Sir Francis Varney was also damned, with the Devil and his angels and all the reprobate, and it was keeping him up at nights.
As the city slept toward morning, he leaned once more on the windowsill of his room and—his mind running in familiar, well-worn ruts—considered himself. He was a very old monster, and quite a cunning one, except for the part where he always somehow got in the way of his own plans and ended up either dead or on the run from a crowd of irate humans—still, the planning was all right, as far as that went. It was the tiresomely persistent self-loathing factor that really doomed him to continued failure.
Ruthven had been undead for what, four hundred years? More than that. Almost as long as Varney himself. And yet he dwelled here, in this comfortable, gracious house with its warmly living atmosphere, surrounded with the innocent and clean. With the living.
Varney went over it again in his mind, deliberately making himself iterate Ruthven’s advantages, like a man probing at a rotten tooth with his tongue. He had his cars, and wireless Internet, and subscriptions to magazines, and a kitchen with food in it, food that he himself cooked and fed to living people. How could he manage to be so … so ordinary, when he was an undead fiend from hell? And that didn’t even take into account Frederick Vasse, or, properly, Fastitocalon, who by his own admission was actually a fiend from Hell, or at least used to be one before a management shakeup in the seventeenth century. Fastitocalon worked as an accountant, for crying out loud. He’d even mentioned that there was an official representative of the nether realms stationed in London to keep an eye on things, and Varney simply couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of demons cheerfully walking the streets with the rank and file of humanity, as if they didn’t mind being what they were.
As if they didn’t mind their own selves.
He could not imagine it, could not comprehend considering himself anything other than a stain on the skin of reality, a regrettable blot on the world’s copybook. His sins were beyond forgiveness.
Not only the fact of his unholy nature, but the terrible deeds he had done, cried out for retribution. Any one of them would damn him to the fiery pits, but one in particular cried out for vengeance: the episode in his existence—he could hardly call it life—he most regretted; the turning of Clara Crofton. Of all the foul, indefensible, destructive, unforgivable acts he had perpetrated on the world during his various sojourns in it, none could be worse than the sin of changing a human being into a damned, parasitic horror such as himself. To doom her to an eternity of pain and loathing, to take away the last sweet gift any human could receive, the gift of absolution—no, Varney could not forgive himself for that, and would not try. Redemption was beyond him.
He leaned his chin on his hand, watching raindrops creep down the glass. Again and again in the course of introspection he would come up against the same question: Why, if he loathed his existence so profoundly, did he struggle so hard to hold on to it? Why not rid the world of a monster and himself of a tiresome burden? Why, when the blue-eyed monks attacked him, when he was half-mad with pain, so ill he could hardly stand, had he come here for assistance? It would have been simpler to let the poison do its work. Simpler, and perhaps better for everyone.
But then Ruthven would not have been warned of the danger, a little quiet voice said in his mind. You did that much good, at least.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough.
Varney heaved a sigh so melancholy it actually fogged the windowpane for a moment. He had to leave, and the sooner the better. First thing in the morning, he would make his apologies and tender his profound gratitude, and then he would leave them and find another of his lairs to hide in while he regained his strength.
Before morning, the rain had grown colder—cold enough to rime the edges of street signs and lampposts with ice, glaze the pavements with a thin layer of it, reduce the remaining plants in window boxes to limp sogginess. London never looked at its best in winter, except for those brief mornings when overnight snows had iced each cornice and roof peak, lending the metropolis a spurious and fleeting purity. Today it was particularly unprepossessing. Waking to find himself warmly tucked in the vast and comfortable bed, Varney contemplated the world outside and considered that perhaps he might put off relocation just a little bit longer.
When he made it down to the kitchen, Greta and Ruthven were already up, and Varney stood for a moment just outside the doorway. Looking in.
“Very stylish,” Greta was telling Ruthven, who hadn’t bothered dressing; he was plying the toaster in a heavily quilted and embroidered silk robe that made him look like a short, exceptionally pallid Mughal emperor. “You ought to have a matching nightcap,” she added.
“Nightcaps are for people with drafty bedrooms.” Ruthven looked over his shoulder and smiled at Varney. “Good morning. Well, not a particularly good morning, the furnace is misbehaving, but we’re all still functioning and nobody else appears to have made the papers for being murdered overnight. Could be worse.” Varney realized belatedly that it was, in fact, a good deal colder in here than usual.
He came into the kitchen and stopped, awkwardly, not knowing what to do with himself.
“Did you sleep all right?” Greta wanted to know, looking up at him, arms wrapped around herself against the chill. She was in jeans and a faded Cambridge sweatshirt, and looked about eighteen with her hair escaping from its band. Her eyes were blue-grey, sympathetic; innocent of makeup, her lashes were dark gold, and caught the light. “Ruthven says he had bad dreams.”
“Quite well, thank you. I really ought to take my leave,” Varney said, trying not to notice that she had the faint marks of pillowcase wrinkles printed on one cheek. “I have trespassed on your kindness long enough, Ruthven, and—”
Another voice cut in. “We’re all trespassing on his kindness, but thankfully he appears to have a lot of it.”
Varney turned to see August Cranswell leaning in the doorway with his arms folded. “And frankly,” Cranswell continued, “I’m not about to go out into the nasty wider world until we have some clearer idea of what the hell those idiots in the robes are actually up to. I’d say that goes double for you guys.”