Talulla Rising Read online

  And how did I know any of this? Because after wrenching his head back and opening his throat (vocal cords, take the vocal cords) with my fingernails I threw him to the floor and sank my teeth into his shoulder, went in the first two ravenous bites through the carotid, subclavian and axillary arteries, mastoids and trapezius muscles, dozens of capillaries and a screaming multitude of nerves. His life, hurrying, grabbed all the above and countless other things on its way out (into me) but flashed between all of them was oh Jesus Jenny get out honey get—

  I turned.

  A skinny girl of around eighteen in pink sweatpants and a white bathrobe was backed against the flank of the staircase opposite the study’s open door. Her dark hair was wet from the shower. The look on her face was the look you get used to, the look of strained revision, the human system trying to accommodate something that seems to invalidate the system itself – the way everyone thought computers were going to feel at the Y2K moment, midnight 1999.

  For perhaps two seconds we looked at each other. I was thinking that no matter what you did to eliminate risk, risk found a way. Between us Cloquet and I had spent a week watching George, establishing his routine. Today there had only been an hour, two hours max, he hadn’t been under surveillance. But risk doesn’t need hours. Risk can work wonders with five seconds.

  Jenny’s eyes were full of me. Werewolf. Real. All this time. Horror movies.

  A tardy wulf muscle popped in my shoulder, made me twitch. I packed my haunches for the leap. She turned and ran.

  She didn’t get far, but that’s not the point. The point is that along with her own blood-delivered montage of kindergarten’s disinfectant smell and her mother letting her lick the spoon’s granular sweetness and the upside-down green world that time she fell out of the tree and Chris’s face when he came and how the vision she’d had of her future had come apart into uncertain pieces she couldn’t pull together the moment the peed-on indicator went unequivocally blue – in with all this like a repeated explosion was THE BABY THE BABY THE BABY and I realised (blood from her neck in rhythmic spurts like a magician pulling out silk hankies) that she hadn’t, as I’d thought, been going for the front door. She’d been going for the stairs.

  For the baby.

  My teeth had just met in her midriff. For a little while I kept them there while her pulse dimmed into mine and I saw it all, the unplanned pregnancy, the suspended college degree, the family shaking its collective head, Grandpa George taking her side (any time you need to get away, honey, you come and stay as long as you like) and the pain of labour like nothing else and the nurse saying you’ve got a baby girl and holding it up all covered in blood and gunk and despite months of not having the faintest idea of what she’d call it the name Delilah had sprung right out and she’d known straight away, under the hot lights, as if the baby itself had told her: Delilah Jane Snow.

  But now, she thought, as her heartbeat eased into mine and her blood waved feebly and the darkness closed like warm black water over her head, a monster... a monster... that’s all my blood oh God it’s like sleep the way... sleep... steals... you...

  Her heart gave its last soft shrug – and stopped. The house was in shock from the blood on its carpets and walls, my obscenely basic graffiti. I tore the flesh I had in my jaws (external and internal obliques, transversus and rectus abdominis) and felt her spirit slip not quite secretly into me. There’s always an obscure interim when the taken-in life struggles to find its place in the new prison. I chewed, stalling, thrilled in my palms, soles, anus, snout. A flicker of intuition in my clit.

  One option (there was no denying it was a matter of options, of choice, of free will) would be to feed on Jennifer and/or George until I was full, until I literally couldn’t manage another bite. Then what? Leave the baby alone in the house? Take her with me and get Cloquet to deposit her on the local church steps? Call 911? Obviously I couldn’t speak, but if the line stayed open long enough they’d send a car. By which time I’d be gone. Or the nearest neighbour, half a mile down the road. There was cover. I could leave her on the porch, as in the movies.

  Another bite of Jennifer. My fingernails had pierced her left breast. Blood and the close-packed odour of mother’s milk. The bulk of wulf strained and bucked, outraged at being held back from full plunge into the feast. But the slyest sliver of its being smiled, an effect like the pleasure of letting your pee out in a swimming pool, because it knew, it knew, it knew: these were only options because of the other option, the one that saw me going with thumping pulse and teased appetite up the stairs, to the pale pink room that had once been Jennifer’s mother’s, and had become – whenever she needed to get away – Jennifer’s.

  And Delilah’s.

  •

  My third recurring daydream was of a werewolf turning to see its reflection in an unfamiliar mirror, a dead werewolf baby hanging from its jaws.

  •

  Wolves are not known to eat their young, Google told me, every time I asked.

  Not known to eat their young. Not known to eat their young.

  Wolves are not known for killing the things they love.

  That’s werewolves, honey.

  •

  I’d been waiting for this moment ever since I’d found out I was pregnant. And now here it was, God’s last chance. My last chance. There must be some things I couldn’t do. There must be some things a mother couldn’t do. A spacesuit of heat surrounded me. My head was a lump of soft fire. Wulf smiled in me, the deep reassurance that all manner of thing should be well. I moved as if choreographed, mesmerised by the sight of my long-muscled hairy thighs going up and down for each ascended step in time with the throb of the new life up there. My human self was in deep adrenal enchantment, repeating its mantra like a dazed priest: I won’t actually do this... I won’t actually do this... while my legs climbed and framed Snow family photos went by, one by one bearing witness to this thing that I wasn’t, actually, going to do, because if I could resist this then surely, surely with my own... and then the bathroom’s whiff of steam and damp towels and coconut body butter and Jennifer’s young wet skin as it used to be only minutes ago, and then the pale pink room with its smell of diapers and talc and laundered clothes and the thing that I wasn’t, actually, going to do.

  Delilah Jane Snow. Two months old, quiet and awake in her cot. Jennifer’s dark hair (as dark as mine, as dark as my baby’s would surely be) and a neat, round, cleanly detailed face that made me think of God using a very fine sculpting tool. She was absurdly unique, involved in her own schemes, which required occasional punches, swipes and kicks, as if an invisible bluebottle was testing her patience.

  I wasn’t, actually, going to do this, as I slipped one hand under her and lifted her out. I wasn’t, actually, going to do this, when I turned her to the window, where the delighted full moon made a silhouette of her downy head. I wasn’t, actually, going to do this, because there must be some things I couldn’t do. There must be some things I couldn’t do.

  For a moment it was fascinating, this thought, as small and vivid as a lone swimmer in a tidal wave’s thousand-foot wall of water. Everything depended on it. There must be some things I couldn’t do.

  •

  You want to not know what you’re doing. You want the swoon, the fall into darkness, the obliteration of all that isn’t the beast. I was drugged and an obscene act was performed on me. No such luck. Nor are you helplessly looking on while the monster runs amok. The Curse insists on full fusion. You and the wolf won’t do. Only the werewolf, single and indivisible. And who is the werewolf if not you?

  •

  She’d be dead in five seconds. I’d feel her sternum go and my biggest canine puncture her heart while its opposite neighbour went through one of her lungs with a poignantly audible gasp. Something would break in me, too, a tiny bone in the soul that when it snapped let the whole godless universe in. Her blood would be warm and sweet-sour and empty and would go into me with innocence, too young to understand it was being
shed. In the old human life meaninglessness was an idea, a hunch, a philosophy. Here, now, looking through the vision of Delilah’s five-second death, it was a fact. No one was watching. No one was keeping score. There was nothing. Just a vast mathematical silence. There was nothing and so there was nothing I couldn’t do. Even the worst thing. Especially the worst thing.

  And we knew, Delilah, my unborn child and me, that soon there would only be one thing the worst thing could possibly be.

  I held her up at the level of my snout, my big hands a dark cradle. She didn’t object. Just gurgled slightly, kicked her right leg, the fat little foot like a lump of Turkish delight. Jennifer screamed in me, the faintest neural tickle.

  At which moment a car pulled into the drive and tipped the balance (the only perfect balance I’d ever achieved) and saved Delilah Snow’s life.

  PART THREE

  LOVE BITES

  ‘In this city a woman needs two cunts, one for business and one for pleasure.’

  Jerzy Kosinski – The Devil Tree

  15

  The night before our bogus meeting with plummy Althea Gordon was scheduled to take place I sat with Cloquet in a hired Corolla parked around the corner from Vincent Merryn’s large detached house in Royal Oak, West London. It was raining. The city’s first leaves had fallen.

  •

  Vast mathematical silence and impenetrable darkness. Yes. For a while. But some perverse gravity had forced me back, to the hotel room’s details, to the rolling boil of full awareness. Returning to myself that night in the Anchorage Grand had felt like being born into a death sentence. I’d opened my eyes with a feeling of surrender. Cloquet was still asleep. Zoë was still awake. For a long time I sat looking at her in the bassinet. I was scared to touch her.

  (The car that had saved Delilah Snow and condemned me belonged, subsequent news reports revealed, to Amber Brouwer, George’s former lover. She’d come by because her dog had died and she’d got a little drunk and weepy and suddenly realised she missed George. A dead dog. Sentimentality. A drive. Headlights swimming over a bedroom ceiling. A life not taken.)

  Only when my daughter closed her eyes did I rest my hand lightly on her body, felt the tiny ribs, the solidity and heat, the heartbeat and the sleeping wolf inside her. That, and how unentitled to any of it I was.

  I had an imaginary conversation with my mother.

  Ma, what do you do if you’re capable of anything?

  Just because you’re capable of anything doesn’t mean you have to do everything. It’s not a death sentence, Lulu. It’s a life sentence. Sorry, angel. You’re going to have to either walk away or give it a try.

  •

  ‘This is insane,’ Cloquet said. The rain accelerated for a few seconds, then slowed again.

  Without Zoë I might have been able to walk away. Without her I might have been able to swallow the loss, cauterise it, grow a new deformed version of myself to accommodate it: The Unfit Mother. But there she was. Her brother’s insurance policy.

  They have your son. Thinking of him as a person made me feel sick. There was a vertigo of the heart. I had to think of him as an object. Like a lost suitcase I had to get back. It was a relief, suddenly, to be reduced to a single purpose. Nothing else matters, we say, when we fall in love. I knew it was hopeless. I knew all I was doing was choosing a route to my own death. It didn’t matter. It was as much of a liberation as walking away would have been.

  Zoë’s brother wasn’t ‘he’ or ‘him’ any more. As Cloquet pointed out, we might have to travel far and fast if and when we found him; it wouldn’t do to have to wait on papers again. He was right, but it didn’t lessen the peculiar agony of naming him. It felt like taking something that didn’t belong to me. My mother had a miscarriage two years after I was born. It was a boy. She told me later they were going to call him Lorcan. So I named my son that, with clinical perversity, since it already had death attached to it. I’d phoned Kovatch before we left Anchorage, and the birth certificate (plus aliases to match his sister’s) had arrived this morning. The name in print unhinged me for a moment, as if I hadn’t known until then that the God who wasn’t there took these dares seriously. I put the documents away and told myself I wouldn’t use the name, even in my own head. But of course that was already impossible. It was entailed in the idea of him, and now every time I thought of him I thought of the name, Lorcan, and it was like an invitation to Death to come and claim his property.

  I’d made a will, leaving my dad more than he’d know what to do with, enough for Cloquet to keep him for the rest of his days, one of the restaurants to Ambidextrous Alison, a million dollars to Lauren, who’d made a mess of her life, one dollar to Richard – and all the rest to the twins, in a trust to be administered by my dad or his nominees until they were of age. It helped to have done this, to know that materially at least I wasn’t leaving any loose ends. In a small way it made me less afraid of dying.

  A black Land Rover sat across the road from us. In it, wearing police uniforms, were Draper and Khan, the two guys supplied by Charlie Proctor at Aegis Private Security. Charlie’s name was on Jake’s list of People I Could Trust. Draper was a fair-haired soft-voiced Scot with a way of moving that never looked hurried and a core of gentleness it seemed his life’s violence hadn’t touched. Khan was a third-generation British Pakistani with liquid black eyes and a thin, clever mouth, shallower than his colleague, and happier giving orders than taking them. They’d spent yesterday scoping the place out. (Two CCTV cameras at the front of the house, three at the back. Two goons. A housekeeper. A Siamese cat.) It was their job to get Cloquet in and secure Merryn for questioning. They didn’t know what I was. As far as they were concerned I was just another client who could afford their company’s services. The first moment of eye contact with them had said sex, yes – then their professional override had shut it down. It was a source of pride for both of them that this system worked, that they could be soldiers first. I envied them: my libido still slept, but I’d known since the second child left my body that it wouldn’t sleep much longer. The thought galled me, the accommodations I’d have to make. Her kid’s being tortured and here she is – screwing! Christ!

  ‘This is insane,’ Cloquet repeated. ‘I hope you realise that?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I have to be here.’

  I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be at the hotel in Kensington with the baby. The baby was asleep in her carrier strapped to my chest. Since the kidnapping I’d found it disturbing to be alone with her. Alone with her, love threatened. Alone with her love came to me like the Devil, rich with temptation. I daren’t look, had to somehow keep myself turned away. I kept thinking of the line from the Old Testament But God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. It was something you could do, I believed, harden your heart.

  ‘It’s completely fucking unnecessary.’

  ‘Look, shut up. I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘When I go in you stay here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean it. In the car.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  Cloquet’s eyes were raw. We were both jet-lagged. He was weaning himself off morphine and it was making him irritable. Draper, a unit medic, had checked the shoulder wound, pronounced it well sutured and free of infection and given him a week’s course of antibiotics.

  Khan’s voice came over the headset. ‘You reading me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, we’re going in. You sit tight. Don’t use the com. We contact you, okay?’

  We watched them until they disappeared around the corner. Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen. The Corolla’s little atmosphere filled up with our waiting. I was mentally busy with the question that had first occurred to me the morning we left Anchorage and that had since become monolithic: why had the vampires taken my son? The reflex answer – that they wanted him for the Helios Project – didn’t stand scrutiny. Assuming Jake had it right, for at least the last hundred and seventy years werewolves had been carrying
a virus that had stopped them passing on the Curse. Instead of Turning, bitten victims died within twelve hours. Vampires bitten by infected werewolves, however, not only survived, but showed an increased tolerance for sunlight. Hence werewolves’ sudden relevance to Helios.

  But I wasn’t infected. WOCOP’s serum killed the virus in newly bitten victims (they’d never established whether it cured existing werewolves, although I vaguely remembered Ellis telling Jake they’d been slipping it to him in drinks from time to time) and I was living proof of its efficacy. But there was no reason to suppose the vampires knew that. To them I was just a werewolf. Werewolves had the virus. The virus conferred sunlight resistance. Ergo, I was a valuable research commodity.