Barking (53 page)

‘All he saw was a stupid woman walking her dog on the central reservation of a busy dual carriageway,' she said. ‘The next one could see something different. Like a fully grown wolf where no wolf ought to be. Oh, I don't suppose the police marksmen could actually hurt you, but I'm absolutely certain you could hurt quite a few of them, and then your life would be really quite interesting for a while. Then they catch you and before they've had a chance to round up a vet with a humane killer, it's morning and you've turned back into a human being. I imagine there'd be quite a tussle between the police wanting to lock you up for murder and the scientists wanting to take you apart to find out how you work. You might be able to find time to squeeze in a little advanced maths, but I certainly won't let them give you my private legal documents, so it won't do you any good. Oh, and by the way, your friend's just about to die, if you're interested. There's still just about enough time to save him, of course, but I don't suppose that matters to you very much.'

Duncan turned his back on her and knelt down beside his best friend's body. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘But I've had enough. I can't . . .'

‘Piss off.' The words were so faint he could barely hear them. ‘You always were a selfish bastard. When I think of everything I've done for you—'

‘Yes? Name one.'

Behind him, Duncan heard a tongue brusquely clicked; then a sharp whistle. Immediately, Luke jumped to his feet. His ears were back, and his hackles were up.

‘It was worth a try,' said Bowden Allshapes. ‘But I haven't got all night. Go on, then, Ferris. Kill.'

Luke sprang at him. Some instinct that had very little to do with being human made Duncan back up a step while there was still time, and push with his hind legs. He reared up to meet the attack, and as Luke's teeth met in his ear, his own jaws closed in the loose skin of Luke's shoulder. The growl in his own throat was an echo of Luke's; he had no idea where it came from, but as he made the noise he realised that this time he really meant it. And, as he jerked his head sideways to try and tear a chunk out of his enemy's skin, he thought:
The vampires knew there was a traitor, but apparently it wasn't me after all
. He felt his own skin and flesh give way, but it meant nothing. It wasn't damage sustained that mattered, only damage inflicted.
You set me up
, he thought, trying to ram the thought through Luke's skull like a wooden stake.
You made me choose to let you die. I can't ever forgive you for that
.

Luke snapped at his throat, missed by a quarter of an inch. The click of his jaws meeting in thin air was as loud as a bone breaking.
So what?
Luke's thought stabbed into his mind like a needle.
You thought I was about to die and you could've saved me, and you fucking didn't. I'm going to kill you for that, Hughes. I mean it
.

There are some things words can solve, and other times when words only make it worse. As Duncan scrabbled vainly for Luke's eyes with his claws, he thought: it's true, sometimes you just can't beat good old-fashioned trial by combat. Because I don't know which of us is more in the wrong, and he doesn't either, the only way we'll know is by who kills who. That's a verdict you can't argue with. Not even two lawyers. Especially two lawyers. No matter how good you are, you can't wriggle out of a ripped-open throat on a procedural technicality.

Duncan felt Luke's claws rake the side of his head, and snapped impulsively, just as Luke's foreleg passed though the patch of air between his jaws. He felt bone crunch under his teeth, just as he felt other teeth clamp shut on his right elbow. For a moment they stood upright - a dog walking on its back legs; quaint, but you'd never in a million years mistake it for a human being - and then they toppled over sideways onto the ground. Luke's back legs kicked Duncan and he kicked back. Every muscle and sinew in his body was working flat out: nothing idle, nothing redundant. Sooner or later it'd come down to a slight superiority in physical strength, not that there was much in it. There didn't have to be. Until then, all he had to do was hold on and not let go, which is what being canine is all about.

It all seemed to go on for a very long time. At some point, Duncan reckoned he heard a human female laughing.

 

Duncan opened his eyes.

Daylight was pouring in through an open window. Immediately, he looked down at his hands. They were hands, not paws, which was good. They were fastened to the steel frame of a bed by thick leather straps. Not so good.

Worse to follow. His right arm was in plaster; likewise his left leg. Bandages wound tight around his chest. Oh yes, and pain. Plenty of that. Special offer on pain this week.

He remembered a fight. That was odd: he hadn't had a proper fight since he was at school. Oh, and the Asterix-the-Gaul dust-up with Wesley Loop, except that that hadn't hurt or done him any harm. He wasn't counting his run-in with Sally, because after all, she was a
girl
. . . He thought about that. Wesley Loop had hurled him into walls, and he'd left Tom-and-Jerry man-shaped dents in them. This other fight, by contrast, had left him trussed up like a half-finished Pharaoh. Must've been some fight, then. Shame he'd been too involved in it to watch.

Duncan turned his head as far as the collar (right, fine, collar) allowed. There was another bed in the room. What was it they said?
Ah, but you should see the other guy
. All he could glimpse of him was one leg, plastered and winched up on one of those gantry things. He grinned. You look such a prat with your leg in batter and pointing at the ceiling.

‘You awake?'

Ferris. He didn't want to talk to Ferris right now. More memories were beginning to seep through the headache (yes, one of them too): nasty memories of what the fight had been about. Betrayal, deceit, manipulation, stuff like that. ‘No,' he replied.

‘Oh. Pity. I just thought you might know where we are, that's all.'

Don't talk to the nasty man, it'll only encourage him. Duncan could remember what it had felt like: how simple, how joyfully, delightfully simple his life had been for those few minutes when all he'd cared about was trying to kill Luke Ferris. For the first time ever, he'd known what he really wanted to do, and was doing it.

Of course, he tried to tell himself, that was just the werewolf inside him behaving badly - it wasn't really
him
at all. Luke was, after all, his oldest and closest friend. Admittedly, Luke had done his best to sell him down the river to the unspeakable Allshapes woman, but civilised human beings don't resort to violence and attempted murder over a little thing like that. Instead, they cross a name meaningfully off their Christmas card list, sulk for a bit, in extreme cases possibly draw all over the fly-leaves of any books the offending party may have lent them. Ripping out throats, though, simply wasn't acceptable behaviour. Under no circumstances; not even when the horrible trick the bastard's played on you has led you to do something really nasty and mean, which you'll be ashamed of for the rest of your life—

A sharp twang of pain in his right arm drew his attention to the fact that he was straining wildly against the straps that tied him to the bed. He forced himself to calm down (
bad
dog, leave it) and tried to rearrange the known facts in such a way that everything was really Bowden Allshapes's fault. It'd be so much more convenient if she could be made to take away the sins of the world, like some kind of ethical skip, into which the whole neighbourhood dumps its old rubbish as soon as your back is turned. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite manage to do that. Apparently, he was better at being a wolf than a lawyer.

It occurred to Duncan to wonder if that was a good thing or a bad one. But the jury was still out on that one, with the door locked behind them and a chair wedged under the handle. Wolves bite, lawyers lie. In both cases it's just business, nothing personal. A wolf can rip up your body. A lawyer—

He sniffed. A delicate perfume, its fragrance slightly distorted by ambient formaldehyde. He twitched his head, but it wouldn't go back that far. Somewhere behind him, a doorknob creaked a little as it turned.

‘You're awake,' she said.

‘No, he's not,' Luke said. ‘He told me so himself and I trust him. He's a lawyer, you know.'

‘How are you feeling?'

Ah, Duncan thought. The other one, so now I've got the complete set. My best friend, and—

‘You left me there,' he heard himself say. ‘In that hell-hole of an office. For weeks. You didn't even
try
—'

‘Who told you that?'

Veronica moved into his line of sight. He'd forgotten how nice-looking she was. Somehow, when he'd thought about her, when he'd been in that place, it hadn't really mattered. ‘Stands to reason,' he snarled. ‘Had to get myself out, didn't I? You obviously didn't care.'

Her eyes were pointy-ended stakes, like cricket stumps with attitude. ‘Yes, I bloody did,' she snapped. ‘Eight times we tried to break in there, and each time they doubled the strings of garlic on the window ledges. It was like bloody Covent Garden market up there when we finally had to give in. Not my decision, by the way. It was Caroline who decided. I threw a copy of Cross and Jones at her. Luckily, she's got good reactions.'

‘Oh.'

‘And if we hadn't shown up when you two were trying to pull each others' heads off—'

‘Sorry.'

Bowden Allshapes had told Duncan there was no such thing as magic, only the occasional very skilful lawyer cutting a deal with the universe. Like a fool, he'd believed her, though why she should choose to tell the truth about magic when she's deceived him on every other point . . . There had to be such a thing as magic, or how else could you account for the change that took place as soon as he said the word beginning with S? One moment the ferocious piercing stare that made him feel as though everything he'd ever done was culpably wrong; the next, a smile you could've fried an egg on.

‘That's all right,' Veronica said. ‘And I don't blame you for being suspicious, not after everything you've been through. He told us,' she added quickly, ‘we know all about it. And—' Slight hesitation. ‘I think I'd probably have done the same, in your shoes.'

Something in the way she said it suggested that she was Being Nice; however, Duncan wasn't going to argue with that. The number of people in the universe who thought he was worth Being Nice to, by his calculations, amounted to precisely one. But it's quality that matters, not quantity. ‘Thanks,' he said.

‘Thank
you
,' she replied. ‘For saving my life. When he poisoned me, with the garlic.'

Curious how the same little group of sounds can be simultaneously music to the ears and bone-grindingly embarrassing. There hasn't been a man since the days of the stone axe and the mammoth cutlet who hasn't at some time daydreamed about hearing the girl he loves shyly mumble ‘Thank you for saving my life.' When it actually happens, though, the urge to crawl away and hide under something until you've stopped doing incandescent beetroot impressions is practically irresistible. Though, in Duncan's case, the straps tying him to the bedframe helped.

Talking of which—

He didn't phrase it well:
By the way, why'm I strapped to the bed?
wasn't the best follow-up line in history, but what with one thing and another Duncan wasn't at his best as far as dialogue was concerned. She explained, very rapidly, that it was only to stop him and Ferris trying to kill each other, which they'd both been dead set on doing when they'd been brought in, even though they were barely conscious—

‘Really,' Veronica went on, ‘it was pretty scary, the way you were tearing into each other, even when we got you indoors out of the moonlight. Eventually I guess you were both too exhausted to carry on, you just sort of keeled over in mid-grapple and fell asleep. But then you kept coming round while we were trying to set the broken bones and do the plaster and everything. Well, when I say ‘come round' it was more like sleep-walking, except there wasn't much walking going on. So when you both passed out again we, um, kind of tied you down. If we hadn't, you'd just have gone on breaking each other's bones till there weren't any left, you'd have been flopping around like a couple of pillowcases stuffed with Lego bricks—' She frowned, and Duncan guessed she was playing that last bit back in her head and wishing she hadn't said it. Even so. ‘Well, you seem to be all right now, so I'll just—' She fumbled with buckles, and Duncan lifted his left arm feebly.

‘I was fighting?' he said. ‘In this state?'

Veronica nodded. ‘Well, it was full moon,' she said, and if that was making allowances, it was a feat of engineering that would've put Brunel to shame. ‘And you'd spent all that time locked up in that horrible place, no wonder you were upset.'

Upset. Well, quite. Upset enough to try and club my best friend's brains out with a crushed fist on the end of a broken arm. But what the heck, she seemed to be saying, that's perfectly normal, everybody's entitled to fly into berserk rage after a trying day at the office. If she really believed that - but she couldn't, surely. Except that she had a coffin in her office, and she slept in it. Sure, she was different from all the others. Probably there was a scruffy old teddy bear with a hand-knitted scarf perched on her coffin lid during the day, or at the very least a nice vase of flowers. Lilies, presumably.
I really have turned into a monster
, he said to himself.
I'm surrounded by monsters: my friends are all monsters, the girl I love's a monster, if I was in my right mind I'd pull the sheets over my head and whimper, instead of lying here trying to look soulful and interesting. My entire life is scary monsters, and the scariest of the lot of them is me—