And so The Restoration had begun. Rory was given responsibilities which, being incompetent, he failed to discharge, drawing sighs from Alan, scoffs from Carmel and winces (off-stage) from Sue. It was all grist to the father-daughter mill. Not, of course, that anything improper had ever happened between father and daughter (Alan, quivering with disgust, would do violence to you for thinking it), which was a pity; its simmering latency was nauseating.

When we entered the building, Carmel was sitting on her bed painting her toenails and listening to Rihanna. Alan and Sue were in the kitchen, Sue preparing the evening’s casserole, Alan going over the paperwork detailing Rory’s latest mismanagements, shaking his head with sad delight and mentally rehearsing his tone of near-exhausted patience: Rory … Rory. These are elemental mistakes, mate. Elemental … Rory meanwhile was simply standing in what would, when it was Restored, be the laundry room, wondering for the nth time how his life had so quickly turned so much to shit and how long it would be before he got his next weary drubbing from Alan and whether he didn’t yet have the courage to tell them all to go and fuck themselves and walk out. Or better still slip away without a word in the middle of the night—

Sue, midway between countertop and range, saw us first.

Us. Me and Walker. (Zoë and Lorcan under strict telepathic instruction to stay put in the hall until called to feed; Lorcan not ready to push his luck with me on this one.) So Sue saw us. Me and Walker, two werewolves, standing there looking at her.

“I mean for Christ’s sake, Rory,” Alan said, momentarily forgetting to keep the rehearsals in his head, “this is fifteen-hundred quid here, mate. It’s not like we can afford—fuck!”

Sue had, after what seemed an extraordinarily long time, dropped the casserole dish, which had exploded on the stone floor. She didn’t scream. It’s amazing how often people don’t scream. Instead her mouth lost its shape and let out a very quiet, wobbling “ohhhh” which, left unchecked, I knew would just keep repeating, indefinitely.

“What the—” Alan started but then saw Sue was looking at something behind him—and turned.

Upstairs, Carmel did scream. Fergus and Trish (who sometimes got it on together in lupine form but never in human) had introduced themselves. A clatter and crash from the laundry room (I pictured Rory backing into a bucket and mop) said Madeline and Lucy had arrived, too.

24

IT’S A THING of beauty to see your victim in perfected extremis like that, maximally himself, all his life’s forgotten details recalled in a rush, as if for the first time since birth every cell’s at full, living attention. The individual’s odour at this moment—your odour facing death—is cruelly sweet, an ecstatic tension before the snap that throws us into attack.

I leaped over the table, over agog Alan’s head, and at the end of my parabola opened Sue’s belly with a contemptuously casual downward swipe. She sank to her knees—oven-mitted arms still weirdly holding the ghost of the dish—then fell against my legs as if in confused supplication. I grabbed her by the hair, tugged her head back, dropped and sank my teeth into her throat, sensing, as I did, Lorcan peeking round the kitchen door—NOT YET NOT SAFE YET STAY THERE—and Zoë’s little tremor of guilt and excitement because she wasn’t far behind him, while Walker punched through open-mouthed Alan’s chest and laid giant fingers around his hot and haywire heart and upstairs Fergus entered Trish from behind as she pinned Carmel (legs and arms flailing, face fat with backed-up blood) to the bed by her throat and Lucy lifted Rory off his feet by his hair and the house filled with the concussive smell of traumatised flesh and blood and the condensed quiet music of death.

It’s only the best for us if it’s the worst for them.

The central truth of the Curse, as succinctly put by one Jacob Marlowe, deceased. No one wants it to be true. But the truth doesn’t care what anyone wants. The truth is innocent. You can’t blame the truth.

Walker had a huge erection. (Yes, I’m afraid this is precisely what the Curse means by “the best for us.” Long ago in a fetid and poorly lit cellar of the universe a wretched marriage ceremony took place between our arousal and your suffering. God gave you away. No pre-nup: divorce was never an option.) I was in a state myself, but not an uncomplicated one. Wulf’s desire was there, deep and dumb and reliable, but so, undeniably, was the dismal impulse to shit on love’s altar, to force through the bill of betrayal. Once when I was small my mother had found me in the yard in tears because I’d trod on a snail and half mashed it. She’d said: It’s very simple, Lulu. If you know something’s dying in pain, kill it. Then she’d stomped on it and whisked away to answer the phone.

The last of Sue’s life was going. I’d had her liver and kidneys and several big chunks from her midriff and haunch. In with the meat had gone the frail fragments of a life lived on tiptoe, a few big moments like standing stones—the day at St. Catherine’s when she’d got her first period in the middle of hockey and run from the pitch in tears; breaking her leg when Jane Radcliffe’s swing collapsed; the surreal afternoon when, knowing it was insane, she’d gone down by the river with the boy from the fair and he’d got angry when she wouldn’t and she’d thought she was going to get raped; her first time—with Alan, the appalled intimation that it might be better, much better, with someone else, but letting the idea go, like a bird released from her hands that would never come home; giving birth to Carmel, seeing Alan’s solar glow when he held her; her demented father in the nursing home not recognising her, accusing her of stealing his cardigan. The World was the ITN News and the Daily Telegraph and Carmel’s i-gadgets and wars always with some foreigners and toothless old women in burkas always screaming over someone’s body and even though she knew it was terrible imagine if your son had been killed she wished they wouldn’t scream and wail like that with no teeth and the men were no better screaming and carrying on and wrapping their arms around the coffin Alan said our immigration’s the laughing stock of the world and not enough whites having kids now because of women having careers and the Muslims breed like rats and pretty soon they’ll outnumber us ten to one and it did seem like they were everywhere now there was a weather girl in a burka the other day …

NO. I CAN’T.

Walker, bloody up to the elbows, had put his hands on my hips.