“Halethorpe,” he muttered, shaking his head. Dandruff flew. “Don’t talk about him. Halethorpe’s dead. Don’t talk about him. Any of them. All dead. Better that way.”
“He isn’t dead,” Greta said, leaving off the yet. “He’s very ill, but he’s alive, and I’m taking care of him. He was part of a religious group calling itself the Gladius Sancti, and we wanted to know if you had any information about them, since you and he were rooming together at the seminary.”
Whitlow stopped fidgeting, staring at her with a hollow, burning intensity. “Wait,” he demanded. “You’re saying he got out?”
“That’s right,” she said. “He got out. He’s—”
She could see very clearly, just as clearly as with the girl a little earlier, the effect of Ruthven’s attention, because at this point Ruthven cut it off, looking around himself for somewhere remotely unhazardous to sit, and Eric Whitlow’s eyes widened very suddenly. His whole body seemed to hunch, as if preparing for some kind of terrible flight, and she could see the little hairs on his forearms all stand up at once in an intense flush of terror. He was sitting on the edge of what she had to assume was his bed, piled high with books and papers and crumpled-up clothing, and now he leaned back away from them.
Humans did smell of fear, Greta thought. There was a sudden sour tang in the air that even she could pick up. Ruthven was wrinkling his nose. “Hey,” she said, gently, but with an edge on it. “Hey. Eric.”
“Who are you?” he asked, shrinking away from them, and Greta’s heart hurt when he reached behind him and grabbed a pillow as if it could offer some kind of shielding, scrabbling his way backward onto the bed, into the corner. “Who—what are you?”
Ruthven moved a little, but Greta made a sharp little gesture with one hand and he subsided. “Eric,” she said. “We’re not here to hurt you. Look at me. Look at my face, okay? Look at my eyes; you won’t come to any harm. Look at me and tell me what you see.”
He wouldn’t, for another awful terrified moment, and then hesitantly—she could see the effort, the courage that went behind it—he looked up at her.
“Tell me what you see,” said Greta again, still low and kind, holding his gaze steadily.
“You’re …” He trailed off, blinking. “You’re a person.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’m a person. Just a person. Bog-standard ordinary person, but—Eric, I believe you. Whatever you saw. I believe you. I don’t know the explanations for all of what’s been happening, but I believe you, and I want to understand.”
For a moment longer he stared up at her, and then in a sudden terrible collapse covered his face with his hands, dissolving into violent, uncontrollable tears.
Greta said a couple of bad words under her breath and sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, putting a hand on his back. Beneath her fingers the knobbles of his spine were much too clear, much too sharp, shaking with the force of his sobs. “It’s going to be all right,” she told him, hoping it was true, and when he turned to her with a face twisted into a damp and miserable mask of fear she put her arms around him and pulled him close, and stroked the greasy tangled hair.
He cried in the hard and choking, almost retching spasms of someone very near the end of their endurance. It didn’t take very long, though, before he subsided into hitching, juddering gasps and pulled away from her, mumbling something that sounded like I’m terribly sorry through the hair.
Greta’s shoulder had been moistened by rather more unpleasant fluids in its time, but she was still very aware of its dampness as she stroked Whitlow’s back gently. “It’s all right,” she said. “Eric—what you saw, whatever you saw—it was real. You’re not—”
“Going crazy,” he said, and parted the unlovely mess of his hair with both hands, wiping at his face. “Gone crazy. He—the eyes—and that voice—I didn’t know what to do—what was your name, I’m sorry, I’m terrible at names—”
“Greta,” said Greta, who couldn’t help a little smile. “Tell me what you saw. I can perhaps—we can perhaps explain some of it, not a lot, but some. But I need to know what happened. You and Stephen were roommates at the seminary?”
Ruthven silently offered her a handkerchief, and she took the pristine square of lawn and pressed it into Whitlow’s hand. He blew his nose, copiously, and she avoided looking at Ruthven as she went on rubbing his back. “Keep it,” she said.
“Thank you,” Whitlow said damply, and swiped the hair out of his eyes again. “It’s—it was months ago, I’ve kind of lost track of time, but Stephen was … he started out so ordinary. You know? Nothing strange about him. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, came to the seminary right out of undergrad with a degree in classics or something. His idea of fun on a Saturday evening was discussing the minutiae of a passage’s translation with a couple of his colleagues.”
“And you wanted something else?” Ruthven said, and Greta could feel Whitlow tense under her hand as he shot a look at the vampire.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, giving Ruthven a let me handle this, okay? look. “All we need to know about is the order.”
“The order,” Whitlow repeated, and gave a nasty clogged little laugh. “It was … fun, at first. Like a club. A little secret society that the faculty didn’t know about. John came up with it. John Arbeiter. Said he’d found the idea in some ancient manuscript or other.”
“The Holy Sword?” she said.
“Sword of Holiness, but yeah. It was … more interesting than the course of study, you know? A little time to … enjoy ourselves.”
“The ceremonial aspect,” Ruthven said.
Whitlow looked up. “Yeah, exactly. The … pageantry. Only on our terms. It felt … oh, fuck, I don’t know. Rebellious and holy at the same time.”
“Where did you meet?” Ruthven pulled his chair closer, across the unspeakable carpet.
“A bunch of places. We’d use the seminary chapel sometimes but mostly it was parish churches, around the city.”
“Anglican churches?”
“John said God wouldn’t mind. That He could hear us just as well from a C of E altar as from a proper Catholic one.”
“How progressive,” said Ruthven.
“Yeah, well.” Whitlow coughed raggedly. “We were all a little dazzled, I think. John was good at it. At the preaching thing. Some people have it, you know, the, the ability to grab people’s attention and hold it, and make them … believe things, at least for a little while.”
“I can imagine,” said Greta. “Go on. You and Halethorpe were part of John’s congregation?” Not Johann, she thought. John.
“Yeah. It sounds stupid but it was all … fun and games, really, until he showed up with those fucking spike things.”
“The crossblades?” Ruthven’s eyes narrowed.
“He had … found them. Somewhere. Didn’t tell us where. Just that God had led him to their hiding place, which—I mean, really? And some recipe for a magic potion that you were supposed to put on them. I was fine with all the … rhetoric, all the great smite-the-infidel shit, but then there were knives. I wasn’t there for knives.”