“I don’t even know your name.”

Aliases like a whirlwind of dead leaves. Me in the middle, myself.

“It’s Jake,” I said.

“You’re lucky. Jake’s a good name.”

“Whereas?”

A pause. Then, “Might as well get this over with, I suppose. My name’s Talulla.”•

You mustn’t fall in love with a woman because you’ll end up killing her.

Not if she’s a werewolf .

I didn’t invent the necessities. But I am bound by them.•

There was no appeal in taking the vampire on. Not with my new investment in not dying. Simpler to wait for sunrise and the shift change with his human proxy. Therefore I got the cabbie to drop me at Caliban’s, a night club (one of my subsidiaries’ subsidiaries’ subsidiaries owns it, as it happens) on New Oxford Street, where I stayed, buoyed by hastily scored amphetamines, until five a.m. Breakfast of eggs Benedict (the first human food since my depressing banquet-for-one in the Hecate ’s hold) at Mikhail’s in Holborn took me through to six, whereupon a mirror-windowed Audi rolled up for the vamp and relieved him with a pair of familiars. The WOCOP tail had been replaced, too. Three agents, as far as I could tell. This was getting ridiculous. I left the café, bought a fresh pack of Camels at a newsstand and wandered down to Trafalgar Square. London was up and running. The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.

I bought a new mobile and called Christian at the Zetter. I wanted a haircut, a massage, a hot shower and a little time and space to gather myself for the laborious business of escapology.

38

TALULLA, LIGHT OF my life, fire of my loins … Ta-loo-la: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate … Ta. Lu. La.

“Talulla’s bad enough,” she said. “Put it with ‘Demetriou’ and you’re in the realm of the ridiculous.”

It was afternoon and we were lying in bed in the Edwardian Park Suite at the New York Plaza, having just had sex for the fifth time in approximately six hours. I never had a sister but I imagine if I had fucking her would have felt something like fucking Talulla, sometime in our very early twenties, coming to it with relished capitulation after years of dirty adolescent telepathy.

“Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou,” she said. “Even in New York you rattle that off and they think you’re speaking Vulcan or something.”

It had taken less than twenty-four hours to ditch the tails, albeit after a wearing epic of old-fashioned cat-and-mouse. With Christian’s help I got out of the Zetter under a pile of soiled sheets in a laundry hamper, and away in the back of the cleaning company van. That did for the vamp flunkies. Not so the agent, whom I clocked still with me barely five minutes after leaving the depot. I wasn’t much surprised. Christian is solid, but there can no longer be any doubt the Zetter’s WOCOP moled. Three hours of Underground-and-black-cab switches (and four agents) later, I was back at Heathrow, if not certain of having slipped them then driven past caring by the force of the need to see her again. Flying business as Bill Morris (an airport-bought first class ticket would’ve waved a flag to anyone watching) I’d had the width of the Atlantic to coddle and thrum my lust. By the time she arrived in the hotel lobby in sunglasses and a pale pink cashmere dress I’d reached maximum agitation. Given which you’d expect a debut fuck of eye-popping gymnastics. In fact it was a thing of slow, hyperconscious deliberateness. You’d similarly expect a dive straight into werewolf biography, an immediate compulsion to compare howler notes. Not so. The deep reflex was postponement. To speak of what we were would be in the long run (but not long enough) to speak of death. We had this one opportunity to come together as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Thereafter the rose would be sick.

Wulf was with us. Wulf knew what was going on. Wulf wanted in, materially. Wulf prowled the blood, rushed up repeatedly only to effervesce into nothing at the surface of the skin. Wulf swung and tossed its head and let loll its degenerate tongue and wreathed us in its feral funk, an odour as dense as the stink of a crammed zoo. If it was getting nothing else out of us it was getting the primary admission, that we knew what we were, that we had both felt the peace that passeth understanding, that this, now, sex in human form, was the imperfect forerunner, the babbling prophet, mere Baptist to the coming Christ. Wulf knew how good it was going to be and would not, even in abeyance, suffer us not sharing in the knowledge. Therefore we knew. Had known from first glance at the airport. Had always known.

Six human victims, I counted. Few enough for each to be still a raw perfume, ghost-traces in the involved and generous scent of her cunt, on the hot flower of her breath. She’d tell me in her own time, we both knew. For now it was the draped obscenity. My own wailing dead in disbelief at the broken agreement had been churned back into the hurrying blood. Only the spirit of Arabella remained still, fixed me with—

Like this?

Yes, just like that. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the life story: One finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension. All of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again–ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body’s moral world. All her parents’ love and spoiling were there in her parted thighs’ sly confidence. She knew the measure of her riches. The wolf had first raped then made her larger, forced on her in addition to the human gifts nauseous exemption from the moral city’s ordinances and limits. You accepted the wolf and grew, or you rejected it and died. She’d had the soft toys and pink bedroom as a little girl, the ballet aspirations, the pony fixations. These had flared and mutated, books, a smart mouth, finding the balance between sophistication and sluttiness, a little material greed, the headache of being sufficiently pretty so that politicisation was a sulkily performed chore, then work, business and the daily shifting survival strategies that made the freshman small-hours ethical arguments quaint. All this was still there, dwarfed under the dark arch of the monster. The challenge was to find the devious bloody-mindedness to keep both, who she used to be and what she was now.