The family looked up at us. Time stopped. There they were, perfected by fear. At your death your life gathers, adds itself up, reaches its last shape. You. Humans. It tips us, that moment. There’s the perfect freeze, when you know, and we see you, complete. It’s like a shared joke. Like the pause when lovers look at each other because they realise—oh God, oh
God
—that they’re both about to come, together. Then the moment’s done its work—and we fall on you, and the life goes, in greedy bites and bloody swallows, into us.
It was hot and fast. It was a blur. The first minute or so always is, for me, a car-crash of joy and disbelief, total blindness and 20/20 smashed together like a pair of cymbals.
But that phase passes. You come back to yourself. To the world, and the solid, filthy reality of what’s happening. The solid, filthy reality that’s better than anything you’ve ever felt before.
Madeline with her snout in the girl’s flank and her ass in the air, legs spread. The smell of her cunt was sly and sweet and full of tortured willingness. And me with a hard-on that could’ve broken a piano in half. I used to think I liked sex. I used to think I’d had sex as good as you could have it. Then I Turned. You Turn, and it’s as if until then you’ve been fucking in two dimensions instead of three.
CAN’T Madeline—just about—gave me.
I KNOW.
Didn’t stop her lifting her head and rolling her shoulder. We were close. We were so close.
THE KID.
I KNOW.
TALULLA.
I couldn’t answer. Didn’t know what I would’ve answered. Instead I reached into the son’s chest cavity and tore his heart out and bit it in half. Sorry, kid, but that’s what mine feels like.
Afterwards we did what we never do. We stayed with the victims’ remains. No choice. The situation had everything we needed. It was remote, there
were clothes, there was money, there was transportation. I’d never cared much for Fergus, but there was a feeling like a ragged burn in me when I thought of Trish, dead. She’d had so much life in her. I’d liked her in the mornings, sitting big-eyed and hungover, knees hunched up, fingers wrapped around a mug of black coffee, not watching TV or reading a magazine—just blinking, just existing, happily. I could feel the loss in Madeline, too. Big loss. She’d loved Cloquet. And Trish. Even Fergus. They’d made money together, amazed when it turned out they could trust each other. We had no clue what the fuck had happened to Lucy. Reaching out gave us nothing. If she was alive she was out of range. Both of us were thinking the same thing, that the old days were over, that the world was waking up to us, that from now on nothing would ever be the same.
Lorcan curled up on the couch. I could feel the thought pounding in his skull. THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE DEAD. Mixed in with the swirling bits of the lives he’d just taken in. I’d wondered about this: How did he and Zoë contain experience that couldn’t be anything other than ahead of their years? They do what kids do, Talulla had said. Put it aside until they’re ready. Like clothes they’ll grow into, eventually.
THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE DEAD.
I grabbed his ankle and gave it a little shake. It made no difference. He’s a tough kid to comfort. He doesn’t believe in it. It’s like the world declared itself his enemy at his birth. (Which, given he started life as a kidnap victim, I guess it did.) There’s no self-pity in him. Just a kind of remote determination. Zoë expects love. Lorcan expects zip. Hard to imagine him growing up and having lovers. Or at least hard to imagine him loving someone.
Madeline and I took turns keeping watch outside, though the truth was neither of us was expecting pursuit. The truth was both of us thought the
Militi Christi
had got—in Talulla and Zoë—exactly what they were after.
The dogs kept us company, wagging their tails.
When the moon set we showered and kitted ourselves out as best we could with our victims’ clothes. Nothing fit Lorcan. We improvised. A pair of the girl’s cut-offs and a t-shirt, with a string belt. The kid had to
go barefoot, but it didn’t matter: If we found ourselves on foot, we’d have to carry him anyway. We found the keys to the Land Rover.
Without any hope, I called Lucy’s cell phone from the house landline.
She answered after two rings.
She was in a house thirty miles away.
And she had a hostage.
I
NCREDIBLY, THEY
’
D MISSED
an exit. From the house’s cellar. Double wooden doors completely overgrown with ivy. Lucy had burst up through them and caught two Angels off-guard. She’d ripped the throat out of one of them then turned to see the other—the dark-haired acne-survivor in his mid-thirties—staring in disbelief at his jammed AK-47.
“He ran,” Lucy told us. “But he didn’t get very far.”
He got as far as the tree line, where Lucy had knocked him unconscious.
“No, you see,” she said, Maddy and I silently marvelling, “I thought I might need a driver.” She’d told us this as if she’d been weighing up how to get home from a flower show.
She dragged him into deeper cover and waited it out. Watched them take down Talulla and Zoë and body-bag the remains of Fergus and Trish. When the unit moved out there were still seven hours till moonset. Cool as you like, she hauled her captive back to the house, trussed and gagged him, then slung him over her shoulders and set off in search of the Fleetwood.
“Which was, surprisingly, just where we left it,” she said. “I did wonder if they’d booby-trapped it or something, you know, but … Well, there wasn’t much of a choice. I brought him round and put him behind the wheel. Drove the whole way here with my hand around his throat.”
Madeline and I listened to all this with increasing incredulity. Didn’t it occur to her that the smart thing would’ve been to drive somewhere remote and wait till she was human again? Lucy looked at us as if we were idiots.
“I hadn’t eaten,” she said. “I was starving.”
So she’d hustled the Angel into the house, re-gagged and tied him, put a cloth shopping bag over his head, then calmly headed upstairs and slaughtered the retirees.
“They were both asleep,” she said.
She couldn’t interrogate her hostage until the moon had set and she’d
regained the power of speech. “Not without some sort of ridiculous version of charades, anyway,” she said. At which point, more or less, she’d got the call from me. “I’m glad,” she said. “I wasn’t looking forward to it. This is where you come in, I’m afraid.”
Because you’re used to this kind of thing. Former WOCOP. Former professional.
Jilted lover.
“Take Lorcan upstairs,” I said.
It didn’t take long. I didn’t have to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt him. I knew if I hurt him it would be something for my broken heart to do, somewhere for its violence to go. I knew if I hurt him I’d be disgusted with myself.
But I didn’t have to. I just had to tell him what I’d do to him if he didn’t tell me what I needed to know. I told him I’d Turn him.
“You know what that means?”
“Yes,” he said.
We were looking directly at each other. I didn’t like him. It was the religion. It was the blazing faith in magic, in a fairy story. What are
we
? she’d said.
We
’re a fairy story. The violence was right there in my limbs, offered itself. I pushed it down. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. It was that I didn’t want to kill him. It was that I was disgusted with myself for my own useless sadness—and because I knew I’d have to kill him. It should’ve been clean and easy. You’re a monster. You kill and eat a human being every month. What’s one religious nut? And a clear enemy at that. But that’s not how it works. Full moon and hunger, killing’s natural. It’s what we are, what we do. It’s still chosen, but it’s a natural choice. It doesn’t carry over. Lose the hunger, lose the moon, lose the fucking
wulf
, it’s a different kind of choice.
And I didn’t want to do it. A light, carefree bit of myself said: You don’t have to do anything. Just walk away.
Walker.
That’s what you really do. That’s who you really are. What’s in a name? Everything.
For a few moments I felt free. I could turn, climb the stairs, say my goodbyes, go. It
was
what I’d always done. Seeing this, I almost laughed out loud.
But it passed, and the room filled up again with sadness and disgust,
and I felt solid and exhausted. The overalls smelled of the farmer’s sweat. All my past was in the room with me, with us. Sometimes your life comes to you like that and asks why it doesn’t make any sense. Why you’ve made nothing of it but a mess.
Meanwhile the boring fucking logic of the situation wouldn’t take its weight off me. There would be no way of knowing if the information he gave up—the location where they were holding Lula and Zoë—was accurate until we got there. We’d have to keep him alive at least till then.
“Well?” I said.
“When I tell you, you’ll kill me anyway.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “Not until I know you’ve told me the truth. And there’s no way of knowing that until we get there.”
“
Then
you’ll kill me.”
It was intimate between us. The problem with these situations is that the frankness creates intimacy. Whether you want it or not. He actually smiled at me, feeling it. I wondered what had happened to make a believer of him. He seemed intelligent. I wondered what it must be like to be an intelligent believer, to see the whole world and everything that happened in it as a series of clues to something grand and invisible, some big story God cooked up in the Beginning. The way she had when she was a kid. The way she’d started seeing it again. Since the vampire came to call.
When he joins the blood of the werewolf.
Funny how making a joke of that hadn’t worked.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
He thought about it, decided giving it wasn’t going to make things any worse. “Mario Donatello.”
“I’ll make you a deal, Mario,” I said. “If you tell us where they are, and you’re not lying, I’ll let you go.”
He laughed. “Are you serious?” he said. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
My arms and shoulders were tired. All the goddamned
if
s and
then
s of these encounters. Again I asked myself why I was bothering. She’s leaving you anyway.
But there was Zoë.
It’s always the innocents that fuck everything up.
I untied his wrists.
“Give me your hand,” I said.
He looked at me from under his brows. Wet black eyes. The acne scarring made me imagine him as a teenager, looking in the mirror, miserable. I suppose it sounds nuts to say I felt sorry for that version of him.
“Just give me your hand,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He was sweating. The fear had drawn back a touch to give his excitement and curiosity room. He knew I wasn’t trying to trick him. He knew this was possible because of the intimacy, because I had his life for the taking if I wanted it. There’s a transparency between you at these moments. Like heavyweights in the ring. Like lovers.
He put his right hand out. I took it in mine, in a handshake grip, held it. Our eyes were locked.
“I’m doing this because I know you know how it is,” I said. “I know you’ll know if I’m lying.”
He wanted to live. He’d thought for a long time he’d take a martyr’s death, willingly. But it was there in his face, the realisation that he wanted, above all, to live. I could see all the sunsets and conversations and cups of coffee and crisp winter mornings he was imagining, that he still wanted, that were precious and that he’d never even thought of before, the absolutely huge wasted gift of being alive.
“I give you my word,” I said. “When we get there, I’ll let you go. You know I’m not lying because you can feel that I don’t want to kill you.”
We stared at each other. His hand was slightly bigger than mine. (Reminded me of Susie Carter, who I dated for a while when I was young. She was beautiful, but back then her hands were bigger than mine. It was crazy how much it had bothered me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even when she was doing something amazing to me in the sack.) “You know I’m not lying,” I repeated—and I knew he could feel it. It was a joy to him, to suddenly see that he might have all that life he’d been picturing. It was a joy and a shame, because he hadn’t known until now his faith wasn’t stronger than life.
When I brought him upstairs, Madeline and Lucy looked at me. What the fuck?
“We need him,” I said. “Let’s go.”
In the Fleetwood I gagged him again and tied him to the base of one of the bunks. He was quiet, cooperative. He’d made his decision. He knew
his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It’s a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job.
I called Konstantinov. The two of us had worked for WOCOP together, and eventually found ourselves on the wrong side of the organisation. Three years ago vampires (the same crackpots who’d taken Lorcan) had kidnapped his wife, Natasha, and Turned her. Mike, faced with losing her, had asked her to Turn him. She didn’t hesitate. In a movie she’d refuse because she loved him. In their reality she Turned him because she loved him. Because she knew how much he loved her. Because it
was
love between them, as big and dark as Mother Russia. If I’d loved Konstantinov any less than I did I’d have hated him for having that, right now.
“Mike, we need you. Where are you?”
“Polynesia.”
“Fuck.
Fuck.
How fast can you get here?”
I could feel him working it out. Night flights only.
“Three days.”
Not fast enough.
“You got people we can use here?”
Pause. I knew the answer. Didn’t even know why I’d asked. Madeline and Lucy were changing their clothes in the back of the vehicle. Lorcan was going through Talulla’s bag looking for his own gear. He’d pulled out a bunch of her things. A white sun-dress I loved her in. Red espadrilles. A denim jacket. It occurred to me I was still in the goddamned farmer’s overalls and cut-open sneakers. I was sweating. My hands felt ill. Lorcan tossed out his mom’s copy of
Don Juan.
Byron. Who I knew was someone I should know about.