IV.

In the end, they all went to Egypt, and a stranger besides. Ethan, Malcolm had expected, though Ethan made also clear that he thought it had been Malcolm's grief that had spoken to him in his dream, and that this journey was a way for him to deal with this. Vanessa, Ethan said, was at peace.

"You did not try to persuade him otherwise?" Dr. Seward asked. Malcolm simply shook his head. She might have been Vanessa's chosen confidante, but she was not his. He suspected that if he told her that he understood why Ethan needed to believe this, that "she is at peace now, and there was no other way" could be the only thing that allowed you to continue without killing yourself as well after you took the life of the woman you had sworn to protect, Dr. Seward would have insisted on making him talk about his family. Given what he had witnessed when she had taken Renfield's knowledge out of the madman's unwilling head, he was not sure Dr. Seward would not succeed with him, if he gave her the slightest opening.

Dr. Seward joining them on their journey had not really surprised him, either; she seemed to feel responsible for Vanessa, despite denying it, she had an understandable loathing for Dracula, and she struck him as a born meddler, an estimation confirmed when he overheard Victor Frankenstein talking wistfully about his mother to her at breakfast, while Ethan exchanged views on former American presidents with her over lunch.

Victor joining them had been more of an uncertainty, but had been very welcome. Given the looks of him, Malcolm wasn't quite sure he would not return to find Victor dead, or with his mind completely destroyed by drugs, if Victor was to remain unoccupied again, as he plainly had been during Malcolm's absence. It was not a little irksome, finding oneself caring for a young man with not much skill for self preservation. And yet, Malcolm reminded himself, the young man had survived so far.

Miss Catriona Hartdegen, on the other hand, Malcolm had had not even to invite; she, he found out, had been planning on joining Ferdinand Lyle in Egypt already. "Besides," she said, "to kill something immortal is the kind of folly no Thanatologist should miss."

"You came with me to save our son," Kaetenay said, when Malcolm asked his question, and no more, as if the implication was self evident.

The true surprise was the man Malcolm found at Vanessa's grave when he went there to follow Kaetenay's advice and gather some earth from it. It might, Kaetenay had said, be necessary to contact her again, and finding someone in the spirit world who was dead was easier if there was some physical connection to their bones. Ethan's instant protest at the idea of exhuming Vanessa, of taking a part of her body, had been so violent that the earth of her grave had been the hasty compromise Miss Hartdegen had come up with, and which prevailed to keep the peace. Malcolm had gone, to exclude further debate. He was, he discovered, not the first to arrive with a shovel and pots, though the man he found was evidently there to plant some flowers, not to remove something. Not any flowers; rose hip, which Vanessa had loved, something a stranger could not know.

The man was tall, broad-shouldered, heavily scarred, with skin that reminded Malcolm, who had seen a great many of them, of dead bodies. He also had extraordinary eyes, not amber but truly yellow; something that would have marked him as both predator and prey, had he been animal. Given what Malcolm now knew about Ethan and Kaetenay both, he could not exclude the possibility.

"I mean no disrespect. She was," the stranger said defensively, "my friend," and that was how Malcolm learned of John Clare, a likely alias, but then they all had their secrets. He did recall Vanessa mentioning him now and then, but at the time his mind and body had been all Evelyn's, and he hardly had noticed anything or anyone else, so he could not remember what she had said. Yet John Clare, it turned out, had known her in her other life as well, those lost years spent at medical facilities, or, as Vanesssa once said bitterly, torture chambers.

Malcolm, intending to leave the next day with the others on the passenger ship he had bought tickets for, had invited Clare to his house, intending a shared drink, no more, in memory of Vanessa. Until Victor and John Clare caught sight of each other, at which point the mutual shock would have been enough to alert even the deaf, dumb and blind.

By the time they were on the Atlantic, Mr. Clare included among their number, Malcolm was sure he still only had half the story, but what had been revealed was extraordinary enough.

"The one thing I don't understand," Catriona Hartdegen mused when they were exercising by sparring on the upper deck, Malcolm feeling every decade while she danced effortlessly around him with her blade, "is why that young man didn't shout it from the skies if he had actually managed to create life out of dead bodies. He doesn't strike me as the sort to hold back with his achievements, any more than you would, Sir Mountain In Africa."

Far from taking pride in his achievement, Victor had insisted that it had only succeeded by accident, that it would thus be impossible to repeat and thus could not be spoken about to the scientific world, or anyone else, for that matter. Mr. Clare's expression at that claim had been mainly one of hostile amusement. Yet he had not contradicted Victor. In fact, the two of them went out of their way to avoid each other, which on a boat with a limited number of people to interact with was not easy. However, Victor had confirmed that John Clare was extraordinarily strong and resilient, which would be of great help, should Dracula's minions await them in Egypt. For his part, Clare had insisted that if there was still a chance to help "Miss Ives" to battle her tormentor, he would gladly join this effort.

"And you know both of us so well to make that judgment, Miss Hartdegen," Malcolm replied sardonically, trying a new feint which she parried.

"I know men," she said.

"And women?" he challenged.

"I know women, too," she returned with some amusement, not batting an eyelash.

"And yet," Malcolm said, "you read Vanessa wrong. Or else you're lying about not knowing which plan she intended to go through with. Either possibility does not enhance my trust in your powers of judgment, Miss Hartdegen."

She fell back, but only to attack him from another side.

"Sir M," she said, finally and ever so satisfyingly slightly out of breath, "if you could trust me, you wouldn't spend any time with me. How's that for a judgment?"

In truth, he did enjoy her company. Given the last woman whose company he had enjoyed had been Evelyn Poole, this did not say much about her trustworthiness. He'd gladly killed Evelyn by the end, when he'd understood what she had done to him and was planning to do with Vanessa, but he also still woke up at times with his body aching for her, her laughter ringing in his ears. The depressing truth was that had she never used a spell on him, he'd still have fallen in deeply with Evelyn Poole, multiple murderer that she'd been. "Like calls to like," she'd have commented on this thought, and thus he was expecting Miss Hartdegen to reveal a bloody past at any moment. In the meantime, he questioned her about what she knew of the Egyptian mythology, kept fencing with her to get into better shape, and tried not to wonder what he would do if nothing else awaited in Egypt but sand and old monuments.

"There are several cosmogonies in Egyptian mythology," Catriona told them all when they were assembled together on the upper deck, watching the nightly sky, "and thus different creation myths and stories of the underworld. But they all agree on this: the only possibility to travel through the Duat is on the barge of Re."

"Re is the sun god, isn't he?" Dr. Seward asked.

"Usually," Catriona confirmed. "But not when travelling through the Duat. Then he becomes "Auf", which means 'dead body'. He has to pass through twelve stages, fitting the twelve provinces of Egypt and the twelve hours of the night. And at the end, he has to confront the serpent Apophis, the worst of monsters, so powerful that it eats souls."

"And that is now Miss Ives' task?" John Clare asked, sounding deeply disturbed.

"No, it is not," Ethan said angrily. "She is at peace."

Dr. Seward cleared her throat. "Be that as it may, we cannot help her in this. Our task, if Sir Malcolm has dreamt true, is to destroy twelve objects used by Dracula to bind himself to this world. Which, if you'll excuse me for pointing out the obvious, Sir Malcolm, sounds to me as if looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. There must be literally thousands of relics in Egypt. Even assuming Miss Hartdegen and our mutual friend Mr. Lyle manage to use their expertise to narrow down the choice, to exclude, say, anything that is younger than two millennia, it still would take various lifetimes..."

"There is one myth here of obvious help," Catriona commented, "that of Osiris. Who died, and rose from the dead, because his faithful wife Isis managed to collect his body parts, all but one. The myth names various places in Egypts as the places where Osiris' body parts were found. Where his cult was the strongest."

"Even so..."

"The Verbis Diablo," Ethan said abruptly, still not looking at any of them, but in the distance, where waves and darkness become one.

"Yes," Malcolm said, realising what he meant, "yes!"

He remembered how it had felt, putting the hints and stories from tribes together to find a way through places yet unchartered by any maps; the pure excitement of it, which had nothing to do with any cause or morals of the enterprise. For a moment, it captured him again.

"Will either of the gentlemen enlighten us?" Dr. Seward asked, eyebrow raised.

"We first found the story of the fallen angels written on various relics in the British museum," Malcolm said. "In a language like none other, the bastard child of many languages at once. It stands to reason that relics that provide Dracula with his power to return to this plane would be similarly engraved. Now there might be many relics with hieroglyphs in Egypt, and with Greek letters, due to the Ptolomies. But I bet there are not many that use this particular writing."

"If they exist," Victor said. He hadn't said anything, but Malcolm suspected he was inclined to Ethan's opinion that all of this was but an way to deal with grief, not a true message from the grave. Victor the atheist, so determined in his disbelief, and yet so ready to fight monsters if it allowed him not to having to dwell on his own choices. This, too, Malcolm could relate to.

"They do," he said, projecting confidence as best he could. "Never show any doubts when leading an expedition," he'd said to Peter, trying to explain, "or they will turn on you."

"But Father, what if you are in error about something? Would you not be grateful if someone prevented you from going the wrong way?"

"If you can't tell a sensible objection from a childish complaint for the sake of complaining, you have no business leading expeditions to begin with. What you're now doing is clearly an example of the later," Malcolm had retorted witheringly, and Peter had fallen silent, hurt. One of many times.

When Malcolm had watched Jared Talbot tear into Ethan, the ugly familiarity of it had made it even easier to shoot the man, in the end.

Later, when their little group had split up again, Ethan was the only one remaining on deck, and so Malcolm remained with him. They didn't speak, just watched the stars while the sky grew lighter again. Finally, Malcolm said:

"You may have given us the way to destroy him, you know."

"Even if I believed that, it still wouldn't help. How long does it take, Malcolm?" Ethan demanded, for the first time not bothering with the respectful title anymore. "How long does it fucking take to live with something like that?"

Malcolm didn't reply. He put a hand on Ethan's shoulder, and Ethan leaned into the touch, just a little, as the morning breeze found them.