“I expect,” Ruthven had told him, “that if you ever actually take the time to think clearly about what you’ve just said, you will be absolutely paralyzed with embarrassment. You are barely a decade changed and you have been reading entirely too many tiresome novels. We are not above or below the living, we are beside them, and if we want to go on existing at all we have to understand that the secrecy must be maintained for everybody’s sake. I thought the way you’re thinking, four hundred years ago and change, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that I survived that thought process. Get out of my city and grow up, if you can manage it.”
And then he had hit the leader hard enough to break quite a lot of bones, mostly because by then he had realized that rational conversation wasn’t doing the trick, and put the lot of them on a lorry heading for the Midlands. Nobody had heard from that particular soi-disant coven again, and Cranswell wondered from time to time whether any of them were still around, and what they’d ended up doing with themselves.
Cranswell’s own familial connection with the world of the supernatural dated back to the early nineteenth century, when two Cranswell brothers, Michael and Edward, and their sister Amelia, had leased an unprepossessing property in Cumberland known as Croglin Low Hall, and were unfortunate enough to catch the attention of a local and extremely uncivilized vampire. Amelia was attacked and survived the encounter, although much weakened, and after a trip to Switzerland to get her strength back had with considerable pluck returned to Croglin with her brothers to lure the creature from its lair and put it properly to rest.
After that success they had stayed at the house only a year or two before Michael received an inheritance from a distant aunt; then the family could afford to move to London, where they had remained ever since. Edward—August’s great-great-grandfather—had become an authority on mythology and superstition, and the next generations carried on the work of gathering as much knowledge as possible about creatures like the one from Croglin.
Like the Helsing family—who had dropped the van from their name in the 1930s, fleeing the Netherlands ahead of the gathering storm of World War II—the Cranswells had found themselves making a transition from hunters to simply scholars, after having made actual neutral contact with the supernatural. In their case, August’s great-grandfather had found himself face-to-face with Lord Ruthven, the latter having been uncharacteristically careless about being seen while changing forms, and had managed to convince Ruthven not to immediately thrall away his memory. The subsequent conversation had surprised both parties with its pleasant interest; and after that first meeting a tentative friendship had developed. It didn’t take long to solidify, based on mutual respect, and—after a little while longer—mutual trust; Ruthven and the Cranswell family had been good friends ever since.
It had in fact been Ruthven, without the title, who introduced Cranswell’s father to the woman he would end up marrying, a Nigerian scholar doing a postdoc at University College London. August himself had first met Ruthven seven years ago; his father had been dying, and August had come home from his master’s program at Harvard to be there. Francis Cranswell had introduced Ruthven to his son as an old family friend who would look after August and his mother.
This Ruthven had done. Adeola Cranswell’s mortgage had been paid off, the death duties taken care of, and her aging car repaired—he had offered several times to replace it, but she told him not to be silly—and August’s student debt mysteriously vanished without trace. That in itself would have been enough to endear the vampire to him forever, world without end, but he simply liked Ruthven as a person, money or no money. Even after the revelation of his actual nature.
In fact, he owed his job at the British Museum partly to Ruthven’s influence, and had been more than happy to oblige whenever asked to do a bit of specialist research. He’d always found his scholarship and time well rewarded—with prettily penned notes accompanying generous and prettily penned checks, or tickets to some particularly desirable show, or reservations for dinner for two at the Petrus.
“Really,” Ruthven had said when the question of his nature had first (awkwardly) arisen, early in their acquaintance, “the easiest thing is to think of me as a large well-dressed mosquito, only with more developed social graces and without the disease-vector aspect. Actually the leech is probably a more accurate simile, but the mosquito tends to offer less objectionable aesthetic connotations. It doesn’t hurt; the bite wounds heal almost immediately, with only a little itching; people have no memory of the experience. I don’t take more from any single individual than they’d give in a Red Cross blood drive, and half the time I just get by on blood packets Greta collects for me.”
“But,” Cranswell had said, “what about the killing people thing? In all the books and movies?”
“Well, really,” Ruthven had told him, looking rather tired, “don’t you think it’d sort of attract public attention, all these random individuals dropping dead of sudden blood loss? Any vampire who kills when he or she feeds is a vampire with some rather significant impulse-control problems, plus I’m not even sure it would be comfortably possible to down that many pints of the stuff in one go. Even if you don’t have access to blood from a bank, it’s much easier and wiser to take a small amount from several individuals than drain one person to the point of death, and far less likely to get you noticed by people with the pitchfork-and-torch mentality.”
Cranswell had blinked at him. “That … actually kind of makes sense.”
“Exactly, which is why nobody suspects it. Do try to keep up, Mr. Cranswell.”
He smiled, remembering Ruthven’s long-suffering expression, and went to call the office and tell them he wouldn’t be coming in.
The Embankment house was three stories high. Ruthven’s bedroom faced the river, as did the two spare rooms flanking it; on the other side of the hall the smaller and less ostentatious apartments where Cranswell and Greta had been installed looked over the back garden. Cranswell balanced the tray against his hip and knocked gently on the doctor’s door. After a moment she called out “Yes?”
“Cup of tea?”
“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “Thank you. Come in?”
Cranswell let himself in. The curtains were still drawn, but the lamp on the bedside table was lit, the crystal and silver on the dressing table glittering softly in its low light. Greta was sitting up in bed, a book on her lap.
“Did I wake you?” he asked, looking suitably apologetic.
“No, course not. Here.” She cleared off a litter of several other books from the table beside the lamp for him to set the tray down. “Thanks. It’s awfully nice of you. I take it the rest of them are still abed?”
“Yup, no sign of anyone else stirring.” Cranswell handed her a cup. “I didn’t know if you took sugar—How’s the neck?”
She made a face and managed to stop herself before she rubbed at it. “Hurts a bit. Mostly just itching. I don’t think the stuff on that blade did me any serious harm, and I cleaned it out properly last night.” The knife itself, as Cranswell knew, was sealed inside three layers of plastic and safely out of the way in the garage: Greta had insisted on keeping it as far as possible from Varney, Ruthven, and Fastitocalon.