The Last Werewolf

“I have to say something,” she said. “What they told me. They said to say to you: ‘Think of it as an incentive.’ Now you’re supposed to open the bag.”

She hadn’t opened the bag. Had been told not to. She would have carried it up in the lift denying it was there, denying her own hand holding it, her arm, her shoulder, that whole side of her body. Because of course the lower animal in her knew. The lower animal knew and the higher animal threw up the ice wall of denial. She said nothing now as I knelt and opened the zip, only leaned back against the door, bare shoulders held a fraction higher than usual. Instinct warned her this was a big moment. She might not be able to carry on being herself after it. The possibility gave her an aliveness she’d never known, as if she’d suddenly been lifted a thousand feet in the air. In spite of everything a part of me wondered what she might become. This is the slow, grinding compulsion I’m sick of, this inevitably getting interested in people. You love life because life’s all there is, Harley had insisted. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment.

Inside the holdall was a second bag made of tough transparent plastic, tightly sealed with tape. Inside that was Harley’s head.

20

THERE WAS A note stuck over his mouth with a message written on it in black marker: IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.

“Oh my God,” Madeline said. She stood with her bare white shoulders slightly hunched and her hands pressed against her midriff. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

The face had been beaten. At leisure, I imagined. Creases in the plastic held bubbles of blood, as with vacuum-sealed beef in the supermarket. They’d made sure his eyes were open.

Just stay, he’d said.

It would be heartening to say I broke down in tears. I didn’t. The moment merely updated the inventory of all the things I should feel but didn’t. I very carefully opened the seal, reached in and peeled the note from his mouth. Like it or not the image of myself sticking it across Grainer’s lips after I tracked him down and killed him came to me, which of course was the idea. Grainer’s idea after all. Ellis would have kept Harley alive. Ellis’s money was on guilt, conscience, responsibility—mine. Grainer’s was on eye-for-an-eye vengeance—mine. New and Old Testaments respectively.

“Jake?” Madeline said. “Is that real? That’s not real, is it?”

I closed Harley’s eyes. You have to. Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life. I knew now all the times I’d pictured Harley’s recuperative solitude after my death I’d never really believed in it. The worst horrors confirm a suspicion you’ve hidden even from yourself.

IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.

I’m used to the body as a thing separable violently into its constituent parts. To me a torn-off arm’s no more searingly forlorn than a chicken drumstick is to you. Still, it was Harley, what was left of him, a blunt testament to the defilements he’d suffered. A farcical testament, if you let yourself see it that way. Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body’s dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim’s personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy—the spirit’s subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things. This too is what I’m tired of, the friability of boundaries, the nearness of opposite extremes, the depressing bleed-ability of grief into laughter, good into evil, tragedy into farce.

Meanwhile Madeline was filling with unruly energies. I knew if she stayed shock would wear off and the demand for coherence take its place. With careful handling I put the head back in the holdall, zipped up gently, found myself out of deep inane habit hoping the darkness would come as a relief to him.

“You should go,” I said to Madeline.

“Who is that?”

“Never mind.”

“We have to call the police.”

“It’s best if you just go. The police aren’t part of this.”

“But—”

“No one will harm you, I promise. Just go and let me deal.” My window was that her system had temporarily crashed. I grabbed everything of hers I could find and stuffed it willy-nilly into the Louis Vuitton. She remained stalled by the door.

“That guy said you were a—”

“It’s a code word. It’s a word agents use.”

He’s a werewolf, honey. Naturally that had gone in. Naturally she’d made the connection.

“But you’ve said … All that stuff. It’s not true. There’s no such things.” This last utterance without much conviction, almost a question.

“Of course there are no such things,” I said. “That’s just a routine of mine, a gimmick. It’s nothing. Come on. Here, take the cash.” Six thousand. She took it, but numbly. Her face was clammy, her white hands lovely with veins. I had to keep pushing her forward against her need to stop, rewind, go over, make sense. In the end I half-propelled her through the door. I knew there was every chance she’d go straight to the police.

From which followed my own hasty pack-up and check-out. I put the holdall with my bag in the boot of the Vectra and drove. South. No specifics, just the sudden claustrophobic need to get out of the town’s clutter to the clean spaces of the coast.

It was dark, raining. I kept imagining discussing all this with Harley—then realising Harley was dead. It was a mental loop, augmented by the windscreen wipers’ two-syllable mantra, wichok, wichok, wichok. I must have been feeling something like grief (or self-pity) because I took the car’s responsive steering and smell of new vinyl as anthropomorphic sympathy. I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans. Instead I drove, fluently, with reverence for the small actions, still going through the same loop of imagining talking events over with Harley then realising he was dead. When the loop faltered a giant contained emptiness took its place.

The road ran down the coast. To the west, Caernarfon Bay and the Irish Sea, occasional boat lights, a tanker or two. East and south the land rose into another stack of vowel-starved hills: Bwlch Mawr; Gyrn Ddu; Yr Eifl. Of course I was being followed, had been since leaving the hotel. A black transit van, which was unusual for the Hunt, who normally use something quicker.

You were pleased to see me. It was depressing as hell. I don’t want that. Of course he didn’t. Forty years he’d been building up to avenging his father’s death. Not much of an avenging if the murderer was going to be grateful to him for it. Therefore provoke the murderer into something other than gratitude.

The question was: Had it worked? Was Harley’s death (or as I must infer, torture and death) incentive enough to bring the wolf out fighting?

Human standards would convict me of obscene weakness if the answer was no. Harley, a man who’d devoted his life to my protection, who’d loved me, whose love I’d exploited when it suited and stonewalled when it didn’t, had been mutilated and killed for my sake. I knew his killer or killers, I had the resources and experience to avenge the crime, and if I didn’t do it no one else would.

But my standards aren’t human. How could they be? The thought of resisting Grainer tomorrow night weakened my hands on the Vectra’s wheel. Revenge entails a belief in justice, which I don’t have. (You can’t count my monster philanthropy, my werewolf good deeds. That’s vestige, habit, a moribund personal accounting system. It doesn’t derive from a principle, it just provides the moral equivalent of hand relief.) I knew what I ought to feel. I knew Grainer (and Ellis, since he would have joined in) ought to be made to pay. But ought and I parted company when I murdered my with-child wife and ate her and carried on living.

I turned off the main road at Trefor and the WOCOP vehicle followed, stopped a token fifty feet behind me when I pulled over at the seaward edge of the village. I was sweating. The Curse played preview blasts of free jazz in my blood, my goosefleshed skin. The hand I lifted to wipe my face was the impatient ghost of the other hand, the hybrid thing, heavy, elegant, claw-tipped. Transformation was less than twenty-four hours away. My body heat filled the car. I got out.

Better. Cold wind and rain. Hands, throat, face, scalp, all cooled. The beach was near. A pale footpath led down to it. I took it, overcoat flapping. A WOCOP van door opened, closed. This would very soon become intolerable, this low-tech, this panto surveillance, ordered surely by Grainer, an extra satirical irritant, but I couldn’t think about it now. There was only the one thing to think about, the one thing to decide.

It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

Knolly turf gave way to shallow sand dunes. A sudden rough fresh odour of the sea. The old Somme survivor stirred: Margate’s salt air had come in through the open window and mingled with the lovely between-the-legs taste of his girl. (Their memories clog me like arterial fur. I’m full, I said to Harley. I have achieved fucking plenum.)

A marker buoy clanged, muted by wind and rain. The lights of a tanker twinkled, conjured a vision of a snug galley, cable-knit sweaters, tin mugs, roll-up-fag smoke. I could hear a helicopter somewhere inland, a sound like an endlessly discharging machine gun.

What’s my motivation? lousy actors want to know. Grainer had given me a legitimate one. I killed your friend, now you want to kill me.

It almost worked. The fuse leading to the appropriate emotional bomb lit, crackled, glowed, dazzled for a few heartbeats, then faltered, sputtered, died. I couldn’t make it mean enough. I couldn’t make it mean anything. Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate your efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn’t go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who’d taken their lives and devoured them, into you. That’s the gift I should have given Harley, or rather made him give me. At least that way we would have been together at the end.

I turned inland, light of heart and heavy as the Dead Sea, thinking, So thank you, dear Grainer, but no—when two things happened.

The first was that I put my hands in my coat pockets and felt in one of them the woollen hat Harley had insisted I take that night in the snow. Your fucking head will freeze, moron, he’d said. Because he’d loved me and I hadn’t loved him we’d cast the relationship as irascible doting father and moody son. It had begun self-consciously, facetiously, but like so much that begins that way acquired some of the emotional substance it lampooned. And this memory, in the perverse way of these things, did pierce me, set an ache in the empty place where the energy to go after Grainer should be.

The second was that the agent, who’d followed me and was now down on one knee not twenty feet away, fired his weapon directly at me.

I felt a single icy stab in my thigh, an eternal three seconds of something like mild outrage—then all the lights went out.

21

WHATEVER THEY USED they didn’t get the dosage right the first time. I floated up to consciousness just long enough to deduce—from the tremor, the noise, the shape of the ceiling—that I was in the helicopter. Restraints pinned my arms, legs, chest, head. A man’s voice (definitely not a vampire’s) said in French, Fuck me, he’s awake—then I felt the scratch of a needle, and darkness closed over me again.•

Transformation woke me to the smell of rust and fuel and seaweed. I was lying on my spasming back on a metal table and the restraints were gone. So were my clothes. Shoulders, shins, head, hands and haunches shunted blood and hurried bone to meet the Curse’s metamorphic demand. My circus of consumed lives stirred. The world felt strangely undulant. I thought, Well, I hope you’re ready for this, kidnapping fuckers, whoever you are. Then, throbbing with Hunger for living meat, I howled and rolled over onto my side.

Bright halogen lighting showed I was in a cage.

In what looked like the hold of a ship.

Being filmed.

Beyond the bars three men and a woman stood between a pair of tripod-mounted motion-sensitive cameras. One of the men was the agent who’d tranquilized me, early thirties, with a sullen, guinea-piggish face, wearing a nose stud and a black woollen cap. The other two were large skinheads in unmatching fatigues and Timberlands. One, arms covered in golden fuzz, was worryingly glazed. The other was baby-faced, with surprised eyes and a dimpled chin. Both were equipped with automatic rifles and side arms.

The woman, in tight white trousers and a clinging bloodred top, was Jacqueline Delon.

She hadn’t changed much in ten years. Slender, petite-breasted with a tiny abdomen and a lean face. Short red hair in the boyish style only French women seem able to carry off. The last time I’d seen her, outside the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, big sunglasses had hidden her eyes, and my inference—of constipation and usefully disturbed sexuality—had been drawn (wishfully, lazily) from the thin-lipped mouth and the patent narcissism of her deportment. Here, however, were the eyes, narrow and dirty green, full of insomniac intelligence, a bright front of compulsive playfulness over God only knew what, fear of death, self-avoidance, money-guilt, loneliness, hunger for love—possibly just immense boredom.

“Can he talk?” the baby-faced skinhead asked, en français.

“No,” Jacqueline said. “But he understands. So don’t say anything you might regret.”

Without the faintest twitch of warning I flung myself snarling at the bars.

To her credit, Jacqueline barely flinched. The men—to a man—leaped backwards, the two meat-goons with guns raised, the Tranquilizer with a priceless falsetto shriek.

Immediately, I subsided, stood down, shook my head dear-oh-dear fashion, a portion of dignity regained. The table I’d woken up on was, I now saw, a huge metal crate. I sauntered back to it and lay down, hands folded on my belly, ankles crossed. Jacqueline laughed, with charming subdued musicality.

“Fuck me,” the baby-faced skinhead said.

“He’s playing with you,” Jacqueline said. Then to the Tranquilizer: “For God’s sake, don’t be such a baby. Turn off the cameras.”

Apparent nonchalance notwithstanding, I was booming with Hunger. And in a cage. Mentally I flashed forward a few hours to the cold turkey scene from every heroin-addict movie. Please, man, just somethin, you gotta give me somethin. I’m not gonna make it. Oh God, it hurts …

Jacqueline stepped forward and wrapped her red-nailed fingers (blouse-matching) around the bars of the cage. “Jacob,” she said, in English, “I’m so sorry for all this. It’s not what it appears, I promise. I know you can’t answer me, so just let me talk for a moment. My name is Jacqueline Delon. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time. I have a proposition for you. But that can wait. You must be wondering where you are.”

I didn’t move. The cage was bolted to the floor. Other than a few wooden crates, some heaps of rope, rolls of tarp and half a dozen oil drums the hold was empty.

“You’re on board the freight ship Hecate and we’re en route to Biarritz where I have a comfortable place and where I hope we can have a mutually rewarding conversation. Aside from this current indignity, for which I apologise again, I intend you absolutely no harm or discomfort, and as soon as you’re no longer a risk to myself or my crew, which should be”—she looked at her watch—“in approximately eight hours, your liberty will be restored to you, and I will personally do everything in my power to compensate you for this inconvenience. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you. You’ll find it in the container you’re lying on.”

She stepped away from the cage and said quietly, “Let’s go.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“The cameras?”

“Leave them off. I’ve got what I wanted.”

The men went ahead of her. At the hold door she turned and looked back at me. “I’m so excited to meet you at last,” she said. “You’re everything I hoped you would be. I know this can be the start of something exceptional.”

After she’d gone I forced myself to lie still, listening to the Hunger turning the volume up in my blood, heartbeat the buzz-thud of a car with the stereo’s bass set to max.

Lie still.

An idiotic injunction.

Lie still.

Because you and I know.

Lie still.

What’s underneath us in the box.

22

IT’S NO ACCIDENT that the great moral philosophers invariably wrote on aesthetics, too. Figuring out what made something Right (or Wrong) was akin to figuring out what made something Beautiful (or Ugly). These days scientists are in on the act: At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It’s hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there’s only beauty left. What theory won’t we espouse if it’s beautiful? What atrocity won’t we excuse?

Or what instinct (to stick, as Madeline would have it, to the story) won’t we overcome?

For a while, standing with my warm lethal hairy hands wrapped around the cold bars of my cage, I resisted opening the container. Truth was I felt slightly seasick. The tip of my snout was dry. Beyond my confines the full moon made its inexhaustible suggestion, sent down its unbankruptable love, weirdly mingled just then with the memory of Jacqueline Delon’s thin face and tightly red-wrapped breasts. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you. Clearly she’d moved beyond customary limits. Courtesy of wealth. You’re everything I hoped you would be. The remark was an affront, subject and object in each other’s seats. I live up to her expectations? Who the fuck did she think she was?

This, of course, was the embarrassing heart of the matter. I was an animal who’d been caught, caged and observed on camera. My scrotum shrank from the shame of having been seen changing—worse, of having been filmed changing. And now left to perform, to do what it was in my nature to do. I was l’objet d’une voyeuse. Even the lion knows his debasement, mounting his mate while the bored zoo crowd looks on. To kill and eat here, now, in captivity and on show (I suspected the cameras despite Madame’s instruction; I suspected other cameras, CCTV, spyholes) would be a rich and vulgar degradation, an aesthetic (dear Maddy) offence.

Thus the Hunger got its first inkling that resistance was on the table. You’re kidding, right? the Hunger said. Then a little more sternly, You are kidding, right?

I moved quickly to the container and threw open the lid.

Inside was a naked, white, epicene young man of perhaps twenty, gagged, bound, and judging by his pupils heavily drugged. Dirty blond greasy hair and tiny nipples. Junkie arms and a long thin penis. Whatever the drugs they weren’t proof against the vision I must have presented. His sore-looking eyes first focused then bugged. He roared behind his gag. An odour of fear on his nostril breath like bitters.

Oh, the Hunger said. Oh you sweet, sweet thing.

In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: The ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) Ganymede’s ankles and wrists were blood-bruised where he’d fought his restraints. Blue circulatory webbing showed through the white skin of his belly. Terror’s mouth-watering secretions crept from his pores. My salivary glands duly discharged. In the face of such … such meat the thought of eight hours ahead without feeding made my teeth and nails hurt. My hair ached. Mentally, weakness worked its angle: Resistance would be futile. I’d crack, I’d kill him and devour him and Jacqueline Delon would watch while getting head or smoking a cigarette or eating a crème brûlée or filing her nails.

And yet.

There remained the profound aesthetic repugnance. Or less loftily, self-disgust. At getting so feebly captured. At finding myself the Entertainment. At the decades spent sick of Being a Werewolf. At carrying on regardless. At costing Harley his life. (His poor head must still be in the Vectra’s boot. The locals would notice a smell. It would make the news, pass to the world via the anchorman’s autocued disbelief: “In the Welsh village of Trefor today police discovered the severed head of …” Christ, the exhausting predictability of it all.)

My young man thrashed, screaming behind his gag. The ship did something, offered some large tilted response to the sea, and I genuinely thought (God being dead etc.) I might vomit over the wretched creature. I let the lid fall shut. Then worried lest he suffocate. Jacqueline opening the case to find him not mauled but asphyxiated was hardly the denouement I was after. A quick check revealed air holes in the steel flank. Very well. But the Hunger had twigged I was serious. No barbs, no bennys, no chloroform, no laughing gas. No chains, no time locks. No teasing or dallying. Just Jake Marlowe, cold turkey, saying No.

There was an inner silence while the Hunger took this in.

I went back to the bars (thinking of Tantalus, of Christ in Gethsemane, unjustifiably of Samson at the Philistine Pillars), wrapped my monster fingers around the steel, closed my eyes and waited for the agony to begin.

Second Moon

Fuckkilleat

23

READER, I ATE HIM.

About three hours after resolving I wouldn’t.

Throughout the dull solo feast the refrain from Tennyson’s “Mariana” repeated in the hot spaces of my gorging head:She only said My life is dreary, He cometh not, she said.She said, I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead.

I would that I were—Yet here was the flesh that took my teeth in helpless succulence and the warm sour fountain of blood, the puncture moment that never gets old but stops being enough. And afterwards the swollen headache of my unsurprised self, the old exhausted cognisance of all the times I’ve vowed it was the last time and all the times it wasn’t.

Don’t misunderstand me: There was no guilt. Only the cavity where guilt used to be. This and the weight of my own still-hereness slumped on me like a corpse. For a long while I lay in the recovery position, eyes closed. Total self-disgust is a kind of peace.

At dawn Jacqueline returned, accompanied by the baby-faced skinhead. Both wore rubber boots over surgical scrubs. From the doorway they unrolled a length of plastic to form a walkway up to the cage. A hosepipe was unwound from a corner of the hold. I understood: a murder scene in the age of CSI. Leftovers were in the crate. The kid’s half-eaten carcase in a gelid blood soup. Wolf remnants wriggled under my human skin like rats in a sack. My fingernails, as always after the withdrawal of their wolf counterparts, hurt like hell.

“It’s warm water,” Jacqueline said. “Do you mind? I’ll help as best I can, with your permission.”

I sat (naked, obviously) in profile to my captors at the side of the cage with my back to the bars, knees drawn up, face smeared and sated. I was full-bellied, heavy in the human-again limbs. The wolf’s ghost dimensions played with me when I moved, the snout’s weight and the long hybrid feet, the haunches still struggling to unload their late mass. The goon had his gun levelled at my belly, but at his mistress’s gesture lowered it.

“Here,” Jacqueline said, handing me a squeezy bottle. “It’s just a sterilising detergent. Would you prefer it if he holds the hose?”

“Decorum and I don’t keep company,” I said, my throat howl-sore. “Besides, the role of prison guard suits you. Go ahead.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Really I am. I promise this is the very last discomfort you’ll suffer as my guest. Please forgive me.”

To repeat: Total self-disgust is a kind of peace—because further ignominy can add nothing to it. Standing there washing myself in front of her I made an intellectual concession to the debasement, but it was only moments before I was enjoying the soft soap and perfectly adjusted heat of the water. Put the right music behind this, I thought, and I could be advertising shower gel.

I dried off with a white towel that might have been manufactured in heaven. The flesh can’t help it. The flesh merely reports. When I’d finished I was tired and roseate and curiously pleased with the ongoing failure of myself.

“The ammunition is pure silver,” Jacqueline said. “I tell you this not as a threat but only so that you know you’ll die if you decide to attack me the minute I open the door. I wouldn’t blame you. You must be furious with me. But there’s a helicopter waiting which will have us at my home in thirty minutes. Once there, I promise you nothing but luxury, rest and conversation. If you prefer, I can make arrangements for you to be taken to any destination you choose, and I’ll never bother you again. But I so much hope you’ll agree to hear what I have to say. Is it safe for me to open the door?”

The heroic thing would have been to refuse. Take her at her word and get the chopper to drop me at the nearest airport. Fuck conversation. But I was exhausted. The appeal of putting myself in someone else’s hands bordered the sensuous.

“I assume you keep a full bar at home?”

“Three full bars.”

“Then it’s safe to open the door.”

When we stood facing each other on the plastic she offered me her hand. I was tempted to take it and bite off a finger (leftover wolf aplenty for that) but settled for a gentle squeeze. “Now we can be relaxed,” she said. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

I followed her to the doorway. The gargoyle with the gun stayed put. In the short corridor facing us was a little fold-out table, on it, my clothes (including the woollen hat Harley had given me) washed, dried, pressed. She opened a door on her left, which revealed a small locker. I saw a shower unit, a plastic chair, a dress the colour of wheat on a hanger. “I just need to get out of these,” she said, indicating the scrubs. I was checking the overcoat’s inside pocket for the journal. It was there, along with passports and wallet. I didn’t waste time wondering if she’d read it. “And?” I asked.

“Fascinating,” she said. “But let’s discuss it over a drink.”

24

JACQUELINE DELON’S VILLA sits a few miles south of Biarritz on a wooded hill a little west of the tiny town of Arbonne. Modern, white, glass, oak and steel, surrounded by eight private acres. The trappings you’d expect: helipad, infinity pool, tennis court, gym, CCTV, a combo-staff of domestics and security personnel. The rooms are big, full of light, ornamented with artefacts reflecting her obsession with the occult. From the upper floors (there are three, plus roof terrace) you can look down over the tops of the evergreens to the pale beach, the surf line, the ocean. In the basement there’s a library to rival Harley’s. All the tech hardware is up to the minute. There are indeed three bars—lounge, pool, master bedroom suite—and it was to the first of these Mme Delon and I retired alone on our arrival.

I lit the first deeply needed cigarette since transformation (a softpack of Camels on the counter; she’d done her homework) while my hostess fixed drinks. Tanqueray and tonic for me (too much sunlight in the room for whisky), a Tom Collins for herself. Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

“It’s ages since I’ve made drinks,” she said. “There’s always someone else. But I thought it best for it to be just the two of us.” She’d taken a seat—the bar had six high swivel chairs of white leather—next to mine, and was poking at her cocktail’s ice cubes with her index fingernail. The wall to my left was glass, and looked out onto a patio of terra-cotta tiles and a cactus garden. Soil red as chilli powder. It was only mid-March but the sky was clear and the air still. You could feel the blinding brilliance summers would have here. Small birds whirred to and from a feeder bracketed to one white wall.

“So,” she said, “I must explain myself. What it comes to, Jacob, is …” She looked down, smiled, had a brief inner dialogue with herself, let her shoulders sag, then slid from her stool and stood in front of me. “Come with me,” she said, offering me her hand. She might have been a nine-year-old with a tree house to show off. “Come.”

I took her hand (retained the Camel, the G&T), got to my feet and followed her.

Through two large rooms (one with a central circular designer fire pit and a large standing stone but little else) down a corridor to a steel door with keypad entry. Beyond, varnished oak stairs led down to the formidable library. Air-con and the feel of soundproof walls. Other heavy doors, also keypadded, led off. Jacqueline paused at one of them, looked me in the eye for a moment, then punched the access code and opened the door.

The room it revealed was small and windowless. A filing cabinet, a desk, a computer—and the wall above it covered in press clippings. All of them related one way or another to me. BODY OF MISSING GIRL FOUND. CORAL INDUSTRIES ESTABLISHES SUB-SAHARAN AIDS CHARITY. VECTOR IN AGGRESSIVE BUY-OUT. MUTILATED BODY DISCOVERED. FAMILY MASSACRED IN MANSON-STYLE ATTACK. MYSTERY DONOR FUNDS PIONEERING CANCER RESEARCH. WHO RUNS LAERSTERNER INTERNATIONAL? “WEREWOLF” EYEWITNESS IS CLASS-A DRUG-USER. UNNAMED DONOR INJECTS NEW LIFE INTO VACCINE DISTRIBUTION. “SILVER BULLETS” FOUND AFTER NIGHT OF MYSTERY GUNSHOTS. VECTOR NOW TO TRADE AS HERNE. FULL-MOON MURDERS ARE COINCIDENCE, POLICE MAINTAIN.

“Press Enter,” Jacqueline said.

The animal remnants don’t like small spaces. I forced myself past it and sat down at the desk. Hit the key as instructed. Instantly footage began to run. Me coming out of International Arrivals in Tokyo. Caption: JM Tokyo, 07/02/06. Me leaving the Algonquin. Me on the beach at Galveston. Me going into Harley’s Earl’s Court house. Me strolling down the Rue de Rivoli. Me in a Cairo café. All shot in the last three years. The last sequence: me dressed as a woman, getting out of a taxi and entering the Leyland Hotel.

“I take it I’m supposed to be surprised?” I said.

“Not at all,” she said. “Just convinced of my dedication.”

There was nothing to put my cigarette out in, so I downed the Tanqueray and dropped the butt in the glass. “Well, you’ve got the transformation footage now. Essential for a name-and-shame operation. The kill too, no doubt. Congratulations. Prepare yourself for the weight of public indifference.”

“Please don’t insult me. You know that’s not what this is.”

“Then what is this?”

“A chance for sanctuary.”

“What?”

“I want you to stay alive. I’m offering you protection, indefinitely. Serious protection,” she added, seeing the dismissal forming in my face. “Not that—not what you’re used to. I don’t think you have any understanding of what a subtraction from the world your death would represent. You’re something magnificent, Jake. There’s such little magnificence left.”

“Thank you very much. I think I’ll be going now.”

“Listen to me, please.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.”

“You must give me a chance to—”

“Don’t be fucking absurd.”

She fell silent. Little-girlishly dropped her head, picked at a hangnail. A performance of compressed sullenness. I remembered the small turgid breasts and inviting abdomen. Blood in my cock twitched. Of course it did. The post-Curse horn. Again: The flesh can’t help it. Laughter, desire, boredom and exhaustion did what they do as a team, cornered me into a unique paralysis. My hands in my lap like two dead crabs. Just stay, Harley had said.

Whatever else was wrong with Jacqueline Delon her sexual instincts were fine. She took the two steps necessary to bring herself within my reach. For such moments to work, knowing when not to speak is crucial. In silence she very carefully placed her legs either side of my knee but remained standing. Thus just above my left dead crab hand was the hot skirt-space. Into which the now livening hand slowly ascended (will always ascend, must ascend, though the gods have gone and the planet’s dying and the human race has ironied itself into terminal indifference and it wasn’t painless and it wasn’t quick) through the zones of deepening heat to the lace-enflowered tender sly swelling of her cunt.

25

SHE HAD THE complete repertoire, the full gallery of sexual personæ, and though boosted by cocaine we flirted with several of them, it was only when I lay on top of her and she stared dead-eyed at me while I went into her that we managed something like alignment. Tender and Curse-hungover I remained in danger of segueing into hysterical laughter or a crying jag. Even when I came (she gave me the raised eyebrows and half smile of sinisterly maternal triumph) it was with sad fracture, a frail sense of the poor old world’s injuries and might-have-beens and my own wretched list of losses. Closely followed by a feeling of deep fraud: Beyond the mawkish moment I remained as sick of the stinking planet as I was of my threadbare little self.

Old habits of decency dying hard, however, I got her off, orally, without the remotest illusion she cared very much, though she held my head and bruised my lips with her pubis and made a masculine noise of apparent satisfaction when she came.

“I’m going to have some food sent up,” she said. “You don’t want anything, I know.” We were in the master bedroom suite on the villa’s sunlit top floor, a large rectangular deep-carpeted Chanel-scented space, again with one wall entirely glass. Décor was ivory, with here and there a big statement: a cowhide chaise longue; a chandelier of red glass; an original Miro. It was still only early afternoon, though already the Hecate seemed weeks ago. Less than forty-eight hours had passed since I’d held Harley’s severed head in my hands. My whole life’s been like this, too much experience crammed into too little time. Two hundred? You feel two thousand.

“You know?” I said.

“You’re still full. It’ll take a week at least before you’re hungry. It’s why you smoke and drink so much. The boredom of the mouth. I was watching, by the way. It seems dishonourable not to tell you now.”

Watching my feast in the hold, she meant. Dishonourable now that we were going to be friends.

“We’re not going to be friends,” I said.

“Aren’t we? I assume you’d like another drink, at least?”

She rang for service. Pâté de foie gras, fresh fruit, yogurt, a selection of cured meats and cheeses, brought by a dark-skinned gold-earringed boy of perhaps thirteen dressed in crisp white pyjamas. In smiling silence he set the platter down on a low Japanese inlaid table along the wall of glass. In smiling silence he exited. Jacqueline, in a pearl-coloured silk robe (cover up; give the gentleman’s postcoital imagination fresh incentive), fixed drinks at the minimalist wet-bar. I lit a Camel.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Why did you give up the search for Quinn’s journal?”

Oh God.

“What?”

“You heard me. Quinn’s journal. Why did you give up?”

My palms needled. Forty years wasted. When I started searching for the wretched book Victoria was on the British throne and Tchaikovsky was debuting his 1812 Overture in Moscow. When I stopped George V reigned and The Waste Land was Europe’s massive tumour of enlightenment.

“Who wouldn’t have given up?” I said. “One gets tired of not finding what one’s looking for.”

“But you believed. Otherwise why bother?”

“I don’t know what I believed. I wanted answers. I wanted the story. Who doesn’t want the story? If someone had told me there was a blind and deaf one-legged washerwoman in Siberia who knew the origin of werewolves I’d have hired myself a yak and set off. There’s a period of being bothered with big questions. It doesn’t last forever.”

“I’m still bothered,” she said.

“You’re French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse.”

She chuckled. Brought me my drink, administered a light fingernails caress to my thigh, then paced silkily away to the Japanese table. She knelt and began undaintily helping herself. Veins showed in her white hands and ankles; my cock stirred in dumb irritable reflex. She wasn’t falling-in-love material but the thought of eating her was already, as from a great distance, starting to appeal.

“Werewolves are not a subject for academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in the concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “I keep telling myself I’m just an outmoded idea. But you know, you find yourself ripping a child open and swallowing its heart, it’s tough not to be overwhelmed by … the concrete reality of yourself.”

Another smile. She was enjoying this. Worse, I was slightly enjoying it myself. Still, the mention of Quinn’s journal and reminder of my hot years when Meaning meant something had disturbed long-settled dust.

“And in any case,” she said, “there remain vampires. If the human psyche’s so at ease with itself why are they doing so well?”

“I don’t concern myself with vampires,” I said.

“They regard you as primitives,” she said. Then, looking away: “It’s the absence of language, naturally.”

The second drink had gone down with shameful ease. Your fucking head will freeze, moron, Harley had said. Poor Harls. Once, heartbroken by a brilliant and toxic young Bosey he’d drunk himself into a semicoma that lasted two days. When he came round and realised I’d been there the whole time, looking after him, he’d said, confusedly: My goodness, aren’t you kind? Then he’d fallen asleep again.

“Sorry,” I said, having lost Jacqueline’s thread. “Say again?”

“Werewolves can’t talk. Les vampyres think this is hilarious.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course they do.” One of the great subcurses of the Curse, this loss of speech. It’s a failure to achieve full monstrosity. Certainly it’s deeply pleasurable to open your victim’s belly with an index claw, but not as pleasurable as it would be to be able to talk to him while you did it. It’s you, Arabella had said—and animal dumbness had denied me the apotheosis of saying, Yes, it is. Purest cruelty requires that the victim knows she suffers by your free choice. It’s you. Yes, my darling, it’s me. Now, observe.

“They’re inclined to snobbery to start with,” Jacqueline said. “This business of werewolf inarticulacy is the great justification. They do have such a large body of literature.”

This has been one of the great vampiric contentions, that they constitute a civilisation: They have art, culture, division of labour, political and legal systems. There’s no lycanthropic parallel. The yeehaw explanation is we’re too busy chasing meat’n’pussy, but the truth is the language of the wer is anathema to the wulf. After a few transformations your human self starts to lose interest in books. Reading begins to give you a blood-brown headache. People describe you as laconic. Getting the sentences out feels like a giant impure labour. I’ve heard tell of howlers going decades barely uttering a word.

“Yeah,” I said to Jacqueline, as I lit another Camel, “we’re not great ones for belles-lettres.”

“Yourself excepted.”

Well, yes. Obviously I, anomalously, still can’t fucking shut up. I blew a smoke ring. “Since you’ve read the journal there’s no point my denying it,” I said.

“How do you explain it?”

“I must like a whore unpack my heart with words.”

“Of course, but why?”

“Congenital logorrhoea.”

“Jake, please. It’s so obvious.”

“And yet I don’t see it.”

She shook her head, smiling. Popped a strawberry into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. Wiped her hands on a fat napkin. “Yes, you do. You’re just embarrassed by it. You’ve held on to language because without language there’s no morality.”

“Ah, yes, I spend a lot of time considering morality, when I’m not slaughtering people and gobbling them all up.”

“I’m talking about testimony. I’m talking about bearing witness to yourself. What is this—what are the journals—if not the compulsion to tell the truth of what you are? And what is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? It’s perfectly Kantian.”

She presented a peculiarly annoying attractive figure sitting there in her ivory silk robe with her legs tucked under her. “What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame …’ Aesthetic fraudulence, notice. Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly—and my dear man, you can’t stop caring about beauty. That is your real predicament, your real curse.”

“Fascinating the way other people see things,” I said. “But I really must be going.” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for my trousers.

“I have Quinn’s book,” she said.

There’s a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn’t have it. It cost me some effort to hold—after the briefest hesitation—to my purpose with the trousers. I stood and pulled them on. You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate. Nonetheless I felt sick. You get used to no one having anything (except their flesh and blood, except their life) you could possibly want. You take your sufficiency for granted. You forget it’s contingent. You forget it’s a luxury.

“Good,” she said, observing. “I see you know I’m telling the truth. That saves us some time.”

“How did you get it?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew. The memory of Harley—someone hit one of Mubarak’s places three months ago—like the punch line that draws a groan.

“Oh, that’s too long a story for now. Stay for dinner and I’ll tell you. Right now I absolutely must take a shower.” She got to her feet.

“This is the technique then, is it? Keep me dangling?”

“Well, if you’re not going to see reason.”

“What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it.”

“Then feel free to leave. If you genuinely have no interest then walk out the way we came in. You’ll find my driver at the gate. He’s instructed to take you wherever you care to go.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked her.

She turned, one hand in the pocket of her robe, and looked out through the wall of glass. “I told you,” she said. “I want you to live.”

26

I FINISHED DRESSING. Sunlight filled the perfumed room. I went to the huge window and, as she had, looked out. Dark conifers swept down to the pale line of the beach and the sea’s glitter. Blue cloudless sky, London’s recent snow a world away and a century ago, though this was still Europe, still early March. The sex had carried us into late afternoon. My shoulders ached. The junkie’s gobbled life was finding room, incredibly, the last seat in a packed arena, that solid deafening crowd of living dead. Somewhere among them an unripe foetus the size of a plum, my daughter, my son.

There were two explanations for what I was doing here. One was that Jacqueline Delon was sufficiently bored and unhinged for the keeping of a werewolf as an erotic pet to seem a rejuvenating novelty. The other was that she had a motive as yet unknown which required, in addition to the palaver of kidnapping me and accessorising herself to murder, temporary dissemblance. A woman of intriguingly acute ambiguity even without the bait of Quinn’s book.

Oh Jesus, Quinn’s book.

Thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Quinn went out to Mesopotamia for the third and final time in the spring of 1863. A double first in classics and ancient history from Oxford ought to have bricked him into academia for life, but by the time he left Kings in 1848 he was ravenous for the world beyond college walls. Brief failed stints in the British Museum, the Foreign Office (Burma) and the East India Company (Bombay) finagled by his Old Etonian dad confirmed the futility of sticking him behind a desk, and by 1854 he was on his first archaeological expedition to the Middle East under the Bacchic eye of Lord William Greaves, a known occultist roué, whom Quinn (no sluggard with the ladies himself) had met and befriended as a fellow whorer at Kate Hamilton’s. Greaves, a collector of religious antiquities and student of the Black Arts, had been thrilled to read of Botta’s discoveries at Nineveh and Khorsabad and was convinced ancient objects of talismanic power were there for the taking if one merely had the money, leisure and inclination to go and dig them up. Quinn, desperate to get his hands dusty and put his colloquial Arabic to use, pretended an interest in diabolism and offered his services as an interpreter-cum-right-hand-man. Which, over the next nine years, is exactly what he became. Along with site management and the cataloguing of finds Quinn greased the requisite bureaucrats, landowners, tribal elders and customs officers and still found time to score opium and girls for his lordship.

How do I know all this?

Because I spent time finding it out.

Why did I spend time finding it out?

Because before his death in 1863 Quinn claimed to have discovered the origin of werewolves.

It’s a ridiculous story, of course, but history’s full of ridiculous stories. You can’t make this shit up, one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don’t ask me. I just work here.

As so often with Great Finds, the man looking was looking for something else. Quinn had travelled to the town of Al Qusayr, whence rumour had reached the archaeologists of an underground temple fifteen miles away, literally fallen into by a retarded goatherd. Greaves, sceptical (the natives had learned quickly there was money to be made selling “information” to eccentric Europeans), had given Quinn the site as a pet project, and the protégé had set off from the camp in Al Qusayr with camels, a guide and two servants, one of whom was to be despatched with the guide back to his lordship to summon hands and equipment should the rumours turn out to be fact.

Which, to everyone’s surprise, they did. The subsequent excavations at Gharab revealed not just a temple but an entire sunken village dating from the third millennium B.C. Lord Greaves cleaned up his act and led the dig, partly because the wealth of artefacts shocked him into a renaissance of genuine interest and partly out of respect for the good man he’d lost.

For Alexander Quinn never made it back to camp. He and his little scouting party were ambushed by bandits on their return journey. Quinn, the guide and one of the servants were killed. The other servant, John Fletcher, though left for dead, survived a knife wound to the shoulder, wandered delirious for a day in the desert, then was picked up by a merchant caravan. On the strength of the only word they understood, “Qusayr,” the merchants returned him to Greaves there two days later, where, having made it through fever and miraculously dodged infection, he told his lordship the whole story.

The night before the attack, Fletcher reported, the party, camped by the temple site, had been startled by the arrival of an astonishingly old man in rags, who’d come crawling on hands and knees out of the darkness. Skeletal and half blind, he spoke a dialect even the guide only partly understood, but they didn’t need the translator to see the old fellow was close to death. When Quinn made to send for help the old man stopped him. No point. Time to die. But listen. Keep story. No children so tell you. You write down. Keep story. He’d laughed when he said this, at himself it seemed. Fletcher had supposed him mad. Quinn, unwilling to simply let the man die, sent the servants back to the village for help, but by the time they returned the old man had expired. In those two hours he had told, Quinn claimed, an extraordinary story, a story which, if its provenance was genuine, had been passed down from the days before Etana and which would provide the oldest account of the origin of a near worldwide myth—of humans who became wolves.

Quinn, via the guide’s translation, had written the whole thing down in his journal.

That wasn’t all. But for the rags on his back the old man’s only possession, wrapped in the remains of a gunnysack, was a piece of stone, some ten inches by eight, clearly a fragment of a larger tablet, bearing hieroglyphs Quinn couldn’t decipher, but which, according to the old man, was proof of the truth of his tale.

Which isn’t much, is it? Hardly sufficient, you’d think, to form the basis of a neurotic obsession for the better part of forty years. Because for forty years the thought of Quinn’s lost journal—and the story of the Men Who Became Wolves—never ceased being a drain on my energies.

There’s a limit to what one can do. I interviewed John Fletcher, Lord Greaves, all the surviving members of the 1863 expedition. I travelled with an interpreter to Al Qusayr and on to the excavated temple at Gharab. I sought out bandit chiefs and offered rewards for information. I retained half a dozen dealers in antiquities and rare books to keep an eye on the market, despite the laughably overwhelming likelihood that Quinn’s diary had simply been deemed worthless and chucked away to be long since swallowed by the desert sand. It all took time, money, mental illness. I knew it was a ludicrous fixation. (One knows one’s madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.) When the Times reported the story in May of 1863 I’d been a werewolf for twenty-one years. The big questions didn’t, it turned out, go away. Once a month I transformed into a monster, part man, part wolf. Fair enough. I killed and devoured humans, starting with my wife. Very well. But where did it all fit in? Was my species God’s handiwork or the Devil’s? Darwin’s Origin, published four years earlier, had said, effectively, neither, but old habits died hard. What would happen to me when I died? Had I still a soul? Where and when did werewolves begin?

Of course I’d read. Folk tales, compendia of myth and superstition, academic studies. Lycanthropy, even a cursory investigation will reveal, has a place in many cultures. I’d travelled to North America and learned what I could of Wendigo and the skinwalkers, to Germany, where rustics still kept silver handy and cherished wolfsbane (which, by the way, though toxic to humans and pretty much every other animal, has absolutely no effect on us), to Serbia to hear of the vulkodlaks and to Haiti to learn what I could of the je-rouges. None of it conclusively convinced. I was a werewolf but the werewolf stories still sounded like fairy tales to me. I began to wonder if my scepticism was congenital, if the howler was naturally equipped with a nose for his own true provenance, or at least his own false biographers. The stories left me with the same depressing doubt the growing youngster begins to feel about Santa Claus and the Stork, those uniquely deflating intimations of the world’s somehow just not being like that. (These were still the days before I’d actually met any other werewolves, by the way. Not that the half dozen I’ve met since have been any use. One was four hundred and three years old and refused to speak at all. One was the founder of a [failed, naturally] werewolf society in Norway, a sect based around the worship of Fenrir, the illegitimate wolf offspring of Loki and Angrboda, which ruled him out of serious conversation. To the other four—one in Istanbul, one in Los Angeles, one in the Pyrenees and one, incredibly, on a Nile cruise in 1909—each monomaniacally desperate for a She, I was simply unwanted sexual competition and lucky to escape with my life.) Whereas, against all likelihood, John Fletcher’s story of Quinn’s encounter rang … if not true then at least not wholly false. Its very inaptness—werewolves in Mesopotamia?—lent it a whiff of mad authenticity.

One meeting with Fletcher was enough to convince me his story was true (what he was telling us was what Quinn had told him) for the simple reason that the man was incapable of making something like that up. So, granted the veracity of Fletcher’s testimony, what did Quinn write in his journal? What was the five-thousand-year-old story of the Men Who Became Wolves?

What I expected, what I realised I’d been expecting ever since the words “I have Quinn’s book” left my hostess’s mouth, was a deep, a bodily certainty that I no longer cared. What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it. Brave words. In fact I felt sick. Sickened, by the combination of knowing it was all too late and knowing that even now it wasn’t too late. “Quinn’s book” was simultaneously an outgrown childhood fetish and a miraculously resurrected dead love. I knew what a liberation it would be to get up and walk away, with a sad smile, as of a final renunciation that brings peace.

The beauty of chronic ambivalence is that even tiny shifts of detail have the power to tip the scales. Jacqueline turned the shower off and exhaled, heavily, and the sound rushed me up out of my stupor. Suddenly the uncertainty of my status here—was I a prisoner or not?—was intolerable. I have Quinn’s book. She wasn’t lying (and even now the thought of it within reach after all these years was like a violent drop in blood pressure) but I couldn’t stand the thought of simply waiting to see how things played out. With the abrupt cessation of the water’s flow and that one female sigh the weeks of passivity caught up with me and yanked me to my feet (without intending to, I’d gone back to the bed and sat down) in a contained paroxysm of self-disgust. I crossed the soft carpet, picked up my overcoat from where I’d dropped it by the door, then quietly let myself out of the room.

27

JUST WALK OUT OF HERE was all I had. Not much, but enough. Take her at her word and see how far I got before someone stopped me. Before someone tried stopping me. That was what I wanted, something concrete to launch myself at, physically, partly for the relief of not having to think, partly to get out from under the weight of shame that had accumulated. She makes a fool of you and you lick her hand. Holds up the baby toy of Quinn’s book and you dribble and coo. Meanwhile it wasn’t painless and it wasn’t quick.

The house was solid silence. If there were staff they were hidden, though there was no mistaking the weird protoconsciousness of CCTV following me from room to empty room. Behind the butch front I was still talking myself out of looking for Quinn’s journal. It wouldn’t be visible, and if it was it wouldn’t be accessible. And in any case what was the point? Suppose I found it and it said werewolves came on a silver ship out of the sky five thousand years ago, or were magicked up out of a burning hole in the ground by a Sumerian wizard, or were bred by impregnating women with lupine seed—so what? Whatever the origin of my species it would no more make cosmic sense than the origin of any other. The days of making sense, cosmic or otherwise, are long over. For the monster as for the earthworm as for the man the world hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and we are here as on a darkling plain … I found the lounge, opened one of the glass doors and stepped outside.

The house was built, I now saw, on the flat summit of a series of landscaped terraces. At the front a little red-earthed cactus garden led via white stone steps (one flight on the eastern side, one on the western) down to a tier of olive and cypress interspersed with lavender and thyme, with more steps down to a paved mezzanine over the garages, beyond which the white gravel driveway through the dark evergreens began.

I stood at the top of the first flight and scanned the grounds. No one visible. The indoor silence continued out here, gravid, surveillance rich. I pictured goons manning a closed-circuit console. He’s just exited the lounge, Madame. Do we intercept? Not yet. Is everyone in position? Good. Wait for my command.

In less than half a minute, unmolested, I stood on the driveway. The sun had dropped below the top floor of the house and the little sweat of self-contempt I’d worked up was cooling on my skin. Ahead the conifers made a dark green resinous tunnel, an odour like a nightmarish overdose of Christmas. I began walking.

Off the drive a floor of dead needles and the firs embracing like mourners overhead. A memory of being in my mother’s wardrobe as a child, the thrill of secret enclosure. Presumably a Freudian enactment of a return to the womb. The realisation that I hadn’t thought of my mother for years. In a universe sans afterlife the dead soon become negligible. Unless they’re the dead you’ve killed and eaten. Then you are the afterlife, the overcrowded spirit prison, the packed ghost hotel.

I walked slowly with my full-of-thinking head down—yet when the attack came I was prepared for it. In spite of myself recent events had rebooted the defence systems, dusted down the schema of combat. Jake in reverie at a stately pace, yes, but with aura madly vigilant, trip-switched, motion-sensored, hair-triggered, so that when the figure launched itself from the trees’ murk I was ludicrously ready.

It happened very fast, the reversal. One moment he was barely arm’s length from me, silver-tipped javelin on a collision course with my chest, the next (the silver forced a rush of sickness, as if I’d looked down to see my feet an inch from the cliff edge) he was on his belly groaning into the gravel. There had been a vertiginous second when I grabbed the weapon but I burned through it, snatched the thing from him, spun it Little John–style and struck low to take his shins out from under him. Since he’d flipped facedown with his legs invitingly parted I kicked him hard in the balls—terrible squish of testes on bone—then with some irritation at how inadequate a release this had been put my foot on the back of his neck and jabbed the point an inch or so into his left buttock. He wriggled, soundlessly, since he couldn’t breathe. I removed the spear and gave him a second jab next to the first. More silent contortion. I removed it a second time, got my foot under his hip, hoofed him over onto his back. Recognised the big-lipped young man formerly armed with a Magnum, Paul Cloquet. Wearing the same trench coat, the same ridiculous mascara. His right hand was now grubbily bandaged.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “You?”

Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing. He brought his knees up and rolled over onto his side, facing the tips of my shoes. I checked him for further weaponry, found none. Instead a gold cocaine tin and spoon, a crumpled pack of Marlboro reds, a copper Zippo, loose matches, an iPhone, a pair of binoculars, a hip flask, a credit card–filled wallet and five hundred euros in cash. Also, touchingly, a pack of cashew nuts. Since he was going nowhere I took a minute to establish there weren’t accomplices lurking. The forest’s lush consciousness said no, just this nut job. We were in quiet partnership against the purely human, me and the forest. Nature livens to the latent animal, concedes you contain a divine fragment of the pantheistic whole, that you are, at least in part, part of it. A mere domestic dog lolloping through the woods knows this, feels it, is happy.

“Well?” I said, returning. “Let’s hear it.”

He closed his kohled eyes, spent what seemed to me an inordinately long time parting and bringing together the Jaggerish lips over the excellent large teeth. Shook his head, slowly: Can’t talk yet. The balls. Must wait for the balls. I got down on my haunches and began slowly rubbing his back. It was what I’d wished someone could’ve done for me when Ellis mashed my nuts that morning at the Zetter. As is the way of it once two men have shared the intimacy of violence, Cloquet took the gesture as if it were the most natural thing in the world. His eyes opened.

“Why are you trying to kill me?” I asked him, in French. “And why are you so superhumanly shit at it?”

Still no dice. He just kept swallowing. His breath was bad. Aware of our conspicuousness I half-carried, half-dragged him off the drive and in among the trees. I’d left my smokes in Jacqueline’s boudoir so filched one of his Marlboros and lit it. Incredibly, he with trembling hands found his coke accoutrements and took a couple of hefty toots. It first dazed then steadied him.

“Better?” I said.

He nodded. “Don’t kill me,” he said, in English. Then added, with something like tenderness: “You fucking cunt.”

I hadn’t heard anything to make me laugh for a while. This did. Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English. “Hot tip,” I said. “If you’re trying to get someone to not kill you, avoid calling him a fucking cunt.”

He smiled, reached for the coke again. I snatched it from him and put it in my pocket. “Enough of that,” I said. “Quid pro quo, understand? You don’t get this back until you tell me what I want to know.”

Something ended in him, visibly. Though still lying more or less on his side, now semipropped against the flared bole of a tree, he sagged. The bright cosmeticised eyes said no sleep for a long time. “Quid pro quo, Clarice,” he said, in a Hopkins-Lecter impersonation of surprising accuracy.

“You’ve got it. Now. Why do you want me dead?”

“Because she wants you alive.”

“Jacqueline?”

“Did you fuck her yet?”

God only knows why, but I lied. “No,” I said.

“Her cunt’s got a mind. It knows you. Everything about you. Like Lucifer. God is omniscient but he can’t separate out the useful knowledge. You know? He can’t distinguish. For that you need the Devil or her cunt.”

“Why does she want me alive?”

“For the vampires.”

“What?”

“You don’t know anything. I can’t believe you’ve lived this long. I’m not talking to you. You’re beneath me.”

I got up off my knees and crept back out to the drive where I’d left the javelin. “I can use this in a number of ways,” I said when I returned. “They won’t kill you, these ways, but they will hurt. You’re fond, I imagine, of your right eye? I mean, you’ve gone to the trouble of putting makeup on it.” I lined the tip up with the object in question.

Tears, to my surprise, welled and hurried down his cheeks. Ignoring the silver point of the weapon (it was as if he genuinely didn’t recognise it was there) he reached up and tenderly covered his eyes. “Oh God,” he said, quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like with her.”

“For the love of Mary,” I said. “I get it, she’s got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try’n get back into it. What is this about vampires?”

He dropped his hands, snuffled up his tears, laughed as if at an irony visible only to him. With the now-smudged mascara he looked like Alice Cooper. “I thought I was large,” he said. “Until I met her. Little sins you’re so proud of. Nothing. Crumbs on her table. Now there’s no going back.”

“I can’t believe you’re going to make me do real damage to you,” I said, raising the javelin. “But if that’s the only—”

“Helios Project,” he said. “You know about the Helios Project?”

“Well, I know what it is,” I said. Hardly a secret: The Helios Project is the ongoing attempt by vampires to get themselves immune to the destructive power of daylight. One way or another they’ve been working on it since the Ten Commandments.

“Well, I know what it is,” he parroted, in satirical falsetto. “Do you know, loup-garou, that they now have three recorded cases of sunlight tolerance?”

“No.”

“No. Of course you don’t. So far it hasn’t lasted more than seventy-two hours, but you can imagine their excitement. Know what all three cases have in common?”

“What?”

“Werewolf attacks. The vampires who showed massively increased resistance to daylight had all been bitten by werewolves.”

I sighed. I probably hadn’t sighed in thirty years, but right then it was just the thing. See, Jake? Life said. See how things just start taking shape if you stick around long enough? Dots were becoming visible; I knew with weary certainty the next few moments would join them into some sort of bastard picture. Still, one goes through the motions.

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There have been plenty of bites down the years. We’re like cats and dogs.”

“Yes, Clouseau, but what happened a couple of hundred years ago? Werewolves stopped multiplying. Victims stopped surviving the bite. A virus, WOCOP says. Who knows? But whatever it is when it’s passed to a vampire it confers, to however small a degree, resistance to sunlight.” He reached for the Marlboro. I let him light one up. In the time since leaving the house late afternoon had become dusk. The forest around us was suddenly wealthy with darkness. The white gravel of the winding drive would be the last light to go. “The vampires are kicking themselves because it took them so long to spot it,” Cloquet continued. “Now that they have spotted it”—the big lips widened to free the equine grin—“O Fortuna!—there’s only one werewolf left.” He laughed, huskily, softly blasted me with the louche breath, forgot not to put weight on his bottom, yelped, curled back onto his side. I rather wished I’d stabbed him somewhere less awkward.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t dig vampires but they’re not stupid. It can’t possibly have taken them this long to work this out.”

He was searching his pockets—for the hip flask it turned out. I helped him unscrew the top. After a glug and a wince he said: “But of course it can. For one thing the cases are so far apart. One in 1786, one in 1860, one in 1952. In the 1952 incident the vampire never told anyone he’d been bitten. He was embarrassed. A minion found it in his journal last year and reported it. Plus you’re overstating the case for werewolf-vampire contact. The reality is that when you meet each other you just turn and go in opposite directions, no? Actual conflict rarely occurs.” He shook his head. “It’s too funny. They’re livid.”

I sat back on my heels. Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—presumably—a vampire plot to get you. Werewolf failure to infect is the result of a virus which when passed via a bite to a vampire confers on him a resistance to sunlight. The impulse to laugh started then immediately died. I closed my eyes. The little combat flurry had left me with a postadrenaline heaviness, worsened now by the predictability of the picture revealed by joining the dots. “Aging Jacqueline’s selling me to the boochies,” I said. “For immortality.”

“The immortal cunt. Le con immortel.”

“So you kill me and there’s nothing for her to sell. Dear God help us. Then what? You send her flowers and a vat of Botox and she takes you back?”

He wrinkled his nose, as if conceding a minor snag. Then smiled. He had a sort of likeable stubborn idiocy.

“Quinn’s book,” I said. “Does she have it?”

“Ah, the Men Who Became Wolves. The place where it all began! Not a very wholesome story from what I hear. Wild dogs and dead bodies. Fucking disgusting.”

My scalp went hot. I pressed the javelin’s tip against the tender meat of his throat.

“Okay, okay, fuck. Ow—”

“Does she have the book or not?”

“She has it. The stone too.”

“The stone? The original stone?”

“You can’t get to it. It’s in a vault underground. You have no clue. It’s like Fort Knox under there.”

“How did she get it?”

“How does she get anything? You know what you’re dealing with. She has the uncanniness. You know Crowley? Do what thou wilt? She has the … Things align for her. She bought a lot of the looted shit that came out of Iraq in the war. She’s got contacts in the military, Blackwater, the CIA, the U.S. State Department. I told you: Her cunt is a giant intelligence. What are you going to do now?”

I stubbed out the Marlboro. Just on the edge of audibility the sound of an approaching car. “Well,” I said, “at the moment walking out of here still seems a luminously good idea.” Except you don’t get the book, the stone, the beginning. Nausea redux, the earlier untenable simultaneity of knowing it was too late and knowing it wasn’t too late. A five-thousand-year-old story. A story. A fucking story. Wild dogs and dead bodies. I told myself I was imagining it, the bone-deep, the cellular recognition, the old blood taste of shame. Not, Jake, mythic resonance or species memory or ringing a bell or striking a chord. Just, dear Jake, the desperate desire not to die a mystery to yourself. Wild dogs and dead bodies. A disgusting story’s better than no story at all.

“How did you get in here?”

“I shot the two guards on the south gate.”

“With what, for God’s sake?”

“My gun. It’s probably over there. I dropped it.” He indicated the spot of his failed ambush. A quick search turned the weapon up, a silenced CZ 75 B cal. 9mm Luger, serial number erased. I checked the ammo: silver bullets.

“Why didn’t you use this? I’d be dead by now.”

“I know. But I had the javelin custom-made. You see this running down the shaft? That’s my name and hers in Angelic script.”

The car was nearer. The car—there was no denying it—was Coming Here. “That’s them,” Cloquet said, trying to get to his feet, managing only to struggle onto all fours, with a look of being about to vomit. I pocketed the handgun and dragged us farther in under the trees. The vehicle—a black people-carrier with mirrored windows—went past slowly over the pale gravel, around which the darkness was now complete. “Why didn’t they pick me up from the ship?” I said. “I was already in a cage.”

Cloquet shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought that was the plan. Keep you on board until sunset. She must have worried the Coast Guard bribe wouldn’t hold. Maybe WOCOP had a vessel close. I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted to fuck you. You fall in love with her because she shows you straight away she’ll never feel anything for you.”

We had to work our way around through the woods to get a downwind view, a struggle for Cloquet, who hobbled, one hand covering his stabbed backside, the other his discordantly singing balls. When we stopped under tree cover not far from the front of the house he dropped to his knees and threw up, quietly. Quietly repeated merde, merde, merde until I hissed at him to shut up.

Five vampires got out of the car. Three males, two females. Beyond that it was too dark for details. Jacqueline Delon, flanked by two armed goons (ammo’d with what? wooden bullets?), appeared at the top of the steps in a pale dress to meet them.

“What happened?” one of the vampires said. The characteristic boredom (a version of seen-it-all teen tedium, forgivable, since so many of them have seen it all) was missing from his voice.

“Come up,” Jacqueline said. “Just come up. We’ll talk.”

Four of them went up the stairs. The fifth, one of the females, stopped halfway and turned. Looked directly at us. I felt Cloquet holding his breath. Realised I was holding mine. Since I couldn’t feel her she shouldn’t, by rights, be able to feel me. I’d left enough distance between us. Even downwind her scent was very slight; mine would be imperceptible. But there she stood, alert. The odour of Cloquet’s vomit, perhaps?

Oh, for fuck’s sake: the blood from his wound.

It’s the obvious things you don’t think of.

She hesitated, lifted her head, took her hands out of her pockets, took a step forward and leaned into the darkness.

“Mia, get up here.”

For a moment her extended sense groped at the edge of our aura. Then it passed, missed us, shrank back to its centre. She turned and went quickly up the steps.

28

“NOW WHAT?” CLOQUET SAID.

Good question. What I really wanted was to lie down there on the soft dead needles under the pines and let myself drift into a deep sleep, come what may. There was profound comfort in it, that phrase, come what may. “I’ll tell you something,” I said. “You’ll find this hard to believe, but all I’m trying to do is stay alive until the next full moon so that a man whose father I killed and ate forty years ago can cut my werewolf head off or put a silver bullet in my werewolf heart.”

Cloquet was on his knees and elbows next to me, apparently a position that maximally relieved his butt, nuts and guts. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Hardly any. Don’t be a baby. Here, have a toot.” I handed him his coke tin. A pause. Two snorts. A businesslike groan of pleasure.

“C’est bon. Aie. C’est beau. Will they kill her?”

“Who knows? They probably won’t be able to summon the requisite vim.”

“Vim?”

“Energy.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“Nothing. Watch and wait. And who the fuck are ‘we’? Starsky and Hutch?”

He chuckled, wheezily. The cocaine had cheered him. “In a way,” he said, “I wish you had fucked her. Then you’d know. Then you’d know the sublime … Her asshole, for example. It’s like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler—”

“Shut up, will you? I need to think. Give me a cigarette.”

The sensible thing would have been to break Cloquet’s neck and slip away. Vampires wanted me alive—so what? It added to the vocabulary of my predicament but the grammar remained unchanged.

Except for Quinn’s book. The disgusting story. Wild dogs and dead bodies and the iron taste of ancient memory. Proximal enlightenment was a throbbing headache that wouldn’t subside.

I cupped the Zippo, lit up, took a ferocious drag. The facts remained, no matter how long I stood there shuffling them: Either the story’s true or it’s false. Either Jacqueline has the book or she doesn’t. If she has it, either I get it or I walk away. If I get it, either it will make a difference to me or it won’t.

Simultaneously (in the inner voice of a female American cultural studies professor): Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there’s no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

Cloquet was now lying on his side with his knees pulled up. In the darkness I could just discern the large wet black blinking eyes and the glimmer of the hip flask. “I’m starving,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat, have you?”

I remembered the binoculars and began going through his pockets for them.

“There’s a little place in Le Marais,” he said, not seeming to mind the manhandling, “that makes the best choux pastry in the world. I could kill for one of their vanilla éclairs right now. This is the beauty of not modelling anymore. I can eat whatever I want.”

“You really were a model? That’s hilarious. Here, have these.”

“My cashews. Thank God. But what I really want is something sweet. When she comes, you know, she looks at you with such pure and remote clear hatred. The contempt … It’s the contempt. I spent so many years looking for a woman who truly despised me.”

The binoculars didn’t help much. Mme Delon had science-fiction technology in her windows, which were now, without the aid of curtains or shutters or blinds, completely opaque. Three of her security men in puffer jackets and combat trousers were visible: two on the ground, one on the roof. They paced, chewed gum, smoked, exchanged occasional quiet words. The firs were a dark fraternal presence around us. Cloquet munched his cashews, breathing through his nose. It got uncomfortably cold. An hour passed.

“She’ll negotiate,” Cloquet said, availing himself of another two hits of coke. “You don’t know how she operates. Do you know about the African kids? Angola, Nigeria, Congo. Kids accused of witchcraft. She takes them off their parents’ hands, pays handsomely too. Then what? What do you think she does with—”

“Quiet! Fuck, I nearly missed them.” I’d been watching the front of the house but the vampires must have come from an unseen exit on the garage level below. Only the sound of the people-carrier door opening alerted me. I put the silencer to the back of Cloquet’s head. “One squeak and you’re dead.”

The ridiculous, of course, waits only for the moment of intense seriousness. In a tiny whisper Cloquet said: “I have to sneeze.” Hardly surprising after the barrel of coke he’d inhaled. I dropped the gun and the binoculars and grabbed him, one hand pinching his nostrils shut, the other clamped over his mouth. One of the vehicle’s side doors slid closed with a rasp and a thud. The female vampire, Mia, lingered, again with her nose lifted in our direction. In the light from the van’s interior I saw a young high-cheekboned face and shoulder-length yellow-blond hair.

Cloquet’s moment was near. I tightened my grip—too much. He wriggled, desperately. I rolled on top of him as if for buggery and held on. Mia got into the front passenger seat. Legs and high heels that would have been at home in an ad for luxury stockings lifted in gracefully. She reached for the door handle.

Chsszn! With an almighty effort Cloquet wrested enough of his nose free to release his bizarre sneeze—by the mercy of the gods precisely synchronised with the clunk shut of the passenger door. I nearly broke his neck there and then. But the engine started and the people-carrier, carrying its immortal people, swung round and pulled away.

A gobbet of Cloquet snot clung to the back of my hand. “Thanks for that,” I said, wiping it on his lapel. “Now. On your feet, soldier.”

“What?”

“Get up. Back against here, please.”

Improvisation. His belt secured his hands around the tree trunk behind him. He didn’t protest much. Evidently he had a penchant for surrender. A little moment formed between us when I’d fastened him. He looked at me.

“What?” I said.

“You lied. I smelled her cunt on your fingers.”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry about that.”

“You’re going back for more. Everyone goes back for more.”

“I’m going back for the book.”

“You think you’re safe. You’re wrong. She already knows what you’re thinking.”

“I’ll take my chances. I’ll also take your Luger and our friend the custom-made javelin here.” I balled up his five hundred euros, shoved them in his mouth and appropriated half the wrist bandage for a gag. God only knows why I didn’t kill him. He was too absurd to murder. The cashews and the mascara and the abandoned modelling career. That sneeze.

“I may be gone some time,” I said.

29

WHEN YOU NEED a plan and don’t have one a retarded giddy indifferent faith takes over. Improv comics know this, criminals, soldiers too. Self dissolves into the flow and will reassemble on the other side of the job—or not. Either way you’re doing it. Either way you’re in.

Moving low, I worked my way silently through the trees, back past where Cloquet and I had first left the drive and on to the very edge of the conifers. From here twenty feet of open ground separated me from the garages. Darkness ample to foil the naked eye but if one of the guards should chance to raise a pair of night-vision binoculars … I went across in an absurd tiptoeing sprint, got my back to the wall below the mezzanine’s overhang, caught my breath. An accommodating deus ex machina would have been to find one of the garage doors open, and inside the garage a second door to the villa’s basement. I did check. All three were locked. I wondered what Jacqueline drove, got a mental snapshot of her in a ’65 ivory Mercedes convertible, red leather interior matching her lipstick and nails.

A pleasing image, but not helpful. I hunted for something to throw. You throw something and according to screen fictions the noise takes at least one guard out of position to investigate. There was nothing to throw. What had I expected? Loose plant pots? Rocks? Empties? Some goddamned thing. Welcome to the downside of dissolving into the flow.

In the end I threw Cloquet’s binoculars. Up across the mezzanine onto the steps on the eastern side of the terrace, where they landed with a (surely?) intriguing clatter. A guard or better still guards would come to check it out, leaving the stairs on the western side free for my stealthy ascent.

“Hear that?”

“Heard it. Call it in.”

I was already on my speedy-tiptoe way (something like the goosestep touchdown celebrations of American footballers) to the western stairs.

Clear. I passed the mezzanine and since there was no reason not to hurried on up the next flight to the level of olive and thyme just below the cactus garden and the villa itself. There, hunkered in a well of shadow between balustrade and trees, I halted to take stock. One guard had indeed descended to the mezzanine, automatic rifle readied, and was cautiously poking about. The roof guard was scanning with (night-vision!) binoculars, but looking in entirely the wrong direction. The second ground-floor guard was less than ten feet away, just above me.

“It’s a pair of fucking binoculars,” the investigating guard said. “Did you call it in?”

“Yes, I called it in.”

“I think someone’s in the woods,” the roof guard called down. “Definite movement in the woods. Nine o’clock.”

Movement in the woods? Was it possible Cloquet had got free?

“Who’s with the boss?”

“Marcel.”

“What can you see?”

“Movement.”

“What kind of fucking movement?”

The guard nearest me was a coward, God bless him. He should have done an immediate sweep of the western side. Instead he went to the top of the eastern stairs and called down to his mate. “Get back up here.”

“Movement in more than one place.”

“What is it?”

This was my chance. Not one of them was looking my way. I crawled out from my hiding place and leaped swiftly—balletically in fact, albeit with neck-tendons straining—up the last set of stone stairs.

At precisely the moment I reached the top a door in the wall of glass opened and the guinea pig–faced goon from the ship—Marcel, evidently—stepped out directly opposite me.

30

NATURALLY WE LOOKED at each other. Naturally the single second that passed was more than enough time to enjoy a purified intimacy, to note each other’s details and feel the exact weight of each other’s history. Naturally our essences, peremptorily denuded, exchanged a stunned glance.

Then I shot him in the face.

It was a near thing. A near thing that he didn’t shoot me first, I mean. His weapon’s muzzle was on its way up, certainly. I was aware of this empathically, as if it were my own arm raising it. In fact my own arm, as if it were the weight on the end of a piece of gym equipment worked by someone else, came up in a perfect 45-degree arc to level the Luger at his head, whereupon my hand—another part of a precision mechanism in someone else’s control—pulled the trigger.

The silenced bullet went into his forehead (a large messily applied bindi) and he collapsed with barely a sound. Jacqueline Delon, in a silk dress the colour of buttermilk, stood in the room a few feet behind him. She was wincing and her shoulders were hunched, as if she’d just heard someone drop a priceless piece of glassware. A quick check to my right revealed the two ground-floor guards now both with night-vision goggles trained on the trees. They hadn’t heard.

Nil time to think. I sprang across the patio, pulled Marcel’s body in from the doorway and closed the plate glass behind me. This was the lounge we’d had our first drink in that morning, and aside from Jacqueline, myself and the late Marcel it was empty. Mme Delon’s shoulders came down slightly. A gesture with the Luger made her position plain: If she made a sound, I’d shoot her. I did shoot people. Witness Marcel here. Her eyes said she understood. Her shoulders came all the way down. She relaxed. “My goodness,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”

“No horseshit, please. I know about the vampire deal. I’m here for Quinn’s book and the stone. Vault in the basement. No time to lose. Chop-chop. Yes?”

She raised her eyebrows. There was music playing softly. Dusty Springfield’s “No Easy Way Down.” Also an unusually strong scent of patchouli. It hadn’t smelled like that this morning.

“It’s not quite so straightforward,” she said. She was making what looked like an effort not to really look at me, or indeed at anything in particular. Outside one of the guards said: “No, Marcel’s with her. We need two more up here right now for a full perimeter sweep. Copy?” I went to her and grabbed her by her hair and put the gun under her chin, a move which required dropping the javelin at my feet. “Don’t fuck about. Please. Let’s go. Right now.”

“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I don’t have the book. Or the stone.”

“Since this morning. I think not.”

“It’s true. They’re in someone else’s possession.”

“Just for a laugh,” I said, “whose?”

Certain tensions rustle up clairvoyance. I knew she was going to look up, over my left shoulder, behind me. She looked up, over my left shoulder, behind me. “His,” she said.

I took a moment to concede there was no point saying, You don’t seriously expect me to fall for that, do you? Then I turned around.

He’d been there the whole time, “he” being a vampire and “there” being thirty feet up with his back against the room’s ceiling directly above the door. A senior, I inferred, gravity defiance being an elite sport that takes, allegedly, centuries to master. As I watched he descended, slowly, a neat slender man in what ought to be his early fifties (though he’d probably rubbed shoulders with Rameses) with artfully cropped greying hair and an elegant calm little face. Grey-green eyes and a thin mouth. The hint of a cleft in his delicate chin. Black close-fitting trousers and black rollneck sweater. I remembered the days when seeing someone move through the air like that would have been a thrilling shock, the days before we’d all seen it countless times in the movies. Modernity’s mimetic inversion: You see the real and are struck by how much it looks like a tediously seamless special effect.

“Since you know about the vampire deal,” the vampire said, when his feet touched the polished oak floor, “let’s not waste time. Donate your services voluntarily in exchange for access to Quinn’s book and the friendship of the Fifty Houses for the rest of your life.”

No point saying: Or what? Now that I could see the vampire I could smell him, too, suggestible schmuck that hybrid perception is. Stubborn pockets of wolf shivered and heaved. Here was the all-but-overwhelming limbic imperative to rip his boochie head off. Here, too, packed tight in the phantom animal haunches, was coiled flight. A migrainy ambivalence: Get him. Run. Get him. Run. There was a burst of automatic weapons fire outside, from the roof guard, I guessed.

“What’s going on out there?” Jacqueline said. I still held her by her hair. Hot scalp and the odour of shampoo. The room’s overdose of patchouli had been to mask parfum de vamp. He stood perfectly still, feet together, hands by his sides, no smile, just the trademark physical economy and the intolerable self-possession of a mime artist or juggler. He’d spoken English with an Italian accent. Casa Mangiardi? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I hadn’t counted heads getting into the people-carrier. Four departed, one stayed behind. In a moment he’d make his move, a move so fast I’d be living in its upshot (doped, gagged, bagged and cuffed) without realising it had happened. In wolf mode I would have been a match. Human, I might as well be a blow-up doll.

“Jacob, please,” Jacqueline said. “That’s really hurting.”

Surrender made itself sensuously available, a lover who’d stolen up behind me and put her arms around me and pulled me close and was breathing on my ear. Here, if I wanted it, was the peace of dissolving into the bigger will. Cloquet’s peace with Mme Delon, no doubt.

“Jacob, please,” Jacqueline repeated. “Please.” I relaxed my grip on her hair. Let her go. She moved away. A small woman with an elfin head and a body just beginning to lose the fight. I thought of Cloquet’s enthusiasm for her anus, and smiled.

“Very good,” the vampire said. “Shall we?”

No illusions. I was going willingly or I was going after a touchingly brief struggle, but I was going. A mad cinematic montage burgeoned, of myself assimilated into vamp-camp, prisoner, yes, but civilly treated, swapping monster yarns by the evening fire, gradually rewiring revulsion, finding the common ground, investing in Helios for the sheer science, against all odds—against nature starting a verboten interspecies affair, the glacial Mia and her lovely legs—jump cut to a shot of myself in lupine form spread-eagled on a brushed-steel slab, limbs shackled and head clamped, screaming, attended by white-coated boochies and state-of-the-art invasive gizmology, blood running from my ears, nose, rectum …

More gunfire from without. Shouts. A helicopter. I wondered where poor Cloquet was in all of it, whatever it was. Wondered too, since for a few moments now the javelin had been a modest little sentience next to my foot, whether I could get down to it and hurl it before the vampire did to me whatever he was going to do. Of no more practical use (obviously, since it was metal, not wood) than giving him the finger, but in my fey state the punk pointlessness of the gesture appealed.

“Take me with you,” Jacqueline said to him. “I know it didn’t go precisely to plan, but after all you’re getting what you wanted. I swear you won’t regret it.”

“Don’t speak,” the vampire said, not looking at her. Then several things happened very fast.

An explosion shattered the wall of glass and a bolus of smoke and flame woofed into the room and almost immediately retreated again. The force of the blast blew all three of us off our feet. I smashed into the stools by the bar and felt a rib crack. The javelin went too, missed my head by six inches, buried itself in the bar’s mosaic flank behind me. The vampire, closest to the detonation, sailed spectacularly over the bar, and went into the mirror-backed brilliant bottles with a flailing crash.

Jacqueline Delon was on her hands and knees two stools down from me. A large shard of glass protruded bloodily from her outer thigh. Another from her shin. Another from the side of her head. She reached up and gently plucked this one out and looked at it. It occurred to me I might be similarly inconvenienced. Sure enough, dreamy investigation discovered a large scalene fragment sticking out of my left shoulder. I followed Jacqueline’s example and tenderly extracted it. Blood welled and hurried out. With a sort of abstracted apathy I took hold of the javelin. The out-of-sight helicopter was a deafening evocation of Apocalypse Now. The explosion had filled the room with heat, briefly; now cool air rushed in like an angel. The javelin wasn’t budging. I struggled to my feet. Jacqueline, in the silence of freakish stoicism or deep shock, hauled herself via one of the stools onto hers. One stiletto had absconded. Even in her state the imbalance was intolerable. She reached down and removed the remaining shoe. We looked at each other as if we’d both just been born.

The vampire appeared behind her. He wasn’t there, then he was. This is the way of it. Fast. Too fast. His natty little face was glass-flecked, glass-studded, beaded with blood. He wiped it, swiped it, actually, as if it were covered in maddening flies, though his expression of compact enlightenment remained intact. “Shall we go?” he said.

Then the helicopter appeared. Descended in profile like Miss Muffet’s spider. Thudding chop and the room’s lethal wreckage crazily aswirl. A WOCOP Bluebottle, lightweight, fast, handleable. The bulbous smoked-glass head dipped, once, as if in decorous greeting—Ellis beamed out at me from the pilot’s seat—then turned through 45 degrees to face us with its brutal lights.

I knew what it was packing. So did the vampire. So, most likely, did Jacqueline. They call the ammunition “hail”: eight-inch hickory darts discharged at the rate of thirty per second. They call the gun, naturally enough, “Mary.”

He didn’t get away clean. At least a dozen shots hit him—I saw one go straight through his throat, another struck just below his eye—but he was fast enough, just fast enough, to cover his vulnerable heart.

With the nearest shield to hand.

Two seconds, no more. I got one glimpse of Jacqueline’s floodlit body magically covered in quills before the vampire launched himself—and her—backwards, shot over the bar’s shattered remains and smashed through the window on the other side of the room, out into the night.

I wasn’t surprised, when Ellis killed the floods, to see a stubbled Grainer in full combat gear sitting with grand masculine casualness half out of the passenger seat, a Hunt Staker resting across his knees, a cigarette slotted semisatirically into the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. He gave me a salute, index finger to forehead, smiled, then turned and nodded to Ellis, who pulled the chopper back, swung it slowly around, lifted it up and away above the trees.

It started raining.

31

I DIDN’T HAVE much fun getting myself out of the villa. There was the removal of two more bits of glass for a start, one in my left calf, one—excruciating when I took my first steps—in my right knee. For a few minutes I just lay on one of the elephantine couches bleeding and feeling sorry for myself. It was pleasant, curled up with manageable pain, listening to the rain fall. These are the first minutes of peace, I thought, with a miffed snuffle, I’ve had in bloody ages.

But that, obviously, wouldn’t do. I hobbled to what was left of the bar, took a fortifying swig of Kauffman’s, retrieved the Luger from the debris and gingerly crunched my way out onto the terrace.

Except for the rain—thanks to which a lovely fresh odour of wet earth cut through the smoke—the Delon estate was silent. The two ground-floor guards lay sprawled nearby, bloodied, dead, one of them still clutching Cloquet’s binoculars. No sound from the roof. Grainer would have shot the lookout up there through the cross-hairs from fifty yards away. The called-for reinforcements weren’t visible, had looked at each other, I felt sure, and with earnest cowardice wordlessly agreed: Fuck reinforcement.

Which meant avoiding them if they were now, tightly wound with safeties off, poking around.

Transportation was the pressing issue. I certainly wasn’t walking, not with my bleeding bits and stove-in rib. (Ribs, plural, I now thought; too much pain for just one.) It was possible Cloquet had driven here, but no less likely he’d arrived by parachute or camel or space-hopper. In any case, who knew how far it was to “the south gate”? No. I needed motorised transport, which, since one of the many things I haven’t got around to in my two hundred years is learning how to fly a helicopter (Jacqueline’s ship-to-shore sat ready on its asphalt pad), meant finding my way to the garages and hot-wiring whatever was in there.

It took me a wearying and peculiarly indeterminate time to locate them, limping and creeping and swearing through my teeth and going around, I now suspect, in circles. I think I might have sat down and passed out for a few minutes in one of the corridors. Elsewhere I vomited dismally against a wall, presided over by a vast sub-Bosch painting of a Black Mass. The rain came down harder, as if to evoke with its hiss time boiling away to nothing. I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language. The baby-faced skinhead from the Hecate lay on the floor in a pool of blood, untidily dead, with eyes open and one leg bent under him. I went down more stairs than there ought to have been.

Eventually, wounds hot, scalp whispering, ribs vociferously against all this moving around nonsense, I found the utility room and a moment’s comfort in the benign smell of clean laundry. A door from there led to a curved corridor, off which (I was under the mezzanine) were three more doors to the garages.

Goldilocks and the Three Cars. Ferrari 458 Italia in red. No keys. 1956 Jaguar XK140 in white. No keys. 1976 Volkswagen Super Beetle in metallic lilac. Keys. See, Jake? Life said. It’s a comedy. Lighten up. I got in and started the engine.

WOCOP forces (if indeed there’d been anyone besides Grainer and Ellis) had withdrawn. When I stopped on the drive and rolled down the VW’s window I got the forest’s massy green consciousness absorbing the rain in the dark, the land’s deep thirst. Nothing else.

“Cloquet?” I called. “You there?”

Nothing. God only knows why I bothered. One has these occult compulsions. He reminded me of Gollum. He’d take it hard to hear his precious was dead. Or undead, depending on vamp whim. I called again. No reply. So be it. I hit the gas.

32

THE SENSIBLE THING would have been to switch to a less conspicuous car and get to an airport. I couldn’t face it. I was exhausted. My wounds had stopped bleeding by the time I drove out of Jacqueline’s south gate (in human form as in lupine I heal with obscene rapidity) and by tomorrow morning would be gone. The ribs, even with my cellular speed-knitting, would take a day longer. Physically this was nothing, a scrape. Yet all of me that was not flesh cried out for repose. The vampire had left me, as I must have him, with a feeling of cloying contamination. I wanted a bath, a quiet room, a cool bed.

All of which, I record with humble gratitude, I found. An hour later, having cleaned myself up as best I could in Arbonne’s public loo, I checked into the Hotel Eugenie just east of the village, where for two hundred and eighty euros I was furnished for the night with a large en suite room done in rustic chic: heated oak floor, Basque rugs, bespoke iron four-poster, wireless Internet and—God bless Monsieur and Madame Duval—an enormous free-standing bathtub. There I took meditative refuge with an iced flannel over my eyes and a bottle of 1996 Château Léoville Barton (Saint-Julien) for company. I dimmed the lights and lay back in the soft water’s warmth and for a short while at least was pleasantly revisited by that sedative phrase, Come what may … Come what may … Come … what …

One wants not to think. One wants, I repeat, all sorts of things. Presently the bottle was empty and come what may had yielded to what the fuck are you going to do? Indeed. Practicalities like a little slag heap. The vampires would know where I was but wouldn’t try again tonight. Too risky with me back under Hunt surveillance. Jacqueline’s job had been to get me off WOCOP’s radar long enough for a snatch. She’d failed. The Hecate must have drawn heat, as Cloquet said, hence the hasty ship-jump to the villa Delon. My cock rose through the bath foam in salute to the memory of the morning’s sex—then just as smoothly sank back when I thought of Quinn’s book.

Taken by the boochies in the hope that my need to acquire it would keep me alive.

Another sigh. This is what happens, I told myself. Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.

I got out of the bath, dried myself with irritated meticulousness, donned one of the Eugenie’s white towelling robes and in an act of forced jolly recklessness ordered up another bottle. Vampires? Hunters? Let the fuckers come! And while we’re at it, fuck Quinn’s book. If getting to it (to the truth, my inner romantic protested, the truth, Jacob, after all these years …) if getting to it meant submitting to the no-nonsense pricks and pokes of vampire science then the book might as well not exist. Of course I could always try force. One werewolf against the Fifty Houses of the undead …

Glass One of Bottle Two went down in a couple of analeptic swigs. I flicked on the TV. A French home-makeover show. A couple weeping uglily at the miracle of their cheaply redecorated kitchen. I changed channels. American Idol. Transformation again, this time from Nobody into Superstar. Perhaps Jacqueline was right: Humanity’s getting its metamorphic kicks elsewhere these days. When you can watch the alchemy that turns morons into millionaires and gimps into global icons, where’s the thrill in men who turn into wolves?

I turned the TV off. Sat on the edge of the bed. Felt the gathered tension go, accompanied, incredibly, by the third sigh of the day. (Like bloody buses or bloody Copean men, these sighs: none for ages then three at once.) Nothing, I averred, breathing with quivering drunk dignity through my nostrils, had changed. Be Quinn’s book true or be it false its existence wasn’t going to alter my course. If you can live two hundred years without the solution to the riddle of your nature you can die without it too. Humans go to their graves with none of the big questions answered. Why should werewolves fare better?

A fresh pack of Camels had arrived as ordered with the wine. I lit one up. The greatest gift of lycanthropy is knowing smoking won’t kill you. I poured the last glass of the night. Peace returned, somewhat. Nothing, I repeated, had changed. I would sit out the twenty-nine days to the next full moon, whereupon Grainer—

Ah, yes. With cruel belatedness the image of Harley’s murderer bloomed. Naturally his appearance on the chopper was a calculated provocation, the ease of body, the joyless Navajo smile, the mock salute. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. Come off it, Jake, I could hear him saying. You telling me you’re really going to let me get away with that? It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

Enough. I finished the cigarette. Turned out the light. Lay down on the bed. How long since I’d slept? Forty-eight hours? Seventy-two?

Wolf-silt churned in my shoulders. When I’d ripped through the junkie’s throat his body had jerked as if in violent ejaculation. Now his spirit shuffled through the packed underworld of my bloodstream, friendless in the murmuring crowd. It’s official. You’re the last. I’m sorry. I closed my eyes.

33

THREE WEEKS HAVE PASSED

Everything’s changed.

Jesus fucking Christ.

34

THE MORNING FOLLOWING my night at the Hotel Eugenie I took a train to Paris and spent the journey bringing these pages up to date. I clocked two WOCOP agents after transferring at Bordeaux, replaced by two more in the capital. A matter of indifference to me—or perhaps not quite indifference, since their presence was keeping the undead in check. Naturally the boochies were watching me, via human familiars during the day, in person(s) by night. Ordering a Long Island Iced Tea in a Montmartre night club at three in the morning a wave of vamp-nausea hit me hard enough to make me reel. I turned. Blond blue-eyed Mia at the opposite end of the neon-lined bar raised her glass (a prop, obviously) with a smile. Calm intelligent white hands and oxblood lipstick. A strikingly beautiful woman who smelled like a vat of pigshit and rotten meat. You appreciate the cognitive dissonance. Anyway, she made no move. I stayed in Paris a couple of days, too dull-hearted even to take a farewell turn around the Louvre. I hired a red-haired, big-breasted athletic escort and surprised myself with the vehemence of my climax. Postcoitally I tried, from a supposed correspondence between volcanic ejaculation and the capacity to affirm life, to work up a bit of feeling for still being here. Failed. Libido, I was forced to conclude, was a lone warrior flinging itself around the battlefield everyone else had deserted.

At last, five days since waking in the Hecate’s hold, I took a British Airways evening flight from Charles de Gaulle to London Heathrow.•

Which is where everything—everything—changed.•

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—

I know what he was going to say now.

(“And you don’t believe in fate?” she said to me.)

(“I’ll believe in anything you tell me,” I said.)

Big coup for the if and then department. If I hadn’t decided to take the Heathrow Express instead of a cab … If I hadn’t stopped to buy smokes in Arrivals … If I hadn’t taken the train to Paris … If I hadn’t spent the night in Arbonne … If, if, if. Embrace determinism and you’re chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.

(“Not according to Stephen Hawking,” she said. “I watched this programme on PBS. He sees space-time as a four-dimensional, closed manifold, like the surface of a sphere, with no beginning and no end. It’s a nifty idea, but I still can’t stop seeing it the old-fashioned way, as if space-time’s a blob floating around in, you know, some other space, with some other time going on.”)

(“Come here,” I said. “Come here.”)

She was getting off the train, I was waiting to get on. Three carriage doors up from me she stepped high-heeled down onto the platform and in a moment found herself being helped up from the floor by the large-limbed Nordic couple in front of whom she’d inexplicably crashed to her knees.

Inexplicable to her. Not to me. I lip-read her going through the motions—Oh, my gosh … Oh … Thank you, thanks, yes I’m fine, I don’t know what happened, I’m such a moron, thank you so much—as the enormous Swedes or Norwegians or Finns covered in blond fuzz with gigantic sunburned gentleness helped her to her feet and handed her her wheelie case and purse—she went through these motions, yes, but she was looking elsewhere, everywhere, with a contained wildness bordering panic for the source of the power that had momentarily upended reality like that.

Me, in other words.

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.

Werewolf.

No preparation. No warning. Just the whole slab of myself fallen flat before her and all my eaten dead shocked into stillness. They’d thought the end of things—release, final dissolution, peace—was near. Instead this betrayal, Marlowe wrenched awake in a world blasted into renewal …

Meanwhile, back on her feet and free of helping hands she stood trembling, gripping her purse, face moist, body discernibly awry. She had the look of a foreign correspondent caught off-guard mid-report by an explosion. Early thirties, eyes the colour of plain chocolate and similarly dark hair in two soft shoulder-length waves. A single mole or beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. White-skinned but with a warmth and suppleness that betrayed—surely?—Levantine or Mediterranean blood. Certainly not “beautiful” or “pretty” but Saloméishly appealing, visibly smudged with the permissive modern wisdoms. This was a girl who’d been loved by her parents and grown vastly beyond them. She thought of them now, with a little searing pain of celebration, as children or simpletons. I had an image of generic homesick immigrants in the U.S. standing in a tenement doorway, waving her off, full of heartbroken pride. She wore a beige mackintosh over a white blouse and brown pinstripe skirt but with no effort at all (since there was no stopping me) I could see her dancing naked but for a veil and a navel ruby. Lip-reading her with the helpful Nords I’d made her American, and something about her relationship with the luggage and the raincoat and the purse reinforced this, the casual entitlement to useful things. While I was soaking all this up her consciousness was hurrying around the tunnel hastily manhandling the dispersing crowd, knowing that somewhere … somewhere very close …

I backed into one of the platform’s exits, managed—just—not to bound up and lay hands on her. Her! The pronoun had rocketed to primacy. Here was recognition as if from the hermaphroditic time before birth’s division. First sight of Arabella in the Metropole’s lobby had been a quickening of hope and fear: hope the recognition was mutual, fear it wasn’t. Here, now, was neither hope nor fear, just nonnegotiable gravity, a fall to the pure animal bitch like the guillotine’s blade to its block.

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.

She swallowed, plucked her blouse away from herself. Her scent was a hot perversion, a dirty cocktail of perfumed femme and the lewd stink of wolf. Fresh, of course, from transformation only four nights ago. She’d fed, too. Oh, yes. The ghost of her gorging was there in her eyes, though she retained something of the recent college grad ingénue making her way in the shocking world of work, determined to keep going, to assimilate the degradations, to master the atrocities.

A shaven-headed WOCOP agent lurked at the end of the platform. In the absence of vamp odour I had to assume a human familiar somewhere on the scene, though I hadn’t ID’d him yet. Could either Hunt or Undead know about her? Her! Hadn’t I known, somewhere at the back of the drift of days? Hadn’t I asked countless times: What are you waiting for, Jacob?

Her nostrils flared. Becoming a werewolf had nearly destroyed her, but hadn’t. Thus she’d discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it. And there in the espresso-dark eyes was the accommodation, the submission to experience she’d made in the silence of her heart, astonished at herself, once she’d decided to accept what she was, once she’d decided to kill others instead of herself. She suffered fiery Hunger and did vile deeds now, had begun teaching herself enlarging self-forgiveness. You do what you do because it’s that or death. She’d had a girlhood of secrets and now here was the Big Secret to justify them. She was—

Steady, Marlowe. For God’s sake, think! Practicalities. Could they know about her? How could they not know about her? Harley had known, I felt certain of it, and if Harley then why not the rest of the organisation?

No way of telling. Therefore assume they don’t. And from this moment do everything you can to make sure they never, ever find out.

Something else was going on. (Whatever is happening, as the late Susan Sontag noted, something else is always going on. It’s literature’s job to honour it. No wonder no one reads.) The something else going on here was my detached admission that the scales had tipped back—crashed back, with laughable immediacy—in favour of life. Detached admission—or deflated? Resignation to death at least simplified the living you had left. Now what? Complexity? Rigmarole? Bothering again? And something else was going on. (The number of these something elses is infinite, the hell literature faces every day. It’s a wonder anyone writes.) Underneath the first admission was a sullen second: One whiff of her had done what Harley’s torture and death could not. That was my measure, a giant standing stone of disappointment if I wanted to look at it. But there came again the sensational stink of her—dear God—and a new yokel leap of dick-blood. Let the factions of conscience quibble: I had work to do.

And the life without love?

My dead like a trade union in a silent phalanx with Arabella, shop steward, at their head.

The Heathrow Express pulled away. All but a handful of disembarked passengers had gone through the exits and were hurrying to the escalators. A sly peep showed me she was still there, apparently brushing at a speck of smut on her skirt, in fact with ravished consciousness still searching for the source of the scent that had felled her. My scent. Me. She had recovered herself, though her face still wore its sheen of sweat. She’d been blind-sided, yes, but now curiosity was at work, smart female lights in the liquid dark eyes. She reached up and with her little finger raked back a strand of hair that had stuck to her damp forehead. Very slightly raised her chin. She was breathing heavily, a lovely insinuation of her breasts against the blouse. I know you’re here, somewhere.

I waited until she moved through her nearest exit, left as much of a delay as I dared, then followed her.

35

THE CHALLENGE, TRAILING her down the aerated tunnels and moving walkways into the bright lights and echoing announcements of departures, was to keep my distance. Just once I got too near and she stopped, turned and took a few steps in my direction. I had to duck into a doorway to break the connection—and do it with sufficient casualness to keep the WOCOP tail in the dark.

There was a vampire, it turned out, a tall black male with greying hair and a gold hoop earring looking down from the check-in hall’s balcony. A further headache: I must keep close enough to my girl to blanket her scent without turning her head or treading on her heels. She’d taken off the fawn raincoat and slung it over her arm, revealing a trim figure and deportment projective of not natural but acquired confidence. I could not shuck the idea of her as the good daughter of immigrant U.S. parents, mindful of the toil and suffering borne to make her what she was, their bona fide American Girl, fluent in brand names and armed with education, health insurance, political opinions, orthodontic work, earning power—though this and all other inaugural projections were polluted by the vampire’s presence like hands pressing down on my skull from above.

She stopped under one of the information screens. I stopped, ostensibly to make a call on my mobile. Logistical problems were stacking up: In a moment she’d find her check-in desk, get her boarding pass and go through security into the sprawling purgatory of the departures lounge. How would I follow her? Obviously, I’d buy a ticket to wherever she was going. But unless her desk handled one flight only, how would I know where she was going? I hadn’t been close enough to read the label on her case. And what if she used self check-in?

Nothing else for it: I had to approach her now.

As soon as I moved towards her she moved away—but only as far as the queue for the Travelex window. She was fourth in line.

“Don’t turn around,” I said, quietly. I still had the mobile to my ear. In the twenty paces it had taken me to reach her I’d sensed her sensing my approach, forcing herself to stay calm, willing herself not to turn around. Heat enveloped her in a rippling aura. Her scent was a ring through my bull’s nose. She was trembling. You had to be close to see it, in the high heels, in the wrists, in the hair. At the very last I pulled back from grabbing her hips and pressing my groin to her ass and filling my hands with her breasts and burying my nose in her nape.

“I know what you are and you know what I am. Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Give me the number.”

American, the accent confirmed as she recited it without hesitation. I keyed in the number but didn’t store or dial. “I’m being watched,” I said. “And for all I know you are too, so change some currency here then go to the Starbucks directly opposite and wait for me to call. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re feeling this, right?”

“Yes.”

A great darkness of relief went through me. I nearly fainted. She moved to the exchange counter and opened her purse.

36

GOD ONLY KNEW if the mobile was safe. Other than to replay Harley’s cut-off message I hadn’t used it, but since it had passed through the hands of Jacqueline Delon I had to assume it was compromised. I copied the number onto the back of my hand and deleted it from the Nokia’s screen. Travelex furnished me with ten one-pound coins and I stepped across to a pay phone.

She said: “Hello?”

“I can see you. Are you within earshot of those two guys with the backpacks?”

“No.”

“Okay, good. But don’t look too obviously in this direction.”

“You were on the platform.”

“Yes, sorry about that.”

“I felt it. This is … Who’s watching you?”

“Long story. Not here. Where are you flying?”

“New York.”

“That’s home?”

“Yes.”

“What time’s your flight?”

“Eleven-thirty.” She risked a direct look. Our first transparent exchange. It silenced us for a moment, since it confirmed we’d entered the realm of inevitability. “I can miss it,” she said.

You’re feeling this, right? Yes. Not just the foregone sexual conclusion but the transfiguration of the mundane: luggage carts; information screens; airline logos; ugly families. Every humble atom glorified. I can miss it. Mutual certainty trims speech and here was our speech, trimmed. She would simply not get on the plane. All that was selfish and weak in me lay heavily upon the very little that wasn’t. She’d get a room at an airport hotel. I’d lose the vamp and the copper. I’d go to the room. She’d be sitting on the edge of the bed when I entered. She’d look up.

“It’s not safe,” I said. “We have to know if they’re onto you.”

“That black guy upstairs,” she said. “There’s something—”

“He’s a vampire.”

Another first, her face and silence said. But also, after a slight delay: Why not? In fact, of course, of course vampires. She’d learned: The world pulled these sudden convulsive moves to reveal more and more of its outlandish self to a random cursed elite. Meanwhile Bloomingdale’s and Desperate Housewives and Christmas and the government carried on. She was carrying on herself, in extraordinary fusion. I could see it in her tense shoulders and flushed face and the care with which she’d applied her makeup. It hurt my heart, the unrewarded courage of it, the particular degree of her determination not to fold in spite of everything. In spite of becoming a monster. It hurt my heart (oh, the heart was awake now, the heart was bolt upright) that she’d had to be brave all alone.

“Did you feel sick?” I asked.

“I still do, a little.”

“When did it start?”

“Just now when I came into check-ins.”

“But nothing before that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing ever?”

“Not like this, no.”

Good. If she’d never encountered a vampire before then chances were the boochie upstairs was for Jacob Marlowe only. Her scent would be churning his guts but without knowing there was another howler in the house he’d put that down to me.

“Don’t look until I tell you,” I said, “but there’s a Bruce Willis type in a brown leather jacket and a white T-shirt standing under the information screens to your left. I need to know if you’ve ever seen him before. Okay, look now.”

“I don’t recognise him,” she said. “Who is he?”

“You don’t know about WOCOP, right?”

“What?”

“It’s an organisation that—Shit, there’s too much to explain like this. All you need to know for now is they’re no friends of ours. Neither are vampires. We’ve got to be careful.”

A pause. Then she said: “I’m not getting on the plane.”

Which forced me to risk a look of my own. She was staring at me with wide-awake consciousness. Whatever else was true it was true this was a relief to her, a vindication of all the hours and days of fierce holding on: You’re not alone. The ease with which I could hang up the phone and walk over to her and take her in my arms was a satanically reasonable temptation. I could see myself doing it, feel the lithe yielding fit of her against me. I know what you are and you know what I am.

“I don’t want you to get on the plane,” I said. “But we have to be sure they don’t know about you.” We were “we,” already. Of course we were.

“Was it you in the desert?” she asked.

“What?”

“California. Nine months ago. When I was attacked. Was it you?”

I’d seen the file. In late June 2008 the Hunt had killed werewolf Alfonse Mackar in the Mojave Desert. Which had left just Wolfgang and me on the books. Or so WOCOP had thought.

“No, it wasn’t me.”

She bit the inside of her lip for a moment. “No, it wasn’t you. I can … feel it.” A mix: pleasure, embarrassment, relief. Suddenly, with the two of us in the same room, even a room as expansively joyless as check-ins, she could feel all sorts of things. So could I. The intimacy was, literally, laughable. Laughter was laughably available.

“How many are there—of us?” A struggle for her to choose which question first, suddenly faced with the possibility of answers.

“I was supposed to be the last,” I said. “But now there’s you. I don’t know how. I don’t know what it means.” We kept looking away from each other, then back, away, back. It was hypnotic. For her as for me there was a vague awareness of all the things we didn’t, in our perfect certainty, need to say, as if pages of TV movie script—I can’t believe this is happening … I knew from the first moment I saw you—were scrolling on an autocue both of us were ignoring.

“I can’t go now,” she said. “You can’t ask me to do that. It’s ridiculous.”

Imagine if a hundred and sixty-seven years ago I’d run into another of my kind at a railway station. Someone who’d lowered his copy of the Times, looked over his spectacles and said, Yes, I know all about it, but you’ll have to wait.

“I know this is hard for you,” I said. “It is for me too—” Our eyes met again and there it still was, hilarious mutual transparency, raging collusion. “But there’s no other way to be sure. Please trust me. I just want to know you’re safe.”

“What do they want you for? Us for.”

I told her what I knew, skipping all but the consequential chunks. Helios, the vamps, the virus. She listened with a slight frown, one arm wrapped around herself. She might have been a young mother hearing a report of her child’s out-of-character misbehaviour at school. The dark hair framed her face in two soft crescents. A vaguely 1970s sub–Charlie’s Angels look. I was thinking, with a mix of bitterness and joy: All these years. All these years.

“I’ll leave the airport,” I told her. “You stay. If they don’t know about you they’ll follow me. You take your flight to New York. I’ll join you when I’ve ditched them. Shouldn’t take me more than a day or two.”

“Wait. This is crazy. What if they don’t follow you?”

“They will. If they don’t, I’ll come back and we’ll rethink.”

“What if there are other vampires?”

“I’ll call you in thirty minutes. If there are others here you’ll still feel sick, and if one of them gets on the plane with you you’ll feel really sick. But that’s not likely. If they put anyone on the flight with you it’ll be a familiar, a human. They won’t do anything as long as you stay in public places, but keep your eyes open.”

“What about these WOCOP guys?” she said. “How will I know if they’re following me?” The charming frown of concentration remained. She looked now like a secretary taking in an astonishing amount of new instruction, forcing herself to stay calm, forcing herself to be up to the inhuman demand.

“You won’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that just now. In any case they won’t make a move yet. They’re trophy hunters. They’ll wait for the next full moon.” The words “full moon” made us look at each other again. All the big things we’d said nothing about. I was down to my last pound coin. I memorised her New York address.

“I can’t just go,” she said. “I need answers.”

“You’ll get them, just not like this. I have to know you’re safe.”

A piercing sweet catch in my chest when I said that, for the simple reason that it was true. Suddenly something mattered. In films someone finds a spaceship that’s been buried for thousands of years and switches the power on—and the whole system flutters magically back into life, lights, gauges, indicators, drives. The lovely thrilling thought that this capacity’s been there the whole time, waiting.

“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Is there a cure?”

“No.”

She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Absorbed. She’d grown a new glamorously deformed personality to accommodate werewolfhood but there in the closing of the eyes and the swallow was an indication of how much of the old personality remained, allowed to stay on condition she could pretend it wasn’t really there. Even this pronouncement—No, there’s no cure—didn’t quite kill it. It would probably live for decades, holding hope in its hand like a hot coal.

“Don’t be alone after sunset and don’t sleep at night,” I said. “You’ll have to go to a club or a bar or whatever. Sleep during the day. With someone, if that’s an option, but only someone you know well.” Now, imprudently, we were staring at each other. The wulf certainty between us was as ugly and exciting as a massive haemorrhage on a white tiled floor. But there was the other certainty too, human, a shock to us both. Anachronistic in this day and age, almost embarrassing. I had an image of Ellis and Grainer and a crew of tooled-up Hunters surrounding us, laughing their heads off.

“You better fucking come after me,” she said, quietly. The composure wasn’t absolute. Desperation was right there, waited only her nod. The dark eyelashes and that beauty spot were her face’s erotic accents.

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“This is insane. There’s so much … I don’t know anything.”

“You will. Everything I know, which isn’t much.”

“You’ll phone me in half an hour?”

“Trust me.”

A pause. Eyes meet again.

“You know I do.”

Moments like tiny gearings; an oiled click and the tectonics giantly shift and suddenly you’re saying, Trust me, and she’s saying, You know I do. Behind the immediacies—the ifs and thens still swarming us—was the carnal eventuality, or rather two carnal eventualities: the coming together in human flesh, and …

I knew it would remain unspeakable, the other consummation, deliciously held in the mouth, in the heart. It had sent an intimation of itself back to us from the future that put a seal on our lips. They’ll wait for the next full moon, I’d said, and as through the wink of a Third Eye we’d seen that nothing, nothing would compare to—

Then it was gone.

“I really don’t want you to go,” she said.

“I really don’t want to go.”

37

BUT GO I DID. I selected a cowboy cab from Heathrow, tipped the driver (a dreadlocked Rastafarian in a leather hat the size of a post box) fifty pounds in advance for the use of his mobile. The car, an unloved Mondeo, stank of ganja and Chinese food. She answered after a single ring.

“How are you feeling?”

“No sickness. They both followed you out.”

“Perfect.”

“You can’t talk freely, can you?”

“No.”

“I can’t stand this. It’s three thousand miles.”

“I’ll be there before you know it.”

“Are we really the only ones?” she said.

“I thought I was the only one, but now there’s you I can’t be sure of anything.” Except that now for the first time in half a century I’m—

“This is like waking up. I’ve been …” She sighed. I pictured her clamping her jaws together, closing her eyes, controlling herself. “Do you know what it is?” she said, eventually. “Does it fit into anything?” “It” being the Curse. “It” being Being a Werewolf. Did it fit into anything? Anything like God or the Devil or UFOs or voodoo or clairvoyance or life after death? There was no disguising her fear that it did, her hope that it did, her deep suspicion that it didn’t.

“No more than anything else,” I said. “We’re here, we do what we do, that’s it. You’ve read the fairy stories, obviously.” Quinn’s journal, I decided, could wait. There was enough for her to take in already without adding the ancient desert, mad dogs and dead bodies. Besides, the driver was listening. Not a vamp lackey, nor WOCOP unless their agents had got a lot better at blending in, but I didn’t want him to have anything useful to say when questioned. As it was I was going to have to give him a crazy price for the mobile, or trash it and risk a scene. Few things more wearying than a stoned cabbie with martial arts delusions. “I wish there was a big secret I could let you in on,” I told her, “but there isn’t.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” she said. She’d absorbed the first shock wave: me, the encounter, the confirmation of the world she’d fallen into nine months ago, the brutal attraction, the violent pitch into a new theatre. She assimilated fast, Manhattan-speed. Here already in the “I had a feeling you were going to say that” was her bigger, calmer, more sophisticated self that was always waiting after whatever temporary naïve furore had died down. Here already was the acknowledgement that whatever else this was it was the beginning of a liaison of fabulous proportions. Here already was the wry aspect, the curious, the playful. Here was the intelligence committed to life, whatever the cost. I was the one still inwardly flapping, grinning, hopping about with excitement. The impulse to thank God, it turned out, was still there. Something in me looked … upwards, humbled.

“Does anyone know about you?” she asked. “I mean apart from the vampires and the agents?”

“Not anymore. You?”

“No. There’s my dad, but it would kill him. I can’t.”

“I understand. Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

“You are going to follow me, aren’t you?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“Tell me my address again.”

“Not advisable. Please believe me, I have it.”

The cab slowed for the Chiswick roundabout, got a green light, whipped through. It started raining. If the boochie was a flier he’d be cold and wet up there.

“I still don’t see why I have to take the flight,” she said. “Why can’t I just check into a hotel here?”

“This country’s too small. You have to trust me. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“How long?”

“Again, inadvisable.”

“You’re old, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

A pause. She was realising what getting the answers would mean. Without them carrying on could be mere blind reflex. With them it was an informed decision. A werewolf by choice, as it were.

“How long will I live?”

“A long time.”

“A hundred years?”

“Try four.”

Silence. I could feel her effort at immense logical extension from the present (via science fiction, Microsoft, the space program) into the future. Impossible: One knows logical extension won’t cover it. One knows the far future will involve unimaginable, perhaps comedic leaps.

“But you’ll look the same,” I said. “Does that help?”

She didn’t answer. Suddenly the full weight of her aloneness—her aloneness, not mine—hit me. There’s my dad, but it would kill him. Nine months she’d been living through this. They found three- and four-year-old kids who’d survived alone in their homes for days, eating sugar, ketchup, butter. You didn’t want to think about what that had been like for them. They were objectionable, somehow. Unless of course you’d been through it yourself. Unless of course you were one of them.

“Shit,” she said. “I need to check in. If I’m really going.”

“You’re really going. Remember: public places at night, okay?”

“And call up an ex to sleep with during the day.”

“I’m serious.”

“Okay, but the longer it takes you to get there the longer I’m going to have to put out for someone else.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Sleep in the public library. Drink coffee. Take uppers.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

Aliases like a whirlwind of dead leaves. Me in the middle, myself.

“It’s Jake,” I said.

“You’re lucky. Jake’s a good name.”

“Whereas?”

A pause. Then, “Might as well get this over with, I suppose. My name’s Talulla.”•

You mustn’t fall in love with a woman because you’ll end up killing her.

Not if she’s a werewolf.

I didn’t invent the necessities. But I am bound by them.•

There was no appeal in taking the vampire on. Not with my new investment in not dying. Simpler to wait for sunrise and the shift change with his human proxy. Therefore I got the cabbie to drop me at Caliban’s, a night club (one of my subsidiaries’ subsidiaries’ subsidiaries owns it, as it happens) on New Oxford Street, where I stayed, buoyed by hastily scored amphetamines, until five a.m. Breakfast of eggs Benedict (the first human food since my depressing banquet-for-one in the Hecate’s hold) at Mikhail’s in Holborn took me through to six, whereupon a mirror-windowed Audi rolled up for the vamp and relieved him with a pair of familiars. The WOCOP tail had been replaced, too. Three agents, as far as I could tell. This was getting ridiculous. I left the café, bought a fresh pack of Camels at a newsstand and wandered down to Trafalgar Square. London was up and running. The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.

I bought a new mobile and called Christian at the Zetter. I wanted a haircut, a massage, a hot shower and a little time and space to gather myself for the laborious business of escapology.

38

TALULLA, LIGHT OF my life, fire of my loins … Ta-loo-la: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate … Ta. Lu. La.

“Talulla’s bad enough,” she said. “Put it with ‘Demetriou’ and you’re in the realm of the ridiculous.”

It was afternoon and we were lying in bed in the Edwardian Park Suite at the New York Plaza, having just had sex for the fifth time in approximately six hours. I never had a sister but I imagine if I had fucking her would have felt something like fucking Talulla, sometime in our very early twenties, coming to it with relished capitulation after years of dirty adolescent telepathy.

“Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou,” she said. “Even in New York you rattle that off and they think you’re speaking Vulcan or something.”

It had taken less than twenty-four hours to ditch the tails, albeit after a wearing epic of old-fashioned cat-and-mouse. With Christian’s help I got out of the Zetter under a pile of soiled sheets in a laundry hamper, and away in the back of the cleaning company van. That did for the vamp flunkies. Not so the agent, whom I clocked still with me barely five minutes after leaving the depot. I wasn’t much surprised. Christian is solid, but there can no longer be any doubt the Zetter’s WOCOP moled. Three hours of Underground-and-black-cab switches (and four agents) later, I was back at Heathrow, if not certain of having slipped them then driven past caring by the force of the need to see her again. Flying business as Bill Morris (an airport-bought first class ticket would’ve waved a flag to anyone watching) I’d had the width of the Atlantic to coddle and thrum my lust. By the time she arrived in the hotel lobby in sunglasses and a pale pink cashmere dress I’d reached maximum agitation. Given which you’d expect a debut fuck of eye-popping gymnastics. In fact it was a thing of slow, hyperconscious deliberateness. You’d similarly expect a dive straight into werewolf biography, an immediate compulsion to compare howler notes. Not so. The deep reflex was postponement. To speak of what we were would be in the long run (but not long enough) to speak of death. We had this one opportunity to come together as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Thereafter the rose would be sick.

Wulf was with us. Wulf knew what was going on. Wulf wanted in, materially. Wulf prowled the blood, rushed up repeatedly only to effervesce into nothing at the surface of the skin. Wulf swung and tossed its head and let loll its degenerate tongue and wreathed us in its feral funk, an odour as dense as the stink of a crammed zoo. If it was getting nothing else out of us it was getting the primary admission, that we knew what we were, that we had both felt the peace that passeth understanding, that this, now, sex in human form, was the imperfect forerunner, the babbling prophet, mere Baptist to the coming Christ. Wulf knew how good it was going to be and would not, even in abeyance, suffer us not sharing in the knowledge. Therefore we knew. Had known from first glance at the airport. Had always known.

Six human victims, I counted. Few enough for each to be still a raw perfume, ghost-traces in the involved and generous scent of her cunt, on the hot flower of her breath. She’d tell me in her own time, we both knew. For now it was the draped obscenity. My own wailing dead in disbelief at the broken agreement had been churned back into the hurrying blood. Only the spirit of Arabella remained still, fixed me with—

Like this?

Yes, just like that. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension. All of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again–ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body’s moral world. All her parents’ love and spoiling were there in her parted thighs’ sly confidence. She knew the measure of her riches. The wolf had first raped then made her larger, forced on her in addition to the human gifts nauseous exemption from the moral city’s ordinances and limits. You accepted the wolf and grew, or you rejected it and died. She’d had the soft toys and pink bedroom as a little girl, the ballet aspirations, the pony fixations. These had flared and mutated, books, a smart mouth, finding the balance between sophistication and sluttiness, a little material greed, the headache of being sufficiently pretty so that politicisation was a sulkily performed chore, then work, business and the daily shifting survival strategies that made the freshman small-hours ethical arguments quaint. All this was still there, dwarfed under the dark arch of the monster. The challenge was to find the devious bloody-mindedness to keep both, who she used to be and what she was now.

Fucking (the word “lovemaking” offered itself, with some legitimacy) let clairvoyance thrash about a bit between us: Here I was looking out from behind her eyes when she was eight, sitting on a back stoop twittered over by leaf shadows and stinging from some giant injustice. There she was behind mine in the sunlit library—WEREWULF—at Herne House. Here was a glowering sky over a dark field with a solitary Dutch barn. Here a car showroom, light bouncing off too much glass. Here Harley lighting the evening fire and saying, Well that’s just fucking nonsense. Here her feet poking out of glittering bath foam, toenails like a little family of rubies. We lived a handful of each other’s moments, or imagined we did. Coming, I gripped the soft warm hair above her nape and stared at her. She stared back. Her eyes had the cold omniscience, her cunt the hot. Her open mouth moved very slightly, a barely perceptible shape of affirmation. This and the beauty spot did for whatever Tantric resolve I was holding on to. A first climax of total dissolution, as into God or void—then the return, the humble reassertion of fingerprints, scalp, knees, tongue, heart, brain. You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.

So the six carnal hours had passed.

But passed they had. Now we lay on the bed like starfish. It’s one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex. Outside, Manhattan was chillily sunlit under a blue March sky. Somewhere back down the hours it had rained. We’d been aware of it, as one harmless animal going about its business might be aware of another harmless animal doing the same. Now the air had a rinsed optimism. To be resisted, my realist warned, because already the future was groping, like a temporarily blinded giant, towards us.

“It’s the Irish Talulla,” she said. “Not the Chocktaw one. My mom’s family came over in the 1880s. Not that it makes a difference. It’s still a god-awful mouthful.”

“Demetriou” from her Greek father, Nikolai, who’d come to the U.S. as a physics postgrad in ’67, got sidetracked by the counterculture, barely scraped his MSc at Columbia and nearly died of a mysterious stomach infection on a trip to Mexico in 1973. He’d survived, however, and emerged traumatised, presumably into readiness for love, since less than six months out of hospital he met, fell for and married Colleen Gilaley, heiress to the not inconsiderable pile represented by her father’s four delis and three diners spread over Manhattan and Brooklyn, a familial empire into which Nikolai was grudgingly (and unproductively) absorbed. In 1975 (Ford in the White House, Jaws in movie theatres, Saigon fallen, the Khmer Rouge overrunning Cambodia, Humboldt’s Gift on the highbrow shelves, Shogun on the low) Colleen gave birth to what would be the Demetrious’ only child, a girl, Talulla Mary Apollonia, now thirty-four, divorcée, werewolf.

“It happened to me in California,” she said, speaking out of the qualitatively different silence that had formed after the nomenclatural explanation. (It happened to me in California. We were talking about “it,” now. This was how it would be, I realised, these early hours would display gentle schizophrenia, the multiple realities of what there was to talk about, of what we were.) “Last summer. My decree absolute had come through and I’d taken a trip out there to visit a couple of old UCLA friends in Palm Springs. Allegedly to celebrate my new singledom. In fact I felt like shit. Sad and washed-up and ugly and sexually dead.” The divorce had been precipitated by the discovery that her ex, Richard, a high-school teacher and aspirant novelist, had been having an affair with the deputy head’s secretary. You know, Talulla had said, if it had been some nineteen-year-old twinkie with pneumatic tits I could have come out of it with a bit of dignity. I pity you, Richard, I really do. But this woman was forty-seven. You can imagine what a boost that gave me.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I got sick of things in Palm Springs and took a rental car out to Joshua Tree to lick my wounds. I stayed in a little cabana motel out on Route 62, hiked in the park during the day, drank tequila with the kids running the motel in the evening. It was a comfort, the desert. I think, by the way, we should order up some Cuervo, don’t you? I’m getting the feeling this is the calm before the storm, though what storm I don’t know.”

Lycanthropy had done things for her, licensed tangentiality, sanctioned intuition, loosened and altogether sexed-up the intelligence. She’d graduated with a degree in English and what turned out to be an insufficient interest in journalism. She started the career, but without much conviction, and after a couple of years drifted into helping run the Gilaley business. The education remained, humoured as a hopeless putz by the smut and savvy of her American trade self. I rang down for the Cuervo, half a dozen fresh limes, worried for the thousandth time Harley’s IDs were rotten, that my flight out of Heathrow had tripped a switch, that Grainer and Ellis were already hip to “Bill Morris” over at the Plaza, bunked up in luxury with his new howler squeeze.

“Then, one night,” she went on, “I wandered into the horror movie. I think it might have been the dumbest sequence of actions I’ve ever performed. For a start, I was driving alone at night in the desert. Off the main road too. I’d been out to Lake Havasu for the day and was determined to get back to my motel without the tedium of 62 West. It wasn’t late. Naturally the moon was up. Naturally the car broke down.”

The Cuervo and limes arrived. I found shot glasses in the suite’s bar and set us up. These, I knew, were the high-octane minutes, days, weeks, when anything she does can pluck the phallic string. Watching her toss back the shot. The pale female throat and her soft hair fallen back to reveal the flushed ears with their pearl studs. And this is nothing, wulf said. You wait. You just fucking wait.

“The horror movie’s always there,” she continued. “Just needs certain conditions to firm up. Mainly human stupidity. You’re driving around thinking the big thing is your poor broken heart and then suddenly the car dies and everything around you says, er, no, honey, the big thing is you’re all alone out here and your phone’s not getting a signal and you haven’t seen another car in over an hour and in any case this is America so the last thing you should be hoping for is another car to come along. Hit me again.”

I poured two more shots. Again the toss back, the taut throat, the breasts’ uplift, the pearls.

“You could have been dumb and ugly,” I said, as she wiped her mouth with her hand.

“So could you.”

“If we both were that would’ve been okay. It’s inequity causes the trouble.”

“What if I’d been smart and ugly?”

“Initially excruciating but better in the long run. Dumb and pretty I’d have ended up killing you. Or more likely you me. Anyway go on. You’d broken down in the middle of nowhere.”

She put the glass on the bedside table and lay on her side, propped on one elbow, facing me. We were over the first miraculous wave, her eyes conceded. Now a soberer relief, and the first shadows of realism. “I’d passed a one-horse town two or three miles down the road,” she said. “A diner, a store, a handful of houses. I was pretty sure I’d seen a garage, too. At the very least there’d be a phone. I’d call Triple A and that would be that. So I walked. I must have gone about half a mile when the helicopter appeared.”

I was studying her hand, enjoying the thought of its history, relishing in the inane way one must in these beginnings the bare fact that it was hers. Full-fleshed with long unpainted nails. She wore a big opal ring on her middle finger. When she’d touched her clit, with healthy deft modern American entitlement, the sight of this ringed finger slipping with cunning purpose through the soft dark hair of her mons had almost finished me.

“It came up about fifty yards away, I guess out of a ravine. I thought it must be the police because of the searchlight. Obviously these were your WOCOP guys.”

“The Hunt.”

“Right. Well, anyway, it happened incredibly fast. I could tell they were chasing someone, something, but I couldn’t see what. It was bizarre standing there with suddenly no category to put the experience in. That’s why I just stood there, like an idiot. Then the searchlight swung and blinded me and suddenly—out of nowhere—the werewolf hit me.”

I thought back to the file I’d seen. Had the report mentioned a witness? It had not. Thank God.

“You’d hardly call it being bitten. More a scrape of the teeth. He really just ran me over. The claws did the real damage. I remember thinking, even in the split-second it took: Jesus, werewolves exist. You’d think you’d be stunned, wouldn’t you? But I wasn’t. I guess, you know, you see something enough times in the movies … I got one big gash on my chest and one on my cheek. It was so sudden, like a huge firework went off in my face. Then he was gone. I’ve never seen anything move that fast. Had never seen, I mean. These days I’m pretty quick myself.”

I almost said: We’ll see how fast soon enough, but didn’t. It would have left us both uneasy.

“Then it was over,” she continued. “The chopper was gone and there I was all alone in total silence again. I walked about twenty paces, in shock I suppose. Then I found the dart.”

“What dart?”

“For the werewolf, but they’d hit me. In the calf. A tranquilizer, presumably, since a moment later I was out like a light.”

“Did you keep it?”

“That would’ve been the smart thing, wouldn’t it? But you find something sticking in you like that you pluck it out and toss it. Or you do if you’re stupid. If you’re me.”

Darting? This is the Hunt. They don’t dart, they kill. They behead. Alfonse Mackar was one of Ellis’s. Grainer had been in Canada looking for Wolfgang. Was there anything in the file about darting for capture? If there was I didn’t remember it.

“I don’t know how long I was out,” she said. “When I woke up it was still dark but the moon was higher. I wasn’t quite where I remembered lying down, either. Must have crawled, I guess. I went back to the road and walked the two miles to Arlette. I seriously thought I’d died and this was the afterlife. By the time I got to the town the wounds had already started to heal. By the next morning there was nothing, no sign of any injury at all. But you know how all that works. Actually I do still get a slight pain in my chest sometimes. As if there’s a splinter in there. God, that tequila’s gone to the tips of my toes.”

A moment in which Manhattan quietened and turned its glittering consciousness on us. I felt the dimensions of the hotel room, the streets outside and the frayed edges of the metropolis unravelling into freeways and the newly hopeful country’s vast distances. And here we were on the bed together, warm as a pot of sunlit honey. With a very slight effort I could have settled wholly into peace. But now we’d gone through the first layer of sex all the wretched questions throbbed.

“The infection,” she said, with mild telepathy. “Why me, now, after you’re saying, what, a hundred and fifty years?”

Build a fortress. Guards. An army of dogs. Victims brought in, paid, tricked. We’d never have to leave. I sketched this and other fantasies, felt the tingle of futility, heard the world’s forces like a billion-piece orchestra tuning up. Why in God’s name were they darting Alfonse Mackar?

“I don’t know,” I answered. “My information’s WOCOP information. They’re the authority, or were. Transmission’s supposed to have been stopped by a virus, which means either the bug’s died or you’re immune. Anything special I should know about you medically?”

“Nothing. I get hay fever and I’m allergic to almonds. Otherwise, nada.”

“There’s got to be something. Anyway it’s not the priority. The priority is … Well, there are several.”

“Not yet, please. Hit me again.”

I had the long-overdue confrontation with myself in the bathroom while she made phone calls. (Three years ago her mother had died of bowel cancer and Talulla had taken on running the business ostensibly with—latterly instead of—her father. Until “it” happened. Two months after Turning she’d hired a general manager, Ambidextrous Alison, to cut herself loose.) “Honey, just ignore him,” I could hear her saying, presumably of meddlesome Nikolai. “I’ve told him he’s out of it. He does it because he knows it pisses you off.” I lay naked on the bathroom floor. Cold marble and the starry light of inset halogens. Things had caught up with me. Chiefly the completeness of my reversal. The universe, I said, demands some sort of deal, so you make one. In my case to live without love. Without love. A hundred and sixty-seven years. Was it ridiculous to speak of love now? No, it wasn’t. Or only in that it’s always ridiculous—on Wittgensteinian grounds—to speak of love. Everything was the same and everything had changed. Outside the city and the voluble traffic and the millions of human eyes and talking mouths and crafty habituated hands testified: The accidental epic of ordinariness goes on. A godless universe of flailing contingency—now with the hilarious difference of not being in it alone. (Suddenly I missed Harley, guiltily.) Courtesy of shared specieshood—indeed sole species representation—we’d skipped the phase of incredulous delight and gone straight to entrenched addiction. It wasn’t a choice. I was for her, she for me. Wulf married us, blessed us, wrapped his arms around us like a stinking whisky-priest. What did I write of Arabella? “We would have killed together and we would have shone.” Yes, and the warmth of that shining lay upon me now like an afterglow. Foreglow rather, since it came back through time from a future rich with murder. Talulla had looked at me when I pushed my cock into her cunt, had looked at me, I say, and sensed something of Arabella, whose spirit lived in me, whose ghost looked out through my eyes, had detected this presence and understood as she lifted her pale hips in slow and complete and victorious compliance that the betrayal whether I liked it or not of course deepened my pleasure, sold me wholly into the new female ownership, pissed on the altar, shat on the grave, dug up and defiled the beloved body in exquisite fully conscious sacrilege under the laws of Eros.

We both knew this was a juvenile phase that would pass, or, if it became a monolithic perversion, cause trouble, choke the sexual stream, breed pestilence. For now, however, she’d looked at me in rousing collusion, yes, I know. How not? How should she, six victims deep, not know the joy of the fall beneath the Fall?

The floor’s chill had become unpleasant. I got up and took a hot shower. I wanted to go back to her clean and put my nose in her cunt, my tongue in her sweet young asshole, the cunning animal scent down there that answered the years of asking. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they loved it. But all the while and all the while and all the while the world. We couldn’t stay here. That business with the dart didn’t make sense. Grainer’s days of live specimen capture were long over. Although of course it had been Ellis, not Grainer, after Alfonse in the desert. In any case we’d have to move. Dumb to have come to Manhattan in the first place, where among the multitudes surveillance was harder to spot.

I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom just as she was wrapping up her call. She looked at me. We didn’t laugh, but if it was a movie that’s what the script would have settled for as a way of showing it was the kind of thing where seeing each other again after ten minutes in separate rooms was a return to the only reality that mattered.

“You’re all scrubbed,” she said.

“Maximal contrast. I want your dirt.”

“Yikes. Okay.”

I went to the bed and lay down next to her. “Tonight we can luxuriate,” I said. “Tomorrow we have things to do.”

39

PARANOIA MADE THE decisions over the next few days. We met only four times, never in the same place. She had to prep Nikolai for her absence (he was prone to quarrelling with Ambidextrous Alison, prone to interfering) and I had logistical matters to attend to. California number plates, an array of wigs, spectacles, false moustaches, centrally the procurement of a fake driving licence for and the transfer of assets worth approximately twenty million dollars to Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou. The po-faced spirit of political correctness put its head around the door but my girl dismissed it. Obviously I should feel whored-out or patronised, she said. Well, I don’t. I barely heard her. Even with the recent global mugging twenty million’s a minor prang in my ride. It’s walking-around money, I told her. I need more time to sort you out properly. Offshore. Swiss. This is just in case of … Yes. Well. The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don’t you’ll have what you need. Just promise me you’ll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay.

However, the paranoia. I had business lawyers in Manhattan (four of my companies have their head offices here) but insisted on meeting for instruction and signatures out of town. (Such meetings are a palaver. My face is rubber masked—I’ve been Richard Nixon; Marilyn; the Wolfman—and I affect one of a dozen accents. The relevant identity’s established first by code numbers and secondly via fingerprint-recognition technology in a portable gizmo. All tiresome, and used only when there’s no alternative.) I hired a car from JFK and drove to Philadelphia. An opportunity, I deemed, to check for surveillance or pursuit. The results were uncertain. No sign of the undead, but I thought I made a couple of WOCOP agents in Philly. I left the car at the airport and took a flight to Boston, dodged around the city for twenty-four hours, then plane-hopped for three days getting increasingly dehydrated: Detroit; Indianapolis; D.C.; Philadelphia. I picked up the car, drove back to JFK and took a cab into the city.

Where I all but bumped into a vampire.

I was getting out of the cab on Fifth Avenue and he was exiting a deli, tearing the cellophane off a pack of American Spirits. The reek hit me when I was halfway out of the car. I went down on one knee on the sidewalk, an impromptu genuflection. Looked up to see him stopped in his tracks with an expression of outraged revulsion. I didn’t recognise him. Tall, long-faced, with short thick hair dyed deep purple. Skinny jeans, leather three-quarter-length coat, orange Converse boots. Humanly you’d say mid-twenties cyberpunk. I got up off my knee. For a few moments we just stood and stared at each other, gorges rising. He looked as if this was new to him, this business of how Jesus Christingly awful running into a werewolf made you feel. Manhattan, needless to say, flowed around us, honked, glimmered, flashed, steamed, whistled, whooped and subterraneanly shuddered. Eventually, shaking his head, he backed, turned, and stumbled away downtown.

“An accident, right?” Talulla said. “I mean he wasn’t following you?” We’d moved to the Waldorf Astoria, a suite overlooking Park Avenue. I was Matt Arnold again. Couldn’t rest easy in any of the aliases.

“I don’t believe he was,” I said. “I’m getting it. I’ve assumed all the vampires know about the virus. They don’t. This is one lot looking for leverage. Why am I so slow?”

Talulla sat in one of the room’s red rococo armchairs with her feet up on a footstool. We were playing this, our condition, what we were, with bright circumspection. The hideous central fact informed everything we did but only took full unironic ownership of us when we fucked. In the sack wulf was stinkily eloquent, the odorous truth around which everything else fainted away. Out of the sack we conceded it like a childless couple who’d agreed to invent a fictional son, the premise, now that I thought of it (God still being dead, etc.), of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was as if each of us was daring the other to admit it wasn’t true. Actually it was her daring me. Or asking me. It reminded me how new she was to the Curse that she had such willingness to believe the whole thing—changing into a monster once a month and killing and eating people—might yet turn out to be a horrible dream. We’d avoided the question of what she’d gone to England for, though I knew: Five victims, however widely she’d spread them across the U.S., had started to feel too close. You go to another country—get in, do it, get out—the police are looking for a native, you’re long gone. England because they spoke English. You want maximum fluency. She knew I’d worked this out. It introduced me to the guilty version of her face, the look an anchor-woman would have on air when someone in her earpiece says he knows all about the abortions or kinky photos, a slight swelling of the cheeks and the mouth momentarily without its guiding will. Sexually becoming, of course, the ghost of Eve’s look, lips still wet with the juice of forbidden fruit.

Thus the obscenity remained draped. For now.

“That’s good then,” she said. “It means we don’t have the entire species to worry about.” She was wearing a grey woollen sweater dress, black nylons and knee-length black leather boots. So you got the soft of the dress and the hard of the boots. Like the soft of the thigh and the hard of the hip. Not sartorial archness, just a sound instinct for sexual accents. We were more than halfway through the lunation and her scent was yielding darker notes. Under the bittersweet glamour of Chanel No. 19 her quickening She exuded a high, tight-packed smell of predatory knowledge. Heat throbbed around her. The Hunger was a second heartbeat still a long way beneath her own. The next dozen days and nights would be the story of its rising. In both of us. Synchronised.

“Yes,” I said. “But the danger is this twerp blabs. He looked as if I was his first lycanthropic run-in. An experience to discuss with his peers. If other vampires who are in the know are here in the city there’s no reason they wouldn’t hook up. He tells his after-dinner werewolf cherry story and they’re onto us. No. We should go.”

“Now? Tonight?”

“Can you stand it?”

She got up out of the chair, crossed to where I stood by the escritoire, slipped her arms around me, kissed me.

“We shouldn’t travel together,” I said, without much conviction.

“Don’t be insane.”

“They don’t have you yet. If they get to you through—”

“Those days are over. It’s you and me, now. That’s all.”

However ridiculous this sounds I already know there will never be a time when putting my hands on her won’t palliate the certainty of death. The feel of her waist between my palms is of the deep geometry that takes you back or forward past the incarnate incidentals to the elemental realm, the realm of soul, one wants to say, knowing one’s going soft in the head. Holding her is a Keatsian beauty-truth. I don’t know what to do with it. I know there’s nothing to do with it. Just live in it and let it bring what it brings.

“We could wait half an hour,” I said, moving my hands to the firm flare of her bum.

“Is it always going to be this bad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hurry up,” she said. “Hard and fast. Please.”

We quit New York that night (cab to Penn Station, Amtrak sleeper to Chicago) with very little discussion. She knew I’d put arrangements in place, but to talk them through would have been, according to the intuited werewolf proprieties, vulgar. Instead we moved around it, our giant ugliness, our unforgivable end point, dirtily enriched, like molested children, by knowing all and saying nothing. I saw in her abstracted moments that she remained disgusted in spite of the months of violent self-baptism. She’d hardened herself in blood but not all the tender remnants were dead. She was a monster, yes, but all she’d lost could still ambush her, turn her gaze back to her childhood and force her to look. You Can’t Go Home Again. (Thomas Wolfe, Jesus how much more?) This hurt, very much. She’d been darling to so many, little black-eyed Lula with the high forehead and the beauty spot. Becoming a werewolf ought to have cut her off from all that but it hadn’t. Continuity of identity persisted. It was like being tortured by an innocent child.

“How do you get around the fact that you should have died several times already?” she asked. To any but new lovers the Amtrak sleeper’s three and a half foot bed width would have been a trial. The little window’s curtains were open, revealing a rolling night sky of curdy backlit grey and gun-blue cloud just beginning, in patches, to break. The train smelled of filter coffee and air-con. “You were born in 1808—which is not a sentence I ever imagined saying—and here we are two hundred years later. There must have been questions to answer.”

We could discuss these past practicalities. Past practicalities.

“It got easier,” I said. “It’s easier than ever now, if you’ve got money. It’s always money. The principle doesn’t change: You’re paying specialists in the manipulation of identity technology. Used to be old guys in basements with loupes and inks and plates and presses, now it’s young guys in lofts with computers. This is the primary level, the simple business of purchasing a fake birth certificate, passport, driving licence, social security number. You’ll be surprised how far you can go with just those: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, loans, investment portfolios. Over a regular lifespan it’s more than enough. Several lifetimes, it gets trickier. I can’t believe what I did the first time. I can’t believe I thought I’d be able to go on doing it.”

“What did you do?”

“I became my own son.”

“Holy moley.”

“Jacob Marlowe ‘Senior,’ as it were, became a recluse at forty-two, in the year 1850. I couldn’t put it off any longer: people were starting to notice I didn’t seem to be aging at all.”

She shivered next to me.

“What?”

“You. 1850. I think I’m used to it and then it gets me again.”

“To tell you the truth I can’t remember much about 1850. Dickens published David Copperfield. Wordsworth died. I’ll have to think.”

“It’s not the big events, it’s the ordinary stuff. A butler warming his hands. Those big damp houses. A bonnet on a chair.” She was trying to picture the time when the present would be as distant to her as 1850 is to me. She was feeling the backdraft or slipstream of the far future: a cold flow. She shuddered, turned towards me, slid her right leg over my hip. “Anyway, go on. Jacob Marlowe Senior.”

“Jacob Marlowe Senior went into reclusion—is there such a word? You think I’d know by now.”

“No one cares, honey. Go on.”

“Marlowe Senior went into reclusion if there was such a word in 1850. Not in England, but at a secret location known only to my lawyers. In fact I was rarely there. Couldn’t afford to be.” Because as you know we can’t let the victims pile up in one place. She felt us duck to avoid this present practicality, a motion like a kite dipping in the wind. “All his business decisions were enacted through authorised proxies and lawyers, who received their instructions from him—I had codes, passwords, ciphers, the whole fucking caboodle—in writing. A rickety arrangement. Near misses of catastrophic losses when messages didn’t travel fast enough. Telegraphy was a great relief when it came in. The telephone—well, you can imagine. Not long after leaving England I was ‘married’ and less than a year after that I had ‘a son,’ Jacob Junior. All fictional. A new will was drawn up—Jacob Junior would inherit everything—and that was that. All I had to do then was stay away from anyone who knew me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course. You’ve got to remember it was a lot easier not to be seen in those days: Photography was in its infancy. No television, no CCTV. Half a dozen false names kept me going through Europe—and eventually here—for thirty-five years. Again, I had money. Money and mobility, that’s how it’s done.”

“Thanks again for the twenty million, by the way. Another sentence I never imagined I’d have use for.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And the fictional wife?”

Another kite dip. The fictional wife evoked the real one. The aphrodisiacal kick Arabella’s ghost being forced to watch had given us, the promise of dark enlightenment. All apparent evil promises the same. It’s a lie. There’s no dark enlightenment because there’s no evil. Whatever it is you’re doing—raping a child, gassing a million—it’s just another thing you can do. The universe doesn’t care. Certainly doesn’t give you divine knowledge in return. All the knowledge and all the divinity is already there in you doing whatever it is you’re doing. Who knows this better than monsters?

Nonetheless my cock thickened next to the moist heat of her hand, and she took it and held it, and that was all the acknowledgement the moment required.

“Enteric fever,” I said. “Poor Emily. She was only twenty-two. And Jacob Junior barely a year old.”

“Birth and death certificates forged.”

“Exactly. I followed them into the grave myself courtesy of heart failure in 1885. I grew an impressive moustache for my return as Jacob Junior, donned a pair of specs, got a new hairdo. My accent had changed, naturally. People see what they’re told to see, by and large.”

“And real kids? You must have them scattered all over the world by now.”

Oh.

As soon as the words were out she wanted them back. These were the last seconds before something was gone forever. Very briefly I considered lying.

“We can’t have children,” I said.

I felt it go into her, find the place already there for it. Of course she’d known, and denied, and still known.

“My periods stopped.”

“I’m sorry, Lu.”

“Richard and I were supposed to start trying. Then I found out about the affair.”

For a few moments we lay without speaking. Cradle comfort of the train’s rocking. It would be peaceful segueing into death like this, I thought, the deepening lull, a tunnel that gets darker and darker until eventually you’re gone out into darkness yourself. Gone out, quite gone out. I held her, but not as if my holding her could make any difference. (The fierce male embrace is invariably patronising to the female embracee.) She still had my cock in her hand. I felt grief and anger and futility going through her and her keeping very still. It was as if she were being burned and had to bear it without flinching or making a sound.

“I knew,” she said. “Carried on taking the Pill in denial. I suppose the thing to say would be ‘Well, it’s for the best.’ ”

There were bigger patches of open night sky now. Stars.

Then suddenly the moon.

“And just to rub it in …” she said, feeling the unignorable insinuation of ownership where its light licked our skin. Then when I didn’t speak: “At least I’ve got a guy who knows when to keep his mouth shut. I guess that’s what two hundred years does for you.”

I too had thoughts of burning, quietly and without pain as she rolled me over onto my back and climbed by degrees on top of me. Burning—or accelerated decay, like time-lapse film of decomposition, my headless trio of foxes going from plump corpses to dust via maggot orgy in grainy fast footage. It looped while we fucked (while she fucked me), interrupted when she leaned back and the moonlight ran lewd riot over her belly and breasts. Finished when I finished. A cine reel with the end of its film strip still whipping round.

She fell asleep immediately afterwards, half draped over me. Her weight had in it the finality of the new fact, a brutal peace now the thing had been faced and taken in. We can’t have children. Somewhere in the sex she’d hated me for it, of course, and known that I’d known and made room in myself for her hatred. Somewhere in the sex was the understanding that love was among other things making room for the beloved’s irrational vengeances.

40

WE ONE-WAY HIRED a Toyota in Chicago. Stayed off the freeways. My thinking was the emptier the space the easier we’d spot a vamp or WOCOP tail. Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.

“But you’re saying there are WOCOP exorcists,” she said. “What are they exorcising?”

One returns to metaphysics, but with diminishing urgency. The assumption is that new phenomena must fill in the picture. But if the picture’s infinite, what difference can half a dozen new species make? She was seeing this already. She sat with a strange neatness in the passenger seat alongside me, knees together, hands in her jacket pockets. She’d pinned her hair up and her slender bare neck gave her a look of appalling vulnerability.

“Demons,” I said. “As far as I know, demons. That’s the idiom. That’s the terminology.”

“Which means heaven and hell, right? Demons and angels. God and the Devil.”

“You’d think I’d know one way or the other by now, wouldn’t you?” I was struck by how long it had been since I’d considered such things, how these questions had subsided. I had only a generic memory of small-hours conversations with Harley, though I knew his view well enough, that there was a transcendent realm but that it spoke in many languages. In one of its languages Isis was a word. In another Gabriel. In another Aphrodite. All we ever got was the language. We were a language ourselves. The thing behind the word remained unknown. Naturally: The Word was with God. What use would that be to her?

“But you’ve seen this stuff?” she said. “You’ve seen demons?”

“I’ve seen someone with something inside them that wasn’t them, that was definitely a separate entity. I’ve seen it—felt it, rather—go out of them.”

“And it was evil?”

This, of course, is the crux. It doesn’t really matter what the language is, only whether there’s a transcendent moral grammar underpinning it. No one really cares what hell’s called or who runs it. They just don’t want to go there.

“It felt like it intended harm to humans,” I said. “But not as if it had much choice about it. Evil has to be chosen.”

She kept her hands in her pockets. Stared at the road ahead. This was the problem with talking. Sooner or later it led here. Sooner or later everything led here.

Evening on our fifth day from New York we stopped in the middle of nowhere for me to pee. Sunset was a gap between land and cloud like a narrow eye or broken yolk of light, rose gold, mauve, dusk. On either side flat prairie to the horizon, an effect that remade the earth as a disk of pale grass. Ahead the road ran straight to vanishing point; turn 180 degrees and look back, same thing. Talulla got out, stretched, leaned against the Toyota’s bonnet, lit one of my cigarettes. (I’d told her smoking wouldn’t harm her and she’d said okay what the hell, it’s something to do.) We yet hadn’t said anything about where we were going or what we were going to do when we got there, and the not saying anything was for her like flies gathering on her skin, more every hour, every day. These last two nights the Hunger had kept us awake in shivering TV light, drinking bourbon, screwing till we were sore, unable to find comfort lying still. Full moon was eight days away.

“When I was driving in the desert,” she said, staring at the horizon, “I’d go a hundred miles and see nothing, just empty landscape.” She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, a cream rollneck sweater. I was thinking of lines from a Thom Gunn poem: They lean against the cooling car, backs pressed / Upon the dusts of a brown continent, / And watch the sun, now Westward of their West … “Then suddenly,” Talulla went on, “in the middle of all this emptiness, like a joke, I’d see a solitary trailer. A washing line, a pickup, a dog. Someone living there all alone. I toyed with doing that, in the beginning, just get as far away from people as possible. Alaska, maybe. The Arctic.” A breeze simmered in the roadside grasses. She took a last drag, dropped the butt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. “But I’m not built for it,” she said. “Loneliness.”

I put my arms around her and kissed her, felt the compact warmth of her under the leather jacket. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke and fresh air. I was very aware of the precise dimensions we occupied just then, two bodies, all the miles around us. “You know what you look like?” I said. “You look like one of those actresses in an episode of a seventies cop show. Cannon or McCloud or Petrocelli.”

“I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve never heard of any of those.”

“ ‘Guest starring Talulla Demetriou as Nadine. A Quinn Martin production.’ They were so beautiful, those girls, they hurt men’s hearts. It’s your beauty spot and your high forehead and your centre-parting.”

“That doesn’t sound very attractive,” she said. “And you can call it a mole, you know, since that’s what it is.”

I held her slightly away from me and looked at her. The Hunger had thinned the skin of her orbits but her face still had its centres of wealth, the long lashes and dark eyes, the mouth the colour of raw meat. A look of fragile control over demonic energies. It had been so much just the two of us that there had hardly been need to address each other by name, but earlier that day in a convenience store she’d said something and I hadn’t heard and she’d said, Jake, and I’d loved her, a sudden access of ridiculous piercing love just because there it was in her voice saying my name, the new deep thrilling familiarity.

Later, driving again in the dark, she said, “I toyed with the other thing too, in the beginning. The radical solution.”

Suicide.

“But?”

She didn’t reply immediately. Cats’ eyes ticked by. The Hunger’s night shift was limbering up. Lust was available to me, moved as with aching muscles towards her hands on the Toyota’s wheel, the small taut weights of her breasts, her knees, the beauty spot by her lip. She kept her eyes on the road. “Turns out I’m not built for that either,” she said. “I didn’t want to die. I put on a show of wanting to die for a while, that’s all. I couldn’t believe I was going to carry on, but there I was, carrying on. No point saying pigs can’t fly when they’re up there catching pigeons.”

The universe demands some sort of deal, so you make one. Yes.

“The truth is I was a monster long before any of this. I got my mother’s narcissism and my dad’s immigrant overcompensation. If it’s me or the world, the world’s had it. Of course that’s disgusting. And liberating. That’s the problem with disgust. You get through it. You feel bigger and emptier.”

Which observation broke some barrier in her, some last resistance to dealing in bald specifics. I felt it—we both did—as surely as we would have felt a tyre blowing out. She understood the genre constraints, the decencies we were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured pride. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. By rights, Talulla knew, she should have been orphaned or raped or paedophilically abused or terminally ill or suicidally depressed or furious at God for her mother’s death or at any rate in some way deranged if she was to be excused for not having killed herself, once it became apparent that she’d have to murder and devour people in order to stay alive. The mere desire to stay alive, in whatever form you’re lumbered with—werewolf, vampire, Father of Lies—really couldn’t be considered a morally sufficient rationale. And yet here she was, staying alive. You love life because life’s all there is. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the top and tail of the case against her.

That night, lying on our backs side by side in a Motel 6 bed, I knew what was coming.

“I killed animals,” she said, quietly.

Nine moons, six human victims. Simple arithmetic.

“Yes.”

“Did you try that?”

“Yes.”

It was raining. The motel was almost empty. The room smelled of damp plaster and furniture polish. A truck honked on the wet highway half a mile away. She was thinking about her parents. Her mother dead and her father living alone in the big maple-shadowed Gilaley house in Park Slope. A lot of her strength had gone into not letting the Curse rob her of the warmth between her and Nikolai, who would without thinking run his hand softly over her cheek as if she were still a little girl.

“Of course it was no good,” she said. “I knew even when I was doing it it wouldn’t work. You can tell.”

You can indeed. Have no illusions, the Curse specifies: human flesh and blood. This isn’t a nicety. An animal won’t “do,” at a pinch. Refuse the Hunger what it demands and see what happens. The Hunger isn’t at all pleased. The Hunger feels it incumbent on itself to teach you a lesson. One you won’t forget.

“I thought I was going to die,” she continued. “Throwing up afterwards it felt like I was trying to turn myself inside out. I was relieved. I thought I’d solved the problem, poisoned myself, accidental suicide. But of course it passed.”

My hand rested just above her mons. The question was whether to use what was coming next erotically. I could feel she was aware of the option. She was undecided. Mentally, too much was mingling: her mother’s death, her father’s loneliness, we can’t have children, innocent victims, the prospect of a four-hundred-year lifespan.

“It got worse,” she said. “The next time. After the third month I knew I wouldn’t make it through another Change without feeding properly.” It cost her something to get that “feeding” out. Her voice hardened for the word. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time she’d had to put it into words. Kurtz’s unspeakable rites. “I was crazy,” she said. “Two hours before moonrise just driving around aimlessly in Vermont. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe get myself killed. Walk into a hotel and just go through the whole transformation routine in the lobby.” She paused. Closed her eyes for a few moments. Opened them. “Well, of course not aimlessly. You know what you’re doing but you pretend you don’t. There was this place I knew from a vacation years back. A big woods between two little towns. Houses far apart. I picked one at random. I wasn’t careful, just went straight in. The doors weren’t even locked. It was a nineteen-year-old boy. His name was Ray Hauser. It was the last week of his summer vacation. His parents were in town watching a local theatre production of Titus Andronicus. I read about it afterwards in the papers.”

I didn’t say anything. Therapists and priests and interviewers know all about not saying anything. When you die and go for judgement God will sit there and infinitely not say anything and you’ll do all the damning work yourself.

“Feel,” she said, opening her legs slightly.

Her cunt was wet. There was the killing. There was the eating. And there was this. The central monstrosity. The way it made you feel. What it did for you. You couldn’t live with it without living with this.

I kept my hand there. Stroked her. This central monstrosity had nearly made her kill herself. But she hadn’t. And once you don’t kill yourself it’s all over.

“I’m smarter when I Change,” she said. “In all the worst ways. In all the ways that matter.”

“I know, Lu.”

“You think some sort of red cloud would come down, some sort of animal blackness to blot everything out and leave just the dumb instinct, but it doesn’t.”

“No.”

“I know what I’m doing. And I don’t just like it—I don’t just like it …”

“I know.”

“I love it.”

We left a respectful silence. Her hair was a dark soft corona around her head on the pillow. Evil has to be chosen.

“I tasted it,” she continued calmly. “All of it. His youth and his shock and his desperation and his horror. And from the first taste I knew I wasn’t going to stop until I had it all. The whole person, the whole fucking feast.”

She moved her hips very gently in response to my stroking. The argument with herself about what she was, what she was willing to be, was effectively over. Her bigger self had gone on ahead and accepted it. These were residual emotional obligations.

“Then afterwards,” she said, lifting slightly as my finger slipped into her anus. “The big talk, the promises to myself I wasn’t ever going to do it again.”

It’ll get easier, I could have told her. It’s the story, the human story, the werewolf story, that the hard things get easier. Carry on and in a year or two you’ll be taking victims as you might grapes from a bunch.

“It’s the worst thing,” she said, turning towards me, forcing herself against my hand. “It’s the worst thing.”

We’re the worst thing, she meant. We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.

There are times when saying “I love you” is blasphemy worthy of the Devil.

“I love you,” I said.

Much later, after we’d lain for a long time listening to the rain in the dark, I felt the last barrier between us dissolve. It was as if the night’s tensile apparatus suddenly fell apart. She said: “You killed your wife, didn’t you?”

She already knew the answer. Had fucked me knowing. Was lying here with me knowing. Accommodating this, even more than accommodating her own slaughters, was the proof of having entered a new world.

“Yes,” I said.

Silence. But of cogitation, not shock. I could feel her trying to find a justifying angle—because sooner or later you’d have had to, the alternative would have been turning her, which would have felt as bad as killing her, with four hundred years for her to spend never forgiving you—then finding the unjustifiable truth: because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.

“It was good,” she said. Conclusion, not question. The insight that withers the old flower and lets the new one bloom.