Dreadful Company Read online

  Greta had never had to treat any Class As herself, but it was fascinating to consider the challenges involved. She had ended up talking to the lecturer for fifteen minutes afterward, and only just remembered her appointment with St. Germain in time to tear herself away.

  Locating the place he’d suggested wasn’t difficult – it was just down the street, really, according to her phone; she wouldn’t have to walk too far, and it was a lovely evening for a stroll.

  She took a deep breath of the linden-scented air as she stepped out of the building. All in all, despite having had to get up early after very little sleep, it hadn’t been a bad day whatsoever, which was why when someone behind her said in perfect English, “Excuse me, miss, I wonder if you could help me?” she turned at once, with a smile on her face —

  — and was looking into scarlet, blood-colored eyes – a dark face – the man from the opera – no, the vampire —

  — and had just enough time to think Oh Ruthven you were right before his thrall hit her like a freight train, and there was simply nothing left to think.

  CHAPTER 3

  V

  ampire thrall can perhaps most usefully be considered as a kind of hybrid of hypnotism and sedation. Its effects vary depending on the individual vampire involved, as well as the victim’s susceptibility, but in general one can expect to experience analgesia, euphoria, diminishment or total loss of consciousness, and – afterward – total amnesia of the space of time between the initiation and withdrawal of influence.

  And complete and utter obedience to any suggestion made while under that influence, of course. Someone under a vampire’s thrall will happily walk off a building if instructed to do so by the vampire. Most often this facet finds its use in the replacement of memories lost during the event: You will remember only that you left the club because you had a headache, and will return home as usual.

  For Greta, there was absolutely nothing between hearing the voice behind her – Excuse me, miss, I wonder if you could help me – and being on her knees, in some dim enclosed space, with her hands tied behind her and the unmistakable smell of blood heavy in the air. It was a mental jump cut, and she recognized it at once – she’d experienced it once or twice before, when she’d voluntarily undergone thralling.

  This time she hadn’t given consent.

  Everything went cold and clear and slow, as it had done once before in the front seat of her Mini, with a poisoned knife held against her throat.

  The chamber was some sort of cave, lit by hanging lamps that did not flicker, though made to look as if they should. They must be in the catacombs somewhere – this wasn’t a cellar, this space was cut out of the living rock. The walls were hung with some kind of dark rich woven stuff. Underneath her knees the floor was covered with Turkish carpets layered on one another like the scales of a moth’s wing.

  And in front of her, on a huge, high, dark, carven chair – a chair clearly meant to resemble a throne – sat a vampire. He was very definitely a vampire. If the bright-red eyes hadn’t given him away, the black flowing hair with a defined widow’s peak would have, along with the pale hands steepled in front of him, their long colorless nails filed to a point. Or the way he smiled at her with his mouth slightly open, so that she could see the elongated canines resting on his lower lip. One of them gleamed silvery-bright.

  Also, he sparkled.

  It was just a little bit, here and there, high on his cheekbones, the planes of his throat in the open V of his shirt collar, but he sparkled, and Greta – despite her daze – thought: Body glitter?

  Other people registered in her peripheral vision. More vampires. More sparkly vampires; all of them were wearing fancy clothes, velvet and chiffon and leather and lace. None appeared to be older than their mid-twenties, which didn’t actually mean much – but one of them, a girl with improbably red hair, couldn’t have been more than a teenager when she was turned. There was a lot of jewelry. The smell of incense and perfume hung in the air, thick and cloying, underneath the coppery stink of blood.

  The vampire on the throne leaned forward, looking at her over his steepled hands. A ruby ring the size of a kumquat glowed on his right ring finger. His leather trousers creaked.

  “Dr. Greta Helsing, I presume?” he said in English. In slightly accented English.

  “Who are you?” she said, and thought somewhat hysterically, I am being held captive underground by a vampire wearing body glitter, with the remains of a Yorkshire accent and apparently no sense of irony at all.

  “I am Corvin,” he said grandly. “And you are my guest. My special guest. It’s a great honor. Isn’t it, Lilith?”

  He turned and beckoned, and a woman came out of the shadows to stand beside his throne and stare at Greta with undisguised dislike. She was stunning. Her hair was paler than Greta’s own, a true platinum silver-blonde, and dressed in long, lush ringlets partly caught up in a knot that glowed with scattered jewels. Her skin was absolutely marble-white, under the faint iridescent touch of glitter, and there was a lot of it on display; her gown, a complicated and thoroughly engineered affair of black silk and lace, left her shoulders bare and her bosom – that was a bosom, no doubt about it – just barely on this side of decency; a necklace of rubies shone like vast drops of wine, or blood, around her snowy throat. In this light it was difficult to tell, but Greta thought she might be wearing purple contacts; her eyes were certainly made up with a great deal of care, and her mouth was a perfectly drawn masterpiece.

  And then she opened that mouth and said in a kind of elongated whine, “Do we have to keep her here?”

  A flicker of irritation crossed Corvin’s face. “Of course,” he said. “I let you keep your toys, don’t I?”

  “That’s different,” Lilith said. “My boys are beautiful. This one’s ugly. I don’t like her.”

  “We will discuss this later, Lilith,” he said with an edge in his voice, the accent more pronounced, and Greta thought, Sheffield? “As I was saying,” he continued, turning his attention back to Greta as if he had realized the scene was losing its dramatic focus, “you are my guest, and will remain my guest for as long as I choose to keep you here; and I am afraid your friends will find no trace of you, dear Doctor. No matter how hard they might try.”

  She was conscious of the hard hammering of blood in her ears, the fine sweat of adrenaline standing out on her skin. Everything was still cold and clear and slow, and she still had no idea why the hell she was down here.

  “No words for me?” Corvin said, dripping with condescension. “Don’t you appreciate my hospitality?”

  “It’s a bit different from the Hotel Le Meurice,” she said, unable to stop herself, and then wondered if she was going to end the day by having her throat torn out by a bunch of idiots somewhere under Paris.

  Corvin’s face hardened. “Take her away, Grisaille, and see she is accommodated appropriately.”

  Strong, narrow hands closed around Greta’s shoulders, and she was lifted effortlessly to her feet – and held, while her legs decided they wanted to try bearing her weight again. “As you command,” her captor said, and she recognized the voice, well-mannered, accentless, I wonder if you could help me, and thought of red eyes in the dark.

  “This way,” he said, behind her, and she was actually grateful for the support of the hands around her upper arms as he propelled her along a corridor, away from Corvin’s audience chamber. “I’m afraid we haven’t got the ensuite marble bathrooms, madame, but one must expect certain privations whilst traveling in foreign parts.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “That would be telling,” he said, and she heard in the voice a kind of amused self-mockery. It felt familiar; the phrase was a quote from some old TV show she’d watched with her father, wasn’t it? The Prisoner. She was almost sure, and flying on adrenaline and lack of any useful options, she gave him another: a line she remembered from the show, but also a question she wanted answered.

  “What do you want?”
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  He chuckled, turning them down another passageway, this one less brightly lit. There were… bars, set into the wall. Bars and a door. It was a cell. An actual cell. He stopped; let go of her with one hand to turn a massive, ancient iron key in its lock; and dragged open the door.

  Greta didn’t try to pull free – for one thing, the hand around her other arm felt like iron itself, and for another, she had absolutely no idea which way to run. Not to mention that her hands were still tied behind her back.

  He let go of her entirely, and then gave her a little push between the shoulder blades; she stumbled forward, into the cell, and turned to face him for the first time. It was the man from the Opera, all right; the dim light caught his dark silvering hair in a waterfall of narrow dreadlocks down his back, and she could see his scarlet eyeshine. If he was wearing glitter, it wasn’t visible.

  He pushed the door closed behind her. “Information,” he said, and now it wasn’t an answer, but simply quoting the scene.

  “You won’t get it,” she said, meaning it in both senses, and she could see him smile without a great deal of humor.

  “By hook or by crook,” he said, almost regretfully, and turned the key with a screech of ancient metal, “we will.”

  At about the same time, a hundred feet above and a few miles away, Alceste St. Germain got up from the table he’d been sitting at for the past hour and a half, and walked out of the bar.

  He was sufficiently tall and broad that very few people took the time to point out to him that Alceste was a girl’s name. His mother had seen Molière’s Le Misanthrope shortly after its premiere, and it had apparently left an impression; and the young St. Germain had very quickly attained a size and stature that dissuaded people from saying anything about it where he might overhear.

  Born in a small village in the province of Gévaudan, he had, in fact, grown so large and strong that his parents had had him quickly apprenticed to the local blacksmith in hopes of channeling that strength into something more constructive than getting into an endless series of embarrassing scrapes. St. Germain had taken to the work at once. In the forge he was able to make things, not just useful things but beautiful things – although a properly balanced blade was a thing of beauty in its own right – and his masterpiece showed an uncommon facility for rendering a kind of delicacy in the medium of iron.

  He had set up his own smithy in the neighboring town, and had enjoyed a career of about nineteen highly satisfactory years before, one night, encountering something in the woods that had yellow eyes and a great many teeth. The eyes – two lamps of yellow, in the dark – had been the only thing he’d remembered very clearly for months, while he tried to climb out of the hole of black madness that had followed the werewolf’s bite; but he had climbed out, and he had learned, slowly, to be a person again.

  A person with a tiresome but permanent condition. One that meant he had to be very careful of certain metals and metal alloys, and that one week out of every month he had to be extremely cautious who laid eyes on him; but all in all, those were not such drastic or terrible handicaps. And he liked being the wolf. There was a certain profound and simple satisfaction in knowing that you could bite directly through somebody’s femur without so much as loosening a tooth; and few people stopped to argue with an animal that stood about four foot six at the shoulder, with implacable amber eyes. It was also of use that he could, when he put a little effort into it, render himself nearly unnoticeable to ordinary human eyes – except in bright sunlight, when the shadow he cast remained visible.

  St. Germain stalked through twilit Paris with his senses idling, not on alert. He could never switch off his nose: that was a constant, even in human form. The intense barrage of sensory input had been the hardest thing to learn to bear in the beginning, but now he could compartmentalize.

  He knew every inch of this city – had been here for a few hundred years now, watched it change, watched parts of it rot, and burn, and fall, and rise again.

  He had come to Paris just before everything really went to hell the first time, before Necker’s dismissal and Camille Desmoulins’s impromptu and incendiary speech on a café table; and he had been here ever since. Through the revolutions, through the famines, through the Commune and the wars and the occupations, St. Germain had been part of the city, taken it into his heart, spent his time walking its streets and keeping an eye on things – helping where he could, preventing harm where it was possible. Slowly the supernatural community of Paris had recognized in him both a resource and a protector, and these days he was known as the unofficial guardian of the city. Every big metropolis had at least one, even if he’d been a little distracted just recently by the manuscript he was working on, a popular history of Paris he’d been meaning to write for about thirty years and had finally begun.

  Which was why, right now, he was in a foul mood. If the woman had decided she couldn’t make it to their meeting, or didn’t want to, for whatever reason, fine: but she could have had the basic courtesy to call St. Germain and tell him not to wait for her. He’d spent the evening sitting alone at a table and looking steadily more ridiculous as time went by, nursing a single beer; he could have been home hours ago and might even have finished the third chapter of the goddamn manuscript by now if Greta Helsing hadn’t wasted his time.

  Peculiar things you should probably know about, she’d said. It had been a phrase designed to capture his attention: he’d agreed at once to the meeting, which he might not have otherwise, not with the manuscript waiting for him at home. Peculiar, in the sense of supernatural, things were exactly what St. Germain needed to know about – although he supposed that rudely standing up a friend of a friend after requesting to meet them could be classified as peculiar. He’d called her back, half an hour after she was supposed to show up, and it had gone straight to voice mail – which he hadn’t bothered leaving.

  He crossed the river and headed west through the gathering darkness toward his flat in the 8th arrondissement, thinking about the part of the chapter where he’d left off earlier in the day, turning over phrases and imagery in his mind. He could still get some work done tonight, even if he’d had to waste several hours already; the night was still young.

  By the time he passed the Tuileries, Greta Helsing and whatever her problems might be had completely faded from his mind.

  “That was a werewolf in a nasty mood,” said Crepusculus Dammerung, raising his eyebrows.

  He and Brightside had been strolling along the edge of the river, discussing where to go for dinner and whose turn it was to pay for it, and had easily recognized the large man walking purposefully across the Pont Saint-Michel. The recent case wasn’t the only time St. Germain had had recourse to their professional services over the years. Brightside liked him very much: he was sensible, which was a quality in short supply in general, and he always paid at once and in full.

  And right now he didn’t look like a well-satisfied client. At all. It wasn’t like him; St. Germain’s other distinguishing feature, besides being large and well endowed with common sense, was his good-natured amiability. At the moment he looked as if he might snap at anyone who got in his way.

  “He’s annoyed about something,” Brightside said, leaning on the parapet with his elbows and watching St. Germain stride off into the distance. “Annoyed, or maybe worried. I wonder why.” He couldn’t quite help feeling a flicker of professional uncertainty – an unfamiliar and uneasy sensation in itself.

  “We could always ask him,” said Crepusculus.

  “We could, but I think I’d rather have another look at that haunting location first.”

  As he said it, Brightside realized he’d made a decision of sorts: that morning, in the café, he’d been trying to convince himself there wasn’t actually anything sufficiently strange about the haunting to warrant further investigation, but he couldn’t get it to sit right in his head. Especially when coupled with the city guardian’s visible displeasure. He needed to make sure they hadn’t somehow m
ade a hash of the job – and more than that, he needed to work out what if anything they had missed.

  The mystery of why the ghosts should suddenly show up several hundred years after the initial disposition of their bones was – well, having considered it, he could think of a couple of answers to that one; people must be sneaking into the catacombs under the city all the time. It stood to reason that eventually someone would have disturbed some of the bones neatly stacked down there and triggered some kind of spectral response. What was odd, in fact, was not that the ghosts had shown up at all: it was that they hadn’t been showing up regularly over the past couple hundred years. If nothing else, the reorganization of the catacombs and the decorative arrangement of the bones in the early nineteenth century should have resulted in any number of hauntings, and neither he nor Crepusculus could remember ever having been called in to deal with this particular issue before. It was possible that some of the other outfits who did similar work had handled the problem, but Brightside was fairly sure he would have heard something about it at the time.