60

STILL HOLDING HIM, I opened my eyes. Over his shoulder I saw Grainer, barely conscious, desperately trying to hold the pistol upright for a second shot. Slowly, I lifted Jake and turned, so that my back was to his killer. I thought: Shoot me too, then, since there’s nothing left for me.

Not nothing, angel. The child .

I looked at him, felt the silver gobbling his life with nonnegotiable greed. Death taking him was like something being dragged out of me. Out of my womb. The cuff cutting into my left wrist broke at last. Blood poured over both of us.

You live , he sent me. There’s no God and that’s His only commandment .

Okay.

Promise ?

I promise. Don’t leave me.

His eyes closed. The seduction was heavy on him, a suave pull on his blood. His heart was going with it, I could feel, like a boat gone from its mooring. But he opened his eyes, with an immense effort of will gathered the remnants, looked at me.

This will hurt .

He held me with sudden shocking strength—then his claw went into the flesh above my breast.

In spite of everything the reflex was to pull away—the pain was small, precise, white-hot—but everything he had went into keeping me still, and in a moment it was over. A knot of blood and tissue with a tiny metal fragment protruding.

Now they can’t find you .

A moment of bafflement, then I understood. In the mess of consciousness a distinct little discharge of disgust that they’d been able to do that, get inside me. Make fools of us.

Love …

Stay with me. Stay with me.

His eyes closed again. The tip of the full moon appeared over the dark line of the trees. The clouds had cleared. The sky was a pretty dusk blue.

No second shot came.•

It’s hard to say how long I stayed there in the middle of what had become a bloody little battlefield, with his body growing cold next to mine. Certainly the moon was clear of the trees when I got to my feet and laid him gently on the ground. In a sort of mild dream my own voice inside my head repeated without any feeling at all, He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone … The forest was very still. Even the stream seemed to have fallen silent. The air had a pared clean quality. The armoured van, the bodies, the trees, all had a weird solid static vividness, as if they’d been carefully arranged like this to mean something.

An indeterminate surreal time passed. There were questions, but they were like vague or distant objects. What would happen to Jake when the moon set? Would his corpse stay Changed? Or revert to human form? There were three human bodies to deal with. What was to be done with them? Where was Cloquet? If I really was pregnant, what would happen if I went into labour on the Curse? What shape would the child have?

There were, yes, these questions—but overwhelmingly, as if the sound of myself was being turned up to a point I knew would cause real pain, there was the Hunger.

Sharp consciousness returned the way sharp hearing does when water you’ve had in your ear suddenly trickles out. A breeze stirred the young leaves. The stream breathed its odour of damp stone. My fingertips tingled. I was freshly aware of my Changed shape, the soft fit of cool air over snout and ears and throat.

I climbed into the back of the van.

Poulsom was a mess. I tore the duct tape (and, accidentally, though I wasn’t particularly careful, a bit of his top lip) from his mouth. A second’s delay then the pain of the ripped flesh hit him and he screamed. I put my right hand, wrist still bleeding, heavily, slowly around his throat and very gently squeezed. Just enough to silence him. I looked down and pointed to my belly.

For a moment I could tell he was trying to work out whether a lie or the truth would serve him better. It was quite something to watch the stubborn calculator still at work. Then, presumably because of vestiges of the idea that virtue will be (ultimately) rewarded, I saw him cast his lot in for better or worse with the truth. He nodded, croaked out, “Yes. Pregnant.”

Not nothing, angel. The child. You live. Promise .

Well, I had promised.

61

IT WAS FULLY dark by the time I finished with Poulsom. I’d fed fast, but my appetite had had all sorts in it: grief, rage, loss, confusion. Also a kind of dumb irreverent hope. I had an image of myself holding hands with a child by the polar bear tanks in Central Park Zoo. My own earliest memory, the chance to give it to someone else.

There was nothing I could do about the bodies, even poor Jake’s. If I was going to live I had to start now. I was a monster alone in the middle of Wales. Even if I got through the Curse I had neither money nor ID nor clothes nor any safe place to go. I thought of my dad and the restaurants and Ambidextrous Alison and my apartment and how sweet it would be to be back there in one piece lying on the couch with a cup of coffee and a stupid magazine. I thought how unlikely it was not only that I’d ever see it again, but that I’d make it through the next twenty-four hours alive.

But you have to. There’s no God and that’s his only Commandment.

So, with great difficulty (try it with werewolf hands) I set about equipping myself. Poulsom had the smallest shoe size so I took his footwear. Grainer’s combat trousers and belt, Ellis’s leather jacket. Between them just over a hundred and fifty pounds in cash. Jake’s clothes were in shreds, but the journal, bloodstained and buckled, was there in the inside pocket of his ruined overcoat. I took it. I found a canvas bag with a handful of car essentials—jumper cables, wheel brace, jack, torch—behind the van’s front seat, so I emptied it and stuffed my new wardrobe in there. I kept imagining telling Jake about all this, later, when it was all over. My wrist was already healing.

I took Grainer’s pistol and three ammunition clips from his belt. Not that I had a clue how to use it. I wasn’t even sure I’d identified the safety correctly. I’d found some thing that looked like a safety switch and moved it to the opposite setting, but there was still, I had to admit, a good chance of the damned thing going off and hitting me in the foot.

It wasn’t easy to leave Jake. Twice I moved away and came back, a last look, touch, smell. Werewolves, I was discovering, can’t weep. Uncried tears knotted my throat. The raw fact of my aloneness kept dissolving into the fantasy of him waking up.

Don’t be sentimental. Get going. You’ve got work to do .

Jake’s spirit, or my own fictionalised version of it. At any rate it got me to my feet and forced me, step by step, away into the trees.