By Blood We Live

by Glen Duncan

  “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.

  53

  Walker

  THE 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.)

  The family looked up at us. Time stopped. There they were, perfected by fear. At your death your life gathers, adds itself up, reaches its last shape. You. Humans. It tips us, that moment. There’s the perfect freeze, when you know, and we see you, complete. It’s like a shared joke. Like the pause when lovers look at each other because they realise—oh God, oh God—that they’re both about to come, together. Then the moment’s done its work—and we fall on you, and the life goes, in greedy bites and bloody swallows, into us.

  It was hot and fast. It was a blur. The first minute or so always is, for me, a car-crash of joy and disbelief, total blindness and 20/20 smashed together like a pair of cymbals.

  But that phase passes. You come back to yourself. To the world, and the solid, filthy reality of what’s happening. The solid, filthy reality that’s better than anything you’ve ever felt before.

  Madeline with her snout in the girl’s flank and her ass in the air, legs spread. The smell of her cunt was sly and sweet and full of tortured willingness. And me with a hard-on that could’ve broken a piano in half. I used to think I liked sex. I used to think I’d had sex as good as you could have it. Then I Turned. You Turn, and it’s as if until then you’ve been fucking in two dimensions instead of three.

  CAN’T Madeline—just about—gave me.

  I KNOW.

  Didn’t stop her lifting her head and rolling her shoulder. We were close. We were so
close.

  THE KID.

  I KNOW.

  TALULLA.

  I couldn’t answer. Didn’t know what I would’ve answered. Instead I reached into the son’s chest cavity and tore his heart out and bit it in half. Sorry, kid, but that’s what mine feels like.

  Afterwards we did what we never do. We stayed with the victims’ remains. No choice. The situation had everything we needed. It was remote, there were clothes, there was money, there was transportation. I’d never cared much for Fergus, but there was a feeling like a ragged burn in me when I thought of Trish, dead. She’d had so much life in her. I’d liked her in the mornings, sitting big-eyed and hungover, knees hunched up, fingers wrapped around a mug of black coffee, not watching TV or reading a magazine—just blinking, just existing, happily. I could feel the loss in Madeline, too. Big loss. She’d loved Cloquet. And Trish. Even Fergus. They’d made money together, amazed when it turned out they could trust each other. We had no clue what the fuck had happened to Lucy. Reaching out gave us nothing. If she was alive she was out of range. Both of us were thinking the same thing, that the old days were over, that the world was waking up to us, that from now on nothing would ever be the same.

  Lorcan curled up on the couch. I could feel the thought pounding in his skull. THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE DEAD. Mixed in with the swirling bits of the lives he’d just taken in. I’d wondered about this: How did he and Zoë contain experience that couldn’t be anything other than ahead of their years? They do what kids do, Talulla had said. Put it aside until they’re ready. Like clothes they’ll grow into, eventually.

  THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE DEAD.

  I grabbed his ankle and gave it a little shake. It made no difference. He’s a tough kid to comfort. He doesn’t believe in it. It’s like the world declared itself his enemy at his birth. (Which, given he started life as a kidnap victim, I guess it did.) There’s no self-pity in him. Just a kind of remote determination. Zoë expects love. Lorcan expects zip. Hard to imagine him growing up and having lovers. Or at least hard to imagine him loving someone.

  Madeline and I took turns keeping watch outside, though the truth was neither of us was expecting pursuit. The truth was both of us thought the Militi Christi had got—in Talulla and Zoë—exactly what they were after.

  The dogs kept us company, wagging their tails.

  When the moon set we showered and kitted ourselves out as best we could with our victims’ clothes. Nothing fit Lorcan. We improvised. A pair of the girl’s cut-offs and a t-shirt, with a string belt. The kid had to go barefoot, but it didn’t matter: If we found ourselves on foot, we’d have to carry him anyway. We found the keys to the Land Rover.

  Without any hope, I called Lucy’s cell phone from the house landline.

  She answered after two rings.

  She was in a house thirty miles away.

  And she had a hostage.

  54

  INCREDIBLY, THEY’D MISSED an exit. From the house’s cellar. Double wooden doors completely overgrown with ivy. Lucy had burst up through them and caught two Angels off-guard. She’d ripped the throat out of one of them then turned to see the other—the dark-haired acne-survivor in his mid-thirties—staring in disbelief at his jammed AK-47.

  “He ran,” Lucy told us. “But he didn’t get very far.”

  He got as far as the tree line, where Lucy had knocked him unconscious.

  “No, you see,” she said, Maddy and I silently marvelling, “I thought I might need a driver.” She’d told us this as if she’d been weighing up how to get home from a flower show.

  She dragged him into deeper cover and waited it out. Watched them take down Talulla and Zoë and body-bag the remains of Fergus and Trish. When the unit moved out there were still seven hours till moonset. Cool as you like, she hauled her captive back to the house, trussed and gagged him, then slung him over her shoulders and set off in search of the Fleetwood.

  “Which was, surprisingly, just where we left it,” she said. “I did wonder if they’d booby-trapped it or something, you know, but … Well, there wasn’t much of a choice. I brought him round and put him behind the wheel. Drove the whole way here with my hand around his throat.”

  Madeline and I listened to all this with increasing incredulity. Didn’t it occur to her that the smart thing would’ve been to drive somewhere remote and wait till she was human again? Lucy looked at us as if we were idiots.

  “I hadn’t eaten,” she said. “I was starving.”

  So she’d hustled the Angel into the house, re-gagged and tied him, put a cloth shopping bag over his head, then calmly headed upstairs and slaughtered the retirees.

  “They were both asleep,” she said.

  She couldn’t interrogate her hostage until the moon had set and she’d regained the power of speech. “Not without some sort of ridiculous version of charades, anyway,” she said. At which point, more or less, she’d got the call from me. “I’m glad,” she said. “I wasn’t looking forward to it. This is where you come in, I’m afraid.”

  Because you’re used to this kind of thing. Former WOCOP. Former professional.

  Jilted lover.

  “Take Lorcan upstairs,” I said.

  It didn’t take long. I didn’t have to hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt him. I knew if I hurt him it would be something for my broken heart to do, somewhere for its violence to go. I knew if I hurt him I’d be disgusted with myself.

  But I didn’t have to. I just had to tell him what I’d do to him if he didn’t tell me what I needed to know. I told him I’d Turn him.

  “You know what that means?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  We were looking directly at each other. I didn’t like him. It was the religion. It was the blazing faith in magic, in a fairy story. What are we? she’d said. We’re a fairy story. The violence was right there in my limbs, offered itself. I pushed it down. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. It was that I didn’t want to kill him. It was that I was disgusted with myself for my own useless sadness—and because I knew I’d have to kill him. It should’ve been clean and easy. You’re a monster. You kill and eat a human being every month. What’s one religious nut? And a clear enemy at that. But that’s not how it works. Full moon and hunger, killing’s natural. It’s what we are, what we do. It’s still chosen, but it’s a natural choice. It doesn’t carry over. Lose the hunger, lose the moon, lose the fucking wulf, it’s a different kind of choice.

  And I didn’t want to do it. A light, carefree bit of myself said: You don’t have to do anything. Just walk away. Walker. That’s what you really do. That’s who you really are. What’s in a name? Everything.

  For a few moments I felt free. I could turn, climb the stairs, say my goodbyes, go. It was what I’d always done. Seeing this, I almost laughed out loud.

  But it passed, and the room filled up again with sadness and disgust, and I felt solid and exhausted. The overalls smelled of the farmer’s sweat. All my past was in the room with me, with us. Sometimes your life comes to you like that and asks why it doesn’t make any sense. Why you’ve made nothing of it but a mess.

  Meanwhile the boring fucking logic of the situation wouldn’t take its weight off me. There would be no way of knowing if the information he gave up—the location where they were holding Lula and Zoë—was accurate until we got there. We’d have to keep him alive at least till then.

  “Well?” I said.

  “When I tell you, you’ll kill me anyway.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “Not until I know you’ve told me the truth. And there’s no way of knowing that until we get there.”

  “Then you’ll kill me.”

  It was intimate between us. The problem with these situations is that the frankness creates intimacy. Whether you want it or not. He actually smiled at me, feeling it. I wondered what had happened to make a believer of him. He seemed intelligent. I wondered what it must be like to be an intelligent believer, to see the whole world and everything that h
appened in it as a series of clues to something grand and invisible, some big story God cooked up in the Beginning. The way she had when she was a kid. The way she’d started seeing it again. Since the vampire came to call. When he joins the blood of the werewolf. Funny how making a joke of that hadn’t worked.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  He thought about it, decided giving it wasn’t going to make things any worse. “Mario Donatello.”

  “I’ll make you a deal, Mario,” I said. “If you tell us where they are, and you’re not lying, I’ll let you go.”

  He laughed. “Are you serious?” he said. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  My arms and shoulders were tired. All the goddamned ifs and thens of these encounters. Again I asked myself why I was bothering. She’s leaving you anyway.

  But there was Zoë.

  It’s always the innocents that fuck everything up.

  I untied his wrists.

  “Give me your hand,” I said.

  He looked at me from under his brows. Wet black eyes. The acne scarring made me imagine him as a teenager, looking in the mirror, miserable. I suppose it sounds nuts to say I felt sorry for that version of him.

  “Just give me your hand,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  He was sweating. The fear had drawn back a touch to give his excitement and curiosity room. He knew I wasn’t trying to trick him. He knew this was possible because of the intimacy, because I had his life for the taking if I wanted it. There’s a transparency between you at these moments. Like heavyweights in the ring. Like lovers.

  He put his right hand out. I took it in mine, in a handshake grip, held it. Our eyes were locked.

  “I’m doing this because I know you know how it is,” I said. “I know you’ll know if I’m lying.”