The first patient Magnus saw at Noah’s clinic was a boy in a football shirt, and for a second, before he remembered that he had never been there, Magnus was back in a railway arch in Bermondsey.
He wasn’t, of course.
He had only heard about Bermondsey later, much later, from someone who had been.
But the boy on the narrow white cot in the clinic’s front room looked exactly like the boy Elena would one day describe to him: twenty, maybe, thin and shaggy-haired, a fledgling only weeks old, shaking under a gray blanket with his knees pulled up to his chest and his eyes squeezed shut.
He had been found that morning in a stairwell in Favoriten, Noah said, by one of the Willing, who had brought him down on the old train.
He had been made by someone, and dumped by someone, and had spent three weeks alone in a city he didn’t know, starving, terrified, with no idea what he was.
He had not killed anyone.
That was the first thing Noah had asked him, gently, in German and then in English and then in Turkish, when he came in.
He hadn’t.
He had been drinking from rats.
“Good lad,” Noah said to him now, crouching by the cot with a blood bag in his hand.
“That’s a good lad.
Here.
Slow.
Little sips.
That’s it.” The boy drank.
His shaking eased.
Noah sat with him, one huge hand on the boy’s back, rubbing slow circles, the way you would with a sick child, and didn’t say anything else.
Magnus stood in the doorway and watched, and found that his throat had gone tight.
The clinic took up five floors of a tall, narrow building carved into the cavern wall above the market square, and it was never quiet.
There was a waiting room on the ground floor with plastic chairs and a water cooler full of something red and a noticeboard covered in flyers: Fledgling support group, Tuesdays.
Ghoul literacy classes.
Sunlight tolerance workshop, ADVANCED ONLY.
Lost: one black cat, answers to Bela, please return to Frau Holz, 3rd terrace.
There were treatment rooms on the second floor, and a ward on the third with twelve beds, and a laboratory on the fourth full of microscopes and centrifuges and refrigerators, and on the fifth, at the top, a long, quiet, dimly lit room where the dying went.
Vampires could die, Noah said.
Not easily.
But they could.
Silver could do it, if enough of it got deep enough, poisoning the blood until it stopped listening to the body.
Fire could do it.
Sunlight, for the young ones.
Starvation, for anyone, eventually.
Old age, even, for the very oldest: a slow fading, over decades, like a photograph left in a window.
And ghouls could die of the Grey, which no medicine on earth could cure, only slow.
“Most of what I do up here,” Noah said, “is hold people’s hands.” He said it simply, without self-pity, folding sheets in the long quiet room on the fifth floor.
Magnus was helping him.
Magnus had been helping him for four nights now, ever since the morning after the Warden, when he had come down to the kitchen of the wine cellar and found Noah eating cornflakes out of habit and asked, without quite knowing why, if he could come to work.
Noah had looked at him for a long moment over the cornflakes.
Then he’d nodded and said, “Bring a clean shirt.” Now Magnus spent his nights in the clinic, carrying bags and changing beds and mopping floors and watching.
Mostly watching.
He watched Noah set the broken arm of a Grazer who had fallen off a bridge chasing a stray dog.
He watched him stitch up two fledglings who had been in a fight over a girl, and lecture them both, at length, in a voice like slow thunder, until they apologized to each other.
He watched him take a bullet out of the thigh of a vampire who would not say how he had got it, and tell him, without heat, not to come back if he got another.
He watched him sit by the bed of an ancient ghoul on the fifth floor, a tiny, gray, papery woman who had come to the city in 1920 and had finally, after a century, begun to go Grey in spite of the Commons Bank, and hold her hand, and read to her from a German newspaper, all night, until she was gone.
And he learned.
“It’s a tide,” Noah said.
“That’s the first thing.
The hunger.
You think it’s a wall.
It’s not.
It’s a tide.” They were sitting on the roof of the clinic, which was a flat ledge of rock with a rusty iron railing, looking out over the Hidden City.
It was the hour the Willing called night, though it made no difference down here; it was simply the hour when the market closed and the lights on the lower terraces dimmed, and the city got quieter.
Below them, the river ran black and fast.
Noah had brought two mugs.
His was coffee, black, which he couldn’t taste but drank anyway.
Magnus’s was blood, warmed.
Noah had taught him that on the second night.
Cold blood’s like cold soup.
You can live on it, but why would you.
“A tide comes in,” Noah went on.
“Slow.
Then fast.
Then it goes out again.
If you wait till it’s up to your neck before you do something about it, you’ll drown, and maybe you’ll take somebody down with you.
But if you know it’s coming, you can get ahead of it.
Feed before you’re hungry.
Every night, same time, a little.
Like taking a pill.
And then the tide never gets past your knees.” He drank his coffee.
“Most of the bad things our kind do, the killings, the sloppy feedings that break the Veil, it’s not because they’re evil.
It’s because they waited too long.
They let it get up to their neck.” Magnus thought about the hiker in the clearing.
About the night before, in the van, listening to Silas and Petra and Irina breathe, and wanting them.
“How do you know when it’s coming?” “You learn.
You pay attention.
It’s different for everyone.” Noah tapped his own temple.
“For me, it’s my eyes.
Things get too sharp.
Edges too bright, colors too loud.
When the world starts looking like a movie, I know it’s time to drink.” He glanced at Magnus.
“What is it for you?” Magnus thought about it.
Really thought.
“The heartbeats,” he said slowly.
“I can always hear them.
But when it’s coming, they get louder.
And I start counting them.
Without meaning to.” Noah nodded, as if that were the most normal thing in the world.
“Then that’s your warning.
When you catch yourself counting, drink.” He learned the second thing on the third floor, in the ward, at three in the morning, holding a blood bag in one hand and a deer in the other.
Not a real deer.
A bottle.
Deer, Styrian, wild, in the same handwriting as the bottles in the market.
Noah had made him try them all: bank blood, cold and plain; bank blood, warmed; the house blend from the Commons, which tasted strangely of everything and nothing at once; and animal blood, deer and pig and horse and rabbit and, once, memorably, goat.
“Grazers live on this,” Noah said.
“About a fifth of the city.
Some of them for moral reasons.
Some because they can’t stand the taste of human.
Some because they’re scared that if they drink human, even from a bag, they’ll want it from a throat.” He shrugged.
“Nothing wrong with any of those reasons.” Magnus drank the deer.
It was thin, and grassy, and tasted of nothing much.
It sat in his stomach like water.
He could feel his body take it and use it and want more.
“It’s not enough,” he said.
“Is it?” Noah looked at him for a long moment.
“For most of us, it is,” he said.
“It’s enough for me.
I’ve been drinking animal and bank since 1946.
Never had a problem.” He hesitated.
“For you, son, I don’t know.
I’ve been watching you drink for four nights now.
You go through a bag like it’s a glass of water.
Twice what a fledgling should need.
Three times.
And your body’s using all of it.” He frowned.
“It’s like you’ve got a second engine running in there.
Burning twice the fuel.” Magnus didn’t say anything.
He didn’t have to.
Thud, went his first heart.
Tap, went the second.
“I’d like to take some of your blood,” said Noah.
“If that’s all right.
Just a little.
To look at.” The laboratory on the fourth floor was cold and bright and smelled of disinfectant, and for the first half hour Magnus could not stop his hands from shaking.
It was the smell.
And the light.
And the steel trays and the glass vials and the man in a white coat bending over a microscope.
It was all wrong and all the same and his body knew it before his mind did.
He sat in a plastic chair with his sleeve rolled up and a needle in his arm and stared at the wall and counted the tiles.
Forty-four.
Then sixty-one.
Then he lost count and started again.
Noah noticed.
Of course he did.
He drew the blood quickly, much more quickly than the nurses at Site Seven, and took the needle out, and pressed a piece of gauze to the puncture, which had already healed.
Then he pulled off his white coat, and threw it in a corner, and sat down in front of Magnus in his old leather flying jacket, and said nothing at all for a long time.
“They did this to you,” he said at last.
“Didn’t they.
In a room like this.” Magnus nodded.
He couldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry,” said Noah.
“I should have thought.” “It’s fine.” “It’s not.” Noah’s broad, lined face was very gentle.
“You don’t have to do this.
You can walk out of here right now and I’ll pour that vial down the sink.” Magnus looked at the vial.
It was on a steel tray beside the microscope.
His blood was so dark it looked black, until the light hit it, and then it looked red.
It moved strangely in the glass.
Slow.
Thick.
As though it were thinking.
He had seen blood that looked like that before.
In an ampoule, on a tray, in a white room, beside a smiling man.
“No,” he said.
“I want to know.
Look at it.
Please.” Noah looked at it.
He looked at it for a long time.
He put a drop on a slide and looked at it under the microscope, and then under a stronger microscope, and then he did something with a centrifuge and looked at it again.
He did not say anything.
His face, bent over the eyepiece, went very still.
Then he got up, and went to a refrigerator, and came back with a second vial.
This one was labeled in Noah’s careful handwriting: Rauch, K.
Warden.
Sample 1997.
He put a drop of that on a slide, too, beside the first, and looked at them both.
Then he sat back in his chair, and took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes.
“The Warden’s six hundred and forty years old,” he said quietly.
“His blood’s the oldest I’ve ever seen.
I’ve got it on file because he let me take some, back in the nineties, when I was trying to work out how age changes us.” He nodded at the slides.
“Old blood looks different under a microscope.
The cells are darker.
Denser.
They clump together, like they’re…
talking to each other.
Holding hands.
The older the vampire, the more of them do it.” He put his glasses back on.
“In the Warden’s blood, about a third of the cells are clumped like that.” “And in mine?” Noah was quiet for a long moment.
“All of them,” he said.
They tested it the next night, on the ghoul from Holešovice.
She had been one of the ones Adrian and Lyra had stolen from Ferrante’s auction in Prague, the week before.
They hadn’t gone back for the auction that night, after the church.
But the night after, while Magnus was asleep in the bookshop, Adrian and Lyra had gone back, and got eleven ghouls out of the warehouse before Ferrante’s people knew they were there.
Ten of them were in the Hidden City now, drinking from the Commons Bank, getting better.
The eleventh was dying.
She was young.
Younger than Petra.
Twenty, perhaps.
She had been a ghoul for less than a year, made by some petty noble in Bavaria who had got bored of her and sold her to Ferrante, and Ferrante had kept her in a cage without blood for a month to make her docile for the auction.
She had gone Grey.
Too far, too fast.
The Commons Bank had slowed it, but not stopped it.
She lay in a bed on the fifth floor with her skin the color of ash, and her fingers crumbling, and her eyes clouding over, and she did not know where she was.
“A few days,” Noah said quietly.
“Maybe less.” Magnus looked at her for a long time.
“You know what I’m going to ask,” he said.
“I know.” “If I give her mine, she’ll be bound to me.
The way Silas is.
Irina.” “I know.” “I swore I’d never use it.
On any of them.
I haven’t.
But she won’t have chosen it.
She can’t choose anything, like this.” Noah didn’t answer.
He just looked at Magnus, steady and patient, the way he looked at everyone.
“If it was you,” Magnus said.
“If it was your call.
What would you do?” Noah was quiet for a very long time.
“In 1944,” he said at last, “there was a German boy in a barn in the Ardennes.
Seventeen years old.
Shot through the lungs.
I was a medic.
I wasn’t supposed to treat him; he was the enemy.
I did it anyway, because he was a kid and he was dying, and I couldn’t stand there and watch.
And while I was doing it, something came out of the hayloft and took me.” He looked at the girl in the bed.
“I don’t know if that German boy lived.
I never found out.
But I’ve never been sorry I stopped for him.
Not once.
Not even after what it cost.” He got up.
“She can choose when she wakes up,” he said.
“Whether to stay bound to you, or switch to the Commons.
The bond fades, if she drinks from the bank long enough.
A month, maybe two.
You can give her that choice.
But you can only give it to her if she’s alive.” Magnus bit his wrist.
He held it to the girl’s cracked gray lips.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then her lips moved.
Her throat moved.
She swallowed.
And Magnus felt the thread form, and felt her on the other end of it: faint, flickering, a candle in a gale.
A smell of pine forest.
A song in Bavarian dialect.
A name: Lena.
He watched the Grey retreat from her face.
Not slowly, the way it had with Silas.
All at once.
Like a tide going out.
Her skin went from ash to pale to pink.
Her crumbling fingertips went smooth and whole.
Her clouded eyes cleared, and focused, and found his face.
She stared at him.
Then her face crumpled, and she began to cry, great gulping sobs, like a child.
Behind him, Noah let out a long breath, and said, very quietly, “Lord have mercy.” “You can’t tell anyone,” Noah said later.
They were back on the roof, with their mugs.
His voice was very serious.
“Not yet.
Not the Warden.
Not even Adrian.” “Why?” “Because there are fifteen hundred ghouls in this city drinking from the Commons Bank, and a few hundred of them are going Grey anyway, slowly, because the bank’s good but it’s not perfect.
And out there,” he jerked his head at the cavern roof, at the world above, “there are a hundred thousand more, in every court in the world, owned by somebody.
If word gets out that there’s a vampire whose blood can bring a ghoul back from the Grey in thirty seconds—” He shook his head.
“Every ghoul in the world would come knocking.
Every master would come hunting.
And every one of them would want to put you in a cage and drain you.” He looked at Magnus.
“Your blood’s a miracle, son.
But miracles are the most dangerous thing there is.” Magnus looked at the city.
He thought about the Ashen Court.
About the Quiet Ones, howling empty in the armory, past saving.
About Ana in the crypt, choosing the Grey because the only cure on offer was another master.
About Bogdan.
About the ghoul in the arch in Bermondsey, under the shopping trolley, saying please.
He thought about a hundred thousand of them.
“Then I’ll have to be careful,” he said.
Noah looked at him for a long moment.
Then he smiled, very slightly.
“You know,” he said, “that’s exactly what I said in 1944.” The third thing he learned at Noah’s clinic, he learned from Kit.
Kit O’Shea was nineteen, or had been when he was turned, two years ago, by a woman he met at a club in Dublin who had told him she was a fashion student.
He had red hair and a broad Dublin accent and a gap between his front teeth and an apparently bottomless capacity for talking.
He worked the front desk at the clinic three nights a week, and drank only animal blood, and supported Shamrock Rovers with a passion that bordered on religious, and he had decided, on approximately the second night, that Magnus was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him.
“You killed a Lord,” he said, for the eleventh time, following Magnus down the stairs with an armful of clean towels.
“A Lord.
With your hands.
Did he scream?
I bet he screamed.
Adrian says you made Luca Ferrante cry.” “Adrian exaggerates.” “Did you, though?” Magnus thought about it.
“A bit,” he admitted.
Kit whooped so loudly that a patient on the second floor shouted at him to shut up.
But it was Kit who noticed it.
On the sixth night, in the waiting room, when a big, nervous fledgling who had been brought in after a fight saw Magnus come through the door and stopped talking in mid-sentence and dropped his eyes to the floor, and went very still, and began, very slightly, to tremble.
“You’re doing it again,” Kit said, in a low voice, as Magnus passed the desk.
“Doing what?” “The thing.
The thing where everyone goes weird.” Kit glanced at the fledgling, then back at Magnus, and lowered his voice further.
“I get it too, you know.
When you walk in.
Like I want to stand up.
Like I’m in school and the headmaster’s come in.” He grinned, a little nervously.
“It’s grand, I don’t mind.
But you’re scaring the patients.” Magnus stared at him.
“I don’t know how to stop it,” he said.
Kit looked surprised.
“Course you do,” he said.
“Everyone does.
It’s like, you know.
Your aura.
Every old vampire’s got one, you can feel it on them.
The Warden’s is like walking into a fridge.
Noah’s is like a big warm blanket.” He shrugged.
“The old ones keep it pulled in, mostly.
Like holding your breath.
Otherwise they’d freak everyone out.
Didn’t anyone show you?” Nobody had.
Veyr had never pulled his in.
He had wanted everyone to feel it.
So Kit showed him.
In the storeroom behind the front desk, among the boxes of gauze and the crates of bank blood, with the door shut, at four in the morning.
It was absurd.
A nineteen-year-old Dublin fledgling in a Shamrock Rovers scarf, teaching the heir of Dracula to control his aura, using the same breathing exercises his mother had taught him for exam stress.
“In for four,” Kit said.
“Hold for four.
Out for four.
And on the out, picture it, like, going back inside.
Like pulling in a fishing line.” Magnus closed his eyes.
He breathed.
He pictured it.
And for the first time, he felt it.
Not the second heart.
Not the voice.
Something around him, like heat around a fire.
A pressure, spreading out from him in every direction, through the walls, into the waiting room, into the street.
It had always been there.
He had simply never known to look.
He pulled it in.
Slowly.
Like a fishing line.
In the waiting room, through the wall, he heard the nervous fledgling let out a long breath, and say to nobody in particular, in German, “Huh.
That’s better.” Kit grinned at him, gap-toothed.
“See?” he said.
“Easy.” It was not easy.
It took Magnus three more weeks to learn to hold it all the time, and even then, it slipped, when he was angry or frightened or very tired.
But it was the first thing anyone had taught him about the power in his blood that was about holding it in instead of letting it out.
He would remember, later, that it was Kit who taught him.
He would remember the storeroom, and the Shamrock Rovers scarf, and the gap-toothed grin.
He would remember it for a very long time.