta thought. From the inside, anyway. She’s a foster who’s never had a decent, supportive, loving home and wants very much to belong to a family who value her, or understand her, or want her to be part of their — tribe, I suppose. Our history, our ways, Dracula had said: the ways of the sanguivore, a completely different world. One in which, perhaps, the girl might find herself fitting much better than in any she’s experienced so far.

“I’ll send you a picture,” said Ruthven, “… once I’ve taken one, that is. She’s quite thin, shoulder-length brown hair, red eyes, straight eyebrows. Pale pointed face with a sharp chin. Hard to read.”

“I would add determined and courageous,” said Dracula. “But that is a fair description.”

“Speaking medically,” said Greta, “I agree with the Voivode’s recommendation for a physically active lifestyle. She gets bored sitting around doing nothing.”

“Sitting around doing nothing is the best thing to do,” Grisaille sighed. “None of this running about getting healthy exercise nonsense for me.”

“Precisely,” said Greta. “Somewhere in the country, with a big garden, would be a better answer than this house. If Varney and I were even slightly the sort of people who could be foster parents, Dark Heart would be ideal, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t work.”

“Or a forest,” said the Countess slowly. “Instead of a garden. A forest to explore.”

“Forests are great,” said Greta. “Anywhere with a lot of space and interesting things to do. I suppose there must be a suitable vampire household somewhere that fits the description.”

“Vlad?” said the Countess, and then added something in Romanian that was obviously a question. Greta found herself wishing they’d done this over FaceTime after all: if she’d been able to see their expressions, she might have been able to work out at least the gist of what they were saying. He replied in the same language briefly, and then switched to English, clipped and businesslike: “We’ll discuss it later. For the moment I have work to do. Thank you, Lord Ruthven, for the assistance you and your associates have provided in this matter.”

“It was our pleasure,” said Ruthven, and Dracula hung up with an abrupt click.

“Where exactly do they live these days?” Greta asked into the subsequent silence. For several minutes now she’d been aware of being watched: she was sitting across the table from Ruthven facing the half-open kitchen door, and behind Ruthven’s back a pair of red pinpoints of light were peering past the edge of the doorframe. She hadn’t let on to anyone at the table that they were being observed, merely giving the watcher the faintest hint of a nod; nor did she mention it when the eyes withdrew.

“Apparently they,” said Grisaille, glancing at Ruthven, “to wit, the Count and Countess, dwell in some dirty great medieval castle on a crag somewhere. Possibly surrounded by a wild and impenetrable forest, as a matter of fact.”

“Fancy that,” said Greta.

CHAPTER 7

Ruthven went upstairs in a thoughtful frame of mind.

He’d asked Greta to look in on Lucy one more time before bed, and once she’d gone up, he and Grisaille had settled in the drawing-room with after-dinner brandy and talked for a while about things completely unrelated to the current situation, which had helped somewhat. At least they’d managed to get hold of the necessary information and pass it on as required; he no longer felt quite so terribly responsible for things he could absolutely not control. Whatever happened next was up to Dracula, not to him, to decide.

He was not particularly surprised to see light under Lucy’s bedroom door, despite the time of night. He’d put her in the smaller of the three rooms overlooking the Embankment and the most normal and modern in terms of furniture, and wondered now if that had been a good idea: there wasn’t much point in trying to achieve a semblance of normalcy in a world that had — for her — comprehensively moved on.

Ruthven stood there for a moment in the dimness of the hall, and then tapped gently on the door. “Lucy?”

“… Yes?” she said, sounding as if she’d been caught doing something against the rules.

“Is anything the matter?”

“No?”

He pushed the door partway open and saw her sitting up in the bed with a book hastily stuffed under the pillows, and another of those narrow sharp spikes of care ran him through the chest. “… Were you just sitting up reading?”

“No,” she said, lying very badly indeed. “Of course not, I know it’s after lights out.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Ruthven, and came over to the bed, pulling the book out from under her pillows. It was the paperback copy of The Hobbit she’d been reading at Dark Heart, now considerably dog-eared. “You can sit up reading in bed till the last trumpet sounds, for all of me, and how many times is it by now that you’ve gone through this particular opus?”

Lucy blinked at him. “You’re not cross with me? But… it’s late? And I stole the book?”

“Borrowed it without asking,” Ruthven corrected, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “I expect Varney’s munificence can run to another copy, and no, my dear, you are now part of a species that is known for staying up all night, although it does make living in the waking world a bit difficult. You can read anything you like — I’ve got tablets you can use to download e-books, if nothing in the drawing-room library appeals.”

“I always got told off for reading under the covers with a torch,” she said, still looking at him as if she wasn’t quite sure he meant it. “Over and over and over. Not just in the home-for-children but in all the foster placements.”

“People who punish children for reading ought to be tied up in knots and roasted,” said Ruthven. “Are there particular books or series of books you liked?”

Lucy blinked at him, and then grinned. “Well, that,” she said, pointing at the book he held. “Tolkien stuff. I couldn’t really understand The Silmarillion but I read The Lord of the Rings and most of that was great. And The Dark Is Rising books. And — stuff with kids who go on adventures that are really hard and grown-up and they do it anyway?”

“Have you encountered Arthur Ransome?” said Ruthven, with a smile whose effect he had completely underestimated: it lit his face, made him look briefly and completely alive. “He wrote some absolutely wonderful stuff about that very subject, young people who sail boats and go on camping-trips to islands and have wars with other kids, all by themselves.”

Lucy was looking somewhat dazed, but blinked herself out of it. “They have wars with other kids?”

“Sort of. They aren’t the sort where anyone gets hurt, but it’s certainly adventurous.”

“I’d like to try that,” she said. “How many books are there?”

“Lots,” said Ruthven. “I think twelve?”

She grinned again, her own face lighting up. “Can I have the first one? I mean may I?”

“You may have the first and second, because I have a feeling you read rather quickly, and it’s nice to have something standing by to move on to, when you finish a book.”

Now her face was positively glowing. “No one understands that! No one got why I wanted that. I could only have one library book at a time, and I wasn’t allowed to check out a new book until I had returned the first one, and sometimes it was days before they let me go back to the library to get another one.”

“Never again,” said Ruthven, “will you be denied all the words you want. I’ll go and fetch the first two for you, and you can stay up as late as you want — but you are also welcome to spend the daylight hours reading, all right?”

Her eyes were shining. “Thank you! Um. I — did kind of want to talk to you about some other stuff, but it’s not that important.”

“I’ll get the books, and then if you’d like, we can talk about whatever’s on your mind,” he said. “Otherwise, it can wait until morning.”

Lucy nodded, and Ruthven got up, setting the battered Hobbit down on the nightstand, and took his leave — both pleased and faintly murderous at the idea of people preventing children from reading, when the whole bloody country kept bemoaning the abysmal state of education.

It took him about fifteen minutes to return, because he was carrying a tray with two books and two small cups on it: warmed blood with cinnamon and nutmeg. This time when he let himself into the room, the look on her face was not one of guilty resentment so much as gladness to see him, and it felt as if the world had been running subtly out of true and had just settled back into its proper track again, frictionless and easy.

He set down the tray and settled again on the side of the bed. “This,” he said, holding out a book, “is Swallows and Amazons, the first of the series, and here’s the next one, Swallowdale. Less good in my opinion, but still absolutely worth reading. And this is blood with some spices in it, in case you’d like some.”

Lucy took the books, turned them over to read the back copy — he’d been right, she read absurdly fast for her age — and then reached out with both hands for the cup. “Yes, please,” she said. “Are you sure it’s all right for me to be up this late?”

“It is consummately all right.” Ruthven cradled his own cup in his hands. “Basically, whatever idiot rules your previous guardians laid down are almost completely moot. Now: did you want to talk about something, or should I push off and let you explore Mr. Ransome’s oeuvre?”

“What’s an urve?” she wanted to know.

“Body of work. It’s French.”

“I was supposed to start French this year in school,” she said, and then smiled gleefully. “And now I don’t have to. At least not with Madame Burton. She has hairs coming out of her nose.”

“You are spared Madame Burton,” said Ruthven mildly. “But I expect you could learn it if you wanted to.”

“Maybe I might,” she said, and he had to hide a smile at the haughty tone, watching her try the blood. “But — this is really good, thank you,” she said, licking her lips. “Okay, so about Dracula.”

“About Dracula,” said Ruthven with a distinct sinking feeling. “What about him?”

“Who is he really? How come you’re all afraid of him? I mean, obviously he’s a famous vampire, all the movies are about him, everybody knows his name, but why? Is he some kind of, like, vampire king or president or something?”

“That is a very good and enormously complicated question,” said Ruthven, trying not to mind you’re all afraid. “He is, as you say, a very famous vampire — and a very old one; he died in the fourteen-seventies, about a hundred and twenty-some years earlier than me. There are older vampires in Europe, of course, but they tend to keep themselves very much to themselves, and many of the really old ones have simply gone into a sort of hibernation, vampire sleep, in which they’re not really here at all.”

“They can do that? Like bears?”

“Rather more like tardigrades,” said Ruthven. “Creatures that can dry out completely, be completely frozen, and then come right back to life when they’re rehydrated. Old vampires are very, very, very tenacious, but like I said, most of them aren’t active anymore.”

“So is it just that he’s the oldest one who’s still walking around and doing stuff?”

“It’s partly that, but partly it’s because a huge fraction of vampires currently active can trace their history back to him in some very distant way. The type of vampire you and I are is called ‘classic draculine’ because we share his traits.”

“History,” said Lucy. “Like — you’re related to him?”

“In a very specific technical way: he turned a great many people into vampires, all of whom turned more people, who turned more people, et cetera. It’s a very distant connection, but a lot of vampires can claim descent from Vlad Dracul, which makes him a sort of — patriarch, at least of this part of the world, as well as elder statesman.”

“Are all the classic what-you-said vampires like his great-great-great-great-grandkids?”

“Not all, but many. I’ve done the research and I can’t exhaustively prove it, since the one who turned me didn’t stick around to tell me his ancestry, but I have good reason to believe I’m a very distant descendant.”

“Is there”—she paused to finish her cup and set it down—“is there some kind of test or something? Like a DNA test? To see if you really are related?”

“No,” said Ruthven. “But it’s not incredibly difficult to trace. There really aren’t all that many active vampires: in a city like London we might have five at absolute most, and in less heavily populated areas there are very, very few. That’s the thing about us: we don’t do well in large groups. The more vampires there are in any given area, the more likely it is that our activity will be exposed.”

“I guess that makes sense,” said Lucy, frowning. “But does that happen in other places? Are the American vampires all descended from him, too?”

“Fewer of them,” said Ruthven. “There are many very old and powerful vampires around the world: the Voivode’s territory just covers the majority of Europe, not the rest of the globe.”

“And he is your leader?”

“Yes,” said Ruthven. “Vampires in his territory follow his direction, or are strongly encouraged to leave. I happen to be a sort of local guardian for London, so I pass on information to him about people who are misbehaving, and it is entirely up to him what he chooses to do with that information.”

“So you don’t know what he’s gonna do to the man from Stonehenge?”

“I do not,” said Ruthven. “But my instinct suggests he’s going to find out about the local vampire society surrounding the attacker’s address, and determine whether this was a single individual acting alone, or if there is some kind of group of vampires doing things like this, and — go from there.”

“But it’s not our problem anymore.”

“Not our problem in the slightest,” he said. “In the meantime, he’s going to find somewhere for you to live that’s safe and not dreadfully boring.”

“It’s not dreadfully boring here,” she said. He had to smile.

“The Voivode seems to think you need somewhere with more space to run around and explore and get into trouble,” he said. “A bigger place than I can offer.”

“What’s he like?” Lucy asked. “I mean — I know you’re scared of him — Mr. Grisaille isn’t, but I think that’s ’cause he didn’t actually know he was real, but Dracula seemed pretty nice when he did the eye thing to me, at least what I remember of it?”

“He is — courtly,” said Ruthven. “Old-fashioned. He still lives in a castle overlooking the River Argeş, and he loves his wife, the Countess Dolingen, very much.”

“Is it a real castle with towers and battlements and stuff?”

“It is indeed. It also has some fairly hefty spells on it to prevent curious tourists from venturing too close; he and the Countess have taken some pains over the centuries to link the Dracula legend to a couple of other castles in Romania to distract tourists.”

“When I was little, one of the foster mums took me to see hillforts and old falling-down castles,” she said. “I loved going up in the towers and imagining what it’d be like with a roof and furniture and stuff. The stairs in the towers had this dent in the middle because people walked up and down them for a really long time.”

“Do you know what I think?” said Ruthven, smiling.

“What?” she said, punctuated by an enormous yawn. The newly sharpened fangs glinted like rose-thorns.

“I think Dracula is right about you,” he said. “I think you’re going to do nicely.”

CHAPTER 8

Greta was finishing up a bogeyman pup’s prescheduled vaccine visit when her phone buzzed in her pocket; as was her usual practice, she waited until Mrs. Gruuuueerrrgh and her small offspring had been seen off with a blood-flavored lollipop before removing her gloves and checking the phone. Two missed calls and a voicemail, both from Ruthven; that wasn’t like him unless something was seriously amiss. She tapped Play.

“Greta, call me back, I told Lucy she could read whatever she wanted from the library and if there was something I didn’t have that she wanted, she was free to use the tablet to get an electronic copy”—he paused, and she could easily picture him pushing back his hair in a little unconscious gesture of distress—“and you know I very specifically don’t have any of the libelous rubbish about us on hand but she’s devoured e-versions of The Vampyre and Carmilla and is well stuck in to Dracula and I am going to have to have a conversation with her about this and I don’t have the slightest idea where to start.”

She couldn’t quite squash a smile. The classic-horror-lit versions of her friends’ biographies never failed to upset Ruthven. The idea that Lucy Ashton should have come across their ill-fated origin stories and would require some explanation was — all right, she could understand his distress, but it was still on some deep level funny as hell. At least Varney was safe; she couldn’t imagine Lucy — or practically anybody — faced with that particular cliff of unspeakable prose doing anything but running in the other direction.

She checked her watch: half past five, and she closed at six. Greta put her phone away and came out to the waiting area to see if anyone was left. The comfortable, mismatched couches and chairs were empty, and her receptionist was picking up the scattered toys from the floor to put them away.

“Hippolyta,” she said, shrugging out of her white coat and hanging it up, “I’m going to shut down early tonight — finish up and make sure the answering service is on and get out of here. I have a vampire’s chagrin to soothe.”

Hippolyta Hollister — an unexpected creature here in Harley Street, a statuesque American blonde and the girlfriend of Greta’s colleague and associate Nadezhda Serenskaya — straightened up and nodded. “Somebody call Ruthven ‘lord’ where anyone could hear?”

“Along those lines,” said Greta with a smile, and let herself out into the slant-light of late afternoon. It was a nice enough day that she could have walked the couple of miles to Ruthven’s house, but he had sounded disturbed enough on the phone that she judged celerity was in order, and took the tube. It had been difficult at first, after the business with the Gladius Sancti and then the Parisian catacombs, to get reacquainted with the idea of going down voluntarily into holes in the ground, but Greta was desensitized to it now: inured enough to ignore the rattling and swaying of the train and consider instead the issue of classic horror literature as unauthorized biography.

Ruthven’s chagrin, while somewhat amusing, was real. There was a peculiar kind of awkwardness for a monster whose continued safety and well-being depended on the world not thinking they were real being known to that world, albeit inaccurately, through a famous work of fiction. Shells of falsehood inside shells of truth. The real problem, of course, was that each of the creatures described in the classic-horror-lit pantheon at one point or another had caught the eye and pen of an author sufficiently deeply to have inspired the subsequent work: it was effectively their own fault for being memorable. There was also the chicken-versus-egg aspect to consider. To what extent did the events in the fictional narrative influence the actual experience of the creature they purported to describe?

On the other hand, Greta thought, the fact that the fictional accounts did exist and were so widely known and recognized did lend a kind of paradoxical security to the creatures that inspired them. To most ordinary adults, the fact that there was a peculiar and extremely attractive Scottish minor peer named Ruthven, with grey eyes, was not a problem since the gorgeous grey-eyed Lord Ruthven in the book was a vampire and thus not real: the book was fiction. There could not be a real version of an imaginary monster, because the monster was a made-up character in a book. This tautology worked on people who didn’t have much imagination of their own, and on people who did but were highly skilled at squashing it underneath common sense. It did not work anywhere near as well on, say, children.

The conversation they were about to have with Lucy would have sent any number of narratologists (and the sort of psychologists who got excited about self versus other) into transports of incredulous delight. Greta regarded the prospect with the same level of enthusiasm she’d greet removing plantar warts from ghoul feet: necessary, not all that difficult, but deeply unappealing; she knew she’d have to do most of the work, with Ruthven clammed up inside a protective shell of embarrassment. Hopefully Grisaille could help somewhat.

When she emerged from the Temple station, the light was low on the horizon, turning the hoop of the Eye into a giant’s golden bangle, gilding the glass spike of the Shard against a deepening blue-grey sky. In its slanted warmth, Ruthven’s house looked both lovely and welcoming and ordinary, as if it contained nothing of supernatural import whatsoever.

Let’s keep it that way, thought Greta, and knocked on the door. Grisaille let her in almost at once, wearing a put-upon expression and an apron that said FORTNUM & MASON on it. The house smelled rather wonderfully of baking. “Thank God,” he said. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”

“I’ll certainly try. What are you making?”

“Croissants,” said Grisaille. “That ginger demon in Paris made croissants and he was incredibly bad at everything, so I should be able to do it no problem, except where I’m having to tell Edmund every five seconds that it’s not actually a big deal that the kid read The Vampyre.”

“What did she think of it?” Greta hung up her coat on one of the pegs in the entryway and followed Grisaille into the kitchen, which was liberally covered in flour.

“She did not say. — You’d better like croissants,” he added, “since there’s rather a lot of them and you’re the only consumer of solid food in the current lineup. I don’t get what all the fuss is about, honestly. It’s an old book about some guy with the same name who did a bunch of stereotypical vampire shit, and the prose is not what I would describe as scintillating. ‘Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’ is kind of Varney-level bad.”

“I like croissants very much,” said Greta, “except the chocolate ones, because that’s all I got to eat in Corvin’s lair, and I have a medical practice staffed entirely by people who consume solid food on a regular basis, so give me a box of them to take in tomorrow.” She paused thoughtfully: something was kicking her brain. Something about Paris. Something about Grisaille and her captivity in Paris, and horror literature.

“What is it?” he asked, beginning to sweep up the excess flour. “You went all quiet.”

She snapped her fingers. “Back in the lair. You said you’d studied medicine in Ingolstadt a long time ago. Didn’t you.”

Grisaille stared at her, red eyes intent. “So?”

“So — would it bother you if Lucy were to add Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to her TBR list?”

She’d wanted to ask him about it all the way back then, but subsequent events had driven the question directly out of her mind; not that it actually mattered, but — she’d been curious. Still was, in fact.

Grisaille sighed, and put the rolling-pin in the sink. “Fine,” he said. “Yes, your insinuation is accurate, and no, I don’t care if she reads it — that one actually is mostly true, unlike most of the others. Victor was exactly as much of a self-obsessed idiot as the book makes him out to be, if not more.”

“I’ve always thought he came across as such an undergrad,” said Greta. “What was the attraction?”

“He was attractive,” said Grisaille, deadpan. “And — oh, brilliant. Flashfire brilliant. Moth-to-flame. I knew he was dangerous and narcissistic and unpredictable and it’s not that I didn’t care so much as that I couldn’t stop myself.” He ran water in the sink and began washing up with neat little self-contained gestures, the tension in his shoulders visible. “I didn’t know what he was working on until too late, and I could have stopped him, I think, and I didn’t.”

“It wasn’t your fault he was the kind of selfish bastard who behaved appallingly without expecting consequences for his actions,” said Greta quietly. She hadn’t actually meant to turn the conversation down this particular alley. “Nor was it your responsibility to stop him.”

“I know,” said Grisaille. “Trust me, I know, and it doesn’t help. But the answer to your question is no, I don’t mind if she reads all about it.” He paused. “Possibly because the book isn’t actually about me, and I was human at the time, but still.”

“I’ll refrain from recommending it to her,” said Greta. “But I have a feeling she’ll probably pick it up on her own, if she’s working her way through the canon.” What else was there? Dracula, Carmilla, The Vampyre, Frankenstein, the lesser-known vampire tales like Croglin Grange, the entire works of M. R. James, Poe…

“Probably,” said Grisaille. “She does know I’ve changed my name, but nothing more than that; it’d be hard to make a connection without more info. Go see if you can get Edmund to chill even slightly, and if these turn out to be food, I’ll bring a few along.”

She found Ruthven in the drawing-room at one of the great windows, watching the last of the sunset fade from the sky. He looked — to the casual observer — perfectly normal; it was only because she’d known him so well for so long that she could pick up the little tells of anxiety. How he was holding himself ever so slightly more stiffly than usual; the tension in the hand that held the curtain aside; the eerie, uncanny vampire stillness of him.

“Hey,” she said gently, and he didn’t startle. “Sorry it took me a while to get here. Have you already talked to her?”

“No,” said Ruthven. “Nor have I dramatically reacted with horror in front of her. I think she’s too absorbed by what she’s reading to notice much of anything else.”

“She’s been reading all day?”

“Solidly. I gather in her previous foster placements reading was not a thing she was encouraged — or permitted — to do at any great length or frequency, so I told her she could read as much as she wants. I expect she’ll eventually get hungry and emerge.”

“How do you know what she’s read, if she hasn’t told you?”

“These are e-books,” he said, and looked at her with mild exasperation, which Greta considered a net improvement. “Which she’s been ordering with my account, because I told her she could, and therefore I get emails with the receipts for everything she’s bought. Isn’t technology wonderful?”

“It certainly does streamline things,” said Greta. “Okay. I think the thing to do here is to let her initiate the discussion, because if you open it with so you’ve been reading the books about us that I specifically do not keep in my library, she will not only feel spied upon but defensive, and that is exactly what you do not want. It’s understandable curiosity, after all.”

“I suppose so,” he said. “I do know I’m overreacting, but that doesn’t seem to help.”

“This is hard for you,” Greta said with a shrug. “I know the book has always been a sore point.” Her father had warned her off mentioning The Vampyre before she’d ever met Ruthven in person.

“I don’t know why it hits me so hard, when the others don’t seem to mind as much.” He paused, pinched the bridge of his nose. “No. I do know why, and it’s stupid. It’s the reputation thing. I put quite a lot of effort into presenting myself to the world a particular way, and here is this wretched screed depicting me completely differently, and it feels both accusatory and—mocking isn’t the right word, but revealing hypocrisy isn’t right, either—”

Greta nodded. “Exposing pretense.”

“Yes. Exactly that. And it’s cripplingly embarrassing.” He sighed. “What I am and who I am seem to be more solidly welded together than they are for other people. Other monsters.”

“Other people,” Greta said, gentle but firm. “And it doesn’t matter what John Polidori wrote — or thought — about the character in his book: you’re not that vampire, it is not you. Lucy will be able to see that just as clearly as I do.” That it mattered enormously what this child thought of him was equally crystalline.

“You’ve known me practically all your life,” said Ruthven wryly. “She’s had, what, a week?”

“An hour would be enough,” said Greta, and put her arm around him. “Hell, a good ten minutes of intense conversation would do it, depending on the topic.”

Ruthven turned to her and blinked, his irises like black-rimmed silver bowls of ice, and in the back of her mind she heard him saying, I trust her with my life. “You are remarkable,” he said — and just then another voice, from the doorway, asked “Do what?”

They turned to see Lucy in the doorway holding Ruthven’s tablet, looking shadowy around the eyes but visibly full of suppressed excitement. “Ten minutes of conversation would do what?”

Greta and Ruthven looked at each other. “Allow someone to form an accurate impression of the person they are talking to,” she said, as dry and academic as possible. “How was your day?”

“Brilliant,” said Lucy, clutching the tablet and coming into the drawing-room proper. “I read so much, it feels like — like my head’s stuffed full of words and stories, like I’m full.”

Greta had to smile. “I know that feeling,” she said. “I had to do an awful lot of reading all the way through medical school, but most of it was textbooks I had to take notes on.”

“Eww,” said Lucy. “I read about vampires. That’s much more interesting.” She paused and took something out of the back pocket of her jeans, held it up: a cheap spiral notebook. “But I took a lot of notes.”

After his initial reluctance, it turned out that Ruthven’s inherent desire to teach had won out over his embarrassment, and when Greta’s phone rang a second time that evening, he, Grisaille, and Lucy were sitting at the kitchen table with a large sketchpad in front of them, making lists of vampire traits and behaviors on a timeline as depicted in horror novels. “So the coffin full of blood thing is just Carmilla?” Lucy was asking. “Nobody in Dracula so far has blood in their coffins, just earth. It’d go all muddy. Ew.”

“I think it’s appeared in a few other places, but that’s the main instance,” said Ruthven. “For my money, it’s a reference to Countess Bathory, who’s supposed to have inspired Dracula, but I’d say Le Fanu got a lot more of his ideas from the Bathory case than Stoker did. Watch the development of the moonlight thing, though. It shows up first in 1819 with The Vampyre, appears in 1845 to ’47 with Varney, and has disappeared again by the time we get to Carmilla in 1872. I think there’s some references to moonlight augmenting Dracula’s powers, but the moonlight-resurrection thing is totally absent.”

“Why’d it stop? It’s really cool.”

“No idea,” said Ruthven. “Except that presumably it wasn’t necessary to the storyline. Notice that the vampires in these stories either have to have specific weaknesses — the earth in the coffin, for example — to counteract their deadliness and give the human protagonists a fighting chance, or they’re portrayed as more psychologically powerful than humans. The moonlight thing exists, of course: it’s one of the very specific traits of the vampyre subspecies, but you will notice that none of these literary masterpieces reference the idea of there being more than one sort of vampire.”

“Maybe nobody after the eighteen-forties was into writing about vampyres,” said Grisaille. “They’re kind of a hassle, after all.”

Greta’s phone buzzed, and she retreated to the drawing-room on a wave of their laughter, fishing it out of her pocket and picking up without bothering to look at the screen. “Greta Helsing,” she said briskly.

“Ah, Doctor,” said a voice she had heard very recently and would probably never forget. “Vlad Dracula. I’d like to speak to you, if you have a moment.”

Greta sat down in a hurry, vividly recalling what it had felt like to pick up the phone and find Johann Faust on the other end. “Um,” she said brilliantly, and was glad her voice didn’t shake. “Yes, of course, Voivode. How can I help?”

“I convinced Lord Ruthven to give me your direct number,” said Dracula. “Forgive the intrusion, but I find myself both fascinated and quite glad to encounter a physician who specifically treats the undead.”

“It’s a family thing,” said Greta, which was as close as she intended to get to Abraham Van Helsing. “My father had the practice and passed it on to me. I’m fully qualified in the ordinary world, but I’m what you might call a specialist GP.” Running on an inane loop in the back of her head was I’m on the phone with Dracula, I’m on the phone with Dracula, which wasn’t helping. “Did you have a medical question?”

“Not regarding myself,” said the voice. It wasn’t beautiful, like Varney’s, but it was compelling and enormously dignified. “I am—interested, shall we say, in the case of Lucy Ashton and her rapid transition. I do not believe I have ever encountered a vampire turned so young or so precipitously, and I have no real understanding of the physical effects of such a change.” He paused. “I am not particularly good at not knowing things, Doctor.”

Ruthven had said almost the exact same thing.

“In that,” she said, wry, a great deal of her confidence coming back, “you and I are very much alike, Voivode. I haven’t seen a case of coercive rapid transition at such a young age before, either; the closest I’ve come is a nineteen-year-old, and even then the individual was not abandoned immediately following the change. Lucy’s trauma is — extensive. On more than one axis.”

Dracula hissed faintly. “I regret that I am able to imagine it,” he said. “Can you tell me the physical sequence of events you observed?”

“Absolutely. I would say I first encountered her approximately three to four hours after the actual act took place, at which point she was experiencing primarily emotional, not physical, stress. About twenty minutes after that, the physical transition shock syndrome began with shaking chills and a spike in temperature, followed by extreme mental and physical distress.” She outlined it without too much clinical detail; it hadn’t been fun watching it the first time around, and remembering how violently ill and miserable Lucy had been was even less so.

Dracula listened in attentive silence, asking the occasional intelligent question. When she was done he said, “The plasma worked fast, then?”

“Faster than I was expecting,” she said. “I think the ginger helped. I also think that the entire reaction was both shorter and sharper in Lucy than it would have been in someone older. The whole thing lasted about six hours, rather than eight to twelve. I’m not sure the difference has to do with age, because there’s so little data on child vampires in the literature, but my instincts suggest that her age has a lot to do with it. When I’ve been present at rapid-transition shock syndrome cases in the past — I think I’ve done it two other times in my career — the patient has been much less violently miserable but the effects have taken longer to pass.”

“There is so little data because, thankfully, there are so few child vampires,” said Dracula heavily. “Do we know anything about — if she will grow at all? Age? Or is she forever going to be ten years old?”

“I really don’t know,” said Greta. “I wish I had any idea where to start looking for precedent. I think the only thing we can do is keep a very close eye on her to see if anything changes, but to be prepared if none are forthcoming. And be honest with her about it, if and when she asks.”

“I find I must agree,” he said. “But — in general — she seems to be well? For someone who’s just gone through such a change?”

“So far, yes. She appears to be just fine now, absolutely normal vitals and appetite for a healthy classic draculine, and her spirits have improved as well.”

“I see,” Dracula said, and she thought for no particular reason that he was taking notes. “Thank you for going through all this for me, Doctor. I very much appreciate your time.”

“Not at all,” she said. “She really is doing much better. Right now she and Ruthven and Grisaille are diagramming the sequence of vampire traits in classic horror literature and making fun of them. She’s been reading voraciously.”

Dracula laughed. “I could not have asked for a better introduction to our world and its foibles,” he said. “Has she read mine yet?”

“Part of the way through it,” said Greta. “She took very many notes.”

“Took notes?” he said, sounding enormously pleased. “A natural scholar.”

“A very curious and intelligent kid, so — yes, pretty much,” she said. “This girl drinks up books the way a desert drinks rain. No one in her life seems to have given her free time to read. Or do much of anything she liked, at all, ever. In a strange way this whole miserable business might even be seen as an improvement, although no one should ever have to be turned so young.”

“But since she has been,” said Dracula quietly, “it is our collective responsibility to provide her with everything she needs and many things she wants, and make a home for her where she can know she is safe.”

“Exactly,” said Greta, hearing very clearly the longing in his voice. “I’ll do everything I can to help.”

“Yes,” said Dracula. “I think you will, Dr. Helsing. I rather think you will.”

He hung up, and in the silence that followed, Greta realized that in the shock and wonder of talking to Count Dracula she had completely forgotten to ask him if there had been any progress on the effort to find and neutralize the vampire who had done this in the first place.

She sat staring at the empty screen for a long moment before hauling herself off the couch and going to see how the others were doing, but the memory of the longing in that rich, compelling voice was very slow to fade.

CHAPTER 9

Without Greta there, neither Varney nor Emily had any reason to pretend to prepare or serve an evening meal or postprandial drinks; nevertheless, both of them found themselves in the drawing-room with the fire lit as the night drew in, as if she were there and would need providing for.

Varney was enormously proud of Emily’s progress in her studies, and of the work she was doing with the hairmonsters and the wellmonsters they’d rescued from Paris the year before, along with Emily herself. After that particular rescue, she’d had a hard time of it working out what she wanted to do next, but — after a particularly successful hairmonster breeding cycle — she had decided that what she was for was fixing monsters. Varney could not really sympathize, but he’d seen the same sort of single-minded purpose in Greta’s devotion to her own work, and simply gave Emily everything she needed to study, to apply, and to excel in her courses. (Yet again, Varney had been grateful to various undead individuals of his acquaintance for offering Emily room and board while she did field study work. It was beginning to seem impossible to ignore the fact that he did, actually, have friends.)

Now he sat by the fire with a couple of hairmonsters sprawled at his feet, while Emily read about were-creatures’ prelunar syndrome and underlined a phrase here or there with her pencil, feet tucked up underneath her on the sofa. Out of nowhere, a soft tapping at the French windows onto the terrace woke Varney out of the edges of a comfortable doze, and he got up to investigate.

Very much as she had seemed a couple of weeks ago, but minus the heartbreaking bundle in her arms, the barrow-wight Sigyn stood outside, all pale green-gold braids and cold-burning points of light in shadowed eyesockets. He opened the door, stood aside. “Sigyn,” he said warmly. “I’ve been meaning to deliver a bottle of something to your barrow. I can’t thank you enough for your help in rescuing Lucy.”

The wight smiled a little, looking distracted. “Polish potato vodka, if you’re offering, and — I have a favor to ask that has nothing to do with that poor little girl.”

“Of course,” said Varney, ushering her to a sofa. “Please. Anything you ask.”

“That’s a bit loaded, aimed at a barrow-wight,” Sigyn said, and then just subsided to the edge of the sofa. “I’m sorry, I’m on edge. It’s my father.”

“Your father,” Varney repeated. Emily brought over a shot of ice-cold, syrupy-thick Chopin vodka; Sigyn took the glass — it frosted over completely at her touch — and seemed to gather herself.

“My father is — a traditional wight,” she said, staring into the glass, and drank off half of it. “Which is to say he’s all into the scaring of the mortals, horrid dreams if they so much as come nigh the barrow, hideously jealous of any of his grave-goods, all that. He’s also been suffering from painful joints for a hundred years or so, but just recently it’s been much worse, serious pain and difficulty moving, and he had a nasty cold several weeks ago, which seems to have settled in his chest and isn’t getting better, and…” She paused, eyes shut, and swallowed the rest of her vodka. “He won’t listen to me, or to my husband. Keeps saying he’s perfectly all right, that he has dwelled here in this barrow in this spell-worn countryside since who knows how many thousand years ago and nothing other than the old gods themselves will shift him. He won’t talk to anyone but who is master of the surrounding land.” She looked up, eyes bright pinpoints of light in dark hollows. “I think he might be — easier to persuade if you had a word with him. As the owner of the estate, and as someone who knows a doctor who treats our kind.”

“Good heavens,” said Varney, unable to stop himself, and then covered his face with a hand. “I’m sorry; I’m just not used to being appealed to as the, ah, country squire, or as anything particularly authoritative. Of course I will visit your father, if he will have me, and do my best to suggest he see a doctor, and that I happen to know one who specializes in the undead and comes very highly recommended.”

“Thank you,” said Sigyn, heartfelt. “I’ve already told him a thousand times he should see Dr. Helsing, but he has this thing about mortals. And about land and landowners and the — the importance thereof. He might listen to you. He’ll probably be horribly rude, and I apologize in advance, but he might listen.”

“I think I understand,” said Varney, still marveling at the idea of his being a figure of actual authority. “Shall I get Greta to come down tomorrow night? And is there anything in particular he would appreciate that I could bring?”

Sigyn looked almost human with a brief flush of warm gratitude. “If you have any sort of — balm, for sore joints, and the sort of high-proof whiskey that’s drunk partly through inhaling the vapors?”

“Both of those I think I can provide,” said Varney. “Should we meet you at the barrow, or somewhere a little distant?”

“At the barrow is fine,” said the wight, smiling. “Thank you, Sir Francis.”

“It’s just Varney,” he said, and smiled back.

When she had gone, he settled back into his armchair by the fire thoughtfully. He had owned the estate for several hundred years now, but only in the last few had it begun to seem like an actual home, somewhere he belonged. His general pattern of behavior in earlier phases of his existence had been predicated upon moving every few years once he’d sufficiently enraged the populace to bring on the torch-and-pitchfork brigade; he’d find somewhere new to settle down under a new name, buy an expensive house, throw money around, and start harassing local maidens all over again.

Dark Heart had been the last of his mansions, and the process of restoring it had given Varney something to do; he found the role of homeowner — rather than itinerant monster — to be both strange and profoundly soothing. There was a difference between homeowner and landowner, however, and he had quite honestly never considered the fact that Dark Heart’s estate contained several barrows and a couple of cottages — long empty — to which he was the landlord. Which meant, he was realizing, that the occupants of the barrows were under his protection. His responsibility.

Not just the house, not just the stables and water-gardens full of monsters, not just Emily, but people he had never met. To be able to provide help and support was one thing, still delightful in its novelty, but to be asked for that help and support was a gift he hadn’t known he’d been missing. It was pleasant to think about; it was more pleasant to be distracted from his ongoing desire to murder the vampire who had turned Lucy.

They hadn’t heard anything from Dracula, which he didn’t know if he ought to treat as good or bad news. Not that the Voivode was under any obligation to keep them up to date on the investigation, of course, but Varney itched for information: having been so involved in it from the beginning and then being cut off from any useful updates on the situation rankled.

One of the hairmonsters sprawled lazily in front of the fire woke up and wuffled at Varney, and he reached down to stroke its silky head, aware of the tableau thus presented and for once not quite feeling as if he was just pretending to be the country squire taking his ease.

He called Greta that night. “I know it’s an awfully long way for a house call,” he said. “Or a barrow call, to be scrupulously accurate — I’m to visit Sigyn’s father to convince him to see you, so I thought I’d better ask you first.”

“Of course I’ll come,” said Greta. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Arthritis, and some sort of chest cold,” he said. “Sigyn was worried and trying not to be, I think. She said he refused to listen to her and insisted he was fine and wouldn’t talk to anyone but the local landowner, which I’m afraid is me.”

“Typical,” said Greta, and there was a warmly amused edge to her tone. “Barrow-wights are the most stubborn creatures on God’s green earth, except perhaps for banshees, and the older ones will allow their barrows to get as wet and cold and insalubrious as possible and then insist they haven’t got aspergillosis. Younger wights tend to be less pigheaded about rising damp and decent ventilation.”

“What’s aspergillosis?” Varney asked, and then cut himself off. “Never mind, I don’t think I want to know. Can you come down tomorrow night? Even if I can’t convince Sigyn’s father to see you, I want to see you.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll catch the five fifty from Waterloo, if you’ll come and fetch me. And aspergillosis is moderately nasty, but the thing you really don’t want to know about is the aspergilloma.”

“I am grateful for the clarification,” said Varney gravely, and got a ripple of her laughter.

Later, he stood at the window of his bedroom, looking out at the deep blue darkness of the gardens and the estate beyond them, stretching away into the night. All this is mine, he thought. My responsibility.

The Varney he had been four years ago would have physically cringed at the thought, and immediately set about ways to weasel out from under that responsibility — or simply ignore it altogether in hopes that it would go away, which was rather more his modus operandi. Even the Varney he had been two years ago would have gone pale and winced. A great many things had changed in the course of those years, some of which he wanted to remember and some of which he most certainly did not. Sometimes, in the dark gutter of the night, the thought of the little bottle of liquid amnesia under the bathroom sink held a rather horrible appeal.

(It was difficult to wrap one’s head around the fact that the Devil himself had given them a bottle full of Lethe water to take home, like the world’s most improbable party favor, so Varney mostly did not try.)

On the whole, the good outweighed the bad, with Greta Helsing very firmly on the positive side. It still amazed Varney that they were actually married, that this was real, that he could have this without the universe snatching it away again. With Greta, everything had changed; with Greta, he had someone with him, someone to lean against, someone to catch him when he fell: a partner to share his days and nights with, to rely on, to trust. That, Varney had never had at all.

With that trust had come a sort of solid foundation that he could build himself upon, take chances he could never have dared to on his own, allow himself to be vulnerable — and it was entirely due to this exploration of what and who he actually was that Varney could view the idea of his responsibilities with pleasure rather than sick dread. He did not know it, and would never have thought of such a thing in so many words, but he had started to make himself into a person rather than a sack of hideous insecurities held together with bad intentions and despair.

Leaning on the windowsill with the night breeze stirring his hair, Varney looked out into Dark Heart’s park and the forest beyond, very aware of the sharp edge where the warmth and light of the house met the vast dark blue stillness of the night: one world resting against another, held in balance, in agreement.

This is mine, he thought, and then — deliberately—and I belong to it.

Greta had come to love the train journey out of London more and more as the days lengthened. Watching the grey metropolis recede as the train raced deeper into green countryside, hedgerows and fields flashing past in the golden light of late afternoon, was ever so slightly magic. By the time Varney met her at the Salisbury station, the sun was low in the sky; there was perhaps an hour left before it would set, and the short drive to Dark Heart in that heavy golden light had been so beautiful, neither of them had said very much at all.

“I don’t know what to expect,” said Varney now, settling a bottle of cask-strength Connemara and one of Chopin vodka into a picnic hamper. “I’ll do my best to convince him to let you in, but I have my doubts about my ability to persuade.”

“Just soften him up a little,” said Greta, smiling, and followed him out onto the terrace. In the golden slant-light the tweed shooting-jacket he wore was the color of honey, the silver streaks in his dark hair mellow and warm. She wondered if he knew how he looked, if the effect was achieved on purpose; with Ruthven, nothing aesthetic or sartorial was in any way accidental, but Varney curated his own appearance to a significantly lesser extent. “Do the lord-of-the-manor Sir Francis, Baronet bit. If he’s anything like the other elderly wights I’ve met, he’ll enjoy chatting with someone of noble quality.”

Varney gave her a wry smile. “I am not full of virtues and noble qualities,” he said. “But I have been at least four separate titled peers over the centuries, including a baron, so I suppose that counts.”

“Definitely,” said Greta. “The whiskey will also help.”

The little cluster of barrows belonging to Sigyn and her family was tucked into the corner of a fallow field, perhaps two miles from Dark Heart itself, struck gold by the westering sun. They could see from quite a long way off when Sigyn — sitting atop one of the barrows — rose to her feet and waved; Greta waved back.

She came to meet them. “I can’t thank you enough, both of you. He’s actually quite excited to see you, Sir Francis, even though he’s pretending otherwise: he insisted on wearing all his best jewels and made us take down his sword from the wall.”

“Good heavens,” said Varney, but he was smiling. “I hope he’s not planning to demonstrate its use. This”—and he handed her the Connemara—“is for him, and the vodka is for you.”

Sigyn looked at the bottle, and her eyes widened. “Thank you very much indeed; this will cheer Dad up no end. Follow me?”

“I’ll wait outside,” said Greta, and watched them vanish into the darkness underneath a low stone lintel. After a moment or two she climbed the next barrow over and settled down to watch the sunset; she was high up enough here that she could see for miles and miles, past Dark Heart in its valley to the distant hills beyond. The ancient patchwork of hedgerows and fields, the woods and spinneys, had not changed in hundreds of years. The age of the countryside felt like a weight on Greta’s shoulders, but not an unkind one.

“It’s one of the better views around here,” said Sigyn, and Greta looked down to find the wight standing by her father’s barrow, hands on hips, looking at the last of the golden sunset-light on the horizon. It wouldn’t be full dark for quite some time yet. “We’re quite fortunate, as wights go.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Greta. “It’s peaceful. I don’t really notice how much of that we lack in London, but here it’s impossible to ignore.”

“It is peaceful,” said the barrow-wight, climbing up to sit beside Greta. “Most of the time, anyway. It’s a long way to come for a house call. I really do appreciate you coming down.”

“I haven’t done anything yet,” she said. “No idea if he’ll even see me, but I’ve brought some stuff you can give him regardless. Is the barrow even remotely warm or dry?”

“No,” said Sigyn, sighing. “We have this argument all the time. At least he let us put electric light in, ages ago, but he won’t have a dehumidifier or a space heater in the place. The closest I ever got to convincing him was when there was actual mold growing on some of his things, and even then he wouldn’t go for it.”

Greta nodded. “Just about what I’d expect,” she said. “I’ve seen very similar cases before. He’ll be all right, Sigyn.”

“I know,” said the wight, and then startled, looking over at the next barrow to see Varney emerging from the dark entry tunnel. He straightened up, pushed back his hair, and smiled at the pair of them.

“Mr. Hrafn will allow Dr. Helsing the privilege of a consultation,” he said, still smiling. “As a personal favor to Sir Francis Varney.”

“You are a gem,” Greta said. She got up, picked up her bag — which clanked — and went to kiss him firmly before ducking inside.

She had been in many barrows, over the years, but it was always slightly worrying: the dank, dark passageway seemed to go on for far longer than one would have thought possible, given the size of the barrow itself. Eventually she reached a hanging animal hide that served as something of a door, pushed it aside, and stepped through into a roughly circular domed chamber lit with what appeared to be the kind of plastic-globe hanging lamps popular in the 1970s. The atmosphere was dank and chill, with a strong smell of mildew, just as she had expected.

Across the chamber, on a low bed draped with rich furs, lay one of the oldest creatures Greta had ever seen outside of her mummy practice. Skeletally thin and wizened, his eyes nothing more than bright points of light in wrinkle-shadowed sockets, bald save for a few straggling locks of snow-white hair, the barrow-wight wore a white grave-robe barely visible under a vast, glitter-glowing weight of jewelry: necklaces of gold and silver and raw amber, brooches set with massive stones. On his head were two circlets, both gold, set with amber and agates; the hands clasped over the hilt of the sword that lay next to him were baskets of bone, dwarfed by the huge jeweled rings on every finger and the heavy gold bangles on both wrists.

Greta had seen barrow-wights’ hoards before; this was the finest collection she’d ever encountered. “Good God,” she said. “That’s some absolutely stunning goldwork you’ve got there, and I’ve never seen a finer cairngorm brooch. — I beg your pardon, Mr. Hrafn. I’m Dr. Greta Helsing, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

One of the quickest ways to mollify a barrow-wight was to compliment their jewelry, and this one was no different; the glower he was directing at her lifted noticeably as he touched the brooch’s huge gem, a piece of smoky quartz the size of a child’s fist. “There is one like it in the British Museum,” he said, his voice a whistling, wheezy croak, “but mine is better.”

“It certainly is. And that amber is exquisite.” She came over to the bed, sat down on a low wooden stool beside it. “Not to mention the inlay work in your sword. You must be very proud of such a collection.”

“It is the best hoard in England,” Hrafn declared. “At least you appreciate it, even if you are a mortal, and by rights I should strike your head from your shoulders for daring to set foot within my barrow.”

“I also appreciate the restraint,” said Greta mildly. “Now: Sigyn said you’ve got a cough and that you’ve been having joint pain that’s been worse recently. Is it all over, or do some joints hurt more than others?”

He looked down, glowering again, but after a moment or two admitted that it was all over, but his shoulders and hands were giving him the worst trouble, and he’d had a cough but it was quite all right now and Sigyn should mind her own business, which led inevitably into a brief but embarrassing coughing fit. When it was over, she asked if he could demonstrate the range of motion in his hands, which was about what she’d expected: it was clear that the old wight was in real pain, and that the chilly damp atmosphere was doing him no good whatsoever.

“This isn’t very nice at all,” she said, gently tilting his hand in hers, examining the swollen knuckles. Touching him was a shock: he was so cold it burned. “What are you taking for it?”

“Aspirin,” said Hrafn, “from time to time. When it is bad.”

“I’m willing to bet that it’s bad all the time and occasionally gets worse,” said Greta. “You need something to knock back the pain and reduce the inflammation; you also need something topical to rub on when it’s really misbehaving, both of which I can give you now and are easy to get hold of over the counter.” She took a bottle of ibuprofen and a tube of Voltaren gel out of her bag, along with her stethoscope, which he eyed suspiciously. “I need to listen to your back and chest,” she said. “It won’t take long, and you needn’t take off any of your jewelry.”

This he suffered with bad grace, grumbling to himself about mortals. She was done with auscultation and hooking the scope around her neck when he started to cough again, harder this time, bending him over and clattering the ropes of precious metal and jewels together, and without thinking at all, Greta steadied him with a hand on his chest and helped him lean over, rubbing his back. He was so cold it hurt, but she didn’t pull back; didn’t let go until the coughing fit was over and she could ease him back to the cushions and try to rub some life back into her hands.

He blinked up at her, exhausted and shocked, presumably at her mortal presumption for touching him, and Greta wondered briefly if the striking of heads from shoulders was still on the table, but when he got his breath back, all he said was, “… Why did you do that?”

“To help,” said Greta simply. “I’m sorry for the — familiarity.”

“You held on to me,” he said, looking at her white hands. “It must have been painful.”

“A bit,” she said with a shrug, “but you needed help, and I am going to give you something for the secondary bacterial infection you’ve picked up and haven’t been able to clear due to several factors including the air quality and temperature in here.”

Hrafn was still looking at her as if she had suddenly sprouted a second head. After a moment or two he said, “Why are you a doctor? It’s an unsuitable thing for a woman to be.”

Greta was rummaging once more in the bag and came out with a handful of amoxicillin samples. “Because my father was a doctor and he had no sons,” she said. “I wasn’t about to let the family business go under simply because of patriarchal institutionalized misogyny, so off I went to school to learn all sorts of unsuitable things. Take one of these twice a day until they’re all gone, even if you feel better before then. That part’s very important.”

“Family business,” Hrafn repeated. “That I will allow is—suitable. To follow in one’s father’s footsteps and carry on the line.”

“To keep the lamp alight,” Greta said. “Yes. That. Now, you can have two of these every four hours for the pain, and a bit of this gel four times a day — I’ll leave the dosing instructions with Sigyn for that. Here, give me your hands.”

Surprisingly enough, he obeyed at once, and she managed not to wince at the chill when she began to apply the Voltaren; he shivered at the touch, but didn’t pull away. “It is sad that the child Sir Francis spoke of has no family tradition to continue. No home.”

“He mentioned her?” Greta went on carefully rubbing the gel into his swollen knuckles. “None of us are sure what to do about her. With her. She needs somewhere to go that isn’t London or Dark Heart.”

Hrafn stared at her. “But is it not obvious, the answer?” Before she could reply, his pinpoint eyes widened and he looked down at his hand. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. I had — forgotten. What it is not to hurt. How strange.”

Greta couldn’t help smiling: this was why she did what she did, to take away pain. To fix what was wrong. “Give me your other hand,” she said. Now that her own fingers were numb, it was less of an effort to go on touching him. “The effect will wear off, but I am glad to see that it works on barrow-wights. What did you mean, the answer is obvious?”

“I can move,” said Hrafn, gingerly curling his fingers, clearly waiting for the pain to strike. “I can — hold things? And not drop them?”

“I don’t see why not,” she said. “Hrafn. The answer?”

“You are oddly obtuse even for a mortal,” he said. “The child should go to the leader of her kind. The patriarch. The one who holds most power. Who else is so well suited to teach her the ways of that family she has unintentionally joined?”

“Dracula?” said Greta. “I — yes, honestly it would be ideal, I’ve thought so for some time, but he’s Count Dracula; he’s not the sort of person one rings up to ask if they’d be willing to take in an orphan child.”

“Why not?” said Hrafn. “You don’t know him. He might want to be.”

Greta stared at him as a number of things suddenly fell into place, like iron filings in a radio coherer aligning all at once, passing a signal across. “You know,” she said, “you’re absolutely right.”

When she emerged from the barrow, it was full dark, with a vast scatter of diamond stars arching across the sky. Sigyn and Varney were waiting for her, with various levels of visible anxiety; she smiled. “Everything is fine. I’ve given him a week’s worth of antibiotics to knock out the chest infection; if it’s still around by then, we’ll do some cultures. Also ibuprofen for the arthritis, and this gel, which seems to work nicely; here’s the dosing instructions.” She handed over the tube and pill-bottle. “And — um, he sort of gave me this?”

In her palm lay a narrow golden ring: heavy, tawny gold, not the bright yellow of the modern metal. “He insisted.”

Sigyn was smiling helplessly. “He loves ring-giving. What on earth did you say to him?”

“Not a lot,” said Greta. “But I did tell him his hoard is amazing, which is the simple truth. We’re working on the idea of the dehumidifier and air purifier, but we’re not there quite yet. I think you might be able to get him to concede to have some of his things brought outside to beat the dust out and let them get some sunlight, though.”

“That’s progress,” said Sigyn. “I really cannot thank you enough. Both of you.”

“Our pleasure,” said Varney, taking Greta’s hand. “Shall we be off?”

“I think so. Sigyn, will you thank him again for the ring, for me?”

“Of course,” she said, and disappeared into the barrow.

Alone under the stars, Greta leaned up to kiss her husband. “I have something important we need to talk about,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

CHAPTER 10

Grisaille had seen Edmund Ruthven in extremis, suffering under a curse that inflicted excruciating pain; had seen Edmund Ruthven miserably ill, irritated, angry, but never this kind of icy wound-tight cold. Until now.

Cold and viciously unhappy at the same time. Grisaille could smell it, acrid and unpleasant, across the kitchen table.

Ruthven’s phone lay in the middle of the table, on speaker; the screen showed GRETA was on the line. In fact, it was Greta and Varney, on speaker themselves, and this was shaping up to be one of the least enjoyable phone conversations Grisaille had had in years. He’d tried to get a few words in edgeways, at the beginning, and been snapped at sharply enough to discourage further attempts, although he couldn’t actually make himself leave the room.

“But look,” Greta was saying. He could hear her own surprise at Ruthven’s reaction to her suggestion quite clearly. “The barrow-wight was right, Edmund, she ought to be with someone who can protect and teach her, someone powerful and important—”

“Never mind the barrow-wight,” said Ruthven. “What he has to say on the matter is completely irrelevant. As is your own opinion. This is vampire business, Greta, kindly stay out of it.”

“But what if Dracula wants to? He’s interested; he called me to ask about her. Directly cold-called me. I didn’t initiate anything.”

“Nor will you,” said Ruthven. “Let me be crystal clear on this point: I am not going to throw away two hundred years’ worth of character restoration efforts to prove I am the sort of person who is so completely incompetent at caring for the creatures under my protection that I am reduced to ringing up the spiritual leader of my bloody species to ask if he might consider doing it for me, and nor will you. Neither am I inclined to pester Count Dracula for updates on the fucking investigation in America.”

“It really does seem like he’s interested in the kid,” Grisaille said. “I mean. Why else would he call a human to chat about her?”

“Stay out of this,” said Ruthven sharply. Grisaille narrowed his eyes.

“He’s been interested since the beginning,” he said. “Remember he was impressed when he thralled her? And there’s a lot of other stuff, too. You even said something about it once.”

“Grisaille is right,” said Varney’s voice, colder than he could remember hearing it. “There seems every reason to believe the Voivode would, if not necessarily accept the idea, at least not mind the act of it being offered.”

“Which of us has had the longest acquaintance with the Voivode?” said Ruthven. “I venture to suggest it would be me, not you, Francis, nor you, Greta, nor you, Grisaille. I’m the one of us who knows him best, and I say this idea is unacceptable.”

“Okay, so you don’t think we should introduce the idea to him over the phone,” Grisaille said, trying to sound reasonable. “What if we invited him to visit?”

“Have you completely lost your mind?” Ruthven said, ice crystallizing on the syllables. “That’s worse: that implies I’m the sort of person who is so useless as to need Count Dracula to drop whatever he’s doing and physically come over to sort out my incompetence for me.”

“What sort of person are you?” said a quite different voice, and with a sudden weight of dread in his stomach, Grisaille turned to see Lucy Ashton standing in the doorway, very white. The scarlet of her eyes stood out vividly. “Are you the sort of person who thinks asking someone to have a kid stay with them is the worst thing anyone can imagine, or the sort of person who finds books for a kid and lets her stay up all night reading if she wants to?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Ruthven in a little strengthless voice, and covered his face with his hands, slumping like a string-cut puppet. There was a long moment of stunned silence before Grisaille turned back to Lucy.

“I think he’s probably the sort who’s worked himself up into a truly stupid state and now feels like shit about it,” he said. “If you want my opinion, that is.”

“Lucy?” said Greta on the phone. “Grisaille is right. Ruthven sometimes gets himself upset over things that don’t actually matter so much. It’s not about you; it’s never been about you. It’s about him.”

“Actually it is about you,” said Ruthven, but didn’t take his hands away from his face to do it. He sounded like someone who had just been punched fairly hard in the stomach. “It’s about the first question we all failed to ask you: Would you like to go and live with Dracula, if it could be arranged? Is that even a thing you’d want to do?”

Grisaille blinked. Had they all really just skipped over that part without realizing? He thought back over the past several days and could not recall this particular conversation ever actually taking place.

Christ, he thought, we really are a Mickey Mouse operation, aren’t we.

Lucy came into the kitchen, still paper-white. “You never asked. Nobody asks fosters where they want to live.”

“And I didn’t think of it,” said Ruthven, finally sitting up and looking at her. Revealed, his face was just about as white as hers, with flushed spots burning high on each cheek; his eyes were suspiciously bright. “I didn’t think, because I wasn’t thinking much at all, and I am most heartily sorry for it, Lucy.”

“You’re scared of him, and you don’t want him to think you’re not good enough,” said Lucy. “It’s hard to think when you’re scared.”

“… Yes,” said Ruthven helplessly. “Yes, it is.”

“What did you say the other day, Dr. Helsing?” she asked. “About minutes. How many minutes it takes to understand who somebody is, by talking to them.”

“I think I came up with ten,” said Greta, sounding more than a little impressed.

Lucy just nodded. “That,” she said, looking at Ruthven. There was a short but incredibly pregnant pause before she continued, “And I don’t know. I liked him when he was doing the eye thing to me but I don’t know if I want to stay with him. And his wife. Is she nice?”

Ruthven blinked at her. “I — yes, I think so—would you like to meet them?”

Lucy nodded. “Really meet them. Not just over the computer.”

Grisaille turned back to him, eyebrow raised. “Maybe,” he said, “you ought to ring him up, and ask.”

A brief, vivid flush came and went in Ruthven’s face; he closed his eyes for a moment before saying, deliberately, like a man pulling out a splinter despite the pain, “Yes. Maybe I ought.”

A short while later Grisaille and Lucy were half-watching The Great British Bake Off in the drawing room, Ruthven having retreated to his office to make the call. “This is the season with the serial killer in it,” Grisaille said with a grin. “See if you can pick him out of the lineup.”

“There isn’t a serial killer,” Lucy told him. “Nobody says anything about serial killers; it’s about baking.”

“I maintain that that guy,” Grisaille said, “the one in the green sweater, absolutely murders people and consumes human flesh. Look at him. Seriously.”

Lucy peered at the screen. “… Okay, maybe. But not on-screen.”

“They wouldn’t let them show that part,” Grisaille agreed.

There was a brief silence, in which Paul Hollywood accused someone of having a soggy bottom, and then Lucy said, “That thing that just happened.”

“Yeah?” he said, hiding dismay.

“Is it because I read that book about him?”

Grisaille sighed. “Partly,” he said. “It’s not your fault, you didn’t know he was stupidly sensitive about that whole business, and it’s partly because as you so pithily pointed out he is scared of Count Dracula’s disapproval.”

“Why does the book thing make him so…” She trailed off. “I don’t know the word.”

“Neurotic,” said Grisaille delicately. “I don’t know for sure, but I think it really is just because he kind of detests the person he used to be, the one that inspired that extremely mediocre novel, and his whole deal is that he’s a competent and capable guardian of the city and the monsters in it. So anything that might suggest he doesn’t have everything under control is awful, and he doesn’t want the vampire he looks up to more than anybody to think less of him, and it all gets mixed up in his brain into the regrettable scene you just witnessed.”

“Does Dracula mind that I read his book?” she asked. “I tried to read Mr. Varney’s and couldn’t.”

“Practically no one can,” said Grisaille. “But no, I don’t think Dracula or Varney would care very much one way or another.”

“What about you?” said Lucy. “I didn’t see your name in any of the books I’ve been reading. Do you care?”

“Ah,” said Grisaille, “that would be because (a) I wasn’t calling myself Grisaille back then, (b) I was human, and (c) the book so very much is not about me. It doesn’t really say much about the person I was back then, so nope: I don’t care at all.”

“But there is a book,” Lucy said.

“There certainly is, and I am pleased to report that it’s a hell of a lot better than either The Vampyre or Varney. Written by a lady.” He smiled.

“And you’re not gonna tell me the name,” Lucy said.

“Spot on,” said Grisaille, smiling wider. “Bright young thing such as yourself should have no problem figuring it out.”

“You suck,” she informed him, and both of them had to snicker, turning their attention back to the TV.

They were halfway through the showstopper challenge when Ruthven came in, and Grisaille had been about to make a witty remark about serial killers when he actually got a good look at him. Ruthven was not so much pale as grey, his lips bloodless. The impression of a spring wound as tight as possible, just before breaking, was very clear indeed.

“I am pleased to announce that the Count and Countess will be arriving at Heathrow tomorrow night at eight forty-five,” he said in a bright and brittle voice. “I have to make up the best bedroom.”

Lucy had also turned to stare at him; now she slid off the couch. “You should sit down, Mr. Ruthven,” she said. “Me and Mr. Grisaille can make the bed; you just tell us where the sheets and stuff are. I’m good at making beds. I can do hospital corners and everything.”

Grisaille, who had been wondering to himself if he’d actually be able to cross the room in time to catch Ruthven if he fainted, simply stood and watched as the girl took Ruthven’s hand and led him to a chair. “Lucy’s right,” he said. “Between us I am entirely sure we are capable of making even the most stately and enormous of beds, bracing though the challenge be. The middle one, yes? With the red hangings?”

Ruthven transferred his gaze to Grisaille, and seemed to gather the edges of his self-control. “… Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes, of course, and the very nice sheets in the airing-cupboard. And fetch the crystal vanity tray from the other bedroom. And hoover the carpet. And we should change the lamps on the nightstands; the ones in our room with the glass drops on the shades are nicer.”

By the end of the list, he sounded less brittle and much more like himself, and Grisaille was fairly sure he wasn’t going to fall over if he stood up. “Got it,” he said. “And tomorrow I’ll go fetch flowers. You just sit there and watch the insipid telly like a good vampire; don’t worry about a thing.”

It had been Grisaille who rang Greta and told her about the imminent visit of the Voivode and Countess; it was Grisaille, looking rather grim, who met her and Varney at the door the following evening.

“How is he?” she asked, not bothering with preliminaries.

“About where you’d expect,” he said, taking her coat. “He’s gone into that sort of one can always do what one must adrenaline-surfing stage. I just hope he has enough stamina to make it through the evening before the collapse.”

Greta nodded. It was one of Ruthven’s responses to stress: he went very cold and very clear and intensely focused on the task at hand, burning up all his reserves of energy, and — once it was done — tended to fall over. “What about Lucy?”

“Weirdly cool with it,” he said. “She was all you should sit down last night and got him to a chair so he didn’t actually faint, to everyone’s relief, and volunteered to make up the guest room. Also she can do hospital corners. Better than me, if I’m scrupulously honest.”

Greta followed him into the kitchen, Varney behind her. In its bright cheerful light Grisaille looked both tired and worried, his dark skin faintly greyish, and she knew he was remembering — as she was — the hideous few days of Ruthven’s curse, when neither of them had been able to do a damned thing to help him other than overdoses of morphine. At least this time the trouble was all in Ruthven’s mind, and she was fairly sure it would go away once their illustrious guests had actually arrived. “What can I do?” she asked.

“Blood,” he said. “We’re going to need quite a lot more with two more vamps in the house. Can you get hold of some pretty sharpish?”

“Yes, of course,” said Greta, pulling out her phone. “The clinic’s delivery was yesterday; I can go fetch what’s in our freezers.”

“I can go,” Varney said quietly. “Let me be of use?”

He had been quiet ever since the announcement of the visit the previous night, and Greta hadn’t tried very hard to draw him out. She remembered him volunteering to fetch groceries, back in the very beginning, during the Gladius Sancti business. How unexpected and welcome the offer had been, and how much it had seemed to relieve him to have something to do while crisis loomed all around them. Thought, briefly, of Colonel Brandon: Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.

“Thank you,” she said simply, and handed him her keys. “The walk-in’s locked, use this one to get in. All the stock is dated, newest to the right as you go in.”

Varney just nodded, slipping the clinic keys into his coat pocket, and silently retreated. They’d driven up rather than taking the train, and his MG was parked down the street.

“Thanks,” said Grisaille, and ran his hands over his face. “Fuck knows how tonight is going to go. I’m gonna apologize in advance if this is unbelievably awful.”

“It’s not going to be unbelievably awful,” said Greta firmly. “Just awkward as hell. Where is he?”

“Upstairs fiddling with the flower arrangements,” he said. “You don’t by chance happen to have a bunch of Xanax in your handbag?”

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, she thought. Aloud she said, “All out, I’m afraid. Don’t worry too much, Grisaille. He’ll manage. I’ll make sure of it.”

“Thank fuck for you,” he said, and then covered his face with his hands. “Pretend I didn’t say that?”

“Say what?” said Greta, smiling.

Upstairs she found Ruthven, the color of good bond paper, leaning on the best room’s exquisite little writing-desk with both hands, his eyes shut. The best bedroom was the largest, the middle of three that looked out over the Embankment and the river itself, and the hangings were a rich dark garnet color that to Greta suggested both wine and blood. On a little rosewood vanity between the windows, laden with crystal brushes and bowls, sat a Sèvres vase containing what Greta estimated to be at least a hundred quid’s worth of flowers, including one tulip with a kinked stem.

“It won’t stay up,” he said, without bothering to open his eyes or turn to greet her. “I don’t quite know why that should be the end of the world, but it feels like it.”

“Because you are running entirely on adrenaline,” said Greta matter-of-factly. “I doubt they’ll mind one tulip missing. Cut it off short and put it in a bud vase; it’ll look nice on the nightstand. When did you last have anything to eat?”

He finally straightened up and turned around, and she could see the effort of winching his usual unflappable urbane persona back into place. “Successfully? Yesterday, I think. I’m all right, Greta, you don’t need to worry. I can get through this.”

“I’m not worrying,” she said. “What I am doing is insisting you have some blood, and then, if you want it, I can give you something to make sure you can get through this.”

“Oh, thank God,” he said, sagging with visible relief. “I wanted to ask you but—”

“I know,” said Greta. “It’s all right, Edmund. Come downstairs.”

He nodded, then held up a finger—wait a moment—and went over to the flower arrangement, pulling the bent tulip gently free of its fellows. There was a sort of terrible delicacy in the way he cut off the stem with a slightly pointed thumbnail, settling the flower into a tiny crystal vase, which for an illogical moment made Greta want to cry.

Downstairs Grisaille had pocketed the car-keys, to Greta’s faint relief, and was shrugging into his coat. “Don’t even start,” he said as Ruthven drew breath to protest. “I know this is your city and you’re the host and all that sort of thing, I do know, Edmund, but right now you’re not in any shape to drive and you know it.”

Ruthven sighed, and sat down at the kitchen table with rather less grace than usual. “Fuck,” he said, passing a hand over his face. “Yes. You’re right. I don’t have to like it.”

“You can feel abundantly free to dislike it,” said Grisaille, “but you are staying right there and I am going to the airport.”

“Quite right,” said Greta, with a hand on Ruthven’s shoulder, and she was slightly horrified to see Lucy standing by the door, staring.

“Can I go, too?” Lucy asked. “With Mr. Grisaille?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Greta. “For two reasons: one, you need to help me keep an eye on Mr. Ruthven here, and two, people are very much not at their best when they’ve just got off an airplane, and they will want to make a rather better first impression on you.”

Lucy considered this, and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “What’s it like, being on an airplane?”

“Cramped and uncomfortable, unless you’re rich,” said Grisaille, “and even then it’s just uncomfortable. Right, I’ll do the diplomatic bit and usher them home — wish me luck?”

When he had gone, Greta fetched a bag from the fridge and set about making Ruthven a cup of blood, which he regarded without love. “Drink that first,” she said. “Slowly, but drink it all. Do you want something to knock the nerves down?”

He looked at the cup for a moment longer, and then took a sip, eyes closed: the effort it took to swallow and keep it down was visible. “—Yes,” he said after a moment. “I seem to need it.”

There was a lot more being said there, Greta knew: for him, admitting that he needed help was a form of surrender. “Lucy, I think my bag’s in the drawing-room. Somewhere in there’s a bottle marked alprazolam containing little oval orange tablets. Can you bring me one?”

Lucy hurried off, and Greta gave Ruthven’s shoulder a little squeeze. “This will all be over soon,” she said. “And then I am pouring you into bed and enlisting Grisaille to make sure you stay there, and don’t let’s do this again?”

“You have my solemn word,” said Ruthven. “Greta — thanks. Really. For this and for everything. I’m sorry about me.”

“Hush,” she said, desperately fond, and he covered her hand with his.

Ruthven managed half the blood before giving up, and Greta gave him the little orange pill without commentary; he made a face at the bitterness, but said nothing, closing his eyes and leaning back in the chair.

It took about thirteen minutes before he opened his eyes again and sat up straight, looking much brighter. “That’s better,” he said. “That’s much better. I’m going to go up and change.”

“Good,” said Greta. She was confident at least that he’d be capable of receiving the Draculas, if not at his sparkling and vivacious best, and she was very glad to hear Varney’s keys in the lock as he let himself in, carrying several anonymous tote bags.

She kissed him in the hallway. “Thanks for bringing it over,” she said. “Grisaille’s gone to fetch the nobility and Ruthven’s upstairs making himself beautiful. What did you get?”

“A variety,” he said. “To — hopefully — suit the noble palate. I made the assumption that as the classic draculine vampire is named after the Voivode, he shares their characteristics, but I did bring one of the special units you keep for me just in case.”

They went through into the kitchen and Greta examined the tote bags’ contents. Lucy came back from the drawing room, curious to see the different types of blood. “What kind of special units?” she asked Varney, who colored faintly.

“Remember when I told you that Varney’s a different type of sanguivore than you?” Greta said. “One of the major traits of his subspecies is that he can only drink a certain kind of blood or he’ll be terribly ill. It’s a bit like humans who can’t have gluten or dairy or something.”

“What kind of blood?” Lucy peered at the labels. Varney’s blush, unregarded, deepened.

“Blood from human virgins,” Greta said, matter-of-fact. “Which is extremely inconvenient, but we manage.”

Lucy made a face. “Why’s that different?”

“That is an extremely good question,” said Greta, putting the units away in the freezer. “A lot of very smart people have been trying to work that one out for a while now, and there’s a university in Germany where research is focused exactly on that topic.”

“So nobody knows?”

“So far. The physical composition of the blood doesn’t change, at least as far as we know — it’s not chemically different — so it’s got to be something nonphysical. Spiritual. If we can work out what spiritually changes, it might be possible to isolate that factor and adjust it.”

“Spiritually like crystal balls and tarot stuff?”

“Spiritually as in souls,” said Greta. “It’s complicated.” In fact, she’d spent quite a lot of her time since meeting Sir Francis Varney thinking about the pre-/post-coitarchal blood question. Having the stuff blessed didn’t make any difference; having it cursed did nothing. Back in Hell, in the emergency trauma ward, Faust had had his staff running Lake Avernus water through the mirabilic resonance scanner to adjust its pneumic nature to mimic angel blood; Greta wondered idly if the scanner might possibly be used to alter post-coitarchal blood to mimic its more innocent precursor.

Lucy apparently found souls uninteresting; she got down from the table and went back to the drawing-room to read. Greta finished putting away the blood and turned to slip her arms around Varney’s waist. “I think we’ve done all we can do,” she said. “I’m going to go put on something a bit nicer than jeans, and then I think we’ve got time for a drink before Grisaille gets back with our visitors. See what Ruthven’s scotch collection looks like this week?”

Varney kissed her, firmly and with deliberate intent.

Some little time later, she and Varney sat on the couch with Ardbeg, while Lucy curled up in one of the armchairs with a handsome copy of Frankenstein in her lap, enthralled.

“I wonder how he’ll feel about being back on English soil,” said Greta, leaning into Varney’s arm around her shoulders. “The Voivode. I mean, last time he got here on a boat, which must have been fairly dreadful if he’s anything like the rest of you, and his departure was somewhat precipitous. You have to assume there’s some emotional baggage attached.”

“I’ve no idea,” said Varney mildly. “I believe it is the Countess’s first visit to Britain, though. One hopes to make it a pleasant one. At least the plane obviates the necessity of the hateful sea-voyage, even if it is cramped and uncomfortable.”

His first flight had been a couple of years ago, a headlong rush to Paris to find a missing Greta, and after the first few moments of solid physical terror had passed off and the drinks trolley arrived, Varney had rather enjoyed himself.

“The fact that they seem to have jumped on the chance to come over as soon as Ruthven mentioned it suggests they’re fairly keen to be here,” said Greta, and sipped her whiskey. “I still can’t believe Count Dracula rang me up to chat about rapid sanguivorous transitions. Good old great-great-whatever-grand-uncle Abraham would have been surprised.”

“Possibly even shocked,” said another voice, and she looked up to see Ruthven in the doorway, and blinked.

The transformation was stunning. He’d changed into a dark red shirt with a faint shine to it, and done his hair with something that let it fall in a soft black sheaf over his left eye, rather than the extra-hold gel he often used. Black pearls gleamed in his earlobes and from his cufflinks. Only because she knew him so well could Greta read the tells of beautifully-hidden exhaustion, of endurance pushed near to its limits, drawn down to a bright thread.

“What?” he said under their combined stare.

“You clean up real pretty,” said Greta, and he rolled his eyes.

“Your input is appreciated.” Ruthven looked over his shoulder as footsteps sounded outside and keys rattled in the door. “Overture and beginners, please,” he said, “we’re on.”

CHAPTER 11

Greta watched as Ruthven stepped into the hall to welcome his guests, and a pang of uncharacteristic shyness made her stay right where she was rather than going to watch through the doorway. Varney glanced over, but he, too, seemed content to remain; Lucy had left the book closed on the seat of her armchair and was peering owlishly from behind the chair itself. She listened instead. Some murmuring, and then Ruthven — as charming and urbane as she had ever heard him — saying “Welcome, welcome, Voivode, Countess, it is an enormous pleasure to have you in my home. Please, let me take your luggage; I’ll show you to your room; you must be exhausted from the journey. Follow me.”

A woman’s voice, low and sweet, said something Greta didn’t catch, and then there were footsteps on the stairs and the voices grew more distant. Grisaille, looking somewhat etiolated, came into the drawing-room and headed directly for the sideboard with the whiskey decanters.

“Well?” Greta demanded after a brief silence.

“Well what?” Grisaille flopped into a chair carefully enough not to spill his drink, and drank quite a lot of it. “I went and fetched them from the airport, exactly as advertised. What did you do to Edmund, feed him amphetamines?”

“Precisely the opposite,” said Greta. “He’s being himself as overtly and as hard as he possibly can, and I don’t know how long he’s got before he runs out of energy completely, but he’s at least not drowning in his own nerves. What are they like?”

“They’re quality,” said Grisaille, the italics audible. “Gracious. And it’s not oh-let’s-be-nice-to-the-help-for-a-lark deliberate, either. Didn’t say a lot on the drive back. I get the feeling Count Dracula doesn’t enjoy flying all that incredibly much.” He took another long sip. “Except as a bat,” he added, and gave a little unsteady laugh Greta didn’t like. This whole business had been a hell of a strain on him, especially; dealing with Ruthven in peak-neurose mode at close range would tire anybody out. The whiskey seemed to revive him a little, however, and after a few more minutes he sat up a bit. “You can come out, kiddo,” he said, and Lucy did, in fact, emerge the rest of the way from behind her chair. “They’re awfully chuffed about the prospect of meeting you. Très bona to varda your dewy youthful eek, is the general gist.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, scowling, and Grisaille laughed again, less unsteadily.

“It means your uncle Grisaille is extraordinarily old,” he said. “You’ll like them, Lucy. Truth be told, I think they’re a bit nervous themselves, which is a jolly funny thing to say about our vampire lords and masters, come to think of it.”

“What happens if he does run out of energy?” said Varney to Greta quietly, ignoring the rest of them.

“He falls over,” she said. “But I really do think he’s got enough left, and knows how and when to use it so as to avoid any truly embarrassing faux pas.”

Varney nodded, and then stiffened for a moment, head tilted, listening. “He’s coming back,” he said. “Alone. Presumably their majesties are not up to socialization at the moment.” If Grisaille was right, Greta thought, they might not be up to socialization at all until the next day, which would be both a vast relief and a huge, shocking anticlimax.

When Ruthven reappeared, very pale but looking entirely in control of himself, he sounded almost completely normal: “They’re unpacking and having a bit of a rest before coming down to say hello to everyone. Flight was a bit rough. Thanks for doing the driving, Grisaille.”

“De rien,” said Grisaille from the depths of his armchair. “Should someone go stoke the microwave’s metaphorical boilers, in case they do want some refreshment?”

“Microwaves don’t have boilers,” said Lucy. “Obviously.”

“That’s why they are metaphorical, darling infant,” he pointed out, getting up. “Do try to keep up. I can run the kitchen, Edmund, sit down and breathe for a second.”

The most surprising thing about the Draculas was how ordinary they really were. Greta hadn’t been expecting opera capes and lacy gowns, but the two people who came into the room about fifteen minutes later looked like any other extremely rich middle-aged couple. Rich was absolutely clear; she’d seen the same undeniable air of old money on other aristocrats, and it was written in the quietly elegant, extraordinarily expensive clothes they wore, as well as the vast ruby around the Countess’s neck and the diamond the size of a hazelnut on her third finger.

Dracula himself looked surprisingly like the famous portrait, minus the mustache and crown-hat-helmet thing; olive-skinned, deep-set eyes, sharp blade of a nose, not so much handsome as striking. His wife had the glamour of an aging Hollywood star from a bygone era, silver streaking her dark hair, her red lipstick immaculate. Both of them had scarlet eyes, unlike Ruthven’s white-silver; they must have been brown before the change. To Greta’s practiced eye, they were both very tired indeed, and Dracula looked a shade under the weather, but their smiles were genuine.

Everyone had risen when they entered the room, and Lucy had retreated behind her armchair; now Dracula lifted a finger. “Before anything else,” he said, the voice instantly familiar and even more compelling in person, “I would like to let everyone know that my people were able to trace Harold Baumann to a rather poorly organized group of vampires in Pennsylvania, and I have just received confirmation that the situation is fully resolved. There was some extremely distasteful nonsense going on, involved in an — initiation rite, of sorts, into a cult, or possibly a secret society, which explains Baumann’s unspeakable behavior here in the UK, but thankfully”—his voice went delicate—“this will no longer be a problem.”

“What initiation?” said Lucy, peering out from behind the chair, and Greta watched as the Voivode and Countess shared a brief but intense glance. “What do you mean?”

There was a moment of silence, and Greta could see how very much he did not want to tell her, and also how clearly he knew he had to: starting out with a lie would not be acceptable. “As I said, it was extremely distasteful,” he began carefully, “but as far as we were able to discover, would-be members of this group were instructed to first find and then drain, turn, and dump a victim within a certain length of time in order to win entry.”

Greta glanced at Varney just in time to see him force back a snarl with effort, and then she turned her gaze to Lucy’s expression, which was thoughtful but unreadable. Across the room, the Draculas also watched her anxiously. After a few moments Lucy seemed to have made some internal decision, and said, “That’s dumb. And also gross.”

Every eye in the room was on her as she came the rest of the way out from behind the armchair, crossed the room to the Voivode and Countess, and said with extremely formal politeness, hands behind her back, “Thank you very much for coming to visit us. May we offer you refreshments? We have five kinds of blood.” Pause. “Including virgin.”

There was an audible wince from several directions, and Ruthven covered his face with his hands — but Greta was watching their guests, and she thought she had very rarely seen two people look at each other with quite such a helpless sort of smile.

Some little time later, Varney had lit the fire and Grisaille had handed round generous glasses of blood and spirits, and the air in the drawing-room was one of warm, convivial comfort. The Draculas were settled on the sofa with Lucy perched on an ottoman nearby, all of her not inconsiderable attention focused entirely on the two of them; she had begun asking questions somewhat hesitantly, but by now had turned the conversation into a full-on interrogation about their home, their likes and dislikes, their history, and anything else she could think of. To Greta’s eye, they were bearing up very nicely indeed under the onslaught; they seemed delighted, if weary, to have their attention so monopolized by an inquisitive child. The rest of them might not have been present at all, so completely were they focused on Lucy.

Greta sidled up to Ruthven, who was leaning on the mantelpiece, and said quietly, “How are you?”

“Exhausted,” he said, turning to her with a little smile. He looked like himself: hollow and bruised around the eyes, but without the febrile kind of desperation he’d demonstrated earlier. “You were right, of course. Most of the stage fright passed off as soon as they got here.”

“Told you,” said Greta without rancor. “They’re just people. Incredibly important and old and rich and sophisticated, but just people who’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, well,” said Ruthven. She could tell there was still some dissonance between the Voivode and just people, but she thought perhaps it might not stay very long.

“I think this could work,” she said, and watched him glance over to them and back into the flames. “I really do.”

“We’ll see,” said Ruthven. Greta patted him on the shoulder and went to fetch herself another drink, just as the clock began to chime eleven.

Grisaille looked up. “Bedtime, Lucy,” he said. Lucy left off her interrogation and looked over her shoulder at him, scowling.

“I’m not tired,” she said. “I want to stay up and talk; it’s early.”

Ruthven straightened up. “You may not be tired,” he said rather gently, “but I expect our guests are—it’s two hours later in Romania than it is here, and they’ve had a long day and a bumpy flight.”

“It’s two hours later?”

“Time zone difference,” said Greta. “One in the morning.” She watched Lucy turn back to the Count and Countess, looking unsure, and was touched by the visible affection in the Countess’s gesture as she put a hand on her husband’s arm.

“I’m afraid Edmund is right,” she told Lucy. “Vlad and I are a little tired — but we’re looking forward to telling you all about the castle dungeons in the morning.”

“There are oubliettes,” said Dracula, with a faintly conspiratorial air, and smiled at his wife. “But thank you, Lucy, for your delightful hospitality.”

Greta was not exactly surprised when the girl flushed bright pink, but it was still deeply charming; appeased with the prospect of oubliettes, she allowed Grisaille to usher her upstairs. Left alone with the grown-ups, both Vlad and Sofiria let themselves visibly relax, the fatigue very evident indeed on their patrician faces.

“Thank you for telling us,” said Varney, apropos of nothing, and clarified: “About the American vampire. It’s — taken care of, then?”

“Entirely,” said Dracula, his expression hardening. “My people and the East Coast network made very sure that no vestige of that particular — coven, or group, or whatever they were calling themselves — was left.”

“Good,” said Varney, and there was enough iron in his tone to catch Dracula’s attention more strongly. The Count sat up a little, finishing his brandy.

“This has been difficult for you, I think, Sir Francis,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Varney. “For all of us. I — am not very good at being unable to handle situations myself, I’m afraid.” Greta knew him well enough by now to understand that he was very deliberately not asking a great many further questions at this precise moment, but there was no doubt in her mind that he had them.

“I quite understand,” said Dracula. “I apologize to you all for failing to keep you abreast of events as they unfolded; of course you would want to know what was going on. It all happened rather quickly once we found the source of the rot.”

Greta glanced at Ruthven, who was looking unreadable and also somewhat evanescent. “Were there others like Lucy?” she asked quietly. “If the members of the group had to turn someone in order to be inducted?”

“No,” said Dracula. “Not like Lucy. The other victims — as far as we could trace them; we found five — were all adults. At least three appeared to have been partly consensual.”

“What exactly did you have them do to Harold Baumann?” asked Ruthven, and went even paler. “Forgive me, Voivode, it is none of my business.”

“Let us simply say that Mr. Baumann is no more,” said Dracula, sounding very weary. “There are some ends one cannot return from, and even the vilest of things may be cleansed by fire.”

Ruthven swallowed hard and nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and Greta wished she knew what he was thinking. Behind her, Varney, at the fire, was very still, and she thought again that he was quite deliberately not pursuing the discussion further — for now. The anticlimax was one thing; the revelation that there had been more people turned for the sake of some idiotic, unforgivable club was precisely the sort of thing Greta knew Varney would not be able to let go with any ease. Part of Greta didn’t want to, either; she had a faint uneasy feeling that there had to be more to this business than met the eye. More than Dracula was telling them.

“And now,” Dracula said, in a different tone, as the moment stretched, “I beg you to excuse us; I am not so young as I once was, and as you mentioned, it has been a very long day indeed.”

“Of course,” said Ruthven. “Is there anything you need from Dr. Helsing?”

Dracula and his wife exchanged glances. “I do not believe so,” he said, “but if the doctor could spare a few moments tomorrow, when convenient, it would be much appreciated.”

“Whenever you like,” Greta assured them, and got a smile of her very own from Dracula that was tinted with the faintest hint of thrall — she was almost sure he wasn’t consciously doing it, simply tired enough to forget the very edges of control, but good God, it was effective even at such a low level. This man can make practically anyone do whatever he wants them to, whenever he wants, with one simple glance. She shivered a little, wondering what it must be like to have that kind of power at one’s disposal. How much work it must be, all the time, to keep it in check.

When she came out of the brief daze, they were gone, and Ruthven was still sitting on the arm of a chair looking greyish and unreadable. “You too,” she told him, hands on hips, and he blinked up at her. “Bed. Right now. You need sixteen hours of sleep and you’re going to have to make do with about ten of them.”

“Listen to the nice shouty doctor, dear heart,” said Grisaille. “Come along.”

For once, blessedly, Ruthven simply went, without argument; and then Greta was alone with Sir Francis Varney, and everything could stop being her problem for a little while.

Ruthven had fallen into sleep like a stone into dark water as soon as he’d crawled into bed; the kind of blank empty sleep that is completely dreamless. To him there was nothing at all between the memory of pulling the duvet over himself and being shaken awake by a small and eager hand on his shoulder. He struggled to the surface of consciousness, and was met with the sight of Lucy Ashton flushed pink with excitement, at quite close range. “Mr. Ruthven?”

“… What time is it?” he said vaguely.

“Half past nine — can I bring them breakfast in bed? I can use the microwave, I know how, I remember what kind of blood they like, can I? Please?”

Ruthven closed his eyes again for a moment, still scarcely awake. “That’s — a very kind thought,” he said, “but I’ve no idea when they usually get up and I’d rather not wake them too early.”

The disappointment was almost palpable. “Tell you what,” he said, to make up for it, “you can absolutely do it tomorrow, if we ask them what sort of time they’d like to have it. All right?”

“Okay,” she said, and the excitement was back; he rather thought that nothing could squash it for very long, just at the moment. “They told me all about the castle and how Vlad came to England the last time and how it’s not like the book says but it’s kind of like the book, and there’s wolves in the woods around the castle and he can turn into a wolf and he said he could teach me to turn into things if I’ve got the — the gift for it, I think he said, and Sofiria told me they have bats nesting in the ceilings and sometimes they come down and fly around at night — oh, and Mr. Grisaille, did you used to be called Henry?”

Grisaille had partly emerged from under the covers during her litany, and now groaned sepulchrally and withdrew once more. Ruthven, now irreparably awake, sighed and sat up, rearranging the pillows. “I see your literary explorations continue apace,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be so good as to bring me breakfast in bed? I am feeling slightly fragile.”

When she had gone, he looked over at the lump under the duvet that was Grisaille. “Well,” he said. “That was the most animated I’ve ever seen that child, and the Voivode and Countess do seem to be — somewhat profoundly taken with her. This might actually work.”

“Far be it from me,” said Grisaille from under the covers, “to say I told you so, best beloved and joy of my desiring, so I’ll just say we fucking told you so, hmmm?”

Ruthven sighed.

Later: in the drawing-room, with the net curtains closed to block out most of the uncharacteristic sunlight of a pleasant spring day, he stood by the window and watched the boats drift past on the broad, brown ribbon of the river. The effects of the nervous exhaustion of the past several days had been partly repaired by sleep, but he still felt bone-weary nonetheless, and watching the river traffic felt faintly hypnotic: something he could do without having to think of anything at all.

He was, in fact, far enough into a sort of trance that he did not sense the Voivode’s approach until he was standing right beside him: “Edmund, I wonder if I might have a word with you?”

Ruthven startled, ever so slightly, and blinked himself back into full awareness. “Um,” he said. “Yes, of course, is something the matter?”

Dracula took his elbow and steered them both to a corner farther away from the light — and from the Countess and Greta, who were deep in conversation. “Not exactly,” he said. “I wanted to relieve your mind on the subject of Harold Baumann and the American coven — I could tell you and Sir Francis were concerned — and I would like to talk with you about Lucy.”

“Of course,” Ruthven said smoothly to cover the sudden cold weight in his stomach.

“It went farther back than just that group,” said the Voivode. “As you probably surmised. Curiously enough we found some ties between their network and some of the vampires you encountered in Paris, but I suppose it is a small enough underworld to make it believably coincidental. I can again assure you that the vampires involved have been dealt with, permanently, and the New York network is taking an active role in ensuring no such secret societies will be allowed to reestablish themselves in America or elsewhere. It is over and done with. You need not concern yourself further, and neither should Sir Francis.”

“That’s — very pleasant to hear,” said Ruthven honestly. “I’m glad we were able to be of some use in tracking down the persons responsible.”

“It would have been nearly impossible without your assistance,” said Dracula. “We are all very much aware of the vital nature of the intelligence you provided. As for the other matter: Sofiria and I need to know if you are all right. If you are — sanguine — about the idea of Lucy Ashton possibly coming to live with us, if she decides she would like to.”

Ruthven stared at him. The red eyes were — for once — utterly guileless. Dracula looked like any slightly anxious middle-aged man waiting to be told something important. They’re just people, he could hear Greta say. “I — are you asking me if I mind if you adopt her?”

“It is very clear that you care deeply for the child,” said the Voivode.

“Well — of course I do, it’s — yes, I am very much in favor, I just — never thought it was the sort of thing I could even ever ask you about. I’d never want to bother you.” He sounded like an idiot even to himself, and passed a hand over his face. “I’m sorry, I’m not making much sense.”

“You do not bother me,” said the Voivode, with more warmth under the words than Ruthven could remember being directed at him. He blinked and found himself caught and held by that red gaze, just the edges of thrall commanding his full attention. “Your work here is exemplary,” Dracula continued. “I am extremely glad to have you here, watching over London; I always have been.”

Ruthven knew perfectly well his expression was ridiculously pathetic, but he absolutely could not help it, not with the Voivode right there, right next to him, saying, Your work here is exemplary.

Dracula sighed. “It is difficult,” he said, “from so far away, to convey my true appreciation for the vampires who help me keep our world in some semblance of order; but I would not have them in my network if I did not truly respect and trust them. That respect and trust is not so very lightly earned. Perhaps I should travel more, or invite my people to visit me; it is somewhat illuminating.” He was still holding Ruthven’s gaze with the very edges of thrall; it was strangely pleasant to be in somebody else’s power, to be their problem, their responsibility.

“The reception Sofiria and I have had at your hands, in your home, is both generous and thoughtful,” Dracula continued. “I have heard from many others that you, in an unkind world, are kind, Edmund St. James Ruthven, and that you provide unquestioning help where help is needed; that you keep secrets secret, and shelter in security those who have nowhere to hide; that your home is a beacon of light and warmth and safety in this grey city of a thousand years. That is all I need to know.”

When he let go of the thrall, Ruthven abruptly, absurdly, wanted it back; wanted to float in those red eyes without having to think about anything at all. The Voivode must have known; he patted Ruthven’s shoulder gently and said in a slightly different tone of voice, “I am glad to have your approval on this — venture, if it is Lucy’s wish.”

“She wanted to bring you and the Countess breakfast in bed,” said Ruthven, not quite in charge of his voice but making an effort. “And she said you were going to teach her to turn into things. I have only known her for a short time, but I have never seen her more — alive, than I did this morning.”

The Voivode actually went very faintly pink, a brush of color on each high cheekbone, just for a moment, and again Ruthven heard Greta say just people.

Across the room, the Countess looked up. “Vlad, darling?”

The Voivode nodded to Ruthven, and went to join his wife, and it was several minutes before Ruthven came down to earth sufficiently to move.

And so, a week later, he stood with the others on the tarmac at Heathrow watching as the three of them climbed the airstairs to the chartered Gulfstream: Lucy’s first flight was going to be free of the bothers and inconveniences of ordinary commercial aviation. The past days had been somewhat of a whirlwind of logistics and shopping, both of which Ruthven excelled at, and they served to some extent to resettle himself in his own mind. The Voivode had extended a standing invitation to him — and any of the rest of them who were interested — to visit them in Romania, and he thought to himself that perhaps he might just do that this autumn. Without having a nervous breakdown about it beforehand.

Lucy, in her new traveling coat, turned at the door of the airplane and waved to them, and got a chorus of waves in return. Beside Greta, Varney was looking more than usually distant, as if he was looking past the girl to something else altogether.

“You know,” said Grisaille mildly, leaning against Ruthven’s shoulder, “that kid is going to turn out to be way better at vampiring than you, me, and Varney put together.”

“I think you might be right,” said Ruthven. “It’s still a vicious crime that someone turned her so damned young, that her whole mortal life was stolen, and we don’t know how or if she’ll ever physically age, but — well. Now she has a family. A proper one, who want her, who want nothing more than to love and care for and teach her everything she needs. Which is a lot more than we could say for this country’s foster system.”

“And there are a lot worse things to be than a vampire,” Greta said. She’d spoken with the Count and Countess about Lucy’s possible development — or lack thereof — and they had promised to keep in touch with her regarding Lucy’s physical health and monitor any changes for Greta’s own scientific interest as well as the girl’s well-being. Very probably she would either stay the same or age slowly: Greta knew that it was theoretically possible, but nothing in the literature was universally known to apply. “As I believe I’ve pointed out before,” she added, turning to Varney, who slipped an arm around her, the distracted look fading from his face. “With or without a Y.”

“A viewpoint which I admit I have begun to consider,” he said, deadpan, and Ruthven knew — absolutely knew — that the Varney who had collapsed into his entry hallway bleeding from a poisoned wound several years ago would never have been capable of that level of wry self-actualization. He’s been managing rather better than I have just recently, he thought. Even if he can’t quite get past the whole America thing.

He’d told Varney about what the Voivode had passed on — that there was some kind of connection between the American clan and the group they’d met in Paris — and almost immediately regretted the decision: Varney was quite clearly not going to let it go without further thought applied to the matter. It had been strongly implied to Ruthven that the Voivode would not welcome any amateur investigations on their part into pop-up secret societies and rites of initiation, and he hoped enormously that Varney wouldn’t decide otherwise; that he could be distracted with domestic matters and leave the foreign affairs to themselves. It was hard to read him when he wasn’t trying to be unreadable, and he had been more than usually inscrutable after that conversation.

There wasn’t a hell of a lot Ruthven could do about it, not at the moment, and so he put the thought on a mental shelf to reexamine later.

Grisaille gave him a nudge. “So now what?” he asked as the Gulfstream’s engines started to spin up. They could see three faces at the windows: Dracula, Lucy, and the Countess, all waving goodbye, and waved back as the plane began to move. “Our lives resume the even tenor of their ways?”

“I wish it didn’t take so damn long to get to and from the city,” said Greta. Beside her, Varney had briefly drawn breath as if to say something, and apparently decided against it. “I’d just stay at Dark Heart and come in each morning. I’ve got to get rid of the Crouch End flat, but I can’t just go on lodging with Ruthven and Grisaille indefinitely, even if they have got loads of room.”

“Of course you can,” said Ruthven, and stopped to watch the distant shape of the white plane soar into the air, graceful as a bird in flight. “That’s them safely on their way, at least.”

“You could always purchase a tame helicopter to whisk you to the teeming metropolis, Doctor,” said Grisaille, with half a smile, as they turned to walk back to the terminal. “It’s not as if money’s an issue, I mean.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “There’s no room in the stables for a helicopter; they’re full of hairmonsters. You know what’d be ideal, though, if some handy demon could stop by on a daily basis to flip me there and back again.”

“You could always ask,” said Ruthven. “After all, you were somewhat instrumental in saving a whole bunch of lives back in that hospital in Hell.”

“Yeah,” said Grisaille. “You could ring up Fastitocalon and be like, ‘Hey, can you have a word with the London surface op, I need to shorten my commute,’ and see what he says.”

“Would that not cause — unwarranted damage to the fabric of reality?” Varney asked. “I mean. Repeated translocations and so on. Back in Paris they were very clear on the subject.”

“Before the reset maybe,” said Greta. “Now I think all the damage isn’t just fixed, it’s been undone, as if nothing was ever wrong. It might be worth the trouble of a transdimensional phone call, I suppose.”

“I can see it now,” said Grisaille, grinning. “They’d be lining up for the Taking Lady Varney to Work detail. So much jealousy in the infernal ranks.”

“Shut up,” said Greta with a very similar grin, and elbowed him in the ribs, and they walked back into the Heathrow terminal on a wave of shared laughter.

Far above now, and still climbing, the white arrow-bird of the Gulfstream jet reached for the infinite blue of the upper sky, beyond clouds, a clear blue vault that went on and on, touching the very edges of the black; and carried with it one very young and two ancient creatures into a future none of them could have imagined, not so long ago at all.

THE END

EPILOGUE

Evening, at Dark Heart: a much later hour now, full summer rather than late spring, but the sweetness of the golden slant-light and the blue dusk rising out of the ancient parklands were exactly the same. Greta Helsing sat on the parterre with a drink — and with Sir Francis Varney, at a little stone-topped table, their attention not so much on the beauty of the summer twilight as on the glowing screen propped up on the table between them.

This had become a regular habit for the two of them: keeping in touch, effortlessly and in real time, rather than relying on the phone or face-to-face visits. Since the Voivode had informed them that the American vampire clan was dealt with, Varney had not made actual mention of it in Greta’s presence, but she knew perfectly well he was still thinking about it, and talking to their friends was probably the best distraction she could provide. Mostly he seemed content, but more than once she’d caught him hastily closing his laptop as she entered a room, as if he were very determined she shouldn’t know what he was typing. Ruthven didn’t know much more than she did, and Greta knew that worried him a little — but she also knew that Ruthven could find something to worry about no matter what.

The screen showed several faces in individual squares: Ruthven and Grisaille, Lucy Ashton, and — most surprisingly — Hrafn the barrow-wight. Greta had given the old wight an iPad some time ago, expecting the response she received, Get this modern nonsense out of my barrow, mortal, which lasted until she called up the online gallery of the British Museum’s jewelry collection to show him, so that he could compare his own and be reminded that his was enormously superior. After that, Hrafn had refused to relinquish the thing until it was completely out of batteries, at which point Greta and Sigyn between them had managed to convince him that his marvelous new toy could only work if they installed the proper electrical infrastructure in the barrow to charge it — and having crossed that particular Rubicon, it had been relatively simple to graduate to the installation of a dehumidifier and a space heater. That had been two months ago, and Hrafn’s arthritis and chronic cough had both undergone marked improvement — not to mention the fact that he now had social media accounts and was becoming an accomplished online troll.

“… and Vlad says I’m getting really good at flying. It still feels so weird to turn into a bat, though; it’s like I can’t see exactly but I see with my ears? Everything’s in black and white.”

“Try mist,” said Ruthven, amused. “That one’s extraordinarily weird.”

“Vlad says not until I get more control. But I get to try wolves next! He took me out into the woods when he was in wolf shape and we met some of the real wolves that live there, and they’re huge. I didn’t know wolves were that big and it was pretty scary but incredibly cool.”

Greta could remember St. Germain the wolf in Paris, and sympathized. On the screen Hrafn was nodding. “You are learning the ways of your kind well,” he said in the wheezing croak that was his pleasantest tone of voice.

“I’m trying. It’s hard but it’s not — like math-class hard? Like a good kind of hard.” Lucy smiled, bright and excited. “Maybe soon I could come visit you and turn into a bat!”

“You are gladly welcome in my barrow,” said Hrafn, sounding very pleased indeed. “In whatever form you choose.”

“And you guys,” said Lucy. “Dr. Helsing and everybody. Sofiria wants to ask you to come stay with us sometime. It’s really pretty here. And there are dungeons!”

“Are there any things in the dungeons?” Grisaille wanted to know.

“Some old bones, but Vlad can’t remember whose they are,” said Lucy offhandedly. “He hasn’t thrown anyone into them for a really long time.”

“That is reassuring,” said Varney delicately. “And the bat colony?”

“I keep trying to talk to them when I’m a bat but they don’t talk back. Maybe I need to do it in Romanian? Since they’re Romanian bats?”

“They might just be wary of you,” said Ruthven. “You’re effectively royalty, after all.”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Grisaille added, and he and Ruthven shared a smile.

“I gotta go, guys,” said Lucy, glancing off-screen. “Time for dinner. See you!” Her square on the screen first blanked out and then disappeared altogether.

“Well,” said Greta. “She definitely seems to be settling in nicely, wouldn’t you say?”

“Happy as a clam,” said Grisaille. “Which I’ve always found rather a suspect simile. Are clams particularly joyful creatures, that we know of?”

“Well-known fact,” said Greta. “Oh, Ruthven, I meant to tell you. Harlach said thank you very much for the bottle of Scotch; it’s appreciated.”

“Least I could do, seeing as he’s added metaphysical taxi driver to his list of surface-operative duties,” said Ruthven. “Nice chap. I’ve only met him once or twice, of course.” The demon who took Greta to and from work every day was the individual assigned by Hell’s Monitoring and Evaluation department to keep an eye on London, and had been surprised — but pleased — to find a gift box delivered to his Mayfair flat with a particularly sought-after single-malt and a note from Edmund Ruthven.

“And you’re sure it’s safe,” said Varney. “The — the flipping thing. Translocation. Not damaging reality.”

“He keeps a very close watch on the essographs to make sure it’s not doing any damage,” said Greta. “So far, we seem to be in the clear, and it is awfully nice to spend less than two seconds on the commute. And to live down here full-time.”

She gestured expansively: at the house, the parklands, the estate in general. Varney. “It’s where I belong. Where I want to be.”

“It is correct,” said the barrow-wight. “To be in one’s rightful place. One’s home.”

“That it is,” Grisaille said with uncharacteristic simplicity. “It’s — rather the best thing, I think.”

All of them were thinking about Lucy Ashton, who had so very recently not had such a thing, and who was now having to learn what it meant to belong somewhere; about Emily, who had lost one home and family and was building another; about finding what and where you were meant to be, and being that just as hard as you possibly could. If you did that, then the rest would take care of itself.

“I think it’s time to say good night,” said Greta, and reached for Varney’s hand; his cold fingers laced themselves with hers, held on tight. She looked up at the old golden-stone house that was now — truly, for the first time — her home, and then at her husband, and her friends; and she was for a moment so full of a brilliant glass-clear gladness, she could barely breathe. It didn’t matter that they still lacked answers about the American business; it didn’t matter that she had a dim, distant, sinking feeling that they weren’t done with it after all. Right now, right here, she had all she’d ever wanted.

This, she thought, leaning against Varney’s shoulder. This, and yes, and you.

Acknowledgments

As usual, I owe a great many people my thanks. My wife, Arkady Martine, who is also my dear friend and first reader; Jane Mitchell, without whom this story wouldn’t exist; my agent Stephen Barbara, whose tireless efforts on my behalf are profoundly appreciated; the fine folks at the Ordnance Survey and their cartographical exactitude; and my family in Dorset, where every summer as a child I used to visit and run around the countryside clambering over barrows and exploring stately homes. (Dark Heart House has a lot of Kingston Lacy in it.)

Content

Vivian Shaw
Bitter Waters

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments