By Blood We Live (16 page)

I ignored it. First contact had buried the claws of my right hand in his throat just above the Adam’s apple. I tightened my grip and pulled. Out came the trachea and a fistful of blood vessels. Sufficient damage—but there was no time for self-congratulation. Nor was there time to pull the sword out of my guts. I looked up to see the second guy standing over me. He’d learned a valuable lesson: Don’t fuck around trying to cut heads off when you’ve got a holy .44 Magnum with a chamber full of silver bullets at your disposal. The gun was pointed directly at my head.

T
HE BRAIN
’
S AN
honest organ. It began the avoidance calculations—time, mass, speed, energy, angles, trajectories—but couldn’t disguise their pointlessness. The gunman’s finger already had the trigger halfway through its spring. I was going to die. I felt the future like a vast dark landscape full of huge sharp things and my children being blown and tumbled around in it alone, lost.

I’M SORRY, I sent them. I’M SO—

Then something smashed into the gunman’s face and knocked him off his feet.

A piece of rubble the size of a bowling ball. Flung by Walker. An explosion had wrecked the room opposite the head of the stairs. In one move I pulled the scimitar out—felt the tissues scream—and thrust it straight through the assassin’s midriff and into the wooden floor.

OUT! NOW!

Madeline had struggled to her feet and Walker had come back down the stairs and pulled the glass shard out of her. The twins were huddled between the two of them. My most perverse self said: That’s the proper picture. That’s how it should have been. Walker and Maddy and the twins. You don’t love anyone enough. You don’t have love. Just fucking curiosity. Like your mother.

NOW!

But all the ground-floor exits were covered. The house was encircled by thirty Angels at least, and
all
the ammunition was silver. Even with our speed we’d be hit. The woods beyond had a beautiful darkness and large, indifferent sentience.

FUCK!
FUCK!

ROOF. THEY’RE CLOSE ENOUGH. OVER THEM.

If we could get up on the roof there was a chance we’d be able to jump clear of their perimeter. It wouldn’t guarantee not getting hit, but they
were less likely to be looking over their own heads than at the building’s obvious exits.

We went back to the stairs, Zoë on my hip, Lorcan clinging to Walker’s back. Madeline had recovered from whatever had debilitated her. Plaster and brick dust swirled.

OH GOD.

Half the front wall of Carmel and Rory’s room had been blown away and the fresh smell of the night came in mixed with the stink of gunfire. Carmel’s body had been ripped in half—though by the explosion or by Trish and Fergus it was impossible to tell.

OH GOD.

We’d all felt it, a moment before seeing it. Trish’s body, splayed, dead. One arm was bent awkwardly under her, her head twisted to the left, mouth open, fat tongue lolling. Thirty or forty bullet-holes, the ether still migrained from where the silver had gone into her, the terrible reaction that touched all of us in our mouths and nostrils, bittered our saliva, turned our guts.

There was no time. There was the fact of the death—everything that was Trish—that had
been
Trish—began the rush together, the panicked gathering in us so we would know all that we’d lost—but there was no time, no time—bullets spattered the wall behind my head and a searchlight’s beam swung—

THIS WAY!

Down the landing a second flight led up to another floor. Four more bedrooms, a half-plumbed bathroom, a tiny water-closet, ladders and tarps, bare plaster, an exercise bike, a brass curtain rod … Zoë, clinging tight to me, was trying to find room to accommodate Trish, lying like that with her tongue out it meant it meant that thing that happens to the humans that happens but and what will where will she go—

HERE. UP.

Walker had found the hatch in the ceiling that led up into the attic or loft. He set Lorcan down, bent his knees, leaped, straight up. The hatch crashed open. He got a purchase and hoisted himself up.

KIDS.

Lorcan first, tossed up by Madeline. Then Zoë, full of gossiping adrenaline.
IT’S ALL RIGHT, ANGEL, WE’RE GETTING OUT OF HERE.

Three skylights. We would have very little time. No time, really. Three or four seconds, maybe, before the first shooter spotted us.

Madeline was first out. I passed Zoë up to her (felt her LIE FLAT ON YOUR TUMMY, SWEETHEART) then Lorcan.

GO!

Walker. I didn’t argue. A second later I’d joined Madeline and the kids, prostrate on the cold shingles. It was better than it might have been: two of the house’s half-dozen chimney stacks shielded us on two sides. We had to go simultaneously. Fast, high, hard. Three at once (and the twins) would be more confusing. Spread their fire. Make them miss. The lies you tell yourself. The necessary lies.

YOU HOLD
VERY TIGHT.
BOTH OF YOU—UNDERSTAND?

Walker took Lorcan again. Zoë scrambled onto my back, wrapped her arms around me. It was a fifty- or sixty-foot jump. Hit the ground running. Eighty yards to the trees. And then? And
then
? The RV was no good to us in this state, and there were still two hours to moonset. Two options: get back to the change site, pick up the clothes and get as far away as possible, or fuck the change site (which they’d more than likely have covered), hit the nearest house and take our chances killing the inhabitants and stealing
their
clothes. Clothes. The inability to drive with these hands and feet. Practicalities. Like a group of happy idiots you could never ditch. You’ve got to laugh. Except when you’ve got two three-year-olds laughing’s not always an option.

READY?

YES.

NOW!

We jumped.

As with all actions performed because other options have ceased to exist, it was a relief. I had time to notice a torn sheet of hurrying cloud just below the moon (while the moon reminded me I hadn’t eaten enough), and, glancing down, to pick out the upturned face of one of the Angels, a young man not more than twenty, wearing some sort of protective headgear (a cross between a boxer’s headguard and a cycle helmet) that framed
a sweet, sharp-featured, androgynous face. He was looking up in just the way he would’ve looked up—freckled, wide-eyed—at a spectacular firework when he was little.

Walker hit the ground a split-second before me. Madeline landed close. The forest rushed towards us like a crowd storming a barricade, full of love. Gunfire and wildly swung searchlights and a voice screaming some order over and over in Italian that mine wasn’t good enough to catch.

Then the tiny detail of something sharp going into the back of my left thigh—before everything went black.

Part Three

The Prophecy

W
HICH WAS WHY
my sweet Justine had kept shtoom. If I found love again, she thought, there would be no room in my life for her. And what would finding Talulla—Vali reborn—be if not love?

“I know why you didn’t tell me what we were doing in Europe,” I said to her, when I came up from the vault, when I came back from death. “What
I
was doing in Europe. I know why you didn’t tell me about Talulla.”

She was in the study, naked, on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the bloodstains with bleach and a brutal-looking brush I didn’t even know we owned. It was just after one a.m. There was no sign of last night’s bodies. Without looking up, she tossed me a roll of garbage bags, which I caught. We don’t drop catches, especially when thrown by one of our own.

“Strip off and put your clothes in there,” she said. “We’re going to have to burn them.”

“Justine, I—”

“We don’t have much time. Go take a shower, then get dressed in something you don’t like because we’ll have to burn that as well. And don’t track back through here when you’re clean. Go around through the lounge. Wait for me in the garage.”

“The garage?”

“They’re in there. We’re going to have to bury them somewhere, right?”

The three from last night. For a moment I stood watching her, full of love. It’s terrible the way someone intently doing a crossword or tying their shoelace or scrubbing a floor can ambush you with the whole weight of your tenderness. When she’d drunk from me I’d felt death very close. A huge soft darkness. Then her blood had come to me like a rope. And in spite of myself I’d grabbed it. Oh,
hadn’t
I just. That wretched moment when I realised I couldn’t stop, that she’d have to make me stop. And she had. It was a delight to me to know she’d had the strength and instinct to do that.

“Justine, angel, listen—”

“Look, we have to deal with this,” she said. “
This.
Now. Okay?”

It was very,
very
difficult not to pour out reassurance. My heart ached with the need to tell her she was wrong, she was worrying for nothing. But her force field made it plain: Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

Very well. Let the practicalities do what practicalities could: provide a distraction until she was ready. It was why she’d begun the clean-up without me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What for?”

“You saved my life.”

She didn’t look up. Her little breasts bobbed, prettily, as she scrubbed. Then she said: “Yeah, well, you did the same for me. Now will you for Christ’s sake hurry up?”

“Is this how it’s going to be now?” I asked her, desperate to put my arms around her.

“What?”

“You barking orders at me all the time?”

“Yes. Get out of here. Go shower.”

Under the jets (set to massage, striking my head and shoulders with a hail of soft bullets) I realised I’d had the dream again. (Coming back from death it’s light-years of void, void, void, but eventually the void morphs into the ocean of sleep, and sleep into the shore of waking.) The memory hit me like the smell of the sea: the deserted beach at twilight, someone walking behind me, the abandoned rowing boat. The terrible feeling of being on the edge of a profound and simple truth. And the maddening familiarity of
He lied in every word
circling my head like cartoon concussion birds when I woke.

Again, fear was very available, if I were only willing to turn and face it.

But I’m no coward when it comes to cowardice. I concentrated instead on soaping my genitals and wondering how long it would take me to pick up Talulla’s trail.

Vali’s trail.

“L
OOK AT THE
tattoos,” Justine said. “They’re Angels.”

We were in the garage, getting the bodies ready. The two women each had a black sigil above and to the right of the navel. The man had one on his right bicep.

“Angels?” I said.

Justine had seen these marks before. Angelic script. Revived by the Vatican’s marketing gurus and flashed in every ad. Apparently, while I’d been asleep, the Catholic Church had not only shed its have-your-cake-and-eat-it coyness about the supernatural (yes, the Devil exists, but please don’t embarrass us by asking us to go into detail) but had introduced the world to the fighting force it had been secretly training to deal with it, namely, the
Militi Christi
, the Soldiers of Christ. Known in the optimistic vernacular as “the Angels.”

“Well, it was only a matter of time,” I said. “What’s rather more worrying is how the fuck did they know where to find us?”

We had to take both cars, the guy squeezed into the Mitsubishi’s trunk, the two women (wrapped in the hall’s Persian runner) in the Jeep’s. Los Angeles’ twinkling darkness had seen all this before, many times. Bodies. Trunks. The innocent practicalities of murder.

Justine was full of glamorous energy. Her new nature flashed and glimmered. All her years of wondering. I could feel the delight. A smile kept coming. She kept suppressing it. But also kept coming moments of residual disbelief that made her go briefly blank, the system trying to reboot past its astonishment at the new software.

We drove inland on the 10. Desert. Sky rich with stars. Murder someone in England or Luxembourg and sooner or later a jogger or dog-walker stumbles on the buried remains. Small countries keep the moral world at your shoulder. The American desert spaces, it’s different. You bury a body, the empty land shrugs and says, Fine with me, Jack.

Six miles east of Joshua Tree there’s a road south that runs for a mile and comes to nothing, just peters out into sand and scrub. Not far enough from civilisation, but there wouldn’t be enough night to get back safe if we went on. Thanks to the new blood, The Lash gratified for the second night in a row, a saguaro cactus stood with its head and three big outstretched arms each lined up with a bristling star. A gesture. One of the infinite number of gestures. Through The Lash’s mischievous grace the shape said absurd balance. The balance you needed to accept the insistent meaningfulness and meaninglessness of things.

We worked in silence under the mighty constellations. Strength came back to me, gently, through the digging. The bodies were forlorn and pathetic. There was no connection with them. We hadn’t drunk from them. Nothing of them had passed to us. They were strangers. I thought (and felt Justine thinking the same) of the people they must have had in their lives who loved them. People to whom their details were precious. It was ugly, to have killed them with no memorial trace in our blood.