Moments like tiny gearings; an oiled click and the tectonics giantly shift and suddenly you’re saying, Trust me, and she’s saying, You know I do. Behind the immediacies—the if s and then s still swarming us—was the carnal eventuality, or rather two carnal eventualities: the coming together in human flesh, and …

I knew it would remain unspeakable, the other consummation, deliciously held in the mouth, in the heart. It had sent an intimation of itself back to us from the future that put a seal on our lips. They’ll wait for the next full moon , I’d said, and as through the wink of a Third Eye we’d seen that nothing, nothing would compare to—

Then it was gone.

“I really don’t want you to go,” she said.

“I really don’t want to go.”

37

BUT GO I DID. I selected a cowboy cab from Heathrow, tipped the driver (a dreadlocked Rastafarian in a leather hat the size of a post box) fifty pounds in advance for the use of his mobile. The car, an unloved Mondeo, stank of ganja and Chinese food. She answered after a single ring.

“How are you feeling?”

“No sickness. They both followed you out.”

“Perfect.”

“You can’t talk freely, can you?”

“No.”

“I can’t stand this. It’s three thousand miles.”

“I’ll be there before you know it.”

“Are we really the only ones?” she said.

“I thought I was the only one, but now there’s you I can’t be sure of anything.” Except that now for the first time in half a century I’m—

“This is like waking up. I’ve been …” She sighed. I pictured her clamping her jaws together, closing her eyes, controlling herself. “Do you know what it is?” she said, eventually. “Does it fit into anything?” “It” being the Curse. “It” being Being a Werewolf. Did it fit into anything? Anything like God or the Devil or UFOs or voodoo or clairvoyance or life after death? There was no disguising her fear that it did, her hope that it did, her deep suspicion that it didn’t.

“No more than anything else,” I said. “We’re here, we do what we do, that’s it. You’ve read the fairy stories, obviously.” Quinn’s journal, I decided, could wait. There was enough for her to take in already without adding the ancient desert, mad dogs and dead bodies. Besides, the driver was listening. Not a vamp lackey, nor WOCOP unless their agents had got a lot better at blending in, but I didn’t want him to have anything useful to say when questioned. As it was I was going to have to give him a crazy price for the mobile, or trash it and risk a scene. Few things more wearying than a stoned cabbie with martial arts delusions. “I wish there was a big secret I could let you in on,” I told her, “but there isn’t.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” she said. She’d absorbed the first shock wave: me, the encounter, the confirmation of the world she’d fallen into nine months ago, the brutal attraction, the violent pitch into a new theatre. She assimilated fast, Manhattan-speed. Here already in the “I had a feeling you were going to say that” was her bigger, calmer, more sophisticated self that was always waiting after whatever temporary naïve furore had died down. Here already was the acknowledgement that whatever else this was it was the beginning of a liaison of fabulous proportions. Here already was the wry aspect, the curious, the playful. Here was the intelligence committed to life, whatever the cost. I was the one still inwardly flapping, grinning, hopping about with excitement. The impulse to thank God, it turned out, was still there. Something in me looked … upwards, humbled.

“Does anyone know about you?” she asked. “I mean apart from the vampires and the agents?”

“Not anymore. You?”

“No. There’s my dad, but it would kill him. I can’t.”

“I understand. Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

“You are going to follow me, aren’t you?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“Tell me my address again.”

“Not advisable. Please believe me, I have it.”

The cab slowed for the Chiswick roundabout, got a green light, whipped through. It started raining. If the boochie was a flier he’d be cold and wet up there.

“I still don’t see why I have to take the flight,” she said. “Why can’t I just check into a hotel here?”

“This country’s too small. You have to trust me. I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“How long?”

“Again, inadvisable.”

“You’re old, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

A pause. She was realising what getting the answers would mean. Without them carrying on could be mere blind reflex. With them it was an informed decision. A werewolf by choice, as it were.

“How long will I live?”

“A long time.”

“A hundred years?”

“Try four.”

Silence. I could feel her effort at immense logical extension from the present (via science fiction, Microsoft, the space program) into the future. Impossible: One knows logical extension won’t cover it. One knows the far future will involve unimaginable, perhaps comedic leaps.

“But you’ll look the same,” I said. “Does that help?”

She didn’t answer. Suddenly the full weight of her aloneness —her aloneness, not mine—hit me. There’s my dad, but it would kill him . Nine months she’d been living through this. They found three- and four-year-old kids who’d survived alone in their homes for days, eating sugar, ketchup, butter. You didn’t want to think about what that had been like for them. They were objectionable, somehow. Unless of course you’d been through it yourself. Unless of course you were one of them.

“Shit,” she said. “I need to check in. If I’m really going.”

“You’re really going. Remember: public places at night, okay?”

“And call up an ex to sleep with during the day.”

“I’m serious.”

“Okay, but the longer it takes you to get there the longer I’m going to have to put out for someone else.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “Sleep in the public library. Drink coffee. Take uppers.”