But my standards aren’t human. How could they be? The thought of resisting Grainer tomorrow night weakened my hands on the Vectra’s wheel. Revenge entails a belief in justice, which I don’t have. (You can’t count my monster philanthropy, my werewolf good deeds. That’s vestige, habit, a moribund personal accounting system. It doesn’t derive from a principle, it just provides the moral equivalent of hand relief.) I knew what I ought to feel. I knew Grainer (and Ellis, since he would have joined in) ought to be made to pay. But ought and I parted company when I murdered my with-child wife and ate her and carried on living.

I turned off the main road at Trefor and the WOCOP vehicle followed, stopped a token fifty feet behind me when I pulled over at the seaward edge of the village. I was sweating. The Curse played preview blasts of free jazz in my blood, my goosefleshed skin. The hand I lifted to wipe my face was the impatient ghost of the other hand, the hybrid thing, heavy, elegant, claw-tipped. Transformation was less than twenty-four hours away. My body heat filled the car. I got out.

Better. Cold wind and rain. Hands, throat, face, scalp, all cooled. The beach was near. A pale footpath led down to it. I took it, overcoat flapping. A WOCOP van door opened, closed. This would very soon become intolerable, this low-tech, this panto surveillance, ordered surely by Grainer, an extra satirical irritant, but I couldn’t think about it now. There was only the one thing to think about, the one thing to decide.

It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

Knolly turf gave way to shallow sand dunes. A sudden rough fresh odour of the sea. The old Somme survivor stirred: Margate’s salt air had come in through the open window and mingled with the lovely between-the-legs taste of his girl. (Their memories clog me like arterial fur. I’m full , I said to Harley. I have achieved fucking plenum. )

A marker buoy clanged, muted by wind and rain. The lights of a tanker twinkled, conjured a vision of a snug galley, cable-knit sweaters, tin mugs, roll-up-fag smoke. I could hear a helicopter somewhere inland, a sound like an endlessly discharging machine gun.

What’s my moti vation ? lousy actors want to know. Grainer had given me a legitimate one. I killed your friend, now you want to kill me .

It almost worked. The fuse leading to the appropriate emotional bomb lit, crackled, glowed, dazzled for a few heartbeats, then faltered, sputtered, died. I couldn’t make it mean enough. I couldn’t make it mean anything. Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate your efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn’t go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who’d taken their lives and devoured them, into you. That’s the gift I should have given Harley, or rather made him give me. At least that way we would have been together at the end.

I turned inland, light of heart and heavy as the Dead Sea, thinking, So thank you, dear Grainer, but no—when two things happened.

The first was that I put my hands in my coat pockets and felt in one of them the woollen hat Harley had insisted I take that night in the snow. Your fucking head will freeze, moron, he’d said. Because he’d loved me and I hadn’t loved him we’d cast the relationship as irascible doting father and moody son. It had begun self-consciously, facetiously, but like so much that begins that way acquired some of the emotional substance it lampooned. And this memory, in the perverse way of these things, did pierce me, set an ache in the empty place where the energy to go after Grainer should be.

The second was that the agent, who’d followed me and was now down on one knee not twenty feet away, fired his weapon directly at me.

I felt a single icy stab in my thigh, an eternal three seconds of something like mild outrage—then all the lights went out.

21

WHATEVER THEY USED they didn’t get the dosage right the first time. I floated up to consciousness just long enough to deduce—from the tremor, the noise, the shape of the ceiling—that I was in the helicopter. Restraints pinned my arms, legs, chest, head. A man’s voice (definitely not a vampire’s) said in French, Fuck me, he’s awake—then I felt the scratch of a needle, and darkness closed over me again.•

Transformation woke me to the smell of rust and fuel and seaweed. I was lying on my spasming back on a metal table and the restraints were gone. So were my clothes. Shoulders, shins, head, hands and haunches shunted blood and hurried bone to meet the Curse’s metamorphic demand. My circus of consumed lives stirred. The world felt strangely undulant. I thought, Well, I hope you’re ready for this, kidnapping fuckers, whoever you are. Then, throbbing with Hunger for living meat, I howled and rolled over onto my side.

Bright halogen lighting showed I was in a cage.

In what looked like the hold of a ship.

Being filmed.

Beyond the bars three men and a woman stood between a pair of tripod-mounted motion-sensitive cameras. One of the men was the agent who’d tranquilized me, early thirties, with a sullen, guinea-piggish face, wearing a nose stud and a black woollen cap. The other two were large skinheads in unmatching fatigues and Timberlands. One, arms covered in golden fuzz, was worryingly glazed. The other was baby-faced, with surprised eyes and a dimpled chin. Both were equipped with automatic rifles and side arms.

The woman, in tight white trousers and a clinging bloodred top, was Jacqueline Delon.

She hadn’t changed much in ten years. Slender, petite-breasted with a tiny abdomen and a lean face. Short red hair in the boyish style only French women seem able to carry off. The last time I’d seen her, outside the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, big sunglasses had hidden her eyes, and my inference—of constipation and usefully disturbed sexuality—had been drawn (wishfully, lazily) from the thin-lipped mouth and the patent narcissism of her deportment. Here, however, were the eyes, narrow and dirty green, full of insomniac intelligence, a bright front of compulsive playfulness over God only knew what, fear of death, self-avoidance, money-guilt, loneliness, hunger for love—possibly just immense boredom.

“Can he talk?” the baby-faced skinhead asked, en français .

“No,” Jacqueline said. “But he understands. So don’t say anything you might regret.”

Without the faintest twitch of warning I flung myself snarling at the bars.

To her credit, Jacqueline barely flinched. The men—to a man—leaped backwards, the two meat-goons with guns raised, the Tranquilizer with a priceless falsetto shriek.