Strange Practice Read online

“A doctor?” he asked, blinking at her. “Are you sure?”

  She was spared having to answer that. A moment later he squeezed his eyes shut, very faint color coming and going high on each cheek. “I really am sorry,” he said. “What a remarkably stupid question. It’s just—I tend to think of doctors as looking rather different than you.”

  “I left my pinstripe trousers and pocket-watch at home,” she said drily. “But I’ve got my black bag, if that helps. Ruthven said you’d been hurt—attacked by somebody with a knife. May I take a look?”

  He glanced up at her and then away again, and nodded once, leaning back against the sofa cushions, and Greta reached into her bag for the exam gloves.

  The wound was in his left shoulder, as Ruthven had said, about two and a half inches south of the collarbone. It wasn’t large—she had seen much nastier injuries from street fights, although in rather different species—but it was undoubtedly the strangest wound she’d ever come across.

  “What made this?” she asked, looking closer, her gloved fingers careful on his skin. Varney hissed and turned his face away, and she could feel a thrumming tension under her touch. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The wound is … cross-shaped.”

  It was. Instead of just the narrow entry mark of a knife, or the bruised puncture of something clumsier, Varney’s wound appeared to have been made by something flanged. Not just two but four sharp edges, leaving a hole shaped like an X—or a cross.

  “It was a spike,” he said, between his teeth. “I didn’t get a very good look at it. They had—broken into my flat, with garlic. Garlic was everywhere. Smeared on the walls, scattered all over the floor. I was—taken by surprise, and the fumes—I could hardly see or breathe.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Greta, sitting up. “It’s extremely nasty stuff. Are you having any chest pain or trouble breathing now?”

  A lot of the organic compounds in Allium sativum triggered a severe allergic response in vampires, varying in intensity based on amount and type of exposure. This wasn’t garlic shock, or not just garlic shock, though. He was definitely running a fever, and the hole in his shoulder should have healed to a shiny pink memory within an hour or so after it happened. Right now it was purple-black and … oozing.

  “No,” Varney said, “just—the wound is, ah, really rather painful.” He sounded apologetic. “As I said, I didn’t get a close look at the spike, but it was short and pointed like a rondel dagger, with a round pommel. There were three people there, I don’t know if they all had knives, but … well, as it turned out, all they needed was one.”

  This was so very much not her division. “Did—do you have any idea why they attacked you?” Or why they’d broken into his flat and poisoned it with garlic. That was a pretty specialized tactic, after all. Greta shivered in sudden unease.

  “They were chanting, or … reciting something,” he said, his odd eyes drifting shut. “I couldn’t make out much of it, just that it sounded sort of ecclesiastical.”

  He had a remarkably beautiful voice, she noticed. The rest of him wasn’t tremendously prepossessing, particularly those eyes, but his voice was lovely: sweet and warm and clear. It contrasted oddly with the actual content of what he was saying. “Something about … unclean,” he continued, “unclean and wicked, wickedness, foulness, and … demons. Creatures of darkness.”

  He still had his eyes half-closed, and Greta frowned and bent over him again. “Sir Francis?”

  “Hurts,” he murmured, sounding very far away. “They were dressed … strangely.”

  She rested two fingers against the pulse in his throat: much too fast, and he couldn’t have spiked that much in the minutes she had been with him, but he felt noticeably warmer to her touch. She reached into the bag for her thermometer and the BP cuff. “Strangely how?”

  “Like … monks,” he said, and blinked up at her, hazy and confused. “In … brown robes. With crosses round their necks. Like monks.”

  His eyes rolled back slightly, slipping closed, and he gave a little terrible sigh; when Greta took him by the shoulders and gave him a shake he did not rouse at all, head rolling limp against the cushions. What the hell, she thought, what the actual hell is going on here, there’s no way a wound like this should be affecting him so badly, this is—it looks like systemic inflammatory response but the garlic should have worn off by now, there’s nothing to cause it, unless—

  Unless there had been something on the blade. Something left behind.

  That flicker of visceral unease was much stronger now. She leaned closer, gently drawing apart the edges of the wound—the tissue was swollen, red, warmer than the surrounding skin—and was surprised to notice a faint but present smell. Not the characteristic smell of infection, but something sharper, almost metallic, with a sulfurous edge on it like silver tarnish. It was strangely familiar, but she couldn’t seem to place it.

  Greta was rather glad he was unconscious just at the moment, because what she was about to do would be quite remarkably painful. She stretched the wound open a little wider, wishing she had her penlight to get a better view, and he shifted a little, his breath catching; as he moved she caught a glimpse of something reflective half-obscured by dark blood. There was something still in there. Something that needed to come out right now.

  “Ruthven,” she called, sitting up. “Ruthven, I need you.”

  He emerged from the kitchen, looking anxious. “What is it?

  “Get the green leather instrument case out of my bag,” she said, “and put a pan of water on to boil. There’s a foreign body in here I need to extract.”

  Without a word Ruthven took the instrument case and disappeared again. Greta turned her attention back to her patient, noticing for the first time that the pale skin of his chest was crisscrossed by old scarring—very old, she thought, looking at the silvery laddered marks of long-healed injuries. She had seen Ruthven without his shirt on, and he had a pretty good collection of scars from four centuries’ worth of misadventure, but Varney put him to shame. A lot of duels, she thought. A lot of … lost duels.

  Greta wondered how much of Feast of Blood was actually based on historical events. He had died at least once in the part of it that she remembered, and had spent a lot of time running away from various pitchfork-wielding mobs. None of them had been dressed up in monastic drag, as far as she knew, but they had certainly demonstrated the same intent as whoever had hurt Varney tonight.

  A cold flicker of something close to fear slipped down her spine, and she turned abruptly to look over her shoulder at the empty room, pushing away a sudden and irrational sensation of being watched.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself, and do your damn job. She was a little grateful for the business of wrapping the BP cuff around his arm, and less pleased by what it told her. Not critical, but certainly a long way from what she considered normal for sanguivores. She didn’t know what was going on in there, but she didn’t like it one bit.

  When Ruthven returned carrying a tea tray, she felt irrationally relieved to see him—and then had to raise an eyebrow at the contents of the tray. Her probes and forceps and retractors lay on a metal dish Greta recognized after a moment as the one that normally went under the toast rack, dish and instruments steaming gently from the boiling water—and beside them was an empty basin with a clean tea towel draped over it. Everything was very, very neat, as if he had done it many times before. As if he’d had practice.

  “Since when are you a scrub nurse?” she asked, nodding for him to set the tray down. “I mean—thank you, this is exactly what I need, I appreciate it, and if you could hold the light for me I’d appreciate that even more.”

  “De rien,” said Ruthven, and went to fetch her penlight.

  A few minutes later, Greta held her breath as she carefully, carefully withdrew her forceps from Varney’s shoulder. Held between the steel tips was a piece of something hard and angular, about the size of a pea. That metallic, sharp smell was much stronger now, much more n
oticeable.

  She turned to the tray on the table beside her, dropped the thing into the china basin with a little rat-tat sound, and straightened up. The wound was bleeding again; she pressed a gauze pad over it. The blood looked brighter now, somehow, which made no sense at all.

  Ruthven clicked off the penlight, swallowing hard, and Greta looked up at him. “What is that thing?” he asked, nodding to the basin.

  “I’ve no idea,” she told him. “I’ll have a look at it after I’m happier with him. He’s pushing eighty-five degrees and his pulse rate is approaching low human baseline—”

  Greta cut herself off and felt the vein in Varney’s throat again. “That’s strange,” she said. “That’s very strange. It’s already coming down.”

  The beat was noticeably slower. She had another look at his blood pressure; this time the reading was much more reasonable. “I’ll be damned. In a human I’d be seriously alarmed at that rapid a transient, but all bets are off with regard to hemodynamic stability in sanguivores. It’s as if that thing, whatever it is, was directly responsible for the acute inflammatory reaction.”

  “And now that it’s gone, he’s starting to recover?”

  “Something like that. Don’t touch it,” Greta said sharply, as Ruthven reached for the basin. “Don’t even go near it. I have no idea what it would do to you, and I don’t want to have two patients on my hands.”

  Ruthven backed away a few steps. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Greta, something about this smells peculiar.”

  “In more than one sense,” she said, checking the gauze. The bleeding had almost stopped. “Did he tell you how it happened?”

  “Not really. Just that he’d been jumped by several people armed with a strange kind of knife.”

  “Mm. A very strange kind of knife. I’ve never seen anything like this wound. He didn’t mention that these people were dressed up like monks, or that they were reciting something about unclean creatures of darkness?”

  “No,” said Ruthven, flopping into a chair. “He neglected to share that tidbit with me. Monks?”

  “So he said,” Greta told him. “Robes and hoods, big crosses round their necks, the whole bit. Monks. And some kind of stabby weapon. Remind you of anything?”

  “The Ripper,” said Ruthven, slowly. “You think this has something to do with the murders?”

  “I think it’s one hell of a coincidence if it doesn’t,” Greta said. That feeling of unease hadn’t gone away with Varney’s physical improvement. It really was impossible to ignore. She’d been too busy with the immediate work at hand to consider the similarities before, but now she couldn’t help thinking about it.

  There had been a series of unsolved murders in London over the past month and a half. Eight people dead, all apparently the work of the same individual, all stabbed to death, all found with a cheap plastic rosary stuffed into their mouths. Six of the victims had been prostitutes. The killer had, inevitably, been nicknamed the Rosary Ripper.

  The MO didn’t exactly match how Varney had described his attack—multiple assailants, a strange-shaped knife—but it was way the hell too close for Greta’s taste. “Unless whoever got Varney was a copycat,” she said. “Or maybe there isn’t just one Ripper. Maybe it’s a group of people running around stabbing unsuspecting citizens.”

  “There was nothing on the news about the murders that mentioned weird-shaped wounds,” Ruthven said. “Although I suppose the police might be keeping that to themselves.”

  The police had not apparently been able to do much of anything about the murders, and as one victim followed another with no end in sight the general confidence in Scotland Yard—never tremendously high—was plummeting. The entire city was both angry and frightened. Conspiracy theories abounded on the Internet, some less believable than others. This, however, was the first time Greta had heard anything about the Ripper branching out into supernatural victims. The garlic on the walls of Varney’s flat bothered her a great deal.

  Varney shifted a little, with a faint moan, and Greta returned her attention to her patient. There was visible improvement; his vitals were stabilizing, much more satisfactory than they had been before the extraction.

  “He’s beginning to come around,” she said. “We should get him into a proper bed, but I think he’s over the worst of this.”

  Ruthven didn’t reply at once, and she looked over to see him tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair with a thoughtful expression. “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Well, maybe nothing. I think I’ll call Cranswell at the Museum, see if he can look a few things up for me. I will, however, wait until the morning is a little further advanced, because I am a kind man.”

  “What time is it?” Greta asked, stripping off her gloves.

  “Getting on for six, I’m afraid.”

  “Jesus. I need to call in—there’s no way I’m going to be able to do clinic hours today. Hopefully Anna or Nadezhda can take an extra shift if I do a bit of groveling.”

  “I have faith in your ability to grovel convincingly,” Ruthven said. “Shall I go and make some more coffee?”

  “Yes,” she said. Both of them knew this wasn’t over. “Yes, do precisely that thing, and you will earn my everlasting fealty.”

  “I earned your everlasting fealty last time I drove you to the airport,” Ruthven said. “Or was it when I made you tiramisu a few weeks ago? I can’t keep track.”

  He smiled, despite the line of worry still between his eyebrows, and Greta found herself smiling wearily in return.

  CHAPTER 2

  Neither Ruthven nor Greta noticed when something that had been watching them through the drawing room window for some time retreated, slipping away before the full light of dawn could discover it; nor were there any passersby there to watch as it crossed the road to the river and disappeared down the water stairs by the Submariners’ Memorial.

  In the early hours of that same Monday morning, the owner of a little corner grocery shop in Whitechapel came down to unlock the steel security grates over his display window and start preparing for the day. He had just rolled the grates up when he saw something in the street that at first he thought to be a stolen department store mannequin; on closer examination it turned out to be the body of a naked woman, her eyes nothing but raw red holes, with something pale spilling from her gaping mouth. He didn’t look closely enough to make out that this was a cheap plastic rosary: as soon as he’d finished being sick, he stumbled back inside and rang the police. By the time most people were awake, it was plastered all over the newsfeeds: RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN! DEATH TOLL RISES TO NINE.

  A few streets away from the grocer’s shop and his unpleasant early morning discovery was the tiny office sign of Loders & Lethbridge (Chartered Accountants), one floor up from Akbar Kebab and an establishment offering money transfer and check-cashing services. The Whitechapel Road accounting firm predated its neighbors by approximately forty years, but times were tight all over, and it had been deemed wise to move the offices upstairs and let the ground-floor space to other businesses. This meant that the entire atmosphere of the firm was permanently permeated with the smell of kebabs.

  Fastitocalon, who had worked as a clerk for the firm for almost as long as it had been around, didn’t really mind the grease and spice in the air, but he did object to taking it home with him in his clothes. He’d made the best of it by demanding of old Lethbridge that he be allowed to smoke in his office. This Lethbridge had grudgingly permitted, mostly because he enjoyed the occasional cigar himself—and perhaps on an unconscious level because he’d found that keeping “Mr. Frederick Vasse” more or less content seemed to be correlated with fewer boils on the back of his, Lethbridge’s, neck.

  Lethbridge was actually one of the more accommodating employers Fastitocalon had known in his time. It wasn’t all that easy to find someone willing to hire a middle-aged and unprepossessing person with an oddly greyish complexion and a chronic cough, even if reassured that he wasn’t act
ually contagious. Lethbridge had overlooked the physical shortcomings and hired him because of his uncanny gift for numbers, which had worked out in everyone’s favor.

  As a general rule Fastitocalon did his best not to read people’s minds, partly out of basic good manners and partly for his own sake—most people’s thoughts were not only banal but loud—but he knew perfectly well what Lethbridge thought of him. When he thought of Frederick Vasse at all.

  Right now, for example, Lethbridge was thinking very clearly if he can’t stop that goddamn racket I’m sending him home for the day. Fastitocalon’s cough never really went away, but there were times when it was better and times when it was worse. He had run out of his prescription antitussives and kept meaning to call his doctor to get more of them, but hadn’t gotten around to it; the cough had been bad for several days now, a miserable hack that hurt deep in his chest no matter how many awful blue menthol lozenges he went through.

  The thought of going home was really rather appealing, even if his flat was currently on the chilly side, and when Lethbridge came into his office a few minutes later scowling intently he argued against it—but didn’t argue very long.

  Ruthven moved through the empty drawing room, picking up the debris of first aid supplies scattered on the floor around the sofa, the discarded gauze-pad and alcohol-wipe packaging looking oddly tawdry in the light of day. He was very much aware of the fact that he had not actually been bored for coming up on ten or eleven straight hours now, and that this was a profound relief.

  It had become increasingly apparent to him over the past weeks that he had, yet again, run out of things to do, which was a perilous state of affairs. He had staved off ennui for a while this time by first renovating his house again and then by restoring an old Jaguar E-type, but the kitchen was as improved as it was going to get and the Jag was running better than new, and he had felt the soft, inexorable tides of boredom rolling in. It was November, the grey end of the year, and November always made him feel his age.