I sat back on my heels. Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s —presumably— a vampire plot to get you. Werewolf failure to infect is the result of a virus which when passed via a bite to a vampire confers on him a resistance to sunlight . The impulse to laugh started then immediately died. I closed my eyes. The little combat flurry had left me with a postadrenaline heaviness, worsened now by the predictability of the picture revealed by joining the dots. “Aging Jacqueline’s selling me to the boochies,” I said. “For immortality.”

“The immortal cunt. Le con immortel. ”

“So you kill me and there’s nothing for her to sell. Dear God help us. Then what? You send her flowers and a vat of Botox and she takes you back?”

He wrinkled his nose, as if conceding a minor snag. Then smiled. He had a sort of likeable stubborn idiocy.

“Quinn’s book,” I said. “Does she have it?”

“Ah, the Men Who Became Wolves. The place where it all began! Not a very wholesome story from what I hear. Wild dogs and dead bodies. Fucking disgusting.”

My scalp went hot. I pressed the javelin’s tip against the tender meat of his throat.

“Okay, okay, fuck. Ow—”

“Does she have the book or not?”

“She has it. The stone too.”

“The stone? The original stone?”

“You can’t get to it. It’s in a vault underground. You have no clue. It’s like Fort Knox under there.”

“How did she get it?”

“How does she get anything? You know what you’re dealing with. She has the uncanniness. You know Crowley? Do what thou wilt? She has the … Things align for her. She bought a lot of the looted shit that came out of Iraq in the war. She’s got contacts in the military, Blackwater, the CIA, the U.S. State Department. I told you: Her cunt is a giant intelligence. What are you going to do now?”

I stubbed out the Marlboro. Just on the edge of audibility the sound of an approaching car. “Well,” I said, “at the moment walking out of here still seems a luminously good idea.” Except you don’t get the book, the stone, the beginning . Nausea redux, the earlier untenable simultaneity of knowing it was too late and knowing it wasn’t too late. A five-thousand-year-old story. A story. A fucking story . Wild dogs and dead bodies. I told myself I was imagining it, the bone-deep, the cellular recognition, the old blood taste of shame. Not, Jake, mythic resonance or species memory or ringing a bell or striking a chord. Just, dear Jake, the desperate desire not to die a mystery to yourself. Wild dogs and dead bodies. A disgusting story’s better than no story at all.

“How did you get in here?”

“I shot the two guards on the south gate.”

“With what, for God’s sake?”

“My gun. It’s probably over there. I dropped it.” He indicated the spot of his failed ambush. A quick search turned the weapon up, a silenced CZ 75 B cal. 9mm Luger, serial number erased. I checked the ammo: silver bullets.

“Why didn’t you use this? I’d be dead by now.”

“I know. But I had the javelin custom-made. You see this running down the shaft? That’s my name and hers in Angelic script.”

The car was nearer. The car—there was no denying it—was Coming Here. “That’s them,” Cloquet said, trying to get to his feet, managing only to struggle onto all fours, with a look of being about to vomit. I pocketed the handgun and dragged us farther in under the trees. The vehicle—a black people-carrier with mirrored windows—went past slowly over the pale gravel, around which the darkness was now complete. “Why didn’t they pick me up from the ship?” I said. “I was already in a cage.”

Cloquet shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought that was the plan. Keep you on board until sunset. She must have worried the Coast Guard bribe wouldn’t hold. Maybe WOCOP had a vessel close. I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted to fuck you. You fall in love with her because she shows you straight away she’ll never feel anything for you.”

We had to work our way around through the woods to get a downwind view, a struggle for Cloquet, who hobbled, one hand covering his stabbed backside, the other his discordantly singing balls. When we stopped under tree cover not far from the front of the house he dropped to his knees and threw up, quietly. Quietly repeated merde, merde, merde until I hissed at him to shut up.

Five vampires got out of the car. Three males, two females. Beyond that it was too dark for details. Jacqueline Delon, flanked by two armed goons (ammo’d with what? wooden bullets?), appeared at the top of the steps in a pale dress to meet them.

“What happened?” one of the vampires said. The characteristic boredom (a version of seen-it-all teen tedium, forgivable, since so many of them have seen it all) was missing from his voice.

“Come up,” Jacqueline said. “Just come up. We’ll talk.”

Four of them went up the stairs. The fifth, one of the females, stopped halfway and turned. Looked directly at us. I felt Cloquet holding his breath. Realised I was holding mine. Since I couldn’t feel her she shouldn’t, by rights, be able to feel me. I’d left enough distance between us. Even downwind her scent was very slight; mine would be imperceptible. But there she stood, alert. The odour of Cloquet’s vomit, perhaps?

Oh, for fuck’s sake: the blood from his wound.

It’s the obvious things you don’t think of.

She hesitated, lifted her head, took her hands out of her pockets, took a step forward and leaned into the darkness.

“Mia, get up here.”

For a moment her extended sense groped at the edge of our aura. Then it passed, missed us, shrank back to its centre. She turned and went quickly up the steps.

28

“NOW WHAT?” CLOQUET SAID.

Good question. What I really wanted was to lie down there on the soft dead needles under the pines and let myself drift into a deep sleep, come what may. There was profound comfort in it, that phrase, come what may . “I’ll tell you something,” I said. “You’ll find this hard to believe, but all I’m trying to do is stay alive until the next full moon so that a man whose father I killed and ate forty years ago can cut my werewolf head off or put a silver bullet in my werewolf heart.”

Cloquet was on his knees and elbows next to me, apparently a position that maximally relieved his butt, nuts and guts. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood.”