Above, in the city, it was raining again: that slow but insistent icy rain that characterizes London for much of the winter. Not quite cold enough to be actually frozen; certainly cold enough to be utterly miserable for anyone unlucky enough to be out in it.
Varney was, despite Greta’s instructions, out of bed. He’d been anxious and irritable all day, ever since the doctor had left against sanguivorous advice to go and … do whatever it was she did, presumably dose other monsters for the grippe and sew up holes in their hides. Wrapped in a borrowed and very beautiful dressing gown that was considerably too short in the sleeves and hem, the vampyre stood at his bedroom window and glowered out at the afternoon.
It had been a very long time since Francis Varney had come across any humans so matter-of-factly involved with the world of the supernatural—perhaps because he took pains to avoid getting to know humans at all. That she was so unafraid of him troubled Varney. He was not sure what to make of it. Or of her.
Varney’s hand crept to the dressing taped over the wound. His memory of recent events had come back to him with rather more clarity than he would have liked, as the fever receded, and he couldn’t help replaying certain aspects of that evening in his mind.
What he had told Greta was true. He did try to minimize the number of occasions on which he lunged at somebody, fangs bared, upon being woken unexpectedly, but it was … still an instinct he could not completely quell. The mortification upon realizing what he had just done—to a total stranger—had been rather worse than the physical effects of his wound, for a moment or two.
Then he’d said something stupid, he couldn’t quite recall what, and after that things went first blurry and then blank behind a haze of sickening, vertiginous misery. He could just about remember cool hands on his face, a delicate touch on his skin, in the middle of all that pain.
When he’d next become aware of the world he had felt different somehow. The wound still hurt dreadfully, but it was a kind of hurt he knew, could recognize, from countless other injuries. Between them Ruthven and Greta had helped him up the stairs, and Varney neither remembered nor wished to know which of them had been responsible for undressing him—
He winced away from the thought, and went back to staring out of the window, but couldn’t quite distract himself from the question of how to react to someone like Dr. Helsing. Did he try to push her away, urge her out of his sphere of influence, insist that she avoid his gaze for her own safety? Did he attempt to eat her? He simply had no basis for comparison.
Perhaps it was just decay of the system affecting his mind, or the fact that he’d been practically in hibernation on and off for several decades now and had not had a great many recent encounters with women, but Varney was finding it increasingly and extremely difficult to avoid thinking about her. He could feel the beginnings of the same inappropriate fixation that he’d had on Flora Bannerworth, all those centuries ago.
She wasn’t anything like Flora, or any of the other maidens he had pursued with such single-minded devotion—none of them would have countenanced the prospect of becoming a physician, to be sure, and he didn’t know if he actually approved of it as a career for a lady—but she was not unattractive, in a pale, pointed fashion.
Ugh, he thought. Shall I never be free of unseemly desire?
It wasn’t simply desire, either. There was a kind of miserable fascination in this, Varney’s mind trying to fit Greta Helsing into any of the available preshaped settings in his view of the world and failing completely. She was odd, and he could not work out quite why she did what she was doing, or why anyone would want to. He could more or less understand the desire to repair things that were broken, but the effort, and time, and energy, a human would have to put into first studying and then qualifying and then maintaining a medical practice for the undead seemed to him utterly incomprehensible. Not only the job she did but the lengths to which she must have to go in order to keep that job, and her livelihood, secret from the waking world. It was so strange. Everything was strange, and nothing he knew seemed to make any kind of sense, and this house was the only place just at the moment where Varney felt even slightly safe or secure. The idea of venturing out into the city beyond these windows made all the little hairs rise on the back of his neck. It was not easy to be a monster. It had never been, but sometimes he simply noticed it more clearly.
Oh, but the world is a cold place, he thought.
A suitably cold one, of course. Varney couldn’t possibly object on moral grounds to being disliked and disenfranchised—he was dead, he fed on the life of the innocent, the blue-eyed creatures who had wounded him were actually quite right in claiming to do the work of God, but … it was cold, for all that. He shivered, leaning against the window frame and watching the distant scurrying of pedestrians, the beetle-black cabs making their way along the Embankment. Were they, too, aware of the icy and uncaring nature of the universe? They were his prey—or, well, certain among them were—and he himself was now prey of a subtly different kind.
Absently Varney rubbed again at the dressing over his cross-shaped wound. It ached now, rather than that awful dizzying burn, and the ache was accompanied by an increasingly maddening itch.
“You oughtn’t to be up,” said a voice from behind him, and Varney was sufficiently far gone in his familiar unhappy reverie that he jerked in surprise and turned to find Ruthven watching him from the doorway. His host’s sleeves were rolled up and his tie loosened, but the hair remained neatly combed back. “Not that I can blame you,” Ruthven went on. “Lying around all day is intensely boring. Do you feel any better?”
Varney almost guiltily dropped his hand from the dressing. “Er,” he said. “Yes, thank you. Quite improved.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Since you are out of bed, would you like to come downstairs and keep me company for a while?”
His immediate instinct was to demur—no, really, he was always better off alone, Ruthven didn’t need his melancholy presence—but something about the way Ruthven was looking at him seemed to change his mind. “If you’re quite sure …?”
“I am.” Ruthven gave him a rueful smile. “And I’m sure I’ve got some dressing gowns somewhere that are proportioned for ordinary people. You needn’t put up with mine.”
Varney felt his face go ever so slightly warm in embarrassment.