Ruthven appeared in the kitchen doorway, outlined by light spilling warm over the black-and-white marble. “Greta?” he said, and she straightened up, realizing she’d been staring into the mirror without really seeing it for several minutes now. It really was late. Fatigue lapped heavily at the pilings of her mind.
“Sorry,” she said, coming to join him, and a little of that heaviness lifted as they passed through into the familiar warmth and brightness of the kitchen. It was all blue tile and blond wood, the cheerful rose-gold of polished copper pots and pans balancing the sleek chill of stainless steel, and right now it was also full of the scent of really good coffee. Ruthven’s espresso machine was a La Cimbali, and it was serious business.
He handed her a large pottery mug. She recognized it as one of the set he generally used for blood, and had to smile a little, looking down at the contents—and then abruptly had to clamp down on a wave of thoroughly inconvenient emotion. There was no reason that Ruthven doing goddamn latte art for her at half-past four in the morning should make her want to cry.
He was good at it, too, which was a little infuriating; then again she supposed that with as much free time on her hands as he had on his, and as much disposable income, she might find herself learning and polishing new skills simply to stave off the encroaching spectre of boredom. Ruthven didn’t go in for your standard-variety vampire angst, which was refreshing, but Greta knew very well he had bouts of something not unlike depression—especially in the winter—and he needed things to do.
She, however, had things to do, Greta reminded herself, taking a sip of the latte and closing her eyes for a moment. This was coffee that actually tasted as good as, if not better than, it smelled. Focus, she thought. This was not a social call. The lack of urgency in Ruthven’s manner led her to believe that the situation was not immediately dire, but she was nonetheless here to do her job.
Greta licked coffee foam from her upper lip. “So,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was—” Ruthven sighed, leaning against the counter with his arms folded. “To be honest I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs and writing nasty letters to the Times about how much I loathe these execrable skyscrapers somebody keeps allowing vandals to build all over the city. I’d got to a particularly cutting phrase about the one that sets people’s cars on fire, when somebody knocked on the door.”
The passive-aggressive-letter stage tended to indicate that his levels of ennui were reaching critical intensity. Greta just nodded, watching him.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever read an ancient penny-dreadful called Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood,” he went on.
“Ages ago,” she said. She’d read practically all the horror classics, well-known and otherwise, for research purposes rather than to enjoy their literary merit. Most of them were to some extent entertainingly wrong about the individuals they claimed to depict. “It was quite a lot funnier than your unofficial biography, but I’m not sure it was meant to be.”
Ruthven made a face. John Polidori’s The Vampyre was, he insisted, mostly libel—the very mention of the book was sufficient to bring on indignant protestations that he and the Lord Ruthven featured in the narrative shared little more than a name. “At least the authors got the spelling right, unlike bloody Polidori,” he said. “I think probably Feast of Blood is about as historically accurate as The Vampyre, which is to say not very, but it does have the taxonomy right. Varney, unlike me, is a vampyre with a y.”
“A lunar sensitive? I haven’t actually met one before,” she said, clinical interest surfacing through the fatigue. The vampires she knew were all classic draculines, like Ruthven himself and the handful of others in London. Lunar sensitives were rarer than the draculine vampires for a couple of reasons, chief among which was the fact that they were violently—and inconveniently—allergic to the blood of anyone but virgins. They did have the handy characteristic of being resurrected by moonlight every time they got themselves killed, which presumably came as some small comfort in the process of succumbing to violent throes of gastric distress brought on by dietary indiscretion.
“Well,” Ruthven said, “now’s your chance. He showed up on my doorstep, completely unannounced, looking like thirty kinds of warmed-over hell, and collapsed in the hallway. He is at the moment sleeping on the drawing room sofa, and I want you to look at him for me. I don’t think there’s any real danger, but he’s been hurt—some maniacs apparently attacked him with a knife—and I’d feel better if you had a look.”
Ruthven had lit a fire, despite the relative mildness of the evening, and the creature lying on the sofa was covered with two blankets. Greta glanced from him to Ruthven, who shrugged a little, that line of worry between his eyebrows very visible.
According to him, Sir Francis Varney, title and all, had come out of his faint quite quickly and perked up after some first aid and the administration of a nice hot mug of suitable and brandy-laced blood. Ruthven kept a selection of the stuff in his expensive fridge and freezer, stocked by Greta via fairly illegal supply chain management—she knew someone who knew someone who worked in a blood bank and was not above rescuing rejected units from the biohazard incinerator.
Sir Francis had drunk the whole of the mug’s contents with every evidence of satisfaction and promptly gone to sleep as soon as Ruthven let him, whereupon Ruthven had called Greta and requested a house call. “I don’t really like the look of him,” he said now, standing in the doorway with uncharacteristic awkwardness. “He was bleeding a little—the wound’s in his left shoulder. I cleaned it up and put a dressing on, but it was still sort of oozing. Which isn’t like us.”
“No,” Greta agreed, “it’s not. It’s possible that lunar sensitives and draculines respond differently to tissue trauma, but even so, I would have expected him to have mostly finished healing already. You were right to call me.”
“Do you need anything?” he asked, still standing in the doorway as Greta pulled over a chair and sat down beside the sofa.
“Possibly more coffee. Go on, Ruthven. I’ve got this; go and finish your unkind letter to the editor.”
When he had gone she tucked back her hair and leaned over to examine her patient. He took up the entire length of the sofa, head pillowed on one armrest and one narrow foot resting on the other, half-exposed where the blankets had fallen away. She did a bit of rough calculation and guessed he must be at least six inches taller than Ruthven, possibly more.
His hair was tangled, streaky-grey, worn dramatically long—that was aging-rock-frontman hair if Greta had ever seen it, but nothing else about him seemed to fit with the Jagger aesthetic. An old-fashioned face, almost Puritan: long, narrow nose, deeply hooded eyes under intense eyebrows, thin mouth bracketed with habitual lines of disapproval.