Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [97]
34
CONFIDENCES
‘You should be upstairs, resting,’ Amworth told her. ‘You’ll mend sooner.’
‘Why should I get well?’ Geneviève asked. ‘The hopping toad will only return and finish me off.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Yes I do. I don’t know why it’s going to destroy me, but I know it will. I’ve been in China. Those creatures don’t give up of their own accord. They can’t be reasoned with and they can’t be stopped. I might as well go out in the street and wait for it to come for me. At least that way, no one else would be in the way.’
Amworth was impatient. ‘You hurt it last time.’
‘And it hurt me worse.’
She was not entirely better. She often found herself moving her head around, to test her broken and re-set neck. Her head had not fallen off yet, but sometimes it felt about to.
Geneviève looked around the lecture hall that had become a makeshift infirmary. ‘No Chinese callers?’
The nurse shook her head. She was listening to the chest of a little new-born girl. For a moment, Geneviève thought it was Lily. Then, she remembered. The patient was Rebecca Kosminski.
‘I wish I knew which of the enemies I’ve cultivated was responsible.’
The Chinese vampire was a hireling. All over the East, such creatures were employed as assassins.
‘I expect I’ll be told. It would seem a waste not to let me know why my head is being torn off.’
‘Shush,’ Amworth said. ‘You’re frightening the girl.’
With a squirt of guilt, she saw the nurse was right. Rebecca looked thoughtful but her eyes had shrunk to tiny points.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Rebecca, I was just being silly, making up stories.’
Rebecca smiled. In a few years, she would never believe a lie that transparent. But now she was still a child inside.
Feeling useless – all her duties had been reassigned for a specified period of convalescence – Geneviève loitered in the infirmary for a few minutes then drifted out to the corridor.
The director’s office was locked; Montague Druitt lurked outside. Geneviève bade him a good evening.
‘Where’s Dr Seward?’ she asked.
Druitt was reluctant to talk to her but got the words out. ‘He’s off somewhere, with no explanation. It’s most inconvenient.’
‘Can I be of assistance? As you know, I have the director’s confidence.’
Druitt shook his head, lips pressed tight. It was business for warm men, he was thinking. Geneviève could not tell what the man wanted. He was another of the Hall’s scorched souls; she had no hope of making common cause with him, much less of being any help.
She left him in the corridor and traipsed out to the foyer, where an unfriendly warm nurse directed a stream of malingerers back into the fog, occasionally deigning to admit someone obviously suffering mortal injury.
Dr Seward had been much absent recently. She supposed he had some private grief. Like everyone else. Through all the pain of her broken bones, she still could not get the death of Pamela Beauregard out of her mind. Everyone lost people. She had been losing people for hundreds of years. But in Charles, the loss still burned.
‘Miss Dieudonné?’
It was a new-born woman. She had come in from outside. She was dressed well, but not expensively.
‘Do you remember me? Kate Reed?’
‘Miss Reed, the journalist?’
‘That’s right. The Central News Agency.’ She stuck out her hand to be shaken; Geneviève responded weakly in kind.
‘What can be done for you, Miss Reed?’
The new-born let go Geneviève’s hand.
‘I was hoping I could talk to you? It’s about the other night. That Chinese thing. The butterflies.’
Geneviève shrugged.
‘I don’t know if there’s anything I can tell you that you don’t know. It was an elder. Evidently the butterflies are a quirk of its bloodline. Some German nosferatu have a similar affinity for rats, and you must have heard of the Carpathians and their pet wolves.’
‘Why were you singled out for persecution?’
‘I wish I knew. I have passed blamelessly through life doing nought but good deeds, and am beloved by all whose path I have crossed. It is beyond conception that anyone