I knew what it was packing. So did the vampire. So, most likely, did Jacqueline. They call the ammunition “hail”: eight-inch hickory darts discharged at the rate of thirty per second. They call the gun, naturally enough, “Mary.”

He didn’t get away clean. At least a dozen shots hit him—I saw one go straight through his throat, another struck just below his eye—but he was fast enough, just fast enough, to cover his vulnerable heart.

With the nearest shield to hand.

Two seconds, no more. I got one glimpse of Jacqueline’s floodlit body magically covered in quills before the vampire launched himself—and her—backwards, shot over the bar’s shattered remains and smashed through the window on the other side of the room, out into the night.

I wasn’t surprised, when Ellis killed the floods, to see a stubbled Grainer in full combat gear sitting with grand masculine casualness half out of the passenger seat, a Hunt Staker resting across his knees, a cigarette slotted semisatirically into the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. He gave me a salute, index finger to forehead, smiled, then turned and nodded to Ellis, who pulled the chopper back, swung it slowly around, lifted it up and away above the trees.

It started raining.

31

I DIDN’T HAVE much fun getting myself out of the villa. There was the removal of two more bits of glass for a start, one in my left calf, one—excruciating when I took my first steps—in my right knee. For a few minutes I just lay on one of the elephantine couches bleeding and feeling sorry for myself. It was pleasant, curled up with manageable pain, listening to the rain fall. These are the first minutes of peace, I thought, with a miffed snuffle, I’ve had in bloody ages.

But that, obviously, wouldn’t do. I hobbled to what was left of the bar, took a fortifying swig of Kauffman’s, retrieved the Luger from the debris and gingerly crunched my way out onto the terrace.

Except for the rain—thanks to which a lovely fresh odour of wet earth cut through the smoke—the Delon estate was silent. The two ground-floor guards lay sprawled nearby, bloodied, dead, one of them still clutching Cloquet’s binoculars. No sound from the roof. Grainer would have shot the lookout up there through the cross-hairs from fifty yards away. The called-for reinforcements weren’t visible, had looked at each other, I felt sure, and with earnest cowardice wordlessly agreed: Fuck reinforcement.

Which meant avoiding them if they were now, tightly wound with safeties off, poking around.

Transportation was the pressing issue. I certainly wasn’t walking, not with my bleeding bits and stove-in rib. (Ribs, plural, I now thought; too much pain for just one.) It was possible Cloquet had driven here, but no less likely he’d arrived by parachute or camel or space-hopper. In any case, who knew how far it was to “the south gate”? No. I needed motorised transport, which, since one of the many things I haven’t got around to in my two hundred years is learning how to fly a helicopter (Jacqueline’s ship-to-shore sat ready on its asphalt pad), meant finding my way to the garages and hot-wiring whatever was in there.

It took me a wearying and peculiarly indeterminate time to locate them, limping and creeping and swearing through my teeth and going around, I now suspect, in circles. I think I might have sat down and passed out for a few minutes in one of the corridors. Elsewhere I vomited dismally against a wall, presided over by a vast sub-Bosch painting of a Black Mass. The rain came down harder, as if to evoke with its hiss time boiling away to nothing. I passed a large dark room where a wall-mounted flat-screen with sound muted showed an overweight rapper performing rap hand gestures, which are supposed to project masculine cool but in fact look like a pointlessly violent version of deaf sign language. The baby-faced skinhead from the Hecate lay on the floor in a pool of blood, untidily dead, with eyes open and one leg bent under him. I went down more stairs than there ought to have been.

Eventually, wounds hot, scalp whispering, ribs vociferously against all this moving around nonsense, I found the utility room and a moment’s comfort in the benign smell of clean laundry. A door from there led to a curved corridor, off which (I was under the mezzanine) were three more doors to the garages.

Goldilocks and the Three Cars. Ferrari 458 Italia in red. No keys. 1956 Jaguar XK140 in white. No keys. 1976 Volkswagen Super Beetle in metallic lilac. Keys. See, Jake? Life said. It’s a comedy. Lighten up. I got in and started the engine.

WOCOP forces (if indeed there’d been anyone besides Grainer and Ellis) had withdrawn. When I stopped on the drive and rolled down the VW’s window I got the forest’s massy green consciousness absorbing the rain in the dark, the land’s deep thirst. Nothing else.

“Cloquet?” I called. “You there?”

Nothing. God only knows why I bothered. One has these occult compulsions. He reminded me of Gollum. He’d take it hard to hear his precious was dead. Or undead, depending on vamp whim. I called again. No reply. So be it. I hit the gas.

32

THE SENSIBLE THING would have been to switch to a less conspicuous car and get to an airport. I couldn’t face it. I was exhausted. My wounds had stopped bleeding by the time I drove out of Jacqueline’s south gate (in human form as in lupine I heal with obscene rapidity) and by tomorrow morning would be gone. The ribs, even with my cellular speed-knitting, would take a day longer. Physically this was nothing, a scrape. Yet all of me that was not flesh cried out for repose. The vampire had left me, as I must have him, with a feeling of cloying contamination. I wanted a bath, a quiet room, a cool bed.

All of which, I record with humble gratitude, I found. An hour later, having cleaned myself up as best I could in Arbonne’s public loo, I checked into the Hotel Eugenie just east of the village, where for two hundred and eighty euros I was furnished for the night with a large en suite room done in rustic chic: heated oak floor, Basque rugs, bespoke iron four-poster, wireless Internet and—God bless Monsieur and Madame Duval—an enormous free-standing bathtub. There I took meditative refuge with an iced flannel over my eyes and a bottle of 1996 Château Léoville Barton (Saint-Julien) for company. I dimmed the lights and lay back in the soft water’s warmth and for a short while at least was pleasantly revisited by that sedative phrase, Come what may … Come what may … Come … what …

One wants not to think. One wants , I repeat, all sorts of things. Presently the bottle was empty and come what may had yielded to what the fuck are you going to do? Indeed. Practicalities like a little slag heap. The vampires would know where I was but wouldn’t try again tonight. Too risky with me back under Hunt surveillance. Jacqueline’s job had been to get me off WOCOP’s radar long enough for a snatch. She’d failed. The Hecate must have drawn heat, as Cloquet said, hence the hasty ship-jump to the villa Delon. My cock rose through the bath foam in salute to the memory of the morning’s sex—then just as smoothly sank back when I thought of Quinn’s book.