By Blood We Live (33 page)

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s …” I let it go. “How is he?”

“Physically he’s all right. He didn’t get a scratch, apart from apparently he nearly got stabbed in the throat.”

“How did you find me?”

“Oh Christ, Lu, that’s a long story. We had help. Blimey, I don’t know where to start.”

She didn’t have to. The door opened. Walker. Unshaven. In black jeans and a denim shirt. The shit-kicker boots he hadn’t worn since the WOCOP days. He looked like he’d lost weight.

An awkward exchange of not quite direct looks between the three of us. Then Maddy got up from the recliner. “Well,” she said, “now you’ve decided to rejoin the land of the living, I’m going to pour myself a bloody huge gin and tonic. We’re still waiting for half the furniture, but the booze and fags arrived today, thank God.”

W
HEN SHE
’
D GONE
, Walker came and sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand around my ankle through the comforter.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The lingering drug had tears ready for me, if I wasn’t going to be ruthless with myself.

Walker gave my ankle a squeeze, then took his hand away. I thought: That’s the last time he’ll ever do that. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. Looked at the brand-new floor. It was all there between us, the innocent reality, that this was us—
us
—and yet this was still happening. All love’s details burned bright. Surely they meant something? Surely they were enough? But they came and went and there we still were, with new unfillable space between us. I felt old and tired. Sometimes your coldness thrills you. Sometimes it’s just a wearily disgusting tumour. Not for the first time, nor did I imagine the last, Aunt Theresa’s voice came back: Talulla Demetriou, you are a dirty little girl. A dirty,
filthy
little girl.

“Thank you for coming for us,” I said. The power of plain words.
Thank you.
I swallowed, swallowed, but the tears came anyway. Shocking to feel them hot and intimate on my cheeks. My mother had always grudged her own rare tears. The harder you are the more they undo you. It’s the price you pay for
being
hard. I was sick of myself, suddenly.

But not sufficiently. My self always wins. Sits out the sickness, drumming its fingers, until I come back, then says, Right. All done? Can we
continue
now?

“We had help,” Walker said. “Vampires, if you can believe that.”

“What?”

He told me. Not looking at me. Like a departing employee tiredly running through stuff for his successor.

“Lorcan pulled Quinn’s book from your bag,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of Olek, otherwise. Maybe someone’s making this shit up after all.”

There was a twitch in the ether between us when he went through the vampire character sketches and got to Alyssia.

“Sounds like she made an impression,” I said.

He was silent for a moment. Then said: “Don’t.” Quietly. If he’d said it in anger it would have been easier to hear. I resisted the urge to say (pointlessly), “Don’t what?”

He stood up—and when he looked down at me and smiled all the shame and guilt my efficient little self had kept in check rushed up. Into my face, I knew.

“Don’t try for a smooth baton change,” he said.

The smile was his smile, being used now to express its opposite.

I’m not normally the one who looks away. Even now I almost, out of sheer self-loathing, didn’t. Then, with more warm tears, I did. It was a little Pyrrhic victory for him. I felt “I’m sorry” coming up in me again. And him thinking: Don’t bother.

We stayed like that, him watching me crying, for as long as we could stand it. Then he took a couple of paces away. The room needed a window for him to go to and look out of. I could feel the grammar of the moment demanding it. But the room was the room. The room was innocent. And designed by us.

“You don’t need me to tell you this,” he said. “But we got the vamp help because I promised Olek you’d go and see him. That was the deal. That’s the story.”

We both knew I would go, that I was always going, but nonetheless I said: “You promised?”

“He took my word. Old school. Obviously there’s nothing making you go. But since you were going anyway …”

I didn’t contradict him.

“He didn’t seem surprised,” Walker said. “Maybe he’s in on the plot.”

It really sickened him, this idea that there was a shape or purpose to all this. Because if there was then he’d gone through everything he’d gone through according to its design. Was still going through it. I thought of how much we’d loved kissing each other. It was almost an embarrassment, how much just kissing turned both of us on. I imagined myself opening my mouth now and saying: I love you. I do love you.

But I didn’t say it. Instead I lay there and he stood there, enduring the pain and awfulness of this. The moment you think is unbearable forces
you to disappoint yourself by bearing it. There’s resigned laughter available, for the hilarity of your own durability.

“He’s in India,” Walker said. “I’ve got the details. He wants you there in time for the next full moon.”

As soon as he said “India” it felt like déjà vu. I realised now that when I’d spoken to Olek on the phone I’d imagined him somewhere like that. Somewhere superficially—somewhere
cinematically
—unlikely for a vampire.

“Mike and Natasha will meet you there,” he said.

Mike and Natasha. Not him. So it had really begun, the sequence of severances. Well? It was what I wanted—wasn’t it?

Walker went to the door and opened it. All our past tenderness rose up in my chest. I was so close to saying, Please don’t go. Please let’s not do this. Please forgive me. Please, please, please. The thought of how good it would feel if he came and put his arms around me and held me wasn’t a thought but a physical sensation, an ache in the space around my body. I imagined myself saying it, heard myself, felt the sweetness that would come to me in his embrace. And immediately it had come so would the knowledge, like a gunshot, that it had been the wrong thing to do.

“It won’t be safe for the kids,” he said, not looking at me now. “You should leave them here. We’ll take care of them until you get back.”

“And when I get back?” Sometimes you need every nail hammered in.

Walker turned and looked at me. He looked so tired and handsome. I wanted to get up from the bed and go to him. He didn’t say anything. It was as if there was a membrane between us, every moment tearing. We stared at each other. You push it to the absolute brink of finality and there’s a pure moment when you know you can pull it back. The huge gift of our past—and the future we could have—was there like an invisible treasure giving off a golden light and warmth.

Then he turned and walked away, and closed the door behind him.

L
OS
A
NGELES TO
New York. New York to Dublin. Dublin to Istanbul. Istanbul to Delhi. Delhi to Bangkok. All First Class. So I could be off the plane fast when we landed.

The New York to Dublin leg was always going to be tough. Six hours. As soon as we took off I couldn’t believe what I was doing. All that resolve about not being stupid. This was the stupidest thing I’d done so far. All the
what-ifs
I’d brushed aside came back like a crowd of ugly people around my seat, jabbing me with their fingers. What if there was a problem with the plane? What if we got re-routed? What if we had to circle for ages before we were cleared to land? What if I took too long getting through Immigration? What if there was a bomb scare, or a fire that closed the airport? I don’t think I moved for the first three hours. Just stared at my video screen, not seeing anything. The movie’s end credits went up and I had no clue what had played. I switched to Flight Map. Distance to destination. Time to destination. That was worse. There was nothing to do except sit there and freak out. They kept offering me stuff. Champagne, food, chocolates. They thought something was wrong with me. Everyone else in First took everything they were offered. I was grateful for the spaces between the seats. I wanted to smoke. Smoking would have helped. Instead I kept getting up and going to the bathroom and washing my hands and face, just for something to do.

Then worse. In the Arrivals lounge at Istanbul one of the TVs was showing CNN with the sound down. Captions in Turkish I couldn’t read. At first I didn’t know why the footage bothered me. It was just another crime scene. Lights, police cars, yellow tape, people milling around, an officer standing with his hands on his hips and his back to the camera. I couldn’t even understand why it had made it to the news.

Until I realised it was Karl Leath’s house.

The footage cut away to the news studio. A new blonde anchorwoman
I didn’t recognise and three male studio guests, one of whom was a priest. I stood there watching, my hands fat and heavy, waiting for a photo of me to come up. I could imagine the voiceover: “The suspect, picked up on CCTV leaving the scene, is considered extremely dangerous …” Any second now. Any second now. My face on screen. My face.

But nothing happened.

They cut back to the studio, and after a couple of minutes of worried-looking conversation, moved on to a story about Justin Timberlake.

Justin. Justine. The feeling of beguilement. The world snickering and dropping a hint.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I made it to the airport hotel with less than thirty minutes to spare. If I’d had luggage I’d have been fucked. As it was, checking-in was agony. The sun trying to slow everything down. Two morons from Atlanta ahead of me at the desk complaining about having twin beds instead of a double. The lights in the lobby were Christmassy, reflecting off everything, digging in behind my eyes. I was drenched with sweat, shaking. My hands all over the place when I had to sign. The clerk asked me if I was all right.

But the bathrooms in big hotels don’t have windows. The sun hates the bathrooms in big hotels.

I was so fucked-up I almost didn’t go on.

But I did go on. What else was there to do?

I searched online for everything I could find on the Karl Leath murder story. As far as I could tell there was no CCTV footage, no identikit or police-artist sketch of Justine Idiot Cavell, no
suspect.
I’d left the gun and my prints all over everything, but since I didn’t have a record there wouldn’t be a database match. (All the low-life years before Fluff took me under his wing flashed, the miracle of never getting busted for anything. A blessing I never even appreciated at the time. Well, I fucking appreciated it now.)

The Internet was pounding out werewolf and vampire content with a new intensity. What I’d done to Leath was just one of countless cases of what more and more people were seeing as the work of monsters. Not tabloid monsters.
Actual
monsters. The Churches were loud. Twitter was full of people asking how much longer was the government going to sit on
its fat stupid ass and Do Nothing. Not so many “exposed hoaxes” as there used to be. A group of scientists publishing as far as they were concerned irrefutable DNA evidence. Monster-deniers were on the same shrinking bit of polar ice as climate-change sceptics.

I must have spent a couple of hours in the bathroom trawling through all this on my phone. I told myself it was necessary. Information gathering. An end to me rushing blindly into things. But I knew what it really was. Delaying tactics. Putting off what I knew couldn’t be put off.

Feeding.

When I’d thought about it I’d imagined finding the poorest area. Homeless. Less chance of investigation. Some piss-stinking old guy with a bag and a bottle. But the Internet told me Istanbul’s slum districts were fast disappearing. Sulukule, formerly home to the Roma, had been pulled down to make way for fancy new buildings. There was hardly anyone left in Tarlabasi. One barber shop pointlessly still open surrounded by rubble and condemned tenements. I took a cab there soon after sunset, but I couldn’t. When it came right down to it I just didn’t believe I’d find someone. I stayed in the cab and went back to Taksim Square. I was so insane and freaked out I nearly just took the fucking cab driver when we stopped at a red signal in a quieter street. He was only about twenty, a thin guy with oily skin and a small head and a too-big moustache and an Adam’s apple that seemed to move around way too much when he talked to me, glancing up in the rearview. I actually felt myself leaning forward towards his seat, smelling deodorant and some kind of hair product and a samosa or something spicy he’d eaten and breath that was a mix of cigarettes and Turkish coffee. It’s possible I would’ve bitten him if the light hadn’t changed when it did. Instead I sat back in my seat horrified that I’d been so close. Was this what it was going to be like? A constant battle with your own loose will? I had a list of Escort Services. Not many supplying male escorts. Male
gay
escorts, yes—but very little for straight women. A sort of religious hypocrisy, I guessed. But the thought of phoning (they all advertised “English Spoken”) to find an in-call, going there, being let in, doing what I had to do, getting out … I was afraid the calls would be recorded. I’d have to use a card for the agency booking fee. The apartment building might have CCTV. I don’t know, maybe it was just
the fucking surreality of it, of calling up a company to make an appointment to kill someone.

In the end I just asked the cab driver to drop me at the nearest night club.

“Fuck me, I’m starvin’,” the guy said, when we got back to his hotel. “But it can definitely wait. Come here.”

His name was Mick. He was English, from Manchester, not bad-looking, in a monkeyish, Robbie Williams sort of way, and enough success with his cheeky-chappie routine and gym-worked body (he was in black Levis and a tight white t-shirt that showed it off) had given him a twinkly confidence I knew would fly with a lot of girls. He and his “mates” were in Istanbul for a “lads’ week,” but he’d got separated from them on the club crawl. I hadn’t had to do much. He was drunk when he hit on me at the bar—“Orright, love? What you drinkin’?”