Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  My hands were bleeding. The cables had left lines of fire in my palms. But there was only one left to break. Suddenly I felt my son’s hot hands gripping the fur on my back.

  Mother.

  Entitlement. Forgiveness. Demand.

  Almost there, angel.

  A vampire’s decapitated body sailed over my head and crashed into Cloquet’s steel pillar. Cloquet, hands bound, kicked it away.

  My son first. Don’t worry. I’ll get you out.

  Someone was nearby. I looked up.

  Marco stood six feet away, lighting another cigarette, watching me. Behind him, Walker had made it to Konstantinov and was in the process of cutting him loose. I had an illusion of sound – the room’s slaughterhouse or torture chamber audio track – muting, as if I’d dunked my head under water. Not all the mischief had left Marco’s face, but enough to make way for a look of twinkling recognition – part invitation, part provocation – under which I felt peculiarly small and finite and known. Peculiarly young. Jacqueline’s Oh my God recurred, her face’s momentary loss of its guiding intelligence.

  He indicated with his eyes that I should look to my left just as sound rushed back in – and I turned too late to dodge a huge crew-cut vampire – six-four, maybe two hundred and eighty pounds – who came down on me like an anvil, ripping the cable from my grip (I felt a swatch of skin go from my left palm like someone tearing off the mother of all band-aids) and propelling me with him from the altar down onto the steps. His face was tattooed with a spider’s web. Rotten-meat breath and the pigshit-stink of his skin filled my mouth, nose, head, all of me. His nickname was probably Geronimo or Banzai or Mad Dog. He was a grinning moron whose only route to credibility was doing insane stunts. He’d landed on top of me. His left arm was across my windpipe and his right had its fingers buried deep in the flesh of my left breast. He was going to rip it off completely. Hey, check it out: genuine werewolf tit! My left side was in singing shock from the fall (the steps had broken three or four ribs) but my right arm was free and in full command of its faculties. I went into the soft part of his flank, hard, with my glass-edged fingers, forced a screw action until I’d got through the muscle into the wet privacy of his mutant organs. I grabbed a handful of whatever he had in there – if it was gut it had the consistency of Vaselined beef jerky – screwed again and yanked as hard as I could. Two seconds of resistance – then it tore, came free in my hand and unplugged a sudden gush of dark blood that smelled of raw sewage. He screamed, lost his will for a moment. Long enough for me to shove my hand back into the hole it had made, push against the spinal column and thrust with my pelvis, to flip him onto his back. I only had a second, but it didn’t need more. I closed my jaws around his neck don’t swallow the blood jammed them together, shoved two fingers into his screaming mouth, then bit, shook and yanked until his big bald head came off.

  Sensation was returning to my left side. I got to my feet and raced back to my son.

  Because the universe is perverse the fourth cable proved tougher than the other three. My cut palms were burning and slippery with blood, and for what felt like an hour I stood there, braced and straining, hands haemorrhaging, thighs quivering, while around me the sound dropped away again and I imagined being stuck like this for ever, like a scene in a macabre snow-shaker. Walker had freed Konstantinov and slung him, unconscious, over his shoulder. Dozens of vampires had got out (once the silver ammo dropped out of the game, they really didn’t want to play) but there were still twenty at least in various states of combat or mutilation. Trish had cut her way to Cloquet and hacked through his bonds with one of the machetes.

  Lorcan was now the only one of us still prisoner.

  I howled. Vampire hair stood on end.

  The cable was grating against bare bone in both hands.

  I saw Marco look up and say: ‘Visitors. Another time, Mistress.’

  Then the steel fibres snapped and the room’s cacophony rushed back in – and my son jumped into my arms.

  Joy closes your eyes.

  But if you’re a werewolf, silver opens them.

  In this case to see Remshi on the floor, convulsing around one of our homemade stakes, and Jacqueline Delon standing over him, holding one of the discarded guns in a two-handed grip, aiming directly at me.

  63

  All I wanted time to do was turn and get my body between the bullet and my son. I didn’t get even that. I was still midway through the move and the understanding that Jacqueline wasn’t going to bother with the Hollywood villain’s victory speech but was in fact going to shoot immediately, when an explosion (as if a time bomb had been ticking in Remshi himself) detonated at her feet.

  Heat the size of a planet hit us, spun the walls and ceiling and floor. We were airborne, revolving, for hours. Plenty of time at least to see that Marco had disappeared and that there was no sign of Jacqueline. The bottom half of Remshi’s corpse was gone. Fergus was feeding on a familiar unchallenged in a corner. Lucy had her jaws around the throat of a female vampire, human age of about seventy, with liver-spotted hands, dangling diamond earrings and what had started the evening as an elaborate silver chignon. Trish had given Cloquet the machete, but the vampires still left in the chamber were more interested in escape than battle.

  Lorcan and I hit the ground as a second blast blew a hole in the western wall and let in with the smell of explosives the cool air of Cretan night with its scents of thyme and pine and moist grass. Let in too gunfire and the soulless chatter of helicopters.

  My son moved against me.

  Alive. He’s alive and you’ve got him.

  I knew he was alive because the blast burns were making him whine and the whines were twisting me inside. Somewhere far away Zoë was feeling it too, a scaled-down version of his trauma in her skin. I had to squash a surge of joy at the thought of them lying curled next to each other. Not yet. Not yet. Two more explosions, the second of which tore a big piece of the roof out and sent Fergus flying across the aisle to land, dazed and bloody, a few feet from me.

  WOCOP. WE GO NOW.

  Walker, with passed-out Konstantinov slung over his shoulders, was hoiking me up with a hand under my arm.

  DON’T KNOW IF SILVER. HAVE TO MOVE FAST.

  Fergus was struggling to his feet. Trish and Lucy were half barring the exit, half taking it in turns to feed on an unfortunate familiar who’d fallen there. The remaining vampires were going for the hole in the roof. Blue-white WOCOP chopper searchlights flashed in, wobbled, flashed out again. A vampire hit by at least twenty wooden shafts (the hickory darts of the Hail Mary) screamed and fell from one of the steel uprights.

  Next to Mia.

  She was conscious, but trapped under a slab of fallen masonry. Her brother had disappeared.

  We looked at each other. I knew what she was thinking: You’ve got what you want. You leave me here, I die. No one to come looking for you and your kids. She was resigned and disgusted. Resigned because she didn’t live in a world where one appealed to another’s better nature. Disgusted because after all the things she’d seen and done (her history floated around her, as if her ghost were rehearsing its departure) here she was about to meet her end ignominiously, helpless, pinned, ready for a WOCOP hot-shot to stake or behead at his leisure, some mortal idiot whose memories stood in relation to hers as a flea to a city.

  Vampires are strong – but not like us. Feeling my prompt Lorcan swung around onto my back and clung on, leaving my arms free. Mia’s expression didn’t change. We understood each other.

  If you think this means I won’t kill you, you’re wrong.

  I know. Can you walk?

  Her left femur and tibia were broken, the tibia sticking through the milky skin just below the knee. (Legs that would’ve been at home in an ad for quality nylons. Oh God, Jacob, I wish you were here!) However fast she healed it wouldn’t be fast enough to get her out before the grunts arrived. A hickory dart hit her in the face, went through her left cheek into her mouth. She plucked it out, spa
t dark blood. Another two hit the wrecked leg.

  I offered her my hand.

  Visibly nauseated – nostrils flickering, gorge rising, mouth turned down at the corners – she took it. I wondered if she’d ever touched a werewolf before.

  Walker, unable to stand the smell of her so close, put some distance between us.

  Between them Trish and Lucy had eaten at least a third of their victim. On my back Lorcan went taut at the scent of it – but not hungry. They’d fed him tonight somehow. Presumably a drugged or idiotic or compelled familiar. Or, as an homage to the movies, a peasant girl with restive breasts and torn skirt, eyes wide, skin wet with sweat. However they’d done it I could feel it in him, the flecks of foreign life, the dirty enrichment. Relieved as I was, I was still starving. Walker too. He’d taken Murdoch’s life but he hadn’t eaten him. I’d thought at the time: he doesn’t want him inside him. Not him. Not inside him.

  HELP ME WITH HER.

  But they couldn’t. The smell. The smell. Trish took Lorcan instead. He went to her readily enough, once I’d sent him the prompt. My soul tore a little as his weight shifted from me. It always would, now, for as long as we both lived. I hoisted Mia over my shoulder, though I knew it mortified her. I felt her retch, emptily, realised she wasn’t wearing the nose-paste; of course: she’d wanted to know when we were coming.

  We ran into the courtyard. WOCOP troops weren’t on the ground yet, and there were only four choppers. Some of the vampires had taken up positions – armed with machine guns – and were returning fire. The moon, in the first phase of its now religiously redundant eclipse, was a blood-edged peach. Walker, shouldering Konstantinov, was ahead on my left, Fergus on my right. Cloquet (having ditched the machete for an abandoned machine gun) was close by me, running flat-out and looking as if doing so was going to kill him. Lucy and Trish were covering our rear. A sort of giddiness flowed between us. Cloquet wouldn’t be able to go at our pace. Would have to suffer the indignity of being carried. Fergus, at my thought, swerved left and scooped him up in a fireman’s lift.

  The first of the outlying trees was near. Crawling towards it, hilariously exposed, was an injured vampire familiar.

  64

  We ran until we hit deeper forest, went a quarter of a mile in and stopped to catch our breath. Pines, holly oaks, evergreen maples. Wood-flavoured air and a feeling of sanctuary. WOCOP hadn’t followed. I thought I understood: But they’re paying us, Murdoch had said. The Fifty Families, he’d meant. Unable to locate the Disciples they’d contracted-out to the Hunt. Job done and no vampire blood on vampire hands. And a bonus if you leave the werewolves alive. The Helios Project hadn’t given up on lycanthrope genetics holding the key to daylight tolerance.

  The moon was almost wholly eclipsed. I’d wondered if it would make any difference. It didn’t. If anything wulf’s dial was higher. Certainly it hadn’t dinted my appetite. We’d torn the vamps’ human into portable chunks and Walker and I had gone through our share in two minutes, barely lifting our heads. Trish and Fergus had slunk away to fuck. After a few moments of palpable vacillating, Lucy had followed them. Anyway, something went, I remembered her saying. There is no old life for me now.

  Walker, obviously, was in a state. He wanted me (and knew I wanted him) but he knew I wouldn’t leave Lorcan again. Not now.

  YOU GO WITH THEM. I WANT YOU TO.

  Blurred and dreamy and unlocked with relief, I did want him to. The thought of him enjoying himself with Trish or Lucy (or Fergus, if the Curse had begun ravaging his other certainties) or all three of them together didn’t bother me in the least, because I knew how much good it would do him. Not only did it not bother me, it filled me with quiet benign pleasure. Just at that moment the notion of monogamy seemed grotesque and anti-life and absurd.

  NO TIME. MIKE.

  Relief on this scale evidently brought idiocy. Of course there was no time. Konstantinov needed treatment. As soon as we’d got our bearings we’d have to move again. The others would either lose themselves or catch us up, but either way wulf was done arguing with them.

  AND NOT SAFE.

  Mia, he meant. Her leg (she’d shoved the tibia back in by hand) was healing who knew how fast, and though there wasn’t much she could do to me there were Cloquet and Konstantinov to consider. She was already able to walk, albeit with an obviously excruciating limp.

  IT’S OKAY. WATCH.

  I tossed a small stick at Cloquet, who was leaning against a tree looking as if he might vomit, to get his attention. I pointed at Mia, then mimed phoning.

  ‘I understand you?’ Cloquet asked. ‘This is the situation we discussed?’

  Mia’s eyes watched everything. I nodded: Yes. Do it.

  He turned to Mia. ‘Caleb is in the basement of a house in the town of Lymington on the south coast of England,’ he told her. ‘I’m texting you the address now. He’s being looked after by a doctor who supplies him with blood when he needs it. Your son is fine, but not at full strength. After you’ve spoken to him, the doctor will leave him enough blood to recover completely. He’ll also leave him money and the phone you’re about to speak to him on. You can make whatever arrangements for a rendezvous you like. Is that acceptable?’

  Mia looked at me. Like me she’d trained herself to harden her heart. But now here we were, and I could feel the little force field of desperation around her. It was desperation that wanted to be allowed its true form: love.

  I gestured to Cloquet to get on with it. He dialled. It couldn’t have rung more than once. I pictured Budarin hearing him out: the round, unperturbable face, the body as neat as a well-fed sparrow’s). ‘Put Caleb on,’ Cloquet said, then handed the phone to Mia.

  She spoke one word in English: ‘Caleb?’ then switched to Russian.

  It was either a coincidence or testimony to the power of his native tongue that Konstantinov, who’d been unconscious the whole time (I’d thought he was in a coma), coughed, said something in Russian, spat out a gobbet of blood and sat up.

  Problems were stacking like air traffic. Since Murdoch had staked out the Falasarna house there was every chance he’d know about the stashed IDs and getaway vans. In the panic of flight we’d come a long way off-course. Mesavlia was now some eight miles north and there wouldn’t be cover all the way. Our only practical support was the sketchy weapons contact in Athens and his unreliable buddies in Heraklion. Konstantinov needed water and antibiotics. We had neither.

  But I had my son back. Unearned, unjustified, a second chance.

  He was curled up in my lap, asleep, I’d thought, but when I looked down I saw he was looking up at me. The giant primary realisation – mother – had blazed through him in the stretched seconds and minutes of the rescue and made everything else irrelevant. But now his reflex emotional spend was over, and other information – more inconvenient truth – was reasserting itself. He knew, at a level beneath or beyond articulation, two things. One, I was guilty. Two, he’d suffered. There was a gap between these two known things. Watching me, letting my body’s heat meld with his, he was deciding what to do with it, this gap. He was deciding whether to close it with a connection. I had an image of him years from now as a wiry teenager sitting on the edge of the pool in the Los Angeles villa, moving his legs slowly in the sun-marbled water, then glancing up at me with the human version of the look he gave me now, one that knew he had power of judgement over me. It would be like a talisman he could produce at any time, to stop me in the middle of whatever it was I was doing, to stop me in the middle of loving him, probably, if he’d inherited any of his mother’s perverseness and cruelty.

  We stared at each other now and understood all this, but understood too that there would be love to ruin, which was better than no love at all.

  He blinked. Gradually let the pieces come apart in his mind – for now. I put my hand on his hot chest and felt his steadying heartbeat. His sister would be what we both loved. We’d meet at her, like rival gang lords on neutral turf.

  ‘Ya teebya
lyubyu, Angel moy,’ Mia said, ending the call. She put the number into her phone, tossed Cloquet’s back to him, looked at me. ‘We’ll meet again,’ she said.

  ‘When you do,’ Cloquet said, ‘remember she saved your life.’

  It didn’t register. Cloquet didn’t count. Humans didn’t count. She turned and limped away into the darkness. A few moments after she was out of sight we heard her go up suddenly and noisily through the trees... and a few moments later come down noisily again. She was in no shape for the effort vampire flight required. But she was desperate to see her son.

  65

  In the end there was nothing for it but to stick with the original out. Even if Murdoch had known about the vans and the hidden IDs, he wouldn’t have passed it to WOCOP. It was after all supposed to be his one-man show: single-handed capture of live werewolf for which Helios would pay WOCOP – or now that I thought about it more likely Sir, privately lining his own pockets – handsomely, and in return for which Murdoch would’ve been reinstated to the Hunt.

  All we had to do now was make it across eight miles of patchy cover with an injured man.

  Which, incredibly, is exactly what we did. Cloquet called the Athens contact, who promised (drunkenly, it sounded to me) he’d send ‘a medical person’ to meet us in the airport parking lot. Walker carried Konstantinov, the rest of us took it in turns to let Cloquet hitch a ride. In a forgivable reversion to type, my familiar had brought along a little cocaine in case of celebration. He took a couple of toots when switching from Lucy to Fergus, looked at me and said: ‘I feel that we should go to the Caribbean. The water there is like liquid topaz.’

  We reached the derelict farm, collected the clothes and IDs, and did what little we could for Konstantinov with the minimal first-aid kit. Cloquet even found a stream nearby, from which, when we carried him there, Konstantinov drank and drank and drank. After that there was nothing to do but wait for moonset. When it came, tacit agreement saw us all seeking our own spots of privacy among the trees, though the air went heavy and active around us when we changed, as if each of us was a separate, confined thunderstorm. We dressed, and Fergus and Lucy went, with the mystery of their human form refreshed (the poignancy of the knees and elbows, the niftiness of the fingers, the unique nudity of the face), to fetch the vans.