Chapter 2

By the time Ruthven—hair sleep-mussed, wearing charcoal silk pajamas and still somehow managing to look elegant—rushed into the room, she had the lights on and was kneeling down beside the bed to peer underneath it.

“Greta?” he demanded.

“Shh.” She looked briefly over her shoulder at him and then returned her attention to the darkness beneath the bed. “It’s okay, I’m sorry I scared you, that was very silly of me, wasn’t it? Come on out, I promise it’s safe, no one’s going to hurt you.”

She was using exactly the tone one might employ to coax a kitten out from hiding. This did not seem to mollify Ruthven in the slightest. “Greta,” he said, “what the hell is going on? If you’re going to wake me up at half past two with bloodcurdling shrieks when I’m already worried about you, at least have the decency to explain yourself. I gather that you are not in fact being murdered, but what are you doing?”

“Shh,” Greta said again, reaching out a cautious hand under the bed. “Come here, sweetheart, it’s okay, I promise…”

A dim humped shape moved tentatively toward her, and something soft and hairy touched her fingertips, sniffing. She held perfectly still for it, and a few moments later the hard curve of a skull came under her palm, nudging to be stroked. “There,” she said gently, “that’s right, come on out,” and sat back on her heels.

What emerged from under the bed was not completely unlike a smallish dog. It was covered in long, soft, silky hair in a fetching shade of auburn, had four legs and no tail, and while it did have a head, it seemed to be rather lacking in the face department. There was just lots and lots of hair.

“Oh, good grief,” said Ruthven, and dropped into a chair. The hairy thing startled, and Greta had to talk softly to it again for a few more moments before it climbed into her lap and settled down to be stroked.

It had been a long time since she’d seen a tricherpeton, commonly if unimaginatively known as hairmonsters. There was a very specific and small community within the supernatural and super-adjacent world that bred them, like pedigreed dogs, in lots of different varieties, although you could summon them individually via magic if you didn’t have the patience or wherewithal to set up a breeding program. This one wouldn’t have won any show awards for conformation or breed-specific traits; in fact, it looked like a complete mongrel—but the quality of the hair under Greta’s hands was impressive nonetheless.

(There were sphynx varieties, but they were somewhat mercifully rare: a hairless faceless creature with nothing but a mouth was difficult to look at, even though their temperament was among the sweetest of the tricherpeton breeds.)

Once she was pretty sure the one in her lap wasn’t likely to scuttle back under the bed in terror, she transferred some of her attention to Ruthven. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t intend to wake you like that, but it took me by surprise: someone rang me by mistake and the monster happened to be in the way when I reached for my bag, poor little thing.”

“I don’t suppose there are any other creatures hiding in here? Have you checked the wardrobe for bogeymen, by chance?”

“I have not. I don’t think there’s anything else here, but it’s weird, Ruthven. First the wellmonster this morning and now this. Do I have—I don’t know, monster-attracting pheromones all of a sudden?”

“Not that I’m aware of. You haven’t changed your perfume lately?”

She gave him a look, and sighed. “I really am sorry. Go back to bed, all right? I’ve got this.”

“Yes,” he said, “you have, and I will in a minute, but perhaps I will raid the minibar first. For nerve-settling purposes.”

The monster in Greta’s lap gave a very doggy contented sigh, and a small pink tongue appeared amid the hair to lap at her fingers. Ruthven stared, running his hands through his own hair, then had to laugh at the absurdity of the entire situation—and came to kneel down beside her for a closer look. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with it, I’m sure,” he said, reaching out a finger to stroke the silky hair. “You can’t possibly adopt stray French monsters; wherever would you put it?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It doesn’t appear to be in bad shape; honestly, I think someone’s been taking at least basic care of it—no mats or snarls, it’s a decent weight for its size, completely tame. It’s not a thoroughbred, though, which means either it’s an adopted stray or it’s been summoned, which is a little odd. God knows why anyone would bother doing that kind of magic, but whatever—I suppose Parisian monster fanciers have to get their jollies somehow. I think it’s come to visit, not to stow away in my suitcase.”

“If this keeps up, you are going to be the most absurd Disney princess of all time,” Ruthven told her. “Instead of happy little bluebirds perching on your finger to sing duets, you will be hung about with monsters like a tree with monkeys, and it will thoroughly complicate your personal life. You can’t talk to them or anything, can you?”

Greta laughed. “No. You know perfectly well I have no special abilities whatsoever, I’m not even slightly clairvoyant, and a good twenty percent of the population has at least some degree of that, whether they realize it or not. I don’t know why I seem to have acquired monsters all of a sudden, but poor old Richard is going to be terribly chagrined to have missed this experience.”

“I expect so,” Ruthven said. “It’s objectively less unpleasant than having his appendix out, although I could do without the middle of the night part. Do you suppose it’s worth trying to go back to sleep?”

“I’d better make the effort if I’m going to be sparkling and vivacious in the morning. Why is it always sparkling and vivacious? Can’t one simply glitter?”

Ruthven quirked an eyebrow at her. “That’s a loaded question to ask a vampire. I’m going to make us a drink, and then I’ll attempt sleep—is that thing going to let you get back into bed?”

“I expect so,” Greta said, looking down at her lapful. The hair really was beautiful; in sunlight it would be full of golden glints and deep red shadows, and she knew that underneath it, the tricherpeton’s skin would be scattered with little coppery freckles. “I certainly intend to find out.”

* * *

The green awnings of Paris’s famous Les Deux Magots café glowed the expensive green of a banker’s lampshade, in the clear light of midmorning. Across the way, the ancient church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés caught the light and held it, mellow stone pale and pleasing; it had stood exactly as it was for ten centuries, while the city around it ebbed and flowed and reinvented itself.

Gervase Brightside, remedial psychopomp, swirled his pastis and held it up to the light: louched pearl-yellow, the liquid was entirely opaque, but nonetheless he could see the church tower through it as clear as glass if he so chose. He could personally remember when the tower had been new; it, unlike several other items of his acquaintance, had aged gracefully.

“I can’t believe you’re swilling strong drink before ten a.m.,” said his companion. Brightside took a sip and put the glass down, fixing him with a reptilian look.

“And I can’t believe you’re playing morality police,” he said. “Doesn’t suit you. Anyway, by our standards it is both all times and no times at once, so the sun is over the yardarm somewhere in eternity, hmm?”

“I hate it when you get philosophical,” said Crepusculus Dammerung, grinning at him. “I think it means you’re bilious. Pass me the paper?”

Brightside handed it over. Dammerung, like Brightside himself, was ageless—but appeared to be perhaps twenty-five, short and energetic, dark brown hair tumbling in untidy curls to his shoulders; he was wearing a T-shirt advertising Led Zeppelin and a leather jacket that seemed to have seen hard wear, and had a cigarette parked behind one ear. The overall impression was one of boundless, unsquashable cheer.

“Ta,” said Crepusculus, refolding the copy of Le Monde and settling down to read about whatever atrocities the Americans had been up to recently. Brightside sipped his drink and watched the people come and go, and tried to ignore a faint, yet growing, unsettled feeling.

Crepusculus and Brightside—they did in fact have official business cards—were in the business of remedial psychopompery: in layman’s terms, they helped the unquiet dead off to a peaceful afterlife. They’d been in that particular business approximately as long as humans had been around, and were in fact as old as creation itself, although Brightside appeared to be stuck in the mid-1970s and his partner would have fit right in at a Pearl Jam concert circa 1998. Nor were they directly affiliated with either Heaven or Hell; operating as independents, like the handful of others who performed this particular service, they went wherever they were needed. It had always been common enough for spirits of the departed to get hung up somewhere, caught between worlds, and Brightside and his partner simply came along and gave them a metaphorical tow.

The pair of them had been in Paris for a week now. The city’s unofficial guardian, a large and amiable werewolf, had called them in to sort out an unexpected haunting some days back—and after dealing with the business at hand, they had decided what the hell, they could take a holiday. Paris was at its most beautiful in springtime, and it wasn’t as if people were clamoring for their services anyway; the call had been their first job in weeks. They had settled into a routine: leisurely breakfast, largely in liquid form, at the café; people-watching; strolling around various points of interest.

The case that had brought them here had been a little odd, however. A whole host of ghosts—or parts of ghosts—had suddenly appeared in a group, in the square that had replaced the long-gone Cimetière des Innocents, confused and distressed: missing arms, legs, heads, milling about in a translucent crowd and demanding to be told where their vanished parts had gone. It hadn’t been difficult to move them on, even though there were nearly thirty individuals, and Brightside thought he knew why they’d shown up in the first place: the desperately overcrowded cemetery’s occupants had been transported piecemeal in the eighteenth century to what would become the Paris catacombs, and undoubtedly bits must have been left behind, causing their owners consternation and distress.

Why they’d suddenly shown up now, though. That was bothering him. Why now, after hundreds of years had passed since the removal?

There seemed to be an awful lot of coincidence going on; yesterday morning they’d been sitting here over coffee and pastries and watching people come and go, and whom should they spy strolling down the boulevard but Edmund Ruthven, accompanied by a blonde human woman. They knew the vampire socially—he’d never had recourse to their services, but they’d met several times over the past century or so, and it was a bit surprising to come across him in Paris: he didn’t travel much outside Britain.

Brightside had considered calling out, or waving to him, but Ruthven and his companion had seemed to be talking fairly intently, and he had decided to let them enjoy the city on their own.

He drained the glass and waved over a waiter to order another. It was, in fact, half past nine in the morning, but Brightside was on holiday, damn it, and he was allowed the occasional flirt with sybaritism. In another couple of days they’d be back in London, their current base of operations, and it would be grey and rainy and ordinary, and the clear light on the church tower was too pleasant to ignore in favor of vague forebodings and disquiet.

“You think it’s a timeslip?” said Crepusculus, out of nowhere. Brightside blinked at him. His partner was irritatingly good at reading Brightside’s thoughts, even when he wasn’t trying to. “Those ghosts suddenly showing up now, I mean. Could be one of those wrinkle-in-time things like we saw in Lyme Regis last year. Seems like there’s been more and more of those lately.”

“I don’t know,” said Brightside. “The thing in Lyme was—I’m pretty sure that was just the standard local wannabe necromancer meddling with things he oughtn’t. Ghost smugglers landing a ghost cargo? That’s classic self-contained disturbance-of-the-dead stuff; there wasn’t any kind of ripple effect, no other weird temporal things going on. We would have noticed.”

“Right, and nobody’s disturbed these dead since seventeen-eighty-whatever,” said Crepusculus, finishing his café au lait. “So why are they showing up complaining about it now? I mean, sure, the laid-back French approach is a thing, but that’s several hundred years of lag time. It’s weird, is what I’m saying.”

“Why indeed? Perhaps some idiot urban explorer knocked over a bunch of bones somewhere in the catacombs and woke them up. It’s over, Dammerung. We sorted it.”

“So why are you still on edge?”

“I’m—” he began, and sighed, and was grateful for the waiter’s return with a tray. “I’m not,” he said once the drink had been set before him and the man had retreated once more. “I’m not on edge. I just would like to know what that was.” He wasn’t used to being less than certain.

“Maybe we’ll find out,” said Crepusculus. “I want one of those, come to think of it. Call him back over?”

Brightside sighed again and pushed the glass across the table toward him, trying to dismiss the lingering unease. “Be my guest. And then we should work out what we want to do today, other than wandering around feeding Gallic pigeons.”

“Yeah,” said Crepusculus, “the Gallic pigeons can take care of themselves; and I want to go look at Versailles while we’re here.”

“Versailles we can do,” he said. “At least everyone there who’s dead has the decency to stay dead.”

“At least as far as we know.”

Brightside found himself—unwillingly—returning his partner’s grin.

* * *

Above the vast and colorful interior dome of the Opera, above the brass-and-crystal edifice of the chandelier, in a forgotten and dust-filled corner of the rehearsal room that occupied the next floor up, something peculiar was going on.

This was a part of the superstructure that had been modeled and remodeled multiple times over the years, and was now used by the corps de ballet: it had the vacant, somehow desolate air of all dance practice rooms when not in use, the long mirrored walls reflecting themselves into infinity. There was natural light from several of the circular windows in the curving wall; the room was approximately semicircular, taking up about half the interior space of this floor. To one side a locked cabinet stood tucked into a niche between support pillars, and beyond this cabinet, in the very far corner, unbeknownst to the people who used this space, was a strange dust-covered object.

It looked a little like a seismometer: a drum with a pen resting on it, tracing a faintly wavy line. The drum turned almost imperceptibly slowly—it would take a full week to complete one revolution—and the line was very nearly straight, although it was being drawn over several previous very similar lines. Whatever it was meant to measure seemed not to have been particularly active.

Now, however, a bluish glow, faint but present, surrounded the machine, and the pen trembled as if in the grip of two opposing and nearly equal forces; trembled, and then shot violently to one side and back again, drawing a wide jagged line. The whole machine shook. A smell like burned tin drifted from it, and a blue spark jumped to ground—and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the transient came to an end. The pen returned to its neutral position. The blue glow vanished as if it had never been there at all. The machine was silent, still. The smell lingered for a few minutes before dissipating into the air completely.

The layer of dust on the machine would seem to suggest that whoever was meant to come and look at its tracings every now and then had not been doing so—which was a pity, because had they bothered to look, they would have seen that nineteen hours ago an identical transient had occurred: a sudden, powerful spike in the reading that lasted only a second before returning to baseline. Unrolling the paper from the drum to examine the recent readings would have shown two things: one, the machine had been drawing over its previous lines with each revolution because nobody had bothered to take away the completed week’s recording, and two, these brief but violent anomalies had been occurring not just over the past week but over the past month, with increasing frequency.

When, in fact, the individual who ought to have been monitoring its readings finally came to look at it, he would be extremely alarmed at what he saw. Alarmed, and fascinated, and profoundly inclined to kick himself for thirty kinds of a lazy idiot.

* * *

The catacombs of Paris were a well-known tourist attraction: a curated series of passageways neatly lined with row upon row of skulls interspersed with femurs, the stacked V-shapes of their medial condyles forming a pattern reminiscent of rough knitting. There were some very big names down there—Danton, Robespierre, Camille and Lucile Desmoulins, among others—although it was now impossible to know which cranium was whose; liberté, égalité, et fraternité demonstrated in death if not in life.

Only a section of the catacombs was open to the public—which represented a very small fraction of the Parisian undercity. The tunnels themselves, chambers and passageways cut into the cream-pale rock, were the remains of subterranean quarries that once produced limestone and gypsum in vast quantities: the source of the phrase plaster of Paris. It was not until the late eighteenth century that they had been pressed into use as a place to store the city’s dead, in response to overflowing cemeteries. Beyond the sections of the tunnel network serving as an ossuary, miles of passageways stretched into the darkness beneath Paris—forbidden territory, in which it was quite possible to lose oneself and be unable to find the way back out again. This was the realm of the cataphiles, a secretive strain of urban explorers who regularly went down into the dark for the thrill of it—who held parties underground, even at one point setting up a fully functional cinema—despite the dangers.

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 assistance. 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 warm. 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.

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.