Not so very far away, Greta Helsing snatched her hand away from the power switch, now slammed back from OFF to ON, and clutched at her head with both hands, eyes squeezed shut. “Fass,” she said, voice wavering on the edge of tears, “Fass, I—I undid it, I put it back, I turned it on again, where are you—”
There was a hole in her mind where Fastitocalon should have been. His presence, quietly protective, safe, was the one thing she had always been able to count on, after her father was gone. I’m here, I’m with you, he had said, and through the numbing, bitter shock of grief she had felt that, felt herself drawn into a mental embrace, held and steadied, reassured: You do not have to bear this all on your own; you do not have to be alone. I’ve got you.
In the years since then she had always known he was there, and now she had thrown the switch and in the moment when it slammed into the OFF detent he had simply vanished. A line cut, a lamp blown out: just empty nothingness in the back of her mind where he ought to be.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, Fass. Come back, fucking come back, please, this isn’t funny, I need to know if you’re okay, I know you can read minds, just please …”
The mental socket where he should have been felt cold, empty, raw. She was barely even aware of Mewleep and Akha kneeling down beside her, of their chilly, strong hands on her shoulders, still preoccupied with trying to find any trace of him in her head. It wasn’t until the baby woke up in his sling against Akha’s chest, woke up and protested in a wail that he was hungry, that Greta came entirely back to the present. She felt scoured-open, ancient, more lonely than she knew what to do with. Empty.
“Are you hurt?” Mewleep said, still holding her shoulder.
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not hurt. But I have to get in there, Mewleep. Into the shelter. Do that for me and then—I don’t know what’s happened, what I did, what any of us did, but you—and Akha and the baby—you should get well clear of here.”
“Not leaving you,” he said.
“You have to. The baby’s hungry and the others in there will keep me safe. You did what Kree-akh asked,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you so much, both of you.”
“Not thank us yet.” Mewleep watched as she reclosed the locks on the electrical cabinet and then stood up, giving Greta a hand to her feet. “Not until all are safe. I take you to the shelter—”
“And then go,” Greta said, hollow-eyed in the last of the foxfire’s light. “Get far away from here. There may be humans, coming down to see what’s going on. I want you all safely gone by the time they get here.”
Mewleep nodded after a moment, and turned. “This way,” he said. “Not far.”
Cranswell would remember for the rest of his life how the cracks raced outward from the point of impact through the glass envelope of the rectifier, crazing spidery pathways around its swollen bulb. The whole of it hung together for a long and terrible moment before imploding in a musical crash of glass. The awful voice in his head screamed like nothing Cranswell had ever heard, or ever wanted to, as, for the second time, the light cut off completely like a blown-out lamp.
This time there was no rekindling of the spark, but the voice remained, no longer contained behind the glass. The scream grew louder and louder, filling the sudden darkness with anger and fear and hate and all of the thousand miseries human beings are capable of visiting upon themselves, upon each other. Grew until he thought it would break the bones of his skull the way opera singers broke wineglasses, the way he himself had just shattered the envelope in which it dwelled. Grew until it blotted out all other sensation—and then just as suddenly, in a devastating flare of brilliant actinic light, cut off.
I am having a stroke, Cranswell thought, pressing his hands over his eyes against the force of that light. In a moment I will lose consciousness entirely and then I will die, and I never even got to see my stupid museum exhibit go up.
It occurred to him that this was not a very noble dying thought to consider, and then a moment later that he was, in fact, still around to consider it, and that the blaze of light seemed to be fading. Sure enough, when he took his hands away from his face, he could make out the edges of the room they stood in, the shapes of Ruthven and Varney, through the glaring afterimage of that first sun-bright burst of light.
He could also, very clearly, make out the fact that they had been joined by another figure. It was just as clearly not a human. The wings were a dead giveaway, huge and snowy-white and folded neatly, arching over the newcomer’s shoulders. The wings, and the blank, pupilless red eyes. Without those it could probably have passed for a very beautiful golden-haired young man, wearing an irritated expression and a white chiton clasped at the waist with a snake-shaped girdle made of gold.
It was holding out a hand over which the source of the brilliant light hung in midair, slowly turning. With an impatient little gesture the figure shooed the point of light up to hover near the ceiling and looked around the little room with undisguised dislike.
“What a complete hole,” it said. “Are any of you hurt?”
Cranswell watched as Ruthven and Varney looked at one another, and then down at the crumpled robes lying at their feet. Apparently the monks had reacted rather badly to the destruction of their idol.
Neither vampire nor vampyre looked even close to okay, but Ruthven was visibly worse off, swaying a little, all his visible skin burned an angry red. Cranswell remembered Fastitocalon saying, I don’t care how determined you might be, Ruthven. You aren’t going to be able to do much of anything after you get in direct line of sight to that UV source. As he watched, Varney stepped over an unmoving monk foot and got an arm around Ruthven’s shoulders to steady him. “I believe you have the advantage of us,” he said, the beautiful voice seeming more incongruous than usual in these surroundings.
“I generally do,” said the figure, and sighed. “Sorry. My name is Samael, and I promise I will do my best to explain, but there’s something rather important I’ve got to sort out first.”
CHAPTER 15
Greta had no idea how long they had been down here, or what might be happening in the world above, and right now she did not care in the slightest; she followed Mewleep with her teeth clenched and her hands curled into fists, still searching with grim determination for the missing touch in her mind. The rattle and clatter of trains in the tunnel above them grew louder as they went along.
She was sore all over, every muscle aching as if it had been her and not Mewleep who had made that run in the dark, but pushed the pain away. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, not now, except Fass. And the others. But Fass most of all. He’s all I have of family without Dad. I can’t have lost him, too.
The ghoul stopped in front of a ventilation grate let into one wall and looked at her. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “This is the way in?”