The Restoration (upper-cased in the minds of all four, since it had
taken over their lives) was Alan’s idea. He’d made a little money. Two lucky London house moves in the price-hiking Nineties—Denmark Hill, Balham—had left him with a £400,000 profit, and hundreds of episodes of
Grand Designs
and
A Place in the Sun
had left him with a vision of himself in benign lordship over a quality B&B—the word
gîte
was rarely off the familial lips—in France. Which vision might never have progressed beyond idle fantasy had it not been for Rory losing (a) his job and (b) all the money he had in a string of wretched investments. Of course this was the global economic clusterfuck—
everyone
lost money (even Jake’s satirically huge fortune took a thirty per cent hit)—but what made it tough for Rory was that he didn’t have much to lose in the first place, and he lost the lot, as well as racking up a hundred grand’s worth of debt. In a way it was a relief to him. He’d painted a completely false picture of their affluence for Carmel, for the simple reason that Carmel insisted on a certain level of affluence. There was Bose in the lounge, Prada in the walk-in, Audi in the garage. And more or less permanent fire in Rory’s armpits, livened by the arrival of every windowed envelope. By rights, on full disclosure, Carmel ought to have ditched him—a development which would have been a large part of Rory’s relief—but she didn’t. Who knew why? Well, oddly, in her timid and denied heart,
Sue
knew why. Because without anything being said between them Alan and Carmel, father and daughter, saw it would be pleasurable to keep Rory around for a little while to make him suffer. Punishment for Lying was Carmel’s superficial rationalisation, while Alan (who had an impregnable image of himself as a Decent Bloke, and began most of his sentences “To be fair …”) went for Giving the Lad a Second Chance. Therefore Rory was, with a sort of stern magnanimity,
spoken to
by Alan. Carmel, in Alan’s idiom, was invariably “my Carmel” (pronounced “mar Carmel”) and when she was in his thoughts he was never far from intense emotion. He was in unembarrassed tears by the end of the talk with Rory, overwhelmed by the ferocity of his, Alan’s, love for his daughter and by his, Alan’s, financial and spiritual largesse. By the end of what he’d assumed would be a merciless dressing down Rory found himself tremulously—and indeed terrifyingly, Alan being a big, solid man, at that moment radiant with paternal heat—embraced.
And so The Restoration had begun. Rory was given responsibilities which, being incompetent, he failed to discharge, drawing sighs from
Alan, scoffs from Carmel and winces (off-stage) from Sue. It was all grist to the father-daughter mill. Not, of course, that anything improper had ever
happened
between father and daughter (Alan, quivering with disgust, would do violence to you for thinking it), which was a pity; its simmering latency was nauseating.
When we entered the building, Carmel was sitting on her bed painting her toenails and listening to Rihanna. Alan and Sue were in the kitchen, Sue preparing the evening’s casserole, Alan going over the paperwork detailing Rory’s latest mismanagements, shaking his head with sad delight and mentally rehearsing his tone of near-exhausted patience: Rory … Rory. These are elemental mistakes, mate. Ele
mental
… Rory meanwhile was simply standing in what would, when it was Restored, be the laundry room, wondering for the
n
th time how his life had so quickly turned so much to shit and how long it would be before he got his next weary drubbing from Alan and whether he didn’t yet have the courage to tell them all to go and fuck themselves and walk out. Or better still slip away without a word in the middle of the night—
Sue, midway between countertop and range, saw us first.
Us. Me and Walker. (Zoë and Lorcan under strict telepathic instruction to stay put in the hall until called to feed; Lorcan not ready to push his luck with me on this one.) So Sue saw us. Me and Walker, two werewolves, standing there
looking at her.
“I mean for Christ’s sake, Rory,” Alan said, momentarily forgetting to keep the rehearsals in his head, “this is fifteen-hundred quid here, mate. It’s not like we can afford—fuck!”
Sue had, after what seemed an extraordinarily long time, dropped the casserole dish, which had exploded on the stone floor. She didn’t scream. It’s amazing how often people don’t scream. Instead her mouth lost its shape and let out a very quiet, wobbling “ohhhh” which, left unchecked, I knew would just keep repeating, indefinitely.
“What the—” Alan started but then saw Sue was looking at something behind him—and turned.
Upstairs, Carmel
did
scream. Fergus and Trish (who sometimes got it on together in lupine form but never in human) had introduced themselves. A clatter and crash from the laundry room (I pictured Rory backing into a bucket and mop) said Madeline and Lucy had arrived, too.
I
T
’
S A THING
of beauty to see your victim in perfected extremis like that, maximally himself, all his life’s forgotten details recalled in a rush, as if for the first time since birth every cell’s at full, living attention. The individual’s odour at this moment—your odour
facing death
—is cruelly sweet, an ecstatic tension before the snap that throws us into attack.
I leaped over the table, over agog Alan’s head, and at the end of my parabola opened Sue’s belly with a contemptuously casual downward swipe. She sank to her knees—oven-mitted arms still weirdly holding the ghost of the dish—then fell against my legs as if in confused supplication. I grabbed her by the hair, tugged her head back, dropped and sank my teeth into her throat, sensing, as I did, Lorcan peeking round the kitchen door—NOT YET NOT SAFE YET STAY THERE—and Zoë’s little tremor of guilt and excitement because she wasn’t far behind him, while Walker punched through open-mouthed Alan’s chest and laid giant fingers around his hot and haywire heart and upstairs Fergus entered Trish from behind as she pinned Carmel (legs and arms flailing, face fat with backed-up blood) to the bed by her throat and Lucy lifted Rory off his feet by his hair and the house filled with the concussive smell of traumatised flesh and blood and the condensed quiet music of death.
It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them.
The central truth of the Curse, as succinctly put by one Jacob Marlowe, deceased. No one wants it to be true. But the truth doesn’t care what anyone wants. The truth is innocent. You can’t blame the truth.
Walker had a huge erection. (Yes, I’m afraid this is precisely what the Curse means by “the best for us.” Long ago in a fetid and poorly lit cellar of the universe a wretched marriage ceremony took place between our arousal and your suffering. God gave you away. No pre-nup: divorce was never an option.) I was in a state myself, but not an uncomplicated one.
Wulf
’s desire was there, deep and dumb and reliable, but so, undeniably, was the dismal impulse to shit on love’s altar, to force through the bill of
betrayal. Once when I was small my mother had found me in the yard in tears because I’d trod on a snail and half mashed it. She’d said: It’s very simple, Lulu. If you know something’s dying in pain, kill it. Then she’d stomped on it and whisked away to answer the phone.
The last of Sue’s life was going. I’d had her liver and kidneys and several big chunks from her midriff and haunch. In with the meat had gone the frail fragments of a life lived on tiptoe, a few big moments like standing stones—the day at St. Catherine’s when she’d got her first period in the middle of hockey and run from the pitch in tears; breaking her leg when Jane Radcliffe’s swing collapsed; the surreal afternoon when, knowing it was insane, she’d gone down by the river with the boy from the fair and he’d got angry when she wouldn’t and she’d thought she was going to get raped; her first time—with Alan, the appalled intimation that it might be better,
much
better, with someone else, but letting the idea go, like a bird released from her hands that would never come home; giving birth to Carmel, seeing Alan’s solar glow when he held her; her demented father in the nursing home not recognising her, accusing her of stealing his cardigan. The World was the ITN News and the
Daily Telegraph
and Carmel’s i-gadgets and wars always with some foreigners and toothless old women in burkas always screaming over someone’s body and even though she knew it was terrible imagine if your son had been killed she wished they wouldn’t scream and wail like that with no teeth and the men were no better screaming and carrying on and wrapping their arms around the coffin Alan said our immigration’s the laughing stock of the world and not enough whites having kids now because of women having careers and the Muslims breed like rats and pretty soon they’ll outnumber us ten to one and it did seem like they were everywhere now there was a
weather
girl in a burka the other day …
NO. I CAN’T.
Walker, bloody up to the elbows, had put his hands on my hips.
I WANT YOU.
I CAN’T. THE OTHERS.
Go
to the others, I meant. Trish. Lucy.
Madeline.
YOU.
IT’S OKAY. I WANT YOU TO.
Lorcan and Zoë were in the room. I hadn’t called them, exactly, but the mental restriction had slackened. They were waiting for permission to feed. When I gave it, neither of them hesitated. Zoë scampered to the wounds in Sue’s midriff, but Lorcan leaped up onto the table and began tearing at Alan’s corpse. We didn’t operate a not-in-front-of-the-children policy (they’d seen what adulthood added to the kill, but they didn’t understand it; it was already a nagging tumour, the question of what I’d do with them when puberty kicked in) but their presence this time confirmed me.
I CAN’T. PLEASE. DON’T.
Pause.
It seemed to last a long time, that pause. In it, I felt him taking it completely into himself that I was leaving him. Had been for months. Maybe years. Maybe two years. Maybe since the night the vampire came to call. It shocked me. As long as Walker hadn’t believed it there was room for a little denial in me. But now he did—and it was like sudden cold air coming up from a sheer drop behind me. Immediately I wanted to undo it, to tell him he was wrong, that we’d stay together, that whatever this was it wasn’t the end of us, that I loved him, of course I did, my God this was
us
—
But at that moment bullets shattered the kitchen window and I realised we were under attack.
W
ALKER HAD
L
ORCAN
safe. Not safe, but out of the kitchen and into the stairwell, walled on both sides. Original walls, two and a half feet thick. I hadn’t been aware of grabbing Zoë, nor of leaping for the stairs after Walker—but there we were. He and Lorcan were already on the first-floor landing. I could hear windows smashing. Searchlights swivelled. I was conscious of some brain department riffling through calculations—
two points of attack so far; how many miles to the RV? why hadn’t we arranged a contingency rendezvous?
—while the big engines of panic churned blood and haemorrhaged adrenaline and moving was a thing of slow delicious vividness—here’s my enormous leaden leg bending its knee to climb another step … and here’s my giant head lunging through the molasses of emptiness … The chateau breathed its odour of damp plaster and dust, avowed in a sad silent way its harmless existence here for two hundred years; it was like a gentle old person forced to witness some modern obscenity in the street. Sue’s spilled blood and beef and onion casserole brought Cloquet’s death back along with the certainty that these were the same assassins. It irritated me, in the midst of all this physical immediacy, that the world had to interfere with us, that the world couldn’t leave well alone.
But of course as far as the world was concerned we weren’t well, we couldn’t be left alone.
Walker shoo’d Lorcan back down to me as an explosion did big damage to the building’s fabric somewhere on the first floor. Incredibly, a severed human foot flew past Walker’s shoulder, struck the wall beside me and bounced down the stairs. Painted toenails (a colour very close to “Scarlet Vamp,” my disinterested ironist observed); Carmel.
Madeline, snout and hands and arms jewelled with winking gore, appeared in the doorway that led from the kitchen into the hall. A huge shard of glass was sticking out of her back. She didn’t seem to know it was there.
LUCY?
I LOST HER TOO MANY OF THEM SILVER SILVER SILVER—
I could feel it, too, on my tongue, in the roof of my mouth. Lorcan and Zoë had their hands over their ears, not understanding it was too late for that, that the metal’s threat and promise was already in the air, in their heads, their lungs, their blood.
Madeline reached out as if to fend off a negligible invisible blow—then sank to her knees.
At which point I saw the two men behind her.
Both young, trim, fair-haired, giddy with health and taut with training. Light combat fatigues in dull grey, niftily designed to accommodate the silver-delivery gadgetry. One of them held what looked like a scimitar. Not silver (only an idiot would make a sword out of silver) but that wouldn’t matter, since its purpose was to separate werewolf head from werewolf body, werewolf life from the universe.
DON’T MOVE DON’T MOVE WALKER THE KIDS—
Since if I didn’t move myself Madeline would die and the instruction to Walker and the imperative to Zoë and Lorcan were left behind like a bright smudge in my slipstream because I was flying through the air—in slow motion, always in slow motion, with time to feel three, four, five silver bullets cut my aura but not my flesh, leisure to see Sue’s moist guts like something her body had heaved out with the very last of its strength and Alan’s head all but severed, eyes open, tongue trapped between his teeth and the windows shattered and figures moving outside and a female voice screaming
Gloria Patri! et Filio! et Spiritui Sancto!
—time to take in all this (and to examine from all angles what might be the last shape of my life: besotted with a vampire; hurting my lover; distracted from my kids; infected again with the suspicion of a plot and simultaneously a little sick of myself, my greed, my promiscuous curiosity, my nothing ever being quite enough so perhaps this is what gives you the courage to risk death—time for all this before, with a detonation of blood that speeded time and space back up to normal, I landed hands-first on the guy with the scimitar, the blade of which went with extraordinary ease, with a delight in performing its function, clean through my lower left abdominals and out the back of me with a feeling of ice that I knew within seconds would become fire.