Talulla Rising (42 page)

Jacqueline’s nostrils flared. She backed towards the altar, where Remshi stood holding his jaw.

‘The original word was lost because the original word in the text was obliterated,’ Marco said. ‘Physically obliterated by an arrowhead, as it happens, but that’s another story. Apart from the author of the Book only two people knew what the line read, before its lacuna.’

‘Kill him,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Kill him now.’

At least ten boochies from the congregation leaped forward – then stopped, as in profound confusion. Their mouths opened and closed. Their eyelids fluttered.

‘And the guns,’ Marco said. The armed vampires all did exactly the same thing: they looked at their weapons, frowned, developed a brief, intense palsy in the hands holding them, made a noise of surprise, then dropped them. One of the pistols went off, and hit a Disciple in the shin. The vampires holding Dimitri barely stirred when he shrugged them off and went to his sister.

‘Who
are
you?’ Jacqueline repeated.

‘And another thing,’ Marco said, lowering the book and addressing the faithful. ‘This daylight nonsense. Where are they, these credulous cretins who’ve strolled around in the sunshine?’

‘Remshi has given them the gift,’ Jacqueline said. ‘You’ve seen it with your own eyes. You’ve
all
seen it.’ A definite note of defence, now. ‘Olivia. Olivia? Olivia and Federico, where are you? Step forward. Step forward. There. They walked in sunlight
this morning.
’

Two vampires, a thin, freckled woman in her mid-forties and a young olive-skinned male with all his features a little too close together in the middle of his face, came to the front of the crowd.

‘There,’ Jacqueline said. ‘You saw the film yourself.’

‘I certainly did,’ Marco said. ‘I’ve seen all the films. They walk, they talk, they smile for the camera, they watch CNN, they stick around for a day or two, then they slip away. Any headaches, Olivia? And Federico, how’s that rash on your heel?’

The formula’s flawed. Lethally. They die sooner or later depending on how many doses.

Federico and Olivia looked at each other. Then at Jacqueline.

‘Headache, rash, fever, coma, death. Anything from forty-eight hours to a week. An improvement on Helios. Their guinea pigs skipped the minor preliminaries and just went straight to death. Usually within twelve hours.’ Then to Federico and Olivia: ‘Sorry, kids.’

The question was: could I rip Lorcan’s restraints from the altar? Once I made my move I’d have maybe two seconds. I couldn’t see the fastenings clearly from where I was standing. If I’d had one of the machetes I could have cut off his hands and feet. I could have done that. He’d hate me all over again. But they’d grow back, and I’d make it up to him...

Marco had followed Jacqueline up the steps. Now he stood face to face with Remshi. Visually a ludicrous opposition. Remshi was tall, beautiful, elegantly dressed, had the transcendent eyes and unblemished ivory skin. Marco looked like a road-weary bum.

‘The author of
The Book of Remshi
,’ Marco said, loudly enough for the whole audience, ‘was an erratic and impulsive individual. He disowned his book, which in any case he claimed he’d concocted as a joke at his own expense. Of the two people who knew the original verb, one didn’t care about that sort of thing, but the other made his own copy with the
correct
verb re-inserted. Further copies followed, but none survived – or so it was thought. But Vincent... ’ He paused... ‘
Merryn
– ’ On the word ‘Merryn’ he slapped Remshi’s head so hard that the vampire rocked, spent a comical moment on one leg, almost went over, before Jacqueline grabbed his arm to steady him – ‘Vincent
Merryn
, God bless his Fabergé egg-head,
found
one. Imagine that! A word-for-word-correct version of the holy book! The living word!’

‘Oh my God,’ Jacqueline said, quietly, in what sounded like a man’s voice. ‘Oh my God.’

‘Vincent Merryn told Raphael Cavalcanti, and Raphael Cavalcanti, dear spectacular
moron
that he was, told Her would-be Royal Highness, Madame Jacqueline Delon.’

With her brother’s help Mia Tourisheva had got to her feet, but with a look of negotiating significant invisible obstruction. A crescent of the pink sweat I’d seen on Caleb showed above her top lip.

‘And do you know, my little starvelings,’ Marco continued, ‘do you know what the missing verb
was
? Can you imagine why it didn’t
fit in
with Madame’s little scheme? You’ll be amazed when I tell you, you really will.’

Palpable Disciple suspense. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see walls and ceiling had developed a visible pulse. Jacqueline backed away from Remshi. There was a moist sheen to her mean, pretty face.

‘Madame?’ Olivia asked, in a tiny voice. ‘Is it true? Are we going to die?’

I doubt Jacqueline was going to answer her, but we never got to find out, because at that moment the doors burst open and four blood-covered werewolves crashed into the chamber.

62

THEY DIDN’T SMELL US COMING!

For a moment no one moved. It was as if the universe demanded everyone involved take a couple of seconds to absorb the incendiary reality of the situation: confined space; seventy-plus vampires in a state of collective shock; five starving werewolves.

Then Trish flung the Meg Ryanish vamp’s severed head at the altar steps, where it struck with an innocently resonant
crack
– and the collective paralysis exploded.

I leaped for my son.

The altar was white granite, refreshingly cool to my palms and soles. Lorcan’s restraints were bracelets attached by short cables to panels bolted into the stone: all steel. More than enough to hold a werewolf infant. Not enough to stop an adult. Two, three, four seconds of resistance – then the ring holding the left-hand cable snapped. Instant logical joy: if I could break one I could break four. I had a terrible dizzying vision of myself with my son and daughter in human form (Lorcan’s face the human face
wulf
could see even if the rest of me couldn’t) snuggled together on a couch in a house by the ocean with a fire going and the TV on, Cloquet making dinner in the background. I had to shut it out. Shut everything out except breaking the cables. Everything but that.

The second cable snapped. I reached for the third. Details from the ambient blur registered whether I wanted them or not. Most of the vampires, rudderless, traumatised by the failed Mass and slapped messiah, were just trying to get out of the chamber, and the few who weren’t were feeling the full force of hunger-furious werewolves. But the hunger worked two ways: thwarted it was fuel for rage; confronted with live prey it forgot everything else. Boochies weren’t food (blared poison, in fact) but the handful of scurrying human familiars were. For now my will and Lorcan’s reek of fear was a frail leash, holding the pack, but there was no guarantee it would last. The air was an orgy of odours, vampire blood and human flesh and our own frank canine stinks. I saw Walker take the head off a Disciple with a single clawed swipe. Fergus jumped to intercept the white-haired priest in mid-flight (a basketball clash), staked him, got his wrist stuck in the ribs, plummeted back to the floor, pulled his arm out gashed by the broken bones.

My hands were bleeding. The cables had left lines of fire in my palms. But there was only one left to break. Suddenly I felt my son’s hot hands gripping the fur on my back.

Mother.

Entitlement. Forgiveness. Demand.

Almost there, angel
.

A vampire’s decapitated body sailed over my head and crashed into Cloquet’s steel pillar. Cloquet, hands bound, kicked it away.

My son first. Don’t worry. I’ll get you out.

Someone was nearby. I looked up.

Marco stood six feet away, lighting another cigarette, watching me. Behind him, Walker had made it to Konstantinov and was in the process of cutting him loose. I had an illusion of sound – the room’s slaughterhouse or torture chamber audio track – muting, as if I’d dunked my head under water. Not all the mischief had left Marco’s face, but enough to make way for a look of twinkling recognition – part invitation, part provocation – under which I felt peculiarly small and finite and known. Peculiarly
young
. Jacqueline’s
Oh my God
recurred, her face’s momentary loss of its guiding intelligence.

He indicated with his eyes that I should look to my left just as sound rushed back in – and I turned too late to dodge a huge crew-cut vampire – six-four, maybe two hundred and eighty pounds – who came down on me like an anvil, ripping the cable from my grip (I felt a swatch of skin go from my left palm like someone tearing off the mother of all band-aids) and propelling me with him from the altar down onto the steps. His face was tattooed with a spider’s web. Rotten-meat breath and the pigshit-stink of his skin filled my mouth, nose, head, all of me. His nickname was probably Geronimo or Banzai or Mad Dog. He was a grinning moron whose only route to credibility was doing insane stunts. He’d landed on top of me. His left arm was across my windpipe and his right had its fingers buried deep in the flesh of my left breast. He was going to rip it off completely.
Hey, check it out: genuine werewolf tit!
My left side was in singing shock from the fall (the steps had broken three or four ribs) but my right arm was free and in full command of its faculties. I went into the soft part of his flank, hard, with my glass-edged fingers, forced a screw action until I’d got through the muscle into the wet privacy of his mutant organs. I grabbed a handful of whatever he had in there – if it was gut it had the consistency of Vaselined beef jerky – screwed again and yanked as hard as I could. Two seconds of resistance – then it tore, came free in my hand and unplugged a sudden gush of dark blood that smelled of raw sewage. He screamed, lost his will for a moment. Long enough for me to shove my hand back into the hole it had made, push against the spinal column and thrust with my pelvis, to flip him onto his back. I only had a second, but it didn’t need more. I closed my jaws around his neck
don’t swallow the blood
jammed them together, shoved two fingers into his screaming mouth, then bit, shook and yanked until his big bald head came off.

Sensation was returning to my left side. I got to my feet and raced back to my son.

Because the universe is perverse the fourth cable proved tougher than the other three. My cut palms were burning and slippery with blood, and for what felt like an hour I stood there, braced and straining, hands haemorrhaging, thighs quivering, while around me the sound dropped away again and I imagined being stuck like this for ever, like a scene in a macabre snow-shaker. Walker had freed Konstantinov and slung him, unconscious, over his shoulder. Dozens of vampires had got out (once the silver ammo dropped out of the game, they really didn’t want to play) but there were still twenty at least in various states of combat or mutilation. Trish had cut her way to Cloquet and hacked through his bonds with one of the machetes.

Lorcan was now the only one of us still prisoner.

I howled. Vampire hair stood on end.

The cable was grating against bare bone in both hands.

I saw Marco look up and say: ‘Visitors. Another time, Mistress.’

Then the steel fibres snapped and the room’s cacophony rushed back in – and my son jumped into my arms.

Joy closes your eyes.

But if you’re a werewolf, silver opens them.

In this case to see Remshi on the floor, convulsing around one of our homemade stakes, and Jacqueline Delon standing over him, holding one of the discarded guns in a two-handed grip, aiming directly at me.

63

All I wanted time to do was turn and get my body between the bullet and my son. I didn’t get even that. I was still midway through the move and the understanding that Jacqueline wasn’t going to bother with the Hollywood villain’s victory speech but was in fact going to shoot immediately, when an explosion (as if a time bomb had been ticking in Remshi himself) detonated at her feet.

Heat the size of a planet hit us, spun the walls and ceiling and floor. We were airborne, revolving, for hours. Plenty of time at least to see that Marco had disappeared and that there was no sign of Jacqueline. The bottom half of Remshi’s corpse was gone. Fergus was feeding on a familiar unchallenged in a corner. Lucy had her jaws around the throat of a female vampire, human age of about seventy, with liver-spotted hands, dangling diamond earrings and what had started the evening as an elaborate silver chignon. Trish had given Cloquet the machete, but the vampires still left in the chamber were more interested in escape than battle.

Lorcan and I hit the ground as a second blast blew a hole in the western wall and let in with the smell of explosives the cool air of Cretan night with its scents of thyme and pine and moist grass. Let in too gunfire and the soulless chatter of helicopters.

My son moved against me.

Alive. He’s alive and you’ve got him.

I knew he was alive because the blast burns were making him whine and the whines were twisting me inside. Somewhere far away Zoë was feeling it too, a scaled-down version of his trauma in her skin. I had to squash a surge of joy at the thought of them lying curled next to each other. Not yet. Not
yet
. Two more explosions, the second of which tore a big piece of the roof out and sent Fergus flying across the aisle to land, dazed and bloody, a few feet from me.

WOCOP. WE GO
NOW
.

Walker, with passed-out Konstantinov slung over his shoulders, was hoiking me up with a hand under my arm.

DON’T KNOW IF SILVER. HAVE TO MOVE FAST.

Fergus was struggling to his feet. Trish and Lucy were half barring the exit, half taking it in turns to feed on an unfortunate familiar who’d fallen there. The remaining vampires were going for the hole in the roof. Blue-white WOCOP chopper searchlights flashed in, wobbled, flashed out again. A vampire hit by at least twenty wooden shafts (the hickory darts of the Hail Mary) screamed and fell from one of the steel uprights.