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Synopsis
A witty, charming standalone novella starring Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, who must get to the bottom of a mystery involving a newly turned child vampire.
A barrow-wight shows up on Greta and Varney’s doorstep one night with 11-year-old Lucy Ashton who’s been newly—and forcefully—bitten and turned. Who did this to her, and why? With the help of her vampiric friends, Greta is determined to find out.
Dr. Greta Helsing Novels
Strange Practice
Dreadful Company
Grave Importance
Release date: June 25, 2024
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 208
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Bitter Waters
Vivian Shaw
Evening at Dark Heart: soft and slow, blue dusk rising out of the parkland little by little, drawing color out of the world. The long avenue of copper beeches that gave the house its name turning from deepest purple to black; over the ornamental lake a faint haze of mist, drifting on the slow night breeze.
Greta Helsing had been down at Dark Heart for a week now, and had spent every evening sitting on the parterre with a drink, watching the slow changing twilight, enchanted by it every single time. Nightfall in London just happened: here it was a process, a kind of tide one could observe going out, and the old parklands were at their most beautiful in the blue deepening dusk.
It was late spring, and still chilly enough once night had properly fallen to send her inside, shivering, to warmth and light and the welcoming scent of a cheerful applewood fire. Sir Francis Varney, draped in a chair by the hearth with a couple of hairmonsters at his feet, looked up and smiled. “Still satisfactory?” he asked.
“Deeply,” said Greta, and set down her empty sherry glass. Stacks of veterinary textbooks everywhere indicated that Varney’s unofficial ward, the young vampire Emily, was studying hard for her latest exams; Greta carefully moved several out of the way to sit on the arm of his chair. “I could watch that every night for a year and not get bored. It’s so—peaceful.”
“There are certain advantages to having a country house,” said Varney. “One cannot order takeout at all hours of the night, nor nip round the corner shop for a packet of fags, but there are nevertheless certain advantages.” He curled an arm around her waist. “You’re not missing the city too much?”
“The only thing I miss is the clinic,” Greta said. “And that is in good hands while I’m down here. I keep meaning to do something about my flat in Crouch End and I keep not getting around to it.”
“Such as moving out,” said Varney. “I can’t think why you lived there to begin with; it’s a wretched place and a long way from your work.”
“Money,” Greta said, wry. “Up until recently I didn’t have any of it, and trying to find a flat anywhere near Harley Street is a thing that normal people cannot actually do—but I’m staying with Ruthven and Grisaille so much of the time now that keeping the Crouch End place is getting a little ridiculous.”
“You know you have access to all the money you want, darling,” said Varney, giving her a little squeeze. “Along with a somewhat absurd but genuine title that you are entirely allowed to use.”
“I’d have to have the brass plate redone,” she said. “Greta Helsing, MD, FRCP, Lady Varney. The idiom’s just wrong.”
“I don’t know, I think it has a ring to it,” said Varney, and leaned up to draw her into a kiss. This was sufficiently distracting that Greta didn’t notice Emily come through from the library with yet another stack of books until she shrieked and dropped them on the floor.
Greta startled, turning to see Emily staring at the French doors onto the terrace with wide horrified eyes. “What the fuck is that?” the girl demanded.
“Good God,” Varney said, following her gaze, and Greta had to admit she might have lost her grip on the books as well. Standing on the other side of the glass was the figure of a woman, skeletally—almost ghoulishly—thin and pale, long hair in green-gold braids hanging over her shoulders, her eyes nothing more than two cold points of greenish light in hollow dark pits. She held in her arms the limp figure of something bundled up in blankets, the size of a child.
“What is it?” Emily demanded, still frozen in place, and that was enough to get Greta moving; she stepped over the fallen books and went to unlock the doors and let the barrow-wight inside.
“Thank you,” said the wight, in a voice like cold stone echoes in the dark. This close, the chill she was giving off was enough to make Greta shiver despite the warmth of the room. “I’m so sorry to barge in like this, but I didn’t know where else to go.”
“What’s—what happened?” said Greta, and the wight pulled aside a fold of cloth to show her what it was she was carrying. Varney was beside them now, and both he and Greta sucked in their breath at the sight.
A child. A young child, no more than ten or eleven. Asleep, or unconscious.
And very definitely a vampire.
“I found her wandering in the fields,” said the wight, whose name was Sigyn, sitting by the fire with a glass of syrup-cold vodka in her hands: frost was forming on the outside. “My barrow’s a few miles from here. We have a lot of—well, sort of ward-spells woven around each individual barrow, to warn us if someone’s trespassing, and ours went off. I thought it had to be teenagers on a dare, but when I came out to run them off, I found this little girl just sitting on the barrow, crying.”
The child had been wrapped up in warm blankets and laid on the couch, still unconscious; after a brief exam, there was nothing physically wrong with her that Greta could discern other than the puffy eyes from her earlier tears—and of course, the single greatest and most irrevocable problem of her new nature.
“I knew this house was here,” Sigyn continued, “and—that it was owned by a vampyre, so I thought it might be possible to take her here for help. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and she couldn’t stay in the barrow, she’d freeze to death—” She stopped, winced. “Not to death. But—”
“I know,” said Greta. “I’m glad we were here, and that you thought to bring her to us. Did she say anything about what happened to her?”
“Not much that made any sense,” said Sigyn, looking over at the couch. Emily was sitting on the arm of it with a totally unreadable expression on her face. “She cried herself sick and said something about getting separated from a school group and a stranger talking to her, and then waking up in the darkness alone like—well, like this.”
Greta reached out sharply to put a hand on Varney’s arm, just in time; he made himself not snarl viciously with all his teeth bared. She knew this was the thing he hated most, that Ruthven hated most: the unethical, nonconsensual, irresponsible, and effectively homicidal turning of a human. It had been bad enough when they first encountered Emily, and she’d been nineteen when she was turned: this little girl’s entire life had been stolen from her, childhood and all.
“I am going to find who did this,” Varney said very carefully. Greta could feel the fine tremor running through him, the effort he was putting into keeping his rage in check. “I am going to find who did this, and I am going to end them.”
“What can I do to help?” said the wight, staring at him with her cold-glowing eyes, and the deathly chill in her voice—frozen stone echoes, deep underground—made Greta shiver all over again.
Her name was Lucy Ashton, it turned out, and she was just short of eleven years old.
After Varney and Sigyn had departed in search of the creature responsible for her condition, she’d woken up and immediately burst into tears all over again, terrified and in shock, and it had taken a while for Greta to calm her down enough to give her name and age. Her vitals weren’t settled into normal range for a classic draculine yet, and Greta knew perfectly well that the worst physical effects of the rapid transition were still to come.
Huddled on the couch, still wrapped in blankets and sniffling miserably, she was still not making eye contact. Greta was using all her encouraging and reassuring bedside manner, kneeling in front of the couch and looking up at her, and it was slow going.
“Sigyn said you’d been on a school trip,” she said gently. “Where was the group going?”
“S-Stonehenge,” said Lucy. Greta winced: that was miles away. Either she’d walked all that way herself in the dark, or whoever had done it had carried her.
“And you got separated from the others?”
“I wanted to see closer.” She sniffled. “When the teacher wasn’t looking, I—sneaked away and hid behind a stone.”
Greta had to wonder why the whole of Wiltshire wasn’t crawling with police searching for a missing child, and speculated darkly on the capabilities of the teacher involved. “The stones are really interesting,” she said. “I’ve often wanted to go see them close up myself.”
“How did they get there?” Lucy said, for a moment sounding like an ordinary curious kid, and Greta’s chest hurt sharply.
“People dragged them a very long way,” she said. “Very clever engineering. So you were inside the stone circle? What happened next?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, and broke into fresh tears. Through the sobs she added, “It was—there was a man—he seemed nice, he asked if I was lost and—and said he’d help me f-find the others and then it’s just—”
She was crying too hard to speak, and Greta simply put her arms around the girl and held her close, only briefly surprised at Lucy’s strength when she clung and buried her face in Greta’s shoulder. None of the things she wanted to say were true: It’s okay, you’ll be all right now, you’re safe, it’s over. The worst was very much still to come.
“I’ve got you,” she said instead. “I’ve got you, I’m going to help you, Lucy, I’m so sorry this happened to you but we’re going to help.”
“W-what did happen?” Lucy asked when the sobs let go somewhat. “I don’t—know what he did to me.”
Christ, Greta thought, shutting her eyes tight. At least there was absolutely no sign the attack had been sexual in nature. “Well,” she said, “he did something bad to you, but it wasn’t—the sort of bad thing kids get warned about in school.”
“I don’t… it doesn’t hurt,” said Lucy, sounding uncertain. “Not there, anyway, but my neck hurts?”
“That’s because I’m afraid he…” Greta swallowed. “He bit you.”
“He bit me?” Lucy uncurled enough to stare at Greta, eyes huge in her tearstained face.
“Yes. And the bite has done some things to you.”
“Do I have AIDS?” she asked without hesitation.
“No. You don’t. You do have a—a sort of disease, however.” Fuck, she wished Ruthven were here, he could do this so much better, he could thrall her into understanding—
No. Not thrall. This kid had had enough of being mind-controlled for a damn long while.
“What kind of disease?” Lucy insisted.
“It’s rare and inconvenient, but you can learn to live with it. What happened when you met Sigyn? Were you afraid of her?”
Lucy blinked at the sudden change of subject. “Y-yes? Her eyes glowed?”
“But you let her help you?”
“She was—nice,” Lucy said. “I was too tired to run away and she talked to me, and she wasn’t—like—trying to scare me? And she was wearing a sweater and jeans like a normal person even though her eyes were weird?”
“That’s right,” said Greta. “She’s a special type of person, but she’s just a person. She’s actually a barrow-wight. Do you know what they are?”
Lucy stared at her.
“They g. . .
Greta Helsing had been down at Dark Heart for a week now, and had spent every evening sitting on the parterre with a drink, watching the slow changing twilight, enchanted by it every single time. Nightfall in London just happened: here it was a process, a kind of tide one could observe going out, and the old parklands were at their most beautiful in the blue deepening dusk.
It was late spring, and still chilly enough once night had properly fallen to send her inside, shivering, to warmth and light and the welcoming scent of a cheerful applewood fire. Sir Francis Varney, draped in a chair by the hearth with a couple of hairmonsters at his feet, looked up and smiled. “Still satisfactory?” he asked.
“Deeply,” said Greta, and set down her empty sherry glass. Stacks of veterinary textbooks everywhere indicated that Varney’s unofficial ward, the young vampire Emily, was studying hard for her latest exams; Greta carefully moved several out of the way to sit on the arm of his chair. “I could watch that every night for a year and not get bored. It’s so—peaceful.”
“There are certain advantages to having a country house,” said Varney. “One cannot order takeout at all hours of the night, nor nip round the corner shop for a packet of fags, but there are nevertheless certain advantages.” He curled an arm around her waist. “You’re not missing the city too much?”
“The only thing I miss is the clinic,” Greta said. “And that is in good hands while I’m down here. I keep meaning to do something about my flat in Crouch End and I keep not getting around to it.”
“Such as moving out,” said Varney. “I can’t think why you lived there to begin with; it’s a wretched place and a long way from your work.”
“Money,” Greta said, wry. “Up until recently I didn’t have any of it, and trying to find a flat anywhere near Harley Street is a thing that normal people cannot actually do—but I’m staying with Ruthven and Grisaille so much of the time now that keeping the Crouch End place is getting a little ridiculous.”
“You know you have access to all the money you want, darling,” said Varney, giving her a little squeeze. “Along with a somewhat absurd but genuine title that you are entirely allowed to use.”
“I’d have to have the brass plate redone,” she said. “Greta Helsing, MD, FRCP, Lady Varney. The idiom’s just wrong.”
“I don’t know, I think it has a ring to it,” said Varney, and leaned up to draw her into a kiss. This was sufficiently distracting that Greta didn’t notice Emily come through from the library with yet another stack of books until she shrieked and dropped them on the floor.
Greta startled, turning to see Emily staring at the French doors onto the terrace with wide horrified eyes. “What the fuck is that?” the girl demanded.
“Good God,” Varney said, following her gaze, and Greta had to admit she might have lost her grip on the books as well. Standing on the other side of the glass was the figure of a woman, skeletally—almost ghoulishly—thin and pale, long hair in green-gold braids hanging over her shoulders, her eyes nothing more than two cold points of greenish light in hollow dark pits. She held in her arms the limp figure of something bundled up in blankets, the size of a child.
“What is it?” Emily demanded, still frozen in place, and that was enough to get Greta moving; she stepped over the fallen books and went to unlock the doors and let the barrow-wight inside.
“Thank you,” said the wight, in a voice like cold stone echoes in the dark. This close, the chill she was giving off was enough to make Greta shiver despite the warmth of the room. “I’m so sorry to barge in like this, but I didn’t know where else to go.”
“What’s—what happened?” said Greta, and the wight pulled aside a fold of cloth to show her what it was she was carrying. Varney was beside them now, and both he and Greta sucked in their breath at the sight.
A child. A young child, no more than ten or eleven. Asleep, or unconscious.
And very definitely a vampire.
“I found her wandering in the fields,” said the wight, whose name was Sigyn, sitting by the fire with a glass of syrup-cold vodka in her hands: frost was forming on the outside. “My barrow’s a few miles from here. We have a lot of—well, sort of ward-spells woven around each individual barrow, to warn us if someone’s trespassing, and ours went off. I thought it had to be teenagers on a dare, but when I came out to run them off, I found this little girl just sitting on the barrow, crying.”
The child had been wrapped up in warm blankets and laid on the couch, still unconscious; after a brief exam, there was nothing physically wrong with her that Greta could discern other than the puffy eyes from her earlier tears—and of course, the single greatest and most irrevocable problem of her new nature.
“I knew this house was here,” Sigyn continued, “and—that it was owned by a vampyre, so I thought it might be possible to take her here for help. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and she couldn’t stay in the barrow, she’d freeze to death—” She stopped, winced. “Not to death. But—”
“I know,” said Greta. “I’m glad we were here, and that you thought to bring her to us. Did she say anything about what happened to her?”
“Not much that made any sense,” said Sigyn, looking over at the couch. Emily was sitting on the arm of it with a totally unreadable expression on her face. “She cried herself sick and said something about getting separated from a school group and a stranger talking to her, and then waking up in the darkness alone like—well, like this.”
Greta reached out sharply to put a hand on Varney’s arm, just in time; he made himself not snarl viciously with all his teeth bared. She knew this was the thing he hated most, that Ruthven hated most: the unethical, nonconsensual, irresponsible, and effectively homicidal turning of a human. It had been bad enough when they first encountered Emily, and she’d been nineteen when she was turned: this little girl’s entire life had been stolen from her, childhood and all.
“I am going to find who did this,” Varney said very carefully. Greta could feel the fine tremor running through him, the effort he was putting into keeping his rage in check. “I am going to find who did this, and I am going to end them.”
“What can I do to help?” said the wight, staring at him with her cold-glowing eyes, and the deathly chill in her voice—frozen stone echoes, deep underground—made Greta shiver all over again.
Her name was Lucy Ashton, it turned out, and she was just short of eleven years old.
After Varney and Sigyn had departed in search of the creature responsible for her condition, she’d woken up and immediately burst into tears all over again, terrified and in shock, and it had taken a while for Greta to calm her down enough to give her name and age. Her vitals weren’t settled into normal range for a classic draculine yet, and Greta knew perfectly well that the worst physical effects of the rapid transition were still to come.
Huddled on the couch, still wrapped in blankets and sniffling miserably, she was still not making eye contact. Greta was using all her encouraging and reassuring bedside manner, kneeling in front of the couch and looking up at her, and it was slow going.
“Sigyn said you’d been on a school trip,” she said gently. “Where was the group going?”
“S-Stonehenge,” said Lucy. Greta winced: that was miles away. Either she’d walked all that way herself in the dark, or whoever had done it had carried her.
“And you got separated from the others?”
“I wanted to see closer.” She sniffled. “When the teacher wasn’t looking, I—sneaked away and hid behind a stone.”
Greta had to wonder why the whole of Wiltshire wasn’t crawling with police searching for a missing child, and speculated darkly on the capabilities of the teacher involved. “The stones are really interesting,” she said. “I’ve often wanted to go see them close up myself.”
“How did they get there?” Lucy said, for a moment sounding like an ordinary curious kid, and Greta’s chest hurt sharply.
“People dragged them a very long way,” she said. “Very clever engineering. So you were inside the stone circle? What happened next?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, and broke into fresh tears. Through the sobs she added, “It was—there was a man—he seemed nice, he asked if I was lost and—and said he’d help me f-find the others and then it’s just—”
She was crying too hard to speak, and Greta simply put her arms around the girl and held her close, only briefly surprised at Lucy’s strength when she clung and buried her face in Greta’s shoulder. None of the things she wanted to say were true: It’s okay, you’ll be all right now, you’re safe, it’s over. The worst was very much still to come.
“I’ve got you,” she said instead. “I’ve got you, I’m going to help you, Lucy, I’m so sorry this happened to you but we’re going to help.”
“W-what did happen?” Lucy asked when the sobs let go somewhat. “I don’t—know what he did to me.”
Christ, Greta thought, shutting her eyes tight. At least there was absolutely no sign the attack had been sexual in nature. “Well,” she said, “he did something bad to you, but it wasn’t—the sort of bad thing kids get warned about in school.”
“I don’t… it doesn’t hurt,” said Lucy, sounding uncertain. “Not there, anyway, but my neck hurts?”
“That’s because I’m afraid he…” Greta swallowed. “He bit you.”
“He bit me?” Lucy uncurled enough to stare at Greta, eyes huge in her tearstained face.
“Yes. And the bite has done some things to you.”
“Do I have AIDS?” she asked without hesitation.
“No. You don’t. You do have a—a sort of disease, however.” Fuck, she wished Ruthven were here, he could do this so much better, he could thrall her into understanding—
No. Not thrall. This kid had had enough of being mind-controlled for a damn long while.
“What kind of disease?” Lucy insisted.
“It’s rare and inconvenient, but you can learn to live with it. What happened when you met Sigyn? Were you afraid of her?”
Lucy blinked at the sudden change of subject. “Y-yes? Her eyes glowed?”
“But you let her help you?”
“She was—nice,” Lucy said. “I was too tired to run away and she talked to me, and she wasn’t—like—trying to scare me? And she was wearing a sweater and jeans like a normal person even though her eyes were weird?”
“That’s right,” said Greta. “She’s a special type of person, but she’s just a person. She’s actually a barrow-wight. Do you know what they are?”
Lucy stared at her.
“They g. . .
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