“We are going—” began Varney, straightening up with the air of one making a decision. “We are going to the Savoy.”
Greta stared at him. Under the grime his expression was unreadable. “Where I will engage a suite of rooms suitable to accommodate the entire party,” he went on. “I believe that would be an acceptable option?”
She and Cranswell looked at one another. “Uh,” he said, “we’re not exactly dressed for five-star hotels at the moment.”
“One thing I have found to hold true across the centuries,” said Varney, “is that people are willing to overlook all kinds of eccentricities if you present them with enough money. This way, I think.” He nodded down the street and started to walk, still carrying Ruthven without apparent effort.
“Is he for real?” Cranswell asked, staring after him.
Greta shook her head slowly in wonder, finding that she was not, after all, too old and worn and battered to smile. “You know, I rather think he is.”
Dawn had run a wash of pale rose and lemon-yellow light up the eastern sky by the time they reached the river, and despite the haze of smoke in the air—she could see another column of it rising somewhere over in Southwark—Greta thought it might possibly be the most beautiful sunrise she had ever seen. The water was a flat sheet of silver, mirror-calm. No breeze stirred the branches of the trees along the Embankment. The glass capsules of the Eye, still and unmoving, glittered like jewels on a giant’s bangle.
She had been dreading the sight of Ruthven’s house, or what was left of it. In her mind’s eye it had been reduced to a blackened cellar hole with half-burned beams jutting out of it like broken teeth. Greta knew perfectly well that the fire was not her fault, but it felt that way nonetheless, and she could not stop worrying about Kree-akh and his people, and wondering where they were now.
There were still fire engines parked in the street ahead, firemen striding around and doing things with hoses, and a small crowd had not yet drifted away. Greta made herself stop and look over their heads at the remains of the house, and could not breathe at all for a moment in a sudden and shocking wave of relief. It was still there.
The roof was gone. She could see the sky through the front windows of the top floor, and the entire front of the house was blackened with smoke—but as she watched, a fireman leaned out of the second-floor windows and called something down to his colleagues on the street below. There was a second floor, then. Maybe not everything had been destroyed.
“Jesus Christ,” said Cranswell. “Is—the monk. Halethorpe. Is he still in there?”
She hadn’t even thought of that. “Probably. Fuck. If—if they find anything left of him, if he can be identified, Ruthven is going to have to deal with even more problems than his house burning down.”
“Greta,” said Varney, and hoisted Ruthven higher on his shoulder. “Sufficient unto the day is the worry thereof. We will deal with the difficulty of the house and whatever and whoever it may contain after we have had a chance to recover somewhat.”
“I hope the ghouls are safe,” she said, her voice sounding thin and small.
“So do I, but there is nothing we can reasonably expect ourselves to do for them just now.”
“He’s got a point,” said Cranswell, and put an arm around her. “Let’s not stand around, okay? We’re kind of noticeable.”
In fact they were far from the only filthy and dazed refugees wandering the streets after the night’s chaos, and Greta was grateful for that as they stumbled along, Ruthven’s house left behind them. She thought she had never been so tired in her entire life, dizzy with it, grateful of Cranswell’s steadying arm.
Varney had been right. It was astonishing how quickly things started to happen once you threw large sums of money at them; as soon as his black credit card made an appearance he became “Sir Francis” to the suddenly deferential staff of the Savoy.
Ruthven had woken up a little upon being deposited in a chair so that Varney could charm check-in clerks, and he had in fact made it up to their suite under his own steam, but it was very obvious that he was feeling dreadful. Greta wished she had even her basic black bag with her—that was back in the house, or whatever remained of it—but what she had was the services of a five-star luxury hotel, and it would have to do.
She got him into bed, and by the time she had finished carefully cleaning his burns the first of her room service requests had arrived. “There, now,” she said. “In a minute you can have a nice cocktail of extremely expensive red wine and several other useful ingredients, but before that you ought to have a couple of pints of blood. I’ll go first.”
Ruthven blinked painfully up at her, his eyes red and glassy. Photokeratitis, she thought. The light had burned not only the skin of his face but his corneas, possibly even the retinas themselves, like a mountaineer gone snowblind. “What?” he said. “No. You can’t. I can’t. I won’t be able to stop, Greta; don’t even think of it.”
“Yes you will,” she said. “For one thing, it’s you, and for another, there’s Sir Francis handy to detach you if you do lose control, and you need this rather badly at the moment, so shut up and bite me. Neck or wrist?”
He closed his eyes tight. “Greta—”
“Neck,” she said, “or wrist?”
After a long moment, eyes still closed, Ruthven said reluctantly, “Neck.”
She leaned over him, tilting her head to expose the great vein in her throat, and although she had been prepared for it, expected it, the sudden force with which he struck took Greta’s breath away. He held her tight in his arms; she could not have pulled away if she had wanted to.
There was pain, at first, quite a lot of it—he wasn’t in any condition to be gentle, and she was fully conscious and unthralled—before the anesthetic in his saliva turned the pain into a spreading sensation of warmth.
She had been bitten before, several times, but you did not ever quite get used to the feeling of your own blood not flowing out on its own but being drawn. It was a different kind of sensation than ordinary phlebotomy, and that was partly due to the sudden noticeable drop in blood volume; even half a pint was enough to make you feel decidedly peculiar.
Greta knew roughly how fast he was drinking, and how long she could let him go on doing it, and when that time approached she said, “Ruthven,” and was not entirely surprised to receive no answer whatsoever. “Ruthven,” she repeated, sharper. “That’s enough, Ruthven. Stop.”
Nothing. Damn; she was going to have to yell for Varney, and it was going to be embarrassing. “Ruthven. Edmund. It’s me, it’s Greta. Stop.”