“It’s always going to be like this,” she said. “On the run. Looking over your shoulder. Getting away with it. What a disgusting phrase that is, really. Getting away with it. I wasn’t going to drown myself, by the way. Can we drown?”

“Yes. In both forms. And burn, eventually.”

The sea’s motion around our legs gave us the illusion of swaying.

“I looked at fabric swatches with my dad and Alison when we stopped in New York,” she said. “We’re redecorating the place on Twenty-eighth Street. And three days earlier I’d fucked you with my face buried in a man’s ripped-open corpse.”

She laughed, once—not, as many would have, histrionically—but because what she’d said was both factually correct and sounded like a line from a cult comedy horror film.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.” I knew why she’d said it. Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It’s a survival necessity. You can’t live if you can’t accept what you are, and you can’t accept what you are if you can’t say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam.

We returned to the house, a silent walk through the silent village under the constellations. For the first time since the kill I felt lust flickering again between us—then realised: She’d felt it before me, knew the next phase of the cycle had begun, was faced again with its inevitable end point. Hence thigh-deep alone in the wine dark sea.

The villa smelled of our freshly washed linen and the veranda’s potted lemon and thyme. We undressed with a strange placid precision and slipped naked between the cool sheets.

“Don’t you find it strange that I’ve taken your word for it about the drugs?” she said. Somewhere on the road trip we’d covered narcotic suppressants, my old days of the cage, the cast-iron safe, the key. I’d told her the truth: It’s possible to get through, medicined to near death, for a couple of lunations, maybe three (doing four I’d nearly killed myself—literally, I’d torn my own flesh off; if it hadn’t been for the howler’s accelerated healing I’d have bled to death), but there are two reasons for not doing it. First, it’s the worst suffering a werewolf can go through. Second, it’s pointless, because whether it’s this month or the next or the one after that, unless you commit suicide you will certainly kill again —and again and again and again until you die of old age or silver finds you. I’d told her all this.

“I don’t find it strange,” I said. “You see the logic. Morally a month’s abstinence here or there’s meaningless.”

“That’s not why I haven’t tried it,” she said. “I haven’t tried it because I remember what those first three times were like and the thought of going through that again terrifies me. It’s not seeing the logic. It’s cowardice.”

“I’m no different. It terrifies me, too. Plus the last time I tried it I failed.”

“But you’ve done good in the world. You’ve counterbalanced.”

“Money gestures. Which is nothing if you’ve got the stuff to burn. Besides, it doesn’t work. Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.”

My cock had stirred next to her hand. I knew she knew. Was readying herself for the exquisite capitulation. Through sorrow and shame into warmth, and the peace of having no one but each other.

“It doesn’t change,” she said. “I keep thinking there’s some way around it, but in the end it’s still either kill yourself or get on with being what you are.”

“Don’t kill yourself,” I said.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Yes.”

Just stay .

“I might kill myself,” she said. “It’s hard to say.”

“Will you promise not to kill yourself without telling me first?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I promise not to kill myself without telling you first.”

That night I had a tumble of vivid dreams. I think we made love again, in the half-asleep way that comes close to magic. Then more dreams. One of being repeatedly stung in the neck by an elusive insect. I thought, I must tell Talulla about this when I wake up. I must—But the thought fell off suddenly into darkness.

And when I woke, late, the room was filled with sunlight and a sea-smelling breeze, and before I lifted my head from the pillow I could feel the emptiness in the bed where her body should have been and Ellis’s voice said: “Jeez, Jake, it’s about time.”

47

HE WAS SITTING in the room’s one rattan chair at the foot of the bed with his back to the French windows that opened onto the veranda, hands clasped over his belly, one leg crossed at a wide angle over the other. Trademark black leather trousers, steel-toe-capped boots, pale denim jacket. The waist-length white-blond hair was down today. A movement of air brought me his marshy foot odour. A tuning-fork hum in my teeth brought me silver rounds in the shoulder-holstered firearm. I sat up to face him.

“We’ve got her,” he said. “Do you want Q&A or shall I just roll it out?”

“Tell me,” I said.

Ellis nodded, briefly, as if to confirm his private guess at my reaction had been correct, then he got to his feet, made a just a sec gesture, went out onto the veranda and came back a moment later with two cups of freshly brewed coffee. He handed me one then returned to his seat.

“First, let me reassure you,” he said. “Talulla’s alive, well, completely unharmed. She’s far from here, in a location I can’t disclose yet, but you need have absolutely no anxieties about her comfort. This I promise you, Jake.”

I set the coffee down on the bedside table. My hands were trembling. Walking back from the beach last night under the stars she’d taken my hand. Neither of us had said a word but the gesture had made both of us think, gently, of death. Now I had an image of her sitting with her knees drawn up on a spartan bunk in a windowless cell. Alive, well, completely unharmed . I had to believe him because not believing him left me nothing.

“I can’t do this naked,” I said.

“I understand. Go ahead.”

I got to my feet, felt the perfect vacuum where any concession to or interest in my nakedness would with anyone else have been, and dressed, quickly, in yesterday’s clothes. Then sat on the edge of the bed and lit a Camel. My in-love self like a straitjacketed lunatic sobbed and rocked back and forth repeating They’ve got her. They’ve got her. They’ve got her . There was a sore spot on my neck I couldn’t resist rubbing.