Whoever it was drew in a deep breath—to explain, or condemn, or recite—and in the same instant her right hand came up holding the little can of pepper spray, pointing over her left shoulder, and pushed the button.
After that everything happened very fast. The hiss of the spray was almost completely lost in the bellow of surprise and agony from her assailant; the blade he was holding against her neck scored a thin line of bright acid pain before it fell to the floor, forgotten in his desperate attempts to stop his face from burning. In that instant she, too, cried out, her own eyes and throat on fire from the spray mist—and scrabbled for the door handle, yanked it open, and mostly fell out of the Mini. Oh, it hurt, Jesus Christ it hurt. What had he cut her with?
He was still thrashing around in the tiny backseat of the car and howling. Her first instinct was to run, in any direction, get as far away from here as she possibly could, but the part of Greta’s mind that had coolly objected to the accusation of evil took over. She was not in immediate danger, unless he had friends nearby; the incapacitant spray had done what it said on the tin, and she needed very much to know who and what it was that had attacked her.
Despite the flailing she could make out that he was wearing some sort of dark garment with wide sleeves and a hood, which fell back to expose a head utterly devoid of hair and plated with ugly red and white ridges of scar tissue. Between his clawing fingers tears flowed and glistened in the car’s dome light—and then her stomach seized up again in a knot of ice, because between his fingers she could also see a bright blue glow, where no light had any business being.
That’s not human, she thought. That’s wrong.
That meant it wasn’t a question of crossover, as she had thought on the journey here. Not humans attacking supernaturals and throwing the whole careful structure of secrecy into precarious imbalance. That meant supernaturals attacking both worlds at once.
She had to know more. Reluctantly—extremely reluctantly—Greta took a step back toward the car, and then another, the canister of pepper spray still clutched in her right fist. She made herself reach out to open the back door, stared at the writhing form of the man, at the rough-spun fabric of his brown woolen robe, the rope cincture round his waist, the livid scars on face and hands. Those were burn scars, and they were recent, too.
He had dropped whatever he’d been holding to her throat when she got him with the spray, and Greta badly needed to get her hands on it—she had to know as much as possible about the weapon that had injured Varney. A glint of metal on the floor almost under the driver’s seat caught her eye. Some kind of dagger. The man was still clutching at his face—if she could just reach past him and grab it—
Searing pain shot through her scalp as he seized a handful of her hair and wrenched her head round to look him in the face. It was not a nice face to look into. It would not have been a nice face to look into even had it not been twisted and piebald white and red, or if his eyes had not been giving off visible blue light.
“Witch,” he choked out. “Filthy … sinful … witch. All of you will die. All of you. The world will be, will be cleansed …”
I’m not a witch, I’m not a witch, Greta thought on a jagged hysterical wave of adrenaline. Nadezhda is the witch, and she’s quite clean already—
She shut her eyes tight, and held her breath, and emptied the rest of the pepper spray right into his face.
He screamed again, a high, thin animal noise, letting go of his handful of her hair, and now Greta was sobbing as she scrabbled under the seat for the weapon he’d been carrying, as she backed away from the car, heedless of the rain that had begun to fall. The lights of the main road, the blessedly ordinary sounds of traffic, beckoned to her, no longer as coldly inaccessible as the surface of the moon.
She dropped the knife, whatever it was—she hadn’t even looked at it too closely—into her bag, and ran.
CHAPTER 4
August Cranswell was now on his third large scotch of the evening, and at the comfortable remove of that much twelve-year-old Macallan he was able to observe matters with rather more equanimity.
They were in Ruthven’s kitchen, the two books he had brought with him carefully laid open on the table. Ruthven’s peculiar friend—who was grey, actually faintly grey in complexion, and who apparently was into cosplaying Edward R. Murrow, 1950s pinstripe suit and all—had turned out to be much better at Latin than Cranswell himself was, and he’d gladly yielded up the duty of translation.
“This is all rather formulaic,” Vasse was saying. “It’s talking about the equivalent of mystery cults, secret societies, that sort of thing, and then it goes into discussing warrior monks, much more to the point.”
“When you said that on the phone earlier, Ruthven, I kind of remembered seeing this a year or two back,” Cranswell said. “Took me a while to find it. The other book has the pictures of daggers I was talking about, but this one talks about orders of various Swords.”
“‘The Livonian Brothers of the Sword,’” Vasse said, his fingertip not quite touching the ancient paper of the page. “Yes. Early thirteenth century, during the Northern Crusades. It says they got sort of subsumed into the Teutonic Knights, but they weren’t the only set of monks at the time who were going around armed to the teeth. The description gets quite lurid in places,” he added.
“Right,” said Cranswell, who had managed to read most of the page in the uncertain light of the basement but was fully aware he hadn’t grasped the nuances. “Several other orders came into being around that time. One of them called itself the Order of the Holy Sword, which looks way cooler in Latin, like a lot of things.”
“Gladius Sancti,” said Ruthven, peering over Vasse’s shoulder. “The sword is to be taken literally, I presume, although what got Varney wasn’t a sword so much as a dagger. Or a spike. It left an X-shaped hole in him, which is not something I’ve seen before.”
“‘Holy sword’ sounds a bit more impressive than ‘holy spike,’” said Vasse, “vallus sanctus, but in point of fact gladius sancti means ‘sword of holiness.’ Which is a bit different.”