Dreadful Company Read online

  These were very new. The wellmonster she held was the size of a large frog, and when it wrapped its hands around her fingers and licked her thoughtfully, she wasn’t quite able to stifle a squeak.

  “That’s intensely adorable,” someone said quite nearby, and she looked up to find the vampire with dreadlocks watching her. He was leaning against the wall on the far side of the corridor, arms folded, exuding the typical effortless vampire style; today’s outfit featured a faintly iridescent dark grey shirt under a fitted leather blazer. One or two of the narrow silvering locks falling over his shoulders had tiny jeweled bands around them, glittering red as he moved. She couldn’t help noticing that it was the only thing on him that sparkled: this one apparently really didn’t go in for nineties nightclub body glitter.

  Greta was extremely aware of the fact that she had on yesterday’s clothes, crumpled and filthy, and that her hair very badly needed a comb. And that she had managed to get free of the rope around her wrists, which she should not have been able to do.

  She glared at him. “What do you want?”

  He opened his eyes wide in a who, me? expression. “I’ve come to escort you to the facilities,” he said. “Unless, of course, you’d rather a bucket?”

  She could feel her face going red. The question had occurred to her more than once, and in point of fact, she was rather in need of facilities. “Oh,” she said. “No. I mean —”

  The vampire turned the key in her cell door. She had tried, of course, to reach it herself, once she’d gotten her hands free; but whoever had designed the door had clearly taken this into consideration, and the lock was set into a flat expanse of metal much too wide for anyone to reach the key from inside. “Come on out then,” he said. “If you can bear to detach yourself from your admirers.”

  It was, in fact, difficult to unpeel the monsters. The little one climbing her leg required less effort; the one clinging to her fingers glupped unhappily as she loosened its grip. “They’re very young,” she said. “Very… new.”

  “They are indeed. You should see the hairy things, too; they shed everywhere.”

  “You have tricherpetons down here, too?”

  “Is that what they’re called? Yes. Many.” He sounded as if he could have done without them. “Come along.”

  Getting up hurt: she was stiff all over, and in fact, he had to steady her with a cold hand on her elbow while she tried to get her knees to work. He picked up the discarded length of rope with which her wrists had been tied, coiling it up with the air of someone tidying a disorganized room; Greta expected him to say something about it, or just tie her up again, but he simply slipped the coil of rope over his wrist like a bracelet and took a firmer grip on her arm. The little group of monsters looked up at her with expressionless coppery eyes as he led her away.

  She had not known what to expect – had no idea how extensive Corvin’s lair was, or how sophisticated his household infrastructure – but in fact, they had quite a luxurious bathroom, even featuring the kind of expensive free-standing bathtub that was currently in fashion. Someone, she thought, staring at her haggard and filthy self in the mirror over the sink, someone has done a great deal of work to make this place habitable, and I bet it wasn’t Corvin.

  When she emerged, still smelling powerfully of wellmonster but feeling rather a lot better as well as less covered in dust, the vampire straightened up from the wall he’d been leaning against. The coil of rope was nowhere to be seen. “Now what?” she asked. “What does he want?”

  “Now you toddle on back to your bijou maisonette,” he said, “and enjoy catered brunch. I’ve found it does not do to ask questions about Corvin’s motive or intention, as a general rule.”

  I’ve found, she thought. Interesting choice of phrase there.

  The grip on her arm was not ungentle, but Greta had no illusions regarding the possibility of escape despite the lack of restraints: that hand was as firm and insistent as iron, and she let him walk her back along the passageways. The bathroom was at the end of a much wider, more brightly lit corridor than the one leading to her cell, and as they passed several other openings, she could glimpse more luxurious furniture as well as rather a lot of decorative bone arrangements, and did her best to mark each one in her memory.

  The wellmonsters were still there when he returned her to the cell, blinking up at them; and when she sat down again, they returned to investigate. Without further comment, the vampire left her alone with them, and she had to wonder what he’d meant by catered brunch – crusts of bread and a jug of water?

  It turned out to be a large coffee and a chocolate croissant still in its white pastry bag; and while Greta was still attempting to assimilate the remarkable nature of this development, the vampire – whose name she still didn’t know – simply gave her a pointed if not unfriendly smile, and said, “Enjoy. It could be worse, you know. He does want you alive.”

  It was not until he had gone away again, until she had half finished the pastry, feeding tiny bits of flaky crust to the monsters, that Greta remembered the line from The Prisoner. She’d got it wrong, last night. It wasn’t who are you that was answered that would be telling.

  It was whose side are you on.

  Alceste St. Germain’s apartment on the Avenue George V faced almost due west. From his fourth-floor windows, the sun wasn’t directly visible until it had climbed quite a long way up the sky; instead, each morning, his bedroom was filled with reflected brightness from the dawn-lit stonework of the other side of the street. From deep shadow the tide of light would catch the chimney tops first, then the blue-grey of the slate roof, creamy limestone, gleam of glass, black lacework of wrought-iron balconies, slipping farther and farther down the facade as the sun’s angle changed. He enjoyed lying in bed and watching the line between light and dark steadily advancing, pushing back the remains of the night. It was not lost on St. Germain that moonlight, which figured so largely in his personal experience, was nothing more than reflected sunlight itself; the thematic continuity amused him.

  This particular morning he was in no mood to appreciate the beauty of sunlit stonework, however. This morning he had woken early, after a disturbed and restless night, full of a vague crawling sensation that something wasn’t right; that he had somehow forgotten to do some task that he ought to have done a long time ago, and something therefore was about to go very badly wrong indeed.

  The feeling hadn’t gone away once he’d gotten out of bed. It was with him while he showered and shaved – this time of the month he could get away with shaving only twice a day, if he didn’t mind looking somewhat stubbly – and it was with him while he made coffee, barefoot on the kitchen tiles, wrapped in a bathrobe precisely the shade of grey that didn’t show the worst of the wolf hair unavoidably clinging to it.

  He’d spent the previous evening solidly working on the book, after returning from his fruitless errand, and he thought he was really getting somewhere on it, and…

  … and he couldn’t stop thinking of Edmund Ruthven the last time they’d talked, sometime last spring it must have been, and the warmth in the vampire’s voice as he discussed his human friend with the peculiar medical practice. Ruthven was kind, yes, but he also didn’t have an enormous amount of patience with stupidity or bad manners, and St. Germain was having an increasingly difficult time making the faultlessly polite woman’s voice on the phone match with the image of a person who’d talk about peculiar things you should probably know about and then casually stand someone up.

  Maybe something had happened to her.

  Maybe she had been unable to keep the appointment, rather than choosing not to.

  He stood there for a few minutes, amber eyes expressionless, before cursing and going to fetch his phone. Trying her number got him nowhere: straight to voice mail, just like before.

  She’s quite remarkable, Ruthven had said. Doesn’t give up in the face of adversity – you should see the things she does with what I’d consider absolutely hopeless mummy cases,
practically rebuilds the poor creatures from scratch.

  St. Germain went back to his phone’s contact list, scrolling down to Ruthven, E. St J. This would be embarrassing if it turned out she was perfectly all right, but still —

  “Your call cannot be completed as dialed,” said a recorded female voice, sounding somewhat smug about it. “Please check the number and dial again.”

  It hadn’t even rung. Carefully St. Germain dialed the numbers one by one, pressed Send. Immediately, not a single ring: “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and —”

  He hung up on the robot and bounced the phone thoughtfully in the palm of his hand. One person not answering their phone, well, there could be a thousand reasons for that. Two people not answering – and one of them not even ringing, like there was something wrong with the number itself – was enough to make St. Germain’s vague feeling of unease solidify into a cold finger at the base of his spine.

  He wanted to talk to some people about this. Some very specific people, who only came out at night —

  And all at once he was entirely and completely aware of what he had forgotten to do, and when he had forgotten to do it; the knowledge dropped into his mind like blood into water, uncurling, spreading tendrils of mordant guilt.

  What he hadn’t been doing was his job, in effect. He hadn’t been a little distracted by the book, as he’d vaguely considered it. He’d been almost totally distracted: so focused on this stupid project, finally doing a thing he’d been thinking of doing for so long, that he had spent less and less time patrolling the city; less and less time keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Less time paying attention, keeping people safe, knowing what was going on.

  St. Germain dropped into a chair, covering his face with his hands. He should have been out every night – or at least most nights of the week – instead of sitting here in his cozy apartment with a glass of cognac trying to make words into sentences into paragraphs the way he had once made bars of metal into delicate and beautiful scrollwork. He should have kept some semblance of balance, instead of forgetting a duty in pursuit of a challenge, and the thought of what might have been going on, all those nights he hadn’t been on the streets, was nearly unbearable.

  So was the fact that he would have to wait until darkness before making that self-appointed round. The people he needed to talk to were other supernaturals who for obvious reasons could not let their presence be widely recognized by the human population, and therefore St. Germain could do nothing useful until nightfall —

  No, he thought, taking his hands away from his eyes. No, I can at least try to track her, even if neither she nor Ruthven are picking up the phone. I know where she was when we spoke – or where she said she was. There might be something still there to find.

  Something that might tell me what happened to her, or where she might have gone. What she might have meant to tell me. And tonight – tonight I am going to catch up with what I’ve missed.

  St. Germain got up, moving fast now, trying to waste no more time than he already had; and by the time the light on the houses opposite had slid halfway down the facade, he was dressed and on his way back to the Place de la Sorbonne, the last place he knew Greta Helsing had been before her disappearance; he needed to be out, in the city, feel it around him, settle it back into his senses the way he should have been doing for weeks —

  I’m here now, he thought, heading south, making his way easily between the herds of pedestrians, moving with purpose. I should have been here all this time, but I’m here now. At this time, in this place. Better late than not at all.

  St. Germain walked a little faster.

  Greta had the smallest of the wellmonsters tucked into the hollow of her collarbone, hanging on to her lapel with both little grey hands, and wished like hell she had a tennis ball to bounce against the far wall of her cell. Anything. Anything, to pass the time, to take her mind off the situation.

  She heard the footsteps quite a while before anyone came into view, and actually welcomed the sound – maybe it was the one with the dreadlocks back again. He was at least entertaining to talk to, even if he was one of them, and he was apparently the person tasked with bringing her improbable pastries. But the sound was too sharp: the sound was the click-tap of steel boot heels, and she thought she could remember hearing that particular pair of boots before.

  She was right. The youngest-looking of the vampires had her hair in elaborate ringlets today, and the body glitter was a fetching iridescent shade of lavender, although Greta would have suggested more subtlety in its application: she must have put the stuff on with a palette knife. She was wearing the same opera gloves and velvet mermaid skirt, but the top was in purple brocade with black lace overlay, rather than shiny vinyl.

  “Hi,” said Greta, since the girl didn’t seem inclined to start a conversation.

  “… Hi,” she said. Again Greta was struck by how completely ordinary she sounded. Somehow the getup and general aesthetic suggested an excitingly foreign if geographically imprecise vampire accent, instead of Estuary English. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” said Greta. After a moment, as she watched, the girl glanced down the corridor as if making sure nobody was there to see her. Presumably nobody was, because she took a few steps forward and sat down all at once on the floor outside the cell. Her velvet skirt trailed in the pale rock dust of the floor, and Greta was slightly impressed by how little she seemed either to notice or to care.

  “Is – so, like, is there any way to, um, de-vampirize a person? Like, is it curable?”

  Oh, thought Greta, and a spike of absolute furious loathing for this group of terrible people and their irresponsible behavior arrowed through her. She thought again of Ruthven talking about this, any number of times – talking about the vicious stupidity of vampires who turned people for the hell of it, without preparing them beforehand, without informed consent. It was the worst thing, he had told her over and over again, the worst thing that could be done to somebody – and Greta could remember, too, how much Varney hated thinking about the people he himself had turned back in the bad years.

  Oh, Christ, she thought. You poor kid. Out loud she said, “No, but there are several things you can do to make it easier to deal with. How long ago did it happen? And what’s your name?”

  “Sofiria,” said the girl with a slight but telling pause. Greta tried to remember where she’d heard that name before, and then sighed. Sofiria was the name of Dracula’s wife, the Countess Dolingen – sought and found death 1801, Greta thought, the dead travel fast – and she would bet a great deal of money it wasn’t the name this child had been given at birth.

  “Sofiria,” she repeated without letting the skepticism into her voice. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No,” said the girl honestly, and Greta had to smile a little. “I don’t, I just – there’s – it’s permanent, then? I can’t – it can’t be fixed?”

  “The condition is permanent,” said Greta, “but how you deal with it is up to you. I expect they’ve told you a lot about how the Kindred are superior to the humans, haven’t they?”

  Sofiria blinked at her. It wasn’t that it was bad eyeliner, Greta thought. There was just a great deal too much of it. “… Yeah,” she said. “I mean. Corvin’s – he takes care of us. He’s a good leader.”

  “He’s a pillock,” said Greta with precision. “And somebody ought to tell him to get a bloody haircut.”

  The girl let out a startled laugh, and covered her mouth with her gloved hands, glancing again down the hallway to make sure nobody was coming. She swallowed hard. “He takes care of us,” she said again.

  “For a certain value of ‘care,’” said Greta. “Tell me what happened? You’re not from here.”

  “I’m not,” she agreed. “I was with some friends – we’d finished our exams, and we wanted to come over here and hang out and go to clubs, like people do – we rented a flat together, we were here f
or, like, a week. That was supposed to be it.”

  Greta thought she could fill in the rest of it, but simply sat there, listening, occasionally stroking the little monster clinging to her neck. Sofiria was looking down at her hands clasped in her lap, and talking fast, as if once she had begun, she couldn’t actually stop.

  “… and so I’m having a great time, right, and we’re all dancing at this club one night, it’s called Rise, really nice place, hard to get into, you have to know somebody who knows somebody, and I’m – kind of wasted, but good wasted, you know? And this ridiculously hot guy just comes up to me and starts talking to me and it’s weirdly nice to hear someone else speak English, and also he’s gorgeous, and we end up in a booth together way in the back of the club and he buys me drinks and gives me these pills, I don’t know what they were but they were brilliant, and I don’t remember anything after that until when I woke up here.”