Grave Importance Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Vivian Shaw

  Excerpt from The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep copyright © 2019 by H. G. Parry

  Excerpt from The Devil You Know copyright © 2006 by Mike Carey

  Cover design by Will Staehle and Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover illustration by Will Staehle

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Emilia Blaser

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2019

  First Edition: September 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Shaw, Vivian, author.

  Title: Grave importance / Vivian Shaw.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2019. | Series: A Dr. Greta Helsing novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019011181 | ISBN 9780316434652 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316434669 (ebook) | ISBN 9781478945178 (downloadable audio book) | ISBN 9780316434676 (library ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women physicians—Fiction. | Medicine—Practice—Fiction. | Patients—Fiction. | Cults—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.H39467 G73 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011181

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-43465-2 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-43466-9 (ebook)

  E3-20190827-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

  A Preview of The Devil You Know

  By Vivian Shaw

  Praise for Vivian Shaw

  For my Uncle Tony, who did the Times crossword in ink.

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  CHAPTER 1

  I’ve just had to rescue a third groundskeeper from drowning in the ornamental lake,” said Sir Francis Varney over the phone, sounding put-upon. “I am beginning to suspect the wretched ornamental lake of harboring something unpleasant and tentacular that drags people into it—or possibly with this rain, everyone has become sufficiently wet and cold to develop suicidal tendencies. Also part of the roof’s fallen in. Again.”

  It was pouring. Greta Helsing watched out of her office window as debris bobbed and swirled in the gutters of Harley Street—hardly gutters so much as small rivers, after the second week of practically ceaseless rain. Autumn this year had apparently given up on the mist-and-mellow-fruitfulness bit as a bad job, and gone straight for the Biblical aesthetic instead.

  “Which part of the roof?” she asked. Varney’s ancestral pile, Ratford Abbey, went by the much more stylish epithet of Dark Heart House, and was in the process of being renovated at considerable expense.

  “The part over the green drawing room, which is not exactly benefiting from the experience. I rescued all the bits of jade and malachite that could be moved. At least the wellmonsters seem to like this weather; they’re having a lovely time splashing around in the gardens.”

  “Well, that’s something,” said Greta. Dark Heart and its park had been pressed into service as a shelter for dispossessed supernatural creatures earlier in the year, and one of the species housed there was somewhat amphibious. “Is—”

  Over the phone she could hear someone else’s voice, and Varney’s inventive cursing. “—Sorry,” he said after a moment, “Greta, I’ve got to go, the stable block is apparently flooding—I’ll call you later, all right?”

  She could picture it, and bit her lip. “Yes, of course. Go sort things out, don’t worry about me.”

  “I can’t help it,” said Varney, “I think it’s a permanent condition. Talk soon.”

  Click.

  She took the phone away from her ear, and it was probably only her imagination that the rain seemed even louder as it spattered against her window. Only her imagination, now that Varney’s voice wasn’t there with her. When she set the receiver back in its cradle, that sound, too, felt much too sharp.

  I could go home, she thought. There weren’t any appointments in her calendar, and it was extremely unlikely that anyone would bother slogging their way through this mess to come and see her, this late in the afternoon—

  But if they did, she finished, not without bitterness, they’d really need me, and anyway, being out in this weather appeals even less than sitting here and listening to the clock tick.

  She watched through the moving blur of rain on the window as a plastic lemonade bottle negotiated a series of rapids across the street, wondering vaguely if it was going to escape the maw of the storm drain in its path or simply vanish into the darkness of the undercity. Into the coigns and brick-arched vaults of Bazalgette’s Victorian sewers, where anything might be waiting for it.

  I hope the ghouls are all right, Greta thought, not for the first time. They lived in the deep tunnels under the city, in the places rarely if ever visited by humans; she knew they were more than bright enough to have evacuated the lowest-lying tunnels as soon as the weather really turned vicious, but it was still a present worry in the back of her mind. Presumably they could, if necessary, seek shelter in the cellar of Edmund Ruthven’s house, as they’d done once before under rather different circumstances. Assuming the cellar wasn’t already full of water.

  She hadn’t heard from Ruthven in several days, and allowed herself a brief flicker of resentment at the fact that he was hundreds of miles away, on the Continent, probably having an absolutely lovely time with his unsuitable boyfriend—and thus not around to let her stay in his Embankment mansion until the weather stopped being quite so vile. Resentful or not, the fact that he was not only traveling, a thing he hadn’t done much of for about two hundred years, but doing so in the company of said unsuitable boyfri
end, was something Greta found enormously pleasing.

  She’d known Ruthven all her life—he was a friend of the family, had extended his generosity to her father before her—and for most of that acquaintance he’d been thoroughly single and stayed firmly ensconced in his large and luxurious townhome, the end of a block of buildings separating Inner Temple Gardens from the Embankment, stirring abroad only very occasionally on some philanthropic venture or other. It hadn’t been until the previous autumn that he’d felt up to leaving London, let alone the country, for the first time in decades. Granted, the house had been partially destroyed by fire at the time and he’d had nowhere to stay, but still.

  That journey—a holiday in Greece, one which he’d shared with Greta herself, along with Varney and another friend of theirs—had been the first of many, including the trip to Paris this past spring during which he’d met an equally stylish and sardonic vampire who’d come home with him after some complicated subterranean adventures. Which she didn’t care to recall in close detail. It was much nicer to think about Ruthven’s warm bright kitchen and the luxurious spare beds, plural, which he had available for guests; nobody did hospitality like a vampire.

  Greta was, in fact, still so wrapped up in the thought of that luxurious home, and the way her old friend seemed to have lost decades off his not inconsiderable age now that he had someone to share it with, that it took her three rings to notice the phone’s renewed demand for her attention.

  “Dr. Helsing,” she said when she picked up, aware that she didn’t sound quite as brisk and in charge as usual, not caring enough to really make the effort.

  “Greta,” said the voice on the other end, warm with relief. “Thank God you’re in town. Are you terribly busy?”

  She sat up. It had been at least a year since she’d talked to Ed Kamal, at a supernatural medicine conference in Germany; his job kept him too busy for much by way of socialization. “Ed? No, I’m not in the middle of anything, what’s the matter?”

  “I absolutely hate to spring this on you with no notice whatsoever, and I completely understand if you can’t do it,” he said, sounding both apologetic and hurried.

  “Do what?”

  “I—something’s come up and I have to go back to Cairo, more or less immediately, and there’s—no one I can really leave in charge of the spa, nobody with the experience to oversee the patients we’ve got, nobody who really understands the therapeutic regimens and the principles we’re using—you’re so good with mummies, and it’d only be for a few months, four at most—”

  Greta stared at the phone, and then at the rain spattering against the windowpane. “Wait,” she said. “Let me make sure I’ve got this right. You want me to spend four months in Marseille overseeing Oasis Natrun.”

  “I know it’s a hell of a lot to ask,” Dr. Kamal said, sounding wretched. “I mean—my nursing staff’s fantastic, I’d never want to imply they’re not competent to keep the place going, but I need a medical director who knows this stuff inside and out and—we have some particularly tricky clinical cases at the moment and I can’t leave without being sure they’re going to have an expert managing their care whom I trust without question—”

  Oasis Natrun. The private and exclusive mummy spa and health resort. Where Greta had sent her own mummy patients who could afford a course of treatment, whenever she possibly could. Where cutting-edge therapeutic, restorative, and cosmetic techniques were being pioneered all the time.

  Which was located in the south of France. Where it almost certainly was not currently pouring with rain.

  “—Ed,” she said, cutting him off in the middle of another compound-complex self-referential loop of apology, “I think the phrase I am looking for here is oh God yes please.”

  The mummy Amennakht was over three thousand years old and on his third set of replacement fingers, but this didn’t severely impact his typing speed. On a good day he was capable of about sixty-five words per minute.

  It was useful to be able to work from home—he hated the word telecommute, he wasn’t commuting at all, that was the point—when you couldn’t exactly go out in public without people noticing certain peculiarities in your personal appearance. Nobody cared what you looked like when you existed solely as a source of e-mails and completed assignments.

  (Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly philosophical, Amennakht reflected that in certain senses the function really did shape the entity: he was a Thing That E-mailed, and a Thing That Sent in Code, and he could feel the metaphysical parameters of that in a way that people who weren’t largely made up of magic would never be able to manage.)

  The other benefit of working from home was that you could fuck around on the Internet as much as you liked, as long as you were getting the job done, and no nosy manager could peer over your shoulder to read your RP posts or critique your Twitter banner image design. Amennakht had a couple of Slack channels open almost all the time, while he coded; he was expert at flicking back and forth between windows without taking his hands off the ergonomic split keyboard. Right now he was half paying attention to an ongoing conversation about the likelihood that anyone would ever design a functional fusion reactor while he slogged away in SQL. Not in my lifetime, however long that is, he thought, and smiled a little: his face creaked faintly. He at least had most of a face; he considered himself pretty good-looking, as Class B revenants went, even if he did need rewrapping rather badly.

  He was halfway through a line when abruptly, viciously, a wave of terrible dragging weakness flooded through him. It felt like being pushed downward by a sudden G-force—the strength he was using to simply sit upright at the desk was not there, and he both felt and heard himself creak as he slumped forward—he felt like he was falling—

  And just as suddenly as it had come, the feeling was gone. Well. Mostly gone.

  Amennakht sat up again, slowly, with another creak. He still felt faintly weak and dizzy, but the awful sensation of weight had disappeared as if it had never been there at all.

  He looked around. Nothing at all had changed: same cluttered apartment overlooking Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood, same stacks of magazines, same canopic jars sitting in a neat row on the mantelpiece. Nor did he himself look any different.

  He saved his work—that was automatic, a completely ingrained habit—and then after a moment closed out of the fusion reactor discussion channel and opened a rather different one, with a more complicated name. There weren’t many people on it at this time of night: mostly his people were either in various parts of Western Europe or in Egypt, and the time difference was kind of hilarious.

  Weird question, he typed after a minute of staring at the screen, has anyone else had a kind of… dizzy spell out of nowhere recently?

  Nothing. He went on staring, the dim pinpoint reflections of his eyes looking back at him. And then, from his friend Mentuhotep—what he was doing up at four in the morning London time was a mystery in itself—You, too?

  A glossy black sedan slipped out of the usual chaotic honking mess of traffic on New York’s Fifth Avenue to pull up precisely within the NO STANDING ANYTIME zone in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the uniformed driver got out, as impassive and impressive as his vehicle, and came around to open the back door.

  The woman who got out was no longer young. It was impossible to determine how old she was: behind the enormous sunglasses she had the kind of peculiar agelessness common to wealthy women with high-priced plastic surgeons at their beck and call, and yet the visible parts of her skin appeared neither artificially taut nor sagging. Her hair, cut and shaped expertly, was silver-gilt, the pale shimmer of electrum; her clothes and shoes, in shades of sand and beige, spoke of stratospheric price tags. The bag the driver handed to her, hooking the straps over one negligently outstretched wrist, was a cinnabar-red crocodile Birkin.

  Without a word, she turned and began to climb the monumental steps—moving with perhaps more energy and confidence on four-inch heels than might have been e
xpected.

  Inside, the security officer whose job it was to peer into people’s handbags attempted to stop her, and found himself transfixed with a hazel glare that felt like a physical blow—for only a second or two, before the sunglasses went back on and the bag was opened with an I suppose I must put up with this ridiculous nonsense sigh. He blinked hard, seeing afterimages, squinted past them into her bag, stammered out a thank you, ma’am that shook, and was extremely glad when she reclaimed her property and stalked on past.

  Two people were waiting for her at the octagonal information desk in the center of the entry hall. “Ms. Van Dorne,” said the taller of them, hurrying forward. “I’m so sorry about that—we do have to make sure no one is carrying anything dangerous—”

  The woman cut him off with a gesture of one gloved hand—and did not pause, clearly expecting the others to keep up with her, turning to head toward the Egyptian wing of the museum. She was moving quite quickly, despite the crowd; it seemed as if people simply and instinctively got out of her way, parting to let her through. The others had a little more difficulty shouldering their way past tourists standing in line.

  “As I said on the telephone,” she said, still walking—stalking was more accurate—“my concern today is the integrity of your security systems in the areas of the museum where my artifacts are displayed. Unless I’m satisfied that they will be completely safe here, I have no interest in going any further with this loan agreement.”

  “Of course,” said the museum’s director, the taller of the two staff accompanying her. He glanced across at the chief curator of the Egyptian Art Department, who swallowed hard.

  “We quite understand your safety concern, Ms. Van Dorne,” she said, “especially in light of the recent series of antiquity thefts. Of course, all the incidents I’m aware of have involved private collections or auction houses, rather than museums…?”

  “Precisely,” said the woman, stopping to stare at a statue; the others had to stop as well. “Which is why I believe it’s possible that my most valuable items will be safer here. Possible, but not certain. I understand you have installed a particularly sensitive security system for certain new acquisitions?”