By Blood We Live (28 page)

“I don’t have much time,” Lorenzo said. Italian, yes, but very good English. He was flushed. Sweat freckled the line above his top lip. “You must listen to me. I can help you.”

I looked up at the CCTV camera on the corridor wall.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It doesn’t work. None of them do. Nothing in here works.”

“Me and my daughter,” I said. “Whatever you want, but it’s both of us. Got it?”

“I can’t guarantee it,” he said, with a touching honesty. “But I can get
you out of the restraints and I can give you a gun. I can also tell you a way out that will not be heavily guarded.”

“I’m not leaving here without my daughter,” I said. “Where’s her cell from here?”

“Not now,” he said. “We can’t do it now—”

“Where is her fucking cell?”

Lorenzo looked to his left. His nostrils were like two graceful little apostrophes. His day’s odour pounded out of him. Clean sweat, Pears soap, a strawberry yogurt he’d forced himself to eat for lunch. He was breathing heavily. “When you get to the end of here turn right. Then third left. Double doors, but they’re locked and guarded. You’ll never—”

“How many guards?”

“Two. But listen—”

“Through the double doors and?”

“Second cell on the left. One guard. But not yet. Please. You have to wait.”

“Now. Right now.”

“It’s not possible now. Please believe me. Tomorrow—”

“What do you want from me. Why would you do this?”

He came right up to the bars. Gripped them with both slender hands. Rested his forehead against them. There was an inner discordant symphony: desperation—but not, as far as I could tell, madness.

“I want you to bite me,” he said.

Footsteps.

“Step back,” I hissed. “Quick.”

He did—just as the previous guard reappeared in the corridor. Not angry, apparently. Smile-frowning.

“Lui non’ c’era,”
the guard called. My Italian covered it—just: “He wasn’t there.” It didn’t cover the second bit:
“Sei sicuro che ha chiesto per me?”

“Tomorrow,” Lorenzo whispered, then turned and hurried away toward his colleague.

B
RYCE CAME TO
see me. He looked exhausted. His face was damp and porous, and the pupils in the roundel eyes were dilated. The cream linen suit had been replaced with black jeans and a green cable knit sweater that almost perfectly matched his eyes. The greens and the beard and the longish hair made me think of him in Sherwood Forest.

“I know it’s been tough,” he said. “But we’re almost there.”

It was late—or at least I’d decided it was late. The guard Bryce relieved—a slabbily built guy in his forties with a Saddam Hussein moustache—had been yawning, hugely, for the last hour, though for all I knew it was three in the afternoon. No windows down here, no clocks.

“They’re moving you both in forty-eight hours,” Bryce said. “Four vehicles, a dozen men. It’s a two-hour drive from here to the landing field. There’ll be a roadblock. Jesus, you’ve no idea what this is costing me. I get an hour head-start with the kid, then you’ll be released. You’ll be given a phone and some cash. You keep the phone and wait for my call. I’ll contact you within twenty-four hours. We’ll arrange a rendezvous then.”

Tomorrow.

I can get you out of here.

I want you to bite me.

Tough to keep everything that had just happened out of my face. Remshi’s face from the dream swam up.
I’m coming for you.

It took everything I had to stay in character. “You fuck with me,” I said to Bryce, “I’ll find you. If I have to come back from the dead to do it.”

I was spared the dream that night because I was spared sleep. Aside from my inner strategist going silently insane the effects of not having fed properly were making torturous fiesta in my blood.
Wulf
never goes quietly even with a full stomach. Denied its monthly due it digs in for prolonged and violent outrage. The way it feels is that if someone were
watching you they’d see the big shape writhing and straining under your too small skin, threatening at any moment to tear out. But of course that’s not what they actually see. What they actually see is a woman glistening with sweat, unsteady on her feet, occasionally doubling up or jerking as if at the mercy of extreme cramp and furious muscular spasms.

Zoë would be feeling it too, although her little belly was easier to fill, and she’d eaten a good few pounds before the assault had interrupted us. I was desperate to see her. I’d have to tell her to be ready. Yesterday I’d felt in her the beginning of resignation:
We’re staying here. Mommy can’t do what she said. I have to live with these ladies in the black dresses. I don’t like it. I don’t like it.

That I’d held her close only confirmed it for her. She could feel my fear. My hopelessness. Today I’d have to do better. Today I’d have to promise and believe it. All night I’d been picturing it. SWEETHEART, WE’RE GETTING OUT OF HERE TODAY.

YOU PROMISE?

And I’d lie. Because what else was there to do with a three-year-old you might be carrying to her death?

YES, I PROMISE.

The door at the end of the corridor opened and Salvatore appeared, flanked by two guards, the nervy skinhead and the bruiser with the Saddam moustache, both armed.

“Talulla,” the Cardinal said, smiling, as if my name was the satisfying solution to a riddle. He stood facing me, hands clasped behind his back. He looked larger than usual, big and plump and human. His moony face was roseate, as if with joy. Light played on the lenses of his gold-rimmed glasses.
Wulf
, determined to make its presence felt, breathed deep in me, inhaled his odour of cologne, recently consumed tomatoes, sardines, strong black coffee. His gleaming boots reeked of polish. All this mixed with the guards’ smell of sweat and canvas and the guns’ stink of metal and rubber and grease.

I got up off my bunk and went to the bars.

“You’ll be expecting your daily visit to see your daughter,” Salvatore said. “With regret, that won’t be possible today.”

It was hard to imagine him alone in a room. His faith was a glaze that
only ever reflected non-believers. If I thought of him on his own I pictured him shutting down, like an automaton. God only came into play as a Divine extension of himself when others were present. Alone, he’d have no room for God.

“I must say,” he said, putting his head on one side like a pleasantly perplexed dog, “your naivety surprises me.”

You might not want this for yourself, but you’ll want it for your children.
The distance between me and Zoë was like a spear being dug into my navel.

“Naivety?” I asked.

“Bryce,” he said.

Adrenaline loosened my knees.

“
Big Brother
with werewolves,” the Cardinal continued. “Bryce has sunk a great deal of money into a new company developing silver-delivery systems.” He leaned forward. “Gadgets to kill your neighbourhood werewolf, if you understand me. Worthless, obviously, until people believe werewolves are
in
their neighbourhood. He’s not a man of faith, therefore he doesn’t believe in the faith-based exposé. Hence the secular—the allegedly ‘scientific’—version. He’s blind. He doesn’t have the faintest idea how many people
already
believe—thanks to whom? Thanks to us! He could have stuck with our arrangement and still made a fortune.”

Which was the verbal cue, obviously, because immediately the words were out of his mouth Saddam raised his weapon—not, I now saw, the standard Uzi, but something lighter and longer-barrelled—and pulled the trigger.

The dart hit me in the midriff, and in the three seconds it took for the giant wrongness to coalesce around me I felt the drug start its sweep up my legs—though the darkness seemed to descend from the space above my head. My hands tightened around the bars, but I could feel the weakness like a rapidly escalating argument in my flesh.

“There have been, as you know, other developments,” Salvatore said—and brought his right hand out from behind his back.

Holding Lorenzo’s severed head.

“The Devil works in mysterious ways,” he said.

I sank to my knees.

“Lorenzo’s behaviour has been a crushing blow,” Salvatore said. “I’ve
had my suspicions, but I have also had my faith. He was dying, of course. An inoperable brain tumour …” He shook the head slightly, as if to listen for the tumour’s rattle. “And for us there’s no greater death than the martyr’s—which is what I’d offered him. But one can never overestimate the greed for life. Apparently at any price. Do you think four hundred years of monstrosity is worth the cost of your soul? It amazes me. It truly amazes me.”

I felt my mouth opening and closing. No speech. Strength going as if a sluice gate had dropped open.

ZOË. ZOË … I’M … DON’T …

“I’m taking it as a lesson: Never relax. Never
assume.
Have faith, but wear the knowledge of human weakness like a burning jewel in the middle of your brow.”

The darkness had weight, now, a soft mass enfolding me. I didn’t know if I was still on my knees or had fallen to the floor. The world’s solid geometry was coming gently apart, with a kind of tranquil resignation, an uncomplaining relinquishment of the rules. Complete blackout for a moment, then I forced my eyes open again. The cell bars blurred and Salvatore’s round-toed boots with their caps of reflected light.
Wulf
thrashing, drowning. The weight of myself pulling me under.
I’m coming for you.

I’M COMING FOR YOU.

I tried to send to Zoë, but she was too far … Too far …

Darkness again, my head completely under black water, pushed down by the drug and Salvatore’s voice.

“Lucifer deals in the currency of our own complacency,” he said. “His greatest achievement is the—”

An explosion in my head cut him off.

In the last uneclipsed segment of consciousness I thought: No, not in my head. An explosion. An explosion …

But it was no good. I was going.

I had a confused dream of gunfire and screams and movement, and a voice—not Salvatore’s—shouting: “Attack! Sir, we’re under—” before a shrill electronic alarm ripped through for a deafening moment, with one flash of blinding light—and the last of my own lights went out.

T
HE HOUSE WAS
thirty miles from where we’d been ambushed. When I got there, Lucy had the Angel tied to a chair in the basement. A guy in his mid-thirties, olive-skinned, with short, thick black hair and bad acne scarring. He looked exhausted, and his jaw was swollen, but he was otherwise unharmed. What was left of the bodies of the house’s inhabitants—a retired couple in their late sixties—was in a bloody heap in bed upstairs.

“This is where you come in, I’m afraid,” Lucy said.

The last twenty-four hours had been a clusterfuck—and now we’d left a trail a moron could follow. I hadn’t even seen Talulla and Zoë fall. We were two hundred metres into the forest before I realised they weren’t with us. I’d stopped and turned, but Madeline grabbed me:

NO. THE KID. WE HAVE TO GET HIM AWAY.

She hadn’t wanted to let it out but I’d got PROBABLY DEAD ANYWAY, since she was thinking it. Lorcan got it, too. I felt it in his grip tightening around my neck.

EASY, KIDDO. SHE’LL BE ALL RIGHT. YOUR MOM’S TOUGHER THAN ALL OF US PUT TOGETHER.

And she’s leaving me.

Left me already.

A grenade detonated thirty metres away. They knew we’d broken through. They were coming. I hadn’t seen any vehicles (and even if they had them they’d be useless past the trees); they wouldn’t catch us on foot. There was no alternative: we turned back, we died. All of us.

So we ran.

The instinct was to stay under cover, but the forest petered out in less than three miles, and, in any case, stay under cover and do what when the moon set? Stroll into the nearest town naked? Again, no choice.

Twenty minutes out of the woods we hit farmland. Sheep scattered,
their little hoofbeats and the fruity smell of their shit. Lights on in the farmhouse. Three dogs. Four humans. The dogs came out silently from their flap and looked at us, awaiting instruction. We didn’t need them. We did a slow circle of the buildings (two dozen bullocks in a barn huddled close together, eyes rolling), a tractor shed, a Land Rover, a VW and two quad bikes in an open garage with a corrugated tin roof. Only the house occupied. Mom, Dad, daughter, son. Sitting around the table, finishing dinner. A steel coffee pot, big yellow slab of butter. Cold cuts, wine, half a dozen cheeses, a blackberry pie. The son, maybe seventeen years old, looked pissed about something. Everything, I thought. He didn’t want this. Farm life. He wanted the city. TV had made inroads. Porn. Girls. Slow Internet that drove him nuts. I thought of Luke Skywalker saying:
If there’s a bright centre to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.
The kid even looked a bit like Mark Hamill. Your mind goes to these places. You can’t help it. The daughter, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, was one of those rare kids lucky enough to be born into a world that fit her. She loved it, the big dung-scented cattle, the chickens with their weird little personalities, the dust from the straw at harvest like smoke, the thick walls and the open fires and breaking the ice in the water butt in winter. Mom and Dad loved them both—and each other. You could feel it. You could see it in the house’s slight untidiness and the girl’s ease in her skin and even in the boy’s annoyance. Even in his annoyance he admitted their love. The parents still liked fucking each other. There was humour and habit there, in the sex—but still sometimes the quickening of the old fire. They knew it was there, they knew they could rely on it, for the rest of their lives.

We didn’t get all this from peeking through the windows.

We got it when Maddy kicked the door down and we leaped in and tore them to pieces and ate them.

Tough not to fuck.

It’d always been there between Madeline and me. She Turned me, after all. We’d kept out of each other’s way for that very reason. I knew, she knew, Lula knew. (
It’s okay, I want you to
, Lula’d sent me, back at the chateau, before everything kicked off.
I want you to so I can feel better about leaving you for a vampire
is what she meant. I hated her for that. For trying to manage it. For trying to manage
me.
It had never really been love. First
it was love minus what she kept for Jake’s ghost. Then love minus what the vampire had left her with. Too many minuses. I’d always been making do with leftovers.)