Talulla Rising (15 page)

‘How long do I have?’ I asked.

‘Till December twenty-first,’ Walker said. ‘Winter solstice. This year coincident with a full-moon lunar eclipse. But listen, we need to discuss—’

‘I only did it to protect you,’ Cloquet said. ‘I didn’t want you to have to carry it around in your head.’

‘It wasn’t your decision.’

‘I just—’

‘It wasn’t your fucking decision. Shut up about it now.’

My heart laboured. All this new information my exhausted strategist could only frantically manhandle, to no purpose. Konstantinov and Walker sat still, Konstantinov with one bony dark-haired hand around the tiny glass of vodka, Walker with his arms folded and his legs stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed. The exchange between me and Cloquet had ravished them a little, Walker especially, seeing me shift up a gear, the flare of passion. I pictured the B-movie cave again, the multicoloured stalactite dagger. Was that the sort of thing my son was going to die for? Hocus pocus? Mumbo jumbo?
Magic
? But of course, we were magic ourselves. Zoë. Konstantinov. Cloquet. Walker. My own cursed carcass – what was that if not magic? It didn’t feel like it. It felt heavy with ordinariness. The vodka was an unwanted seduction in my fingertips, yet another indication of what a useless mother I was.

Zoë needed changing. There were two disposable diapers in the pocket of her carrier. I didn’t want to do it in front of everyone, with trembling hands: Look, kids, the Werewolf mommy. Just like a human mommy, except she doesn’t love her babies and she kills people and eats them.

I pulled out one of the diapers. ‘Is there somewhere I could see to this?’

Walker got to his feet and nodded for me to follow him. We’d passed three small bedrooms on the way from the front door to the living room, one of which clearly wasn’t in use. A single bed with a bare mattress, a bedside table, a falling-apart white Ikea wardrobe. I unhitched Zoë’s carrier, took her out and laid her on the bed. Walker stood in the doorway. His consciousness touched me at my hips and collar bone and breasts and thighs. There were these moments when the universe insisted it was purely perverse, had no other aspect or trick:
Now she knows they’re going to kill her son, her libido wakes up
. It meant nothing. Or it meant what it always means, that we’re strange creatures, that there are internal weather systems we’re not answerable for. Less than three hours after I’d found out about Richard’s affair I’d masturbated, furiously, thinking about the two of them together in our bed, and had a huge climax. It didn’t mean I didn’t despise him. It was just something else that was going on. I remembered the Sontag quote from Jake’s journal:
Whatever is happening, something else is always going on
.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Walker said.

‘What?’

‘I think you want us to help you get your son back.’

‘I’ll pay you.’

‘I know. Money’ll come in handy for Mike and Natasha.’

‘Not for you?’

‘Sure, for me. I’m not noble.’

‘So you’ll help me?’

‘Well, it’s either that or kill you.’

I said nothing. The room smelled of damp carpet and radiators. I wondered who had lived here before it became the place these guys used. I pictured a tired woman, three children, welfare, the television never off.

‘You’re going to try’n get your kid back anyway,’ Walker said. ‘Same vamps have Mike’s wife. We don’t help you, there’s a good chance we’ll get in each other’s way.’

So why not kill us now?
I didn’t need to say it. We looked at each other. The attraction was a stubborn softness between us. It was also the first sexual honesty I’d felt in months. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me or I wouldn’t kill him. I thought: all men and women should start from that understanding.

‘What about Konstantinov?’ I asked. ‘He doesn’t want me dead?’ Cynic’s advocate, just in case. Maybe they wanted to trade me for Konstantinov’s wife? But Jacqueline had the wife, and if Jacqueline wanted me she could have taken me in Alaska. Okay, but there were other vampires. Jacqueline might not care about the Helios Project but the eggheads among the Fifty Families did. If they didn’t know I was virus-free they’d want me. Maybe enough to force the Disciples to give up a prisoner. I’d have to tread carefully.

‘Mike doesn’t want to kill anyone he doesn’t have to,’ Walker said. ‘That might sound crazy to you, but it’s all I’ve got.’ Then after a pause: ‘Look at me.’

The command startled me, the sudden masculine shift of tone that registers in a girl’s heart. And cunt, if she’s the wrong type of girl. I looked at him. I had disturbed him, brought him unexpectedly awake. It had been a long time since anything had. But he was disturbing me too. I could imagine all his sweet golden boyhood still there in his shoulders.
Nothing compares to killing the thing you love
. But that was okay because this wouldn’t be love.

‘I’m not lying to you,’ he said. ‘You know I’m not.’

Implicit was
how
I knew. Because I was like him. A killer. Killing’s a club. No secret handshakes. Just a look.
You’ve done it too
. Yes.

I conceded, silently, then looked away, ran my index finger down the side of Zoë’s cheek. She kicked her legs, made wordless shapes with her mouth. As Delilah had. The thought of the Disciples was a mental loop that made me frantic and exhausted, though I kept telling myself Lorcan was better off with them: They wouldn’t need him until midwinter. They’d have to keep him alive till then. Whereas the Helios scientists would have started work straight away. I kept telling myself this but I couldn’t shake the nausea, knowing religion was involved, priests, prophecies, rituals. Mumbo fucking jumbo. It meant all bets were off. It meant anything that didn’t make sense was possible. Probable, in fact.

‘How many of you are there?’ I asked.

‘Nowhere near enough for what we need. You forget we weren’t with the rebels, and most of them have gone underground anyway. I doubt we’ll see them again. The ones Murdoch misses will get new faces, new IDs.’

‘So I get what, a force of two?’

‘Hey, it’s two very good guys. But no, you get more than two. There are twenty or so in the same boat as me and Mike, wrongly accused and on the run, plus a few people on the inside who are helping us keep a step ahead. And don’t forget you’ve got Clouseau.’

‘He’s not ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I know you think he is, but I’d be dead by now if not for him.’

‘I’ll take your word for that. But he better understand: no catwalk tantrums.’

‘Don’t worry about it. He’ll be fine.’ I was thinking: Twenty or so. Jacqueline’s got three hundred vampires. Hollywood odds. Like it or not I was going to have to call Charlie at Aegis again. This wasn’t the time to mention it to Walker, however.

‘What’s in it for you?’ I asked. ‘Or rather what
was
in it for you, before the chance to make some money presented itself?’

The smile reflex fired, started to allude to our sexual potential – but he couldn’t carry it through. He lowered his eyes. ‘I owe Mike,’ he said. ‘You know how it is.’

Not now, whatever the story. Masculine honour, presumably. Fine. It made no difference to me. I was tired. My back ached from the baby carrier. I knew how wonderful it would be to lie down on the bed and curl up with Zoë next to me and let sleep close over me like black water.

‘Tell me something,’ I said, unfastening the diaper. ‘Doesn’t it bother you that I’ve killed your kind?’

The ugly question asked uglily not just out of annoyance with libido’s timing but out of the knowledge that if I slept with him it would be good – and however good it was it wouldn’t be good enough. For what I was there was only one thing that would ever be good enough. Only one thing and no one to share it with.

‘Why?’ he answered. ‘Does it bother you that I’ve killed yours?’

20

Back at our hotel in Kensington I settled Zoë in her bassinet and sat Cloquet down opposite me. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Tell me the vampire fairy tale.’

The rooms – one bedroom with en suite and a separate lounge/dining area – were luxury corporate, done in shades of beige with occasional planes of dark brown. London’s tense damp evening was like a listening intelligence pressed up against the window.

‘You think I should have told you,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should.’ He looked tired, and a little crazy.

‘Just tell me everything you know,’ I said. ‘And no bullshit, please, whether you think it’s in my interest or not.’

He sank back into the leather armchair, which received him with a sigh. His face was unshaven, bloodshot, pouchy. If I thought of getting rid of him I found I couldn’t imagine him living any other kind of life. It was his default to dissolve himself into the will of a monstrous woman. My human occasionally hefted the idea of getting him help, but she couldn’t hold it up for long, not with
wulf
sneering and telling her she was wasting her time.
He’ll be worse without you, now. That’s the nature of the familiar’s disease: he can’t live with the cure
.

‘I told you everything already,’ he said. ‘Truly.’

‘Then tell me again. I want to know what we’re dealing with.’ I knew what we were dealing with: the desperation for meaning, for answers, for an invisible scheme of things underpinning the absurd concrete here-and-now. We were dealing with vampires terrified of the vast mathematical silence. Every time I saw Muslim masses bowed in prayer or the Catholic faithful gathered all I saw was fear. Moronically nodding Hasidim, paint-throwing Hindus, shimmying and jabbering Evangelicals, they were all scared shitless this was all there was. Even the Buddhists (whose crinkled tee-heeing lamas always made me want to slap them) were terrified of their own flesh and blood, needed some disembodied desire-free fairyland to shoot for. The Disciples were no different. The belief in a messiah was their collective confession that they couldn’t hack it alone. My own darling Jake had spent forty years of his life obsessed with the closest thing werewolves had to a sacred text, Quinn’s Book, the story of
The Men Who Became Wolves
. According to Cloquet the book (and the stone tablet that belonged with it) actually existed, though thanks to Mme Delon it was now in the hands of the Undead. Cloquet claimed he’d seen it with his own eyes (though never read it) and there was no reason to disbelieve him, but my feeling was the one Jake ended up with: that even if the book was real it didn’t follow that the story it contained was true. And since there was no way of verifying the truth of the story, what difference could it possibly make? Furthermore (since there was no denying the two things had wearily connected, whether I liked it or not), even if the oldest living vampire was old enough to have been alive at the time of the events the story described, there was no reason he’d know anything about them. Certainly no reason he’d know if they were true.

I emerged from my reverie to find Cloquet repeating what, between them, he and Walker had come out with earlier: that according to legend Remshi was the oldest living vampire, that he’d existed, as the useless phrase had it ‘from the beginning’, that he had extraordinary powers, that periodically he returned to reclaim his kingship.

‘Where does he return from?’

‘Sleep. He sleeps for long periods, decades, maybe centuries. He comes back when the vampire race needs... needs a kind of renewal. It’s vague.’

‘So there must be records. They write their history, don’t they?’

‘There was a fire that destroyed the big vampire library at Pasargadae in 2500 BC,’ Cloquet said. ‘That was where almost all the authorised histories were kept. There were copies, but not many. Over the years they were scattered, lost.
Some
records since then say Remshi appeared again for a short period in China, around 400 BC. But after that, nothing, and even by then there were many vampires who didn’t accept him. Now the world has moved on. Vampires are
pragmatique
. The idea of a messiah has lost... credibility.’

‘But if Remshi existed there must have been
living
vampires who remembered him.’

‘It’s possible. But they don’t live that long.’

‘What do you mean? They’re not immortal?’

He got up and poured himself a Jack Daniels from the minibar. Went into his pocket for cigarettes – remembered Zoë, checked. Old habits. ‘They are immortal,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean they can stand living for ever. Most of them give up. They walk out in the daylight or throw themselves on a wooden stake. Not many make it past a thousand years.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Jacqueline.’

Vampire burn-out. (Literally.) It was feasible. The thought of a mere four hundred years gave me vertigo if I dwelt on it, and that was four hundred years
without
losing the ability to have sex and eat normal food and move around in daylight.
Boochies are depressives
, I recalled from one of the journals.
Centuries of no sunlight. Seasonal Affective Disorder on a massive scale. What do you expect?

Cloquet remained by the minibar, leaning against the wall, visibly in pain. It was high time I found someone to check his shoulder wound. ‘The idea of Remshi survived,’ he said, ‘through Greece and Rome, but always with fewer and fewer believers. There was a revival among the Vikings, but it didn’t last. By the time of the Renaissance it was barely a cult. Before Jacqueline came along it was a handful of zealots gathered around two or three priests. The Fifty Families thought of them as a few harmless fools.’

‘But not any more.’

‘No. Now they are starting to be concerned. The fools are no longer harmless. Or few.’

‘What about this
Book of Remshi
?’ I asked, hating even having to say the words. ‘What about these prophecies?’

‘Jacqueline believed they were authentic, but to me it was the weakest part of the story. There are different versions of the book. No one knows where they originated, who wrote them. The earliest copy was from second-century Athens, but claimed to be a translation of something much older. I don’t know.’