Taken by the boochies in the hope that my need to acquire it would keep me alive.

Another sigh. This is what happens, I told myself. Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.

I got out of the bath, dried myself with irritated meticulousness, donned one of the Eugenie’s white towelling robes and in an act of forced jolly recklessness ordered up another bottle. Vampires? Hunters? Let the fuckers come! And while we’re at it, fuck Quinn’s book. If getting to it (to the truth , my inner romantic protested, the truth , Jacob, after all these years …) if getting to it meant submitting to the no-nonsense pricks and pokes of vampire science then the book might as well not exist. Of course I could always try force. One werewolf against the Fifty Houses of the undead …

Glass One of Bottle Two went down in a couple of analeptic swigs. I flicked on the TV. A French home-makeover show. A couple weeping uglily at the miracle of their cheaply redecorated kitchen. I changed channels. American Idol . Transformation again, this time from Nobody into Superstar. Perhaps Jacqueline was right: Humanity’s getting its metamorphic kicks elsewhere these days. When you can watch the alchemy that turns morons into millionaires and gimps into global icons, where’s the thrill in men who turn into wolves?

I turned the TV off. Sat on the edge of the bed. Felt the gathered tension go, accompanied, incredibly, by the third sigh of the day. (Like bloody buses or bloody Copean men, these sighs: none for ages then three at once.) Nothing, I averred, breathing with quivering drunk dignity through my nostrils, had changed. Be Quinn’s book true or be it false its existence wasn’t going to alter my course. If you can live two hundred years without the solution to the riddle of your nature you can die without it too. Humans go to their graves with none of the big questions answered. Why should werewolves fare better?

A fresh pack of Camels had arrived as ordered with the wine. I lit one up. The greatest gift of lycanthropy is knowing smoking won’t kill you. I poured the last glass of the night. Peace returned, somewhat. Nothing, I repeated, had changed. I would sit out the twenty-nine days to the next full moon, whereupon Grainer—

Ah, yes. With cruel belatedness the image of Harley’s murderer bloomed. Naturally his appearance on the chopper was a calculated provocation, the ease of body, the joyless Navajo smile, the mock salute. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. Come off it, Jake, I could hear him saying. You telling me you’re really going to let me get away with that? It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

Enough. I finished the cigarette. Turned out the light. Lay down on the bed. How long since I’d slept? Forty-eight hours? Seventy-two?

Wolf-silt churned in my shoulders. When I’d ripped through the junkie’s throat his body had jerked as if in violent ejaculation. Now his spirit shuffled through the packed underworld of my bloodstream, friendless in the murmuring crowd. It’s official. You’re the last. I’m sorry. I closed my eyes.

33

THREE WEEKS HAVE PASSED

Everything’s changed.

Jesus fucking Christ.

34

THE MORNING FOLLOWING my night at the Hotel Eugenie I took a train to Paris and spent the journey bringing these pages up to date. I clocked two WOCOP agents after transferring at Bordeaux, replaced by two more in the capital. A matter of indifference to me—or perhaps not quite indifference, since their presence was keeping the undead in check. Naturally the boochies were watching me, via human familiars during the day, in person(s) by night. Ordering a Long Island Iced Tea in a Montmartre night club at three in the morning a wave of vamp-nausea hit me hard enough to make me reel. I turned. Blond blue-eyed Mia at the opposite end of the neon-lined bar raised her glass (a prop, obviously) with a smile. Calm intelligent white hands and oxblood lipstick. A strikingly beautiful woman who smelled like a vat of pigshit and rotten meat. You appreciate the cognitive dissonance. Anyway, she made no move. I stayed in Paris a couple of days, too dull-hearted even to take a farewell turn around the Louvre. I hired a red-haired, big-breasted athletic escort and surprised myself with the vehemence of my climax. Postcoitally I tried, from a supposed correspondence between volcanic ejaculation and the capacity to affirm life, to work up a bit of feeling for still being here. Failed. Libido, I was forced to conclude, was a lone warrior flinging itself around the battlefield everyone else had deserted.

At last, five days since waking in the Hecate’ s hold, I took a British Airways evening flight from Charles de Gaulle to London Heathrow.•

Which is where everything —everything —changed.•

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—

I know what he was going to say now.

(“And you don’t believe in fate?” she said to me.)

(“I’ll believe in anything you tell me,” I said.)

Big coup for the if and then department. If I hadn’t decided to take the Heathrow Express instead of a cab … If I hadn’t stopped to buy smokes in Arrivals … If I hadn’t taken the train to Paris … If I hadn’t spent the night in Arbonne … If, if, if. Embrace determinism and you’re chained all the way back to the beginning. Of the universe. Of everything.

(“Not according to Stephen Hawking,” she said. “I watched this programme on PBS. He sees space-time as a four-dimensional, closed manifold, like the surface of a sphere, with no beginning and no end. It’s a nifty idea, but I still can’t stop seeing it the old-fashioned way, as if space-time’s a blob floating around in, you know, some other space, with some other time going on.”)

(“Come here,” I said. “Come here. ”)

She was getting off the train, I was waiting to get on. Three carriage doors up from me she stepped high-heeled down onto the platform and in a moment found herself being helped up from the floor by the large-limbed Nordic couple in front of whom she’d inexplicably crashed to her knees.

Inexplicable to her. Not to me. I lip-read her going through the motions—Oh, my gosh … Oh … Thank you, thanks, yes I’m fine, I don’t know what happened, I’m such a moron, thank you so much—as the enormous Swedes or Norwegians or Finns covered in blond fuzz with gigantic sunburned gentleness helped her to her feet and handed her her wheelie case and purse—she went through these motions, yes, but she was looking elsewhere, everywhere, with a contained wildness bordering panic for the source of the power that had momentarily upended reality like that.