Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  Lucy, ‘the accident’, was a thirty-eight-year-old recently divorced ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital who’d come out of the settlement with, amongst other things, a detached cottage in Wiltshire, where she’d gone for a solitary weekend three months ago. Madeline, with nous enough not to kill on her own doorstep, had been in the area, had watched the house, had got in through an upstairs window. Then been interrupted. ‘I heard a car and people getting out right outside,’ she told me. ‘I panicked.’

  And fled, leaving would-be victim Lucy with a nasty bite, a horror story and a brand new constitution. ‘That’s how I found out how it worked,’ Madeline said. ‘Lucy tracked me down six weeks later.’

  Yes, assuming no virus, that was how it worked. You got bitten, you survived, you Turned. But here was Madeline, positive she hadn’t been bitten. How could that be?

  Trish was a friend of hers since elementary school who’d ended-up in thrall to tosser Alistair. Alistair had a very simple system. He got teenage girls hooked on heroin then forced them into increasingly extreme porn to pay for it. He’d put Trish in hospital a dozen times, most recently with four broken ribs and a miscarriage. When Madeline went to see her, Trish asked Madeline to lend her the money to have Alistair killed. Madeline made a her an offer: She’d get someone to put an end to Alistair if Trish promised to get off the drug.

  Arrangements weren’t difficult to make. Alistair had been trying to get into Madeline’s pants for years.

  ‘You know what the weird thing was?’ Madeline said. ‘I told Trish the whole story, what I was, what I was going to do to him – and she believed me. Just believed me straight off like that. She said she wanted to watch. So I let her.’

  The trouble was, even after Alistair had met his end, Trish couldn’t get the monkey off her back. ‘She’d been through too much,’ Madeline said. ‘You seriously don’t know. Stuff he did to her? Unbelievable.’ She shook her head, disgusted. ‘And after all that she goes and tries topping herself. Twice! Honestly, the woman was a wreck. In the end she just asked me flat out if I’d... You know. She said she’d seen what it had done for me. I mean I’m different to how I used to be. I used to be... Well. Anyway. You know. I mean you do know.’ I thought I did. Whatever else the Curse had done to me it had removed physical fear. You don’t know how much physical fear you’ve been carrying around until it’s gone. Imagine every time you find yourself alone with a man you don’t know. Walking on a street. At a gas station in the middle of the night. Imagine knowing he can’t kill you. Imagine knowing you can pull just enough wulf to the surface to let him know pissing you off will be a really, really bad idea. Madeline sipped her gin and tonic and continued: ‘So I thought: You leave her to herself, Mads, and she’ll be in a coffin in a month. And then what was it all for? Sounds barmy, I know, but I didn’t really see what she had to lose. So I did it.’

  A maid pushed a tinkling trolley past the door. The world had receded from us. The room was dark. Getting up and turning on a light would’ve been brutal.

  ‘She’s off the shit now,’ Madeline said. ‘She’s gone completely the other way. You should see her. She’s like bloody Lara Croft.’

  Lara Croft or not, Trish botched her kill last month, and now they had Fergus, a three-times-divorced fifty-three-year-old alcoholic sales rep, to add to the family. Like Lucy, he’d tracked his maker down. ‘That’s what’s different with you,’ Madeline said. ‘Lucy and Fergus, they could find us. I mean we’ve all got a feeling for where we are. Instinct or whatever. If I go out of here and start walking, pretty soon I’ll know which direction to go for any one of them. It’s not like that with you. It’s more confused.’

  She wasn’t sentimental. When I told her about the birth and my dead heart, the empty space where love should have been, she didn’t say I mustn’t blame myself, or that it wasn’t my fault, or that there was nothing I could have done. She just sat, intrigued, hooked on the story. A couple of times I paused too long in the narrative. Then what happened? she demanded. I found myself liking her. She couldn’t disguise her satisfaction at the thought of never aging. She wanted confirmation of the four-hundred-year lifespan and immunity to disease. I told her that was what Jake had told me – and if anyone knew, he did.

  It was a bitterish fascination to her that Jake had loved me. Not because she cared about Jake, but because she was compelled to find out what merits or skills other women had. I could feel her trying to imagine what it had been like between him and me. I could feel her getting it, reluctantly, that it was the other thing, the mysterious thing, the thing of which even fabulous sex was only a part. She’d never been in love. Not as an adult. She was unformed in that department. I’d felt it in the slim, tight shoulders. It was there in the appetite for things. It was there in the prostitution. There was a weird moment when I asked her if she was still working as an escort and she told me she was. Weird because obviously it brought Jake again, the images, the speculation (with you, did he like to... ?) and weird again because in spite of everything she thought I might disapprove (she put on a bright little pretence of pragmatic shamelessness at first); but weird chiefly because it raised like a hot flush in both of us the other, gentler atrocity of our condition: wulf libido. Suddenly the fact of Curse nymphomania was there, unignorable, and for a moment we didn’t know whether to acknowledge it. There was a brief silence. Then, as before, we found ourselves laughing. ‘I got three months off when I was expecting,’ I told her. ‘Now it’s on again.’

  She was on her fourth Hendricks. ‘Way I look at it,’ she said, ‘why pack the job in now? At least there’s more to it than just the money.’

  It was after eight o’clock when Cloquet knocked to see what I wanted for dinner. By which time I’d done what I could to drum into Madeline the need for extreme caution in all our movements and communications from now on. She’d also managed to reach two of the three others (Trish and Fergus) and arrange a meeting for nine tomorrow night, location (I insisted) to be called-in by me not more than two hours beforehand. She gave me her number, and didn’t make a fuss when I told her I couldn’t give her mine on the clean cell. I told her I’d sort another phone out tomorrow and thereafter we’d use that. I introduced her to Cloquet as a friend and said nothing about what she was. Partly to see if he’d be able to tell (it was one of the things I was never sure of, whether we didn’t – through some vibe or pheromone – give ourselves away to humans) but mainly because I couldn’t face going through the whole explanation again with Madeline there.

  ‘Did you notice anything odd about her?’ I asked him, when she’d gone. We were alone in my suite, him in the window seat, me on the edge of the bed. It was fully dark out, and raining. The TV was on, with the sound down. CNN, which Walker and I had been half-watching on his last visit, like two people looking back through time and space to the world they’d lost, long ago.

  ‘Odd? No. Why? What’s odd?’

  He’d reacted oddly himself when I’d introduced them, said barely a word, seemed unsure whether to shake hands with her. Now he was reacting oddly to the question.

  ‘You seemed a little strange with her.’

  ‘Strange? Pas de tout. I know nothing about her.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said, with belated intuition. ‘You liked her.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  His sexual self had been dormant for so long I was astonished at my certainty that that’s what it was. But no less certain, astonished or not. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘She looks like someone I worked with once, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Merde alors. She looks like a fucking model I worked with, years ago.’

  ‘She’s a werewolf.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right. Still want her number?’

  He listened in frowning silence, then asked question after question, most of which I didn’t have answers for. It was unhinging him, all this su
dden change, first Walker and Konstantinov, then me and Walker, now four more werewolves.

  ‘They’re a pack,’ he said.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Maybe nothing. But I don’t like it that they can find you so easily.’

  ‘Not so easily, apparently.’

  ‘That they can find you at all then.’

  ‘I can trust her. I know. Don’t ask me how. It’s a species thing.’

  ‘She’s one of four.’

  ‘Yeah, well, beggars can’t be choosers. They’re going to help us.’

  He opened his mouth to say something – then stopped.

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  The TV, he meant. On screen was a large dark building in the middle of nowhere up to its ground-floor windows in snow. I didn’t recognise it at first. Then did. It was the Alaskan lodge. The next shot was inside the lounge kitchen. A team of guys in thermal gear conducting what looked like a forensic sweep. Cloquet found the remote and unmuted.

  ‘... very early stages,’ one of the team said to an off-camera interviewer. ‘But we have found what at first sight appear to be genetically anomalous materials. We’re not jumping to any conclusions, you know, but this business teaches you to keep an open mind.’

  ‘An open mind?’ the reporter’s voiceover asked us, rhetorically. ‘One person whose mind is already made up is the young lady whose incredible story started this investigation.’

  And there she was: Kaitlyn. She looked harried and greasy in the lights’ glare. She was wearing an enormous Parka and big boots. ‘Look, I never believed in any of this stuff,’ she said. ‘But what happened here was real, and these guys with the scientific... these guys with the equipment and all, they’ve already found particles, right? I mean that’s biological evidence, that’s hard evidence. This thing was as real as you standing right there and for all those people who say I’m crazy they can just talk to these science guys, they can just... you know? This thing was real. It was absolutely real.’

  Cloquet and I watched the rest of the report. The story would have started as a tiny item on a Fairbanks radio phone-in or low-rent TV talk show and someone’s interest would have been piqued. A paranormal nut with money. Now science. Now the police. There were county badges among the forensic team.

  ‘Fuck,’ Cloquet said. ‘Great.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now,’ I said. ‘We didn’t fly on the IDs we rented the place on anyway. They won’t be looking for us. They won’t even know we left the country.’

  ‘She’ll have given a description,’ Cloquet said. ‘If they look at the Anchorage airport CCTV—’

  ‘Look, forget it. It’s out of our control.’

  The phone rang.

  The Walker phone. My scalp went hot.

  ‘Hello?’

  The silence just before his voice was like deep space. I knew what was coming.

  ‘We’ve found them,’ he said. ‘They’ve got your boy and Natasha together. But we have to move fast.’

  30

  According to Hoyle they were in a derelict farmhouse fifteen miles outside Macerata in the Le Marche district in Italy. Jacqueline Delon, five other vampires, four familiars, Natasha Konstantinov and one baby werewolf boy, two and a half weeks old.

  I told myself to stay cold. Don’t let the heart in. Let the heart in and you fuck it up. But I sat on the bed sick with adrenalin and hope and fear.

  ‘We fly to Rome,’ Walker told me, ‘then on to Falconara, where there’ll be transportation. The big problem is weapons.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because there might not be any.’

  I tried to visualise it. I had an image of myself, Walker and Konstantinov moving through a field of long dry grass under an aquamarine sky. I had a very clear sense of what being completely unarmed would feel like, the air passing over my empty hands.

  ‘How can we do this without weapons?’

  ‘Well, we go in in daylight, so that eliminates the vamps. Then you’re only looking at four familiars.’

  ‘Four armed familiars.’

  ‘I know, I know. But there’ll be six of us.’

  ‘Six? What happened to twenty?’

  ‘Well, Murdoch’s killed four of them. The rest are either underground or flat-out not interested. It’s not like all of them give a shit about Mike’s wife. And none of them gives a shit about you or your son. I told them you’re paying, but money’s not what they care about right now. What they care about right now is staying alive. I’m sorry. You’re just going to have to trust that we can get this done. Also, don’t mention to the team that there might not be guns. If there aren’t, we’ll deal with it when the time comes. Now, give me your passport details.’

  ‘We’re going on a regular flight?’

  ‘As opposed to?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something under the radar.’

  ‘Those were the good old days. We’re outside the organisation now. Helicopters, big hardware, ghost flights, carte blanche mobility – that’s all gone.’

  Then why am I hiring you? I didn’t need to say.

  Because it’s us or you on your own, he didn’t need to reply.

  A little silence in which we both felt over the connection how much more complicated we’d made this by sleeping together.

  ‘What are we going to do with her ladyship?’ he said.

  Ask me when we’re good to go, I’d told him.

  Well, we were good to go now – or rather had to go, good or not.

  •

  Cloquet sat there on the edge of the bed and took it. I’d just run through the instructions for formula milk, which, having known this moment would come, I’d bought and hidden in my room.

  ‘There’s no other way,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  ‘What if you don’t come back?’

  ‘I’ll come back, I promise.’

  ‘You can’t promise.’

  ‘No. I can’t. I’m sorry.’

  It was two a.m., raining heavily, audibly. The first flight Walker could get us on left in three and a half hours. I was meeting him at Heathrow. I’d wire-transferred extra funds to Cloquet’s account and written a letter to my dad Cloquet would have to hand deliver if I was killed. The will was with the Manhattan lawyer who’d handled my divorce. I’d thought of writing a letter to Zoë (to both of them, since it was theoretically possible Lorcan would survive even if I didn’t) but I couldn’t do it. It felt bogus, something for me disguised as something for them. Better to be a clean mystery. Better to leave them free to imagine the mother they would have wanted. As they’d have to imagine their father.

  I gave Cloquet Madeline’s number.

  ‘You’re not serious?’ he said.

  ‘If they survive they’re going to need their own kind. I know you’ll look after them, but you’ll need help. Madeline’s not a bad person. Trust me, I know. Plus, you know... who knows, right? She could be good for you.’

  ‘This is—’

  ‘This is necessary. Don’t argue. Now you’re sure you know what you’re doing with the formula?’

  I’d packed, if you could call it that. IDs, cash, cards, Lorcan’s birth certificate, a toothbrush, three changes of underwear. Jake’s last journal. I wanted not to be ready until the car came. I wanted to have to leave in a hurry and not have to think of anything to say. I wanted not to be able to hold Zoë for more than a moment.

  To kill time I went into the en suite and put on some make-up. Flossed. Rinsed my mouth with toothpaste. Sat on the toilet for what seemed a long time after I’d peed. Found myself taking in the bathroom’s details they way you would if it was your last few seconds before being executed. The vast mathematical silence was here, in the white porcelain and delighted halogens. Again I imagined moving through the field of long dry grass with no weapons in my hands – and my hands in reality felt as if half their mass had gone. I bent over the toilet, convinced I
was going to throw up. Nothing happened. I straightened, trembling.

  The room phone rang.

  ‘Car’s here,’ Cloquet called.

  He had Zoë in his arms when I came out of the bathroom. I took her, quickly, held her, looked at her. Felt everything I wasn’t entitled to like a contained quivering tidal wave. Her face was hot from a nap, lined on one cheek where a crease had pressed. She went cross-eyed focusing on me. Quick, before the falling away into nothingness, quick, quick. I kissed her, smelled her head, held my face against hers for a moment, began inwardly I’m sorry, angel, sorry for everything – then stopped. It rolled darkness down over the winking lights of her future. It softened Pharaoh’s heart and I thought I can’t leave her which immediately sent me into the sickening fall away from her because who was I? Who was I? When I put her back in the bassinet the transfer of her weight from me pulled at my insides, a gentle evisceration. Turn away right now or you’ll never be able to leave. Right now. Right now.

  Cloquet was suddenly full of realities, all his denial and postponement mechanisms failing. His face was frank with fear. I hugged him, quickly, mumbled ‘Don’t say anything.’ His arms came up around me. I knew if I let him establish a proper embrace it would be a long labour to extricate myself. ‘I have to go,’ I said, pulling away. I grabbed my backpack, crossed the suite and opened the door. I imagined my mother standing behind me like a talisman saying, quietly: Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

  So I didn’t.

  31

  At Falconara we picked up a Land Rover and a Mercedes saloon. To Walker’s visible relief there were weapons in the trunk of the SUV: four pistols with a clip each and two Lancaster Tactical AK-47s with one thirty-round magazine apiece. Which still left one person unarmed. With Walker and Konstantinov were three other ex-WOCOP agents – Hudd, Carney and Pavlov (all on Murdoch’s death-list) – none of whom would countenance going in without hardware. ‘I guess that means I get the prize,’ Walker said. ‘Presumably no one will object if I bring up the rear, with my lethal kung-fu skills?’