Talulla Rising (5 page)

No.

Verboten
.

I knew it intuitively, and, since these were the days before Delilah Snow, I took it as evidence of a werewolf scheme of things, an unspoken catechism.
A werewolf shall not enjoy carnal relations with her familiar
. The bond had to be unequal, maybe specifically required unrequited—

Just at that moment Cloquet looked up and saw me.

We didn’t speak. He didn’t turn or try to conceal himself, but I knew from his look – part sadness for what was dead in himself, part relief to be free of it – that werewolf Commandments or not, he wasn’t going to be my lover. Someone had killed or broken the sexual man in him, though not, I knew, the need to submit to something he believed bigger than himself. (I knew who ‘someone’ was, too: Jacqueline Delon, gamine billionaire occultist femme fatale who’d stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. What she wanted was immortality. The non-figurative kind. She wanted to live forever and never look a day older. To which end she snared (and bedded) Jake Marlowe with a view to turning him and his prized sunlight-resistant blood over to the vampires, in exchange for their brand of eternal life. Cloquet had been her unhinged lover. He knew if she got what she wanted he’d lose her. So he’d tried to kill Jake. Twice, with farcical results. He needn’t have bothered. Jacqueline’s deal with the vamps never went down. Mid-transaction at her Biarritz retreat, WOCOP, who’d been tracking proceedings, launched an assault. Madame’s corpse was last seen playing human shield to one of her Undead business partners. From then on Cloquet stopped trying to kill Jake and started trying to kill the man responsible for Jacqueline’s death, WOCOP werewolf hunter, Eric Grainer.
Life’s generally artless
, Jake wrote,
but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you’re in the final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror movie, usually
... Cloquet did kill Grainer – but not before Grainer killed Jake. On a night of full moon, five months ago, in a Welsh forest, where, when the carnage and death and vengeance and loss had done their thing to us, I offered him my hand . . .)

I turned from the bathroom doorway and walked away, embarrassed. Phoned an escort agency and selected a guy who received in-call clients and took a cab to his apartment (we were in San Francisco at the time) and had two hours of depressing muscularly efficient professional sex, sans conversation. The next morning I went to Cloquet’s room. He was up and dressed, standing by the window, apparently doing nothing, apparently waiting for me. I said: I’m sorry. He looked at the floor and said: I’m your friend. It’s a great thing in my life, to have a friend. Then he looked up at me and suddenly he seemed the saddest, gentlest man I’d ever seen. There was a suspended moment in which we both knew this was a chance to separate as well as a chance to continue, then the awkwardness dissolved between us and we knew we were past what had happened. I said: I’m glad we’re friends. I understand. Now let’s go have coffee.

After that I’d got organised, brought to libido the same management skills I’d applied to the restaurants and delis – until pregnancy and the Hunger started their war and my sex-drive died, albeit with the warning that it wouldn’t stay dead for ever.

Two hundred years, you get around to it
... Would I? I’d never had sex with a woman, though it worked often enough as a fantasy. Women together in porn turned me on too, although in the desperate days
jellyfish
together would have turned me on. (I knew what was wrong with pornography. But the part of me that knew was weaker than the part of me that didn’t care as long as it worked. Of course it was depressing – and responsible for making the question every twenty-first century female was sooner or later faced with
Will you put in your mouth something that’s just been in your ass?
Back when I might have wanted the cheap thrill of a guy’s contempt or the dreary high of self-degradation, maybe; but since the Curse I found I wanted different things... But when you needed to get yourself off it was hard to take the long view. Harder still when the long view in question was four hundred years.) I might have slept with a woman already if ubiquitous male coercion hadn’t put me off. (Richard, my ex-husband, made a monotonous art of it, allegedly mitigated by what he thought of as glamorously brutal honesty: I don’t want you to
want
to do it, for God’s sake. I want you to go down on a woman in spite of
not
wanting to. Jesus, where’s the fun in it for me if you
want
to? I thought everyone knew that.) Jake would’ve added his share, if he’d lived. He was
wulf
, but sufficiently
wer
so that he’d soon enough have been angling for a two-girl-one-guy fuckkilleat if my being the only female lycanthrope on earth hadn’t made it impossible.

Fuckkilleat.

I don’t just like it, I’d confessed to Jake. I don’t just like it. I
love
it. (And his hand between my legs had rewarded me. We’d exchanged horrors like wedding vows. Love and a shared nature could make any ugliness beautiful. Which left what was left when your lover was dead.) That was the inconvenient truth: killing and eating a victim felt very (pause)
very
(pause) good. And killing and eating a victim with someone you loved? It was as the heroin addicts said of their drug: if God made anything better, He kept it for Himself. The memory of the kill with Jake at Big Sur bubbled stickily around everything else in my head, caramelizing my brain. It had been bliss. That was the word: bliss. You don’t forget bliss. Especially when you know you’ll never have it again. Even if I got my appetite back it wouldn’t be the same. The Curse insisted there was no solo route to heaven. You needed a partner in crime.
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
. Really? It didn’t feel like it facing four centuries of never draining the filthy Grail again. My mother once told me she thought hell would be nothing more than being given a glimpse of God – then having it taken away, for ever.

Which thought led me back to the question I’d forbidden myself from asking, and which I couldn’t stop asking, and which I’d
been
asking since the first days after Jake’s death: Couldn’t I make myself a companion?

Werewolves don’t reproduce sexually
, the journal said:

Howler girls are eggless, howler boys dud of spunk. If you haven’t had kids by the time you’re turned you’re not having any, get used to it. Lycanthropic reproduction is via infection: survive the bite and the Curse is yours.

But here’s the thing, the old news, the stale headline: no one is surviving the bite any more
.

Thanks to a virus. For which WOCOP had found a cure. A cure they’d shot into me the night I was bitten. (The organisation had had an internal crisis: with werewolves at the brink of extinction the Hunt had all but cancelled its own paycheck; the guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job. Certain members had realised this and resolved on getting monster numbers back up. The World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena found itself facing an insurgent offspring, the World Organisation for the
Creation
of Occult Phenomena. The ideologues and old-schoolers, horrified, reacted by coming down hard on the rebel faction, but in the interim I’d been darted – accidentally – with what turned out to be an efficacious version of the anti-virus. I was bitten, I didn’t die, I changed.) So if any of my victims survived, wouldn’t they become werewolves too, the old-fashioned way? In theory it was as simple as finding a guy I liked then taking him for a moonlit stroll at that time of the month.
If you go down in the woods today
... Except of course for the minor snag of how his feelings towards me would change once he realised that every full moon he’d have to transform into a monster and rip someone to pieces and eat them.
I know you hate me for doing this to you, but trust me, once you’ve experienced fuckkilleat you’ll be glad I did...
Not a good start to a relationship. But what was the alternative? My libido was dead now but resurrection was only a matter of time. There was no kidding myself I was going to make it through the next four hundred years effectively – by werewolf standards – celibate.

That isn’t going to be the problem, Lulu, I imagined my mother saying. The problem is going to be finding a man worth Turning...

I was shivering so badly now I couldn’t hold the journal steady. I set it aside and crawled onto the bed, hands swollen, body jabbering with cramps. Random memories detonated: lying with my face on the Brooklyn stoop watching a bee sipping a puddle of spilled Pepsi; my mother laughing at something grown-up; my first period, that warm trickle like a big teardrop but I put my fingers there and it was blood and Mrs Herschel saying in a smokey sisterly way you’re a young
lady
now Talulla, which just made me think of Lady Diana and creepy big-eared Prince Charles.

‘It’s time,’ Cloquet said from the doorway.

‘I know.’

‘As we decided?’

‘Yes.’

As we decided
. We hadn’t decided anything. We’d made hypothetical observations.
Outside would be easier to deal with. We shouldn’t forget we have sedatives. It would be better if I went out first.
Behind these were bald specifics: Cloquet would give her a sedative. I would go into the forest. He would bring her out and tie her up. I would come out of the dark and take her life, quickly. Or as quickly as the hunger’s tastes allowed.

At the thought of which
wulf
gave me a jolt of demand that nearly threw me from the bed.

‘You better go,’ I said. My watch showed 16.42. Moonrise was 17.11. Twenty-nine minutes. I wondered if Kaitlyn was awake. What sort of life she’d be leaving behind. No one who gives a shit about me’s got any money. The sour-smelling jeans and the chipped nail polish and the trying not to see the contempt the guys had for her even when they were holding her head and going Oh yeah baby, that’s it, just like that, you could still tell it was contempt just beneath – but the hunger interrupted with a flash of her midriff punctured and the soft white meat opening with helpless obedience (the word ‘flensing’ suggested itself, though I wasn’t even sure I knew what it meant) and I couldn’t lie still any longer but got up and staggered with unstrung knees downstairs and watched Cloquet draw the sedative into the syringe and we couldn’t quite look each other in the eye.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked. I stood in the doorway, flesh heavy with the sordid basics of my needs. My old voice inside still sometimes objected: You can’t do this. It’s the worst thing. You have to stop. My old voice was a machine that didn’t realise its own obsolescence. Because while it went on the new voice eloquently didn’t say anything, knew it didn’t have to, knew the argument was already won. And in any case, this wasn’t the worst thing, killing Kaitlyn. I knew what the
real
worst thing was. I’d known since the night I met Delilah Snow.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. He’d left me blankets on the couch. So I’d have something between me and the cold when I stripped. Practicalities, like biology, endured.

‘I’ll go downstairs now,’ he said. Gentle. For my benefit. So I’d be kind to myself and not mind the murder.

When I change I change fast. The moon drags the whatever-it-is up from the earth and it goes through me with crazy wriggling impatience. I picture it as an electrical discharge, entering at my soles and racing upwards in haywire detonations that shock the bones and explode the neurons. The magic’s dark red, violent, compressed. I get random flashes of mundane memory – pushing a shopping cart around Met Foods; opening my apartment window; standing on a subway platform; saying to someone,
No, that’s carbohydrates in the evenings
– intercut with images of the kills: a white male body on an oil-stained warehouse floor; a solitary trailer with a storm lamp burning; a female thigh releasing a dark arc of blood; my clawed hand scooping out a still-hot heart. This is the Curse’s neatest trick: one type of memory doesn’t destroy the other. It’s still you. It’s still
all you
. You wouldn’t think you were built to bear such opposites, but you are. You’d think the system would crash, but it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the freak biology show. My lungs expand, threaten to burst against the ribs – but never do. My spine elongates in three, four, five spasms and the claws come all at once, like speeded-up film of shoots sprouting. I’m twisted, torn, churned, throttled – then rushed through a blind chicane into ludicrous power. Muscular and skeletal wrongness at an elusive stroke put right. A heel settles. A last canine hurries through. A shoulder blade pops. The woman is a werewolf.

And she’s starving.

I stood, transformed (jaws open, tongue as thick as a baby’s arm, breath going up in signals of dreadful life), half a dozen trees back from the edge of the drive. Moments ago I hadn’t wanted this. Now I wanted nothing else. Same every time: you forgot the Curse was an exchange, took your speech and your mercy but gave you in return the planet’s dumb throb and your own share in it. Lilac shadows on the snow, the fine-tuned trees, the Eucharist moon and the victim’s heart like a song calling you home.

Kaitlyn wouldn’t see me waiting here. She wouldn’t see me until the last moment, but in all the moments before the last moment she’d know what she didn’t want to know, that the worst thing had come to her. The worst thing was a simple thing, an old thing, an ordinary thing – and here it was. She’d look for God, guardian angels, miraculous intervention – and get nothing. Just the trees and the snow and the moon – nothing from them either. She’d get the real universe, once, before the end.

The two of them emerged from the front doorway, Kaitlyn tranquilised, Cloquet struggling to hold her up. He’d dressed her warmly, hat, gloves, fleece. Reflex kindness. Or else he didn’t want the cold to undermine the sedative. A few steps past the Cherokee her left knee buckled and she went down, crookedly. I could see him considering fireman’s-lifting her, the effort it would take to carry her all the way to the trees. He settled for uncuffing her and taking her arm over his shoulder, wrapping his other arm around her waist, her head lolling. As they staggered towards me, I thought, Like a guy and his drunk girlfriend.