DON’T BE AFRAID. I WON’T LEAVE YOU.
How odd to know this was true. I
wouldn’t
leave him. It was a surprising gift to my heart. I smiled, though only another werewolf would’ve seen it.
‘Talulla,’ Jacqueline said, smiling herself, while the vampires nearest to me backed away, holding their noses despite their ridiculous stripes of paste. ‘Welcome. If for no other reason than at least now I know exactly where you are.’ She was dressed in tight black suede pants and a black silk blouse. Red hair Hitler-slicked as before. Peppery green eyes and precise, glamorous make-up. Standing next to her was a tall, slim, prettily handsome vampire male. Turned in his early thirties God knew how long ago. Dark hair, shoulder-length, a finely cut, high-cheekboned face – and eyes that stopped you in your tracks: they were pale silvery-green, filled with forgiving omniscience. He could have played Jesus. He was barefoot, dressed in an ivory silk Indian ensemble, long
kurta
with Nehru collar and baggy pajama pants ruched at the ankle. I thought of what Mia had said:
There’s something here, it’s true. Very old. I don’t know
. Very old. I could feel it. Sunlight in a Roman courtyard. The smell of slaves and dust. Big stones going up. A thousand miles of forest. Firelight in the mouth of a cave. Ice, everywhere.
Not many live past a thousand years
. This one had. Remshi.
There were other vampires in a loose horseshoe around the royal couple, holding candles or censers. A small pulpit stood next to the altar, occupied by a short, plump boochie with thick white hair in a basin-cut and a white beard like a stiff paintbrush. He was wearing what looked to me like white work overalls. A large book was open on a lectern in front of him. Two more... priests, I supposed, since they were the only ones uniformly dressed in the absurd overalls, stood at either end of the altar. Their outfits made me think of the movie of
A Clockwork Orange
. Six bare steel columns upheld the roof. Konstantinov, covered in blood, sat cuffed, unconscious (not dead, my nose said) to the base of the one to the left of the altar. Cloquet, as far as I could tell uninjured, stood cuffed to the one on the right.
I was scanning the ranks for Mia. I’d never seen her, but I told myself I’d know her when I did. The logic had to hold: as far as she knew if I didn’t get out of here alive she’d never find her son. Ergo, she’d have to make sure I got out of here alive.
‘They’re all dead,’ Cloquet said.
‘I’m afraid that’s true,’ Jacqueline said. ‘But you knew that already. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’
They’re all dead
. She’d agreed. She didn’t know about the others.
‘
C’est vrais, n’est pas?
’ Jacqueline asked Cloquet. ‘She wants to trade?’
NOT YET.
Cloquet looked at me. There was no sign I could give him that I wasn’t alone. He’d be wondering if he was ever going to see another sunrise.
‘You want to offer yourself in exchange for your son,’ Jacqueline said to me.
Lorcan struggled against the cuffs. I felt it in my own wrists and ankles. The effort to keep still was making me dizzy. All my failures formed a close-fitting heat around me. Breathe. Breathe.
Breathe
.
‘I don’t have children myself,’ Jacqueline continued. ‘And without intending this personally I must tell you I loathe the idiocy that infects adults the minute they become parents. But of course I understand. It’s an instinct.’
‘We are not sadists, Ms Demetriou,’ Remshi said, smiling. His voice was warm, resonant, gentle, with an accent unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was hard, after the first look exposed you, to meet the silver eyes. I had an image of him standing in a desert alone at night. Icy sand. Stars that came all the way down to the ground. The remote past was here, in the room, centuries made negligible, an effect of appalling compression. It was dreadful to be connected to it, as when I was a kid and my dad had given me the kite string to hold and seeing it up there in the sky so far away but attached to me had made me terrified and sick and I’d started crying. ‘The blood of
gammou-jhi
is the blood of
gammou-jhi
,’ Remshi continued. ‘Yours, your child’s, it makes no difference. If you would like to take your son’s place, that is acceptable to me.’
‘Don’t listen to them,’ Cloquet said. ‘They’re going to give you to Helios to get the Families off their backs.’
Remshi laughed, with what seemed genuine amusement. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And we shall frequent graveyards and wear black cloaks and twirl our moustaches and say “Ha-
harr
” with great relish of our wickedness.’
Konstantinov, on a rogue current of consciousness, groaned, then fell silent again. Jacqueline looked at him. ‘Irony is inexhaustible,’ she said. ‘We released Natasha last night. She’s out there, free as a bird. She’s probably on a plane home as we speak.’
I looked at Cloquet. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘She’s probably dead.’
‘I promise you she’s very much alive,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Alive and at liberty, although not quite the woman she was when she came to us.’
The neat, grey-haired vampire from the Alaskan raid handed Jacqueline a syringe. She came around the altar, descended the four steps and walked down the aisle to stand six feet in front of me. She bent, tidily knees together, placed the syringe on the floor, stood. ‘A sedative,’ she said. ‘You understand?’
Yes, I did.
NOW! NOW!
Nothing happened.
I pointed to Lorcan. Him first.
‘Talulla,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Let’s be grown-ups. You can either trust us and do exactly as we tell you, in which case there’s a chance your child will live, or you can die right here and now, in which case your child will certainly follow you. Look around you, please.’
At least a dozen members of the congregation had weapons trained on me. Silver, my spine said. The ones not holding guns were all carrying copies of a small, red leather-bound book. Naturally.
The Book of Remshi
.
NOW!
Nothing happened.
‘It’s now or never, Ms Demetriou,’ Remshi said. ‘We don’t have much time. Forgive me if I seem punctilious, but for better or worse there are protocols, and I’ve been waiting four hundr—’
‘Move and this goes through you,’ Mia’s voice said. ‘Don’t talk, just do exactly as I say.’
She had been one of the crowd around the altar. Now she had her arm around Remshi’s throat.
‘Good grief, is that a
stake
?’ Remshi said. ‘Seriously? You seriously think a stake is going to—’
‘Shut up,’ Mia said. ‘Jacqueline, release the kid.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Jacqueline said.
‘Don’t speak. Just do it.’
‘My lord, for God’s sake,’ Jacqueline said.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Remshi said. ‘The last time someone tried this was in Florence in twelve eighty—’
I don’t know how he did it. The moves were so fast that when they stopped it was as if a chunk of time had just been cut out. One moment Mia was behind him with her arm around his throat, the next she was on the floor, disarmed, with her head bleeding from where it had cracked the side of the altar. He had one knee across her throat and the stake poised at her breast.
‘Who
are
you?’ he said.
Mia spat in his face. ‘
Pizda
,’ she said
‘Charming! Nice talk from a lady.’
A murmur had spread through the congregation. A fair-haired vampire detached himself from the throng and stepped into the aisle. ‘Mia,’ he said – then followed it with Russian that self-evidently translated to something like:
What the fuck are you doing?
Her brother, I realised. Dimitri. Same glacial eyes and sensual mouth.
Mia answered him in Russian, not with self-evident meaning. I wondered how strong his faith was. No doubt Jacqueline had preached the new messiah would divide loved ones, set husband against wife, brother against sister...
‘Let her go,’ Dimitri said. His English came with a slight American accent.
‘Stand down, Dimi,’ Jacqueline said.
‘Let her go
now
.’
‘Dimi, please.’
He took three paces towards the dais, nostrils tense, hands readying themselves.
‘Restrain him!’ Jacqueline ordered. Immediately three male vampires from the front row grabbed Dimitri and wrestled him to the floor.
‘My lord,’ the pulpit priest said, ‘we really need to get on. The time is crucial.’
‘Is this it?’ Mia shouted, eyes closed. ‘Is this the best you can do? You fucking useless piece of
shit
.’
She was talking, I realised, to me. Yes, this was the best I could do. Fail. My son would die and so would she, believing I’d killed her boy. If I’d been able to speak I would have told her: It’s all right. They’ll let him go in a week. But I couldn’t speak. She’d die hating me.
‘If you wouldn’t mind, Talulla,’ Jacqueline said. ‘The sedative?’
There was nothing left. I bent, ostensibly to pick up the syringe, in fact to get maximum speed and force from a standing jump. I wondered how many I could kill before one of the bullets hit. Jacqueline first. Rip that precisely-lipsticked smile off her precisely self-delighted face. Lorcan looked at me, snapped an appeal with a small sound between a bark and a yap.
I’m sorry, kiddo. Really, I’m so sorry.
‘This is taking too long,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Inject yourself now or they shoot.’
‘My brothers and sisters,’ Remshi said, arms raised. ‘It’s been a long wait, but at last a new day is dawning!’
‘Horseshit!’ a male voice called out from the congregation.
Vampires and familiars, stunned, turned to where the voice had come from.
‘Fraud!’ the voice called out, apparently from somewhere altogether different.
‘Silence!’ the pulpit priest shouted. ‘Who is that? Who is that speaking?’
‘Ask them why they killed Raphael Cavalcanti,’ the voice said, from yet another place. ‘Go on, ask them why they did away with poor old Vincent Merryn.’
I looked at Mia. Her look back said whatever this was it was nothing to do with her. The part of her look that wasn’t filled with hatred for me.
‘Jacqueline?’ Remshi said, very quietly.
Madame was visibly confused. Her petite fists clenched under her breasts. I knew it was a childhood habit. I had an image of her as a little girl standing just like that in front of her father, being scolded.
‘Show yourself,’ she called out. ‘Show yourself!’
‘Show myself? What are you, blind?’ the voice said – and there, suddenly, when everyone looked up, was a figure descending feet-first through the air.
61
The silence was dense, seemed synaesthetically to pick out
visual
details: the candle flames; Jacqueline’s pearl earrings; the white-gold edging on the priest’s book. With the possible exception of my son, everyone in the room was staring at the vampire who now stood –
smoking a cigarette
– at the bottom of the steps leading up to the altar.
Human age would’ve put him in his early forties, a slim, dark-eyed man of no more than five-eight, with skin the colour of latte and longish dusty black hair. A full-lipped face of chimpish mobility and mischief. Beautiful dark hands, though the fingernails were filthy. He wore a fractured leather flying jacket over a white t-shirt, with pale green combat pants tucked into battered shitkickers. If you found out he’d just completed a thousand-mile motorcycle ride it wouldn’t surprise you. It would explain his look of exhaustion, exhilaration and grime.
‘You people are ludicrous,’ he said. ‘Absolutely
ludicrous
.’
I was thinking: He doesn’t smell. Impossible. But he doesn’t. His accent, like Remshi’s, was homeless, but quite different. I could have sworn I’d heard it before.
‘Give me that,’ he said, approaching a stocky, goatee’d vampire in the front row of the congregation and snatching the little red book out of his hand.
‘Who the fuck
is
this guy?’ Remshi said.
‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ the newcomer mimicked, falsetto. ‘Well, you should know, Bubbles.’
‘It’s... He’s one of us,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Marco, what are you doing?’
The vampire in the flying jacket, ‘Marco’, flicked though the red book, cigarette slotted into the corner of his mouth, eyes narrowed against the sidestream smoke. I looked at Mia. Remshi still had her pinned, but his attention had shifted. She knew. She was getting herself ready.
‘I repeat,’ Marco said: ‘Ask them why they killed Raphael Cavalcanti and Vincent Merryn.’
‘Merryn was working for WOCOP,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Everyone knows that. What can you possibly think—’
‘Merryn was working for WOCOP, yes, but that’s not all he was doing, and that’s not why you killed him, is it,
ma bichette
? Ah, here we are:
Vor klez mych va gargim din gammou-jhi
: “When he drinks the blood of the werewolf.” Any scholars in the audience?’
The room remained utterly still, solid with the congregation’s focused consciousness. Jacqueline was at the edge of herself. Her face’s poise quivered.
‘Linguists? Historians? No?’
‘The translation is correct,’ the priest said, exasperated. ‘“
Vor klez mych
” is “when he drinks” and “
va gargim
” is “the blood”. Everyone here knows what “
gammou-jhi
” is. Really, Madame, this is ridiculous. He must be ejected immediately.’
In a move almost as fast as the one that had subdued her Mia jabbed upwards with the heel of her hand and struck Remshi with incredible force under the chin. We all heard the little
tuk
! of his bottom teeth hitting his top ones. She twisted out from under the stake and before he could react had launched herself through the air away from him – though after only a second she was back on the floor, sucked down, it appeared, by sudden magnetism.
‘Stay put, Miss Tourisheva, for God’s sake,’ Marco said. ‘I like your style, but seventy-four to one... or
two
– ’ a wink at me – ‘are fool’s odds. Now, where was I? Yes, the translation.’ He took a last drag of the cigarette and tossed it. “
Vor klez mych
”, as the padré has pointed out, is indeed “when he drinks”. The problem is “
mych
” is an erroneous verb. It’s been there for more than four thousand years, but it’s wrong. The original had a different verb altogether. Isn’t that right, Madame?’