Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

Author:Vivian Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary, Fiction / Fantasy / Paranormal, Fiction / Fantasy / Urban, Fiction / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / General
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

When Greta woke up, fully clothed but shoeless, there was a note leaning against the glass of water on the bedside table. Forgive the presumption. R.

She sat up, the movement accompanied by a fusillade of cracks from her spine, and winced. Being carried off to bed like a kid who’d stayed up past her bedtime was admittedly to be preferred over spending the night sleeping where she’d dozed off at the dinner table, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t embarrassing. At least she’d managed to outlast Cranswell, who had drifted off in the middle of an increasingly incoherent conversation with Fass about what did and did not rate as part of the binary Heaven–Hell balance.

Six hours of sleep was not even near enough to make up for the past several days, but it at least made her able to think a little straighter, pushing away some of the fatigue poisons and the dull, formless dread.

She swung her legs off the bed and got up stiffly, padding over to the window to notice that it wasn’t raining and that a weak, watery sun was even trying to poke its way through the clouds, for the first time all week. Slightly cheered up, Greta went to check on her latest patient and found Ruthven sitting by the burned monk’s bed reading, yesterday’s tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Some of his hair had even escaped its usual aerodynamic styling process and drooped over his forehead. Absurdly and suddenly she wished she could draw, wanting to catch the scene on paper: Casual Dracula.

“I’ve been watching since about three in the morning,” he said, not looking up at her until he’d marked his page in the book he was reading. “No change for the worse. He woke up twice and asked for water, mumbled a lot of stuff about damnation and the reprobate and eternal suffering, and went right back to sleep. If that’s what this is. Unconsciousness, sleep, I don’t know.”

Greta came over to put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. After a moment he covered her hand with his own, and smiled up at her. The smile was only a little worn round the edges. He had color in his face; his lips were faintly pink. “You’re being wonderful about all of this, Ruthven. Thanks for looking after him, despite—”

“Despite everything,” Ruthven finished for her. “Yes, well. One tries, you know. One does one’s best. I went out to eat after you’d conked out, so Fass took the first watch, but I took over and sent him to bed when I got home. Varney, I think, didn’t quite trust himself not to come over all murderous in the middle of the night, and sensibly stayed far away.”

Something was kicking her brain. “Where did we even get to last night? I remember them talking about entities that don’t belong to either God or the Devil, and you were trying to explain electronics to me and Sir Francis and it wasn’t working.

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