Talulla Rising (11 page)

I wasn’t, actually, going to do this, as I slipped one hand under her and lifted her out. I wasn’t, actually, going to do this, when I turned her to the window, where the delighted full moon made a silhouette of her downy head. I wasn’t, actually, going to do this, because there must be some things I couldn’t do. There must be some things I couldn’t do.

For a moment it was fascinating, this thought, as small and vivid as a lone swimmer in a tidal wave’s thousand-foot wall of water. Everything depended on it. There must be some things I couldn’t do.

•

You want to not know what you’re doing. You want the swoon, the fall into darkness, the obliteration of all that isn’t the beast.
I was drugged and an obscene act was performed on me
. No such luck. Nor are you helplessly looking on while the monster runs amok. The Curse insists on full fusion. You and the wolf won’t do. Only the werewolf, single and indivisible. And who is the werewolf if not you?

•

She’d be dead in five seconds. I’d feel her sternum go and my biggest canine puncture her heart while its opposite neighbour went through one of her lungs with a poignantly audible gasp. Something would break in me, too, a tiny bone in the soul that when it snapped let the whole godless universe in. Her blood would be warm and sweet-sour and empty and would go into me with innocence, too young to understand it was being shed. In the old human life meaninglessness was an idea, a hunch, a philosophy. Here, now, looking through the vision of Delilah’s five-second death, it was a fact. No one was watching. No one was keeping score. There was nothing. Just a vast mathematical silence. There was nothing and so there was nothing I couldn’t do. Even the worst thing. Especially the worst thing.

And we knew, Delilah, my unborn child and me, that soon there would only be one thing the worst thing could possibly be.

I held her up at the level of my snout, my big hands a dark cradle. She didn’t object. Just gurgled slightly, kicked her right leg, the fat little foot like a lump of Turkish delight. Jennifer screamed in me, the faintest neural tickle.

At which moment a car pulled into the drive and tipped the balance (the only perfect balance I’d ever achieved) and saved Delilah Snow’s life.

PART THREE

LOVE BITES

‘In this city a woman needs two cunts, one for business and one for pleasure.’

Jerzy Kosinski –
The Devil Tree

15

The night before our bogus meeting with plummy Althea Gordon was scheduled to take place I sat with Cloquet in a hired Corolla parked around the corner from Vincent Merryn’s large detached house in Royal Oak, West London. It was raining. The city’s first leaves had fallen.

•

Vast mathematical silence and impenetrable darkness. Yes. For a while. But some perverse gravity had forced me back, to the hotel room’s details, to the rolling boil of full awareness. Returning to myself that night in the Anchorage Grand had felt like being born into a death sentence. I’d opened my eyes with a feeling of surrender. Cloquet was still asleep. Zoë was still awake. For a long time I sat looking at her in the bassinet. I was scared to touch her.

(The car that had saved Delilah Snow and condemned me belonged, subsequent news reports revealed, to Amber Brouwer, George’s former lover. She’d come by because her dog had died and she’d got a little drunk and weepy and suddenly realised she missed George. A dead dog. Sentimentality. A drive. Headlights swimming over a bedroom ceiling. A life not taken.)

Only when my daughter closed her eyes did I rest my hand lightly on her body, felt the tiny ribs, the solidity and heat, the heartbeat and the sleeping wolf inside her. That, and how unentitled to any of it I was.

I had an imaginary conversation with my mother.

Ma, what do you do if you’re capable of anything?

Just because you’re capable of anything doesn’t mean you have to do everything. It’s not a death sentence, Lulu. It’s a life sentence. Sorry, angel. You’re going to have to either walk away or give it a try.

•

‘This is insane,’ Cloquet said. The rain accelerated for a few seconds, then slowed again.

Without Zoë I might have been able to walk away. Without her I might have been able to swallow the loss, cauterise it, grow a new deformed version of myself to accommodate it: The Unfit Mother. But there she was. Her brother’s insurance policy.

They have your son.
Thinking of him as a person made me feel sick. There was a vertigo of the heart. I had to think of him as an object. Like a lost suitcase I had to get back. It was a relief, suddenly, to be reduced to a single purpose. Nothing else matters, we say, when we fall in love. I knew it was hopeless. I knew all I was doing was choosing a route to my own death. It didn’t matter. It was as much of a liberation as walking away would have been.

Zoë’s brother wasn’t ‘he’ or ‘him’ any more. As Cloquet pointed out, we might have to travel far and fast if and when we found him; it wouldn’t do to have to wait on papers again. He was right, but it didn’t lessen the peculiar agony of naming him. It felt like taking something that didn’t belong to me. My mother had a miscarriage two years after I was born. It was a boy. She told me later they were going to call him Lorcan. So I named my son that, with clinical perversity, since it already had death attached to it. I’d phoned Kovatch before we left Anchorage, and the birth certificate (plus aliases to match his sister’s) had arrived this morning. The name in print unhinged me for a moment, as if I hadn’t known until then that the God who wasn’t there took these dares seriously. I put the documents away and told myself I wouldn’t use the name, even in my own head. But of course that was already impossible. It was entailed in the idea of him, and now every time I thought of him I thought of the name,
Lorcan
, and it was like an invitation to Death to come and claim his property.

I’d made a will, leaving my dad more than he’d know what to do with, enough for Cloquet to keep him for the rest of his days, one of the restaurants to Ambidextrous Alison, a million dollars to Lauren, who’d made a mess of her life,
one
dollar to Richard – and all the rest to the twins, in a trust to be administered by my dad or his nominees until they were of age. It helped to have done this, to know that materially at least I wasn’t leaving any loose ends. In a small way it made me less afraid of dying.

A black Land Rover sat across the road from us. In it, wearing police uniforms, were Draper and Khan, the two guys supplied by Charlie Proctor at Aegis Private Security. Charlie’s name was on Jake’s list of People I Could Trust. Draper was a fair-haired soft-voiced Scot with a way of moving that never looked hurried and a core of gentleness it seemed his life’s violence hadn’t touched. Khan was a third-generation British Pakistani with liquid black eyes and a thin, clever mouth, shallower than his colleague, and happier giving orders than taking them. They’d spent yesterday scoping the place out. (Two CCTV cameras at the front of the house, three at the back. Two goons. A housekeeper. A Siamese cat.) It was their job to get Cloquet in and secure Merryn for questioning. They didn’t know what I was. As far as they were concerned I was just another client who could afford their company’s services. The first moment of eye contact with them had said sex, yes – then their professional override had shut it down. It was a source of pride for both of them that this system worked, that they could be soldiers first. I envied them: my libido still slept, but I’d known since the second child left my body that it wouldn’t sleep much longer. The thought galled me, the accommodations I’d have to make. Her kid’s being tortured and here
she
is – screwing! Christ!

‘This is insane,’ Cloquet repeated. ‘I hope you realise that?’

‘I’m sorry. I have to be here.’

I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be at the hotel in Kensington with the baby. The baby was asleep in her carrier strapped to my chest. Since the kidnapping I’d found it disturbing to be alone with her. Alone with her, love threatened. Alone with her love came to me like the Devil, rich with temptation. I daren’t look, had to somehow keep myself turned away. I kept thinking of the line from the Old Testament
But God hardened Pharaoh’s heart
. It was something you could do, I believed, harden your heart.

‘It’s com
pletely
fucking unnecessary.’

‘Look, shut up. I know. I’m sorry.’

‘When I go in you
stay here
.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean it. In the car.’

‘Yes. I know.’

Cloquet’s eyes were raw. We were both jet-lagged. He was weaning himself off morphine and it was making him irritable. Draper, a unit medic, had checked the shoulder wound, pronounced it well sutured and free of infection and given him a week’s course of antibiotics.

Khan’s voice came over the headset. ‘You reading me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, we’re going in. You sit tight. Don’t use the com.
We
contact
you
, okay?’

We watched them until they disappeared around the corner. Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen. The Corolla’s little atmosphere filled up with our waiting. I was mentally busy with the question that had first occurred to me the morning we left Anchorage and that had since become monolithic: why
had
the vampires taken my son? The reflex answer – that they wanted him for the Helios Project – didn’t stand scrutiny. Assuming Jake had it right, for at least the last hundred and seventy years werewolves had been carrying a virus that had stopped them passing on the Curse. Instead of Turning, bitten victims died within twelve hours.
Vampires
bitten by infected werewolves, however, not only survived, but showed an increased tolerance for sunlight. Hence werewolves’ sudden relevance to Helios.

But I wasn’t infected. WOCOP’s serum killed the virus in newly bitten victims (they’d never established whether it cured
existing
werewolves, although I vaguely remembered Ellis telling Jake they’d been slipping it to him in drinks from time to time) and I was living proof of its efficacy. But there was no reason to suppose the vampires knew that. To them I was just a werewolf. Werewolves had the virus. The virus conferred sunlight resistance. Ergo, I was a valuable research commodity.

Except they hadn’t taken me. They’d taken my child. Again: why?

Obviously they’d known there was going to
be
a child, otherwise why the bag, the cattle prod, the ketch-pole? No doubt they had a WOCOP agent or two in their pockets, which would explain how they knew I was pregnant (if not how they knew just when I was going into labour), but if that was true then surely they’d know that I – famously –
wasn’t
carrying the virus? And if I wasn’t carrying the virus, chances were my offspring wouldn’t be, either.

So what did they want with him?

I’d put it all to Cloquet on the flight out of Alaska, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Or so he said. He’d seemed a little distracted. At the time I put it down to him being in a lot of pain (no prescription for the morphine so he was downgraded to Advil on board) but wondered since if there was more to it.

There was something else bothering me. Since arriving in London I’d several times had a feeling of... not quite being watched, but of invisible things passing near.
Someone walked over my grave
. In the street outside the hotel I’d stopped and turned, expecting to see someone I knew behind me – but there was no one. I’d said nothing about it to Cloquet. But it had kept happening – and now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

A click-scratch in my headset.

‘You reading?’ Khan asked.

‘Yes,’ we said in unison.

A pause.

‘They’re all dead.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve got five bodies. The two guards, the housekeeper and your man Merryn...’

For a moment I thought somehow Draper and Khan had completely misunderstood the mission and were telling us they’d accomplished it by killing everyone in the house.

‘... Plus... I don’t know. I guess it’s a body. It’s basically black slime with bits. Looks like it’s gone through an acid bath.’

Cloquet and I looked at each other. Vampire corpse.

‘How are the others killed?’ Cloquet asked.

‘The two gorillas took one each in the head at close range. The housekeeper and Merryn... I don’t know. Big neck and thigh wounds. Massive haemorrhaging. And the geezer in the acid bath, I haven’t a fucking clue. Looks like something from outer space. We need to, ah, get the fuck out of here. CCTV discs are all gone and the system’s off, so if we’re very lucky we
might
not be suspects in a multiple murder investigation.’

‘Wait,’ I said – then to Cloquet: ‘You have to go and take a look.’

‘Forget it.’

‘That’s a vampire’s body.’

‘So what?’

‘Don’t be idiotic. We have to take a look. We
have
to.’

Cloquet closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the seat. He looked like he needed to sleep for a week.

‘Khan?’ he said into the headset mic.

‘Here.’

‘I need to get in there. I need to take a look.’

I discerned Khan covering his own mic. To confer with Draper.

‘Five minutes. Then we’re out. You got gloves?’

‘No,’ Cloquet and I said together.

‘No worries, we’ve got spare. Just don’t touch anything on your way in. Are you...’ Something off-mic to Draper...‘Are you both coming in?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘No,’ Cloquet said.

‘Roger that,’ Khan said. ‘Front door’s open. Don’t step in the blood.’

16

Cloquet raced through a cigarette as we walked. Skirls of wind whisked the rain around us, blew it into our jet-lagged faces. A tracksuited jogger with a Collie on a lead ran past, looking like he was in a foul mood. Zoë, shocked by sudden emergence from the Corolla’s warmth, woke up silently. Black onyxy baby eyes in the dark. This was her first rain. One of the countless first things the world had to offer. Her brother would be experiencing first things too, if he wasn’t already dead. The image of Jacqueline inserting a wire into his eye was right there. Don’t think of it. But you can’t not think of it. Thinking of it’s entailed in saying don’t think of it. I saw him tied spread-eagled to a brushed-steel table, head strapped and muzzled, eyelids clamped open, fur hot and damp. Jacqueline made an unanaesthetised incision. He screamed, unable to move. Vampires in lab coats made notes. I had these visions all the time now. I told myself it didn’t make any difference: the project was still to get him back. I told myself it was lucky I hadn’t felt anything for him, otherwise imagine how these visions would make me feel. Imagine.