By Blood We Live (11 page)

I stopped reading. I didn’t have a choice. The remainder of the page had been torn away, along with all the other remaining pages.

… but it was not until people returned to the banks of Iteru that

The implication—Olek’s editorial implication—was clear: someone, eventually, had found a cure.

W
ALKER FINISHED READING
and laid the book down on the nightstand. We were in the bedroom. Bed unmade (
love
unmade, my nasty inner voice said), each of the two big windows full of afternoon sunlight. Across the hall, the twins were trying to wake Cloquet up. Cloquet wasn’t enjoying the experience.

“So?” I said.

I was sitting on the floor by the open door across from him, smoking a Camel filter. Last night’s hangover had talked itself into wanting another drink. My copy of Byron’s
Don Juan
was open face down on the floor by Walker’s foot. I remembered exactly where I’d stopped reading last night. Before we’d had the sex that had felt like an argument:

There’s doubtless something in domestic doings,/Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis.

He shook his head. “What do you want me to say?”

Wait. Count to five. Don’t snap at him.

“Well, do you think it’s genuine, for starters?” I said.

“Do you mean do I think this is really Quinn’s journal, or do I think this story has any basis in fact?”

Count to five again. Pointless, since my irritation contained was just as visible as it would have been let out.

“Okay,” he said, exhaling, seeing it. “I think there’s every chance the journal’s the real deal. As for the story …” he laughed. Shook his head again. No.

“Just like that,” I said. “Amazing.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Lu, are you serious?
Gods of the Lower Realm
? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I’m aware of what it sounds like.”

“Apparently not, if you’re taking it seriously. Who knew demons could suck some poor bastard’s soul out of his ass!”

My face was hot. Because of course he was right. Of course. Of
course.

“Please,” he said. “
Please
tell me you’re not …” He couldn’t finish. Incredulity was getting the better of him.

“Doesn’t something resonate?” I asked. “I mean not the details, necessarily. I mean the … I don’t know.”

Across the hall, Cloquet said: “Zoë,
mon ange
, that is really annoying. I am not well.”

Delighted giggles from the twins. Zoë had a funny little old lady laugh.

“No,” Walker said, with his own forced calm. “Nothing resonates. It’s a
fairy
story, for Christ’s sake.”

“What are we, then?” I asked him. “
We’re
a fucking fairy story.”

Awkward silence. For the two readings of that sentence. I’d meant we, werewolves, are a fairy story. But the opportunist subconscious never sleeps. He’d heard we as in me and him,
we
were a fairy story. A relationship not to be believed in.

“
Mes enfants,
” Cloquet groaned. “There is going to be violence here if you keep doing that.”

More fiendish cackling from the twins. I wondered how long we’d have before Lorcan’s next rage, or nightmare, or worrying trick of picking an adult and staring expressionlessly at them until they got mad.

“You know what you’re pissed about?” Walker said. “You’re pissed because it
doesn’t
resonate. You were expecting some big revelation. Instead you get this horseshit. It’s just another story. I mean why stop here? If a story’s all we need let’s have the little baby Jesus and the Tooth Fairy and fucking Santa Claus.”

I didn’t say anything. Because again, he was right. He got up from the bed, went to the window and looked down into the softly blazing garden, hands in his back pockets. I thought how much I’d loved the shape of him. Lean, economically muscled. The pretty profile. Loved. Past tense. What happened? What happens?

A vampire comes to call.

“Let me ask you one thing,” I said. “If there was a cure, would you take it?”

This, I knew, was also what had vexed him. The suggestion of return. Which brought the absence of anything to return
to.

He didn’t answer straight away. His face was calm and golden in the sunlight.

“There’s no going back,” he said. “Not for me.”

At which moment my phone rang. Again.

“F
ORGIVE MY IMPATIENCE
,” Olek said, “but I’m on tenterhooks here. Have you read Quinn’s journal?”

I got to my feet and stepped out onto the landing. Walker turned and watched, but didn’t follow. Through the door opposite I could see into Cloquet’s room. The twins had found an assortment of hats and gloves and shoes in the downstairs closet. They were putting them on Cloquet, who was still half asleep. He was currently wearing a bicycle helmet, an oven mitt and a pair of battered dress shoes much too big for him.

“Yes,” I said. “So what?”

“So what, Miss Talulla, is that I know what the people who returned to the banks of Iteru—or the Nile as we now call it—knew. I know the way out of the Curse.”

“I repeat,” I said: “So what?”

If you can hear a smile, I heard his.

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“Who the fuck
are
you?”

“Who am I? I’ve told you. My name is Olek. I’m a vampire. I have an interest in science. And
I
repeat: I have a proposition of potential benefit to us both.”

“Not if I don’t want what you’re offering.”

“You might not want it for yourself,” he said. “But you’ll want it for your children. Do you have access to a computer?”

For your children.
It sounded like a threat. Then I thought of Lorcan’s problems around full moon. Could the vampire know about that?

“Yes,” I said. I could feel more of what there was between me and Walker tearing. He hadn’t moved from the window. Was letting himself imagine the future without me.

“Stay on the line. Go to your computer. Open your web browser.”

The laptop was in the en suite, half-buried under a pile of laundry.
Lycanthropy hadn’t made me any tidier. I went back through the bedroom—Walker gave me a now what? look to which I raised a hand: Hang on. I sat down on the bathroom floor and powered-up the laptop.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m online.”

“Good. There’s something you need to see. Go to Google. Sign in to Mail with the following address. Don’t worry. It’s an account I’ve set up just for this.” He gave me a sequence of letters which didn’t spell anything in English, at gmail.com. The password was numbers and letters that meant nothing to me. Naturally the thought that this was being traced or hacked—or that the entry would set a time bomb under the villa ticking—occurred to me, but I dismissed it. Not with good reason. Just out of impatience. I was doing this, whatever the fuck it was.

An inbox opened, with one mail item.

“Open the email and click on the link,” Olek said. “It’s secure, I promise you. When the link page opens, it’ll ask you for another password. You there?”

“Yes. Page open.”

More numbers and letters.

I hit enter.

“What you’re about to see is a real event,” Olek said. “I’ll stay on the line. Just watch. I’ll explain when it’s run.”

Video clip. Very high resolution. No sound. Timecode in the bottom left corner. Another sequence of numbers on the right.

Blue sky. Sunshine. A long line of what appeared to be Chinese people filing into a solitary low-lying white building with no windows set in manicured grounds. Heavily armed military everywhere.

Cut to inside.

Processing. Desks with more military personnel. People one by one presenting driver’s licences, passports, documents—and being issued in return with numbered paper wristbands of the kind used at music festivals.

Cut to: An overhead shot of a room the size of a soccer pitch, divided into rows of concrete cubicles, several hundred, each with a set of steel bars down one side and another set across the roof.

The people in the holding cells, looking scared shitless. Some of them in tears. Families incarcerated together, single people alone. One armed
soldier per three or four cells. Men and women in civilian dress with iPads and walkie-talkies.

Cut to: A large digital stadium clock. Counting down.

Cut to: Wide angle. Twenty or thirty of the cells visible. A sudden silent flurry of activity. Soldiers and iPad personnel moving. Prisoners screaming—all with the terrible visual intimacy of silent film.

Jerky zoom in.

In one of the cells, a woman of around twenty years old is turning into a werewolf.

Because, I now realise, the countdown has reached zero—and the full moon, though we can’t see it, is up.

Two soldiers empty magazines into her.

Silver, manifestly, since she falls, immediately.

“T
HAT WAS SHOT
in secret three months ago at Zanghye, Gansu Province, in the People’s Republic of China,” Olek said. “It was one of dozens of such actions currently being carried out by the Chinese government. They’re starting small.”

I was still, absurdly, sitting on the bathroom floor. I was thinking three things. First, that the footage was genuine. Second, that it wouldn’t be possible to roll out extermination like that openly and nationally—to industrialise it. Third, that that was naive. It had been done before. Many times. Which gave birth to a fourth naive thought: In China, maybe, but not at home. Not in the U.S.

Wrong.
It couldn’t happen here
was exactly the thinking that made it happening here possible. Wherever “here” was and whatever “it” might be.

“You’re thinking, perhaps,” Olek said, “that even if what you’ve just seen is genuine, it’ll be confined to places like China. Places without what the West likes to call freedom.”

“I’m a little ahead of you, thanks,” I said.

He laughed. A sound of genuine delight. “A pupil of Mr. Marlowe’s,” he said. “Of course. And perhaps his Conradian namesake. ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ Very good. This saves us time. We have a sensibility in common. I’m so much looking forward to meeting you.”

“Now you’re ahead of
your
self,” I said.

“You wouldn’t want to spare your children extermination?”

“It’s going to be a long time before they’re at risk.”

“You
have
a long time. All of you. Four hundred years, give or take. The writing’s on the wall, Talulla, and people with a big simple enemy will have no trouble reading it. Extend logically from what you’ve just seen. Extend twenty years. Fifty. A hundred. Your species—and ours—is living
in the last days of its liminality. China is the New Inquisition’s first whisper in secret. But soon the whisper will be a proud global shout. Genocide has always depended on getting people to see the enemy as not human. A redundancy, if the enemy
isn’t
human.”

Walker had appeared in the bathroom doorway. I hit the video’s Play button and handed the laptop to him.

“I’m offering a way out for you, for your children, for any of your kind who want it,” Olek said. “You’re too smart to dismiss it out of hand.”

“What makes you think we’re going to line up for this?” I said. “You think this is going to happen without a fight?”

“Of course not,” Olek said. “I imagine you’ll raise an army. Turn as many as you can. Maybe you’ll win. Maybe you’ll become the new master race.”

I had a vision of myself and the pack going through city after city, biting or scratching everyone we could. News reports of escalating panic. A world map showing a werewolf population exploding. But it was followed by a vision of the Chinese model turned into a primetime game show, bets placed, just another outlet for the viewing world’s already rapt boredom.

“Maybe you’ll elect to roll the dice of all-out war,” Olek said. “If anyone could lead a species … Well, you’ll think this is just flattery. But I think the truth is you know they’ll win. They have that thing. They have collective durability. It’s a sort of stupidity, really, a lack of refinement, but it keeps them going.”

I felt tired, suddenly. Claustrophobically irritated. Questions I hadn’t wanted to ask myself were here now whether I liked it or not, petitioners who, once they were in, simply wouldn’t go away. Even the sunlight and the garden’s sleepiness felt like the soft edge of the world’s incipient threat. It’s coming for you. They’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time.

“Why don’t you tell me what it is you want from me,” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure whatever it is it’s something I’m not going to give you.”

“Talulla, I promise you, it’s nothing that will harm you. But I don’t want you to make a decision until you’ve seen the proof.”

“The proof of what?”

“The proof that the cure works.”

“Which you have.”

“Which I have. I want you to come and see him.”

Walker had watched the video. He set the laptop down, open, on the bed, and returned to his objectless vigil at the window. I knew it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. I knew he wasn’t, under any circumstances, going back.

“Fine,” I said to Olek. “Let me think about it. I have your number. Don’t call me again.”

“But you mu—”

I hung up.

“Don’t say anything,” I said to Walker.

He didn’t, but he didn’t stop staring out the window either. I kept telling myself to get up off the floor, and kept failing to get up off the floor. The bathroom smelled of unwashed laundry and the villa’s lousy drains. I thought: Symbolic—then was immediately pissed at myself for thinking it. It was an annoying habit I’d acquired, of looking for signs, correspondences, metaphors, the goddamned pointless tic of finding things behind things, things connected to things, things
in
things.
Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all, Lu. There isn’t one.
But ever since the vampire sought me out … Ever since the recurring dream …

The self-disgust was enough, at least, to get me up off the floor. I was about to go to Walker and stand close behind him and wrap my arms around his chest and haul whatever was left of love up into my heart and be thankful, when he said: “That’s becoming the thing you say to me.”