“What’s flipping?” Cranswell wanted to know.
“Translocation,” he said. “But this’ll have to be good old-fashioned invisibility. Stay close to me and don’t make any sudden movements. I need to keep physical contact for this to work, and remember that people won’t be able to see you, but they can still feel you, so don’t bump into anybody.”
He took a precautionary dose from his inhaler—it would not do to start coughing noisily in the middle of this operation—put his hand on Cranswell’s shoulder, and shut his eyes.
When he opened them again they were ever so slightly orange on top of the grey, like a coat of luster on stoneware. Around the two of them, color and light and sound faded out slightly, as if someone had turned down the volume.
Cranswell was staring at him. He made what he hoped was a reassuring face, and nodded toward the museum.
It had occurred to Greta Helsing with increasing frequency over the past twenty-four hours or so that, having lost her father before she hit thirty, she had developed a tendency to gravitate toward other older male figures, presumably to make up for a perceived or unconscious lack of parental guidance in her life. Older in some cases meaning by at least several hundred years, and probably more. She didn’t know whether this was really something she ought to encourage in herself.
It had been particularly noticeable earlier in the day when she’d found herself arguing with three of these older male figures at the same time that she could, in fact, be trusted to get herself to Harley Street and back without being murdered or walking into anything or falling down a hole.
“Look, I appreciate the concern,” she had said for the fourth time. “I do. Believe me. But they’re vulnerable to very basic self-defense equipment, and I have a job to do that needs doing. I don’t intend to stay out very late and I’m not going to be wandering alone down any alleyways.”
Ruthven and Fastitocalon had shared a look with Varney, whose advice they had sought after Greta refused to be cowed by either of them, singly or in concert. It was a look she had seen God knew how many times on the faces of parents dealing with irrational and exasperating teenagers, and it gave her a lovely warm sense of righteous resentment that kept her going all the way to the bus stop. At which point, of course, trepidation had set back in, and she had found herself alternately looking in all directions for people in brown woolen robes and saying lots of bad words under her breath.
The bus had arrived, had not been full of murderers, had gone where it said it was going to, and had stopped where it was promising to stop. Greta decided against calling up Ruthven to inform him she’d arrived in one piece after all.
Her clinic occupied one of the less grand of the houses that lined Harley Street: the ground floor was white-painted stonework with brick above it like most of her neighbors’, but the second-and third-floor windows lacked pediments, and Greta tried not to notice just how badly the door needed repainting. Or how dusty the panes of the fanlight above it were. Her brass plate by the door was kept polished, however, and she gave it a rub with her sleeve before letting herself in: She could see her face reflected behind the letters: GRETA HELSING, MD, FRCP.
The friends Greta had prevailed upon to keep the clinic running had been managing between them in her absence. Greta’s patients were used to seeing them in the clinic; Nadezhda did a lot of helping out with the magical aspect of some of the mummy cases, as well as maintaining the wards on the front door that prevented ordinary people from getting a close look at her patients as they came and went, and Anna was often there to assist Greta with minor surgical procedures. Today Anna was in charge.
So far Greta had not mentioned anything about the nature of her sudden and enforced absence from work, and if they could only work out a way to deal with the situation sooner rather than later, hopefully her colleagues would never need to know.
She was going to buy both of them a very, very large drink when this was over. Knowing that her practice was in good hands was—well. It was important to Greta.
There were only two walk-in patients in the waiting room when she arrived, and Anna was escorting a glum-looking banshee in a scarf back from the examination room.
“Hello, Anna,” she said, “and hello, Mr. O’Connor. I hope the strain’s getting better? Excellent. Have a happy Christmas. Sorry—I’d meant to get back before now. Has it been crazy?”
Anna was a comfortably large lady who wore purple scrubs in the office and only very infrequently had to suppress urges to stand around in ponds and lure travelers to a watery grave. She gave Greta a hug. “Good to see you, love. No, it’s not been too bad, couple of cases of the flu, one or two of that GI bug, poor Mr. O’Connor’s vocal strain. Mr. Renenutet did call and I told him you weren’t in the office at the moment but you’d give him a ring about his feet when you got in.”
Greta nodded, hanging up her jacket and getting into a white coat. “Right, I’ll do that once I’ve seen these two. I’m afraid I can’t stay the whole day—you haven’t scheduled any appointments?”
“Lord no. No, and people who need to be seen right away I’ve sent over to Richthorn. I rang him up and he’s happy to help out. I’ll get you a cup of tea, love.”
“You are a gem,” Greta told her, and went out to the waiting room to check the sign-in sheet.
Time always went faster while she was working. Once she’d seen her patients—a young were-cat in search of birth control and a thin creature of indeterminate species with strep throat—she rang up the mummy Renenutet to discuss replacing three of the bones in his left foot. She did a lot of restorative and maintenance work on mummies, and kept meaning to find time and money to actually go visit the exclusive—and necessarily secret—Oasis Natrun spa and resort, just outside Marseilles.