When I brought him upstairs, Madeline and Lucy looked at me. What the fuck?

“We need him,” I said. “Let’s go.”

In the Fleetwood I gagged him again and tied him to the base of one of the bunks. He was quiet, cooperative. He’d made his decision. He knew his soul would have to deal with the consequences, but for now, God had lost. It was a relief to him. It always is, to find the edge of yourself. To know the exact limit of your strength. It’s a relief because not knowing it is an exhausting full-time job.

I called Konstantinov. The two of us had worked for WOCOP together, and eventually found ourselves on the wrong side of the organisation. Three years ago vampires (the same crackpots who’d taken Lorcan) had kidnapped his wife, Natasha, and Turned her. Mike, faced with losing her, had asked her to Turn him. She didn’t hesitate. In a movie she’d refuse because she loved him. In their reality she Turned him because she loved him. Because she knew how much he loved her. Because it was love between them, as big and dark as Mother Russia. If I’d loved Konstantinov any less than I did I’d have hated him for having that, right now.

“Mike, we need you. Where are you?”

“Polynesia.”

“Fuck. Fuck. How fast can you get here?”

I could feel him working it out. Night flights only.

“Three days.”

Not fast enough.

“You got people we can use here?”

Pause. I knew the answer. Didn’t even know why I’d asked. Madeline and Lucy were changing their clothes in the back of the vehicle. Lorcan was going through Talulla’s bag looking for his own gear. He’d pulled out a bunch of her things. A white sun-dress I loved her in. Red espadrilles. A denim jacket. It occurred to me I was still in the goddamned farmer’s overalls and cut-open sneakers. I was sweating. My hands felt ill. Lorcan tossed out his mom’s copy of Don Juan. Byron. Who I knew was someone I should know about.

“No,” Konstantinov said. “Why? What’s happened?”

Lorcan had pulled something else from the bag.

A voice in my head said: See how it all fits together?

Quinn’s journal.

The note from Olek slipped from its pages and wafted to the RV’s floor.

“I’ll call you back,” I said—and for a weird moment it was as if all the atoms in everything around me buzzed and glowed. “There may be someone else who can help us.”

55

OLEK SENT FOUR vampires to meet us two miles outside Caminata.

Only four? Not enough. And “us” was me and Lucy. Madeline was babysitting Lorcan and Mario. And keeping herself out of the way. (Did you fuck Walker? I guessed it would be one of Talulla’s first questions to her. Hoping the answer would be yes. Thanks. Take him off my hands, would you?) A force of six to take on God knew how many.

“Weapons for you. Twenty clips apiece. Heavy, but you’ll need them.”

This was Alyssia. Australian, human age mid-thirties, bleach blonde with bangs, blue eyes, supple, neatly proportioned body. Exquisitely beautiful hands with perfectly manicured purple nails. She was wearing, as were we, odour-block paste between nose and top lip—some chemical compound only marginally better than the stink of the vamps themselves (and presumably the stink of us to them); we would’ve looked fucking ridiculous to anybody watching, but without it we wouldn’t have been able to get near enough to each other for a conversation. As it was we were twenty feet apart, fighting off nausea.

“There are grenades, tear gas canisters and masks in the bag,” Alyssia said. “We won’t need the masks. They’re for you.”

No disguising the slight sneer in that. As in: We don’t need to wait for a full moon. We can deal with this shit anytime. (It’s one of the bloodsuckers’ snobberies, that we’re lunar-governed, that we’re part-timers.) “We go in hard and fast,” she said. “If it’s human, kill it—right?” This was to her crew. As in: This is not a drinking party. No stopping for a quick cocktail.

The crew, also armed with machine guns and pistols, sort of ummed and grinned and nodded. Clearly no promises. They didn’t want to be doing this, every syllable of their body-language said. They had, make no mistake, better, cooler things to be doing. Olek must have some clout, charlatan or not.

“We’re not going to be hanging around,” one of them said, “any longer than necessary.”

I didn’t like this guy, Miro. He was a tall and thin-legged Pole with a hairdo like the top of a goddamned scallion and what my mom would’ve called a butt-face. Which is to say his cheeks were a little too full and his mouth and nose seemed to sit in a vertical groove.

“We don’t need to go over it,” a third vampire said. “We know what we’re doing. Let’s just for fuck’s sake get on with it.”

She couldn’t have been more than nineteen when she was Turned—although, as Lula would’ve said, for all we know she could’ve got hammered with Shakespeare. A broad-shouldered English girl with long dark hair in a ponytail and big, bored dark eyes. Her name was Eleanor.

The fourth member of the vampire squad, Nils, a Dutchman, inspired confidence, though his stink was worse than the other three put together. He was at least six-four, not gym-muscled but solid-limbed, dense, visibly full of speed and heft. Short blond curls plastered tight over a big, tough-boned head.

“Don’t worry about us,” he said. “You just worry about keeping up.”

It was (obviously) dark. The facility was a quarter of a mile northwest of the rendezvous. Mario had described the layout—though it was plain from his description there were parts he was hazy on. Talulla and Zoë were being held below ground. Sub-level 2, Red Wing, cell numbers 4B and 17A. The numerical odds were stupid, of course, but we had—in the hired vampire help—more speed and strength than could be counted by heads. That, plus our desperation. That, plus my moments of not giving a fuck whether I lived or died.

56

IT WAS A BLUR. Like all combat. And yet like all combat weird details stood out. Dandelions brushing my shins on the approach. The Big Dipper tilted and winking over the installation’s roof. The moment between the first grenade toss and the explosion, when Lucy cleared her throat and checked the safety on her automatic one last time. The foot of one of the guards I shot, twitching, bootlace coming undone. A crucifix knocked crooked on a bloodstained corridor wall. One of the female Militi Christi screaming something in what sounded like Latin. The sound of a bullet going straight through Alyssia’s leg, next to me. Making no difference to her whatsoever. When she went ahead of me her ass looked good in the tight dark-blue jeans. Headfuck: attraction and repulsion at the same time—in the middle of adrenaline chaos.