In the end there was very little discussion over who would stay behind to keep an eye on Halethorpe. Greta had already come to the obvious conclusion, and it did not make things easier to see the profoundly relieved expressions of the rest of them when she told them she would be staying. There were any number of very good reasons for this, and none of them made up for the crawling miserable awareness that she would be safe and comfortable up here while the others faced whatever they would find beneath the city.
“It has to be me,” she said, biting off the words, “because I’m the only person qualified and capable of taking care of our guest, and because I have responsibilities to the rest of my patients and to London’s supernatural community in general. I am not replaceable.”
If she got herself killed chasing mad monks, her patients would have to find somebody else to provide specialist care, and for some of them that might not be possible at all. It was not lost on her that this would please whatever was running this whole wretched business enormously.
Greta had rarely resented the responsibilities of her job quite so much as she did just at this moment. She hated this like fire, both the fact that she had to be the one who stayed and the fact that she knew it.
“Quite right,” said Ruthven, doing the annoying thing where he tipped up her chin with his finger. “The city needs you a great deal more than it needs any of the rest of us.”
“It needs you, too,” she said. “You know that. You’ve always known that, Ruthven.”
“I don’t intend to deprive it of the benefit of my presence and attention,” he told her. “But if, in theory, it came down to losing you or losing me, I think both of us know which one represents the more significant hardship to the greater number of people.”
She held his gaze for a long moment—which was damned difficult, he was looking at his most inhuman, silver-white eyes enormous—and then turned her head away from his hand. “Try not to get lost,” she said. “In any sense.”
“That at least I can promise,” Ruthven said, letting his hand drop. He took a step away from her, and the place where his fingers had touched her skin felt absurdly, awfully cold, the instant of time stretching slightly out and then snapping back to normalcy. The clock struck half past eleven.
Cranswell had watched this little exchange in silence, but as soon as the clock’s chimes ended he spoke up, arms folded, truculent. “Like I said, I’m coming with you. You guys are gonna need all the help you can get.”
“They can see in the dark and they’re considerably stronger than ordinary humans,” Ruthven pointed out. “Like I said, you’re at a distinct disadvantage.”
“Which is why I’m gonna be carrying these,” Cranswell said, turning to the knife block on the kitchen counter and removing a couple of Wüsthofs, which he brandished at the group. Ruthven went slightly paler.
“Put those back,” he said. “I have had to overlook a number of personal inconveniences just lately, but I am not having you ruin the edge on my good knives by using them to chop up violent lunatics. If you insist on coming with us, go and get one of the damn swords over the dining room mantelpiece, and try not to hurt yourself with it.”
Cranswell grinned. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said, and hurried out, coming back with a very fine nineteenth-century cavalry saber. He gave it an experimental swish. Ruthven backed hastily out of range, looking as if he was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of this move. Greta wondered, briefly, where the hell the saber had come from, and who had last been using it, and if that previous owner would have approved.
The others were unarmed, but wearing silk gloves; Varney and Ruthven both carried a length of what had up until recently been Ruthven’s best silk gauze curtains to use as veils against the ultraviolet light. Varney gave his a faintly suspicious look and tucked it into his pocket, or as much of it as would fit. “I hope you’re right about this,” he said.
“Me, too. Only one way to find out,” Cranswell said. “Let’s get going.”
In the hallway Greta wrapped herself impulsively around Fastitocalon in a hug. “Bloody well be careful,” she told him. “All of you. I—Just be safe. I need you.”
“We’ll do our best,” he said, gently, and with that she had to be content.
From Fastitocalon she moved to Ruthven, who blinked at her but returned the hug, and to Cranswell, who didn’t blink but grinned, and then to Varney—and stopped short. “Sir Francis,” she said, and looked up at him. He was absolutely not the sort of person one embraced.
After a moment, though, he made her a courtly bow and took her hand in his—cold, hard, but very careful—and brushed the lightest of kisses over it. A shiver ran through her, racing down her arms and legs, all the tiny hairs on her skin standing up at once, and just for a second, as he straightened up, Greta saw herself reflected in his eyes. A wave of dizzying numbness washed through her, just as it had when she’d touched him in the middle of thralling Halethorpe, and she heard his voice again inside her head with that astonishing musical sweetness, very faint but unmistakable: Thank you.
Then he broke eye contact. Sound and light and time seemed to come back in a rush, and she stepped back, feeling herself blushing, powerless to stop it and barely able to fight down the rising threat of angry, frightened tears.
“Good luck,” she said, keeping her voice from cracking with grim determination.
Varney simply nodded, and turned away with the others, and she noticed that his hair was mostly black now, just a little silver glittering here and there in streaks. She remembered seeing that hair spread tangled over the sofa cushions the night she had arrived—was it really less than a week ago?—all silver-grey with darker streaks; remembered him smiling unexpectedly up at her, changing his face for a moment into something memorable in a different way.
Ruthven opened the door on the darkness, and she watched them go. Out of the bright and into the black. The darkness seemed almost opaque, closing like ink around the four of them, as if they had never existed at all. For a moment she stood there, the night air biting at her face, before turning back inside. She thought helplessly of travelers setting sail across cold unknown oceans, passing beyond her reach, beyond her help, where she could not follow.
Greta leaned her back against the closed and locked door, and slowly slid down to sit on the floor, breathing deeply to try to clear her head. In a minute she’d go back upstairs and sit with Halethorpe. In a minute.
When her phone rang it seemed appallingly loud in the echo chamber of the hallway, and she fumbled it out of her pocket, suddenly sure it was one of the others calling to tell her they’d changed their minds, she should come with them anyway.
It was not. Greta sighed and lifted the phone to her ear. “Hello, Dez,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I won’t be in again tomorrow. I’m sorry to keep asking you to help—”
Nadezhda cut her off, her voice uncharacteristically sharp. “Greta, Anna’s been hurt. I’m with her right now, at Barts.”