Or pain, she thought. That could be pain.
The shifting of a log in the fireplace behind Greta made her jump a little, and she regathered the wandering edges of her concentration. With a nasty little flicker of surprise she noticed that there was a faint sheen of sweat on Varney’s visible skin. That really wasn’t right.
“Sir Francis?” she said, gently, and leaned over to touch his shoulder through the blankets—and a moment later had retreated halfway across the room, heart racing: Varney had gone from uneasy sleep to sitting up and snarling viciously in less than a second.
It was not unheard-of for Greta’s patients to threaten her, especially when they were in considerable pain, and on the whole she probably should have thought this out a little better. She’d only got a glimpse before her own instincts had kicked in and got her the hell out of range of those teeth, but it would be a while before she could forget that pattern of dentition, or those mad tin-colored eyes.
He covered his face with his hands, shoulders slumping, and instead of menace was now giving off an air of intense embarrassment.
Greta came back over to the sofa. “I’m sorry,” she said, tentatively, “I didn’t mean to startle you—”
“I most devoutly apologize,” he said, without taking his hands away. “I do try not to do that, but I am not quite at my best just now—forgive me, I don’t believe we have been introduced.”
He was looking at her from behind his fingers, and the eyes really were metallic. Even partly hidden she could see the room’s reflection in his irises. She wondered if that was a peculiarity of his species, or an individual phenomenon.
“It’s all right,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the sofa, judging that he wasn’t actually about to tear her throat out just at the moment. “My name’s Greta. I’m a doctor; Ruthven called me to come and take a look at you.”
When Varney finally took his hands away from his face, pushing the damp silvering hair back, his color was frankly terrible. He was sweating. That was not something she’d ever seen in sanguivores under any circumstance.
“A doctor?” he asked, blinking at her. “Are you sure?”
She was spared having to answer that. A moment later he squeezed his eyes shut, very faint color coming and going high on each cheek. “I really am sorry,” he said. “What a remarkably stupid question. It’s just—I tend to think of doctors as looking rather different than you.”
“I left my pinstripe trousers and pocket-watch at home,” she said drily. “But I’ve got my black bag, if that helps. Ruthven said you’d been hurt—attacked by somebody with a knife. May I take a look?”
He glanced up at her and then away again, and nodded once, leaning back against the sofa cushions, and Greta reached into her bag for the exam gloves.
The wound was in his left shoulder, as Ruthven had said, about two and a half inches south of the collarbone. It wasn’t large—she had seen much nastier injuries from street fights, although in rather different species—but it was undoubtedly the strangest wound she’d ever come across.
“What made this?” she asked, looking closer, her gloved fingers careful on his skin. Varney hissed and turned his face away, and she could feel a thrumming tension under her touch. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The wound is … cross-shaped.”
It was. Instead of just the narrow entry mark of a knife, or the bruised puncture of something clumsier, Varney’s wound appeared to have been made by something flanged. Not just two but four sharp edges, leaving a hole shaped like an X—or a cross.
“It was a spike,” he said, between his teeth. “I didn’t get a very good look at it. They had—broken into my flat, with garlic. Garlic was everywhere. Smeared on the walls, scattered all over the floor. I was—taken by surprise, and the fumes—I could hardly see or breathe.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Greta, sitting up. “It’s extremely nasty stuff. Are you having any chest pain or trouble breathing now?”
A lot of the organic compounds in Allium sativum triggered a severe allergic response in vampires, varying in intensity based on amount and type of exposure. This wasn’t garlic shock, or not just garlic shock, though. He was definitely running a fever, and the hole in his shoulder should have healed to a shiny pink memory within an hour or so after it happened. Right now it was purple-black and … oozing.
“No,” Varney said, “just—the wound is, ah, really rather painful.” He sounded apologetic. “As I said, I didn’t get a close look at the spike, but it was short and pointed like a rondel dagger, with a round pommel. There were three people there, I don’t know if they all had knives, but … well, as it turned out, all they needed was one.”
This was so very much not her division. “Did—do you have any idea why they attacked you?” Or why they’d broken into his flat and poisoned it with garlic. That was a pretty specialized tactic, after all. Greta shivered in sudden unease.
“They were chanting, or … reciting something,” he said, his odd eyes drifting shut. “I couldn’t make out much of it, just that it sounded sort of ecclesiastical.”
He had a remarkably beautiful voice, she noticed. The rest of him wasn’t tremendously prepossessing, particularly those eyes, but his voice was lovely: sweet and warm and clear. It contrasted oddly with the actual content of what he was saying. “Something about … unclean,” he continued, “unclean and wicked, wickedness, foulness, and … demons. Creatures of darkness.”
He still had his eyes half-closed, and Greta frowned and bent over him again. “Sir Francis?”
“Hurts,” he murmured, sounding very far away. “They were dressed … strangely.”
She rested two fingers against the pulse in his throat: much too fast, and he couldn’t have spiked that much in the minutes she had been with him, but he felt noticeably warmer to her touch. She reached into the bag for her thermometer and the BP cuff. “Strangely how?”
“Like … monks,” he said, and blinked up at her, hazy and confused. “In … brown robes. With crosses round their necks. Like monks.”
His eyes rolled back slightly, slipping closed, and he gave a little terrible sigh; when Greta took him by the shoulders and gave him a shake he did not rouse at all, head rolling limp against the cushions. What the hell, she thought, what the actual hell is going on here, there’s no way a wound like this should be affecting him so badly, this is—it looks like systemic inflammatory response but the garlic should have worn off by now, there’s nothing to cause it, unless—