“I was just about to go out looking. I rang Sheelagh O’Dwyer and got her and the other banshees to do a sweep and had the damn ghouls pass the word to try to catch your scent. For God’s sake, Greta, what have you been doing all day that you couldn’t bother to answer your bloody phone?”
She winced, rubbing her temple. When he was cross he just stuck to icy sarcasm, but when he was really angry he went up half an octave and the Scots crept into his cut-glass accent.
“I’m sorry, Ruthven, I really am. It’s my fault, I completely lost track of time, but could you maybe not shout?” She sounded exhausted even to herself. “We took care of the car thing, then Fass caught the … scent? Trail, track, whatever, of the man who attacked me. We followed it to Camden Town and, uh, long story short, I’ve got one exhausted demon and one seriously damaged mad ex-monk on my hands and I forgot to call you and I’m sorry.”
“You’ve got one?” She could hear excited voices on the other end.
“Yes. An exile from the ranks. He said he’d been excommunicated, presumably because he didn’t manage to kill me properly the last time we met.”
“Can he talk?” That was Cranswell. “We can probably make him talk.”
“Do shut up, Cranswell,” said Ruthven, and much of the anger had leached out of his voice. “What condition is he in?”
“Terribly burned, and he’s been flogged on top of that, and God knows what pathogens he’s been exposed to—but he’s healing, amazingly well as a matter of fact. Much faster than he ought to be. He’s stable for now.”
“Can you move him?”
“If I have to.” The voices in the background on Ruthven’s end were raised in argument now. “Why?”
“Interrogation,” Ruthven said. He sounded tired, too, tired and worn out with worry, and she felt another stab of guilt. “I’d say all three of us here are very definitely interested in whatever your catch can tell us about the Gladius Sancti and their plans. Varney in particular would like a personal word with him on the subject of stab wounds.”
“And if he doesn’t know anything? He seemed really out of it. I’m not sure he can remember much detail.”
“Well, we’ll work out what to do with him, at least. How’s Fass?”
“Exhausted. I want him in bed. He spent much too much time out in the cold and rain today, and then he had to flip all three of us back here. From a church, no less.” She rubbed at her temples again, wondering when she’d last been this tired.
“And you?” Ruthven’s voice had warmed back up. “No, don’t answer that. I can imagine. I’ll come and fetch you. If we fold down the Volvo’s backseat you can slide your new friend in on a stretcher and I can get all nostalgic about driving ambulances in the Blitz. Won’t that be nice?”
She laughed despite herself, as he had meant her to, and had to swallow as her throat ached with a sudden wave of fondness. “You didn’t really, did you?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, my darling. Go and pack up what you need. I’ll be there in a little while.”
It had been easier than Greta had anticipated, getting her patients stowed in Ruthven’s elderly 240 wagon (which was that particular shade of pale yellow reserved for eggnog and Volvos). The drive over had been quiet except for Fastitocalon’s cough; she had spent it sitting perfectly still with her eyes shut and savoring the experience of not being in charge of the situation. Being managed by other people was often maddening, but sometimes—like right now—Greta luxuriated in the somehow anesthetic insulation it brought. She did not have to think, and that felt like … oh, like sitting down had felt, after the hours and hours of work: a vast and crawling weight removed.
As they drew up in front of the Embankment house, reality came back, stacking up the weights again in her mind, in her heart. She was going to have to protect the man who’d fairly recently tried to kill her from the attentions of a very angry vampyre as well as August Cranswell’s enthusiastic questioning, and it was going to …
She mentally rephrased her analysis from suck to be bloody awful, and then again to present a considerable challenge, and the progression was enough to make her laugh a little at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Ruthven raised an eyebrow at her.
“Nothing,” she said, swallowing against a sudden unexpected threat of tears following in the wake of the laughter. The image of balancing on a very narrow ledge between deep valleys rose in the back of her mind, and she pushed it away, willing her voice to sound normal. “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”
“It certainly has.” Ruthven patted her hand. “Come on, I want to get some food into you. You’ve gone the color of good bond paper and these two need their beds.”
Fastitocalon protested being lumped in with the quondam Gladius Sancti infantry on the invalid list, but he was handily overridden.
Later that evening, after Ruthven had made dinner for her and Cranswell (no garlic was the only real house rule when it came to food; small amounts of scallions and chives were on the okay list, and it turned out you didn’t need Allium sativum to make quite a passable Bolognese), she told them her interpretation of what she had seen.
“They’re radiation burns, not chemical, and I can’t think of a thermal burn situation that would result in the pattern I saw. Full-body burn cases from stuff like falling into boiling hot springs exist in the literature, but the pattern doesn’t fit; his aren’t all over, they’re worst on his front, and some parts of his back and legs seem to have been spared.” She looked around the table at their expressions. “Judging by the repeated references he made to blue light I’m going to venture the theory that they’re UV burns, and that they’re due to something like an unshielded welding arc, or extended exposure to a mercury vapor lamp without the outer protective bulb. The pattern is consistent with his having spent a significant amount of time in a kneeling position facing the source, possibly with his hands held together in front of his chest. The burns are worst on his face and neck, his hands and forearms, the front of his lower torso, and the front of his thighs. He said something about a noise, too, as well as the light. A humming or buzzing sound.” She paused, and tucked her hair back. “The real question is what the hell a UV source like that is doing underground, and what has it got to do with their kill-all-demons bit? And not incidentally who they are, and why they are doing whatever it is they’re doing, but mostly I want to know what’s responsible for this.”
Cranswell was winding up the last strands of spaghetti on his fork, his appetite apparently unaffected by her narrative. “Blue light of God,” he said with his mouth full. “Whatever it is, they’re being exposed to the source on purpose. Maybe for penance. Like hair-shirts or flagellation, you know, mortification of the flesh.”