Garrett Investigates (13 page)

Ruth accepted the assistance gratefully. Ulfhethinn or no, she was still a recovering invalid. Mary burned
fuel
; she would need to feed when this was done with, but she did not become weary. Ruth’s near-white hair hung in grimy strings; her breaths came slowly, but heavily.

“Spoken like a true Ulfhethinn,” Mary said. “At least that’s where I assume you get the Norse fatalism.”

“The Norse don’t have a lock on fatalism,” Ruth answered. She leaned down and put her hands on her knees. “How much further?”

“Less than half as far as we’ve come,” Mary replied.

“Oh thank
God
.”

“Yes.” Mary seated herself on the edge of the next higher step. “Do you believe in God?”

Ruth shrugged. “Ask me again in a year.”

“Fair enough. So if you’re not suicidal—”

“I’m not suicidal.” She straightened, pushing her hands into the small of her back. “But I killed seven men, Mary. And I’d have killed more if I could have laid hands on them.”

“How much blood did those men have on their hands?”

“That’s irrelevant,” Ruth said levelly. That amber-red flame glossed her pupils again. “I can make excuses, and be no better than they are. Or I can trust in the law to judge me, and live or die as a…it sounds stupid, even inside my head.”

“A righteous woman,” Mary said.

Thin-lipped, Ruth nodded.

Mary pinched the bridge of her nose. Not the Russians. She wouldn’t do it. She
couldn’t
do it, any more than Ruth could blithely sail away to South Africa or South America.

And then, like moonrise, the answer dawned on her. “We’ll get you to the Iroquois.”

Ruth’s head had been turned away, giving Mary the privacy to think. Now it swiveled back. “Iroquois?”

“Or the Americans. It doesn’t matter. You have a chance of surviving
that
trial.”

“Americans,” Ruth said, as if it hadn’t crossed her mind. “I could live with that.”

“And where there’s life, there’s hope.”

Mary stood, and prepared herself to face the chair-high steps again. Only one or two more to the next passageway, and from there, the surface was not far. If they didn’t beat the sunrise, well, they’d be spending the day in a cathedral’s crypt. There were worse fates.

“Anyway,” she said, hoisting herself up. “It’ll be easier in the long run. The Prussians will be
expecting
you to make for Calais.”

Ruth laughed bitterly. It echoed.

The sound gave Mary strength anyway.

If we’re very lucky, at the end of our lives, we get to have and keep the thing we wanted most—if we can figure out what it was.

The woman on the doorstep had drawn her black hood to a dripping peak that shaded her face. Dark gloves concealed the long hands that tugged her oilcloth cloak tight under her chin. Behind her, the night glistened and rang with rain.

The wampyr knew her by her smell, though the storm and something else had left a cool edge on it. One without the hissing allure of living blood moving beneath warm skin.

“Mary,” he said, and held the door wide. “Come in.”

“Don Sebastien.” She mounted the threshold. Careful of the rugs, she shed her dripping oilskin. She had a firm step for one he would have expected to find bent with age, tottering on a cane.

But she was as tall and straight as she had ever been, her medium-brown skin and mulatto features uncoarsened by age. Some gray stroked her temples—her wiry hair had grown long, and she wore it pulled back in a tight oiled bun now rather than caught up under a kerchief. Laugh lines showed at the corners of her eyes, but that was all.

He shut and locked the door behind her. When he took her coat and gloves, her hand was cool and soft.

Ah. So.

“No servants to open the door, Don Sebastien?” she asked, her eyes sparkling. The years had not amended her American accent, though the demure pink seed pearls at her throat spoke of money and Parisian pre-war fashion.

The wampyr had heard she’d done well for herself in France. And then the curtain of Prussian occupation had fallen across Europe, and he had heard very little more.

“Jason and Mrs. Moyer are abed,” he said. “And in any case, it does not trouble me.” He smiled. “I was awake.”

She nodded. Shed of her cloak, she stood revealed as a spare, tall woman clad in sensible black-and-white tweed, her heeled shoes laced over the arches. The seashell color of her blouse matched the pearls. It might have been silk, but Sebastien thought it rather one of the new synthetic fabrics. It smelled faintly of chemicals.

“You heard,” he said.

“More, I bring news you won’t have. Is she awake, then?”

“She sleeps not much more than I do, these days. She’s old, but she’s a sorcerer. She may live ten years yet. If you have come to see her, you’ve come in plenty of time.” Sebastien thrush his hands into his pockets, squeezing the hard flesh of his thighs with his hands. It was too late to say it, but he could not hold his tongue. “Mary. You know that this decision you have made will eventually leave you unstuck in time. Drifting. You will lose everything.”

“Sebastien,” she said. “I lost everything long before I entered Lady Abigail Irene’s service.”

He looked at her. He did not say to her,
Your definition of ‘everything’ will change.

“If you need me,” he said, “I am ever your friend. Remember that in centuries to come.”

***

Garrett lay across her bed, drowsing irritably. There was no sleep to be had. She wondered if her body’s last rebellion against the long sleep to come was to abandon all the little ones.

So when her bedroom door cracked gently, even the softness of a wampyr’s approach alerted her. She didn’t need her spectacles to identify the slender frame silhouetted through the crack.

She pushed herself up on her elbows, which was enough effort to set her heart racing.
How far we have fallen.
“Well, don’t just stand there like Patience on a monument. I heard the voices. Who’s here?”

“Mary Ballard.”

She would have rubbed at her ears, if she hadn’t been using both hands to haul herself upright. It was a name she had not heard in years. “Mary?” she asked, despising her own querulousness. “
My
Mary?”

By the movement of his silhouette, he nodded. She groped on the nightstand for her spectacles and balanced them on her nose, fumbling with the arms because her fingers trembled. When she had them set to her satisfaction, she blinked to clear her vision. “I must see her at once.”

“She is not,” Sebastien said, delicately, “as she was. But I will fetch her for you.” He paused then, already turning, and looked back over his shoulder.

***

Never had Garrett so disdained the wheelchair to which her infirmity now largely limited her. She allowed Sebastien to help her dress, to brush her hair, to fit socks and house-shoes over her horny feet. The arthritis curled her toes in on themselves; when she walked at all, she hobbled like a spavined horse, and she did not walk far.

Even with his help, it took twenty minutes to struggle into her clothes. And then she had to nerve herself—it was as well Sebastien was pushing her, because she was not certain she could have made herself roll down the hall into the drawing room. Mary, alive. Mary, undead.

Mary, a wampyr.

All down the long hallway, she wondered if Sebastien would have done that for her. She thought of his children, the members of his court—the ones she had met, the ones she had watched die. Was it worse for him, she wondered, when children (inevitably) left him, or when courtesans aged and died?

Or was it worst of all when the children burned before your eyes?

Her hands knotted with fear and anticipation as the wheels whirred and squeaked down the long wooden boards of the hall, into the drawing room with its sprigged wallpaper, upright piano, and low shelves of books.

Then they entered and Mary stood to meet them, and all Garrett’s worry fell away. Mary crossed the room in three quick strides, her calves flashing under the hem of her skirt—Garrett would never get used to women’s legs made so plainly visible—and bent to encircle Garrett gently in her arms. She held her with such fragility that Garrett almost wanted to pound on her back and demand a better hug than that, but a wampyr’s strength was nothing to mock.

Instead, she put her crabbed and spotted hands on Mary’s fine shoulders and set her back so she could regard her better.

Mary disentangled herself gently from Garrett’s grip. “The war is over. The occupation of Paris is ended. And I hear through the grapevine that it’s you I have to thank?”

“Mine was only one small part of it,” Garrett said. She glanced at Sebastien. He steepled his fingers and leaned one elbow on the marble mantel, doing his undead best to impersonate a stick of furniture. A hat rack, perhaps. A very narrow armoire.

It had been his doing more than hers, the death of the Prussian Chancellor at the hands of one of his own berserker Ulfhethinn
guards. For all his determination to leave politics alone, Sebastien’s courtesans had a way of drawing him into the world.

That Mary knew about Ruth Grell and her long-planned assassination told Garrett a good deal about how
Mary
had spent her war. “You were in the Resistance in France, I gather?”

“Once a detective, always so,” Mary said. Her diction had grown more polished; Garrett imagined it was the result of much effort. “Thank God it’s over now. The worst of it. There’s still the hungry to be fed and governments and industry to rebuild, of course…”

“I lived to see it end,” Garrett said. “And look at you.”

Mary smiled. It made no dimples in her thin cheeks. “I’ve kept up on your exploits. You’ve had a busy forty years.”

“And I have heard so little of yours,” Garrett replied, “that you must now tell me everything. Sit, please. I’d ring for tea, but Mrs. Moyer is in bed.”

“It would be wasted on me.” Carefully, tucking her skirt with her hands, Mary settled again on the cream velvet divan opposite. “Tea, I miss.”

She offered it up like an admission, a confidence, and Garrett accepted it the same way. “Who was it—” she glanced at Sebastien, not sure if what she was about to ask was a terrible breach of etiquette among the blood. Sebastien’s face remained impassive. “Who made you?”

Mary smiled. “Alice Marjorie,” she said. “A friend of Sebastien’s.”

“Tea, I can make,” Sebastien said, and evaporated from his corner as if a wampyr could in fact sublimate away to a bank of mist. Garrett barely heard the door close behind him.

She did not miss the ease with which Mary said Sebastien’s name, dropping the title he was no more entitled to than the name itself.

“But that must have been before the Prussian invasion,” Garrett said. “You look—no more than ten years older, I should say, than when I saw you last. And I cannot imagine those bastards would have been kind to you.”

Her fierceness did not surprise her, but Mary blinked.

“Doctor Garrett—”

“Abby Irene,” she said. Of course Mary would remember what she had lost, when she fled America, and would not call her by the Crown Investigator’s title that had been stripped from her. “Please. If you can stomach it. If we are not old friends…” She sighed. “I cannot imagine calling you Miss Ballard, though I will if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Abby Irene.” Mary smiled. “Maybe I should get my business out of the way before you make any such decisions. I come with an invitation. On behalf of the King. He wishes you to be present when he returns to English soil.”

“King Phillip?” Garrett’s hand pressed to her breastbone, to the cloth that covered the faded remains of her sorcerer’s tattoo. “He asked for—me?”

“For you,” Mary said. “And for Sebastien—John Chaisty, I should say, though he knows that is an alias. And for your friend Mrs. Smith. Apparently his ministers are well-aware of the actions of the English Underground, and how directly they led to his reinstatement. And I think he knows too, of your relationship with his uncle.”

Phillip II’s uncle, Prince Henry—Garrett’s once-lover—had died in the Fall of London. Henry had been instrumental in spiriting the young Phillip—newly King of England on his father’s death, neither yet crowned nor consecrated—onto the aeroplane that had borne him, in an unprecedented midnight flight, across the wide Atlantic to Iceland and from there to the safety of New Amsterdam.

Garrett would have braided her fingers together, but it hurt, so she settled for clasping one hand inside the other. “Don’t you have a telephone in that shiny modern palace? Or did the Prussians take them all with them when they fled?”

“I do.” Mary smiled. “But it seemed too late to ring you.”

***

Garrett waited in the drawing room with Mary while Sebastien went in to wake Phoebe. Phoebe must have been roused by the conversation, however, because it wasn’t long at all before she had joined them downstairs—a vigorous little white-haired lady with a stoop, clad in a green knit dress and support stockings that hid most of the spider veins in her calves. She swept into the drawing room a few steps in advance of Sebastien, pulling him along like a toy bobbing in her wake.

“Miss Ballard,” she said, not batting an eye. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

Mary stood, as she had stood for Garrett, and smiled. Her surprise when Phoebe offered her a hand was palpable, but she took it. “Please,” she said. “Call me Mary.”

“Then I am Phoebe,” Phoebe said—and that being settled, and Sebastien having brought the promised tea, she sat herself down beside Mary and began cheerfully quizzing her about her adventures since they all had parted ways in Paris, so many decades ago.

“Sebastien has brought me up to date,” she said. “But you must tell me how on earth you wound up running errands for the King-in-Exile.”

“It’s a funny story,” Mary said, frowning at the tea with obvious longing. Garrett grimaced. Perhaps she should have forestalled Sebastien, so as not to tempt their guest with what she could not have. But then, it was Garrett’s experience with the blood that they found most food odors nauseating. “You see, after I left your company in Paris, I could not see myself taking up work as a domestic again. The intrigues and adventures of living in your house—” she smiled at Garrett “—quite spoiled me.”

Garrett leaned forwards. “So what did you do?”

“Ah,” said Mary. “Thereby hangs the tale. For you see, it occurred to me that in Paris I was the exotic. And I thought, I must learn the language, beyond the little you had taught me, and learn it quickly. So I put aside the severance package you had paid me, and I found work…” Her smile was enigmatic. “I found work in a bar.”

“I cannot picture you a barmaid,” Garrett said.

“I was a good one,” said Mary. “But not for too long. Only a couple of years, until I could make myself understood, and understand most of what was said to me. Then, I fear, I truly capitalized on my prior employment.”

“You became a detective,” Sebastien said, from his place by the mantel.

Mary grinned, showing tea-stained teeth in a broad smile. “You are ahead of me.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, making a pretty bow of apology.

Garrett blinked. Was Sebastien flirting with her former housekeeper?

…and indeed, if he was, what of it? “Please,” she said, “Mary. Continue.”

“I fell in love with Paris. I could have stayed there forever, had the city herself but proved as unchanging as my love. In any case, I did not want for work, though mine was of a more prosaic sort than yours. I sought out cheating husbands and deadbeat debtors, not sorcerers and monsters in the night. But it was a living, and from observing your methods I developed my own.

“Eventually, my former employment with you led to the most interesting of cases. Do you remember Dr. Tesla?”

Garrett felt her eyebrows rise. “How could I forget him?”

“He hired me to track down a thief. This was a case that resulted in some notoriety, and guaranteed me steady business until the war came to us, in ’22.” She looked down at her hands. Garrett thought if she were alive, she would be weeping. “Paris,” she said, “is not what it was.”

“You joined the Underground,” Phoebe said, stirring her second cup of tea. Brightness was returning to her expression.

“I did. And there I met Alice Margorie, who took me in as her courtesan and eventually made me what I am today.” Mary looked directly at Sebastien now. “Grandfather.”

Sebastien looked down at his hands. “It suits you.”

“I am grateful to you for showing me that our kind are not monsters, but erratic beings of good and evil, love and hate—like any human thing.”