By Blood We Live

by Glen Duncan

  “Angels?” I said.

  Justine had seen these marks before. Angelic script. Revived by the Vatican’s marketing gurus and flashed in every ad. Apparently, while I’d been asleep, the Catholic Church had not only shed its have-your-cake-and-eat-it coyness about the supernatural (yes, the Devil exists, but please don’t embarrass us by asking us to go into detail) but had introduced the world to the fighting force it had been secretly training to deal with it, namely, the Militi Christi, the Soldiers of Christ. Known in the optimistic vernacular as “the Angels.”

  “Well, it was only a matter of time,” I said. “What’s rather more worrying is how the fuck did they know where to find us?”

  We had to take both cars, the guy squeezed into the Mitsubishi’s trunk, the two women (wrapped in the hall’s Persian runner) in the Jeep’s. Los Angeles’ twinkling darkness had seen all this before, many times. Bodies. Trunks. The innocent practicalities of murder.

  Justine was full of glamorous energy. Her new nature flashed and glimmered. All her years of wondering. I could feel the delight. A smile kept coming. She kept suppressing it. But also kept coming moments of residual disbelief that made her go briefly blank, the system trying to reboot past its astonishment at the new software.

  We drove inland on the 10. Desert. Sky rich with stars. Murder someone in England or Luxembourg and sooner or later a jogger or dog-walker stumbles on the buried remains. Small countries keep the moral world at your shoulder. The American desert spaces, it’s different. You bury a body, the empty land shrugs and says, Fine with me, Jack.

  Six miles east of Joshua Tree there’s a road south that runs for a mile and comes to nothing, just peters out into sand and scrub. Not far enough from civilisation, but there wouldn’t be enough night to get back safe if we went on. Thanks to the new blood, The Lash gratified for the second night in a row, a saguaro cactus stood with its head and three big outstretched arms each lined up with a bristling star. A gesture. One of the infinite number of gestures. Through The Lash’s mischievous grace the shape said absurd balance. The balance you needed to accept the insistent meaningfulness and meaninglessness of things.

  We worked in silence under the mighty constellations. Strength came back to me, gently, through the digging. The bodies were forlorn and pathetic. There was no connection with them. We hadn’t drunk from them. Nothing of them had passed to us. They were strangers. I thought (and felt Justine thinking the same) of the people they must have had in their lives who loved them. People to whom their details were precious. It was ugly, to have killed them with no memorial trace in our blood.

  We got home an hour from dawn. Obviously there was an argument for not going back to Las Rosas at all, but it didn’t hold. If they knew about that place there was no reason they wouldn’t know about any of the others within a couple of hundred miles, and none of those had a vault to compare. They’d have to find the vault, for starters (it’s hidden) and if they did find it nothing short of demolition explosives would get them in. All, if it were to take place in the next fourteen hours, in broad Californian daylight. I doubted even the messengers of God had the requisite madness or chutzpah for that.

  Neither of us needed to feed. Not, in my case, because I was full, but because my system was still raw from the Turning. Justine would need blood three nights from now. Her first human.

  With the vault door locked, we showered (there’s a walk-in down here) and got ready for bed. Justine’s face, scrubbed of its make-up, looked young and surprised and tired. Without the practicalities to distract us what she’d kept her mouth shut about was between us like an embarrassed third person, shuffling and clearing its throat. The longer we ignored it now, the worse it would get.

  “I know what you’re afraid of, angel,” I said. I was lying on the vault’s bed, undressed but for a pair of black Calvins. She was in crisp white t-shirt and panties, sitting on the edge with her back to me. We’ve seen each other naked often enough (she knows there’s no sex in me, knew it from that first moment in Manhattan; it was what tipped her scales) and we’ve always been physically affectionate, but the secret she’d kept from me had thrown up tension around her body. I’d stayed out of her mind so far, but she knew that had been my choice, not hers. Now there was defeat in her small shoulder blades. “It’s all right,” I said. “I understand. But you’re worrying needlessly.”

  “Am I?” she said.

  “You think I’m going to leave you.”

  “You are.”

  “Listen to me. I’ll never leave you. Not like that.”

  “Not like that.” Sarcastic emphasis. She sounded exhausted. Torn by regret already, only twenty-four hours old.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I’ll be in your life, with you, living with you for as long as you want me.”

  “No, you won’t. Three’s a crowd.”

  “That’s not it. That’s not—”

  “It won’t work anyway if you can’t fuck her. I don’t know much but I know that.”

  “Justine, listen to me. It’s not about that.” (It’s not only about that, I should have said. And besides, apparently … No. Better not go into that.)

  “Right. I forgot. It’s about ‘the prophecy.’ The big fulfilment. And by the way how exactly are you going to ‘join the blood of the werewolf’? Just following her around gave you dementia and nearly fucking killed you. Some fulfilment.”

  She got down off the edge of the mattress and went to the vault door. For a second I thought she was going to walk out. Daylight fear rushed my skin. I opened my mouth to say “Don’t!” But she reached for her leather jacket hanging there and went into one of the pockets. Took out a pack of American Spirits and lit one. Then lit another for me. Smoking’s integrity: Two people, mid-combat, the etiquette of shared vice endures.

  “Look what happened,” she said, handing me the cigarette. “As soon as she came on the scene everything started going wrong. You disappear for days on end. I get a phone call from fucking Alaska. You were so sick I thought you were going to fucking die. It was like dealing with …” She turned away. “Actually forget it.”

  “I’m aware of how insane it must seem.”

  “No, you’re not.” Very rational. Very subdued. “You’re really not.”

  Vor klez fanim va gargim din gammou-jhi. Translation: “When he joins the blood of the werewolf.” One of the prophecies. One of my prophecies. Written down in The Book of Remshi. The only prophecy that mattered to me anymore.

  “Do you really believe it?” Justine asked. Her little face looked drained. “Just tell me, honestly, that you believe, I mean really believe, that a woman—a werewolf you were in love with thousands of years ago, who died, has come back as … I mean can you hear this? Can you hear what this sounds like?”

  “Yes, angel, I can hear what it sounds like.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  I wanted, you’ve no idea how much, to give her a simple yes or no. But either would have been a lie. “It’s something I have to do,” I said. “It’s … I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, Juss. One doesn’t like the word ‘destiny,’ but …”

  There’s that phrase you have: Someone walked over my grave. For when the future’s cold ether reaches back into your warm present and touches your shrinking skin. Years ago, when I’d kept journals to pass the time I’d written: It’s either/or. Either the world contains magic—dreams, portents, visions, signs, clues, synchronicities, maddening oblique gestures to a hidden meaning—or it does not. There are no grey areas. It’s one or the other …

  “Destiny,” Justine repeated, then laughed, sans amusement. “Fluff, it’s just the same face, that’s all. Everyone’s got a double walking around, even in their own lifetime. We’ve probably both got doubles right here in LA. In five hundred years the same face must turn up … I don’t know. In a thousand years? Ten thousand?”

  “I know,” I said, with a gentleness I knew would only make her more desperate. “I’ve seen them.”

/>   “So why this time? Why her?”

  There was nothing to tell her except the feeble truth. My hands filled with weakness at the thought. “I felt it,” I said. “That night in Big Sur. I felt it. And I started having the dream.”

  “What dream?”

  Ah. Shouldn’t have said that. It wouldn’t help. Nothing by way of explanation would help. She didn’t want explanation. She wanted me to forget the whole thing.

  “What dream?” More exhaustion. And a hint of derision. Dreams! she was thinking. Destiny, prophecies, dreams. Sure, why not?

  “You don’t dream, you said.”

  “Forget it. It’s not—”

  “Tell me.”

  It would be worse not to, now. Now that I’d opened my big mouth that’s learned nothing in twenty millennia.

  “I’ve been having this dream,” I said. “When I woke up last night I thought it was the first time I’d had it, but now I know I’ve had it before. I’ve been having it since I saw Talulla. Before that I hadn’t dreamed since Vali died.”

  I was ready for her to ask what the dream was, but she didn’t. The fact of a dream, the fact that a dream was involved, disgusted her. Dreams were in the same bag as Meaning and Things Happening For A Reason and God. And yet now that I had opened my big mouth, I felt relieved. “I know it’s something,” I said. “This beach I’ve been dreaming about. I know I have to find it. It’s a real place, though I haven’t the faintest idea where it is. I thought you might help me look for it. I thought we might travel together. It’ll be different for you, now we’re the same. There are so many places I want to show you.”

  It didn’t help. Visibly it didn’t help.

  “There’s something I’ve never got,” she said, with unnerving evenness.

  I had a terrible feeling of energy leaving me. “What?”

  She paused. Wanted to get it right. Wanted to make it as hard for me as possible.

  “Why don’t you drink from people all the time?”

  Ah.

  “I mean, if blood from the living lets you … I mean if you can see the meaning of things, the connections … If you can see the goddamned story life’s supposed to be, why stop? Why not live like that all the time?”

  Ah, again.

  I took a moment myself. There are moments when twenty thousand years catch up with you.

  “It’s unbearable,” I said.

  She looked at the floor, jaws bitterly clamped.

  “It’s too much,” I said. “We can’t stand it. Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to? Seeing what we see brings … It brings the reality of life too close. It brings death too close. You can’t live with the reality of death at the centre.”

  I remembered the stone circles going up. One night in Britain in spring I came to an encampment. Humans had spent the day dragging a stone that must have weighed seventy tons. Now they lay by their fires, exhausted, breath going up in clouds, hands and feet bloody and scraped, eyes bright with the inscrutable purpose that had been revealed to them. They call the place Avebury now. There’s a pub and a car park and t-shirts. There are dozens of books in the gift shop. All with the same conclusion: We no longer know what purpose these megaliths had. We no longer know what they mean. Forgetting hadn’t even taken very long. I’d gone back there four hundred years later and people were already vague. Smiling, but vague.

  “It makes you too curious about who’s writing the story,” I said, regretting it even as I said it. My mouth felt like a handful of dead grass. “It makes you too curious about death.”

  There are these utterances that still and silence a room at the molecular level.

  “There’s something going on here, Justine,” I said. “There’s a confluence, don’t you see?”

  Justine shook her head. Not disagreement. Surfeit. Refusal. Annoyance.

  “It’s just your thing,” she said. “It’s just your word, beguilement. It’s your word and you can’t even see it. You can’t even see you’re falling for it.” She walked over to the refrigerator and opened it, stood looking inside. Displacement activity. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You go and do what you have to do.” Then after a pause: “I’ve got things I have to do, too.”

  The priority, immediately she’d said this, was to avoid making her do something rash. If I obeyed my impulse, which was to wrap her in my arms and tell her that we’d work things out and that I’d never do anything to hurt her and that I’d never go near Vali again, there was every chance I’d wake to find her gone.

  “Can we agree something?” I said, quietly.

  She didn’t answer, but thought IT DOESN’T MATTER, which, since she’d half-thought it at me, I got.

  “It does matter,” I said—and felt the little thrill in her. First flash of invasive telepathy. FUCK FUCK THAT’S WEIRD BUT HOW BUT HE MUSTN’T DON’T DON’T—

  I withdrew. I can turn it off. Perk of age.

  “Listen,” I said. “All I want you to agree is that we don’t discuss this any more right now. It’s my stupid fat-head fault for bringing it up. I’m exhausted. I still feel like shit from last night. And whatever you say I know you’re tired too. We have this conversation now, it’s going to be pointless.”

  “You wrote it as a bet,” she said, still calm, still staring into the fridge. “You wrote a bunch of prophecies as a joke, stoned, in a hut in the middle of nowhere.”

  The image detonated: Me and Amlek, heads thick from the fazurya, cold dirt floor, curved walls of baked dung, firelight and the body of the witch-doctor we’d fed on. We’d been laughing (difficult not to) at the poor old fellow’s last thought: “I didn’t see this.” Amlek, between laughing fits, had said, I bet you I can see more of the future than you can. Which, whether I like it or not, was how it started. We began that night.

  I see a mighty people from the north with yellow hair like rope.

  I see sickness and death and rats fifteen thousand summers from now.

  I see a leader of this country who eats babies for breakfast and his name is Jehengast Ka.

  I see a man making visions on the ceiling of a cave like no other. There are white clouds and blue sky and naked humans.

  I see a silver spear taller than the tallest tree with a tail of fire and smoke rising up into the air. There are humans inside it.

  I see a thin man stuck with big thorns to a tree.

  All those were mine. Amlek soon got bored. I don’t know why I didn’t. I started writing them down. One day I wrote: And in time Vali will come back to him and he will achieve fulfilment when he joins the blood of the werewolf. “He” was me, obviously. “He” featured in the prophecies, from time to time. I met Amlek in Jerusalem the night Christ was arrested. That’s another of mine, I told him. He’s the thin man. You watch. Not thorns, nails. Close enough, though, right? Don’t like to say I told you so, but …

  I’ve counted them up, the ones that have come true. Less than a third. Just enough to keep the belief alive that I’m living in a story—the greatest detective mystery story ever written—that I’ve been given clues, that it’ll mean something, in the end. Just enough for that—and just not enough to do away with the thought that the whole thing’s complete random meaningless bullshit and that any village idiot could’ve cooked up prophecies so vague that some of them were bound to come true. Or rather “true.”

  Just enough to keep the faith in Vali’s return alive.

  Just not enough to stop me conceding my own idiocy in keeping it.

  “Please,” I said to Justine. “Can’t we sleep first?”

  She closed the fridge door, gently. More calm defeat.

  “Come on, sweetpea, turn out the light.”

  She stared at me. It didn’t need telepathy. What I’d said to her last night: I promise I won’t leave you.

  29

  Justine

  NIGHT AGAIN. DARKNESS goes into you like ink into water.
Like. I keep seeing the ways things are like other things. Since Turning.

  I thought Fluff would’ve been awake before me, but he wasn’t. I sat up and looked down at him. He was frowning, slightly. Sometimes, asleep, he looks about five years old.

  Five years.

  Twenty thousand.

  One night, a few months after we met, he took me to a self-storage place out in Pasadena. U-STASH. It’s a chain. He owns it. A hundred facilities, nationwide. You’ve probably seen them: logo’s a big red packing crate on a yellow background. We went in and he took me to one of the units and opened it up. It was full of Egyptian treasure. Gold. So much gold. He said it was only a small part of it. Amenhotep the First. His tomb was never found. The tomb builders were kept in isolation in special villages so no one would find out where the king and his treasure was going to be buried. Sometimes, when the tomb was finished, the Pharaoh would have them killed to make sure. Stonk said he got the information from one of the workers in exchange for his life.

  I left him sleeping in the vault, got dressed and went upstairs. The house knew I’d changed. The floor and the walls and the furniture. They were in on it.

  There was something else. A faint throbbing I hadn’t felt last night. I stood still. It was a good, warm feeling now but I knew it wouldn’t feel good later, in a few days if I didn’t … if I didn’t …

  Drink.

  The thirst. For years the thirst meant him. Now it meant me. My skin prickled. I thought of the blood bags in the fridge—but that wouldn’t work yet. He’d told me it took years to make the shift. And even the thought of MREs sort of annoyed the thirst, put an edge on it like the smell of electrical burning. I tried to remember drinking his blood, but I couldn’t, even though my body knew it had happened. Instead of a memory of it there was just a massive red blackness. Just nothing.

  For a while I stood in the kitchen doorway thinking about what I was, now. The reality of it. A vampire feeds on the blood of humans. Drinks it. Swallows it down. In the world I grew up in blood was something to be scared of. Hepatitis. HIV. (Stonk had shaken his head when I asked him. No, sweetpea, we don’t get diseases. Diseases can’t live in us.) In the world I grew up in blood was practically the dirtiest thing around.