By Blood We Live Read online

  It seemed to last a long time. It occurred to me that if the wind shifted slightly they’d catch my scent. There was an appeal in that, the rushed confrontation, the surrender to chaos, the relief of rushing the male, of killing or being killed. It would consume me, at least, eclipse the unspeakable wealth of detail, of sordid, brilliant particulars, of her tongue curled in martial or erotic delight, his dark moist cock giving rhythm to my misery, in, out, in, out, her body warm and full of cunning welcome. I knew how it was. I knew, I knew, I knew.

  He lied in every word.

  The dream images burgeoned and died, repeatedly, bled through by the other dream, sent to me by Vali or the liar in every word the night she died. I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.

  And here she was, and I had waited, and now become a giant, laughable sickness. Because apparently it wasn’t me she’d come back for after all.

  I tailed them, unseen, all the way to where they’d left their gear hanging high in a tree, the packed rucksacks, the clean-up products, the car keys. Justine would be pissed—but there was no going back until I’d seen it, seen her, in human form. Short window between moonset and sunrise. I’d have to move fast when it was over—but I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking, period. I was caught in the slipstream of the living dream.

  They lay a little apart on the ground. Here were shivering ferns, nodding bluebells, the tree roots’ knuckles breaking the earth. The scene had a quality of appalling familiarity. Hadn’t I been here before? Those three small pale rocks there, blotched with yellow lichen? Those twittering leaf-shadows?

  She regained her human form quicker than he did his. Hers was seamless CGI, his clumsy stop-motion. I watched her skeleton’s fluid shrinkage, the impossible resizing of muscle and skin, the human head resolved out of the lupine’s compressed implosions. Her hands were the lovely hands I remembered, touching me, idling on my chest, tracing the outline of my jaw, buried in my hair. The body was the body I knew, the pale breasts and belly, the small shoulders, the tenderly functional knees. Her shins were wet with dew. The last phase of the transformation turned her face-down in the ferns. Her spine rippled, hooked—half a dozen vertebrae bulged like buboes, then settled, straightened, found their place, stopped their squabble—and there was the smooth and deep-grooved back I’d run my fingers down a thousand thousand times (the journey never got old, renewed its mystery with each passage of discovery) and the sacrum’s flare, and the beautiful rear, upthrust in fabulous diptych, as it had been for me, for me, for me.

  She lifted her head. I saw her face. The dark hair and self-accommodating eyes. The full mouth.

  I knew her.

  It was Vali.

  It was Vali.

  10

  Justine

  I WOKE UP in the vault, in bed with the vampire.

  I woke up in the vault—a vampire.

  A vampire.

  You can’t imagine what it feels like.

  No matter how much you’ve talked about it or thought about it. You really can’t.

  The weird thing (like there’s one weird thing; like the whole thing isn’t the weird thing)—the weird thing is you know straight away how soon it’ll feel completely normal. Like the first time I drove a car I knew that by the third or fourth time it would feel totally familiar. My hands on the wheel remembering something from a former life. Second nature.

  This is my second nature.

  I didn’t like my first, so I changed.

  Vampire. Vampire. Vampire.

  That thing where if you keep repeating the same word it just becomes meaningless sound.

  No going back.

  Ever.

  There were empty MRE bags scattered around. Spots of blood on the sheets. Fluff told me once that in the old days they used to hang the new bride’s bloody sheets out the window to prove she’d been a virgin. And the ones who weren’t virgins used to shove pellets of goat’s blood up themselves to fool everyone.

  I sat up, slowly. Thought back to what had happened. Tried to put it together.

  Last night I’d woken in the study to find Stonk slumped across me. White, cold, not dead—but dying. I could tell. It wasn’t just the way he was breathing. There was something else, like I could feel his life inside mine. It took a weird effort to feel it. Like the effort you have to make with those Magic Eye pictures, the trick of sort of looking and not looking at the same time. I can’t describe it. It was like there was a bigger body squeezed inside mine that any second was going to tear through, like the Hulk ripping through his clothes. All my sensations were big and soft and heavy. Everything—the chair, the rug, the lamp on the floor—was somehow too much itself, like all the dials had been forced up past max.

  I seemed to get to my feet without getting to my feet.

  Then I felt it.

  Sunrise.

  Minutes away.

  I didn’t know how I knew, since the drapes were closed, but I did. You just do. You feel it inside. It’s like a shadow made of pure light rushing towards your heart.

  I had to get blood into him. Hide the bodies. Get us underground. I knew I had to do these things and I knew there wasn’t time. There just wasn’t. It was impossible.

  When I moved it was like I was constantly catching up with my body. I kept finding myself doing things: running through the hall; opening the fridge; carrying him over my shoulder (he weighed nothing) down the vault stairs. And the whole time the sun was coming. I pictured myself caught by daylight halfway to the garage, dragging three corpses out to the cars. You’ll burn. Your skin knows. Your skin screams when you even think of it.

  I managed to find four pouches. I laid him on the bed. Raced back upstairs—but moving got harder. Space went syrupy, like in those dreams where you’re running but it feels like you’re wading through treacle. The sun loved it. The sun wanted me slow. I was thinking how weird it was that the sun straight away became your enemy, really an enemy, like an evil old man, like a god who hated you.

  Two minutes till it came up.

  One minute.

  Thirty seconds.

  My head and arms and legs were hot and everything had a confused edge. All I could do was throw the corpses into the hidden place that led down to the vault. I couldn’t stand the thought of bringing them into the vault, to spend the night with us. There was nothing I could do about the blood all over the study. Just had to hope no one came snooping.

  I got the doors locked and sealed. All the system lights were green. I’d never felt the vault like this before, all that snug concrete and fat steel no amount of sun could get through. I’d never felt the goodness of that until now.

  On the bed I had to hold him up and pour the MREs into his mouth. His breath totally stank. The pouches wouldn’t be enough. I knew that, too. I could feel he’d drifted far away. I thought I heard his voice saying: No, don’t, angel. I won’t be able to stop. But I blanked that out and bit into my wrist. I felt the blood rush up and something like a big rubber band in my heart snap. Then I forced the punctures up against his mouth.

  Dark and heavy and blurry after that. Except for one image: him trying to keep my wrist there and me grabbing him by the throat and squeezing and strangling until he let go.

  Then I guess I must have passed out.

  I sat up now in bed in the vault and looked at him. Still sleeping. His body was calm in the wrong way. Like in a film when someone’s sitting there smiling and peaceful but it’s shock because their entire family’s just been hacked up in front of them. Inside myself I could feel a sort of faint copy of what he’d been through. He’d been to the edge of death. A blackness like deep space where even the stars have run out. For a moment I got scared: What if it was like before and he didn’t wake up for years? All those nights I’d come down and tried to wake him (I burned the back of his hand with a cigarette one time; it didn’t make any difference. The skin just healed in front of my eyes)—but the moment passed. He was coming back. I could fee
l him hauling himself on my blood like someone going hand-over-hand up a rope. My blood. Our blood. His before it turned into mine. Mine before it turned back into his.

  If I wanted you to Turn me one day, I’d always asked him, would you do it?

  He’d always said: If I believed it’s what you really wanted, yes.

  If I wanted you to Turn me.

  Not if. When. That first night in New York I stood there looking at him and I knew what he was and the voice in my head said: This is the way for you. It’s the only way. It’s just a matter of time.

  Now I’ve done it. Now there’s no way back. Ever.

  No way back reminded me of something: last night, standing in the study listening to his voicemail just before he walked in I’d noticed the title of one of the books on the shelf in front of me. It was called You Can’t Go Home Again.

  Was this what he’d told me about, the way things started to connect? Signs. Coincidences. He said you had to be careful of it. He said it was a … what was the word?

  Beguilement.

  I lifted my hands and looked at them. My skin was whiter. Fingernails grey glass. The turquoise nail polish was gone, even though I didn’t take it off. Fingernails. I’ve seen him open a can of cherries with his. You feel what your new fingernails can do. You feel what the new all of you can do.

  I ran my tongue over my teeth. Nearly laughed. Fangs. The movies. True Blood. What the movies and TV don’t show is the way fangs feel. Like they’re little alive things in your mouth. If someone pulled them out—

  Ohmygod.

  Blood-rush. Puke coming up. A scream trapped in my skull.

  I grabbed the edge of the bed and held on. Breathed through it.

  Fuck. Lesson one: You don’t want your fangs pulled out. And not—another blood-rush, barf-rising—your fingernails, either.

  I put my feet on the floor. Stood.

  Stupid strength. Sick strength. This time I did laugh. I could feel it in my shins and thighs and butt and shoulders. Crazy power. You could pick that up with one hand. Punch through that. Pull that off like a button. Objects told me what I could do to them now. There were a lot of things I’d be able to do, now.

  As long as I didn’t mind being a murderer.

  That had been in me from the second I woke up. Like a new person living inside my body who was more alive than I was, someone I had to catch up with. Now she was there I realised I’d been waiting for her ever since. Ever since all of it.

  All of it was the other thing that had been in me from the second I woke up.

  I’d thought it might be gone, but it wasn’t.

  I used to know this crackhead on the street, Toby Dreds. Mentally fucked, but harmless. His thing was philosophical questions. Suppose you got a car, right? Like it’s a Lexus, right? And every now and then something on it breaks and you have to replace it. You go on replacing parts as they wear out. Years, right? But at some point, if enough of its parts have been replaced, isn’t it true that it’s a different car? It can’t be the same car if all the parts have been replaced. It’s still a Lexus, but it’s not the Lexus you started with. It’s notionally the same car, right? But it’s not materially the same car. He knew big words. Notionally. That killed me. I’d never heard it before, but I got what it meant. Like a notion. Like an idea.

  All of me had been replaced—except the one thing that was still there.

  Her face sweaty and her eyes wide. Looking at me to show me she couldn’t see me.

  You get the body restart for free. The rest you have to earn.

  I put my hand gently on Stonk’s forehead. (I don’t know why I call him these things. Stonk. Fluff. Frankie. Norman. He doesn’t mind. He says he likes it.) His life came to me through my fingertips. There’s species understanding, he’d told me. Telepathy ish. But you have to learn to control it, to be selective. Like screening calls. It was one of the things that had always put me off. Too late now. I knew if he woke up he’d be able to see everything, go into my mind like a burglar wandering through a house and the owner has to just sit there watching, horrified. Which would mean he’d see all of it.

  As soon as I had this thought I knew he’d already seen all of it. When he drank from me. Maybe I thought he’d drink it out of me for good.

  It doesn’t matter. He’s always known anyway. He’s always imagined. Everyone always does. It comes off me like a smell. (One of them, the one they called “Pinch,” had said: Honey, I’m gonna make you so dirty you won’t never scrub clean again.)

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: So what? It’s not a big deal for anyone, apart from the ones who feel insecure and useless so they become social workers or therapists so they can be around fuck-ups who make them feel competent and normal. But for most people when they get the smell off me it’s just a drag they know they’ll have to deal with sooner or later because I’ll turn out to be a wacko or whatever. To most people what happened to me is just that thing that can happen, that happens. They’re right. That’s all it is. A thing that can happen, that happens. That’s all anything that happens is.

  I was still in last night’s clothes, covered in blood. We both were. I lifted my t-shirt to see the place where the Cate Blanchett bitch’s sword had gone into me. Nothing. Completely healed. Not even a scar.

  Fluff’s eyeballs moved behind his eyelids. REM sleep. When you’re supposed to dream. He doesn’t dream, he says. Not a vampire thing. Just him. Remshi, whose REM’s for shit, I’d said to him. He’d said: Juss, if you ever become like me, you’re going to have to do better with the jokes.

  Would I stop dreaming now? Sleep without dreams would be like something cool resting on me. Like that time in kindergarten when the Sri Lankan nurse put her hand on my forehead and I hadn’t known how hot I was until I felt her cool palm on my skin.

  Every now and then, Justine, I’ll take a longer than usual sleep. There will be disorientation when I wake up. There are things you’ll need to ask me to jog my memory. Don’t worry. I’ll write them down. I’ll know when it’s coming, so you’ll have time to prepare. Except I didn’t. One minute he was there, the next he was gone, out like a light for two years. Two years in Las Rosas alone. Hours and days and weeks and months. I lay curled up on the bathroom floor. I felt safest between the base of the washbasin and the side of the tub. I wrapped myself in a blanket and slept there, eventually. Slept during the day. Nights at the club. Two thousand strangers. You go into them, you imagine their lives. I don’t know how much longer I would’ve lasted if he hadn’t woken up.

  And now that he had I was going to lose him all over again.

  Either because the werewolf was who he thought she was, and if he found her he wouldn’t want me around.

  Or because finding her would kill him, just like it nearly did the last time.

  Part Two

  The Fairy Tale

  11

  Talulla

  MY CELLPHONE RANG. Factory setting ringtone. Our days of thinking it a hoot to have “Bad Moon Rising” and “Werewolves of London” are over.

  “Talulla?” a man’s voice said.

  It was just after sunrise. I was standing, naked, in the kitchen of the falling apart villa we’d taken in the hills outside Terracina. The window showed a coarse back garden of long grass and peach trees and sunlit floating dandelion seeds. My phone had been left out on the dining table (Jesus, woman, shape up) amid empties and ashtrays and the remains of Cloquet’s blanquette de veau. The table itself looked like a post-apocalyptic city.

  I felt terrible. Less than seventy hours to transformation wulf was all muscle-jab and neural snap, the peppy violence to remind me, redundantly, who’d be running the upcoming lunar show. Walker and I had got smashed on tequila and grass last night to take the edge off. Bludgeoned awake by dehydration (and the now predictable dreams of misbehaviour) I’d come down for water.

  To this. A stranger’s voice. Adrenal flash-flood and the hangover’s blur washed away, instantly. Even with the sweat com
ing out in my palms like stars I thought: Serves you right: All this and it’s not enough.

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “There’s a package for you. If you go to the front hall you’ll see it on the doormat.”

  I scrolled the known voices, got nothing. The accent might’ve started in the Middle East but it had picked up tonal inflections on promiscuous travels.

  “Happily,” he went on, “it fit through the letter-box. Otherwise we would have had, God help us, logistics to negotiate.”

  Wulf thickened in my wrists, the ghost-claws split my nails. Trying it on. This close to full moon, my girl took any heightened state as an invitation.

  “Hello?” the voice said.

  I ran for the stairs.

  “Are you in the hall yet?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Oh. You’ll be worried about the children. I understand. But can you at least see the package?”

  I had, in fact, glimpsed a small Jiffy bag on the front doormat, but panic owned all of me. Actually not quite all. The voice had conjured, whether I liked it or not, Omar Sharif, Persian carpets, mint tea, a perfumed moustache, that big male ease that looks genial but is really just a habitually gratified ego on autopilot. Years ago when we were teenagers my friend Lauren had said: My mom likes this guy, Omar Sharif? He’s one of those guys looks like he’s got an invisible woman permanently sucking his cock.

  “I’ll give you a minute,” the voice said. “But if it’s any comfort I’m several thousand miles away as we speak. I promise you, no one in your house has anything to fear from me.”

  My tongue was dry, knees liquid. Lose possession of your child once and the fear it’ll happen again becomes your resident hair-trigger insomniac. Once a bad mother, always a bad mother. It’s like being an alcoholic: you only ever haven’t fallen off the wagon yet.