Her entire practice—in fact most of her day-to-day life—was predicated on the fact that the majority of the ordinary world did not, and must not, know her patients existed. Their safety, their well-being, their livelihoods, their whole existence depended on their remaining firmly in the realm of fiction. Taking this … whatever he was … to the nearest hospital would be an unacceptable breach of the cardinal rule of secrecy. She didn’t need to think very hard about what it would mean for Fass, for Ruthven, for Varney, for the rest of the vampires in London—and the weres—and the mummies—and the banshees—and the ghouls …
And even if she had personally been able to get up and walk away from this man, walk away and abandon him to whatever fate remained, she couldn’t do that, either. Eventually he would be found, and whoever found him would start asking the inevitable questions—and they’d end up with the same problem. All roads led to the pitchfork-and-torch brigade, except one.
Greta cursed everything to the deepest pits of Erebus and got out her phone.
“Fass,” she said when he answered, cutting off his hello. “I’m going to need a ride to the clinic, and I don’t think this guy can walk. Can you flip someone from inside of a church?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never tried to find out. No time like the present, I suppose.”
The weariness—and the resigned willingness—in Fastitocalon’s voice hurt her heart, and Greta promised silently that when all this was over she’d do something, anything, to make it up to him. She didn’t look up as the church door opened, or as his footsteps approached; she kept her eyes on the shivering velvet-wrapped form of her patient until Fastitocalon reached them and held out his hand.
She gripped it, thin and chilled and strong, and squashed her revulsion sufficiently to take the burned man’s hand as well. The moment all three of them were linked, Greta’s vision flared orange-white and she felt herself both pulled and twisted as the church around them flickered and was gone.
Translocation under the best of circumstances was a little dizzying; translocation like this, with Fastitocalon ill and at the end of his strength, fighting the metaphysical environment, carrying two people with him, was violently disorienting. Greta had to blink through sparkly grey static for several miserably nauseated moments before she could see properly again.
They were in her office, in the Harley Street clinic, lying on the floor. Sitting up brought on another wave of dizziness, but it passed more quickly this time, and she looked around. It was blessedly ordinary in here, warm and bright and familiar and safe, and the rain still pounding against the windows merely made the space more cozy.
Beside her Fastitocalon was stirring, his face a peculiar shade of pale grey, and Greta only just managed to reach over to grab the rubbish bin in time for him to be sick, glad she herself had gotten that part over and done with already this afternoon.
While he was occupied she turned to the burned monk, still wrapped in his purloined ecclesiastical curtain and deeply unconscious. The enormity of the task that lay ahead hit her in the face. He needed so much work, and she wasn’t at all sure she could manage to provide it on her own. Anna’s knock at the door a few minutes later, and her muffled inquiry if Greta was a) in there and b) all right, had never been more welcome.
Anna put the CLOSED sign up and locked the clinic while Greta got Fastitocalon dried off and provided with hot sweet tea and something for his church-induced headache. Together she and Anna turned their attention to the job of first cleaning and then dressing the burned monk’s overlapping and extensive injuries. They got fluids into him as fast as Greta deemed advisable, both a little surprised at how stable he actually seemed to be despite the multiple burns and lacerations. It was becoming evident that whatever was making his eyes glow was also speeding along the process of healing. Even as they worked, some of the cuts were beginning to scab over, and one minor scratch completely vanished into a shiny pink line as Greta and Anna watched, mouths open.
“That’s not right,” Anna said, pointing with a gauze pad clamped in her forceps. “That’s … vampire-level healing, but this one’s a living human. Or at least he used to be.”
“I want Fass to have a look at him, when he can see straight. Earlier he was going on about this guy’s pneumatic signature, or something, I can’t remember—a trail only he could see. Maybe he can tell us what we’re looking at.”
“I’ve never seen human eyes do that, either,” Anna said, going back to work. Neither had Greta; the blue light was somehow still faintly visible through his closed eyelids. She described how the eyes had looked the last time she’d seen them up close, in the backseat of the Mini: the corneas boiled-egg-opaque, a mass of tattered and ridged tissue through which he couldn’t possibly have perceived anything beyond blurry light and dark, if that, and yet he had somehow been able to see her nonetheless—see through his ruined eyes. Greta wondered if he could see through other things as well, fascination and curiosity warring with alarm in the back of her mind.
“The whole of the eye glows, but the light’s not given off by the corneal surface,” she said. “More like … I don’t know, like the light is generated farther in, passing through the eye itself and visible only in the outside air?”
“It must have been what the ghouls saw,” Anna said. “Blue eyes glowing in the dark.” She shivered, and Greta thought again of the way Kree-akh had held the mother and her child, in the harsh light of the cellar’s single bulb, thought of death in the darkness, sudden and swift—
Enough, she told herself. You have a job to do. “Pass the saline, please.”
CHAPTER 10
Afternoon had turned into evening by the time all the monk’s burns and slashes had been cleaned and attended to, and Greta’s phone had rung and gone to voice mail several times. She had sent Anna home with fulsome thanks and a promise of overtime pay when Greta could scrape up the extra, and she was alone now with the burned monk and Fastitocalon.
She stripped off her gloves and dropped into the exam room’s chair, closing her eyes for a long moment before taking her phone out of her pocket. It felt as if she’d been up for approximately a week; her back and neck hurt, the tension headache that had started in her temples had taken over her entire skull, and fatigue dragged at her as if gravity had been jacked up a couple of notches just in her immediate vicinity.
There were texts waiting as well as voice mail. Oh. Right. It would probably have been a good idea if she’d called Ruthven at some point to let them know where she and Fass were, or weren’t, such as dead in a ditch somewhere.
Guiltily she scrolled through the increasingly irate texts, considering asking Fastitocalon to be the one to call Ruthven, but she could hear him coughing monotonously from her office and thought, probably, all things considered, it would be more efficient if she did the talking.
Ruthven picked up on the first ring. “Where the hell are you?”
“The clinic,” she said. “Look, I’m—”