The Last Werewolf

“Yes.”

“Because you loved her.”

“Yes.”

And here we were at the delicate logic. I was thinking: She’ll be a much better werewolf than me. (And with this thought came the first true realisation that she was less than a fifth my age, that half her life would be lived after my death in a world beyond my imagining.) Already she had an understanding it had taken me decades to arrive at. Very soon, a year, two, I’d be struggling to keep up with her.

“Maybe you’ll kill me,” she said, pressing her hand flat against my chest. “Maybe that’s what I was hoping for.”

It had occurred to me she might want this, an exit strategy. But there was that past tense: Maybe that’s what I was hoping for. If she had wanted it she didn’t now. Or at least not cleanly.

“There’s something better than killing the one you love,” I said. I extricated myself from her embrace, gently forced her onto her back, held her wrists above her head, got on top of her, felt her bedwarm thighs softly opening. Her eyes and earrings and lips and teeth glimmered in the dark.

“Something better?”

I eased into her as she lifted her hips.

“Killing with the one you love,” I said.

It was only afterwards, when she slept (wondering what knowing the worst would feel like had been one of the things keeping her awake; now, having let it in and found room for it she surrendered to exhaustion, a blissful rapid unspooling into sleep) that I knew there would be no purpose served, indeed none, by telling her Arabella had been pregnant, and that in murdering and devouring my wife I’d also murdered and devoured the only child I’d ever have.

41

THE BIG OPEN spaces thin the American gods: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, Charles Manson, JFK. Out there they’re like frail clouds tearing, nothing behind them but blue emptiness. It sends some people mad. Americans know this and gather by collective intuition on the coasts.

Life reduced to the dimensions of a car. Lack of sleep and the deepening drift of miles blurred all our categories, yielded absurd conversational segues, from Tom Cruise’s career to WOCOP genetics to Obama to the fragmentation of feminism to the history of the Hunt to the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile Texaco, gospel, storm clouds, scarecrows, Jack Daniels, Camel Filters (the brand divinities prove surprisingly resilient), fucking, stars, vending machines and the constantly tightening torque of the Hunger. She wanted to know everything, Harley, Jacqueline Delon, Cloquet, Ellis, Grainer, the Fifty Houses. And that was just the contemporary matter. I had two hundred years’ worth of places I’d been, people I’d met, things I’d seen. No matter how much I told her there was always more. But she wanted to talk, too. The Curse had left her memories intact but not her sense of entitlement to them. They had become unspeakable. Now here I was, apparently having the cake of my past and eating it. Her unsalved grief was for the lost familial warmth. Her mother’s clan had been large, featured Irish characters, clichéd Irish in some cases, colossi of drinking and sentimentality and with the great bloodstained tapestry of Roman Catholicism to wrap everything in. The Uncles. When she was a child these men picked her up in massive sausagey hands and sat her on their shoulders amid whisky vapours and wild hair and talked fabulous nonsense. The women initiated her in gossip and the arts of masculine deflation. This had been her template for happiness. This and the deep cahoots with her long-suffering father, whose little sprite she was and who indulged her, recklessly, and who had not just heroes and gods to entertain her but black holes and comets and the precise weight of the sun. Among the Gilaley tribe Nikolai’s already negligible Greek Orthodoxy had disappeared.

“He started with capitulation,” Talulla said. “Went through the farce of converting to marry my mother. It made him smaller in her eyes, of course, though she’d never have married him without it. She held all the paradoxes, casually. Not that I can talk, the rubbish I’m still carrying around.”

“So you do believe in God?”

We were in Nebraska, south of the Middle Loup River, east of the Sand Hills. It was evening, cold, sleeting since we’d stopped for gas an hour ago. I’d seen the acned cashier give us a sidelong look. This was new. In human form I never failed to pass as simply human. Were we, together, palpably more Other?

“It’s not belief,” she said. “It’s just what you’re stuck with, the lousy furniture you can’t change. The educated me knows hell’s nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I’m going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way.”

“It’s the postmodern solution,” I said. “Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.”

“But you don’t think the story in Quinn’s book’s a fiction, do you?” I’d told her what I knew, how close I’d been at Jacqueline Delon’s, the Men Who Became Wolves.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” I said. “Let everything else have its place in purposeless evolution but let my lot be exempt. It’s just a hangover from—” I was going to say “the days of being human,” but felt how it would bring the fact of infertility close again. “It’s just the same old shit,” I amended. “The desire to know whence we came in the hope it’ll shed light on why we’re here and where we’re going. The desire for life to mean something more than random subatomic babble.”

“And now the vampires have it,” she said. “Assuming you really think they do?”

“I really think they do.”

“I know this is crazy, but I can’t quite get over the whole vampire thing. That they really exist.”

“It’s the lameness of their having to sleep during the day. That and the not having sex.”

“They don’t?”

“They don’t. The desire goes. I mean, they’ll tell you screwing’s nothing to draining a victim but that’s always sounded desperate to me. It’s one of the reasons they hate us.”

Us. I felt the word evoke for her a tribe, a family, a kind—then the effect dissolved. A whole species gone to silvered dust.

“How do we really know there aren’t any others?” she said, off the back of this image, rolling her head a little to ease the neck’s knots of gathering wolf. “Alfonse Mackar turned me—okay. You say there must be some anomaly in me that made infection possible. But what if it was an anomaly in him? If the thing interfering with infection really is a virus maybe he was immune to it. In which case who’s to say he hasn’t turned others? There could be dozens, or hundreds—”

“Not hundreds. WOCOP would know. Harley would’ve known.”

“A few then. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two-hundred-year-old gut I didn’t buy it. “It’s possible,” I said. “Of course it’s possible.”

“But you don’t think so”

“No. I’m not sure why.”

Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. “It’s because it would be less romantic,” she said.

We drove long into the nights, since it gave at least the one behind the wheel some distraction from the Hunger. Our scents made a dirty brew in the car, went into us, absolutely refused to let desire sleep. Sex muffled the drum-thud for an hour or two. Then the beat struck up again—worse. Diminishing returns. I could feel her sometimes looking back to her werewolf life before we’d met and feeling a kind of retroactive vertigo or nausea that she’d survived it alone so long. It was as if the sun had come up and shown her for the first time how close to the edge of a thousand-foot drop she’d been walking in the dark. Despite which reflections (I could also feel) she was daily making the aesthetic or dispositional shift: As long as you’re still considering suicide the Curse can play as tragedy. Once you’re resolved on living only comedy will do.

Unless you fall in love, Jacob.

(Harley’s ghost? Arabella’s? Whoever, I ignored it.)

I bought things we’d need. A lightweight rucksack. Binoculars. Clip ropes. Talulla didn’t ask. Not, any longer, out of avoidance, but because for the first time in nine months she was enjoying being entirely in someone else’s hands.

The early hours of our eighth day from New York found us in a Super 8 motel in Wyoming.

“The more I think about it,” she said, “the more it doesn’t seem possible they don’t know about me. WOCOP, I mean.” It was just before dawn. My head rested on her thigh. The room’s one thin-curtained window was a lozenge of smoke-blue light. We were dry-eyed, wakeful. The Hunger had forced us off regular food. This, as Jacqueline Delon would no doubt have known, is the way of it: Human appetite occupies roughly the middle fourteen days of the cycle. The rest of the time you’re winding down from the kill, or winding up to it. Now, four days from the full moon (waxing gibbous), we were reduced to water, black coffee, liquor, cigarettes. Even chewing a stick of gum felt categorically wrong.

“It’s bothering me too,” I said. “I feel sure Harley knew, and if he did there’s no reason the rest of the organisation wouldn’t. But you’ve never felt yourself being followed or watched?”

“Would I feel it? Surely not if they’re any good.”

Quite. My own sense for surveillance had had a long time to develop. She was an infant. A conviction seized me suddenly that the motel was surrounded, that any second the door would be booted in. I leaped up from the bed, unlocked, looked out. Nothing. The parking lot’s winking mica. The road. The mountains, white on the heights. Clean cold air and the predawn feeling of the earth’s innocence. I went back inside.

“Maybe I’m wrong about Harls,” I said, as she lit us a Camel each. “It’s just that when I saw you at Heathrow, the instant I saw you it seemed to complete his cut-off message. It was a tonal thing, you had to know his voice. But maybe that wasn’t what he was telling me. It could just as easily have been that he’d found out the vampires were after me for the virus. Or it could have been that he knew his cover was blown, that his own people were onto him. Christ, it could have been any number of things.”

“I’ve wondered if they even saw me that night in the desert,” she said. “I mean it was a matter of a couple of seconds. The chopper was having trouble keeping the light on him. They could have missed me. I mean they could have. Otherwise wouldn’t they have come back for me?”

“There was no mention of you in the report I saw,” I said. “And in any case they’d assume you’d be dead in twelve hours. There was no reason to come back. As far as they were concerned the only thing you were going to turn into was a corpse.”

She considered this for a few moments, staring at the ceiling. The effects of we can’t have children were still going on. She was wondering where the grief might go, what shape it might take. Anger—or rather focused malice—was a possibility. I could feel her considering it, the complete devotion of herself to only a handful of her aspects: intelligence, cruelty, destruction. She could become Kali. “Well,” she said, “that’ll teach them to be complacent, won’t it?”

Fear of pursuit grew in inverse proportion to evidence of pursuit. The back of my head and neck developed a blind hypersensitivity. I got eye ache from repeatedly checking the rearview. Abnormal scrutiny of every desk clerk and chambermaid and store manager and waitress. The world was vampire or WOCOP until proven innocent.

But the miles passed with no sign we were being followed or watched.

We drove west through the Rockies. A bad idea, wulf so close. The latent creature yearned and strained for the sheer spaces. Flaring mountain flanks gashed with snow. Big stone knees bent up out of pools of forest. When we stopped and got out the air was thin and mineral. Talulla suffered spells of fever, in the worst of them sweated and shivered, wrapped in a blanket, but passed from these fugues into picked-clean awareness, like a child after its evening bath. We needed less and less to speak. The dusk sky with the first sprinkle of stars became our element. Mile after winding mile of rich silence in the car. I watched her when she drove, her dark eyes’ incremental submission to what was coming, what she was. It was the look of a little girl who’s assimilated a secret she knows can bring the grown-up world crashing down.

Sex stopped. Without verbal agreement we found ourselves numbed, a pitch of desire so extreme, perhaps, that it nudged or bled into its opposite, as all extremes must. I could barely touch her, she me. Neither of us was surprised. Wulf had its occult necessities, demanded now that the great consummation was close a small fee of purity, a little swept-clean antechamber before the hall of majestic filth.

In the early hours of our tenth day from New York, road-burned and red-eyed, with the Hunger forcing lupine life through human exhaustion, we left Nevada’s share of the mountains and crossed, just south of keen-aired Lake Tahoe, into California.

Transformation was two nights away.

42

MY LAST KILL in the Golden State was thirty-two years ago, in the summer of 1977. Led Zeppelin had played the Oakland Coliseum and a vanload of fans had driven up to Muir Woods after the show to drop acid and screw. I’d planned to go farther north into the Napa Valley (the woods here a tad too close to the city and occasionally ranger-patrolled) but when a young hallucinating gentleman, gamine, with pre-Raphaelite blond curls that would have given Robert Plant’s a run for their money, injudiciously wandered away from his hallucinating friends and all but fell into my lap … Well. No pain felt he. I am quite sure he felt no pain. Had I not been long past the days of self-comfort I would have comforted myself with the thought that to him I’d been nothing more than an alarming—and final—hallucination. Altogether a lazy kill. I barely took pains to bury what was left of him. Of course the remains were found, three days later, but by then I was in Moscow.

Talulla was sick. We checked into a motel on foggy 68 just east of Carmel and I left her soaking in a hot bath. A risk, but unavoidable: Moonrise tomorrow would present its necessities. There was reconnaissance to be done. Besides, I’d seen absolutely no sign of pursuit since we left New York. We had new phones; check-in would be every hour. If she saw or felt anything—anything—suspicious she was to get among the public and call me. “Is it this bad every month?” I asked her. She was pale in the tub, dead-eyed, shivering. Her little breasts were goosefleshed despite the water’s warmth, nipples prettily puckered.

“At least.”

“Jesus, how’ve you managed?”

She just looked at me, jaws clamped, on behalf of womankind. My own pre-Curse blood-bubble and bone-burp routine was under way. The premature hybrid hands and feet were ghost-fucking with me (extra care behind the wheel, Marlowe), lupine previews flashing in my human shoulders and hips. I deal by keeping on the move. Sitting still makes things worse. Not so for Lula. She looked like she never wanted to move again. Her makeup was smudged. She’d started taking it off then given up. She stared at me with the baleful resignation of a seventeen-year-old suffering the sort of hangover she’ll come out of with a feeling of humble spiritual enlargement—if she comes out of it at all.

“I’ll wait awhile,” I said. “We’ve got time.”

She shook her head. “Don’t bother. This is just what happens to me. It’ll last till this evening then I’ll be full of beans. Come this evening you’ll wish I was like this again.”

It still wasn’t easy leaving her. Several false departures. “If for any reason something happens to me,” I said, turning back for the fourth time at the door—then realised I didn’t have anything useful to offer.

“Just go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

I left her a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, three packs of Camels, a dozen Advil and a pot of lousy motel coffee. Also Cloquet’s Luger, which I’d hung on to, though I’d replaced the silver ammo with regular rounds. Useless against boochies (should I not be back before sundown) but fine for familiars and agents. “Anyone comes through that door who isn’t me,” I said, “shoot them.”

She nodded, teeth chattering, then closed her eyes and waved me away. I locked the door behind me. It was just after noon.

Novelists, notoriously, are always working, eyes and ears open for anything they might be able to use. Ditto werewolves. Not for quirky characters or snippets of dialogue but for murder locations, places that lend themselves to the secret kill. I’d had this stretch of coast—the hundred miles between Monterey and Morro Bay—in the file for years. Along with the requisite geography and the ghosts of Steinbeck, Miller and Kerouac, Big Sur’s got isolated houses and a glut of whacked-out residents with more money than sense. In the late sixties I’d rented a place here for a few weeks (flew to Alaska for the kill) and been struck by the potential richness of its pickings. Odd I’d left it this long, really. You were saving it for her, my romantic insisted—and in my new generous idiocy I didn’t wholly dismiss the idea.

It’s a strange craft or art, finding the where and the when and the who of the kill. Naturally one develops a nose for it over time, a sensitivity to variables. In the early years I used to spend weeks as it were casing the joint. Now you can drop me anywhere there’s human habitation and in less than twenty-four hours I’ll give you the optimal target.

Of course there are soft options. The Western world’s so mad these days you can put an ad in the paper and some desperate self-harmer will answer it. Wanted: Victim for werewolf. Must be plump and juicy. Non-smoker with GSOH preferred. No time-wasters. I’ve had my share of drug addicts and alkies, the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the infirm, the mentally ill. I’ve hired escorts (male and female), doped them, driven them out to the countryside, let them wake up and make me a chase of it. All of which will do (the Curse being unencumbered by aesthetics or fair play) but there’s a peculiar profound satisfaction in the straight—one wants to say traditional or clean-lined—mode of predation: You stalk a perfectly healthy human being, confront them, give them plenty of time to really take it in, then do what you do.

I spent the day driving and hiking, equipped with knapsack, bush hat, state-of-the-art Van Gorkom walking boots, binoculars and a paperback copy of Birds of the Western United States, officer. Tourist season was a month away and the trails were quiet. I had the place to myself. The odour of redwoods and damp earth made my eyeteeth and fingernails throb.

By three in the afternoon the fog had lifted and the sun had come out. I worked with free-form fluidity, and with an hour still to go before sundown I’d lined up a hit and two backups. It would mean a sixteen-mile on-foot round-trip and smart timing but we could do the whole thing without breaking cover once—and it doesn’t get better than that.

Talulla phoned as I was climbing back into the Toyota.

“You’ll be sad to hear,” she said, “I’ve entered the full-of-beans phase.”

“Good.”

“Don’t get excited. It’s basically ADD, with fever and hallucinations.”

This is another purpose of civilisation, so that we can exchange love-packed banalities over the phone.

“Everything’s set,” I told her. “I’ll be home in an hour.”

The sun was setting over the Pacific and the mountains were lit pink and gold. The car was warm with evening light and spoke in its fuel and vinyl odours of America. I drove carefully, holding focus. Wulf heckled, spooked my hands and face with claw and muzzle. My scalp loosened and shrank, hot and cold by turns. Close, now, brother, very close. But I drove to my beloved, carefully.

43

THE FOLLOWING EVENING we parked the Toyota, now with its California plates, in a twenty-four-hour gas station and diner just off Route 1 about a mile north of the Andrew Molera State Park. Talulla wore a blond wig while I sported a false moustache and a Yankees baseball cap. Sunglasses for both of us. The disguises felt excessive but the gas station had CCTV. It was cool and damp. Moonrise was three hours away. Lu’s mode had changed again. Last night’s fidgets had subsided. Now she was quiet, clear-eyed. This was her penultimate pretransformation stage. The final stage would come ten minutes before Turning. Not pretty, was how she’d described it.

It was an hour’s trek to the change site I’d selected. Redwoods mixed with coastal oaks at least a half mile from the nearest trail. From there a seven-mile romp to the target. Kill. Seven miles back. Two miles to the car. Timing was the issue. Timing’s always the issue. Moonrise was 8:06, moonset tomorrow morning at 7:14. Eleven hours and forty-six minutes on the Curse. Hunting alone I’d hold off till 4:00 a.m. Two hours for killing and feeding and an hour-fourteen to get back to base camp. Once you can manage the Hunger, whet and dandle and tease, you want the shortest possible time between werewolf crime and human flight—for the simple reason that if the remains are discovered and the alarm raised you don’t want to be nine feet tall covered in hair sporting a gory muzzle and bloody claws when the sirens start to wail. But I wasn’t hunting alone.

“It’s coming,” Talulla said.

“In here. Quick.”

I lifted a branch and she ducked under. Her face was strained and sweaty. “Get undressed,” I said. “Can you manage?”

No one near, according to my nose, and in any case we weren’t visible. Twilight on the roads and trails was coagulate darkness under the trees.

“Oh,” Talulla said, down to her underwear, holding her belly. She swallowed, repeatedly. Dry heaved, once. I got her out of the bra and panties and stuffed them with the rest of our clothes into the rucksack. Kit-checked: wet wipes, water spray, liquid soap, bin liners. I climbed fifteen or twenty feet into the oak (as rehearsed yesterday) and secured the pack with the clip cables. Back on the ground I found Lula on her knees, doubled up, arms wrapped around herself.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Very close.”

“I know. Me too.”

They were the last words we exchanged that night.

She was quick. Quicker than me. I had assumed—as a male? as an elder? (as a moron, Marlowe)—I’d be fully transformed and at her service while she was still in the throes. But no. Her damp face rendered an appalling small-eyed in extremis version of itself, she vomited bile, jackknifed, rolled onto her side, curled her pretty lips and went in less than twenty seconds with an extraordinary symmetrical fluidity through the Change, while I was still untidily crunching and popping out of my human lineaments. Cutting-edge CGI versus fifties stop-motion, an embarrassing discrepancy I wondered if we’d be able to laugh about later.

Not that there was much time for wondering, what with the fully released scent of a She filling my hybrid nostrils. Oh. Oh. The weeks of human-leaked olfactory hints were no preparation, really no preparation for the merciless clout of the female werewolf stink. Standing, I nearly fell. At the first inhalation my balls filled with a riot of libidinal jazz, my cock shot up like a sprung—like a booby-trapped—device. Talulla, still on all fours with her hindquarters raised, issued a low sound and slowly spread her legs for my questing snout. And there, dear reader, wet for my wet muzzle’s tip was her lupine cunt, larger, slyer, darker-skinned than its human sister, murder-silked and blood-fattened, firm and soft as a ripe avocado and releasing a sweet scent just at the evil edge of rot.

Not yet.

She growled at the injunction, delivered to both of us in simultaneous telepathy, but we knew the waste it would be to come together now, with the Hunger holding our innards at knifepoint and the gift of the kill not yet unwrapped. I let the tip of my cock nuzzle her for a moment, felt the slick entrance hotter than a fevered baby’s mouth, almost, almost failed the dalliance test at the last—but withdrew, and watched with a sort of vicious admiration as she rose to her full height, looked at me with her wiser animal eyes, grinned, and moved off ahead into the darkness. I shot one hot arrow of piss to mark the tree, then followed her.

We understood each other. Clairvoyance that in our human form was no more than the standard new lovers’ allowance increased posttransformation to near-total mutual transparency. She knew, for example, where we were going, though I hadn’t told her. The route I’d traced yesterday led her like an aboriginal songline; it was there in front of her as clearly as if I’d left a trail of phosphorus. Ditto, since she was at liberty to rummage any of the relevant mental files, the image of the house I’d selected, binocular-watched and eavesdropped-on long enough to establish a lone male inhabitant for whom the sub–Frank Lloyd Wright pad was a second home–cum–recording studio retreated to at times of creative crisis. “Look, if they’re going to keep changing the cue-points the whole thing’s a complete fucking waste of time, Jerry.” Under my surveillance yesterday he’d come out on the deck with a coffee, a joint and his cell phone. “No. No, I’ve got all the software here. It’s the same shit. The same useless shit if they’re going to keep changing the cues. I really … Seriously. Tell me how someone making his third feature thinks you can score from footage that isn’t the final fucking cut? I mean … Exactly. Seriously. Seriously. Yeah. Well. That’s the fucking indie wunderkind for you …” He was handsome, with dark blond hair chopped to create a look of boyish self-obliviousness, a good thin mouth, a hard jaw and a long-muscled body. More than enough success with women for resolved misogyny. Or so I thought, perhaps wishfully. I’d picked a man (and a looker at that) lest a woman complicate things for Talulla, which rationale I felt her now perceiving—she turned her head back to me with a grin—and being in equal parts touched and offended by.

Moonlight blotched the forest floor, maternally soothed us when we moved though it. Lu stopped once to look up and let her werewolf face take its cold balm and I saw my lover silvered in all her sinuous beauty, the hardened breasts and fatless belly, the long deadly hands, the thin-haired muscles of thigh and calf. I shuddered at how close to giving up I’d been. Remembered Harley in the library saying, You’ve got a duty to live, same as the rest of us, with London’s snow hurrying and the whisky’s firelit gold. You love life because life’s all there is. The last two weeks, the motels, the miles on the road, Manhattan, Heathrow, all had the closed encrypted quality of a dream. This was the waking world, lust and hunger racing to the primal feast, my dead rapture brought back to life by the simple miracle of not having to do it alone …

Meanwhile we’d come too far too soon. A small stream broke into a steep valley, conifer-covered on its western wall (the great fresh flank of the Pacific just beyond it), mixed forest and stony outcrops on its eastern, snaked down through by a smooth, single-lane, new-smelling tarmac road, sparsely lit. Talulla stopped, breath going up in plumes. I stood behind her, wrapped my arms around her and filled my hands with her breasts and lightly bit her shoulder. She put her head back, licked my snout. I’m smarter when I Change, she’d said, and I could feel it in her, the deepened cunning and whetted nous. Inside the Hunger’s red din her predator was busy with angles and shadows, lines of cover, points of entry, how far a scream would carry. I’d underestimated her, in spite of myself, out of vestigial delusions of female delicacy assumed I’d have to help her through this. She knew, sensed my embarrassment. The lick was partly It’s all right, I understand. Sweet of you. But you see what you’re dealing with now?

The house (lights on, black Lexus in the drive) was built like a chic bunker into the side of the hill, two storeys, a basement, a pool, a decked balcony running all the way round the upper floor, double garage, stone gateposts, electronic gate. Even without our advantages getting in wouldn’t be difficult. The downstairs doors were shut, granted, but it was too early in the maestro’s evening for the hi-tech lockdown his Shield 500XS Security System allowed. In the centre of the upper floor one of a pair of sliding glass doors was open, beyond which were visible an elephantine white leather couch and a plasma-screen TV with the sound down. Our friend, barefoot in Bermudas and a baby-blue rollneck fleece, reclined on the couch with the remote in one hand and his phone in the other, channel surfing and bitching, with a monotony implying defeated acceptance of the rest of the world’s unprofessionalism, about the director.

The plan said to wait several hours. The plan was dead. Hunger and desire had unceremoniously assumed control. We felt it go, both of us, with relief. Come what may conferred its mantric blessing as we moved silently up the eastern slope of the valley, in a single bound each across the empty road, and on, with all lupine stealth, towards the house.

I went first. One leap got me over the gates. A second from the ground to the balcony. A third from the balcony through the open door and directly onto the couch.

Hyperbole’s a writing vice, but I stand by the claim that I gave Drew (Drew Hillyard, the papers have since informed us) quite literally the fright of his life. The Old World snob in me thinks he screamed—or rather went maaah! in falsetto—because he was Americanly conditioned to do so by lifelong overingestion of television and movies. A woman dumps you, you go to a bar and get drunk. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, you shout “Asshole!” and give him the finger. A werewolf appears, you scream like a six-year-old girl. These are the scripts. In any case he not only went maaah! in falsetto but flung both arms up in the region of his head. The remote flew from his hand and sailed across the room to clatter against a chair, leaving America’s Next Top Model to keep us company for the duration. Perhaps by profound survival instinct he held on to his cell phone. I reached out, relieved him of it, and while he watched crushed it in my own ample monster mitt, which spectacle elicited from him a strange nasal moan. His face crumpled or crimped as in preparation for grown-man toddler tears, but from the distension of his mouth and his filling lungs I knew another bigger scream was coming. I thought, We can’t have that.

We didn’t. Talulla’s dark lovely long-fingered hand came from behind and covered the bottom half of his face.

44

YOU’LL WANT ORDER, sequence, categories. I sympathise. But the trinity mystery of fuckkilleat collapses distinctions, swipes aside the apparatus separating this from that and introduces with the transcendental equivalent of a Gallic shrug a completely new form of experience.

There was, for example, deep turf, frost-hardened, fracturing with a soft crunch underfoot. Turf? Where? We were in his living room. We moved languidly, two creatures gone into by the drift of dark water alongside us, neither river nor sea and with no opposite shore. Stars came all the way down to the horizon, nestled in the water. Which isn’t to say I don’t remember Talulla’s black-clawed thumb tearing his neck, a mastoid opening, a fan of blood and his sealed-up roars. The landscape was nowhere and it rolled out from the room. Bits of it fizzed or crumbled away to reveal the deity it belonged to, not God but one of his aspects, the great clean spirit of Predation, to whom we belonged, of which we contained a fragment or flame like a portion of pure joy.

We looked at each other and everything became still. Which isn’t to say the white leather couch wasn’t smeared red where his hand went hurriedly back and forth, as if waving or trying to erase something.

Between us was the shared certainty of escalation, a speeded-up version of the ticking of roller-coaster cars climbing the hill to the Big Drop. You’re feeling this, right? Yes. Meanwhile Drew’s life in vivid chunks like the “Previously, on—” opening of a soap: his mother’s large blond-haired head, blue-eyeshadowed and coffee-breathed, blotting out the light over his pram and coming down to him like a benign planet. His fingers’ ache stretching for the piano keys and the keys themselves clues from the time before birth. A dark-haired twelve-year-old girl biting her lip and the feeling like Christmas and birthday of his young hand creeping under the elastic of her pants her pants her actual pants, and Rheingold saying, You’ve got talent but no star quality, and he was right. A million-page flick-book of TV images, cowboys lightsabres Coke car-chases Friends the Twin Towers. That dream he’d had of swimming to what he thought was the shore except it was the flat edge of the pre-Columbus earth and suddenly he was being sucked to where the ocean poured its wrecks and sharks over the rim into black empty space not even stars just nothing and then waking covered in sweat and the escort wasn’t next to him as instructed but sitting in the window seat sending a text message on her BlackBerry and the thing with women now was purely transactional probably always had been they pretended to want sex but it was always some other fucking thing and it was amazing how you could at forty-one accept that the thing with women from now on forever was just going to be transactional he would still like to have a son and teach him music.

In spite of the moon the television’s light perceptibly twitched and shivered, a blond green-eyed contestant on America’s Next Top Model wept glitterily, half her face obscured under the screen’s pancake of congealing blood.

Talulla turned from what she was doing and looked at me. It’s close. Can you feel it?

Sky and water shifted or swivelled their occult constituent parts and like the solution to a visual riddle the stars yielded a new constellation describing the figure of a wolf, a diagram showing that there was no reason for us, only the certainty of us, and understanding this was like taking the hand that would lead us to peace. The night in the room agreed, through the drifting water and the smell of frost.

Which isn’t to say we weren’t wet with blood or that Talulla didn’t arch her back or that my hands didn’t cup her breasts or that her legs didn’t open with sly animal capitulation. I’d thought I loved her before, and so I had, the woman. But this was the monster and the monster was magnificent. I got an unmanning glimpse of the depth of my capacity for worship, drew back from it as from the edge of a cold-aired chasm. She saw that, too, and sent me, It’s the same for me, don’t you see?

Her question turned out to be the tipping point. A second of absolute balance—then down from the fulcrum moment I went into her as her eyes rolled back and her tongue curled in martial or erotic triumph (detonating however absurdly Dante, And now a she-wolf came, that in her leanness / seemed racked with every kind of greediness)—while the sudden plunge tore us out of our bodies and for an unmeasurable moment returned us to the thing that wasn’t God but the aspect of him that was ours, and in which infinitely generous archetype there was neither her nor me but only the rapture that calls you home to unity with the sweetest song and painlessly burns away the straps and buckles of the suffering self.

Bliss.

Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you’re not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the comedown, never the zenith. We went to the place. We came back—spoiled, made ruined addicts at a stroke. From now on nothing less would do. I thought: Two hundred years of ignorance; now this. And only two hundred years to repeat it in.

I love you, the moment instructed us (as Drew’s life, like the last lights off the black West, went), was for the human sphere. Here, humbled and filled with tenderness for the newly restored finiteness of arms and teeth and lips and bellies, we brought our noses close, lapped, nuzzled, paused, looked, saw into each other and knew for better or worse we’d been consecrated, not just our unholy marriage but our aloneness together in the world. A condition both of us calmly conceded might lead to complete mutual hatred. It was a great comfort to know this, to understand it, to allow all the possibilities. We felt like modest little gods ourselves, beating with fresh love for life and humble in the face of the possibilities. Would have laughed if we could.

Time had misbehaved, disguised hours as moments. I’d lost track. Unforgivably let myself unravel. Fuckkilleat came at the price of caution and control. America’s Next Top Model had been replaced by the Good Morning News. (The standard U.S. double act of paternal toupéed golfer fluffered by twentysomething L’Oréal dummy. The wigged father fucking the waxed daughter is okay as long as both maintain calculated incredulity and restrained outrage at what’s going on out there in the world.) Now, as if it had been caught asleep on duty, the moon woke and began sending its warning, a dragging (menstrual, for all I know) sensation in the lower body’s blood. We might have been two heavy fish on a weak line being reeled in by an invalid—but a magical invalid, since the thin force was irresistible.

As one we left what remained of our victim (not much) and bounded like dog-food-ad dogs out of the open door and over the balcony’s rail into the collusive forest and the vapours of the waning night. My restarted inner clock said less than sixty minutes to moonset.

45

WE RAN, PASSING his spirit back and forth like teens swapping gum. Mist clung. The woods went by in a resinous blur. Half a mile from where we’d set out I caught the scent of my own piss, cut hard left, plunged with Talulla close behind through a band of fog and came in a matter of minutes to the marked tree. I went up it in a single leap and there was the pack, clipped, dew-beaded, but with contents dry and filled with the odours of civilisation. A bit of trouble with the clip cables (there’s not a product on the market built with werewolf fingers in mind) but I resisted slashing straight through them, and after a few moments’ patient application had them unfastened and stowed. I dropped to the ground.

Our pelt back had left us twenty minutes to spare. We lay near each other but not touching, silent recipients of Pan’s globally ignored dawn suite, a soft exhalation through turf and leaf, the whirr of small wings, the introspective clambering of beetles, the shiver of water. The world, Lula was thinking, is oozing, teeming, crawling with miracles. And we live in the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze. You should start keeping a journal, I sent her, but too late: The metamorphic current had caught her. Her animal receptors were frying. I reached for her but remembered Don’t touch me and drew back. She crawled on all fours in a loose semicircle, collapsed, curled up in a ball. Out of sight the moon set, a tiny pain, like the tearing of the last fibre holding a comically loose tooth. Talulla, foetal, jaws clamped, convulsed rhythmically, as if keeping time with something. Mucus rattled in her snout.

Again she was ahead of me. Had the opportunity to observe—which she did, sitting and catching her breath—the body-popping extravaganza of Jake Marlowe Changing Back.

“Thanks for not laughing,” I said, once I was confident language had returned.

She didn’t answer, was still inwardly returning herself. Her eyes were big and bright, murder-purified. Helping her clean herself up (the products don’t care, address blood and guts with the same floral cheer as they would ketchup and gravy) I felt the stunned regrouping of her human aspects, the shock and disgust that here, again, was the grossest defilement, beyond forgiveness, beyond any kind of washing away. Very soon followed (her eyes hardened) by the knowledge that shock and disgust had already proved themselves inadequate. Six times. Now seven. Which left the fact of herself she must find a way of getting along with, since it was either this or death. I know what you’re going through, I wanted to say. I didn’t say it. Aside from the psychic travails she was visibly Curse-hungover. I, old lag that I am, had forgotten how it used to be, aura peeled, consciousness red-raw. You don’t want talk, for Christ’s sake.

I bagged up the cleaning accoutrements and kicked earth over where she’d vomited last night. Rucksack on, final idiot-check of the site. Short of the fading odour of werewolf piss there wasn’t a sign we’d been here.

An hour later, fog-damp, meat-heavy, we were back at the car. My calves ached. Talulla was shivering. The vehicle’s interior was a tremendous comfort when the doors thunked shut. This is another of the purposes of civilisation, so that you can get in a car and close the door and be surrounded by technology-studded vinyl and drive away in conditioned air. I dropped the bin-liner (a DNA conundrum, should anyone ever find it) in a rest-stop Dumpster en route to San Francisco and replaced the number plates in an empty lay-by a little farther up the road. Two hours after that, having returned the Toyota in the city, we boarded an Amtrak bound for Chicago.

For a while we sat side by side in silence, Talulla in the window seat looking out. Sunlight warmed our hands and faces. Her pupils were small. She blinked slowly, as if each meeting and parting of the eyelids yielded its distinct portion of peace. Her body radiated exhaustion. The train’s motion went into us like a sedative.

My eyes were closed when she spoke.

“I’m getting used to it,” she said. Neutral statement. Gain and loss in mutually nullifying equilibrium. Her throat was sore. I didn’t reply. She wasn’t expecting me to.

After a while, she put her head on my shoulder, closed her eyes and fell asleep.

Third Moon

The Cruellest

Month

46

SIX DAYS AFTER murdering Drew Hillyard we arrived, surreal from too many time zones and too much weather, in Ithaca.

Not Ithaca, New York. Itháki, Greece.

We had stopped for a night in New York, however, against my inclination. Nikolai had been haranguing Talulla over the phone ever since we’d left and she insisted on putting in an appearance before we skedaddled again. There was peace to be made between her father and Ambidextrous Alison, who’d threatened, for the dozenth time, to quit if Nikolai didn’t stop interfering. (There was no financial need for the restaurants now, of course, but aside from the problem of how to explain the sudden acquisition of twenty million dollars, Talulla knew the Gilaley business was for Nikolai a nexus for happy memories.) In any case, it gave us a night in a hotel bed after the torturous dimensions of the Amtrak sleeper. A bed we slept in, chastely. Sex on the Curse, it transpires, zeroes libido just in the way that no sex on the Curse whacks the dial up to max. When we touched it was with geriatric solicitousness. Of the many memories from those crammed weeks that one—of slipping between crisp cold hotel sheets with her after three nights on the train—is peculiarly vivid, the swan dive into sleep, like pitching voluntarily into death, the last friable bits of shared consciousness—is this peace? this is peace, isn’t it, to be able to let go?—dissolving into darkness like a skyrocket’s trail of sparks … There are great sleeps, sleeps of monumental innocence, and that was one. We woke with a feeling of having been popped brand-new out of a mould. It gave us a current of mild giddiness on which to make our second exit from New York.

American Airlines to Rome, then Air Italia to Cephalonia. From there a boat to Ithaca. A modest villa up a hundred rough steps overlooking the little harbour town of Konia, an off-season short-notice snip at twelve hundred euros a week. I’d been here thirty years ago, having killed a healthy young French contemporary-dance student holidaying across the Aegean in Ephesus. The place had been insinuating itself at some subconscious level, I believed, since I first set eyes on Talulla at Heathrow, and I’d fixed this sojourn before we left Manhattan for California three weeks ago.

“It’s the domestic happy ending,” she said. “Odysseus back to hearth and home and faithful wife. A kid could have worked that out. I thought you were supposed to be smart?”

Not smart. Happily stupid. Stupidly happy. The Jake Marlowe revolution was complete: Tedious self-knowledge had become blissful self-ignorance. All former certainties were up for renegotiation. The circuitry of detached self-analysis was fried. Here again was immersion in the good blind flow.

Not so simple for Lula. Her larger self might have moved ahead into acceptance but her smaller wasn’t going without a fight. Nightmares woke her, drenched. Fugues took her, after a while gave her back. She didn’t talk about them. Sometimes the entire weight of her self-loathing was compressed into the angle at which she held a cigarette. In the white bedroom I’d wake alone, panic, search, find her lying in the empty bathtub, or standing on the veranda staring at the sea, or curled up with her arms wrapped around herself on the kitchen’s terra-cotta floor. These rites were necessary, in both senses of the word: There was no escaping them, and through them survival lay. She knew this, was sickened by the logic of her own continuance. That’s the trouble with disgust, she’d said. You get through it.

One night in the small hours I found her—after a rise to near hysteria when she wasn’t in the house, or on the balcony, or in the garden, or in the village—out to thigh-depth naked and alone in the sea. I stripped, waded, shosh … shosh (she glanced back, once, saw it was me), stood beside her. The beach was deserted. Cool but not cold. Moonlight (waxing crescent) lay in flakes of silver leaf on the water. I knew not to take her hand, not to touch. In this state she wanted touch like a woman in labour wants a French kiss.

“My dad used to tell me the story of Lycaon when I was small,” she said. “He always made a big deal of the eight years proviso, how no one ever heard of any of the wolves changing back into men.”

There are two versions of the myth. In one, Lycaon, king of Arcadia, tries to feed Zeus human remains in a pie at a banquet and is punished by being turned into a wolf. In another, he offends Zeus by sacrificing a human infant on the god’s altar, after which not only the king but anyone who sacrifices there suffers lupine transformation—and can return to human shape only if he manages not to eat human flesh for eight years.

“What’s the longest you’ve gone?” she asked.

“Four moons.”

“How close would you get to eight years?”

“Eight years might as well be eight thousand. You know that. There’s no going back.”

A little while passed before she said, “No. I know.”

I was aflutter with urgent masculinity, a scowling hyperreadiness to do violence to anyone or anything that might have the obscene inclination to harm her. It was very difficult not to keep putting my hands on her, my arms around her, my body and soul between her and all conceivable dangers. It was such sweetness, such an undeserved relief not to have to care about myself anymore. Only her. Only her.

“It’s always going to be like this,” she said. “On the run. Looking over your shoulder. Getting away with it. What a disgusting phrase that is, really. Getting away with it. I wasn’t going to drown myself, by the way. Can we drown?”

“Yes. In both forms. And burn, eventually.”

The sea’s motion around our legs gave us the illusion of swaying.

“I looked at fabric swatches with my dad and Alison when we stopped in New York,” she said. “We’re redecorating the place on Twenty-eighth Street. And three days earlier I’d fucked you with my face buried in a man’s ripped-open corpse.”

She laughed, once—not, as many would have, histrionically—but because what she’d said was both factually correct and sounded like a line from a cult comedy horror film.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.” I knew why she’d said it. Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It’s a survival necessity. You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.

We returned to the house, a silent walk through the silent village under the constellations. For the first time since the kill I felt lust flickering again between us—then realised: She’d felt it before me, knew the next phase of the cycle had begun, was faced again with its inevitable end point. Hence thigh-deep alone in the wine dark sea.

The villa smelled of our freshly washed linen and the veranda’s potted lemon and thyme. We undressed with a strange placid precision and slipped naked between the cool sheets.

“Don’t you find it strange that I’ve taken your word for it about the drugs?” she said. Somewhere on the road trip we’d covered narcotic suppressants, my old days of the cage, the cast-iron safe, the key. I’d told her the truth: It’s possible to get through, medicined to near death, for a couple of lunations, maybe three (doing four I’d nearly killed myself—literally, I’d torn my own flesh off; if it hadn’t been for the howler’s accelerated healing I’d have bled to death), but there are two reasons for not doing it. First, it’s the worst suffering a werewolf can go through. Second, it’s pointless, because whether it’s this month or the next or the one after that, unless you commit suicide you will certainly kill again—and again and again and again until you die of old age or silver finds you. I’d told her all this.

“I don’t find it strange,” I said. “You see the logic. Morally a month’s abstinence here or there’s meaningless.”

“That’s not why I haven’t tried it,” she said. “I haven’t tried it because I remember what those first three times were like and the thought of going through that again terrifies me. It’s not seeing the logic. It’s cowardice.”

“I’m no different. It terrifies me, too. Plus the last time I tried it I failed.”

“But you’ve done good in the world. You’ve counterbalanced.”

“Money gestures. Which is nothing if you’ve got the stuff to burn. Besides, it doesn’t work. Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.”

My cock had stirred next to her hand. I knew she knew. Was readying herself for the exquisite capitulation. Through sorrow and shame into warmth, and the peace of having no one but each other.

“It doesn’t change,” she said. “I keep thinking there’s some way around it, but in the end it’s still either kill yourself or get on with being what you are.”

“Don’t kill yourself,” I said.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Yes.”

Just stay.

“I might kill myself,” she said. “It’s hard to say.”

“Will you promise not to kill yourself without telling me first?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I promise not to kill myself without telling you first.”

That night I had a tumble of vivid dreams. I think we made love again, in the half-asleep way that comes close to magic. Then more dreams. One of being repeatedly stung in the neck by an elusive insect. I thought, I must tell Talulla about this when I wake up. I must—But the thought fell off suddenly into darkness.

And when I woke, late, the room was filled with sunlight and a sea-smelling breeze, and before I lifted my head from the pillow I could feel the emptiness in the bed where her body should have been and Ellis’s voice said: “Jeez, Jake, it’s about time.”

47

HE WAS SITTING in the room’s one rattan chair at the foot of the bed with his back to the French windows that opened onto the veranda, hands clasped over his belly, one leg crossed at a wide angle over the other. Trademark black leather trousers, steel-toe-capped boots, pale denim jacket. The waist-length white-blond hair was down today. A movement of air brought me his marshy foot odour. A tuning-fork hum in my teeth brought me silver rounds in the shoulder-holstered firearm. I sat up to face him.

“We’ve got her,” he said. “Do you want Q&A or shall I just roll it out?”

“Tell me,” I said.

Ellis nodded, briefly, as if to confirm his private guess at my reaction had been correct, then he got to his feet, made a just a sec gesture, went out onto the veranda and came back a moment later with two cups of freshly brewed coffee. He handed me one then returned to his seat.

“First, let me reassure you,” he said. “Talulla’s alive, well, completely unharmed. She’s far from here, in a location I can’t disclose yet, but you need have absolutely no anxieties about her comfort. This I promise you, Jake.”

I set the coffee down on the bedside table. My hands were trembling. Walking back from the beach last night under the stars she’d taken my hand. Neither of us had said a word but the gesture had made both of us think, gently, of death. Now I had an image of her sitting with her knees drawn up on a spartan bunk in a windowless cell. Alive, well, completely unharmed. I had to believe him because not believing him left me nothing.

“I can’t do this naked,” I said.

“I understand. Go ahead.”

I got to my feet, felt the perfect vacuum where any concession to or interest in my nakedness would with anyone else have been, and dressed, quickly, in yesterday’s clothes. Then sat on the edge of the bed and lit a Camel. My in-love self like a straitjacketed lunatic sobbed and rocked back and forth repeating They’ve got her. They’ve got her. They’ve got her. There was a sore spot on my neck I couldn’t resist rubbing.

“Still stinging?” Ellis asked. “Tranquilizer dart. We’ve got this new guy, calls himself the Cat. Justifiably, if he got up onto your balcony without waking you. You didn’t hear anything?”

A dream of being stung by an insect. My own uselessness lay on me like a passed-out drunk.

“Just give me the information,” I said.

“Right. So we’ve got her. You can have her back and live happily ever after. All you’ve got to do is kill Grainer.”

I looked up at him. His face was peaceful, dark blue eyes lucid. He returned my stare. “You heard me correctly,” he said.

“Why Grainer?” I asked.

Ellis took a sip of his coffee, swallowed; his Adam’s apple moved in his gullet like a little elbow. “Jake,” he said, “it’s like this. For some time now I’ve been involved with a movement within the organisation. This is a group of people—some from Hunt, some from Tech, some from Finance—who’ve read the writing on the wall. I mean it’s pretty big writing on a pretty big wall: We need you. Literally, you’re our reason for being. Not just you, obviously. The vamps, the demons, the reanimated, the voodoo kids, the Satanists, the djin, the poltergeists, the whole crowd. Problem is the crowd’s getting a tad small. You see this, right?”

Post-9/11 wacko-rumour said the Bush administration had launched the attacks itself, the reward being carte blanche for oil-savvy aggression and a shot in the already steroidal arm for the military-industrial complex. No fear, no funding. Ergo al-Qaeda. Same principle here.

“The guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job,” I said.

“Exactly. My friends and I aren’t prepared to let it happen. It’s okay for Grainer, he’s got money and he’s sick of all this shit anyway. But what’s a guy like me going to do? Flip burgers?”

Not just funding, then. Identity crisis too. Ellis didn’t know anything else. Porn stars talked of the industry as a loving family. The Hunt, I could well imagine, played the same role.

“FYI,” Ellis continued, “there are now two WOCOPs. World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena, and World Organisation for the Creation of Occult Phenomena. We’re not out. In all likelihood we never really will be. But under our influence things are going to change. We’re going to save what’s in danger of being lost forever.”

“By killing Grainer?”

“You have no idea, Jake, how much clout the guy has. It’s not just him. There’sa nucleus, a damned junta. They’re controlling funding, recruitment, research, policy, media. Half of them are cynics robbing the organisation blind and the other half are zealots who don’t realise they’re cheerleading themselves into redundancy.”

“I had you pegged as a zealot,” I said.

Ellis shook his head with a sort of benevolent disappointment. “I’m a pragmatist, Jake. Always have been. I thought you knew that.”

“And when you kill Grainer—sorry, when you get me to kill Grainer—what then? A coup d’état? Or are you picking the generals off one by one?”

“We don’t want a bloody revolution,” he said, then swallowed the last of his coffee and put the cup down on the floor. “The organisation’s too unstable and our numbers too small. We’re looking at three, maybe four key deaths in the U.K. cabal. A dozen in the States. We don’t want to overdo it. We’re looking at quietly making our presence felt. Gentle steering. You see how this would work? The zealots, admittedly, have got to go, and Grainer’s a zealot to the core, but the cynics can be persuaded. Either to go voluntarily or to stop abusing the organisation. Not a bloody revolution, but not an entirely velvet one, either.”

“Then you don’t need me,” I said. “Just kill Grainer yourself. In fact you have to for the threat of your group to be credible.”

“I am going to kill him,” he said. “It’ll be me replacing the silver ammo with regular shit. You just provide the camouflage, Jake. It’s the perfect faux cover. We have to let these guys know we did it without giving them the means to prove it. They’re connected in the straight world. We could face regular legal prosecution if we don’t get it right.”

“You’ve left it a bit late, haven’t you?” I said. “I mean, there’s only me left. What difference is keeping me alive going to make?”

He looked at me, almost smiling. “Nice, Jake. But there’s you and her. You didn’t know if we knew about her. You had to find out. We do.”

A slender hope, but worth a try.

“Grainer knows about her?”

“No. Just my people.”

My inner strategist was working through the terror. Grainer doesn’t know about her. Is that any good? Can we use that? Not sure. Give me a minute.

“Okay,” I said. “So there’s me and her. That’s two of us. Big deal. Hardly enough for a Hunt renaissance.”

For a moment Ellis didn’t reply, indeed seemed to attend to some frequency only he could hear. Then returned, with a short sigh. “Jake,” he said. “Oh, boy. You have no idea what’s going on. I don’t even know where to start.”

My scalp shrank. I didn’t want him to start. The details, in any case, wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was that some giant First Principles error had produced fantastic false ramifications. Now everything you thought you knew … Everything you were sure was … Didn’t you see this coming? You, the big reader?

“We’ve cracked the antivirus,” Ellis said.

The temptation to say “What?” though I’d heard him perfectly was all but overwhelming. I resisted, just.

“Serendipitously, too,” he said. “I guess it’s always like that with the big discoveries, a bit of raw meat falls on the fire and voilà!—cooking. Anyway, we’ve got your girl to thank.”

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

No, angel. Not a tranquilizer. Jesus Christ.

“Is Alfonse Mackar dead or not?” I asked.

“He’s dead,” Ellis said. “He died the night he ran into Talulla in the desert, though he wasn’t killed by us. Some local amateur outfit in a fucking Jeep. Can you believe it? We had to recruit them to shut them up. Seriously, Jake, it’s a circus out there, a free-for-all. Every teenager with a smelting kit and a diploma in Buffy. I mean there was a time when—”

“Would you just tell me what’s going on?”

He held up his hand. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Let me get a refill. You want?”

I did not. While Ellis fixed himself a fresh cup I picked up the few items of Talulla’s clothing that lay scattered around the room and put them out of sight. Covered the bed, too. It was horrible, him seeing the evidence of our intimacy now that it was wrecked. I couldn’t stop thinking of the way she’d taken my hand last night and neither of us had been able to say anything. As if we’d shared a premonition of loss.

Ellis put his head round the French window. “You want to sit out here? It’s a beautiful day.”

Teeth clenched, I joined him on the veranda in dazzling light. The sun said maybe three o’clock. Below us a scatter of small white houses dotted the hill down to the village, where Konia went about its absurdly picturesque business. A brown-skinned fisherman sat on a capstan mending a net. A waiter leaned against a lamppost, smoking. Four teenagers lounged around an orange Vespa. I took the seat opposite Ellis with the light behind me. The sun’s heat fit the back of my head like a hellish yarmulke.

“Okay,” he said. “Research on werewolf infection stopped officially five years ago. Unofficially, our boys carried on. It was tough, with the shortage of live specimens—but we had Alfonse Mackar. Alfonse was our golden goose—until he got away. Escaped, for Christ’s sake. Can’t believe we were so slack there. Some of those young guys …” He looked away, shaking his head. “Anyway,” he continued, “that night in the desert we were trying to recapture him. Failing that, get a shot of the latest version of the antivirus into him. What happens? The shooter hits Talulla with the dart by mistake.” He leaned forward, eyebrows raised. “And who is the shooter? Me! Fucking Dead-eye Dick!” He relaxed and leaned back again, smiling. “Serendipity, Jake, every time. All along we’d been trying to treat the werewolf. Suddenly, accidentally, we treated the victim. Talulla’s the first person to survive the bite—and Turn—in more than a hundred and fifty years. She survived and Turned because the meds our eggheads cooked up actually work. We still don’t know if they kill the virus in an established lycanthrope, but they obviously kill it in a new one. A dose of this when you’re bitten and bingo—brand-new werewolf. That’s Poulsom’s thinking, anyway. He’s the brain. These are exciting times.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You killed Wolfgang. You. You’re Grainer’s surrogate son. You’ve killed loads of us.”

He nodded again, lowered his head. Ridiculously, sighed. “You’re right, Jake,” he said. “It took me too long. I was under the man’s spell. He’s got the gift, you know, the charisma. He has been like a father to me. But I had to stay close to him to find out who the crucial players in the organisation are. He’s got access to everyone. Even now the thought of him not being around makes me a little ill, and it’s a year since I joined the renegades. There’s the ghost of ambivalence like a spirit that can’t cross over. It’s the price of double agency.”

I felt ill myself. Not least because it was clear Ellis was mad. His inner universe was impenetrable. He might be telling the truth. He might be suffering a protracted hallucination. The fundamental reference points and parameters weren’t there. You had to make a decision to take him at face value. Easy enough, since the alternative was a void where another explanation should be.

“By the way,” he said, “it’s only fair to tell you: You’ve had the antivirus yourself. The new one. More than once.”

“What?”

“Drinks at the Zetter. Again in Caernarfon. Poulsom’s still after a version that destroys the virus in the biter. Talulla got bitten, and got the antiviral, and as a result Turned. But we still don’t know if she can Turn anyone herself. Plus, having the drug that allows successful infection in the bitten victim gets us nowhere in the big picture. I mean, think about it: We’d have to be there every time someone got bitten to administer the drug. It’s completely impracticable.”

There was a memory of a Scotch at the Zetter that hadn’t tasted right. I ordered an Oban, I’d said to Harley. I think they’ve given me Laphroaig.

Harley.

My life, I thought, is a list of people I’ve failed.

“Trouble is of course you haven’t bitten anyone,” Ellis went on. “That’s another condition of the deal, obviously. You’re going to have to start leaving survivors. We’re thinking two living for every one dead. You guys are going to be in clover while the numbers go up again.”

The light sheeting off the white veranda was irritating my eyes and the heat was an angry sentience. In spite of their irrelevance the details maggot-tickled my brain.

“Why didn’t you take her?”

“Say again?”

“Talulla, in the desert. Why didn’t you take her in then?”

Ellis’s phone rang. He glanced at the number. Ignored it. “We would have,” he said, “but another unit turned up. Regular WOCOP with one of the goddamned Directors on board. They didn’t know what had gone down, obviously, no clue a civilian was involved, but they wanted us to get Alfonse’s body out of there ASAP. Poulsom had gone back to surgi-tag Talulla, but beyond that there was nothing he could do on his own. The Director transferred to our chopper to fly Alfonse back to the Phoenix HQ. Poulsom had to leave her where she was and hightail it. We picked him up a mile from the highway.”

“What do you mean ‘surgi-tag’?”

“It’s a bug,” Ellis said. “A transmitter. ’Bout half the size of your pinkie nail. Surgically implanted. It’s in her chest. Poulsom was curious about what effect the antivirus would have on her. I guess even then he had a hunch. The guy’s uncanny with these things. Anyway, we lost her. We thought she must have died like all the others because for the longest time we got nothing. Then, two months back, beep … beep … beep. I wanted to bring her in right away but the vote was against me. Rumours were rife we had a mole ourselves. Climate of paranoia. One of Poulsom’s guys had disappeared. The whole movement nearly collapsed. But we waited it out.”

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. The thought of them knowing where we were the whole time, all the miles across the States, all my pointless caution, gave me a feeling now like sensual capitulation.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this when you came to see me at the Zetter? Or in Cornwall?”

He nodded, lips pursed and eyes lowered, as in admission of a weakness. “Fear and unpreparedness,” he said. “Grainer was supposed to meet me that morning at the Zetter. We knew you’d start to wonder if Harley’s cover was secure. The suits’ thinking was the story of the French idiot needed reinforcing. Then at the last minute I got a call from the office saying Grainer was tied up with something and that I should go ahead on my own. To this day I don’t know whether they were testing me. They could have bugged the room, or there was your escort, whatsername, Madeline, who for all I knew had been recruited. Anyway, I didn’t like the setup and I wasn’t going to put my head on the block. Too much riding on it.”

“Madeline’s not WOCOP, is she?” I asked, with a genuine feeling of fracture. Maddy not being what she seemed would be a uniquely dismal disappointment, the sort of thing that makes you say, Jesus, is nothing sacred?

“Pure civilian,” Ellis said. “A nobody. Forget her.”

Small mercies.

“Okay, but what about the stakeout in Cornwall?”

“That was just shit luck. I was literally just about to spill the beans to you when I got a message from the crew that two more vampires had been spotted. I had to go. FYI, we killed another three that night, but it took all night—and in the morning you hauled ass back to London before I had a chance to speak to you.”

“You’re not in charge of this, obviously,” I said.

“Holy crap, no way. Wouldn’t want the headache.”

A transparent lie—we both knew he was on the path to remote supremacy—but I ignored it. “So who is?”

“Come on, Jake, that’s classified. Why should you care?”

Madeline would have said: Because I want the organ-grinder, not his monkey.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s because you seem to move back and forth between sounding deeply rational and completely insane.”

He nodded. “It’s a difficulty of manner,” he said. “I’m oblique, they tell me. You know I’m an orphan, right?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“My mom left me in a Kmart in Los Angeles when I was less than a year old. I still dream of the place, a kind of blurry Christmas glitter.”

His consciousness was like a lethal ocean undertow. Before you knew it you were in colder water, miles from shore. I stood up. “Enough shit,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Cool your heels, Jacob. Nothing, yet. Seventeen days to full moon. Grainer still wants the animal. As far as he knows you’re off-radar. In a couple of weeks you’ll contact him and lay it out. Revenge for Harley. You and him, winner takes all. Stick with your original site in the Welsh forest. We’re set up for that. I’m leaving three guys with you in case the vamps pick up your trail, but keep your own wits about you, will you? Oh, and don’t waste your money trying to buy her location off my boys. They don’t know it. You’re on a flight to London tonight. Here’s a new phone and charger. You keep it clear 24/7. The only person ringing you on it will be me. For the time being you just go home and sit tight.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Trust me, Jake, everything’s going to be fine. We’re both going to come out of this winners.”

His own phone rang again. This time he answered, said, “Go,” then paused for a moment before holding it out to me. “Here,” he said. “Talk to your lady.”

48

THE SKY SUFFERED a particle surge, briefly went a deeper blue. Sweat bloomed in my palm as I took the phone.

“Lu?”

“Jake?”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. Where are you?”

“You’re not hurt? They haven’t hurt you?”

“No, I’m not hurt.”

“Don’t be afraid. I’m going to get you out. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the villa still. You don’t know where you are?” I could sense Ellis peripherally with the face saying, Come on, Jake, don’t be silly.

“I don’t know. I think I was on a plane. It’s like a hospital. There’s a doctor here, or a least a guy dressed as a doctor.”

“What have they done to you?”

“Nothing. Took a blood sample, a urine sample. Everyone’s very solicitous.”

“Lu, listen. They’re going to keep you for seventeen days. I’ll be able to talk to you on and off—” I looked at Ellis. Not very often, his face said. “But just sit tight. I’m going to get you out, okay?”

There was a pause in which I felt, like a sudden drop in temperature, how afraid she was. “Promise?” she said.

I had to swallow. And turn away from Ellis. “I promise. I’m going to get you out. Just wait for me.”

“Okay, I’ll try.”

“They want me to—” The line went dead.

I spun on Ellis. “Jesus fucking Christ, get her back. Get her back right now.”

“Jake, Jake, calm down. Calm down. You know the way these things work. You’ve spoken to her. You’ve established it’s your woman. You know she’s okay. I promise you nothing’s going to happen to her. I’ve seen the room she’s being held in and you know what? It’s nice. She’s got a TV and a comfortable bed and her own little bathroom with a shower and everything right there. So seriously, stop fretting.”

He reached out for the phone but I held on to it. Her voice had come through it, felt still there in my hand.

“Come on now, Jacob. Don’t be an ass.”

I gave him back the phone. “You listen to me,” I said. “I’m not doing anything for you until I’ve seen her. Understand? With my own eyes, in the flesh. I see her in person or you get dick. Nonnegotiable.”

Ellis got to his feet. Looked at me curiously for a moment, then turned and rested his hands on the veranda’s rail, looking out over the red roofs and white boats to the shimmering blue of the Ionian. “Jake,” he said. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer him. My head throbbed. A smell of raw fish came up from the village. A Jet Ski thumped across the bay. I was aware of having done something stupid.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s cool. I’m intrigued. I mean you’ve been around for two hundred years. I’m assuming the Death of the Heart at some point. The End of Love. I’m assuming decades of emotional … What’s the French word? Longueurs. Look at that, I surprise myself. Decades of longueurs, then suddenly zammo, this, love again.”

His tone hadn’t changed much, but it had changed enough. I remained silent. The sun and the heat like a million spider bites.

“Don’t make me make them do anything,” Ellis said, quietly. “With sulphuric acid or anything. On her leg or someplace.”

“Please,” I said—but he held up his hand.

“You don’t have sufficient power to dictate terms, Jake,” he said. “I understand the impulse, but you’re not, you know, congruent with reality.”

The leg or someplace. Someplace is somewhere else, her face or breasts or between her legs. Acid makes a sound like a sigh of relief or ecstasy. It would heal but it would hurt so much and they can just keep doing it and this is the possibility you sign up for with love as Arabella had signed up and said, It’s you it’s you, so of course this would be the long-winded justice but not Talulla just me not her just do whatever it is to me.

“You’ll get to talk to her again,” Ellis said. “And we can discuss you seeing her once—maybe—before you do your part. But Jake, seriously, come into line with things, you know? The tone, man. The tone’s all wrong.”

In films a soldier looks down between his feet and sees he’s millimetres from a mine. He looks farther. Mines everywhere. From now on every step is a matter of life and death.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Emotions. I understand. But can I just make a suggestion, an observation?”

“Of course. Shoot.”

“You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to keep her. Let me explain. In fact let me ask you a question: Why was Harley killed?”

“To get you riled up,” Ellis said. “Although between you and me I thought we’d have done better to hold him, alive, until you were willing to play ball.”

“Exactly. Harley was killed because you knew I needed an incentive to make a fight of it. And you were right. A month ago I’d had enough. A month ago I didn’t want to live.” He was already nodding, slowly, with a smile. “Now everything’s different. Now I have her. I’ll kill Grainer anyway, with satisfaction and relief, because as long as he’s alive he’s a threat to the woman I love.”

The smile wasn’t just advance comprehension. It was the recognition of a fellow strategist. “That’s nice again, Jake,” he said. “The logic’s sound. I like it. And for what it’s worth I believe you. But you know it’s not going to fly. Aside from the fact that it’s still just you trying to negotiate a concession we have zero reason to make, it’s not even my call. As I said, I’m not running this.”

Silence. Mentally the equivalent of someone trapped in a room repeatedly trying the doors he already knows are locked. Blood and urine. Why? Everyone’s very solicitous. Solicitous captors worse than brutal ones in the long run. We know this. She knew it. It had been in her voice.

For what seemed a long time Ellis and I stood without speaking, him looking out into the blue-silver bay, me with my face and wrists and fingers full of useless life. He had the air of a man thinking sentimental thoughts. Engendered, perhaps, by the memory of being abandoned in a Kmart. Then he turned to me and stretched out his hand. Sunlight blazed in his white-blond hair. “So,” he said. “Do we have a deal?”

49

THERE WAS NO talking him out of the three-goon bodyguard but I managed to get a break on London quarters: After a low-voiced call to whoever was running the show it was agreed I could hole up at Harley’s place in Earl’s Court—and thus, after passing through the first hours of pointless incredulity, I’ve spent thirteen of the seventeen days confined here, brought takeout food by the agents (a fourth drafted in for rooftop duty when the attic skylights were discovered), working my way through Harley’s whisky, bringing this journal up to date and living for the rationed phone contact with Talulla.

“Half the problem’s boredom,” she said, yesterday. “You know what the other half is.” Three-quarters into the lunation she, like me, had stopped eating. I’d told Ellis she’d need cigarettes, booze, water, and he’d promised me, apparently in good faith, to make sure she got them. But a higher authority had intervened. Poulsom, I inferred, the sound of whom I liked less and less. Water, yes, but no alcohol, no nicotine. Instead she was offered sleeping pills and muscle relaxants, which, after two nights on the Hunger’s rack, she’d accepted. Aside from the loss of her liberty this was, according to her, the first hardship she’d suffered in their custody. (Unless one counted kidney ultrasounds, of which she’d had three. Poulsom suspected stones.) She’d had the situation explained to her (by Ellis, whom she said treated her with a sort of ludicrous medieval politesse), understood there was no (avowed) intention to harm her, and that as soon as I’d delivered on my part of the deal she’d be released. Aside from the ultimate question of whether either of us would make it through this alive was the nearer mystery of what they were going to do with her come full moon.

“Poulsom says they’ve got it covered,” she told me. “Whatever that means.” False uncertainty. We knew what it meant. Either they were going to kill her or they were going to restrain her or they were going to put her in a cage with a live victim—and most likely record the spectacle for the breakaway WOCOP archives.

“Anyway, they’re taking care of me,” she said. “I’ve got Luxury Bath and Shower Gel from Harrods and a brand-new set of enormous white towels. Also a hundred-plus TV channels. I’m now an aficionado of East-Enders and Coronation Street and—”

The line went dead. Sudden amputation lest we forget who’s in charge, lest we forget by whose grace we live, lest we forget there’s a job to be done.

To deal with the obvious matter first. Ellis has no intention of letting Talulla go. And if he does, Poulsom doesn’t. Assuming there’s a genuine agenda to kick-start a new lycanthropic generation (and this I can believe), the science is in its infancy. Talulla survived the bite and—courtesy of the antivirus, apparently—Turned. Very well. But the big question, by Ellis’s own admission, is whether she can Turn victims of her own. And that question will be tackled in the laboratory. Poulsom et al. aren’t going to release her into the field when they can feed her test victims in a controlled environment.

Which means—try not to laugh—Me Rescuing Her.

Which in turn means either gangbusting her out by force or smuggling her out by guile. Sliced any way, it means me finding out where the fuck they’re holding her.

Enter: money. This is where money comes in. Thanks to the recent boom in military subcontractors one can, with sufficient resources, buy one’s own little army. (As is now widely known, the Bush administration bought one—Blackwater—and sprinkled it just above the law all over Iraq.) My resources are sufficient—but still, I don’t know where they’re holding her.

There is one infallible way of finding out.

Meanwhile my life here is a dentist’s waiting room. A rhythm soon established itself: dayshift agents handing over to night, evenings in the library, jagged bits of sleep, raw-eyed mornings, the shift change, the daylight hours of pacing or lying on the couch. Harley never had a TV, so I can’t keep my love company in Soapland, but of course I’m surrounded by books. This afternoon I leafed through a 1607 Dutch-German edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses illustrated by Crispijn de Passe. Market value, according to a 2006 index, eight thousand pounds. I have no idea what Harley intended for the collection, whether he’d made a will, what’ll happen to the place now he’s gone. Not that the world has a clue he’s gone. Grainer & Co. have seen to the cover-up of his murder (God only knows what became of the severed head in the Vectra’s boot) though it can only be a matter of time before a utility company or Council Tax office starts chasing a payment. Harls had no living relatives. There’s a solicitor in Holborn, but since I’ve no intention of getting involved in a homicide investigation there’s little point in contacting him. Instead I wear my deceased friend’s clothes and drink his supply and pass the tight-wound time with his books. Of late I’ve found myself leaning, at idle moments, on his bone-handled cane.

I have little truck with my minders, who’ve been schooled to keep shtoom, and in any case I’m not disposed to chat. A few words exchanged with the arrival of cigarettes or firewood, but otherwise I remain mute and they talk among themselves, quietly, over their headsets. There’sa man stationed on every floor. The miserable roof detail rotates, since no one wants it. I’ve offered to take a turn myself (the Hunger with no fresh air is a soft close hell) but no dice. Sorry, chief, can’t be done. This is Russell, the one responsible for lopping off Laura Mangiardi’s head back in Cornwall, who has an appealing liveliness and who is by now so bored that he would talk to me if I didn’t keep making it obvious that I wished to be left alone. Instead he smokes and does Sudoku and thinks up wretched jokes with which he torments his fellows—What do you call a small robot vampire? Nosferatu-D2—and strips and cleans and reassembles his personal arsenal two or three times a day. The team’s firepower is a mix of conventional automatic hardware and antivamp kit: night-vision goggles, long- and short-range Stakers, UV sticks, a miniature version of the Hail Mary for whoever’s on the roof. Russell packs a small flamethrower, too, though I recall Harley telling me most Hunters regarded even the compact versions of these units—“boochie-burners” (“BBs” for short)—as obsolete. Thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s turn in Alien there had been a revival in the eighties, but the hard maths of weight-to-efficacy had soon reasserted itself, and now they were seen as an affectation. In any case young Russell wears one from time to time, and is wearily mocked for it by his compadres. With all this equipment dedicated to my protection I ought to feel safe. I don’t.

Outside, London goes about its business like a virile degenerate old man. By the fire’s light I sit in the window seat with a straight Macallan (two bottles remain from a case of twelve) and a Camel, watching the traffic—sudden halts and surges like blood through a complex valve—and the self-involved comings and goings of humans. As always most are full of energy, riddled with their own details, asimmer with schemes and regrets, fears, secrets, hungers, sins. Occasionally love. A very young dark-haired couple came out of a deli, not dreamily or holding hands or in any way obviously rapt but deep in conversation and glimmering with the shared wealth of each other. My in-love heart tautened to see it. In love. Oh, indeed I have the condition. Verily, reader, I am fully, absurdly sick. Life, grinning like a great white, is enjoying the joke: Years of incrementally getting ready for death and now all he wants is life. Come on, Jake, you’ve got to laugh.

I can’t. Not with my in-love heart on perpetual pleading duty, inwardly audible at every gap in my self-distraction: Please … Please … Please … There are specifics—please don’t let them hurt her; please let me see her again; please let me find out where they’re holding her—but this pleading is an emotional whole greater than the sum of its parts, addressed to the God who isn’t there, to the benignly indifferent universe, to the spirit of Story, who we know these days has a soft spot for the dark ending. Please … Please … Please …

My inner dead are asleep, sleeping very badly, dreaming of release. Love, it appears, has the power to force them under. They toss and turn. Their murmur builds, threatens a swarm into wakefulness, dies back. Love’s crude spell holds them down, just. Arabella’s ghost endures in seared wakefulness, knowing something’s over. I keep turning away from her. I keep turning my face away. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years a hundred and sixty-seven years ago doesn’t seem like yesterday. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years the present matters more than the past.

It’s seemed, these thirteen days, that I’ve left real time behind, drifted into a suspension or loop where seconds bulge and minutes warp, taking their normal shape only when I hear Talulla’s voice on the phone.•

It’s seemed. Until a couple of hours ago. Ellis has been.

I was pouring myself a drink when the library door opened and he entered, smelling of wet London. He had a painful-looking stye on his left eye and was wearing an excess of ChapStick. The effect was of a creepily humanised waxwork. “Wouldn’t mind keeping you company with one of those, Jake,” he said, before taking the armchair opposite the couch, which received him with a leather gasp. “It’s miserable out there.” I poured a second Scotch and handed it to him, suppressing a shudder when our fingertips met at the glass. “Jiminy,” he said, after slug and lip-smack. “That’s better.”

The impulse to do violence to the man was powerful, reflexive and held absolutely—Talulla on her bunk, eyes wide in the TV light, trying to see through the wall, the night, the unknown miles, to me—in check. I put another log on the fire, pokered it a bit, pointlessly, then sat down on the couch, facing him. Obedience. You keep her alive with obedience.

“Okay,” he said. “Operational instructions. Two days from now, on Wednesday morning at nine a.m. precisely you ring the WOCOP office in Marylebone on this—here: It’s a completely clean phone with a trace blocker. Don’t mix it up with the other one. Grainer will be at the office. You won’t get him, obviously, you’ll get the usual bullshit from whoever’s on reception. You tell them to give Grainer the message to call you on the clean number in one hour, then you hang up. Grainer will call.”

“How do you know?”

“Jeez, Jacob, just listen, will you? He’ll call because you’re all he fucking thinks about. You think I’m making this up as I go along?”

“Okay, okay.”

“I’m under pressure, dude.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Held the heel of his hand against the stye. “When he calls you, you set the meet. Full moon’s Friday, moonrise 18:07. This you know, obviously. Don’t let him change the location. Wales. Your forest, okay? We’re set up for that. You head out for the Pyrenees or someplace and we’re screwed. Got it?”

“Got it. When do I see Talulla?”

No reply. The blood drained from my scalp. My knees and hands were adrenaline-rich, giddily ready to do something. There was nothing I could do. “I have to see her,” I said. Then added, with no need to pretend careful desperation, “Please. For God’s sake.”

Ellis exhaled, heavily. The brightness, the look of heightened sensuality, was, I now saw, exhaustion. I hadn’t realised he was so near the edge. “Oy, Jake,” he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I’d disappointed with my weak will. “Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you …” He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior … “Actually I do know this is hard for you. I’m sorry. I’m not using my imagination. That was my New Year’s resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow’s shoes. That and to read one poem every day.”

The feel of the poker I’d used was still phantomly there in my hand. Perfect for splintering a human skull. I didn’t move.

“Okay, listen,” he said. “The hotel you stayed at in Caernarfon, the Castle Hotel. You’re booked in there Thursday night. Same room. The room that overlooks the street. You get there Thursday and wait for my call. You stay in the room. You don’t go anywhere or see anyone. No hookers, nothing.”

Again I thought of Maddy—or Poor Maddy, as she’s become in my lately sentimentalised memory, her terrible comprehension (and flawed denial) when Grainer had said, He’s a werewolf, honey. On the back of which flashback something suddenly nagged—but I had no time for it.

“You’ll bring her to the room?” I said.

“No, Jake, we won’t bring her to the room. You just check in and wait.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Ellis. Seriously. I’m not—” I stopped. Ellis sat very still, the awful long-fingered white hands at rest on his knees. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. The feelings. God dammit.”

He rolled his head on his neck a couple of times, easing tension. I held my tongue between my teeth. To my good fortune Russell appeared in the doorway. Ellis looked up.

“Land Rover went past again, sir,” Russell said. “You told us to let you know.”

“Okay,” Ellis said. “Get a trace on the plate. It’s probably nothing.”

“On it, boss.”

“And tell Chris I’m coming out, will you?”

“Roger that.”

“What Land Rover?” I asked, after Russell had gone.

“It’s nothing,” Ellis said. “Been seen twice. Now three times. Probably just a local resident. These guys are getting bored.” He swallowed the last sip of his drink and leaned back in the chair, for a moment turned his face to the fire and watched the buckle and snap of the flames in the hearth. “We’ll do a slow drive-by, Jake. You’ll see her. You’ll talk to her on the phone. That’s it. Don’t push it. This is a favour. This is goodwill. In lieu of future cooperation.”

“I understand. But Ellis?”

He looked at me.

“I want to level with you about something.”

The blond eyebrows raised. Eyes lapis lazuli buttons. “You do?”

“Yes. Listen, and don’t flip out: I know they’re not going to release Talulla. Wait—” when he opened his mouth to protest. “Wait. Hear me out. Don’t say anything till I’ve finished. You and I both know the eggheads want her in the lab. I’m buying that you want werewolves back, but not that people like Poulsom are going to take their chances with natural selection. I know the odds are I’ll never see her again, even if I survive Grainer—unless you take me in too. Look, for all I know that’s the plan anyway. I off Grainer for you and your boys are waiting with tranqs and a cage. In which case fine. In which case go ahead. If the only way I get to live out my days with Talulla is as her fellow lab rat then so be it. I’d rather share her fate than live without her. Now you can laugh if you want to.”

He didn’t laugh, but the eyebrows were a long time coming down. Eventually, he smiled. “I’ll tell you what, Jake,” he said. “I like you. I really do. You’ve got the clarity. So many of the fuckers I deal with are just blundering around in a fog.” He shrugged. “Of course you’re right. They want to keep her until they know transmission really works. They want to get the numbers up to fifty in captivity, then everyone gets out and the game begins again. Frankly, I don’t know why they bothered trying to sell you anything else. I was against it. Won’t be like that when—” He stopped himself. Almost blushed. When I’m in charge, he’d been going to say.

“And me?” I said. “What’s supposed to happen?”

“They want you, too, of course, if we can get you in safely.”

“Then get me in safely, will you?”

He stared at me with what looked like collusive delight. “That I can promise you, Jake. You have my word on it.”

Operationally there wasn’t much to go over. I’d given him the Beddgelert location soon after arriving here and he’d prepared an Ordnance Survey map showing a half-mile radius around the spot where, a hundred and sixty-seven years ago, my life as a werewolf began. I was to stay within it. The bodyguard wasn’t going with me to Wales. Ellis thought there was a good chance Grainer would put surveillance of his own in the area once I’d made the call: A glimpse (or word) of me in the company of WOCOP personnel and he’d know something was afoot. The climate of paranoia was extreme. Therefore Thursday morning a private car would pick me up and drive me, alone, directly to Caernarfon. Yes, I’d be exposed for a few hours at the hotel, but it was unavoidable. Ellis himself would be with Grainer.

“He’ll want you there?” I asked.

“He’s always said I’d be with him. I think he wants a witness. You have to understand, this is his whole life. The culmination.”

Mentally there was much going on. Chiefly file-rifling for who I’d need to contact and how to move the requisite fees fast, whether I’d be able to get past the phone and room taps at the Castle, but also stubborn currents of doubt that Ellis really had it in him to murder his mentor. Pointless currents of doubt. There was no other way to get to Talulla.

“Here’s the Marylebone office number,” Ellis said. “Wednesday, nine a.m. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He turned for the door.

“Ellis?”

“Yeah?”

“Is she really all right? I mean, no one’s done anything to her?”

He looked at me again. For a moment all veils fell and I could see what he really thought: that I’d been weakened, that in some fundamental way I’d let him down. As of course had Grainer. As of course had his mother before that. He was, I now realised, the most singularly alone human being I’d ever encountered. In the purified moment between us I saw his future, the rise to despotism, isolation, eventual madness, most likely suicide. All without love. We both saw it. And as if the universe was invested in proving there was no end to the perverseness of the heart (even the werewolf heart), I felt a flicker of pity for him. He felt it too—and in a reflex of terror shut it out.

“She’s fine, Jake,” he said. “She’s cool. I promise you. Stop worrying. You okay for supplies here?”•

It’s three in the morning. The night-shift boys are at the nadir of their boredom. The fire in the hearth is low, hissed into occasionally by rain coming down the chimney. For days now I’ve been circling my predicament—our predicament, mine and Talulla’s—trying to will a better way out of it. There isn’t one. It’s a relief to accept it, finally. In thirty hours, with a prayer to the God who isn’t there, I’ll make the call to the Marylebone office.

50

THE BLOOD ON these pages is mine.

51

THIS MIGHT BE the last I write. If it is, I hope whoever finds this journal carries out my final wish (see inside front cover) and gets it to you, angel.

On Wednesday morning I made the call. Got the call back, from Grainer himself. The trick, I’d decided, was not to oversell it.

“Jacob,” he said. “I’m aghast.”

“I don’t want a conversation,” I said. “Friday moonrise. Have you got a pen and paper? Beddgelert forest, Snowdonia. OS Grid SH578488. You get what you wanted.”

“All things considered,” he said, “it’s really the only fitting—”

I hung up.

The day was a churning and excessively detailed nightmare. It rained, continuously, cold skirls blown and dashed by an icy wind. Brollies dislocated. Car headlamps came on. A drain in Earl’s Court Road blocked and made an iridescent black lake. The Hunger was a long-nailed hand raking my insides from gullet to anus. Desire, too. Oh, yes. Plans to hatch and a lovesick heart to comfort were matters of indifference to the pre-Curse libido, which, having reached apotheosis with Talulla last full moon was making it clear it would never again settle for less. I had to watch the booze, too, though by Wednesday evening the last of Harley’s Macallan was gone. Diminishing anaesthetic returns. I hadn’t left these rooms for more than two weeks. Perhaps a little craziness was setting in, but I was convinced I could feel Lula reaching out telepathically. Maddeningly just on the edge of clarity. I’d asked Ellis to let her call me but he’d claimed it was out of his hands. Said he’d stuck his neck out as it was to get me the drive-by.

My own phone had been confiscated and Harley’s disconnected. I had no doubt the two I now had from Ellis were bugged and alarmed, but it was a ticklish trial to resist taking the chance. Every hour was an hour I could have spent getting the mercenary ball rolling. As it was I’d have to find a way of getting a clean line out from the Castle Hotel, which would be my only chance to act unwatched. I’ve had moral offsetting recourse to hired guns before. I used them against the Fascists in Spain, the Nazis in occupied France, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the death squads in El Salvador, most recently against government forces and Janjaweed militia in Darfur—and in every instance absolutely nothing moves without money. A lot, up front. I have half a dozen SCOAs (Security Codes Only Accounts) in Swiss banks but even with my access and contacts setting up an operation in less than twelve hours would be a trip to the border of insanity. But it was all I had. I’d never see Talulla again without getting into WOCOP myself, and I’d never spring us without professional help from outside.

The vampires had other ideas.

Just after midnight I heard Russell outside the library door saying: “Andy? You reading me?” Pause. “Andy, come back.” Pause. Then loudly: “Andrew, put your twatting headset back on.”

Nothing.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Russell put his head round the door. “Sit tight in here,” he said. Then into his com: “Chris, I’m not getting anything from Andy. Go up there and check, will you?”

Andy was on roof duty. Chris on the floor immediately below him. Russell was on the library level with me, and fourth man Wazz (I hadn’t enquired into derivation) patrolled the ground floor. “Wazz? You copy all that? Yeah. Look lively.”

I’d got up from the couch and was about to advise being given a weapon just in case, when what happened next happened.

Very fast.

A (literally) staggering stink of boochie. Clamped salivary glands and the surge of nausea. One foot came off the floor for a moment while the room tilted. I found myself back on the couch. My vision clouded. Someone upstairs screamed.

When my sight returned I saw Russell in profile through the library’s open doorway. He was looking at something out of shot and his face was the face of a child in deep distress. In an admirable testament to Hunt training his hands were doing what they’d been drilled to do and searching his belt for optimal weaponry. I saw his fingers close on a UV stick and begin to draw it out—before the sound of flesh and bone rupturing followed a split-second later by a spray of blood that covered his face and chest stopped him. He groped, blinded, managed to get the UV stick out—then jerked and dropped it, undetonated, both hands ascending with a strange slow grace to his throat, where what was unmistakably one of the Hunt’s own wooden stakes had buried itself.

Flung or fired by whatever was coming along the landing towards him. He went with what looked like deliberate slowness down onto his knees, eyes wide, mouth open, trying and failing to swallow, khah … khah … khah.

The black vampire from Heathrow appeared on the landing. Seductively calm long face suggestive of immense patience and capability. In his left hand he held a Hunt Staker, lately discharged. With his right he dragged the body of Chris, the second-floor man, by its spinal column, which had been yanked through the abdomen and ribs. In with the stench of vampire I caught a poignant whiff of shit from the gashed human bowels.

Two rapid computations. First, that only Wazz downstairs remained alive. Second, that only a dozen paces stood between me and capture.

The library had a second door connecting to a bedroom, from which another exit took you back to the landing. The question (posed in the distended dreamscape of perhaps two seconds, while the vampire dropped Chris’s corpse, moseyed over to kneeling Russell and took the young man’s skull gently between his hands) was which door to go for.

A person steps into the road, turns, sees a truck about to hit him, seems to freeze. The freezing is the amazingly quick brain making its honourable start on the avoidance mathematics, the geometry of getting out of the way. And even the amazingly quick brain is too slow. The first trajectory calculations are barely—BAM! Good night.

Ditto here. I was still in the early trigonometry when the vampire with a deft twist snapped Russell’s neck, turned and launched himself at me.

One finds oneself flying through the air. That’s quite something. Time stretches to accommodate peripheral details: my foully smouldering Camel abandoned in the onyx ashtray; the empty Macallan bottle on the floor; a signed first edition of American Psycho one of the agents had brought up from the contemporary collection downstairs; the bellows I gave Harley for Christmas twenty years ago.

Nearer details were regrettably vivid too: the vamp’s dark eyes with whites tinctured brown, his bad meat odour and long calm face, the feel of his cold left hand around my throat (a nail had already drawn blood) and his cold right in a grab that pinched the flesh of my chest through my clothes. Overwhelmingly the power discrepancy. Overwhelmingly his being able, now that he had hold of me and we were flying through the air, to do pretty much whatever he wanted.

Not that revulsion wasn’t mutual. His face’s calm was forced. The werewolf, a vampire has written, smells like the Platonic form of a filthy animal. I wondered—as I had such liberty for wondering, while we sailed across the library—if vampires ever threw up. Throw up what, though? All they had was blood. Harley would have known. (Poor Harls. He hadn’t much liked American Psycho. Savage satirist or twisted fuck? he’d asked me, when he’d finished it. Both, I’d said. It’s a false dichotomy. The romantic days of either/or are over. Who’d know that if not me?)

As one we crashed into the chimney breast and fell, just to the right of the hearth. Something brittle snapped under me. My spine, I thought, since the vertebrae had taken the brunt of impact—but in the moment it took him to slash four fingers across my face (white heat, blood welling in my left eye as if half the world were having a red cocktail poured into it) I knew both that it wasn’t a bone and that it was my only chance of escape.

We’d ended up with me propped at an angle against the wall, him sitting astride my thighs. His face had a sprinkle of dark skin-tags or moles (that in a genuine horror evocation brought Lula’s fair torso with its beloved beauty-spot constellations) and a likeable outcurve from nose to top lip. Black typecasting would have him as nirvanic drug lord or philosophising janitor. He put his hand over my face and I writhed as if trying to get out from under him—in fact trying to get hold of the thing that had snapped under my back.

I wasn’t, quite, quick enough. Before I could make my move—my one move, my first and last and only resort—his other hand had torn through my shirt, executed a deep screw manoeuvre into the flesh of my chest and come away with a bloody gobbet of pectoral muscle, hardly Shylock’s pound but more than enough to take my scream (for a moment I thought my poor nipple had gone) to the comedy edge of falsetto.

It probably worked in my favour, that scream, pleasurably diverted enough of his concentration so that my wriggling under him played as just more futile struggling. I’ll never know. Because having at last got proper purchase on the top half of Harley’s bone-handled walking stick, which had been left propped against the wall when I’d poured the first of the day’s drinks, and had snapped under me when we fell, I whipped it out from behind my back and with a blurred prayer to the God who wasn’t there drove it with all my strength into the vampire’s heart.

As at all such moments the prosaic din of things subsided out of respect for the magnitude of our event. Time paused and space solidified around us. For a moment we were figures in a paperweight. He managed a look of nude surprise—a sudden, a cartoon change of expression, as if he were exaggerating for the benefit of a child—when he lifted his hands to see their veins blackening as if hurriedly filling with ink. What he couldn’t see was the same phenomenon at work in his neck and face, the blood vessels showing as a darkening web, the magical roadmap of his death. He stiffened, paralysed first by incredulity, second more literally by … well, paralysis. I jerked my hips up, swiped, knocked him off me. He went over with a lightweight or taxidermed rigidity onto his side, knees bent at ninety degrees, hands fixed as if readying an invisible basketball for a shot. His eyes closed.

I got to my feet. The face and chest wounds were burning. Obviously I’d heal, but the pain was determined to show its stuff while it could.

However. This was a chance. Russell & Co. all had mobiles. I’d just doubled the time I had to set up a rescue. (There remained the question of how, once inside the renegade WOCOP facility, I was going to let my guys know where that facility was, but again, since there was nothing to do but trust I’d find a way, that’s what I did, wondering, with haggard realism, whether mobile phones were small enough these days that I might conceal one up my arse.) I hurried out onto the landing.

Cold air and the sound of heavy rain came down from the floor above. The boochie must have taken out roof-man, Andy, and got in through the skylights—whereupon I remembered young red-haired Wazz, as yet unaccounted for, who’d been on watch on the ground floor. If he was alive he’d be on a hair trigger. I didn’t want him shooting me by mistake. Also, depressingly, I’d have to kill him if I was going to take full advantage of the phones.

I stepped over Russell and Chris’s remains and took a cautious peep over the banister. Blood crept down my face like the hot tears of childhood.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” a female voice said.

I spun left. The blond vampire, Mia, stood on the landing maybe fifteen feet away. The bottom half of her face was covered in blood in just the supposedly endearing way a Kodak toddler’s is covered in chocolate (or a scat star’s in shit, I always think every time I see one of these revolting infants) and in her hand she held the raggedly severed head of the unfortunate Wazz. His tongue protruded lewdly from between his lips and his eyeballs had rolled back in their sockets. He looked as if he’d died just as he was about to blow a halfhearted raspberry, to express extreme tedium.

Mia, on the other hand, in black boots, black suede skirt, black nylons, black satin blouse and black leather jacket, appeared superabundantly alive, smiling through the blood mask. Her blue eyes—not the dark lapis lazuli of Ellis’s but somewhere between periwinkle and turquoise—glittered with what looked like joy. A vein in her temple showed. She was white, even by vampiric standards. From her name and the company she’d been in at Jacqui Delon’s I’d made her Italian, but now that I mentally replayed Is this what you’re looking for? the accent, though elusively mixed, put her roots a long way east of Trieste. A Russian with Norse colouring—but why not? Scandinavian marauders sailed down the Volga and took charge of Novgorod more than a thousand years ago. For all I knew she’d been there when the Vikings raided Constantinople.

All of which redundant speculation laboured under the perceptual paradox of a beautiful woman exuding a smell of decomposing meat and ripest pigshit. Initially her teammate’s odour—less faecal but gamier—had obscured hers. Now I got it clear and unmingled. I sank to my knees, put a hand out to stop myself from complete collapse, slipped in Russell’s lake of blood and fell facedown next to his corpse.

There was very little time. No time, really. Any moment now she’d drop Wazz’s head and be upon me. Any moment now it would already have happened.

Nonetheless I’d made certain calculations. (Whatever is happening, something else is going on.) Russell had ended up on his front with his right arm trapped under him. That put most of the kit—including the UV stick he still had in his hand—out of reach. The Staker’s holster was empty, the Staker itself lay five feet away in the library doorway. Getting at the stake, still buried in his throat, would require three seconds more than the one I’d actually have from the moment I made my move. The only weapon within reach was the flamethrower, and I wasn’t sure how to—

I heard the head drop and felt the air shift. She Is Coming. Hopeless hopeless hopeless but I rolled and plucked at the BBs’ gun-unit holstered at Russell’s thigh—not fast enough. Her boot heel gouged a divot from the side of my skull as she went past in a blur. I collapsed a second time.

Stay put.

Not only because the blow, a rude and deafening bok, had dazed me but because the position concealed my Braille navigation of the flamethrower. She hadn’t seen that. Didn’t know the weapon was there. What I needed from her now was the Bond villain’s soliloquising delay. I wasn’t going to get it. She was here to kidnap, not to kill.

“Uhhhr,” I said, not entirely faking. The head gouge was in the transitional stage between very cold and very hot. The wound in my chest was a rose of fire. I opened my eyes to see her descending gently to the floor. Flier. Fuck. Closed them again. Forced nimbleness into my fingertips. It’s basically a glorified water pistol, Harley had said, knowing not whereof he spoke. Two triggers, one for fuel release, one for ignition. Ergo I’d need both hands. The odds had just worsened.

“Phil?” Mia said.

Flying over me she’d passed the library doorway. Peripherally registered its lone occupant. She hadn’t known.

Two-thirds out of the holster.

She stood with her feet apart and an ugly hang to her limbs, face slack, staring at the crisping corpse by the hearth. Rain was a continuous exhalation against the house.

The weapon’s nozzle was caught on something, I couldn’t tell what. Talulla’s voice said quietly in my head: You’re running out of time.

Closing my eyes would’ve helped my fingers but Mia turned in the doorway and looked at me. “You?” she asked. I opened my mouth to lie but she said: “Don’t bother.” In the brighter light of the library her face’s colours vivified: red; blue; white. Very calmly she bent—one nyloned knee ticked, humanising her—and picked up the Staker that lay by her feet.

“You want me alive, don’t forget,” I said. She stood over me. I looked up at her. Here was the submissive’s camera angle of choice for his dominatrix, the perspective all boot and thigh and hip narrowing to the remote worshipful contemptuous head like a mountaintop divinity. I took a breath for reiteration—and she shot a stake through my left leg.

Pain, yes, sheet lightning, but also a peculiarly schoolboyish sense of injustice. She’d clipped the femur but not broken it, gone instead at an angle through the quadrilateral and vastus externus. No major arteries, but the sciatic nerve violently wronged already playing the Psycho shower scene strings in shock, a sensation that went all the way up to my molars.

Paltry vandalism as far as her ladyship was concerned. Something to keep me busy while she, tossing the Staker downstairs and turning with an expression testifying to the effect of my odour on her, took out a mobile and dialled. “It’s me,” she said. “I’ve got him.” Pause. “Phil’s dead.”

I wrapped my left hand around the stake, bit down on Russell’s leather elbow guard, pulled. One wonders why grimacing’s a reflex, since it can’t possibly help. In any case a few Popeye gurns and gurgles later I got the bastard thing out. No blood-spurt but a fart or squelch from the wound. The sciatic nerve was heartbroken, unable to do anything to comfort itself except sob. I lay, groaning, now practically on top of the Hunter’s body—and straight back to concealed woozy frantic work on the stuck flamethrower.

“Bring the van,” Mia said. She’d taken a few paces away and was now, with her back to me, searching her skirt pocket for something.

The weapon came free of the holster.

“Nothing serious,” she said into the phone. Having extracted from her pocket a white handkerchief she held it up to her nose. Her next utterance was muffled. “Four of them.” Pause. “What do you think?”

The little fuel unit in its bulletproof case remained strapped to Russell’s back. No time to get that off. Whatever I was going to do I’d have to do from where I was. Very well. Kneeling, I lifted the gun unit and hit both triggers.

Nothing happened. Or rather, the thing I wanted to happen—the throwing of flame—didn’t. What happened was that a quantity of unignited fuel squirted out of the nozzle and spattered the back of her leather jacket. Not surprisingly, she turned to face me.

I looked down at the weapon as if it were a child of my own who’d turned me in. Then I looked at Mia. The moment I had before she came at me again was courtesy first of her surprise and second of her embarrassment: She’d got cocky, turned her back. If Don Mangiardi had seen this … Shame enriched her. The white skin didn’t blush, but the access of professional guilt sensitised it. Her stink deepened.

Meanwhile I fumbled mentally with a handful of engineering components and a sketchy cross section: fuel hose, gas pipe, fuel-release trigger, valve plug, ignition trigger, spark plug, battery, ignition valve.

Ignition valve. Lets compressed gas into the business end of the gun where it mixes with air and fuel released through small holes in the nozzle. Unopened, there’s nothing for the ignition trigger to ignite.

I opened the valve.

She was in midair when the flame-jet caught her, spectacularly, in the chest. Momentum kept her coming but I held the triggers down. She veered and crashed into the library doorway—oddly silent. Fat heat filled the landing’s space. My face felt tight-skinned. I released for a second. She scrabbled and thrashed like a short-circuiting robot, threw herself backwards into the library. I hit the triggers again. Her arms flung petals of flame. She got airborne, jackknifed, dropped to the floor. A bookcase was on fire. So was the couch. I’d taken the hose to full stretch from the tanks on Russell’s back but she was still, just, in range. I released and fired again, the dregs of the fuel, I could tell. The smoke alarms went off. Into perhaps the last margin of her strength, she launched herself straight at the window, crashed through it and disappeared, upwards.

Fire was thriving in the bookcase, living it up on the couch. The room was a box of priceless kindling.

Sorry, Harls.

No time for elegy, however. The couch’s conflagration had spread to the rug, where my journal (this journal, dear reader, dear finder and I pray honourer of the dead) lay within a hand’s span of the flames. I leaped in, snatched it, leaped out again. A quick frisk of Russell’s carcase yielded his phone. Ditto headless Wazz’s after I’d more or less fallen down the stairs. I grabbed an overcoat of Harley’s from the hall, threw a chair through the kitchen window (the boys had kept the place locked and there was no time to hunt for keys), cut my shin on a shard getting through and, with on top of all this the Hunger raking my guts, made my escape through the sodden back garden.

52

AN HOUR LATER I lay on a king-sized bed in a double room at the Grafton Hotel in South Kensington. Checking in had been delicate. Harley’s overcoat hid most of the bloodstains but the singed hair and four diagonal stripes across my face, though already semihealed, gave the desk clerk pause. “Don’t ask,” I said, snapping the Amex Platinum (Tom Carlyle) down on the counter. A tactical simultaneity: brusque tone and class plastic. It worked, just.

“What the fuck, please, is going on?” Ellis asked, very calmly, on the Ellis phone. (I now had the Ellis phone, the Grainer phone, the Russell phone and the Wazz phone. The Grafton phone—untapped!—had made the latter two redundant.) His team hadn’t called in. He’d rung their phones, obviously. I’d deemed it prudent to answer only the one I was supposed to have. “I mean,” he said, still very calmly, “what the fuck, please, is going on?”

I told him about the Attack of the Vampires. I did not tell him that I’d already called my contact at Aegis (the U.K.’s version of Blackwater, former SAS, MI5, army and navy) and woken the dozing funds at three of the Swiss banks.

“You’re a lucky sonofabitch, Jacob,” he said.

“Yes, well, I recommend you make flamethrowers compulsory kit.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re lucky we had one of our guys in the local force.”

“The police?”

“Think about how this would look: four Hunters dead and Jake Marlowe miraculously at large in perfect health. It would look, would it not, as if you’d done my boys in yourself and fled.”

This hadn’t occurred to me. A worry: What else hadn’t occurred to me? The hotel room was deep-carpeted and thick-draped. A small part of me thought how wonderful it would be to lie down to sleep here and never wake up.

“Fortunately for you,” Ellis continued, “our agent verified the vamp remains, once they’d got the fire out. There’s not much of Harley’s library left, I’m afraid.”

I opened the curtains a couple of inches and looked out. There was a break in the rain. Wet London breathed, half asleep, twitching here and there where night-drama neurons fired: a woman getting raped; a junkie expiring; someone proposing; a baby slithering out. In the daylight the city’s all brash bounce, no question of not going on. Nights you feel the exhaustion, see the going on for what it is: terror of admitting the whole thing’s been a mistake.

“I’m not in perfect health, as it happens,” I said. “I got staked in the leg. I’ve got a gouged skull and a hole in my chest the size of a tennis ball.” All of which were healing—the whispering knitting circle, the cellular cabal—even as I spoke.

“I should have been there,” Ellis said. “I would have made a difference.”

“Maybe. It happened very fast. Did you get a trace on the Land Rover?”

“What? Oh, that. No. Guess Russell flaked on it. I clean forgot myself. Anyway it was the vamps, evidently.”

“Looks that way,” I said, although Mia, I quite clearly recalled, had said “bring the van” not “bring the car.” Competition for my attention was fierce, however, and the Land Rover question was lightweight.

“We’re going to have to redirect the pickup,” Ellis said. “Where are you?”

“Tell your guy ten a.m. outside the Masonic headquarters in Long Acre.”

“Jake …”

“Listen, Ellis, I’ve had more than two weeks of not being able to go for a piss without someone’s say-so, and then with someone else listening in while I’m having it. You can give me one night of privacy. You know I’m not going to run. You’re still holding the cards. I just need to get my head together. What’s your driver’s name?”

Over the phone I could feel his will to autonomy. There was someone he should okay it with, someone he didn’t like. Whoever this person was their days of unchallenged leadership were numbered. Ellis liked me more than he liked them.

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t dick me, Jacob. You know the cause-and-effect reality.”

“Hundred percent.”

“Driver’s name is Llewellyn. He’ll know you, but just in case, he’s in a BMW four-by-four license plate Foxtrot Tango six seven two Echo Uniform Delta. Code word is lupus. Ten a.m. Don’t let me down. Don’t let your lady down. And no”—as I drew breath to ask—“you can’t talk to her now. You’ll see her tomorrow. Trust me, she’s fine. She’s comfortable.”

I spent what was left of the night on the hotel phone.

53

THE DRIVER, LLEWELLYN, young, fair, leanly muscled, with the cleanliness and near-skinhead haircut of a Mormon proselytiser, was precisely on time. The code word seemed redundant but I asked for it anyway and received “lupus, sir” in reply. Sir. Okay. Picked for this job because he followed orders to the letter. You will treat Mr. Marlowe courteously, but you will not engage in conversation. Fine. I was in any case itchy with sleeplessness and inwardly ajabber with Hunger. “I’m going to have to chain-smoke, Llewellyn,” I warned him. “I hope that’s not going to be a problem for you?”

He opened the rear nearside door. “Not a problem, sir,” he said. “We’re partitioned in any case.”

Indeed. Bulletproof glass, by the look of it. Ditto the windows. “Are we expecting to be shot at?” I asked him, giving it a rap.

“Fitted as standard on these, sir,” he said. “Do you want the radio on or anything?”

He called in to let whoever it was (not Ellis, the ether said) know I was on board, then we were on our way. It was a pretty morning. Blue spring sky and lively sunlight and a breeze that shivered the puddles and set London’s buds nodding on their stems. Not that much of it got through to me, quietly bearing up as I was with the Curse’s foreplay, the phantom elongation of snout and finger, the compressed spasms, the importunate erections, the occasional prescience in toenails and eyeteeth. My teeth chattered, actually, as in the first phase of the flu, prompting Llewellyn to remind me I had my own heat controls in the back. Meanwhile Piccadilly, Park Lane, Marylebone, the Westway, the M40. I tried to sleep. Failed. Instead pictured the effects of the dumped money, the fertility of the down payment. Impossible to know yet how many men a breakout would need, but I’d paid Aegis for a squad of fifty up front, nonrecoverable. My guess was that wherever they had Talulla there wouldn’t be a large defence. Ellis’s London renegades couldn’t number more than five hundred and the majority would be carrying out regular WOCOP duties as normal. Poulsom’s installation would rely on concealment rather than a standing force.

Alongside these ruminations I kept up a more or less continuous self-harangue. You fucking idiot, you’re going to get yourself killed. They’ll torture Talulla and rape her and do experiments and mate her with animals and if you’re not already dead force you to watch and this whole fantasy of rescue and survival you’ve cooked up is obscene and preposterous and even Charlie at Aegis had trouble not laughing at you down the phone and only didn’t because he knows you’ve got the money and it’s your fucking funeral you stupid cunt she’s going to die and so are you—

The Ellis phone rang.

“Jake, you’re en route I hear.”

“Is she with you?”

“Not yet. Calmez-vous. You’ll see her tonight. Now listen. To confirm: Moonrise is 18:07 tomorrow. It’ll just be me and Grainer. He’s already up there, so don’t deviate: Stay in the hotel. Llewellyn’ll pick you up at 14:30 tomorrow and drop you in Beddgelert. You’re on foot from there. Obviously you know the way.”

“Aren’t you going to be on the drive-by tonight?”

“Can’t. I’m going up to meet Grainer now. After that he’ll want me with him. I do the weapons check. There’sa routine, a set of rituals. Don’t worry, Jake, she’s in safe hands, I promise. Just stay in your hotel room until you get the call.”

The rest of the journey was febrile peaks and troughs. Moments of vividness—the huge wheels of a truck very close; a crow flapping up from fresh roadkill; a green verge covered in crocuses—and long blurred stretches, pre-Curse hypersensitivity that amounted to perceptual distortion or fuzz. My face tingled, eyes itched, limbs lost their edges to the pins-and-needles ghost of the wolf. The memory of killing with Talulla was a root that clutched from balls to brain. Neither fear nor fatigue obscured it. Wulf went out from it, ranged to tearing point, searching. She was here, somewhere, close, somewhere …

Just after three o’clock, under a pied sky of cumulus and silvery blue, we arrived in Caernarfon.

54

I MANAGED AN hour of reiterative calls to Aegis before the batteries on Russell’s and Wazz’s mobiles died within minutes of each other, like an ancient couple who couldn’t bare to be parted. Daren’t risk the room phone. It’s probably bugged, but there’s also the possibility they’ll call in on it for the drive-by with Talulla. Either way I’ve left it alone.

Of course without the calls there’s nothing to do but wait. Smoke. Pace. Write. Look out. Drink. I’ve allowed myself one bottle of Scotch between now and tomorrow afternoon. Eighteen-year-old Talisker’s the best the Castle’s got. Shame not to go out on something classier, if going out’s what I’m doing.

The room is as I remember it. Seems a decade ago. Poor Maddy’s white shoulders hunched and her face full of immediate belief though she’d said, Is that real? That’s not real, is it?

It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

I’m sorry, Harls, for the mess I made of your life. For costing you your life. Vengeance, now, late, shamefully overdue, but vengeance nonetheless. Grainer. Ellis too, eventually. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’m sorry the bare fact of what they did to you wasn’t enough. I’m sorry it took loving someone. Someone else.•

Dark. I watched the last of the light over the Irish Sea. Now the window shows only the street. No call.•

The whole of one’s being reduces to listening for the sound of a ringing phone.•

Something nags when I think of Madeline here. This room’s hauled it to the edge of memory but can’t quite heave it over the border.•

22:50. Still no call. It’s raining again. I’ll have to open the window to see her clearly.•

Thank God.

I was beginning to give up hope. Just after midnight the room phone rang. Not Ellis. An older-sounding male.

“Take the handset to the window. ETA two minutes. Now hang up.”

Time, as the twee verse has it, is too slow for those who wait. I opened the sash. The two minutes swelled and warped. Car after car that wasn’t them. Then a mirror-windowed people-carrier pulled up across the road. The handset rang again.

“Hello? Lu?”

“Listen carefully,” the male voice said. “You get thirty seconds, precisely. Not negotiable. Go.”

The vehicle’s rear window went down—and there was Talulla’s face, awake, expectant, full of her nimble consciousness. Not quite fully disguising fear, though I could see even in that first glance the work she’d put in not to let it show. She smiled at me.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“I’m fine. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m getting you out, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It won’t be long, I promise.”

“Be careful. You have to be careful.”

“I will. I’m coming for you.”

“Promise you’ll be careful.”

“I promise.”

“What happened to your face?”

“Nothing. A scrape. You look so beautiful.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. You’re sure they haven’t hurt you?”

“They really haven’t. I miss you.”

“You’ll be seeing me very soon.”

“I could feel you close all day.”

“Me too.”

“I wish I could come to you right now.”

“Oh, Jesus, Lu, I—” A hand wearing a black leather driving glove took the phone from her. I saw her face’s effort collapse. You think: I should have spent days just holding her, kissing her, looking at her. The electric window closed. One last glimpse of her straining to see over it. The soft dark eyes.

“That’s it, chief,” the voice said—and hung up. Seconds later the people-carrier was gone.

55

SOMETHING’S HAPPENED TO ME. I’ve stopped abstracting. This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains. Madeline was right in her priorities all along.

I hadn’t realised my conversion until reading back over these pages, and now, when they ought to present themselves, conclusions desert me. For a werewolf facing what might be his last few hours your narrator finds himself woefully short of summative maxims. The great mysteries endure, unsolved, unseen-into (except love, which is really not a mystery but the force that eases mysteries into the hard shoulder); I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it. You love life because life’s all there is. And I only know that because I happen to have found—again—love. There’s no justice: that I know. Precious little to show for two hundred and one years.

My skull aches from where the moon spent the night under its cranium, like a lozenge of slowly melting ice. In a few minutes Llewellyn will arrive to take me to Beddgelert. I haven’t slept but in spite of the pre-Curse torments I’ve showered, shaved, trimmed my finger- and toenails. There are no clean clothes so I washed my socks and underpants in shampoo and dried them on the room’s radiator. Ellis tells me there’ll be fresh gear for me when the deed is done. I drank the last of the Talisker around noon. Since then coffee and Camels, the occasional glass of tap water. It’s raining, halfheartedly. This seat by the window’s become a dreary home. Its view is of the town’s grey edge: a road, passing cars, headscarved old ladies, dog walkers, now and then a flushed jogger. Beyond this a low grey wall, a narrow strand, the shifting colours of the Menai Strait, Anglesey.

Not for much longer.

My inner dead make their presence felt now like a silent congregation. Arabella, their priestess, has gone, so lately they’re still in shock. There’sa tenderness around her absence, like the soft blood-filled cavity of a pulled-out tooth. What can it mean that I killed and consumed my wife and unborn child and now have love in my life again—except that there’s no justice and that one must, if one can bear it, live?

Enough. My nerves are bad. Reflection no longer becomes me, has no place alongside love.

Besides, here’s Llewellyn with the car. For better or worse it’s time to go.

56

NO ONE RAPED ME. First because they were all scared of Poulsom and I guess he’d taken anything like that off the menu. Second because raping me would have meant killing me: A woman you’ve raped tracking you down is one thing, a werewolf you’ve raped is another. Within hours of my first abduction I stopped worrying about it.

Then the second abduction happened.

Seeing Jake had been hard. He looked terrible. Those scratches on his face like an insult. He seemed so alone standing there in the hotel window. His shirt was wrongly buttoned, just one button out of line, the slightest effect of crookedness. The makeup on my face felt obscene. I’d wanted, among the million other things, to look pretty for him—and perversely the universe had cooperated. Earlier, back at the place they’d held me—“the white jail,” as I thought of it—one of the female guards had slipped me a paper bag with cosmetics in it. Eyeliner, mascara, lip gloss, eyeshadow, blusher. “I know you’re seeing your guy tonight,” she said. “Don’t say where you got it.” She was embarrassed. What was weird was that until then she’d been utterly stony. Hardass, I’d nicknamed her. I was so stunned I didn’t say a word. Afterwards, sitting on my bunk, I cried. I read somewhere that when you’re a kid it’s people’s cruelty that makes you cry, then when you’re an adult it’s their kindness. I hadn’t realised until that moment how completely I’d given up any entitlement to kindness. And then when I saw Jake, so visibly strung out, looking so totally alone, the makeup felt cheap on my face, a stupid girl’s gesture. (The girl’s still in there, waist-deep in the blood and guts of the monster’s victims. There might be something out there that’ll kill the girl but if so I can’t imagine what it could be.) Are you okay? I’m fine. Are you all right? I’m fine. Weeks of waiting and then when the moment comes you trade the plainest words. The nearness of him hurt, my heart, my head, my breasts, my womb, it felt like, started the wolf trying to tear itself free. Memory of the kill we’d shared in California opened in me like the warmth of hard liquor, starting in the chest and hurrying outwards, a secret ecstasy in my hands and teeth and scalp. Poulsom said, Careful, you’ll hurt yourself. On the cuffs, he meant. I hadn’t known I was straining against them.

I wish I could come to you right now.

Oh, Jesus, Lu, I—

Thirty seconds, we’d been promised. It felt like three. A glimpse. A blur. A joke at love’s expense. Then the car was pulling away, my neck twisted to see out the back, Jake in the lit window getting smaller. Going. Gone. That feeling like the first day at school, a ball of emptiness in my stomach because my mother had seen me crying but still turned and walked away to the car, the silver Volvo I couldn’t stand after that. You learn early the basic thing is loss. Then spend the rest of your life trying to forget it.

Jake says he stopped abstracting. Seems I’ve started. Writing this isn’t easy. I haven’t kept a journal since UCLA. Back then we all kept them, miles of young women’s handwriting like barbed wire, the full-time job of self-dramatisation. I don’t care what he says now. I’ve been fucked over by that asshole for the LAST TIME!!!

I supposed they were taking me from Caernarfon back to the white jail (“they” being Poulsom and two guards, Merritt and Dyson), wherever the hell the white jail was. I knew we were in Wales, but that was pretty much it. My European geography’s the standard American shambles and the place-names I’d seen on the way—Llandovery, Rhayader, Dolgellau—could’ve been in Wonderland for all they meant to me. The headache I’d had since first being captured was knowing I had to do something and knowing there was nothing I could do. I hadn’t bought the line that I’d be released once Grainer was dead any more than Jake had, but there was no choice except to play it out. The rationed phone minutes had carried Jake’s message in the spaces between words: Sit tight. I’ll get you out. In the good moments it was like having a powerful talisman in my pocket. In the bad it was like a voice (Aunt Sylvia’s, in fact, that bitch who fell on childhood optimism like acid rain) repeating, He won’t come, you stupid little girl, you’re dead. And these were bad moments, now, after seeing him. He’d looked so tired. Those scratches and the wrongly buttoned shirt.

We’d been driving maybe twenty minutes—a narrow winding road bordered by woods on both sides—when we found the way blocked by a traffic accident. A silent ambulance with lights sadly splashing the trees, two medics tending a helmeted motorcyclist down on the ground, the bike on its side nearby.

“Er …” Poulsom said. He was in the back with me and Dyson. Merritt was behind the wheel.

“Inconvenient,” Dyson said.

“Reverse,” Poulsom said. “Immediately.”

What happened happened very fast. There was the tiny precise sound of a bullet going neatly through plate glass—and almost simultaneously Merritt’s head lolled on the back of his seat.

Intense dreamy fumbling followed: Poulsom wrangling his gun out of his shoulder holster, Dyson trying to clamber over both of us to the door on the opposite side from the shot, me trying—dreamily knowing it was pointless—to get out of the restraints. It would have looked like the Three Stooges if anyone had been there to see it. I took Dyson’s full body-weight—one booted foot on my thigh—as he launched himself through the rear door, then he was out, stumbling for the cover of the trees.

He didn’t make it. A short burst of automatic gunfire dropped him six feet away. In the silence that followed I felt Poulsom’s body next to mine softening into acceptance.

“Get out, slowly, Poulsom,” a man’s voice said. “Hands where we can see them.” I looked past Merritt’s body through the windscreen. The medics and the motorcyclist were now on their feet by the open back of the ambulance, armed with rifles. It had started raining.

“Well, Talulla,” Poulsom said, quietly, “this is going to be bad for me, I think.” He got out. I sat very still. Not that I had much choice: In my white jail cell I’d been free to move around, but for transportation they’d put me in Guantánamo-style restraints, the I-shaped wrists-and-ankles arrangement that allows short steps only. From the ankles another set of cuffs attached me to the bolted base of the seat.

“Drop the weapon,” the voice told Poulsom. “Get on the ground facedown, hands behind your back. Do it now.”

Looking to my left through the open door I watched Poulsom follow the instructions. A moment after he’d assumed the position an athletic guy in full black combat fatigues melted into view from the darkness behind the trees. A WOCOP Hunter, from the gear, with a dark crewcut and heavy-lidded eyes. He genuflected onto Poulsom’s neck while he cuffed him, then helped him, gently, to his feet.

“Miss?”

I started. The motorcyclist—helmet removed to reveal a young, cheerful face with a goatee and a silver nose stud—was at the other open door on my right, holding a heavy set of wire cutters. Cold wet air touched my face and throat. I was suddenly very thirsty.

“Don’t be alarmed. I’m just going to get your legs free. Excuse me.” He bent, and with hardly any effort clipped through the cable that fastened my ankle restraints to the seat. “Have to leave the others on for a moment,” he said. “If you’d like to take my arm, I can help you out of there. That’s it.”

In spite of the adrenaline rush and frantic figuring (was this Jake’s doing? Was I being busted out?) it was good to stand straight after the cramped hours in the car. I lifted my face to the rain. The night air was delicious with the smell of damp woodland, streaked with the odours of wet tarmac, cordite, diesel and the seductive whiff of the motorcycle leathers. This close to transformation the Hunger goes through me in surges that take all the strength out of my legs. I swayed, almost fell. The surge subsided. We were under thick cloud but the moon knew I was there. I get it in the roof of my mouth, my teeth, the palms of my hands, my belly, my cunt. (One of the hells of jail had been the dumb persistence of sex. Jerking off under the covers or in the shower even though I was sure there were cameras, despite Poulsom’s assurances otherwise. He’d said, “I know rising libido is going to be a problem for you as we enter the waxing gibbous phase.” For a terrible moment I thought he was going to offer me the use of his men, or a vibrator, or, God forbid, himself, but he went on: “Please understand, Talulla, surveillance stops at the door to your room. The space you occupy beyond it is one of complete privacy, I promise you. We have absolutely no desire to make things any more difficult for you than necessity dictates.” Which presented one of the other hells of jail: trying to be civil to Poulsom. Truth was I hated him on sight, and he knew it, but he also knew I wasn’t going to risk pissing him off. I read an interview once, someone—an actress—complaining that Christopher Walken—or it could have been James Woods—smelled or maybe even tasted of formaldehyde. Either way I could believe it, and Poulsom had the same deal, the fish eyes and the waxy skin, that look of having been under fluorescents too long …)

The Hunter spoke into a headset: “Okay, we’re good here. Come ahead.” An armoured van crept from a concealed gap in the trees and pulled up behind the people-carrier. While the medics were closing the ambulance doors and setting the bike upright, Poulsom and I were escorted to the van’s rear, where the motorcyclist opened the doors. The vehicle’s interior was occupied by a steel cage, snugly fitted and bolted down. No sign of lock or key, only a mystifying plate of what looked like dark glass in a metal housing where the lock should be.

Not mystifying for long. The Hunter pressed his palm flat against it. With a string of blips and a gasp of what sounded like hydraulics the cage door popped open.

“Inside,” the Hunter said. Poulsom clambered in, gracelessly, and in a moment had been seated on the floor and secured, cuffs to bars. The motorcyclist helped me in, fastened my wrists to the cage, then released and removed the ankle cuffs altogether. “Better for you like this,” he said. “Save you getting tossed around like a lettuce.”

The Hunter leaped up into the van and stood over Poulsom. Shouldered the automatic and pulled out a pistol from a side holster. Pointed it at Poulsom’s head. “Phone,” he said.

“What?”

“Call in. You’ve drawn heat. You’re going round about. They wait for your update but Ellis is green for go. That’s all.”

“They’ll know—”

“They won’t know shit without any of the alert words, all of which you know I know. Are we clear?”

Pause.

“I’m not going to ask twice.”

Poulsom opened the phone.

“I dial,” the Hunter said.

Poulsom’s performance was surprisingly convincing, considering he had a gun at his head, a blend of tension, weariness and irritation; he was the horrifically overworked dictator who had to suffer shit luck and universal incompetence.

“Good,” the Hunter said, pocketing the phone. He gave the motorcyclist a nod, not looking at me. Palpable contempt came off him. Not for me personally but for all women. I had an image of him choking a young girl while sodomising her, his face testifying that it wasn’t enough, nothing was enough. My nose has sharpened for these things. He knew I knew, which made a disgusting claustrophobic intimacy. It was then I began worrying again about getting raped. Rape was his default. To him the only obstacles were practical. But fear was a practical obstacle. He knew what I was. This, I had to hope, would keep him off. Another surge of the Hunger went through my thighbones. My face was hot. He turned and jumped down from the van.

The motorcyclist produced a small capped syringe from his pocket. “Bobo time, doc,” he said. Poulsom’s face quivered—fear and a look of sensuous revulsion—as the motorcyclist approached him. “Relax. It’s a sedative, that’s all. Hold still.”

“Whatever you’re doing,” Poulsom began—but the motorcyclist belted him, hard, a backhander; my armpits went suddenly hot—across the face.

“Hush. And relax. There we go.”

“Where are you taking us?” I said.

“Can’t tell you, miss. Sorry. Not far, though. Don’t worry.” He saw me eyeing the syringe. “You’re not having any of this.” He winked, then went to join the others. Poulsom’s eyes had closed.

“Let’s move ourselves, gentlemen,” the Hunter said. I heard the people-carrier doors slam and the ambulance start up. The whole ambush had taken no more than two or three minutes.

A slight weight shift said our driver had left the armoured van, and a moment later a man in his early forties wearing Securicor overalls appeared alongside the Hunter. “Thought you should know, sir,” he said. “Looked like a tail a couple of miles back. Can’t be certain. Probably paranoia.”

“Vehicle?”

“Land Rover, white, Alfa Lima two five five Juliet Papa Romeo. Single male driver. Nothing, really, one mile too many, maybe.”

“It’s because it was white,” the motorcyclist said. “You notice white more. It’s the Moby Dick effect. What sort of moron tails someone in a white car?”

“The world’s full of them,” the Hunter said. “I’ll let the boss know anyway. Let’s go.”

57

WE DROVE FOR what felt like fifteen or twenty minutes. There was only a small opaque glass window in the back door, and the Hunger soon had motion sickness to keep it company. I was close to throwing up (or dry heaving, since I’d eaten nothing for a week) by the time we stopped. The van’s rear door opened and the Hunter palmed the cage’s lock. The Securicor guy climbed in to unfasten me and put the leg cuffs back on. Over his shoulder I could see the motorcyclist dismounting. Poulsom, still out cold, was left shackled where he was.

Hard to make out detail in the dark. We were outside a small stone farmhouse with no lights showing. The land around felt empty. I had a sense of deserted fields, remnants of dry stone walls. No cattle, no sheep, nothing.

“Get her inside,” the Hunter said, not looking at me.

The farmhouse was L-shaped, low-ceilinged, damp, furnished with junk-shop crap from what looked like the 1930s. A dark wood bookcase with no books. A green couch you didn’t want to sit on. An armchair with stuffing coming out like ectoplasm. A faded floral carpet. All the curtains were closed. They lit a log fire in the stone hearth. My shins ached. Wolf in my finger- and toenails like the dull biting shock you get from an electric cattle fence.

“I suppose it’s pointless me asking what’s happening?” I said to the motorcyclist, when the Hunter was out of earshot.

“ ’Fraid so, miss,” he said, with the diamond smile and alert friendly green eyes. His curly hair was surfer two-tone, blond and brown.

“Or how long I’m going to be held here?”

“I wish I could tell you, I really do. Try not to worry about it.” He was tearing the cellophane off a pack of Marlboro. Poulsom had forbidden me cigarettes and booze, but since his reign was over …

“Any chance of bumming one of those?”

We lit up. “Thanks,” I said. “Now all I need is a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Maybe you could have a quick rootle arou—”

“Carter,” the Hunter said. The motorcyclist turned. “Outside. Check Poulsom in an hour. If he’s not quiet when he wakes up, give him another shot.”

When the motorcyclist—Carter, evidently—had gone, the Hunter approached me on the couch. I thought, excruciatingly, of myself jerking off in my cell. In the dark, yes, but there must have been infrared. A terrible feeling of disgust came over me. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a roll of duct tape. “You can agree to keep quiet—silent in fact—or I can stick this over your mouth. It’s up to you. You won’t be given the choice again.” The space between us held information. He was up against a higher authority. He was restricted. Whatever he was capable of, he wasn’t capable of it yet. And there was, no mistake—the curryish stink of it came off him—fear. It was causing him trouble, that he could be afraid of a woman. It didn’t compute. He had to keep reminding himself this wasn’t a woman, this was a monster.

“I’ll be quiet,” I said, looking straight at the fire.

It was a bad night. They rotated the watches, two men outside, one in. Obviously I couldn’t sleep, with the pre-Curse fevers and the Hunger like talons trying out their grip on different bits of my insides. In the white jail Poulsom had “allowed” me muscle relaxants, which I’d taken with deep resentment. I would’ve taken a handful with gratitude now. I lay curled up under a blanket on the couch, shivering in spite of the log fire. And if not the shivers the sweats. Jake says shoulders and wrists feel it first but for me it’s the line from the back of my skull to the end of my spine. In the deliriums (deliria? deliriæ? Jake would know) the yellow-toothed wolf from the Little Red Riding Hood book I had when I was a child comes to me—purple jacket and all—shimmering out of the wall or the fire or the carpet or just thin air, comes to me and wraps his bigger weightless body around mine and tries to get in.

The motorcyclist made cups of instant black coffee which I drank because it was better than nothing. My clothes hurt my skin. There was a pendulum wall clock in the kitchen that went toonk … toonk … toonk and the soft sound was almost unbearable. Jake came in and out of the fever. Sometimes he was the Red Riding Hood wolf, or the wolf spoke with his voice. You’ll be seeing me very soon. I could feel you close all day. Me too. Sometimes he was just himself, invisibly next to me on the couch, the source—as in heat source or light source—of unloneliness. The way sometimes he’d put his hand in the small of my back. It was as if my consciousness was there, in my sacrum, not in my head. Or at least the bit of my consciousness that was terrified of having to go back to being alone.

Sometime in the small hours Poulsom was brought indoors so he could go to the bathroom. He was given water, then taken back to the van. He must have been freezing in there.

At dawn the Hunter and the Securicor guy came in looking raw. The motorcyclist cheerily fixed breakfast from what was in the fridge, eggs, bacon, bread, cheese, tinned fish. The smell of the fried food was nauseating. I sat in the bathroom with the extractor fan going, wafting an open bottle of bleach under my nose. There was no window to even think of climbing out of, and in any case they’d left the Guantánamo restraints on.

My escort was visibly relieved to have got through the night without incident. The Hunter opened the curtains in the lounge. A morning of low cloud and weak light. Last night’s impression of the landscape had been accurate: It was empty, crossed here and there by low pale stone walls. East, the fields undulated very slightly into a distant stack of hills. West, maybe three hundred yards away, they were bordered by a forest.

I’d assumed daybreak would bring some development, but apart from the men’s air of having survived the worst of an ordeal, nothing changed. I saw the Hunter standing fifty yards off talking into a cell phone. The Securicor guy took the cold breakfast leftovers to Poulsom in the van.

At four in the afternoon the motorcyclist and I smoked the last two of his Marlboros. I began to wonder whether the impossible was true, and they didn’t, in fact, know that in a little over two hours I was going to turn into a monster. In which case all I had to do was request a bathroom visit as close to transformation as possible, Change—and kill them. I wondered if I was up to that. The Hunter, surely, would be armed with silver.

Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t they all be?

“Okay,” the Hunter said, having wrapped up another fifty-yards-away cell phone call. “It’s time. Get her hooked up in the van. No, wait …”

He walked over to me and pulled the duct tape out a second time.

58

THEY MUST HAVE given Poulsom another shot because he was unconscious when I resumed my place with him in the cage. I had to work hard not to let the tape over my mouth drive me crazy. Incredible the difference it made, being denied speech. In combination with the restraints (this time both hand- and foot-cuffs were attached to the cage) it felt like being buried alive.

The journey wasn’t long but it wasn’t easy. Standing was the best position, but with the short length of cable from my ankles to my wrists I could only hold on to the bars at navel height. Jolts and sudden turns flung and yanked me. Poulsom, tossed around, as the motorcyclist would have said, like a lettuce, would be covered in bruises when he woke up. If he woke up.

Five minutes before we stopped, the terrain got rougher. What had already felt like a primitive road turned into what can only have been a dirt track, full of ruts and potholes. Keeping my balance was impossible. Poulsom was the better off, loose-bodied, out of it.

We stopped. Executed a cramped three-point turn. Stopped again. The rear doors opened. The Hunter stood with his hands on his hips, looking at me. Through the bars I saw we were on a dirt road barely bigger than a bridleway that threaded between thinning trees before curving to the right about twenty feet away to run parallel with the bank of what I could hear and smell was a stream. On the opposite bank a narrow strip of grass, a few lilac bushes, then trees again. There was no sign of the motorcyclist or the Securicor guy.

“Getting hungry?” the Hunter said.

I looked past him. Concentrated on breathing through my nose. The air was loamy and damp. The cloud cover had broken and the evening star was out. My nostrils were hot and tender. Moonrise was less than two hours away. The first inkling of animal clarity was already there, a kind of vicious joy in the power that would come up through the soles of my feet into my ankles, shins, hips, elbows, shoulders. If I lived that long.

“Come on,” the Hunter said. “You’ve got meals-on-wheels in there. Couldn’t be handier.”

Poulsom, he meant, obviously. Poulsom says they’ve got it covered, I’d told Jake when we’d discussed full moon, the Change, the need to feed, whatever that means. Whatever it had meant to Poulsom, it hadn’t meant this. It cost me a lot to hold on, teeth jammed together, the tape on my mouth still imprinted with the heat and weight of the Hunter’s hand.

I looked directly at him. Very slowly gave him the finger. He laughed, quietly. Then slammed the van door shut.

59

POULSOM WOKE UP, shivering, in a sweat. As far as I could tell in the little light that made it through the frosted glass his night and day in the van hadn’t agreed with him. He murmured behind his strip of tape, pointlessly. Then looked at his watch.

I didn’t need his reaction to what he saw to tell me how close transformation was. The last hour had taken me into the penultimate phase, the wolf looking out through human eyes with quiet blazing animal alertness. My wrists and ankles were bloody from where Hunger spasms had cut me against the cuffs, but my limbs had calmed in spite of the pain.

Had calmed. The penultimate phase was passing. Any moment the final phase—cramps, sickness, hot and cold, half an infinite minute of casually ripped-up muscles and rearranged joints—would begin. The cuffs would either burst or slice clean through me. I had an image of myself Changed but with four bleeding stumps. I knew just the sound the stumps would make, knocking against the floor and walls of the van.

I looked at Poulsom. He was shaking his head, no, no, no. Very soon, when things began visibly happening to me, he’d start thrashing and screaming into his gag and all his life would rush to the surface of his flesh and be there sweetly for the taking. It was a relief, the Hunger, its refusal to negotiate, something solid to hold on to in the uncertainty.

Suddenly I caught Jake’s scent. My legs nearly buckled. I twisted myself as close to the rear door as I could get. Overrode the impulse to make as much noise as possible. It’s me! I’m in here! Jake!

Wait. Be smart. Listen. There were voices.

“I thought you said we’d be alone,” Ellis said.

“I know,” a second voice said. “But something occurred to me after we last spoke.”

Poulsom, presumably at the recognition of Ellis’s voice, began kicking about.

“Who’ve you got in there?” Jake said. “What the fuck is this?”

The van’s rear door opened. Standing twenty feet away were Jake, Ellis and a third man in Hunt fatigues. Mid-forties. Dark hair flecked with grey. Broad cheekbones. He looks like a Native American, I remembered Jake telling me—and realised I was face-to-face with Grainer.

The other Hunter, to whom Grainer, it dawned on me, was “the boss,” stood close to the cage with the automatic pointed directly at me.

“Nothing silly, Jake,” Grainer said—then something extraordinary happened.

Grainer took a pace backwards and another half pace to his left. He did it as if woodenly executing a formal dance step. For a second everything froze. Jake’s mouth was slightly open. The shirt buttons were still wrongly done-up. Ellis seemed to very slowly reach around for the rifle that hung slightly behind him on its shoulder strap. Grainer’s right hand went up and behind his head. There was a soft rasp and a flash of bright metal. Everyone observing jumped, as if we’d all been given a small electric shock at exactly the same moment: the moment the blade, a brilliant broadsword, swung—with a sound like a wet branch snapping—through Ellis’s neck.

The head toppled a fraction before the legs went. The long blond hair snagged on the rifle. The corpse’s collapse was curiously neat. It dropped to its knees, hesitated, then fell forward as if in a gesture of complete worship. The head, still attached by its hair to the gun, lay facedown just next to the hip, as if it didn’t want to see anything anymore.

“Lu?” Jake said. “You all right?”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“How did you know?” Jake asked Grainer.

“How do we ever know? We got a good gal on the inside. I’ve always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It’s hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever it felt like it you’d learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can’t blame the women.”

Grainer transferred the sword to his left hand and with his right took a pistol from his side holster and pointed it at Jake. I dropped to my knees and retched up bile. It was coming.

“Keep her covered, Morgan,” Grainer said. The Hunter by the cage retrained his gun on me. It had drifted a little during the beheading.

“I’m sorry, angel,” Jake said to me. “I was stupid.”

I couldn’t speak. We got a good gal on the inside. It didn’t have to be Hardass. There were other women at the white jail. But the ugliness of this moment spread backwards. I know you’re seeing your guy tonight. And me like an idiot weeping on my bunk. It didn’t have to be her. But there was the cynic’s version of Ockham’s razor: All things being equal the shittiest explanation’s the best.

“I’m so sorry,” Jake said.

“It’s not”—a cramp at which the reflex was to bend double, except I couldn’t, with the cuffs still attached to the cage—“your fault,” I managed to get out. “My fault. I’m sorry.” In spite of everything, Poulsom’s flesh, fear-soaked, piping hot, was a fat pulse in the confined space of the van. Morgan looked at me, smiling. “You ready to party?” he said.

Grainer looked at his watch. “Not long now, kids,” he said. “By the way, before you go, Jake, congratulations. I’m sure fatherhood would’ve suited you.”

Poulsom wriggled and roared.

“What?” Jake said—then dropped to one knee, shuddered, got down on all fours. Jammed his teeth together. His clothes started to tear at the seams. The hair was coming. Mine too.

“Yeah,” Grainer continued, “apparently the big side-effect of the antiviral. Seems your old lady’s nearly two months gone. Ask Poulsom. He’s over the moon about it, all set to go down in history as the man who changed werewolf reproduction forever. Except of course now he’s not going anywhere. Nowhere good, anyway.”

Jake looked up at me. My spine shifted. The shoulders of my blouse split. Movement in the top of my skull. The waistband of my skirt went. Seems your old lady’s nearly two months gone. It was impossible, and yet as soon as I’d heard the words it was like falling off a cliff. No smoking. No drinking. Ultrasounds. Harrods towels, television, reassurance. I thought of those Magic Eye pictures, the disturbing moment when three dimensions shiver out of two. It was impossible. But then until the antiviral so was surviving the bite.

“Talulla!” Jake called. He was more than halfway. His eyes were going. His clothes hung in shreds. Soon speech would be impossible.

Grainer, face empty of all expression, pointed the gun at Jake’s head. One of my ankle cuffs broke. The other was cutting its way into the swelling flesh. Jake convulsed. Somewhere far away my clothes were disintegrating and Poulsom was screaming into the duct tape. Fear around Morgan like a swarm of flies.

“Is it better to kill her in front of you?” Grainer said. “Or you in front of her? How about an impromptu Caesarian? Morgan’s pretty good with a knife.”

The van was packed with the heat of my transformation. In the blur of the final spasm I’d snapped the cable free of the cage. The left handcuff was gone. The right cut my flesh with a kind of fierce boredom. In spite of which joy filled me. My mouth was hot. Jake was still in the throes. Poulsom’s legs struggled to get him upright. His body heaved out its stink of fear and meat.

“Your lady’s ahead of you, Marlowe,” Grainer said. “She’s making you look like an amateur.”

Jake foetal as the details of claws and ear tips worked themselves out—then his long soft throat lifted as the last of the Changing resolved itself. He began to get to his feet.

“Good-bye, Jake,” Grainer said—then two things happened simultaneously.

My second ankle cuff snapped (a surge of blood, a lovely feeling of relief) and a silver javelin, travelling at speed, struck Grainer in the chest. He staggered back a pace, dropped the pistol and fell to his knees.

Morgan spun and fired a burst wildly, hit turf and trees, involuntarily took a step backwards. I threw myself at the bars.

The step backwards had brought him—just—close enough. At full stretch I got the collar of his jacket and his nape’s sweat-hot hair, yanked him, flailing, up against the cage, locked a hand around his throat, with the other ripped the automatic from his grasp, though I fumbled and it dropped to the ground. He twisted, but either by deep training or extraordinary will overrode the instinct to reach for the hand cutting off his air, instead freed a knife from a sheath in his belt and drove it into my forearm. The pain reflex opened my hand and he tore free, went down on one knee and reached for the gun.

When Jake leaped, his trajectory made an arc that framed Grainer for me in weird vividness. He was still on his knees, propped up by the javelin, arms hanging inert, eyes half-closed, a thickened gobbet of dark blood hanging from his open mouth. The image had the remote clarity of a religious icon. Then Jake descended, fell on Morgan with a draught of the evening’s moon-edged air and in a single swipe gashed him—a gesture with a sort of emphatic masculine grace—from throat to belly. The body unstrung, collapsed like a dropped puppet.

Jake wrapped his hands around the bars of the cage and braced himself to pull but I gave him through the confusion—his head was full on the upswelling joy of pregnant can’t be javelin love by love Cloquet can’t be but please please let her be—the image of Morgan’s palm, felt it emerge in him amid the chaos like a developing print and felt his own giant animal delight as he went to the Hunter’s corpse, ripped the arm from its socket, pressed the hand to the panel and received, like magic, the string of blips, the gasp, the open door.

We fell into an embrace. Speech had gone from both of us, but we didn’t need it, not now with the wolf melding us and our bodies free and the miracle ghost-flicker (or was I imagining it?) of new life in my womb. For a moment we held each other and everything but the purest certainty of shared nature, of common blood, of sameness dropped away. For a moment the world was perfect.

If I hadn’t closed my eyes.

Jake’s written all about if and then.

As it was, eyes closed in the bliss of feeling his warm arms around me and his heart beating against mine, I saw nothing, only felt the thud-twitch of impact and heard, what seemed such a long time after, the sound of a gunshot.

60

STILL HOLDING HIM, I opened my eyes. Over his shoulder I saw Grainer, barely conscious, desperately trying to hold the pistol upright for a second shot. Slowly, I lifted Jake and turned, so that my back was to his killer. I thought: Shoot me too, then, since there’s nothing left for me.

Not nothing, angel. The child.

I looked at him, felt the silver gobbling his life with nonnegotiable greed. Death taking him was like something being dragged out of me. Out of my womb. The cuff cutting into my left wrist broke at last. Blood poured over both of us.

You live, he sent me. There’s no God and that’s His only commandment.

Okay.

Promise?

I promise. Don’t leave me.

His eyes closed. The seduction was heavy on him, a suave pull on his blood. His heart was going with it, I could feel, like a boat gone from its mooring. But he opened his eyes, with an immense effort of will gathered the remnants, looked at me.

This will hurt.

He held me with sudden shocking strength—then his claw went into the flesh above my breast.

In spite of everything the reflex was to pull away—the pain was small, precise, white-hot—but everything he had went into keeping me still, and in a moment it was over. A knot of blood and tissue with a tiny metal fragment protruding.

Now they can’t find you.

A moment of bafflement, then I understood. In the mess of consciousness a distinct little discharge of disgust that they’d been able to do that, get inside me. Make fools of us.

Love …

Stay with me. Stay with me.

His eyes closed again. The tip of the full moon appeared over the dark line of the trees. The clouds had cleared. The sky was a pretty dusk blue.

No second shot came.•

It’s hard to say how long I stayed there in the middle of what had become a bloody little battlefield, with his body growing cold next to mine. Certainly the moon was clear of the trees when I got to my feet and laid him gently on the ground. In a sort of mild dream my own voice inside my head repeated without any feeling at all, He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone … The forest was very still. Even the stream seemed to have fallen silent. The air had a pared clean quality. The armoured van, the bodies, the trees, all had a weird solid static vividness, as if they’d been carefully arranged like this to mean something.

An indeterminate surreal time passed. There were questions, but they were like vague or distant objects. What would happen to Jake when the moon set? Would his corpse stay Changed? Or revert to human form? There were three human bodies to deal with. What was to be done with them? Where was Cloquet? If I really was pregnant, what would happen if I went into labour on the Curse? What shape would the child have?

There were, yes, these questions—but overwhelmingly, as if the sound of myself was being turned up to a point I knew would cause real pain, there was the Hunger.

Sharp consciousness returned the way sharp hearing does when water you’ve had in your ear suddenly trickles out. A breeze stirred the young leaves. The stream breathed its odour of damp stone. My fingertips tingled. I was freshly aware of my Changed shape, the soft fit of cool air over snout and ears and throat.

I climbed into the back of the van.

Poulsom was a mess. I tore the duct tape (and, accidentally, though I wasn’t particularly careful, a bit of his top lip) from his mouth. A second’s delay then the pain of the ripped flesh hit him and he screamed. I put my right hand, wrist still bleeding, heavily, slowly around his throat and very gently squeezed. Just enough to silence him. I looked down and pointed to my belly.

For a moment I could tell he was trying to work out whether a lie or the truth would serve him better. It was quite something to watch the stubborn calculator still at work. Then, presumably because of vestiges of the idea that virtue will be (ultimately) rewarded, I saw him cast his lot in for better or worse with the truth. He nodded, croaked out, “Yes. Pregnant.”

Not nothing, angel. The child. You live. Promise.

Well, I had promised.

61

IT WAS FULLY dark by the time I finished with Poulsom. I’d fed fast, but my appetite had had all sorts in it: grief, rage, loss, confusion. Also a kind of dumb irreverent hope. I had an image of myself holding hands with a child by the polar bear tanks in Central Park Zoo. My own earliest memory, the chance to give it to someone else.

There was nothing I could do about the bodies, even poor Jake’s. If I was going to live I had to start now. I was a monster alone in the middle of Wales. Even if I got through the Curse I had neither money nor ID nor clothes nor any safe place to go. I thought of my dad and the restaurants and Ambidextrous Alison and my apartment and how sweet it would be to be back there in one piece lying on the couch with a cup of coffee and a stupid magazine. I thought how unlikely it was not only that I’d ever see it again, but that I’d make it through the next twenty-four hours alive.

But you have to. There’s no God and that’s his only Commandment.

So, with great difficulty (try it with werewolf hands) I set about equipping myself. Poulsom had the smallest shoe size so I took his footwear. Grainer’s combat trousers and belt, Ellis’s leather jacket. Between them just over a hundred and fifty pounds in cash. Jake’s clothes were in shreds, but the journal, bloodstained and buckled, was there in the inside pocket of his ruined overcoat. I took it. I found a canvas bag with a handful of car essentials—jumper cables, wheel brace, jack, torch—behind the van’s front seat, so I emptied it and stuffed my new wardrobe in there. I kept imagining telling Jake about all this, later, when it was all over. My wrist was already healing.

I took Grainer’s pistol and three ammunition clips from his belt. Not that I had a clue how to use it. I wasn’t even sure I’d identified the safety correctly. I’d found something that looked like a safety switch and moved it to the opposite setting, but there was still, I had to admit, a good chance of the damned thing going off and hitting me in the foot.

It wasn’t easy to leave Jake. Twice I moved away and came back, a last look, touch, smell. Werewolves, I was discovering, can’t weep. Uncried tears knotted my throat. The raw fact of my aloneness kept dissolving into the fantasy of him waking up.

Don’t be sentimental. Get going. You’ve got work to do.

Jake’s spirit, or my own fictionalised version of it. At any rate it got me to my feet and forced me, step by step, away into the trees.

I’d only gone a few paces, however, when I found Cloquet. It couldn’t have been anyone else, from Jake’s description, and of course there was the silver javelin, custom-made, with his and Jacqueline Delon’s names entwined around it in angelic script, now buried in Grainer’s chest. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to find a werewolf standing over him, nor, to his credit, much afraid. He was lying propped against a beech tree with a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty bottle of vodka in the other. He’d been hit by a bullet in the left leg. The Hunter’s wild burst from the automatic that had missed Jake and peppered the trees.

“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he said. Then in English. “He killed my queen. Therefore I killed him. C’est tout. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Kill me if you like, but don’t make me suffer.”

You saved my life, I wanted to say, but of course I couldn’t. The impulse to help him was strangely acute, partly for Jake’s sake, somehow, since I knew they’d shared an odd camaraderie—but what could I do?

There was the armoured van, but it held Poulsom’s messy remains, and in any case I couldn’t face going back there. The motorcyclist’s rhetorical question came back to me: What sort of moron tails someone in a white car? This sort, evidently. Not quite believing what I was doing, I pointed to him then mimed holding a steering wheel. Repeated the gesture. Where is your car?

Not surprisingly, it took him a few moments to get his head around what he was seeing. When he did, he laughed, one half-cracked burst of hysteria that started and stopped abruptly. I felt Jake’s spirit like the sun’s warmth on my back.

“Un kilometre,” Cloquet said, pointing behind himself. I could tell his light had come back on. Until this moment he’d thought he’d reached the end of himself. Now here was life again. A werewolf offering help. I held out my hand to him. He laughed again, then became slightly teary, then took it.•

Which really completes the job I set out to do here, to finish Jake’s story. I wanted to stick strictly to the events, to leave feelings out of it—but I find reading back over these few pages that I haven’t quite managed that. It’s surprisingly hard (dear Maddy, as Jake would have said) to stick to the story. Of course there’s another story (among other things of how to get a nine-foot werewolf into a Land Rover) but it doesn’t belong here. There might be time for that later. I get the feeling I’ve caught the writing bug, in honour of Jake, yes, but also from psychological necessity. Talking to yourself might not cure loneliness, but it helps.

A month has passed since that night in Beddgelert forest, and though I’ve survived it hasn’t been easy. I couldn’t have done it without Cloquet’s help—but again, that’s a story for another time.

Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I leave for New York.

In the meantime there’s the Curse to get through. Tonight’s the full moon, and the Hunger doesn’t care what you’ve been through or what your fears are or where you’ll be next week. There’s a comfort in it, the purity of its demand, its imperviousness to reason or remorse. The hunger, in its vicious simplicity, teaches you how to be a werewolf.

Maybe that’s the best way to end this postscript, with a statement of final acceptance. My name is Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou, and I am the last living werewolf on earth.

Until my baby’s born. Then there’ll be two of us.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A big howl of appreciation to: Jonny Geller, Jane Gelfman, Melissa Pimentel, Nick Marston, Jamie Byng, Francis Bickmore, Sonny Mehta, Marty Asher and all at Canongate and Knopf; to Stephen Coates for musical genius and free psychotherapy; and to Kim Teasdale, without whom none of it would be any fun at all.

For the sound track to The Last Werewolf by The Real Tuesday Weld, go to: www.tuesdayweld.com/thelastwerewolf.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Glen Duncan is the author of seven previous novels. He was chosen by both Arena and The Times Literary Supplement (London) as one of Britain’s best young novelists. He lives in London.