By Blood We Live (41 page)

“Muni doesn’t speak English,” Olek said. “Not, frankly, that it would make a difference if she did.”

The baby’s smell had detonated memories of Zoë and Lorcan as newborns, erased the three years between then and now. Three years. Impossible. I thought of Zoë saying to Cloquet one morning: “Your ears look like bacon.” It gave me a moment of vertigo. At the same time the vault’s subsonic hum went up a notch. The air was warm and pliable. My breathing wasn’t clean. I felt crowded. My face prickled. I knew what was coming. The dirty, disappointing things are always a little ahead of themselves, always make themselves known by the opening your brain makes to receive them, a neural pathway that’s always been there waiting for the shape that fits. I thought of Christ in Gethsemane, beads of blood on his brow, asking for this cup to be taken from him. Knowing already that it wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be. The Divine Chomskyan grammar in him had already guaranteed its necessity. I thought of Devaz, lying curled on his bunk, so obviously empty, so obviously at the end of himself.

“A child born on a full moon,” Olek said. “Less than three months old. There is a ritual, there are words, which sound, I’ll grant you, nonsensical, and which are written on the page I’m holding on to until you’ve done your part. In any case you speak the words … You place the stone on bare earth, you see …”

And shed a little of your blood on it, and slaughter the child, and the blood mingles and runs through the hole in the centre of the stone and carries the soul down to Amaz in the Lower Realm, who takes it in exchange for freeing you from the Curse.

Wittgenstein said we don’t really ever discover anything. We just remember it.

Which was what this felt like. A drearily dredged-up memory.

Olek laughed, having observed me intuiting it. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” he said. “After all, what is one supposed to believe? That deities—which for starters one
doesn’t
believe in—deities from the ancient world are still knocking around up there or down there or wherever in some metaphysical fashion? I suppose there’s the notion that these things are outside time,
as we understand it, but really … I mean,
really
—it’s risible. Exactly risible.” He was, if his face was any indicator, tickled immensely by how risible it was. “Believe me, you can’t possibly hold this in greater contempt than I do. But here’s the remarkable thing. It works. Look at Devaz. I can only say to you: Look, please, at Devaz.”

Yes, I thought,
look
at Devaz.

There was something still missing. There was something the room was trying to tell me. Or rather the room was trying—with the stone as its little centre of intelligence—to savour withholding.

At a gesture from Olek the old woman, still smiling, still gently rocking the baby, exited. I heard her Nikes squeaking down the corridor.

“What’s the catch?” I said. My voice sounded slightly slowed down. Tape running just barely below speed. “I mean, it’s hardly a head-scratcher, is it? We kill and eat a human being every month. Babies are …” I was thinking of the night, transformed, I held a human baby in my hands, waiting for something inside myself to say: You can’t do this. This is too much. Her little head was silhouetted against the moon. I’d waited and waited. “Babies are no exception,” I finished.

Olek was watching me. Separate from what he needed out of this his disinterested clinician—his scientist—was fascinated.

Again his answer arrived in me fractionally ahead of him giving it. And I understood how Devaz had ended up in his state.

“You cannot perform the ritual on full moon,” Olek said. “You have to be human to do it.”

The room’s atmosphere emptied. All my muscles relaxed.

And, upstairs, something big crashed through a window.

I
WAS AHEAD
of Olek until the second flight of stairs—in spite of the alarm he didn’t neglect to lock the case and the vault door behind him—but on the landing he went past me without his feet on the ground. I could hear raised voices, objects being hurled and broken. It sounded like people throwing furniture around.

Then Olek’s voice, raised above the racket. “Stop this immediately! Stop! All of you!”

They were in the library. The big window was smashed. The asparagus fern was on the floor in a sad little disgorgement of soil. There were books all over the floor and both couches had been overturned. The stink of vampires almost kept me from entering the room.

Natasha, with a gash in her forehead, was on her hands and knees by the glass desk.

Konstantinov had someone pinned against one of the bookcases.

A young dark-haired woman—vampire—I’d never seen before was struggling to get up off the floor. Her hands and face were bleeding.

Suddenly Caleb—Caleb!—appeared outside the broken window.

“Let her go,” he shouted, leaping into the room. “You fucking let her go right
now.
”

“Please, Mikhail,” Olek said, quietly. “Do let her go. Let us all immediately calm down calm down calm
down.
”

A fraught moment of everyone waiting to see if this was sufficient. A piece of glass from the window fell and tinkled.

Then Konstantinov released his victim and stepped back, and I recognised her.

Mia.

“What the
fuck
, if you don’t mind, please,” Olek said, “is going on here?”

I’m coming for you.

“We need your help,” Mia said, straightening her jacket, brushing the
fierce blonde hair off her face. She and I hadn’t seen each other since the uneasy leave-taking two years ago on Crete, though I’d sensed her from time to time, keeping an eye on me, weighing up whether to kill me. I’d saved her life. But I’d also kidnapped and threatened to kill her son. We were, at a distance, peculiarly and mutually fascinated.

“Remshi’s sick,” Mia said.

“Remshi?” Olek said.

“He’s outside.” Then to Caleb: “I told you to wait.”

“Good Lord,” Olek said. “Remshi is here? My good godfathers, how utterly extraordinary! For heaven’s sake, tell him to come in.”

No one moved. The room was in shock from the violence that had just exploded in it.

“He can’t come in,” Caleb said, stung by the rebuke and his own (relative) powerlessness and the shock of seeing me. “He can’t fucking walk.”

I’ll see you again,
he’d said.

Well, I didn’t think he was seeing me now, though I was seeing him.

Olek carried him down to the laboratory.

“You’re going to have to let me see what I can do for him,” he said, when he’d laid him on the brushed steel table. Only the dark-haired girl (holding her nose, occasionally gagging) and I had followed him down, without exchanging a word. “Talulla, my dear, I take it you’ll … Please don’t go anywhere until we’ve had a chance to discuss things further—yes?”

I didn’t say anything, but he could tell I wasn’t going anywhere. I was thinking—in the storm of thinking—of poor Devaz. Who’d got his humanness back at the cost of his humanity. Ancient gods or not, something still had a black sense of humour.

“I thought it was your fault,” the girl said to me, in the hallway at the top of the stairs.

“What?”

“I thought it was your fault when he got sick like this the last time. Now I’m not so sure.”

A sudden stab of her scent made me remember one of the first things I’d discovered about him. On Crete we’d been surrounded by vampires, so it
had gone unnoticed, but when he’d sat only feet away from me at our last encounter I’d realised: Remshi didn’t smell.

And still didn’t. I wondered what it meant.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t know who you are. Maybe it’d be easier to talk outside. Hang on.” I went back into the library, where Natasha and Konstantinov were righting the furniture. I got a tube of the nose-block from Natasha.

“They’re in the upstairs sitting room,” Natasha told me, meaning Mia and Caleb. “What’s the story?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Stay put. I need to talk to the girl.”

In the garden, I offered her the paste. “It’s not perfect,” I said. “But it takes the edge off.” I applied my own when I saw her hesitating. “Go ahead. Seriously. It’s fine. We’re all using it.”

She put it on, but kept her distance. I sat down on a carved stone bench backed by a huge bougainvillea.

“For starters,” I said, “who are you?”

P
ARTLY
, I
COULD
sense, because she was ragged with newness and too much too soon and exhaustion and air miles and fear, fear, fear for him, she—Justine—told me everything. Or at least told me so much so disingenuously that it was hard to believe she was keeping anything back on purpose.

“Is it true?” she asked, more than an hour later. “Are you … I mean who
are
you?”

The muscles in my back were full of granular crunch.
Wulf
, regardless of plot intrigue, was still fighting every inch of the road back to quiescence.

“You mean am I the reincarnation of his dead lover of thousands of years ago?”

She didn’t laugh, exactly, but her face acknowledged that I was acknowledging the ridiculousness of it. Or at least the ridiculousness of the way it sounded.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” I said. “I don’t believe in any of this shit. Afterlife, God, reincarnation, dreams, clues, destiny, magic. A plot. I don’t believe the world’s got a fucking plot. I really don’t. But ever since I met him, ever since those first moments on Crete, and afterwards, when he came to see me … Ever since then he’s been in my head. Ever since then I’ve been having this dream.” Our eyes met. “I know, a
dream
, right? But anyway I’ve been having this dream about …” I hesitated. Then thought, Fuck it: she’s been honest with me. “Oh God, well, it’s partly an erotic dream”—she looked at the ground—“but it’s mainly the two of us on this beach. Walking along this beach at dusk. It doesn’t sound like much, but there’s a weird quality to it. I know: It’s a dream. Of course there’s a weird quality to it. But this is different. I realise I sound like a lunatic, by the way. I’m sorry.”

“Do you have a cigarette?” she said.

Two Camel Filters—just two—left in my crumpled softpack. One—just one—tear-off match from an airport bar. We looked at each other. Again, didn’t, quite, laugh.

“Thing is,” she said, “here you both are.”

I was thinking I liked her. I was thinking she was a fast learner. If she survived even another two or three years she’d be a force to be reckoned with. There was damage there, but she had sufficient self-brutality and hunger to make herself bigger than it.

“When I left him in LA,” she said, “I wanted him to be free to go look for you. But he didn’t do that. He came looking for me. And because of that, he’s here. On the other side of the world. In the same house as you.”

“Well, if you believe in destiny,” I said, “I guess that’s what you’d call it.”

“Do you?”

I remembered the conversation with Maddy on the way back from Rome airport.
Ever since I met him I’ve had this feeling that this isn’t just all random crap. It’s as if someone’s watching it all, or making it up.

“I dislike it enough not to believe in it,” I said, thinking: That’s the first time I’ve ever thought that. There was that Forster quote: How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

“So how come you
are
here?” Justine asked.

Well. Yes.

And though merely opening my mouth to begin felt like a labour against giant exhaustion, I told her everything. Granted there was an uncanny ease between us, but I was so sick of weighing narrative rations by now that I would have told anyone. All of it. Quinn’s Book. The myth of origin. The Chinese executions. Salvatore and Bryce. Olek’s vampires. The fucking human
world
closing in. You might not want this for yourself, but you’ll want it for your children.

“We were attacked by the religious nuts, too,” she said. “Back in LA before I left. Mia says it’s going to be an all-out war.”

“Or all-out primetime entertainment,” I said. “Whatever does not kill them makes them make TV shows.” I had an image of Zoë and Lorcan pitted against human kids: assault courses; IQ tests; spelling bees; cooking shows. I could see the new version of
Blind Date. One of these three
would-be Prince Charmings has a dark secret … Will tonight’s Cinderella still want to go to the Ball—when she finds out it’s on a full moon?

“So what
is
the cure?” Justine asked. As I’d known she would, since I’d stopped short of the details. I’d stopped short of the details because the cocktail of disbelief and nausea and absurdity and intuitive certainty made me want to go somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere and sleep. I thought of Muni, her calm, smiling physical care for the baby. I thought of Devaz, lying on his bunk, staring into space. Human again.

While I told her the details she stood looking at the ground, frowning, slightly, one arm wrapped around her middle, the other—hand holding the all but untouched cigarette—down by her side. I told her without emotion. Just what I’d heard. Just what I’d seen.

When I’d finished, she said: “You don’t believe that.” Fast learner was right. I’d known her less than a couple of hours and here were the pronouncements. On me. On what I believed.

“No,” I said. “I don’t. But I knew without him having to tell me exactly what the ritual was. It didn’t feel like an educated guess. It felt like a memory. And there’s Devaz. He was a werewolf. Now he’s not.” As soon as I said this I realised (slow, Talulla, this place makes you so dumb and
slow
) that of course Olek wouldn’t let him leave here alive. He was probably already dead. He’d probably already been neatly driven away by Grishma and neatly buried somewhere. It was a strange little fleck of disgust in the mass of disgust. Out of it, I said: “I could give my children the chance of a normal life.”

You say these things as an experiment. To see if you believe them. How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?