By Blood We Live (32 page)

I was remembering the darkening land, those last flakes of light and the night coming down inside me, his drinking to the rhythm of my heart, to
what felt like the rhythm of the land itself. It was such a thin, light-aired place between life and death. In it you could see the universe was like a frail smile.

“When he opened his wrist and put it to my lips, I remember I said: ‘Why?’ And he answered: ‘Because someone must bear witness. My time is over. This is the last thing I can do. Now drink.’ So of course,” I said, smiling, feeling the tears coming again, “I drank.”

Caleb had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It had burned all the way down, and its ash had fallen on the carpet. I could feel Mia trying to make the emotional calculation. She was barely six hundred years old. There was, I knew, a determination in her to pass the thousand-year jinx—but twenty thousand?

“What happened to him?” Caleb asked.

I swallowed the tears. Blinked. Blinked. There’s no fool like an old fool.

“I never saw him,” I said. “I crawled deep into the cave and slept. When I woke the next night, there were only the remains.”

“What remains?”

The other youth demand—for end-points. Prime movers and final destinations.

“Not much,” I said. “I couldn’t see. It was still dark. Something like wet ash. I left the cave and went out into the night. I had a woman. Children. There was no going back. I knew that from the very beginning.”

“And did you have to feed straight away?” Caleb asked—but Mia shook her head.

“That’s enough questions,” she said. She, at any rate, could see or sense the state I was in. You’re a bit fragile …

Caleb, snapped out of it, saw what had become of his unsmoked cigarette. “Oh,” he said. “Shit. Sorry.”

“Sir?” Damien’s voice came over the PA. I picked up the phone by the bar.

“Yes, Damien?”

“Sir, we’re starting our approach. We should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

I turned to my guests. “Okay,” I said. “Seats upright, please. Fasten your seat belts. We’re landing soon.”

I
T WAS OBVIOUS
before the Caminata installation came into view that whatever had happened here, we’d missed it. The air (to noses of our refinement) stank—beyond the quiet base notes of meadow grass, gorse and rain—of explosives and gunfire.

Something very bizarre had happened to me en route.

We’d parked the car a quarter of a mile away on a chalk track that led off a rutted lane and made our way through a thin line of woodland up towards the ridge. A stream ran through a gully some thirty metres into the trees. Mia and Caleb went over it in a single leap, but I found myself compelled to wade. Not just the threatened unsteadiness in my pins (my body had decided to experiment with various anomalies and I’d decided to keep quiet about them) but a
psychological
necessity. A sort of dim curiosity about what the water would feel like, although I had no earthly reason for expecting it to feel like anything other than water. Fortunately, by the time I began to cross mother and son were far enough ahead not to see what happened.

What happened was that after three or four paces, shin-deep, I became convinced that I was treading not on what were obviously—visibly—the rounded stones of the stream bed, but on the heads and bodies of dead people.

I made it to the opposite bank and sloshed out, shaking, wondering not only what new doolally gimmick my brain was trying out, but also why the feel of the non-existent corpses underfoot reminded me of the old geezer I’d seen that night on the drive at Las Rosas, with his crutch and his bloodshot eye and his baffling bulletin that I was “going the wrong way.” Him and that wretched horse I’d had to shoot the night I went after Justine in North Vegas. I’d forgotten both of them until just now.

Needless to say I didn’t mention any of this to Mia and Caleb when I caught up with them at the edge of the tree line.

Now we lay on our bellies on the ridge with night binoculars trained on what looked like the human equivalent of a smoked wasps’ nest some three hundred metres away. Part of the building’s roof had caved in. There were detonation scars everywhere. The main doors had been blown clean off. Half a dozen dazed personnel moved around, manifestly not knowing whether to abandon what was left of their post.

“She’s not here,” Mia said. Grudging satisfaction. She’d pulled her blonde hair back and bound it in a bun as hard as an eight ball, exposing her fine Slavic cheekbones and the superb whiteness of her throat. Had I not come along, she could have had a career as a model. Night shoots only.

“Apparently not,” I said. I could feel her weighing up whether to take a feed from the shell-shocked victims still in the facility. They looked in no state to offer resistance. She was at least thirty hours early, but her recent travails had made an opportunist of her. The thirst was lifting its head in her, the red snake waking from a light (always light) doze.

“We need one of them alive,” I said.

“They’re not going to know anything,” Mia said. “She’s been taken out by force. I’d say it was her pack, except …” She didn’t need to finish. I could smell it, too: along with the odour of werewolves was the inimitable perfume of our own kind. Vampires had been here.

“Two different snatch teams?” Mia said. “That’s an unlikely coincidence.”

“And yet still more likely than ours and theirs joining forces.”

“How many do you think are left?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Stay here.”

I went fast and low between the gorse bushes. I needn’t have bothered.
Militi Christi
vigilance had collapsed.

Seventy metres. Fifty. Twenty-five. There were now only two guards outside the building. Take one out, grab the other. I readied myself for the last sprint.

I must have made some sound when I fell, but, either deaf from the explosions or past caring, neither of the grunts heard it. The world swung up and went out. I lay on my side with my left arm trapped under me. Nausea. A rush that dipped me for a second into complete blackness. A
moment needed when I came back to organise the rearranged geometry. Grass tickled my face. One huge trodden daisy head beamed at me sadly. I could smell wet earth, rabbit shit, wild rosemary. I retched, thinking, as I retched, of the idiom,
as weak as a kitten.
I thought, Yes, I’ve never considered the weakness of kittens properly, but that’s how I feel,
as weak as a kitten.
Briefly, I felt sorry for weak things everywhere.

Something moved, very fast, over my head.

It was a moment before I could lift my kitten skull (on what felt like its broken kitten neck) to see what it was.

Mia.

She was—even in my state—a joy to behold. She took the last thirty feet in an airborne leap. The first guard—a trim woman in her twenties with a long dark plait—lost half her throat in my companion’s single right-hand slash and fell to the floor—or rather knelt, slowly, trying to hold the blood in with her hand, mouth opening and closing. She had marvellously long thick eyelashes. The second guard—a fair-haired, tough-headed guy with a frowning face and a stocky, muscular build—made some vague, slow-motion movements with his hands about his person, in abstracted reflex search for the automatic rifle that was in fact propped against the wall ten feet away, before Mia’s high kick—a
gullgi chagi
, to be precise—rendered him immediately unconscious, and nearly took his head off into the bargain. Within two seconds she had him slung up over her shoulder (his weight no more to her than a sack of potato chips) and was heading back to the cover of the ridge.

I heard her dump him on the ground and say to Caleb: If he wakes up, knock him out again.

Then she came back for me.

“What’s the matter?”

Good question. I was on my hands and knees, thinking what a distant and futile goal getting to my feet seemed. I had a brief, vivid vision of my old friend, Amlek, the way he’d looked when I found his body one night in Athens, staked through the heart and bound to a wooden post, papyrus scraps driven into his flesh with nails, covered in Greek obscenities.
Names in my ears,/Of all the lost adventurers my peers
 … The vision vanished.

“Fuck,” I heard myself saying, as if from a long way away. “Fuck. I don’t … I …”

At which I was unceremoniously hoisted myself, and carried back to the ridge.

“Caleb,” Mia said, “go and get the car.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Just get the Jeep, will you? Do it. Now!”

Caleb (no slouch overground himself) was back within ten minutes. He nosed the vehicle in second gear cross-country with the lights off (he had to perch on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals) though there was no one outside the facility to hear. I wondered if Mia’s abrasive visit had been observed, and now the remnant force was indoors, collectively and firmly resolved on cowardice. Or prayer. I had a curious little image of them all kneeling, saying the Rosary in unison.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s passing. I can manage.”

It’s passing.
Whatever “it” was. The kitten-weakness, the nausea, the dip into the vat of pitch. The vortex of memories. Amlek’s corpse.
You don’t look well.

We put the guard in the trunk. I got in the back seat and lay down. Caleb slid over and Mia got behind the wheel. I called Damien. He was at the rendezvous, ready, with the truck. No one likes spending the daylight hours in a freight container, but on the road needs must.

Halfway there (I was feeling better) my phone rang. It was Olly, from Amner-DeVere.

“What’ve you got?”

“Two hours ago,” he said. “LAX. She bought a one-way to New York. Flight leaves in thirty-five minutes. Sorry I couldn’t get this to you sooner.”

“Keep tracking it,” I said. “Get me the next transaction as soon as you can.”

“I’m supposed to be going to Napa this weekend,” he said. “It’s my mother’s—”

“Double rate,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Pause. I could see him doing the imaginary steam-train-whistle-pull celebration. “Roger that,” he said.

“As soon as, Olly. Understood?”

“Understood.”

I hung up.

“How far are we?” I asked Mia. She was a fast, utterly confident driver. Her white hands looked lovely on the wheel and gearstick.

“Twenty minutes,” she said. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong with you?”

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Except he lied in every word. And the stream was filled with bodies.

“Do you two have passports?” I said.

Caleb looked at Mia.

“Yes,” she said. “Several. Why?”

I thought of the fear Justine was up against. Night flights. The real world. Small windows to get undercover. All the way to Bangkok, the hard way.

“Because we’re going to Thailand,” I said, redialling Damien’s number.

I
WOKE UP
in bed in my underwear in a room in the Last Resort. So christened by poor Fergus, who would never have need of it again. I remembered Trish getting childishly excited over the architectural drawings. Sweet Trish who always looked too small for whatever motorbike she was riding. And for whatever helmet she was wearing. I know I look like a science fiction dwarf, she said, but I don’t want my feckin brains all over the central reservation, do I? Zoë, who had a passion for headwear of all kinds, once put one of the visored helmets on. She was sitting on the floor. When she tilted her head back to look up at us the weight of the thing made her keel over. It was, we all agreed, just as well she was wearing a helmet.

You might not want it for yourself, but you’ll want it for your children.

I lay there in the first minutes of coming-to with Olek’s words running through my head. Jake was dead. Cloquet was dead. Fergus. Trish. I’d been close to death a dozen times or more in the last three years. My son had been kidnapped, my daughter incarcerated with me. WOCOP was gone, but the
Militi Christi
had picked up where they’d left off. I thought of Bryce’s
Big Brother
with werewolves format. There would be other shows. Hunting shows. Game shows. Gambling shows. The world was turning its gaze on us. The world was realising that
something would have to be done.
The noose, as Olek had suggested, was only going to get tighter.

“Hey,” Madeline said.

I opened my eyes. White ceiling with inset yellowy halogens turned low. I was in a crisply made bed, linen fresh out of the packaging. It smelled of department stores, human civilisation, the old life, mixed with the room’s comforting odour of new plaster and paint. Pale oak floor, no windows. (Most of the Last Resort was underground, for obvious reasons.) Skirting uplights opposite. A green leather recliner next to my bed, with Maddy in it. She was, as usual, accurately made-up. She wore slimline khaki combat pants and a black t-shirt that had belonged to Cloquet. Red flip-flops showing off her pretty feet and scrupulous pedicure, toenails
vermillion. She’d caught the sun in Italy. There was a tan line where her watch had been.

“Zoë’s fine,” she said. “She’s here, she’s safe. She’s playing snakes and ladders with Lorcan and Luce upstairs.”

I hadn’t known I’d got up on my elbows, my whole body tensed, until I felt it relax now.

“Know where you are?” Madeline asked.

“Croatia?”

She nodded. “Whatever the fuck they shot you with, there was a lot of it. You’ve been out for two days. We had to tell passport control you were zonked on painkillers. Still cost us three hundred quid. How are you feeling?”

“Thirsty.”

There was a bottle of Jamnica mineral water on the floor next to her. She handed it to me. I drank the lot.

“More?”

“In a minute. What happened back there?”

Back there. When I was captured. When I risked my children’s lives. Again. Part of the question—oh,
part
of it—was: Did you fuck Walker? I could feel her screening a little for a moment, then giving up. “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

It was the truth, but it was also an admission of how close she’d come.