Talulla Rising (44 page)

‘He shouldn’t be out of bed,’ I said, ‘let alone wandering around in the snow.’

‘Yeah, well, this is Mike. This is the Russian thing.’

Zoë and Lorcan were asleep side by side in a new (bigger) bassinet close by me. (It was an excusable madness that I literally wouldn’t let either of them out of my sight. Temporarily excusable. Soon, if I didn’t break the habit, it would turn toxic. Watching them sleep close to each other was an endlessly renewable joy. I’d stand there, transfixed, unutterably happy, happy in my fingernails and teeth and stomach and palms and breasts, then move away to close the curtains or put another log on the fire and when I came back there the same joy was all over again, completely refreshed and brand new and self-incredulous. The beauty of a meaningless universe is that you don’t get what you deserve.) Fergus was already back in London, treating his money with profitable contempt for its stupidity. Lucy and Trish were in the kitchen midway through a second bottle of Bordeaux, Trish trying to teach Lucy not just how to smoke, but how to roll her own cigarettes, now that we’d convinced her, Lucy, that unless they were cigarettes containing silver they’d do her no damage. (
If smoking were completely harmless
, Jake wrote,
everyone would smoke
.) Madeline was in the upstairs bathroom making languorous and epic preparation: Cloquet didn’t know it yet but tonight he was going to get comprehensively laid. Dangerous, everyone agreed, but we were reckless and giddy after what we’d been through, and Madeline, I knew, felt sorry for him. Besides, she said, I’ve never done it with a Frenchman. She wouldn’t take money. Don’t be daft. I probably need it more than he does. It’s all right for you, with the big lovey-dovey. In case you forgot, I was babysitting your
sprog
when I should’ve been you-know-what. Yes, she was. She’d made it all possible – and given me the gift of Walker, too, no strings attached. Do you have any idea what a good person you are? I’d asked her. It had been an odd moment. We were alone in her room, her sitting at the dressing table, me standing by the window with a cup of black coffee, in that peculiar afternoon light you only get from snow outside. I hadn’t meant it to come out so seriously, but I’d been thinking of Jake writing he wished he’d kissed her more, and simultaneously got an intimation of a wretched period in her life when she was seventeen or eighteen, new to London, scared, lost. She’d worn a big leather jacket because it felt like a friend she had with her all the time. She’d found herself in wrong situations. Then met people. Then started the Life. And until the Curse she’d lived in perpetual loneliness and boredom and fear. I hadn’t meant it to come out so seriously, but Pharaoh’s heart, unhardened now, was erratic in its wellings-up. She was just about to dismiss it – Yeah, yeah, fuck
off
– but found she couldn’t, because we were looking at each other and she knew I meant it, and no one had ever said that to her and meant it, and suddenly the two of us were nearly in tears, and had to try to laugh it off, but the laughter made it worse, and then we both
did
shed some tears, laughing, and knowing there was nothing to do but just let this moment come into being and pass away. Somewhere in the middle of it she said: It’s okay, you know, I don’t do it with anyone now unless I want to. Then she laughed again and said: It’s just that I want to all the bloody time. Can’t lose, really.

I could hear Cloquet now, moving about in his room above us, humming Jacques Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’, thinking he was having an early night. It gave me pleasure to think of the erotic wealth that was coming to his poor neglected body. And because every small good feeling connected to the big one, I got up to look at the twins again.

Walker came to me and put his arms around me from behind. We hadn’t had sex yet, but it was close. He was scared he wouldn’t be able to, in spite of manifest erections when we kissed and touched each other, and he knew it would get mentally tougher the longer he waited. Like standing at the edge of a diving board, he’d said to me last night, when we’d been fooling around, and he’d got hard, then panicked and retreated, and a silence had expanded between us.

For a while we stood without speaking, pressed against by all the newness. We were afraid, both of us, that now there was nothing to stop us being together we wouldn’t want to. We both knew I was attracted to people who were bigger than me – smarter, deeper, less afraid; Jake, most recently and most obviously, but even before him, all the way back to the Very Bad Dirty Filthy Little Girl at college, that was the pattern. Even Richard had been the type, although in his case I’d mistaken vanity and articulate cynicism for depth. But any way you looked at Walker and me, I’d gone ahead, I was waiting for him to catch up.

‘How did you do this alone all those months?’ he asked.

Madeline, of course, was flamily connected to him, though she did her best to keep out. It wasn’t her fault. Turning someone created an unreliable psychic umbilical. She was in him, erratically, whether she wanted it or not. It was, I thought, the real reason she’d decided to give Cloquet the loving-up of his life, to give me as much room as possible with Walker. How Jake had underrated that woman!

‘I never really thought I was alone. I always thought... I mean there was the one who Turned me, for a start.’

‘And then Jake, eventually.’

‘Yes.’

And so it had begun: he’d have to compare himself, have to know who was better. In spite of everything it irritated me. It irritated me because it demonstrated the inevitability of masculine competitiveness and it irritated me because Jake was better and he was dead and I didn’t even have his ghost to talk to.

But Jake had had two hundred years to perfect himself. Walker was only four days old.

‘Do you feel him, at all?’ Walker asked, moving away from me. A glass of Laphroaig stood on the mantel. He picked it up, sipped, tasted, swallowed. ‘I mean the dead. That guy we... ’

That guy we ate. The victim we’d shared. His debut meal. He was feeling the first flickers of being inhabited in that way. Tank to the ethereal fish. You think you’ve felt it all. Then this. (Which thought produced something like déjà vu, for a second or two – then it was gone. The hairs on my skin had a little electrical moment.)

‘Not Jake, no,’ I said. ‘Not my mother, either. But the kills, yes.’

He looked down into his glass. ‘It makes us an afterlife,’ he said.

I knew what was bothering him. If the dead we ate went into us then the dead we didn’t eat had to go somewhere else. If there was a Somewhere Else then anything was possible: God, a scheme of things, morality, consequences. In which case...

‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I said. ‘I think it’s that their lives don’t just flash before
their
eyes, they flash before ours, too. They pass away into nothing, but we’re left with the flash, like a snapshot, like an incredibly detailed echo that’ll keep sounding in us as long as we live. It’s not really them. It’s what they were. I don’t know.’

‘The ultimate download.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘So you don’t think there’s anything?’

I remembered the certainty I’d felt looking past Delilah Snow’s death into the void that would have swallowed her. I remembered the certainty of nothingness. Last night, in the small hours, I’d begun a journal.
We’re alone in the darkness,
I’d written,
so we hold hands and tell stories of good and evil to comfort each other. It works, for a while, for a life, for a civilisation, perhaps for as long as the species survives. But have no illusions: it makes no difference to the darkness. The darkness swallows us all – good and evil alike – with monolithic disinterest.

An odd beginning, considering I was happy, but I’d put the pen down with a feeling of contentment.

‘Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all,’ I said. ‘There isn’t any.’

Not a conversational aphrodisiac. We took the twins’ bassinet and went to join Lucy and Trish in the kitchen. It was a big square room with an Aga and spotlights with a lilac tint and gold tinsel on the dresser. Trish and Lucy were at the dining table, an oak slab that looked as if it had been archaeologically unearthed from the days of Roman Britain. The radio, volume low, was playing Christmas carols, currently ‘Gloria in Excelsis’. I poured myself a large Hendricks. Zoë and Lorcan wouldn’t need milk (they both drank water now and then) for days.
Wulf
kept telling me I was being an idiot about these things, that nothing that didn’t harm me could possibly harm them, but enough of my human remained to keep the fires of paranoia going. Not until they’re weaned. Another couple of months, according to the internet, although obviously Google was assuming babies who didn’t change into monsters once a month and devour live flesh and blood.

‘I still can’t get over how easy it was,’ Trish said. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t make that the plan from the start. They were a bunch of wusses.’ She was, as ever in human form, full of compact energy. The green eyes were her face’s big treasure, set off punkily by the artfully chopped deep-red hair. She could drink anyone, it had been conceded manfully by Fergus, under the feckin table.

‘Yes, but without Mystery Marco we’d have been in trouble,’ Lucy said.

We’d gone over it countless times. Whoever he was, ‘Marco’ had power over the vampires. The armed boochies had dropped their weapons on cue. ‘Remshi’ – beyond doubt a fraud – had taken his slap like a gimp. Jacqueline had retreated. Even Mia had been compelled to earth apparently at his will.

‘Had to be an elder,’ Walker said. ‘There’s no other explanation.’

‘Unless he was the real thing,’ Lucy said, as one of us always said, sooner or later, every time we talked about it. The possibility excited us. (With the exception of Walker.)
There’s something here, it’s true
, Mia had reported.
Very old. I don’t know
. Of course she would have felt it, and since Jacqueline’s male model was being billed as its source, that’s where Mia would assume it was coming from. But ‘Marco’ was there too, as one of the Disciples. It could just as easily have been coming from him. I’d felt it myself, the nearness of a past that should have been remote, the appalling temporal compression. There was the odourlessness too, and the way he’d talked about the book.

There was the look he’d given me, of deep recognition.

‘I felt sorry for that Olivia,’ Trish said. ‘You could see she’d totally believed.’

‘At least we know they
can’t
walk around in daylight,’ Lucy said. ‘Or not yet, at any rate.’

Evidently the raid on the Helios lab in Beijing had been the work of the Disciples after all. They’d come away with a flawed formula and administered it to willing zealots as the ultimate Remshi marketing tool. Recipients were shunted out of public view (according to Jacqueline and her puppet messiah, off into the world to enjoy their new daylight freedom), monitored, and killed as soon as they started showing serious side-effects. By which time members of the congregation were queuing up to be given the gift. It was no wonder the Fifty Families had called time: there would be no competing with an outfit that promised its members a release from nocturnality. Jacqueline’s gamble was that they’d perfect the formula before the side-effects jig was up, by which time her position as Queen to the magical King would be established beyond question. Also by which time the gift would’ve stopped being a gift and become a reward, earned only by complete and indefinite submission to the royal will. The old boochie oligarchy would give way to a new monarchy. You had to hand it to Jacqui, as Walker had said: she didn’t think small.

‘I want to know what the missing verb is,’ Lucy said.

Walker didn’t, I knew.

‘Whatever it was,’ Trish said, ‘it was enough to get one of their own priests done-in when he found it out.’

‘Something blasphemous,’ Lucy said.

Walker poured himself another.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘The main thing is we all got out in one piece.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Trish said, topping up her and Lucy’s Bordeaux.

‘Cheers.’

‘Sláinte!’

‘
Stin iya mas
,’ Walker said – just as his cellphone rang.

He looked at the number. ‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘It’s Mike.’

67

Walker had known. I’d known myself, ever since Jacqueline had said Natasha was free,
though not quite the woman she was when she came here
. It was Madame’s style, to return her to her lover as everything he didn’t want.

But she’d underestimated both of them. She’d underestimated love.

‘Talulla Demetriou, Natasha Alexandrova,’ Mikhail said. ‘Without doubt the strangest introduction I’ve ever made.’

Odour, mutually repellent, was a farcical problem for all of us, though less for me after my time in close quarters with Caleb. I stepped forward and Natasha and I shook hands, forcing ourselves not to hold our noses. She smiled. ‘It might not look like it,’ she said, with only the slightest trace of a Russian accent, ‘but it’s an honour to meet you. Mikhail’s told me you’ve been a good friend to him. I’m in your debt.’

We were in the house’s big back garden, now a foot and a half deep in snow. Neither Natasha nor Konstantinov would ever feel the cold again.
Not many make it past a thousand years
. These two might.

Trish and Lucy, with a blanket-wrapped and wide-awake twin each, were in the conservatory doorway, looking on. Suddenly Madeline appeared behind them, in a short silk robe over white lingerie. She looked like a porn version of the angel on the Christmas tree. ‘Christ, can no one else smell the – oh. Blimey. Right. Fuck.’

‘I just wanted you to know,’ Konstantinov said. ‘This is my choice. This is the only way it could be.’

He was a little paler, of course, but apart from that in perfect health. He’d shaved off the sick-bed stubble and in the nude face his polished black eyes were renewed jewels. On looks alone he and Natasha could’ve been brother and sister. Their love had a whiff of that, too, a thrilling, incestuous claustrophobia. It wasn’t vampirism that made these two transcendently indifferent to any law, it was love. Next to the love, the vampirism was small.