Grave Importance

Grisaille let go of Ruthven and flopped face downward onto the duvet, with a creak of springs. 'I am never leaving this bed again,' he said, muffled by the covers. 'I am amalgamated with this bed. This bed and I have achieved spiritual oneness. I am it and it is me.

Varney and Tefnakhte looked at Greta. After a moment she sighed, pushed her hair back. 'I don't know why everyone seems to think I'm the one in charge here; we're all equally making this up as we go along.' 'Because you are,' said Tefnakhte mildly.

Asking her had been the sort of almost-impulsive decision that had characterized a lot of Varney's more terrible life choices -- he'd said it and then been flooded by a vast horrible wave of terror that had tightened his fingers on the wheel and lifted all the little hairs on the back of his neck -- and the moment when she had not said no, where she had -- smiled at Varney, the way she smiled sometimes that made him feel as if all the insides of his bones were glowing warm -- she'd smiled and she'd said yes and that meant, didn't it, that meant that oh God, could this actually happen? To him?

All the forecasts were tentatively hopeful about the idea of it not actually continuing to rain for the remainder of ever, but Varney had his doubts. It really did seem slightly sinister.

The mummy Amennakht was over three thousand years old and on his third set of replacement fingers, but this didn't severely impact his typing speed. On a good day, he was capable of about sixty-five words per minute. It was useful to be able to work from home -- he hated the word telecommute, he wasn't commuting at all, that was the point -- when you couldn't exactly go out in public without people noticing certain peculiarities in your personal appearance. Nobody cared what you looked like when you existed solely as a source of e-mails and completed assignments.

she’s in France again, but don’t worry, it’s—she’s over in some fancy resort for the undead gluing parts of mummies together, it’s quite safe,

Of course,” said Grisaille, “the dissolute nightlife of Rome is at our disposal.” He held out a hand to help Ruthven to his feet. “Untold perils haunt the streets, and so on.” “They’re not untold,” said Ruthven, and smiled for the first time in a while. “They’re us.

still audible over the immediate roar of appreciation that had followed celebration.

Being a human was, in general, not a thing she thought one should be proud of.

Greta thought of golden snowflakes falling in Hell, lit with the moving opalescent glow of the burning lake; thought of jeweled battlements in Heaven, white-winged angels, Samael, almost indistinguishable from them save for the color of his eyes; thought of all the mummy bones she had repaired, the architectural structure of muscle and tendon and ligament replaced with new materials, the time she had spent just sitting with her patients, listening, understanding, learning. Thought of the books she had read and the books she would read, how much more there was to learn, how she never wanted to stop learning, all the days of her life, with him beside her. How she never wanted to waste a single moment. Varney was right, she thought, looking up at the stars: forever would do, for now.

It had been a relatively slow day, after dealing with poor Ms. Akhetbasaken's dermestid beetle problem; a couple of routine daily exams, one replacement finger, one partial rewrap. The spa's clientele was growing.

Looking out over her friends, her family, the people she had met and worked with and loved and cared for, saved and been saved by, Greta thought how utterly fortunate she was to be what, and who, she was. All her life she'd been aware of existing in the strange liminal space between the ordinary world and the one her patients inhabited, not quite wholly in either one, and resigned to loneliness. Now the borders of that space seemed to have expanded, drawn back like stage-curtains to encompass not just Greta but the people she loved, and who loved her.

Absurdly, Varney thought, Should I be kneeling now, I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to pray, I just asked questions, and there was not so much an answer as a drawing back: an invitation to speak words into that emptiness, and have them be heard.

He turned away, walked over to the window, looked out over the ornamental lake--smaller than it had been, but still brimful--and at the rolling parkland and the woods beyond. Varney remembered this view yesterday, a century ago, two centuries: the trees had changed but the contours of the landscape remained the same; time's blurring brush had not altered the bones of the land itself. What had changed was--everything else. What had changed was him.

Greta Helsing," said Djehuty. "Your heart does not rise up against you as a witness, nor does it make opposition against you in the presence of the keeper of the balance.