By Blood We Live (40 page)

“As you see,” Olek said.

Devaz was sitting on his bunk with his knees up, head bowed. Unchanged. Untransformed. Human.

“How do you feel, Christopher?” Olek said into the intercom.

Devaz raised his head. His eyes were raw, but apart from that he looked completely normal. He shouldn’t. He should look just like me. For a moment I wondered if the vampire had found a way of insulating a room against the effects of the moon. But I’d been deep underground myself, on more than one occasion. It hadn’t made any difference.

“Let me out of here,” Devaz said. He still sounded exhausted.

Olek ignored the request. He released the speak button and turned to me. “Well?” he said. “Are you impressed?”

I didn’t respond. Just ducked back out of the doorway. He followed.

“It’ll be tedious for you if I explain how it works now. You’ll have questions, for which, obviously, you’ll require your regular vocal skills. So in the meantime, rest, digest, consider. My home is your home, and your friends are here. Please, after you.”

Back in the hallway above ground, he lit another cigarette. “If you prefer to be outdoors,” he said, “feel free. There isn’t another property for a couple of miles around. You won’t be disturbed. And don’t worry about the mess. It’ll be taken care of. I have some work to do downstairs, but get your friends to let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

I did spend the night in the garden. Stuffed, objectlessly angry, going into and out of sadness. When I thought about Walker. When I thought about the future. When I thought about my kids.

I’
D SEEN HIM
like this before. After London. After Crete. After Talulla. His head was hot. His limbs felt swollen. His breath stank. In and out of consciousness, and when he was in, making no sense. No strength in him. You could see the effort it was just for him to raise a hand. He couldn’t lift his head.

“We have to get him into the hotel,” Mia said. “We can’t spend daylight in here with him like this.”

In the Transit van, she meant, which is where we were. Where we’d had to carry him from Schrutt’s villa. We’d pulled over halfway to the airport because suddenly he’d half sat up and seemed to be trying to vomit. But nothing had come up. Just him spasming, like someone was repeatedly punching him in the guts. There were three hours of daylight left. I was getting better at being able to tell without a watch.

“What’s happening to him?” I asked. “Is this something that happens?”

Mia shook her head. “I’ve never seen it,” she said. “I don’t know any more than you.”

It was weird, us feeling each other out, mentally. I’d got enough from Stonker through the confusion of those first moments when they came in—FRIENDS. DON’T BE AFRAID. TRUST—but we were all still testing and pulling back. She’d put a screen up, eventually, but sort of politely, as in, There’s enough going on here. Let’s just talk. The kid was wide open, but I let him alone. I didn’t even know if I
could
screen.

I wasn’t feeling good myself. Shouldn’t have drunk when I didn’t need to. I hadn’t needed to. But I’d had to. The air in the back of the van was heated by Fluff’s body going crazy. The kid, Caleb, had got out and was smoking a cigarette. He was quiet, freaked out, fascinated. He could feel how new I was.

“He was sick like this two years ago,” I said. “When he went looking for … He went looking for a werewolf.”

“Talulla,” Mia said.

“You know?”

She smiled, without any pleasure. “It’s a long story,” she said. “And irrelevant. Enough that I know who she is.”

“He thinks she’s …” I stopped, didn’t know how much he’d want me to say. But her face told me she was picking up the gist anyway. Obviously I
couldn’t
screen. She felt me thinking how dumb and fucked-up it was. He thinks she’s the reincarnation of his dead lover. I could feel her mental reflex, too, to dismiss it as bullshit. As mumbo-jumbo. As a fairy story. But then immediately the reflex to that, too, as in, Who the fuck were
we
to dismiss fairy stories?

I held Fluff’s head in my lap. He was shaking. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying.

“What? What is it? Tell us what we need to do!”

Suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Fluff? Jesus … What should we do? Do you need blood? Should we get blood?”

He smiled, but like he was seeing something else. Not me. Something miles away.

“Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,” he said. “So much as gladness that some end might be.”

“What? For fuck’s sake, Fluff, we—”

But a spasm took him again, lifted him almost into a sitting position like someone had yanked a chain around his throat. Then he fell back into my lap. There was pinkish snot coming out of his nose. My hands were weak. “Oh God,” I heard myself saying. “Oh God, Oh God …”

“Listen,” Mia said. “Will the pilot take orders from you?”

“What? Yeah. Why?”

“Call him and tell him to make the preparations. God only knows how we’re going to get him through the airport like this … We’ll have to find another way …”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are we going to stay here all night?” Caleb said, appearing in the van’s open rear exit.

“Get in,” Mia told him. Then turned to me. “I know someone who might be able to help,” she said.

I
SLEPT THROUGH
most of the next day, but since there were still three hours of daylight when I woke I went downstairs with the hope of grilling Devaz. Whatever it was that had “cured” him had come at a cost. I needed to know.

No luck. The doors at the bottom of the first flight down were locked. So much for
mi casa, su casa.
The house was quiet. There were no signs of the gore I’d traipsed in yesterday, nor, when I went back out beyond the banyans, was there any trace of the kill. Grishma, presumably, whose absence from the house my nose had noted, despatched to do the unsavoury necessaries. There was nothing to do but wait. I poured myself a Macallan and ran myself a bath. “Childe Roland” hummed a little, from the bedside table, but I felt sick at the thought of going back to it. Even when you knew the ending every reading would be the same hopeless circular triumph of loss. It was in keeping with the place, somehow, no matter how superficially different its landscape. It was in keeping with the sluggish, surreal quality of everything I’d seen and done since leaving the Last Resort. It was in keeping with the dream of the vampire. It was in keeping with me.

Bath and single malt didn’t take much of the edge off.
Wulf
was still wide awake, fighting the lunar law, teeth and claws dug into every grudged second, minute, hour. There was a huge, sudden temptation to phone Walker, to speak to the kids. But by the time I left the bath and dressed (jeans, a black cotton t-shirt, a pair of red DMs—impractical footwear in the heat, but the brand-new flip-flops Grishma had left by my bed would be worse than useless if trouble came my way) I felt as if I’d lost the right. Every moment I spent here—this slow-motion vertigo—dragged me closer to inertia—yet there was nothing I could do to pull myself out. By sundown, all I’d done was sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the floor.

When someone knocked at my door, I assumed it would be Olek—or Grishma to take me to him.

It was Konstantinov.

“Put it on,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

The damn nose-paste.

“What’s the matter?” I said, when we’d applied it. Confronted by him, I was relieved and sad. Because there was no lying to him. He never lied himself. And always knew when you were. He looked at you and your energy for lying just burned away.

“Listen,” he said. “I know things aren’t good between you and Walker. I’m not asking. It’s for the two of you. You go your separate ways, my friendship remains. You’ll both have it, always. Understood?”

It was a terrible refreshment, his plain way, the simple words, the absence of strategy. It made you realise how much of your life you spent not being like that. It made you realise what a waste not being like that was. My body, which I hadn’t known had been tense, sitting on the bed, relaxed into a kind of pleasant defeat.

“Understood,” I said.

“There’s a little disgust in you, right now,” he said. “It’s not for me to tell you not to be disgusted with yourself. That’s your business. But don’t let it make your decision for you here.”

“You think I’ll regret it? If I take the cure? If I give it to my children?”

“I think you’ll regret it if you make a decision out of disgust. That’s all.”

And that
was
all. Conversations that would last dreary, punishing hours with other people were over with him in a half-dozen exchanges. Truth forged economy.

For a few strange, purged moments we remained in silence, me sitting on the bed, him standing, dark and still and tall in front of me. He was a blessing in my life. My life was full of blessings. And one curse: That no amount of blessings was ever enough.

He went to the door, opened it.

“He’s waiting for you downstairs,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready. If you need us …”

“I know. Mikhail?”

He turned.

“Yes?”

“Do you trust him?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t read him. At all. I’m sorry. All I can tell you is that so far everything’s been as he said it would be. But that doesn’t mean much, since we don’t know what he
hasn’t
said.”

Again we paused in silence, as if there were crucial information the room’s ether might choose to share with us.

It didn’t.

“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet, as a knot of
wulf
came undone in my shoulders. “Let’s go and see what he has to say.”

O
LEK, BACK IN
Levi’s and a new crisp white
kurta
with a Nehru collar, was waiting for me in the vault. On the steel table, the case containing the stone tablet was open. He was holding a sealed envelope in his left hand.

“In here,” he said, “are the remaining pages—bar one, which I shall retain until you fulfil your part of the agreement—from the journal of Alexander Quinn.” He dropped the envelope in front of me on the table. “They’re yours to read at your leisure, but I can summarise in the meantime. They tell the story, long after Liku and Lehek-shi had gone wherever the dead go, but still a thousand years before the First Egyptian Dynasty, of a
gammou-jhi
by the name of Ghena-Anule, a magician-priest who, for all his magical priestliness, got bitten by one of your ancestors when he was in his early sixties and thereafter devoted his energies to finding a cure for the Curse. He was one of the last of the Maru, and, as far as this record knows, the
very
last of the Anum, those members of the tribe who possessed the ability to travel—transcendentally, one must assume—between the Upper, Middle and Lower Realms. One of the last to be able to hold—as Quinn’s translation has it—‘converse with the gods.’ Feel free, by the way, to roll your eyes at any time. I can assure you that was my reaction. I must repeat: I’m a scientist. I’m not, to put it mildly, in favour of mystical claptrap. You look tired, incidentally. Are you all right? Are you rested?”

I wasn’t tired. Or rather, I was, but a sort of dead, claustrophobic energy was forcing its way through the tiredness. The vault was full of it, like a subsonic noise you knew would, eventually, split your head. I was trying to picture Jake and my mother watching all this from their afterlife casino. I was trying to picture them smiling and shaking their heads in loving but pitiful incredulity. But I couldn’t. This was a show broadcast on a channel they didn’t get. This was their reception turned to pixel-snow and static hiss. This was Jake putting his drink down on the baize and whacking the set with his fist and saying, What the fuck?

Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all, Lu. There isn’t one.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Finish the story.”

Olek smiled. I wondered, suddenly, if Devaz was still in his cell. Lingering
wulf
nose reported human presence not too far away, but it didn’t smell like him.

“So,” Olek continued, “Ghena-Anule begins by petitioning the Upper Realm. These would be the good guys of the cosmogony. This would be, in the moral economy, the appeal to mercy.”

He paused. I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the floor. It was one of those moments—one of those situations—wherein the absurdity of the content vivifies the mundanity of the context, refreshes the humble molecules of walls, floor, table, light. These and the blameless pounding continuity of your own body. Yes, this is really happening, and here you still obscenely are. I was very conscious of the weights of my hands at the ends of my wrists. A vision flashed: Myself, in a cave, transformed—but with my hands missing. Amputated. For a moment I felt the cellular fizz of regrowth—with such convincing intensity that I actually looked at my hands to check it was an illusion.

It was. But it brought the dream back, the vampire’s face. I’m coming for you.

Olek’s pause, I knew, was to acknowledge our shared understanding of where appeals to Divine mercy got you. Nowhere.

“So,” he went on, “Ghena-Anule turned the other way, and began to petition the Lower Realm. Not for mercy, but for a transaction, for a deal. Eventually, apparently, he succeeded.” He raised his voice a little: “Muni?” he called.

An elderly Indian woman in thick dark-rimmed spectacles entered, smiling, with a baby-carrier strapped to her front. In the carrier, obviously, a baby. Very small. Weeks old, I guessed. The one that I hadn’t imagined hearing the other night. The one I’d dismissed. The woman, in baggy jeans, brand-new Nikes and a blue-and-white floral print smock, had grey hair in a plait that reached her coccyx. Grey-green eyes and deep lines from the curve of each nostril to the corners of her mouth. She smelled of jasmine oil and tobacco—but the baby’s odour, of clean diapers and Sudocrem and talc—had the bulk of my attention. The woman seemed wholly at ease. She stood just inside the vault doorway gently
moving her hips from side to side, both thin-skinned elegant hands cradling the carrier, smiling.