“Thank you,” Kree-akh said, and gave her a very horrible attempt at a smile. Greta smiled back and reached for the phone to call in a new prescription to the nearby pharmacy on Beaumont Street. By the time she’d finished dealing with the pharmacist, he was sitting a little more upright and looked somewhat less miserable.
“I’ll go and pick that up as soon as it’s ready,” she said, “or send Anna, if she’s not in the middle of something. In the meantime, can you tell me what happened? I don’t … want to pry, but there have been some strange and rather awful things going on, people on the surface being attacked by a group of madmen dressed up as monks—”
Kree-akh hissed, sitting up straight, his eyes glowing brighter in the dimness of her office. “Monks,” he said. “It was monks did it. Humans, but not—ordinary humans, they smelled wrong.”
“Did what?”
“We were … taken by surprise,” he said, looking both furious and somehow embarrassed. “My sentries were overcome, it was—most of us were asleep, and there were many of them, fast and strong, and they could see in the dark as well as we can. I lost two young ones. The rest of us escaped.”
“Leaving behind everything,” Greta said, slowly, realizing it. “Including your meds. I am … so sorry, Kree-akh. I don’t know what’s happening, or what to do about it—”
“We could not even retrieve the bodies,” he said, guttural and harsh. “They are not at rest. Their flesh is. Is wasted.”
Greta closed her eyes. That was a particularly terrible insult, to the ghouls—a vicious insult, and a bone-deep sorrow. In a society that ate its own dead as a means of honoring their memories, being unable to claim the bodies of the slain meant their spirits could not be properly freed, that the grieving process could find no natural conclusion. “I’m so sorry,” she said again, knowing it was completely inadequate.
When she looked back at him Kree-akh was watching her steadily, and it was not at all easy to hold that gaze—red light, in dark hollows—but she did it anyway. For a long moment he simply looked at her, and then spoke a sentence or two in ghoulish. Greta only caught a little of it: something about respect, or earned trust, she wasn’t sure. One day she really would get around to properly studying the languages her patients spoke.
He sighed, and passed a hand over his face, and looked—briefly—very human indeed. “Yes,” he said in English. “You are sorry, Doctor, for dead who are not your own, or even your own kind. That is … rare, I think.”
“There isn’t much I can really do to help, I know,” she said, “but if there is anything, please will you tell me? And—are the rest of you safe?”
“For now, yes. We have moved away from the tunnels they invaded. There are other places in the undercity to make a home; and when my people have settled there will be time to observe these monk-men and find their weakness.”
Kree-akh didn’t need to add and avenge our dead. The combination of needle-teeth and red eyes was suddenly very frightening indeed. “They attacked a friend of mine,” she told him, looking away from the teeth. “Or a friend of a friend, at any rate. And one of them had a go at me. If they’re the same people, and I cannot think there are two groups of homicidal monks with glowing blue eyes roaming London at the same time.”
“Blue eyes,” he repeated. “Yes. They saw in the dark, with blue eyes. Blue flames. Like—” He waved a clawed hand irritably, searching for the word. “Gas. Like gas burns blue.”
“They look burned,” Greta said. “At least the one who attacked me was covered in what I think were fresh burn scars. I wish I knew who they were.” Too many bits of information were swirling in her head—too many questions and answers that she couldn’t clearly piece together. “Or what they were. Because they aren’t human, or at least not entirely human, anymore.”
Kree-akh hissed to himself, and clittered his claws together: an unconscious gesture, like lashing a tail. “They tried to harm you?” he said.
“Tried,” she told him, and pulled down the collar of her sweater to show him the pad of gauze. He hissed again, looking rather terrible, and she hastened to add, “It’s okay, I’m all right, I wasn’t badly hurt. And I’m staying with Ruthven. Where it’s safe.”
He nodded, and the terrible look passed off into an aching kind of tiredness. Greta tucked back her hair and said, rather tentatively, “I’m pretty sure you could, too. Stay there, I mean. You and your people. In the cellar of the Embankment house, if you truly ever are in need of a safe place to hide beyond the tunnels.” It wasn’t her cellar she was volunteering, but she knew Ruthven would almost certainly agree. Almost.
“I will remember,” Kree-akh said, and got up, steadying himself on the edge of the desk. “That is better. I feel almost well.”
“Good.” Greta got up, too, reaching for her phone and tucking it into her pocket. “I’ll go round the corner and collect your medicine, shouldn’t be very long. You can wait in here or go out to the waiting room, whichever you prefer.”
“Here,” he said. “Here is … safe. Everywhere else is too bright.”
It was obscurely gratifying to have her office labeled safe. Greta smiled at him and went out to tell Anna she would be right back.
Her phone buzzed as she was about to leave, and she paused at the door to read the text. Harry had come through for her after all: Hey, Helsing. Got your mass spec results. Whatever you’re into is some fascinatingly weird shit. Emailed you the numbers.
Greta thought fascinatingly weird shit was the understatement of the century.
On an ordinary map of London it would be difficult to make out the precise route taken by the creature that had visited Crouch End the night before. Some of the roads he had taken did not follow anything written down for the general public to see.
He was aware that he had failed in his mission and that God was displeased with him; but God surely knew he had tried, and at least he had wounded the woman—even if he had lost the sacred blade in the attempt. When he got back to his brothers he would tell them about it, and do his penance for failing to complete his mission. There would be more vigil in front of the blue light; he longed for it, in a cloudy, indistinct way, even as he feared the pain it would bring.
Not terribly far away, in a different tunnel, another pair of pinpoints of light paused, blinked on and off, tilted, as their owner listened to blue-lit words that echoed inside its head. It had been heading north to evict a couple of ghouls from their refuge in an overflow chamber. Now it turned, retraced its steps through bobbing debris. It had something more important to do than chase off the unclean eaters-of-flesh from the underground passageways that now belonged to its Order; it was charged with intercepting anathema.
In its glass prison, the jumping spark of the light-of-God hissed and crackled and flung deadly light across the walls of its little room. Under the steady atonal humming, another sound rose and fell in electrical singsong, almost like words; a faint sibilant voice, muttering to itself in the blue heart of the glow.
CHAPTER 8