Me, in other words.

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.

Werewolf.

No preparation. No warning. Just the whole slab of myself fallen flat before her and all my eaten dead shocked into stillness. They’d thought the end of things—release, final dissolution, peace—was near. Instead this betrayal, Marlowe wrenched awake in a world blasted into renewal …

Meanwhile, back on her feet and free of helping hands she stood trembling, gripping her purse, face moist, body discernibly awry. She had the look of a foreign correspondent caught off-guard mid-report by an explosion. Early thirties, eyes the colour of plain chocolate and similarly dark hair in two soft shoulder-length waves. A single mole or beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. White-skinned but with a warmth and suppleness that betrayed—surely?—Levantine or Mediterranean blood. Certainly not “beautiful” or “pretty” but Saloméishly appealing, visibly smudged with the permissive modern wisdoms. This was a girl who’d been loved by her parents and grown vastly beyond them. She thought of them now, with a little searing pain of celebration, as children or simpletons. I had an image of generic homesick immigrants in the U.S. standing in a tenement doorway, waving her off, full of heartbroken pride. She wore a beige mackintosh over a white blouse and brown pinstripe skirt but with no effort at all (since there was no stopping me) I could see her dancing naked but for a veil and a navel ruby. Lip-reading her with the helpful Nords I’d made her American, and something about her relationship with the luggage and the raincoat and the purse reinforced this, the casual entitlement to useful things. While I was soaking all this up her consciousness was hurrying around the tunnel hastily manhandling the dispersing crowd, knowing that somewhere … somewhere very close …

I backed into one of the platform’s exits, managed—just—not to bound up and lay hands on her. Her! The pronoun had rocketed to primacy. Here was recognition as if from the hermaphroditic time before birth’s division. First sight of Arabella in the Metropole’s lobby had been a quickening of hope and fear: hope the recognition was mutual, fear it wasn’t. Here, now, was neither hope nor fear, just nonnegotiable gravity, a fall to the pure animal bitch like the guillotine’s blade to its block.

Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.

She swallowed, plucked her blouse away from herself. Her scent was a hot perversion, a dirty cocktail of perfumed femme and the lewd stink of wolf. Fresh, of course, from transformation only four nights ago. She’d fed, too. Oh, yes. The ghost of her gorging was there in her eyes, though she retained something of the recent college grad ingénue making her way in the shocking world of work, determined to keep going, to assimilate the degradations, to master the atrocities.

A shaven-headed WOCOP agent lurked at the end of the platform. In the absence of vamp odour I had to assume a human familiar somewhere on the scene, though I hadn’t ID’d him yet. Could either Hunt or Undead know about her? Her! Hadn’t I known, somewhere at the back of the drift of days? Hadn’t I asked countless times: What are you waiting for, Jacob?

Her nostrils flared. Becoming a werewolf had nearly destroyed her, but hadn’t. Thus she’d discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it. And there in the espresso-dark eyes was the accommodation, the submission to experience she’d made in the silence of her heart, astonished at herself, once she’d decided to accept what she was, once she’d decided to kill others instead of herself. She suffered fiery Hunger and did vile deeds now, had begun teaching herself enlarging self-forgiveness. You do what you do because it’s that or death. She’d had a girlhood of secrets and now here was the Big Secret to justify them. She was—

Steady, Marlowe. For God’s sake, think! Practicalities. Could they know about her? How could they not know about her? Harley had known, I felt certain of it, and if Harley then why not the rest of the organisation?

No way of telling. Therefore assume they don’t. And from this moment do everything you can to make sure they never, ever find out.

Something else was going on. (Whatever is happening, as the late Susan Sontag noted, something else is always going on. It’s literature’s job to honour it. No wonder no one reads.) The something else going on here was my detached admission that the scales had tipped back— crashed back, with laughable immediacy—in favour of life. Detached admission—or deflated? Resignation to death at least simplified the living you had left. Now what? Complexity? Rigmarole? Bothering again? And something else was going on. (The number of these something elses is infinite, the hell literature faces every day. It’s a wonder anyone writes.) Underneath the first admission was a sullen second: One whiff of her had done what Harley’s torture and death could not. That was my measure, a giant standing stone of disappointment if I wanted to look at it. But there came again the sensational stink of her—dear God —and a new yokel leap of dick-blood. Let the factions of conscience quibble: I had work to do.

And the life without love?

My dead like a trade union in a silent phalanx with Arabella, shop steward, at their head.

The Heathrow Express pulled away. All but a handful of disembarked passengers had gone through the exits and were hurrying to the escalators. A sly peep showed me she was still there, apparently brushing at a speck of smut on her skirt, in fact with ravished consciousness still searching for the source of the scent that had felled her. My scent. Me. She had recovered herself, though her face still wore its sheen of sweat. She’d been blind-sided, yes, but now curiosity was at work, smart female lights in the liquid dark eyes. She reached up and with her little finger raked back a strand of hair that had stuck to her damp forehead. Very slightly raised her chin. She was breathing heavily, a lovely insinuation of her breasts against the blouse. I know you’re here, somewhere .

I waited until she moved through her nearest exit, left as much of a delay as I dared, then followed her.

35

THE CHALLENGE, TRAILING her down the aerated tunnels and moving walkways into the bright lights and echoing announcements of departures, was to keep my distance. Just once I got too near and she stopped, turned and took a few steps in my direction. I had to duck into a doorway to break the connection—and do it with sufficient casualness to keep the WOCOP tail in the dark.

There was a vampire, it turned out, a tall black male with greying hair and a gold hoop earring looking down from the check-in hall’s balcony. A further headache: I must keep close enough to my girl to blanket her scent without turning her head or treading on her heels. She’d taken off the fawn raincoat and slung it over her arm, revealing a trim figure and deportment projective of not natural but acquired confidence. I could not shuck the idea of her as the good daughter of immigrant U.S. parents, mindful of the toil and suffering borne to make her what she was, their bona fide American Girl, fluent in brand names and armed with education, health insurance, political opinions, orthodontic work, earning power—though this and all other inaugural projections were polluted by the vampire’s presence like hands pressing down on my skull from above.