We left Mrs Sanderson where she lay. She didn't look as though she had any intention of getting up, again, and anyway, it was easier than hacking her up. If she was found there, cold and dead, it would be a sad thing, but if she was found there, sans head, it would be a homicide, and while Chessie and I had never found ourselves on the wrong end of a murder investigation, we preferred not to take chances.
'What the devil was that?' Chess asked as we ducked back into our flat. She peeled out of her coat and dropped it on the floor, her sabre clattering down on top of it.
I shrugged. 'She died, and he came back to get her.'
'Do they do that, though? Is that something creepy crawlies do?'
'Looks like.'
She frowned and kicked off her shoes beside her coat. 'That's... That's creepy.'
'I thought it was a bit sweet.'
She pulled her head back and widened her eyes at me.
'Just a bit,' I clarified. 'Assuming we don't hear tomorrow that anybody was found with their throat torn open. I think he only came back for his wife. He must... He must have been waiting for her, somehow.'
I slouched into the sitting room and glanced at the crumbs of dirt scattered beneath the chair, then at the sheaf of papers on the table.
'Not only for his wife,' Chessie commented.
I shrugged again and went to the kitchen to get the dust brush and pan and began to sweep up.
'What was he talking to you about, anyway? Taking a sabbatical? He's not wrong. I've been telling you that.'
No, he wasn't wrong. Chessie hadn't been wrong, either. I wasn't doing well in my studies, and the term wasn't providing the distraction I had hoped. But it had to be doing some good. If I took time off, ran away to my father's home in Amsterdam, or to the south of France, or something, there would be nothing at all to capture my attention, and then I would only be able to sit and stew until something broke.
I had seen a friend kill himself. And I had seen him come back and make a go at killing his own children. I'd seen a woman immolated by demonic fire, my uncle tortured until he could no longer speak, and another dear friend nearly damned. December had been awful. I had survived it. Chessie had survived it. But it wouldn't leave me alone.
'What on earth would I do with myself on sabbatical?' I asked lightly.
'Read,' she began, resuming the litany she brought out once a week or so. 'Go for long walks. Take up an instrument, visit your family, see your boyfriend, learn blacksmithing, I don't know.'
I moved back out into the hall and brushed up the dirt there, swept it all into the pan and carried it to the bin.
Why did she have to mention Geordie? She had no reason to know that he was a tremendous part of what was keeping me up at night. I hadn't told her. But it had been nearly nine weeks, and...
'What was that it called you?' I had asked him. 'When it asked why you wouldn't speak its name?'
He'd wet his lips and taken a reflexive step away. 'Ghiţă,' he'd replied. 'Geordie is an English diminutive. A Roumanian would call me Ghiţă.'
'It's a very familiar form of address?'
'Yes.'
'It's...' A little breath had done nothing to quiet the sound of my heart quickening in my ears. 'It's a very familial form of address?'
He knew who had driven Quincey Harker to suicide, who killed Jack Seward and his son and his son's nurse, who bound Imelda and then set her on fire when she had ceased to be useful. He knew, and he would not name the culprit, because it was a member of his own family. God, I had tried to be understanding. His family was cursed, as he had been, with an inability to see others as people, to form human connections, and I had sworn to him over and over that our plan of attack would be to break the curse, promised him over and over that we would do all we could... But we both knew that quote about the best-laid plans, and if the monster could not be saved, we would have no choice but to put it down. So he kept his mouth shut and kept the name to himself.
It had been nearly nine weeks without another peep from our stalker, no scarlet eyes glowing in the shadows, no remotely-controlled revenants coming after Chessie or her family or any of the other descendants of the band who defeated Dracula. For the first month, I had barely slept at all, always staring at the ceiling in the dark and listening hard for the sound of breaking glass or creaking floors. I had wasted so many hours peering tensely into dark corners and staring into shadowed doorways when Chessie and I walked at night. So many hours waiting for the telephone to ring, to hear a voice on the other end telling me that one of the Harkers was dead, Mina or Lucy or Little Jonathan or Ian, or perhaps Uncle Abraham or Tomás Hinojosa, or Chessie's parents, the Lord and Lady Godalming.
Nine weeks waiting for Geordie to just say the damned name, so we could finally do something about all of it.
I had made some inquiries behind his back, hoping to come up with some clue, at least generate a list of possible names. But Roumania's record-keeping seemed to be haphazard, from what I could tell, worse since the War and the occupation of Wallachia, and still in chaos after the unification in 1918. And I had no personal contact there whom I could ask to dig through decades of jumbled, damaged, and missing paperwork. And besides, the Apostol family considered itself separate from humanity; why would I suppose they let the state keep track of them?
I had nothing. Geordie had the power to put an end to this, and he refused.
I squeezed my eyes shut and finally released my death-grip on the dust pan, setting it aside and filling the kettle for tea.
No, he didn't refuse. That was unfair. He had tried to tell me twice, and I had no idea how many times he might have begun to confess to Sir Hannibal or one of the other members of the Academy. He tried so hard, face twisting in agony and grief, fighting the constriction in his throat, but it just wouldn't come out. There was the danger of teaching a monster how to love.
Love.
Two old lovers, embracing one last time in a misty, twilit graveyard, waiting for one another so they could leave this world together.
I was acutely aware of the possibility of falling in love with Gheorghe Apostol. The fact that some of my generalised, omnidirectional anger had leaked onto him didn't change that.
I sat at the kitchen table and measured my breathing carefully. In for a count of three, out for a count of five. In three, out five. In ten breaths or so, my headache began to abate. That was how the fits always started, with the knowledge that there was nothing I could do, then the spiral of thoughts, helpless and growing darker, the headache, the tightness, then finally the little click inside as I forgot to keep breathing, sometimes for long enough that I wound up on the floor. It had been happening more than usual, these past two months.
I did know how to make myself better, and it wasn't to take long walks or pick up a new hobby. I'd be better when the situation was taken care of, and not until then. Maybe if I just told him that...
I rose mechanically when the kettle began to sing and took it off the hob, spooning dry chamomile blossoms into our chipped brown teapot. Even a cup of real tea seemed like a bit much, at the moment. The water steamed down over the mound of vegetation, making petals swirl, and quickly turned pale yellow. The colour always came first, and it would take a few minutes for the flavour to diffuse. I placed the lid on the pot and stood on tiptoe to pull a mug from the cupboard, fetching the honey next. A bit of lemon would have been nice. Still I kept breathing, in three, out five, letting that and the ritual calm the storm in my head.
Maybe I ought to telephone the Academy and ask again. Even if I didn't get an answer, I would still have done something, and that was better than hiding in Oxford.
Yes.
But no, that would be an awful thing to do over the 'phone. It would only cause Geordie pain and me anxiety, with miles and miles of wires between us.
But if I asked whether he would mind if I came down for an afternoon, or if he might come up...
I poured a cup of chamomile tisane and stirred in a spoonful of honey. The first sip did wonders. I didn't feel that I needed to count in order to breathe, anymore.
Chessie poked her head out of the sitting room as I passed and watched me trot upstairs toward the telephone. 'All right?' she asked.
'All right,' I replied. It wasn't quite a lie. I wasn't any worse than I had been, recently.
'Plan?'
'A bit,' I called down from the top. 'I'm going to put in for a sabbatical first thing, and then I'd like to see Geordie, tomorrow. It's been a while.' She knew that our assailant was someone who knew him and that we had failed to kill our enemy back in January, but I had not told her that it was someone in his family, or that he knew exactly who and wasn't saying. It was a useless secret, but it wasn't mine, and I wasn't going to spread it around. He attracted enough scepticism for being an ex-sorcerer, an incubus, and one of the Drăculești. Renewed suspicion and sidelong glances would not convince him that his loved one was safe from our revenge.
'That's good!' she exclaimed.
I paused with my hand on the telephone receiver. She was right. It probably would be good. In my effort to run away from December, I had also inadvertently been running away from London as a whole, from the Academy, and, by association, from Geordie. I'd seen it coming, even then. I knew myself fairly well. And I'd told him plainly that it would take time. But it wasn't fair to him to vanish into the library and emerge only to press him on painful matters. That wasn't a way to earn anybody's trust.
I placed the trunk call and waited as the connection was made and spoke for only a minute to the Academy man who answered. No, he couldn't put Mr Apostol on the line, and no, he couldn't give him a message. Why not? Because he'd gone up to Oxford for the week.
I really had disappeared, hadn't I? We were already in the same town, together, and he hadn't bothered to let me know. Why should he? He'd made a few attempts, and I'd been too busy, or too stressed, or simply unreachable, and I had told him I would need time, and he'd been giving it.
But if he was in Oxford, I knew exactly where to find him.
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