The Last Werewolf (23 page)

“I’ll leave the airport,” I told her. “You stay. If they don’t know about you they’ll follow me. You take your flight to New York. I’ll join you when I’ve ditched them. Shouldn’t take me more than a day or two.”

“Wait. This is crazy. What if they don’t follow you?”

“They will. If they don’t, I’ll come back and we’ll rethink.”

“What if there are other vampires?”

“I’ll call you in thirty minutes. If there are others here you’ll still feel sick, and if one of them gets on the plane with you you’ll feel
really
sick. But that’s not likely. If they put anyone on the flight with you it’ll be a familiar, a human. They won’t do anything as long as you stay in public places, but keep your eyes open.”

“What about these WOCOP guys?” she said. “How will I know if they’re following me?” The charming frown of concentration remained. She looked now like a secretary taking in an astonishing amount of new instruction, forcing herself to stay calm, forcing herself to be up to the inhuman demand.

“You won’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that just now. In any case they won’t make a move yet. They’re trophy hunters. They’ll wait for the next full moon.” The words “full moon” made us look at each other again. All the big things we’d said nothing about. I was down to my last pound coin. I memorised her New York address.

“I can’t just
go
,” she said. “I need answers.”

“You’ll get them, just not like this. I have to know you’re safe.”

A piercing sweet catch in my chest when I said that, for the simple reason that it was true. Suddenly something mattered. In films someone finds a spaceship that’s been buried for thousands of years and switches the power on—and the whole system flutters magically back into life, lights, gauges, indicators, drives. The lovely thrilling thought that this capacity’s been there the whole time, waiting.

“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Is there a cure?”

“No.”

She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Absorbed. She’d grown a new glamorously deformed personality to accommodate werewolfhood but there in the closing of the eyes and the swallow was an indication of how much of the old personality remained, allowed to stay on condition she could pretend it wasn’t really there. Even this pronouncement—No, there’s no cure—didn’t quite kill it. It would probably live for decades, holding hope in its hand like a hot coal.

“Don’t be alone after sunset and don’t sleep at night,” I said. “You’ll have to go to a club or a bar or whatever. Sleep during the day. With someone, if that’s an option, but only someone you know well.” Now, imprudently, we were staring at each other. The
wulf
certainty between us was as ugly and exciting as a massive haemorrhage on a white tiled floor. But there was the other certainty too, human, a shock to us both. Anachronistic in this day and age, almost embarrassing. I had an image of Ellis and Grainer and a crew of tooled-up Hunters surrounding us, laughing their heads off.

“You better fucking come after me,” she said, quietly. The composure wasn’t absolute. Desperation was right there, waited only her nod. The dark eyelashes and that beauty spot were her face’s erotic accents.

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“This is insane. There’s so much … I don’t know
anything.
”

“You will. Everything I know, which isn’t much.”

“You’ll phone me in half an hour?”

“Trust me.”

A pause. Eyes meet again.

“You know I do.”

Moments like tiny gearings; an oiled click and the tectonics giantly shift and suddenly you’re saying, Trust me, and she’s saying, You know I do. Behind the immediacies—the
if
s and
then
s still swarming us—was the carnal eventuality, or rather
two
carnal eventualities: the coming together in human flesh, and …

I knew it would remain unspeakable, the other consummation, deliciously held in the mouth, in the heart. It had sent an intimation of itself back to us from the future that put a seal on our lips.
They’ll wait for the next full moon
, I’d said, and as through the wink of a Third Eye we’d seen that nothing,
nothing
would compare to—

Then it was gone.

“I really don’t want you to go,” she said.

“I really don’t want to go.”

B
UT GO
I
DID
. I selected a cowboy cab from Heathrow, tipped the driver (a dreadlocked Rastafarian in a leather hat the size of a post box) fifty pounds in advance for the use of his mobile. The car, an unloved Mondeo, stank of ganja and Chinese food. She answered after a single ring.

“How are you feeling?”

“No sickness. They both followed you out.”

“Perfect.”

“You can’t talk freely, can you?”

“No.”

“I can’t stand this. It’s three thousand miles.”

“I’ll be there before you know it.”

“Are we really the only ones?” she said.

“I thought
I
was the only one, but now there’s you I can’t be sure of anything.” Except that now for the first time in half a century I’m—

“This is like waking up. I’ve been …” She sighed. I pictured her clamping her jaws together, closing her eyes, controlling herself. “Do you know what it is?” she said, eventually. “Does it fit into anything?” “It” being the Curse. “It” being Being a Werewolf. Did it fit into anything? Anything like God or the Devil or UFOs or voodoo or clairvoyance or life after death? There was no disguising her fear that it did, her hope that it did, her deep suspicion that it didn’t.

“No more than anything else,” I said. “We’re here, we do what we do, that’s it. You’ve read the fairy stories, obviously.” Quinn’s journal, I decided, could wait. There was enough for her to take in already without adding the ancient desert, mad dogs and dead bodies. Besides, the driver was listening. Not a vamp lackey, nor WOCOP unless their agents had got a lot better at blending in, but I didn’t want him to have anything useful to say when questioned. As it was I was going to have to give him a crazy price for the mobile, or trash it and risk a scene. Few things
more wearying than a stoned cabbie with martial arts delusions. “I wish there was a big secret I could let you in on,” I told her, “but there isn’t.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” she said. She’d absorbed the first shock wave: me, the encounter, the confirmation of the world she’d fallen into nine months ago, the brutal attraction, the violent pitch into a new theatre. She assimilated fast, Manhattan-speed. Here already in the “I had a feeling you were going to say that” was her bigger, calmer, more sophisticated self that was always waiting after whatever temporary naïve furore had died down. Here already was the acknowledgement that whatever else this was it was the beginning of a liaison of fabulous proportions. Here already was the wry aspect, the curious, the playful. Here was the intelligence committed to life, whatever the cost.
I
was the one still inwardly flapping, grinning, hopping about with excitement. The impulse to thank God, it turned out, was still there. Something in me looked … upwards, humbled.

“Does anyone know about you?” she asked. “I mean apart from the vampires and the agents?”

“Not anymore. You?”

“No. There’s my dad, but it would kill him. I can’t.”

“I understand. Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

“You are going to follow me, aren’t you?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“Tell me my address again.”

“Not advisable. Please believe me, I have it.”

The cab slowed for the Chiswick roundabout, got a green light, whipped through. It started raining. If the boochie was a flier he’d be cold and wet up there.

“I still don’t see why I have to take the flight,” she said. “Why can’t I just check into a hotel here?”

“This country’s too small. You have to trust me. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“How long?”

“Again, inadvisable.”

“You’re old, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

A pause. She was realising what getting the answers would mean. Without them carrying on could be mere blind reflex. With them it was an informed decision. A werewolf by choice, as it were.

“How long will I live?”

“A long time.”

“A hundred years?”

“Try four.”

Silence. I could feel her effort at immense logical extension from the present (via science fiction, Microsoft, the space program) into the future. Impossible: One knows logical extension won’t cover it. One knows the far future will involve unimaginable, perhaps comedic leaps.

“But you’ll look the same,” I said. “Does that help?”

She didn’t answer. Suddenly the full weight of her aloneness
—her
aloneness, not mine—hit me.
There’s my dad, but it would kill him
. Nine months she’d been living through this. They found three- and four-year-old kids who’d survived alone in their homes for days, eating sugar, ketchup, butter. You didn’t want to think about what that had been like for them. They were objectionable, somehow. Unless of course you’d been through it yourself. Unless of course you were one of them.

“Shit,” she said. “I need to check in. If I’m really going.”

“You’re really going. Remember: public places at night, okay?”

“And call up an ex to sleep with during the day.”

“I’m serious.”

“Okay, but the longer it takes you to get there the longer I’m going to have to put out for someone else.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Sleep in the public library. Drink coffee. Take uppers.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

Aliases like a whirlwind of dead leaves. Me in the middle, myself.

“It’s Jake,” I said.

“You’re lucky. Jake’s a good name.”

“Whereas?”

A pause. Then, “Might as well get this over with, I suppose. My name’s Talulla.”

•

You mustn’t fall in love with a woman because you’ll end up killing her.

Not if she’s a werewolf
.

I didn’t invent the necessities. But I am bound by them.

•

There was no appeal in taking the vampire on. Not with my new investment in not dying. Simpler to wait for sunrise and the shift change with his human proxy. Therefore I got the cabbie to drop me at Caliban’s, a night club (one of my subsidiaries’ subsidiaries’ subsidiaries owns it, as it happens) on New Oxford Street, where I stayed, buoyed by hastily scored amphetamines, until five a.m. Breakfast of eggs Benedict (the first human food since my depressing banquet-for-one in the
Hecate
’s hold) at Mikhail’s in Holborn took me through to six, whereupon a mirror-windowed Audi rolled up for the vamp and relieved him with a pair of familiars. The WOCOP tail had been replaced, too.
Three
agents, as far as I could tell. This was getting ridiculous. I left the café, bought a fresh pack of Camels at a newsstand and wandered down to Trafalgar Square. London was up and running. The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.

I bought a new mobile and called Christian at the Zetter. I wanted a haircut, a massage, a hot shower and a little time and space to gather myself for the laborious business of escapology.

T
ALULLA, LIGHT OF
my life, fire of my loins … Ta-loo-la: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate … Ta. Lu. La.

“Talulla’s bad enough,” she said. “Put it with ‘Demetriou’ and you’re in the realm of the ridiculous.”

It was afternoon and we were lying in bed in the Edwardian Park Suite at the New York Plaza, having just had sex for the fifth time in approximately six hours. I never had a sister but I imagine if I had fucking her would have felt something like fucking Talulla, sometime in our very early twenties, coming to it with relished capitulation after years of dirty adolescent telepathy.

“Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou,” she said. “Even in New York you rattle that off and they think you’re speaking Vulcan or something.”

It had taken less than twenty-four hours to ditch the tails, albeit after a wearing epic of old-fashioned cat-and-mouse. With Christian’s help I got out of the Zetter under a pile of soiled sheets in a laundry hamper, and away in the back of the cleaning company van. That did for the vamp flunkies. Not so the agent, whom I clocked still with me barely five minutes after leaving the depot. I wasn’t much surprised. Christian is solid, but there can no longer be any doubt the Zetter’s WOCOP moled. Three hours of Underground-and-black-cab switches (and four agents) later, I was back at Heathrow, if not certain of having slipped them then driven past caring by the force of the need to see her again. Flying business as Bill Morris (an airport-bought first class ticket would’ve waved a flag to anyone watching) I’d had the width of the Atlantic to coddle and thrum my lust. By the time she arrived in the hotel lobby in sunglasses and a pale pink cashmere dress I’d reached maximum agitation. Given which you’d expect a debut fuck of eye-popping gymnastics. In fact it was a thing of slow, hyperconscious deliberateness. You’d similarly expect a dive straight into werewolf biography, an immediate compulsion to compare
howler notes. Not so. The deep reflex was postponement. To speak of what we were would be in the long run (but not long enough) to speak of death. We had this one opportunity to come together as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Thereafter the rose would be sick.

Wulf
was with us.
Wulf
knew what was going on.
Wulf
wanted in, materially.
Wulf
prowled the blood, rushed up repeatedly only to effervesce into nothing at the surface of the skin.
Wulf
swung and tossed its head and let loll its degenerate tongue and wreathed us in its feral funk, an odour as dense as the stink of a crammed zoo. If it was getting nothing else out of us it was getting the primary admission, that we knew what we were, that we had both felt the peace that passeth understanding, that this, now, sex in human form, was the imperfect forerunner, the babbling prophet, mere Baptist to the coming Christ.
Wulf
knew how good it was going to be and would not, even in abeyance, suffer us not sharing in the knowledge. Therefore we knew. Had known from first glance at the airport. Had always known.