Arthur Blackwood was the most excited human being Magnus had ever met, and he was trying very hard not to show it.
He came down the stairwell at a quarter past nine in the morning, a tall, thin, stooped man of sixty-five in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a woolly scarf and a battered leather satchel over his shoulder, and he stopped on the landing above them exactly where his daughter had stopped, two hours before.
He looked at Magnus.
At the burns, mostly healed now, leaving pink, new, shiny skin across his face and hands.
At the empty blood bags piled on the step.
At the red at the center of his eyes.
His face did several things at once.
Shock.
Fear.
Wonder.
And then, quite clearly, something that looked very like vindication.
“Good Lord,” said Arthur Blackwood softly.
“Good Lord.
Forty years.” “Dad,” said Sarah.
“Don’t.” “I’m not doing anything.” “You’re doing the face.
The conference face.” “I am not.” Arthur came down the stairs, slowly, one hand on the rail, his eyes never leaving Magnus.
He stopped two steps above them and crouched, his knees cracking, so that he was at eye level.
He had a long, mild, bony face, with a gray beard trimmed short and wire-rimmed spectacles, and behind the spectacles his eyes were very blue and very bright.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said to Magnus.
“You must think me unspeakably rude.
It’s only that I’ve spent my entire career being told that you don’t exist, and it’s rather a lot to take in at nine in the morning.
Arthur Blackwood.
Professor of Eastern European History, Balliol College, Oxford.
Retired.
Well.
Semi-retired.
Forced into early retirement, if we’re being honest, after a rather unfortunate lecture in 2019.” He held out a hand.
“How do you do?” Magnus looked at the hand.
Then, slowly, he took it.
Arthur’s hand was warm and dry and a little shaky.
His eyebrows went up when he felt how cold Magnus’s was.
But he didn’t let go.
“Magnus,” said Magnus.
“Magnus.” Arthur nodded, as though filing it carefully.
“Sarah says you’ve been badly hurt.
And that you lost someone this morning.” His voice changed.
Gentled.
“I’m so sorry.” Magnus looked down at the burned scarf in his lap.
“His name was Kit,” he said.
They got him out of the hospital at dusk, in the back of Sarah’s rented car, under a pile of blankets, and drove to the flat Arthur had taken for the month: three rooms at the top of an old building on a narrow street behind the National Library, with sloping ceilings and creaking floors and every surface covered in books and papers and photocopies and coffee cups.
Adrian was waiting on the doorstep.
Magnus had felt him coming, all afternoon, through the new warm sense between them.
A long way off at first, frantic, searching.
Then closer.
Then very close, and very still, and very, very afraid.
And when Sarah pulled the car up and Magnus climbed out of the back, wrapped in blankets, Adrian Vale came down the steps of the building in three strides and grabbed him by both shoulders and held on so hard it hurt.
He didn’t say anything.
He just held on.
Magnus could feel him shaking.
“Kit,” said Magnus.
“I know.” Adrian’s voice cracked.
“I know.
I felt it.
I felt you feel it.
I was at the clinic.
I was with Mara.” He let go, finally, and stepped back, and looked at Magnus’s face, at the new pink skin, and his own face crumpled.
“I couldn’t find you.
I’ve been looking for twelve hours.
I could feel you, but you kept moving, you kept fading, and I couldn’t—” He stopped.
Pressed his hand over his mouth.
“I thought I’d lost you too.” “I’m here.” “I can see that.” Adrian took a long, shaky breath.
Then his eyes went past Magnus, to Sarah, standing by the car with her arms folded, and to Arthur, standing on the pavement beside her, staring at Adrian with an expression of pure scholarly ecstasy.
Adrian’s own expression went very flat.
“And who,” he said, “are the humans?” It took an hour to explain, and a bottle of Arthur’s whisky, which only Arthur and Sarah could drink, and a phone call to Noah, and another to Lyra.
By the end of it, Adrian was sitting on the floor of Arthur’s cluttered sitting room with his back against a bookcase and an expression of deep, wary, reluctant fascination, and Arthur was sitting on the sofa opposite him with a notebook on his knee, scribbling furiously.
“Eighteen fifteen,” Arthur was saying.
“So you’d have been, what, twenty-three at Victoria’s coronation?
Extraordinary.
Absolutely extraordinary.
Do you remember the crowds?
The accounts say there were four hundred thousand people in the streets.
Is that accurate?” “It felt like more,” said Adrian, after a moment.
“It was very hot.
A man next to me fainted.
I caught him.” He paused.
“No one has ever asked me that before.” “No one has ever been able to ask you anything,” said Arthur, with deep satisfaction.
“That’s rather the problem with your kind, from a historian’s point of view.
All those centuries.
All those witnesses.
And not one of you has ever given an interview.” He scribbled something.
“I don’t suppose you knew Lord Melbourne?” “Dad,” said Sarah.
“Sorry.
Sorry.” Arthur put the notebook down, reluctantly.
He turned to Magnus, who was sitting in an armchair by the window, still wrapped in a blanket, with Kit’s scarf in his lap.
Arthur’s bright eyes went to the open collar of Magnus’s borrowed shirt.
To the long, pale, surgical scar running down his sternum.
He went very still.
“May I ask,” he said quietly, “where you got that?” Magnus looked at him for a long moment.
He looked at Adrian, who shook his head very slightly.
Don’t.
You don’t know him.
He looked at Sarah, sitting on the arm of the sofa, who had stolen six bags of blood for him and sat with him on a cold concrete step and might very well have lost her job.
“A place called Site Seven,” he said.
“In the mountains above Brașov.
It’s run by—” “The Hellsing Foundation,” said Arthur Blackwood.
The room went very quiet.
Arthur took off his spectacles, slowly, and cleaned them on the end of his scarf.
His hands were not quite steady.
“I’ve been looking for Site Seven for eleven years,” he said.
“I knew it existed.
I found references to it.
Budget lines, buried in the Foundation’s charitable filings.
Land purchases in Romania under the name of a shell company.
Recruitment adverts for paid medical trials in deprived areas of northern England, all through the same agency.” He put the spectacles back on.
“I wrote a paper about it.
In 2019.
Suggesting that a British medical charity with an unusual interest in rare blood disorders might be conducting unethical human research in Eastern Europe.” A small, bleak smile.
“That was the unfortunate lecture.” “What happened?” said Magnus.
“Nothing happened.
That was the strange thing.
Nobody sued me.
Nobody threatened me.
The paper was simply never published.
The journal lost it.
The college asked me, very politely, whether I might like to take early retirement.
My research grants were not renewed.” Arthur looked down at his hands.
“And a man came to see me at my house in Jericho.
A very pleasant man, with a gray cardigan and kind eyes.
He brought flowers for my late wife’s grave.
He said he had admired my work for years.
He said that some doors were better left closed.” He looked up.
“His name was Jonathan Harker.” “Here,” said Arthur.
“This is why I’m in Vienna.” It was past midnight.
Sarah had gone to bed, exhausted, in the little room at the back.
Adrian was asleep, or pretending to be, on the floor by the bookcase, with his coat over him.
And Arthur and Magnus were sitting at the kitchen table, in a pool of yellow lamplight, with a cardboard box between them.
Inside the box were photocopies.
Hundreds of them.
Old handwriting, brown and faded on the gray copier paper, in English and Dutch and German.
Letters.
“Abraham Van Helsing,” said Arthur, “had a friend in Vienna.
A physician.
Leopold Weiss.
They’d studied together in Amsterdam as young men, and they corresponded for fifty years, right up until Weiss died in 1904.
Weiss’s papers came to the Austrian National Library in the 1930s, from his grandson, and they were catalogued as medical correspondence and never looked at again.” He laid his hand flat on the box.
“I found them two years ago, by accident, looking for something else.
A footnote in a Viennese medical history.
I’ve been coming back every year since, reading them.” “What’s in them?” Arthur was quiet for a moment.
“The truth,” he said.
“Or as much of it as one frightened old man could bring himself to write down.” He took out a sheet, and smoothed it flat on the table, and put on his spectacles, and read aloud.
“London.
14th December, 1897.
My dear Leopold.
I have done it.
God forgive me, I have done it, and I do not know whether I am a hero or a murderer or something worse than either.
He is dead.
Or he is not dead.
That is what I must tell you, and what I can tell no one else, not Harker, not the Romans, not even my own son.
His heart beats.
Once in six minutes, as regular as a clock.
I have him in a lead coffin in the cellar of the house in Wiltshire, with the Roman sword still through him, and I go down every night and put my hand on the lid, and it beats.” Arthur looked up.
Magnus didn’t say anything.
His own hearts were beating very slowly.
Thud.
Tap.
Arthur took out another sheet.
“February, 1898.
I have begun to open him.
I cannot burn him, Leopold.
I promised the Fathers that I would, when I understood what he was, and I find that I understand less every day.
His blood is unlike anything.
It moves on the slide.
It will not be still.
And the heart, when I lift it from his chest, goes on beating in my hands.” Another.
“1899.
I have begun to dig beneath the house.
I have told Harker it is for a laboratory.
It is.
But it is also, I think, a tomb, and a church, and a cage.
I do not know which of these things I am building.
I think perhaps all three.” And another.
This one, Arthur read more slowly.
“1902.
I have had a thought, Leopold, that I cannot put from my mind, and it frightens me more than anything I saw in the Borgo Pass.
The heart will not die.
It wants to beat.
It is looking for something to beat for.
What if it were given a body?
A living one.
A human one.
What would it make of a man?
What would a man make of it?
I have written the thought down in my private journal and then torn out the page and burned it.
But I cannot burn the thought.
My son has read the journal.
I fear he has read the page before I tore it.
He has that look in his eyes.
The look of a man who has seen a door and wishes to open it.” Arthur put the sheet down.
Magnus sat very still.
He could hear the kitchen clock ticking.
He could hear Sarah breathing, in the room at the back.
He could hear Adrian, on the floor in the next room, not breathing at all, listening.
“He thought of it,” Magnus said quietly.
“Van Helsing.
He thought of it first.” “In 1902,” said Arthur.
“And then spent the rest of his life trying to unthink it.
There’s a letter, in 1908, where he begs Weiss to tell him whether it is possible to be damned for an idea.” He shook his head slowly.
“He died in 1912.
And a hundred and nine years later, somebody at Site Seven finally opened the door.” He looked at the scar on Magnus’s chest.
“And you’re what came through it,” he said.
There was one more letter.
Arthur saved it for last.
He said he had been saving it for years, without knowing who for.
“Wiltshire.
6th November, 1910.
Thirteen years tonight, Leopold.
I find I cannot sleep on this night any longer, and so I write to you, as I always do.
“There is a thing I have never told you.
I have never told anyone.
On the morning we left the castle, as we came down through the pass, there were wolves on the ridge.
A great many of them.
More than I have ever seen.
They did not attack.
They watched us pass, and they watched the cart that carried him, and then, Leopold, they bowed.
Every one of them.
They lowered their heads to him as he went by, as subjects bow to a king’s coffin.
And then they went away.
“I have learned a little more since then.
The old women in the villages near the pass would speak to me of it, when I paid them.
They say that the wolves of those mountains are not wolves.
Or not only.
They say they are a people, older than the castle, older than the Prince, and that they had a compact with him, sworn in blood under the moon.
A promise between peoples.
That he would protect their forests from the hunters, and that they would guard his borders in return, and that neither would ever raise a hand against the other.
“The old women say the compact was broken on the night he died.
Not by him.
Not by the wolves.
By someone who wished it broken, and who let the wolves be blamed.
They say the wolves have been grieving ever since, and waiting.
“I do not know what to believe.
I am an old man, and I have seen too much, and I am no longer certain of anything.
But I find that on this night, every year, I lie awake and I think of those wolves on the ridge with their heads bowed, and I think: what if he was not only a monster?
What if he was also a king, and kept his promises, and I have broken more than a man?
What if I have broken a peace?
“He told me, at the end, that I had not killed his people.
Only the thing that kept them kind.
I think now that he may have been right.
God forgive me.
I think he may have been right.” Arthur put the last sheet down on the table, very gently, and took off his spectacles, and wiped his eyes.
“I’ve been trying to prove that for forty years,” he said.
“That he was more than a monster.
That the history we tell is the history the victors wrote.
Everyone thought I was a romantic old fool.
And all along, the man who killed him thought the same thing, and was too frightened to say it.” He looked up at Magnus.
“I don’t know what you are.
I don’t know what’s in your chest.
But I think it was once something that kept promises.
And I think somebody out there broke that promise on purpose, a hundred and twenty-nine years ago, and has been hiding it ever since.” Magnus didn’t answer for a long time.
He was thinking of the Northerner’s memory: the winter campaign, the man on the black horse.
The Blood Guard captain’s memory: Hold the wall, Octavian.
The empty chairs at a long table.
He was thinking of the second heart, which had been very quiet all evening, listening.
And which, when Arthur read the word wolves, had beaten once, hard, like a fist on a door.
“May I keep a copy?” he said.
“Of the letters.” Arthur smiled, very tiredly, and pushed the whole box across the table.
They went home through the tunnels, at four in the morning, Adrian and Magnus, with the box under Magnus’s arm and Kit’s scarf around his neck.
They didn’t talk much.
At the Sanctuary Gate, under the words NEMO HIC SERVUS and the scarred, restored crown, Adrian stopped.
“The humans,” he said.
“The professor and his daughter.
Are you going to tell the Warden?” “Do you think I should?” Adrian was quiet for a moment.
“I think he’d say they’re a risk.
That they know too much.
That humans who know about us end up as Hellsing informants, or Hellsing targets, and either way we end up dead.” He looked at the gate.
“I think he’d be right.” “She stole six bags of blood for me,” said Magnus.
“She sat on a step with me.
She didn’t run.” “I know.” Adrian sighed.
“I know.
I liked her, too.
Him, I’m not sure about.
He asked me if I knew Lord Melbourne.
Who asks that?” In spite of everything, Magnus felt his mouth twitch.
Then they went through the gate, and down into the city, and the light went out of both their faces at once.
Because there was someone waiting for them on the steps of the clinic, in the middle of the night, alone.
Mara.
She was sitting on the top step with her arms wrapped round her knees.
She had been crying for a long time.
Her face was swollen with it.
When she saw Magnus coming across the square, she stood up, slowly, and stood very straight, the way she had stood in the market in the broken glass, waiting to see if there would be another blow.
Magnus stopped in front of her.
He didn’t know what to say.
He had never known what to say.
So he took the scarf from around his neck, and held it out to her.
Burned, black at the edges, green and white in the middle.
It smelled of smoke.
It smelled, faintly, of Kit.
Mara looked at it for a long time.
Then she took it, and held it against her face, and closed her eyes.
“He talked about you every night,” she said, into the scarf.
“Every single night.
The boss this.
The boss that.
He thought you were a hero.” Her voice cracked.
“He said you were going to change everything.” Magnus couldn’t speak.
“I was going to say yes,” said Mara.
“He was going to ask me to the cinema.
He’d been trying to ask me for two weeks.
He kept losing his nerve.
I was going to say yes.” There were no ashes.
The wind in Mariahilf had taken them.
So in the morning, at the hour when the lights on the lower terraces dimmed, the people who had loved Kit O’Shea went down to the river: Noah and Lyra and Adrian, Silas and Irina and Jiří the baker, half the staff of the clinic and both football teams from the Sunday pitch.
And Mara knelt on the stone quay and laid the green-and-white scarf on the black water, and let it go.
It floated for a long time.
It went under the first bridge, and the second, and turned a slow circle in the current, and went on, downstream, toward the tunnel where the river left the city, toward the world above, toward wherever running water goes.
Magnus watched it until it was gone.
Then he went back to the wine cellar, and down the stairs, and knocked on the door that said KNOCK OR DIE.
“Lyra,” he said, when she opened it.
“You said you’d find out what I am.” He held out Arthur’s box.
“I need you to do it now.
All of it.
Everything Hellsing has.
I don’t care what it takes.” Lyra looked at him for a long moment, with her flat dark eyes.
They were red at the rims.
She had been crying too.
Then she stood aside, and let him in.