Unless there had been something on the blade. Something left behind.
That flicker of visceral unease was much stronger now. She leaned closer, gently drawing apart the edges of the wound—the tissue was swollen, red, warmer than the surrounding skin—and was surprised to notice a faint but present smell. Not the characteristic smell of infection, but something sharper, almost metallic, with a sulfurous edge on it like silver tarnish. It was strangely familiar, but she couldn’t seem to place it.
Greta was rather glad he was unconscious just at the moment, because what she was about to do would be quite remarkably painful. She stretched the wound open a little wider, wishing she had her penlight to get a better view, and he shifted a little, his breath catching; as he moved she caught a glimpse of something reflective half-obscured by dark blood. There was something still in there. Something that needed to come out right now.
“Ruthven,” she called, sitting up. “Ruthven, I need you.”
He emerged from the kitchen, looking anxious. “What is it?
“Get the green leather instrument case out of my bag,” she said, “and put a pan of water on to boil. There’s a foreign body in here I need to extract.”
Without a word Ruthven took the instrument case and disappeared again. Greta turned her attention back to her patient, noticing for the first time that the pale skin of his chest was crisscrossed by old scarring—very old, she thought, looking at the silvery laddered marks of long-healed injuries. She had seen Ruthven without his shirt on, and he had a pretty good collection of scars from four centuries’ worth of misadventure, but Varney put him to shame. A lot of duels, she thought. A lot of … lost duels.
Greta wondered how much of Feast of Blood was actually based on historical events. He had died at least once in the part of it that she remembered, and had spent a lot of time running away from various pitchfork-wielding mobs. None of them had been dressed up in monastic drag, as far as she knew, but they had certainly demonstrated the same intent as whoever had hurt Varney tonight.
A cold flicker of something close to fear slipped down her spine, and she turned abruptly to look over her shoulder at the empty room, pushing away a sudden and irrational sensation of being watched.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself, and do your damn job. She was a little grateful for the business of wrapping the BP cuff around his arm, and less pleased by what it told her. Not critical, but certainly a long way from what she considered normal for sanguivores. She didn’t know what was going on in there, but she didn’t like it one bit.
When Ruthven returned carrying a tea tray, she felt irrationally relieved to see him—and then had to raise an eyebrow at the contents of the tray. Her probes and forceps and retractors lay on a metal dish Greta recognized after a moment as the one that normally went under the toast rack, dish and instruments steaming gently from the boiling water—and beside them was an empty basin with a clean tea towel draped over it. Everything was very, very neat, as if he had done it many times before. As if he’d had practice.
“Since when are you a scrub nurse?” she asked, nodding for him to set the tray down. “I mean—thank you, this is exactly what I need, I appreciate it, and if you could hold the light for me I’d appreciate that even more.”
“De rien,” said Ruthven, and went to fetch her penlight.
A few minutes later, Greta held her breath as she carefully, carefully withdrew her forceps from Varney’s shoulder. Held between the steel tips was a piece of something hard and angular, about the size of a pea. That metallic, sharp smell was much stronger now, much more noticeable.
She turned to the tray on the table beside her, dropped the thing into the china basin with a little rat-tat sound, and straightened up. The wound was bleeding again; she pressed a gauze pad over it. The blood looked brighter now, somehow, which made no sense at all.
Ruthven clicked off the penlight, swallowing hard, and Greta looked up at him. “What is that thing?” he asked, nodding to the basin.
“I’ve no idea,” she told him. “I’ll have a look at it after I’m happier with him. He’s pushing eighty-five degrees and his pulse rate is approaching low human baseline—”
Greta cut herself off and felt the vein in Varney’s throat again. “That’s strange,” she said. “That’s very strange. It’s already coming down.”
The beat was noticeably slower. She had another look at his blood pressure; this time the reading was much more reasonable. “I’ll be damned. In a human I’d be seriously alarmed at that rapid a transient, but all bets are off with regard to hemodynamic stability in sanguivores. It’s as if that thing, whatever it is, was directly responsible for the acute inflammatory reaction.”
“And now that it’s gone, he’s starting to recover?”
“Something like that. Don’t touch it,” Greta said sharply, as Ruthven reached for the basin. “Don’t even go near it. I have no idea what it would do to you, and I don’t want to have two patients on my hands.”
Ruthven backed away a few steps. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Greta, something about this smells peculiar.”
“In more than one sense,” she said, checking the gauze. The bleeding had almost stopped. “Did he tell you how it happened?”
“Not really. Just that he’d been jumped by several people armed with a strange kind of knife.”
“Mm. A very strange kind of knife. I’ve never seen anything like this wound. He didn’t mention that these people were dressed up like monks, or that they were reciting something about unclean creatures of darkness?”
“No,” said Ruthven, flopping into a chair. “He neglected to share that tidbit with me. Monks?”
“So he said,” Greta told him. “Robes and hoods, big crosses round their necks, the whole bit. Monks. And some kind of stabby weapon. Remind you of anything?”
“The Ripper,” said Ruthven, slowly. “You think this has something to do with the murders?”
“I think it’s one hell of a coincidence if it doesn’t,” Greta said. That feeling of unease hadn’t gone away with Varney’s physical improvement. It really was impossible to ignore. She’d been too busy with the immediate work at hand to consider the similarities before, but now she couldn’t help thinking about it.
There had been a series of unsolved murders in London over the past month and a half. Eight people dead, all apparently the work of the same individual, all stabbed to death, all found with a cheap plastic rosary stuffed into their mouths. Six of the victims had been prostitutes. The killer had, inevitably, been nicknamed the Rosary Ripper.