Ruthven leaned against a handy wall and made himself unnoticeable, fading into the background, just an unremarkable figure in an unremarkable location. He had a few minutes to wait before Greta’s bus arrived, and he wanted to keep a good lookout for any more people interested in damaging him and his friends. Nothing seemed to pose an obvious threat, though. While he listened to the rain beat on his umbrella and scanned the road and pavement, he considered again what they’d found out so far.
It was not immediately evident to him why something out of the more obscure and less desirable annals of history had suddenly popped up here, in London, in the present day, but the similarities were beyond question. The people who were responsible for the attack on Varney—and now on Greta, too, which Ruthven couldn’t think about too hard just yet—had clearly been reading the same books he’d just seen, and he didn’t know if it was worse to imagine that they were following the example of the past, or that they were trying to re-create it.
And if they were determined to cause this much of a nuisance for Ruthven and his friends, what else might they be up to? There were a large number of people in London who might fall under the broad category of undead for the purposes of persecution. He hadn’t heard of anyone else being attacked by robed assassins, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening, or hadn’t happened already.
He looked up as the blunt snout of the bus hove into view, its windows bright and cheerful in the darkness, and detached himself from the wall. First things first, he’d get Greta home and make sure she was all right, and then he would consider the reappearance of murderous monastic orders and try to make sense of it.
The rain intensified, pouring down the gutters and washing rubbish in clots and tangles down into the tunnels below. Greta had to wait for everyone else to shuffle down the aisle and down the bus steps before she could get out—and then half-fell into Ruthven’s waiting arms with a distinct lack of grace, burying her face against his shoulder.
He held her close, his arms around her hard and strong as iron bars, his skin very smooth and cool and white, and the familiar smell of whatever he put on his hair was absurdly comforting: something a little like roses, sharp and faintly sweet. She could feel his heartbeat, slow and even and deep, and that steady rhythm seemed to settle her own racing pulse a little.
She clung to Ruthven, her face pressed into his shoulder and her arms wrapped tight around his ribs, and he simply held her for a few minutes, stroking her hair, and then sighed.
“It’s a miserable night,” he said, reasonably, “and the way our luck’s been going, one or both of us are going to come down with something if we stand around here any longer. Come on, we are going back to the house and you are going to have a very large drink. Perhaps two large drinks. I haven’t decided.”
Greta gave a little unsteady snicker and after another moment unwound herself from him, rubbing at her face, glad it was dark. She was not one of the rare but infuriating people who could cry becomingly, which was one of the reasons she tried very hard not to do it. “All right,” she said, “but if anyone comes at us with sharp things I’m going to let you handle it. I’ve had enough of that for tonight.”
Ruthven’s mouth thinned, but he didn’t say anything, just put his arm around her waist and let her lean on him for the brief walk back.
In the darkness and the pouring rain, not a soul noticed the two pinpoints of blue light slowly withdrawing from a storm drain in the pavement opposite the house, or the emergence, a moment later, of several terrified rats.
In the warmth and light of the entrance hall, he took her coat—and then stared, tipped up her chin with a finger, and swore.
“What?” She twitched away from him. Ruthven looked uncharacteristically worried, focused intently on her. “What is it?” she repeated.
“Why didn’t you say they’d done their best to cut your throat? Oh, Christ and all his little angels. Come and sit down before you fall over, and let me clean that out for you.”
Greta stared at him, then took a step toward the side table with its green mirror and pulled her scarf away from her neck. Where the man’s blade had bitten, over the great vein just below the angle of her jaw, an angry red furrow marked her flesh. The tissue was puffed and shiny around it, and as the relief of being back in the safety of Ruthven’s home began to sink in, she was increasingly aware that it hurt. Well, not so much hurt as burned. It felt like lye on unprotected skin.
“Oh,” she said, blinking at herself in the mirror, and found the floor suddenly tilting under her feet like the deck of a ship in rough seas. The familiar checkered marble of the entry hall went sparkly grey. Distantly she could hear Ruthven saying some words unfit for polite company, and then the floor gave another dizzying heave and everything went away for a little while.
CHAPTER 5
Greta opened her eyes and blinked, and couldn’t work out exactly what it was she was looking at. A flat surface, mostly white, and the edge of some kind of raised pattern, curly leaves and flowers twining into each other.
After a moment or two her eyes decided to focus, and she recognized the plaster-work pattern of Ruthven’s drawing room ceiling. This revelation prompted some more blinking.
She sat up, or rather tried to, surprised to find that the room swung dizzily around her, and had to shut her eyes very tight for a moment or two until it decided to settle back down again. Her neck hurt like hell. A brief exploration revealed that somebody had taped a gauze dressing over the cut.
A second, slower attempt at regaining verticality met with more success. Still touching the pad of gauze, Greta looked around. She was lying on the nicer of the drawing room sofas, with Fastitocalon ensconced in an armchair nearby. He looked up as she stirred, and marked his place in the book he was reading.
“Back with us?” he said mildly.
The immediate past was filtering back into her memory little by little. Greta could recall getting off the bus and wrapping around Ruthven like a panicky octopus, and then it was raining on her, and then he’d said something and … everything had gone grey and sparkly, and Greta had no idea how much time she’d lost. She made herself stop fiddling with the bandage, with an effort; she wanted to get a look at the cut itself and make sure it was properly clean.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” she told Fastitocalon.
“You fainted dead away,” he said, reaching over to the coffee table for a cup of something. “Don’t worry; you haven’t been out more than, oh, I’d say fifteen or twenty minutes. Quite a creditable swoon, if I’m any judge; Ruthven caught you in his arms very prettily indeed, just like in the films. I expect he felt quite pleased with himself. Drink your nice tea; it’s good for you.”