Dreadful Company Read online

  There were more dangers now than simply getting lost, or caught by the police. There were things down there now far more worrisome than the empty-eyed glare of a thousand nameless skulls, and one of them was currently paring his fingernails with the tip of a gem-encrusted stiletto and considering the relative merits of assorted methods of murder.

  The vampire Corvin had chosen, for his lair, a section of the tunnels not so very far away from the Palais Garnier, in one of the old gypsum mines. He felt at home in the underworld, in the city’s dark and ruined heart, and the aesthetic of the catacombs proper held a powerful appeal for him. ARRÊTE! said the inscription over the ossuary portal, C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT. And Corvin thought it was entirely appropriate – although undead would technically be more to the point.

  He stretched out his arm to admire the newly sharpened fingernails. They were about half an inch long and very pointy, and went well with the enormous heavy ruby ring on the third finger of his right hand – a ring which had begun its life adorning some fourteenth-century bishop, and which a museum in Germany would probably quite like to reclaim. Corvin had had it professionally desanctified, just to be sure; and the underworld jeweler who had sized it down to fit had been paid by the simple expedient of having his neck broken afterward. Corvin liked to watch candlelight run and gleam in the depths of the stone, like a lump of solid anger, and thought it suited him very well: the red matched his eyes.

  Corvin, who had been christened something rather different in a previous phase of his existence, liked red things. And expensive things. Most of his clothing was either black, or shades of red from burgundy to crimson, and he went heavily in for velvet and embroidery and leather. Where the walls of his lair were not stacked with bones, they were hung with red and violet silks and brocades, and his furniture tended toward the heavy, dark, and Victorian. Tonight he was in a fetching ensemble consisting of leather trousers and a dark red velvet shirt, accessorized with tall boots, and his black hair hung unbound halfway down his back. It was very black; he would need to have his roots touched up in the next week or so, but in the candlelight the contrast between the hair and his pale skin looked appropriately stark.

  (Whether or not long hair suited him was not a question anyone wished to discuss, if they wanted to continue the even tenor of their ways.)

  Satisfied with his nails, he sat back in his ebony chair and considered what little Grisaille had been able to tell him. The woman accompanying Edmund Ruthven was in fact apparently not just some human whore: she was of all things a physician, a human who made her living treating monsters, and from what Grisaille could make out, was a close friend of Ruthven’s. They were staying together in one of the more expensive five-star hotels not far from the river.

  Corvin closed his eyes, tapping the blade of the dagger gently against his teeth. One of them – the left upper canine – was made of platinum, set with a ruby, and it went tink as the blade made contact. He was picturing Ruthven on the staircase at the opera house, perfectly groomed and moving with the unconscious dancer’s grace of a vampire, ruby shirt studs glittering, and as always when he let himself think very closely of Edmund St. James Ruthven, Corvin’s mouth twisted subtly into a snarl.

  He would have his revenge. Somehow, soon, he would have it. Ruthven had not defeated him the last time they had met: that had been… a setback, that was all. An inconvenient little setback. Anyway, he had regrouped. He had recovered, and regrouped, and gathered a new coven around himself, and traveled across Europe. He’d seen a lot; done a lot. He’d even been to Transylvania, which had been exciting, even if the people there tasted funny and didn’t really agree with him; and up to Russia, where he’d had quite a nice time for a while, and eventually back to France. And when he’d been passing through Paris again, and felt a little voice inside him say, Here, here is where you should be, he had listened – and up until last night had been really enjoying himself, Lilith’s stupid bullshit aside.

  (Lilith. There was a problem, if you liked. She was dim even by Corvin’s standards, and he did not exactly impose an intellectual requirement on his people, merely demanding their loyalty. She was dim but she was also determined in several counterproductive ways – she was particularly good at finding creative work-arounds to things Corvin had forbidden her to do, without directly disobeying his commands – and lately he’d had to spend much more time than he’d have liked in dealing with her overindulgence in junkie blood. More than once he’d wondered if this nonsense was worth it or if he should simply kick her to the curb and announce that the position of consort was open – but she was also unbelievably good in bed, and when she wasn’t wasted, she was gorgeous, and looked just right on his arm, and at least she was mostly obedient and subservient and would do what he told her, most of the time, but ugh, Corvin wished things could be simple.)

  At least her newest hobby with the monsters got her out of his hair: it was nice for her to have an interest, and she looked cute with the little baby creatures all cuddled in her lap and so on, even if Corvin wasn’t sure it was such a hot idea to just… dump them in the sewers when they got too big to be adorable. Still, it was easier to deal with than her other habit of keeping humans as pets until she got tired of them or they died off; Corvin had never quite really liked the way she’d looked at her “beautiful boys,” although he had avoided examining this reaction in any great detail.

  He’d had a couple of fights with her about how many of the monster things she was keeping in the lair, however, and told her to go find somewhere else to do the stupid magic bullshit that wasn’t right in the middle of his personal space, on account of he’d had enough of there being chalk circles and graveyard dirt all over the place. That whole business with the spells and chanting had weirded him out anyway, particularly the way the air felt while she was doing it – there were occasionally these kind of waves of pressure that made your ears pop, and the whole place smelled like thunderstorms for hours afterward.

  It didn’t matter now. Either she’d quit it, or she’d obeyed his order and moved her operations elsewhere; Corvin didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem.

  Ruthven was his problem. He’d dreamed for so long of what he would say when he finally got the opportunity, and now it was so close he could almost taste it —

  But the woman. The blonde woman. The human. She might be just what he’d been looking for. She might be the way in.

  He got up, slipping the little dagger back into its jeweled sheath on his wrist, beneath the velvet sleeve, and made a decision. No sense wasting time. He would —

  Corvin stopped, and looked down, and swore. Wrapped around his ankle was one of Lilith’s monsters, a greyish lump about the size of a grapefruit. The goddamn things got everywhere. He’d told her not to let them roam around the lair all unsupervised; it was embarrassing. He shook his foot to try to dislodge the thing, but it just hung on tighter, wrapped around his boot with all four little limbs – and it looked up at him, blinking slowly, as if expecting him to do something.

  Corvin’s face hardened, and he slipped his hand into his sleeve and brought the dagger out again, its blade winking in the candlelight, and bent to remove the impediment in his way.

  Paris was at its loveliest in springtime, Greta reflected, and the lime trees in the Place de la Sorbonne were in full bloom, filling the air with their sweetness. It mostly made up for having to get up early, after her somewhat complicated night.

  The tricherpeton had curled up and gone to sleep on the end of her bed, and was gone by the time Greta woke up; presumably it had left the way it had gotten in, via the window. It was almost possible to imagine that the whole thing had been a dream, except for the part where the bedspread was covered in long silky auburn hairs.

  Ruthven had been somewhat hollow-eyed and irritable in the morning, but he’d insisted on taking the time to do her hair for her before having to leave for the airport. Greta missed him already, partly for the company and partly for the linguistic assistan
ce. Standing in the bathroom, watching the deft white fingers in the mirror, remembering the care with which he’d touched her face, taking off the makeup – she’d thought briefly of what it might be like to have Varney there instead of Ruthven, Varney’s long mobile hands in her hair, the easy intimacy of it, the calm competence. She’d seen him using those hands to play the piano once and never forgotten it; she imagined them cupped carefully to the curve of her skull – and then had shied away from the thought before her face could go an embarrassing shade of pink.

  She had spent the morning after her panel listening to what turned out to be quite an interesting lecture on sarcoptic mange in bogeymen, complete with full-color slides, and then had gone to lunch with a couple of colleagues she hadn’t seen in years. The story of her unexpected hotel visitors had raised some concern in the course of their discussion: someone must have summoned the specimen of P. incolens and then let it go, which was both irresponsible and unethical – in addition to which the subsequent appearance of the mixed-breed tricherpeton implied either a feral breeding population or another summoning-and-release.

  That kind of magic wasn’t exactly dangerous, the way a sharp knife wasn’t dangerous in the controlled hands of someone who knew what they were doing, but summoning monsters and then releasing them suggested that whoever was responsible was – well, irresponsible, and might inadvertently do something that was dangerous to themselves or others.

  Greta’s colleagues had suggested that she look up the city’s unofficial guardian, the werewolf St. Germain, and tell him what she’d seen. He ought to know about this, if he wasn’t already aware.

  He was, perhaps surprisingly, in the Paris phone book, or rather the online annuaire téléphonique; and now she had bought herself a latte and returned to the university, sitting in the shade – and fragrance – of the Place de la Sorbonne’s lime trees, and got out her phone.

  He picked up on the third ring, the French allô deep and not unfriendly. Haltingly she introduced herself as a friend of Edmund Ruthven, and was spared having to work out how to explain wellmonster sightings with her limited vocabulary when he interrupted her in perfect, only slightly accented English. “Ah, yes, Dr. Helsing, I’ve heard your name before. A pleasure to speak with you; how can I be of service?”

  It was a nice voice, she thought. “I’m sorry to just ring you up out of the blue, but I’m in town for a conference and I’ve seen a couple of peculiar things which you should probably know about. Do you have a minute?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m just on my way out, but if you’re available later on, we could meet somewhere for drinks? Any friend of Ruthven’s is most welcome to Paris.”

  She didn’t have anything to do after the next lecture, other than show up to the obligatory formal dinner at eight; a drink or two beforehand would almost certainly render that experience less tedious, and this probably wasn’t the kind of urgent that required a response right now; it could wait a few hours. “That would be lovely,” she said. “Where shall I meet you?”

  “There’s a nice little bar called Bonvivant not far from the university,” he said. “On Rue des Écoles. Shall we say six o’clock?”

  “Perfect. Thank you so much,” she said, smiling. Even if all she really had to say was someone’s summoning supernatural creatures, FYI, it would be nice to get away from academia for a little while. Greta was a clinician, not a research academic: she was very fond of her colleagues, but one could have enough of them quite quickly.

  “My pleasure. Until then, Doctor.”

  She hung up, and sipped her coffee, and scrolled through her contacts to the V section, still smiling. V for Varney the Vampyre-with-a-y, who had given her the earrings she’d worn to the opera and the ones the wellmonster in the sink had been hoarding, and also incidentally the aquamarine pair she had on right now to go with her neat conference-wear suit: he seemed to have settled on jewelry as an acceptable gift, and then decided it ought to happen quite frequently. She couldn’t wear big fancy rings – she washed her hands all the time, which was bad for the stones, and wore gloves that could get torn on the setting; and she had never really been much for necklaces. Earrings, therefore, were the logical conclusion.

  Varney liked logic, for a certain value thereof. She tucked her hair behind her ear, waiting for him to pick up: the double brr brrr ring went on and on until she’d almost decided to give up, when —

  “Greta?” he said, sounding slightly out of breath and both surprised and pleased. “I’m so sorry, I’d left my phone all the way upstairs, I only just heard it. Are you still in Paris?”

  “I am,” she told him, “currently sitting just outside the Sorbonne watching tourists. And I take it you are not in town but in the country?”

  Varney had spent quite a lot of the previous century in hibernation in the cellars of his decaying country manor, a huge pile with the unprepossessing name of Ratford Abbey – which was generally known to the locals as Dark Heart House, due to an avenue of copper beeches and a stand of them surrounding the house itself: dark reddish-purple leaves against pale stone. Greta had never seen it, but from Varney’s description, it made her think of the House of Usher. It had an ornamental lake in which numerous people were said to have drowned over the years, and part of the roof had caved in while Varney slept the sleep of the dead in the wine cellar, down among the cobwebs and the nitre.

  He had woken for the first time in thirty years the previous November, and come up to the city to slake his thirst and spend some time melancholically gazing into the river, weighing the merits of throwing himself into it. His plans had been drastically altered by the appearance of a sect of mad monks armed with vampire-slaying weaponry; following that unpleasant little episode, however, Varney’s outlook on life had taken on a somewhat rosier hue, and he had recently decided to begin the work of repairing – well, rebuilding and redecorating – Dark Heart.

  “I am indeed in the country,” he said now, with a faint rueful edge to it. “Which contains rather more wildlife than one could strictly wish, and much of it seems to want to be inside the house rather than outside; there’s a colony of what appear to be little brown bats that have taken over the room at the east end, which is still uninhabitable. I have tried persuading them that they’d be better off elsewhere, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working.”

  She could picture him very easily: a tall spare figure with shoulder-length silvering hair, standing with his hands on his hips and looking up at bats roosting in the half-repaired coffered ceiling, addressing them in earnest and somewhat lawyerly tones. “Leave them for now?” she said. “They won’t do very much harm, even if the floor will need to be cleaned, or possibly replaced, and they’re useful creatures.”

  “Well, yes,” Varney said, “of course I’m leaving them there. I’m not about to try to evict my first tenants in a hundred-something years until we build bat houses in the stables and the copse. I am not entirely without heart.”

  “You have rather more of it than me sometimes,” Greta said with a swell of fondness. “I miss you. You’d find it desperately dull here, but – I miss you anyway.”

  She did. Once you got past the dour expression and the general air of melancholia, and the odd fact that the irises of his eyes were actually reflective, a dark grey with a metallic sheen like polished tin – he was excellent company; he enjoyed learning things, and there were so many he had missed out on, over the centuries. And Greta loved to teach. The thought of his hands in her hair came back, unbidden, very sharp and clear, and she closed her eyes for a moment.

  “You miss me? Good heavens, really?” he asked, sounding taken aback.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m coming home on Monday morning; I want to beg Nadezhda to run the clinic for me for a few more days, so I can come down and see these grand works of yours for myself. Including the bats.”

  “I think that could be arranged,” he said, and his voice – the most beautiful thing about him, mellifluous – was very war
m. One of the few things that penny dreadful by Rymer and Prest had managed to get right was their description of Varney’s voice.

  “Good. Oh, hell, I’ve got to go, I have another lecture to attend and tomorrow is packed, but I’ll be home Monday on an early flight.”

  “Should – I come to meet you at the airport? Since Edmund’s not here to play taxi driver?” He sounded as if he wasn’t entirely sure the suggestion was appropriate.

  “That would be lovely,” she said, and even the prospect of the formal conference dinner ahead seemed suddenly less unpleasant.

  In fact, the lecture wasn’t too shabby, either: an overview of the various treatment modalities for tissue degeneration in Class A revenants, or in layman’s terms, how to stop bits falling off zombies. The generally agreed-on therapeutic regimen had hitherto relied on chemical fixatives such as formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde, conveniently available in a variety of formulations from embalming supply companies – there was an ongoing argument on one of Greta’s listservs over whether Kelco’s Viscerol 30, Pierce’s Cavicide, or Champion’s Firmatone fluids were the superior choice – but today’s lecture had covered the potential applicability of plastination as a permanent solution to the problem. It would, of course, be extremely unpleasant for the patient during the process, but afterward they could enjoy a greater quality of unlife without the constant concern over bodily integrity.