Barking (52 page)

It was working. The van was swaying from side to side, setting up a feedback loop of panic and over-correction. Duncan lengthened his stride just a touch—

The file.

Well, it wasn't in his mouth. He must have left it behind when he started the game, or else dropped it at some point. He knew that losing the file was terribly important somehow, but he couldn't be bothered with all that now, not when his control over the prey was tightening with each spurt of acceleration, to the point where his nose could already anticipate the smells of spilled diesel and burning rubber. Bowden Allshapes and Luke and all that nonsense seemed hopelessly remote, in any case. He wasn't doing this because he was the victim of some bizarre and complex conspiracy, or because his friends and the girl he loved had left him up there in that office and not even tried to get him out. He was doing it because he was a werewolf; a good werewolf, possibly even a great one. Because it was fun.

Smells don't carry upwind, so the first he knew of it was a large, solid body looming up on his left side. The collision winded him; he lost his footing, stumbled, felt the hard asphalt slam into his shoulder and squeeze out all the air. Then he was tumbling, head over paws; the tarmac kept punching him - head, ribs, elbows, head again - until something metal and a bit stretchy caught him like a net, and he stopped. When he opened his eyes and saw what a mess he'd made of the crash barrier, he couldn't help feeling mildly impressed. Eighteen-wheeler artics didn't usually do that much damage.

He smelled Luke Ferris before he saw him. The Ferris sweat had a distinctive tang to it that he'd know anywhere. This, however, was the first time he'd smelled Luke's blood. Also quite distinctive, and there was—

- Rather a lot of it.

Duncan picked himself up, gave himself a good all-over shake, and looked round. Luke was a long, splayed shape on the opposite carriageway: he'd burst clean through the barrier (typical Ferris, had to outdo everyone else) and was lying stretched out, as if frozen in the middle of a flying stride. For some reason, all Duncan's anger evaporated. Something was wrong. A healthy werewolf wouldn't be lying like that, not with that rather distinctive newly ironed look that you only get with fresh road kill.

If he'd still been angry, he'd have jumped the barrier. Instead, he walked slowly through the gap Luke had torn in it - taking his time, he realised, because he was in no hurry to get there and see what he had to see.

It's marginally better to travel hopelessly than to arrive, but Duncan got there in the end. Luke was still breathing, but he was making a noise like someone filing the sharp edges off thin sheet metal. He opened one eye as Duncan sidled up to him and sniffed.

‘So there you are,' Luke said, and Duncan realised he could hear him the usual way, rather than in his mind. ‘I've been looking everywhere for you.'

A bit like a slap round the face with a handful of nettles. ‘You have?'

‘We all have.' Luke tried to nod, but apparently it was too difficult. ‘I asked the vampires where that dreadful woman might've taken you, but they said they had no idea. I think they were lying.'

‘But she gave you the address. For delivering the file.'

‘Really?' Luke coughed, and something dark red and thickly wet trickled down the side of his jaw. ‘Don't think so. The address they gave us turned out to be a key-cutting place in one of those grotty little streets near Victoria. So we split up and went out looking for you. Every night, after work. Pure chance I happened to catch a whiff of you tonight - extreme range, eight miles away.' He glanced down at his back legs. Human legs were supposed to bend that way, but not a wolf's. ‘I suppose I just got lucky, wouldn't you say?'

Duncan opened his mouth to say something, but it evaporated along the way.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘you're out now, so that's all right. I'd love to hear all about it, but I get the feeling that I'm a bit pushed for time. You know,' he went on, ‘I'd always wondered exactly how much punishment one of these bodies could take, and now I know. It'll survive pretty much anything except a fifty-mile-an-hour collision with another werewolf. Only,' he added, ‘you don't seem too bad. Which is great,' he said, ‘but curious. A mystery. Oh well.'

‘Luke,' Duncan said. ‘Why did you do it?'

‘Do what?'

That infuriating Ferris don't-know-what-you're-talking-about stare; if Luke hadn't been dying, Duncan would've smashed his face in. ‘Ram into me like that. Stop me—'

A slight frown, if wolves can do that sort of thing. ‘You know perfectly well why,' Luke replied. ‘I haven't got the faintest idea what got into you, but I know precisely what you were trying to do, and no, sorry, we don't do that. The Walthamstow mob yes, but not us. It's what you might call a point of honour. If you happen to be a pompous git, I mean.'

Duncan wasn't sure where the anger came from, but there was plenty of it. ‘And you think that's worth getting yourself smashed up for.'

‘Me? Not sure. It's you I was thinking of. You're the one who'd have to live with it, if you'd caught that van like you were trying to. Stupid bastard,' he added, with a trace of a grin. ‘You could've killed somebody. Sorry, am I boring you?'

Duncan lifted his head. Maybe Luke was too badly smashed up to notice it, but the smell was everywhere. ‘She's here,' he said.

‘She who? Clare Short?'

‘The unicorn.'

Luke laughed, messily. ‘Then you'd better give her my regards, but she's wasting her time. I won't be chasing anybody tonight, that's for sure. You'd better clear off, though. Go on, don't mind me.'

Duncan turned round slowly. There she was, the milk-white unicorn. If anything, she looked more beautiful than ever, a soft bright glow that was far more than just light. The moon flared on her hooves and horn, as though she was drawing it in.

‘You arsehole,' she said. ‘You complete shit.'

‘Go away,' Duncan said. ‘I'm busy.'

‘You dropped this.' The Allshapes probate file materialised in the air just in front of his face and flopped to the ground. ‘It's a miracle I just happened to trip over it. Do you realise what it'd have meant if you'd lost it? I'm very angry with you. In fact—' She broke off, and her soft white nostrils twitched. Then, apparently for the first time, she noticed Luke. ‘Oh for pity's sake, not another one.'

‘Afraid so.'

She came closer, and her nose brushed Duncan's shoulder as she lowered her head to look. ‘Don't tell me,' she said. ‘Another rescue bid.'

‘Yes.'

A long equine sigh. ‘I must say,' she said, ‘I'm glad I'm your enemy, not your friend. You really are a bit hard on the people you like.'

‘Yes.'

‘Not to mention,' she went on, ‘inconsiderate. If you think I've got nothing better to do than go around snatching your nearest and dearest from the jaws of death—'

It was as though what she'd just said was a windscreen, and he was a little slow, soft-bodied fly.
Impossible
, he thought frantically.
She can't possibly save him now, he's all smashed up. She could cure Veronica because all it took was stopping her dying of garlic, which is just supernatural rubbish. This is different, it's splintered bones and ruptured spleens and punctured lungs. Real stuff. There's no way anybody can—

‘You can do that?' he asked.

‘Oh yes.' She was managing to sound as though he'd phoned her at five twenty-nine, just as she was on her way out of the office. ‘Any time in the next two minutes. After that, no. At least,' she added, with a twinkle in her voice that made Duncan want to growl, ‘not in the sense you mean. Though - no offence - he's not quite the sort of person we're recruiting right now, career opportunities-wise. A bit too boisterous and Tiggerish, to be perfectly honest with you.'

‘I see.' Duncan looked her in the eyes. It was like trying to outstare a tunnel. ‘Same terms as last time, I take it.'

‘Basically,' she said. ‘Except this time, we're really going to have to put in some kind of guarantee clause, to stop you wandering off every five minutes. I do understand you wanting to stretch your legs now and again, but I'm afraid it's not on. Not when you've got responsibilities.'

‘Guarantee clause,' Duncan repeated.

‘Oh, nothing too blood-curdling,' she said briskly. ‘All I was thinking of was planting a silver bullet in your chum's chest. You know the sort of thing - like old soldiers who carry on quite cheerfully for years and years with huge great chunks of shrapnel still inside them after they got blown up in the war: so long as it stays put and doesn't move about, no bother at all. Same idea. So long as you stay put and do your job, the bullet doesn't move. It's no trouble,' she added, ‘I can pop it in now before I close him up. Well, is it a deal?'

‘Duncan, for God's sake.' The words came out of Luke's throat like air from slow puncture. ‘Don't listen to her, mate. Don't do it. I'm not worth it, OK?'

‘Oh dear.' The unicorn sighed wearily. ‘You were at school together and everything, and still you don't know him half as well as I do, you silly man. Now please be quiet and don't move around more than you can help. There's enough wrong with you as it is.'

Duncan frowned. All his life, the trend had been for things to get more and more complicated, each set of aggravations and encumbrances impacting on its predecessors and snagging in those that followed. But that was what he'd grown used to, his natural habitat. Moments of perfect simplicity disconcerted him, and he wasn't quite sure how they worked. Still, he thought, I'll just have to do my best and hope I get the hang of it as I go along.

‘No,' he said, ‘Luke's right. He's not worth it. No deal.'

The unicorn's shocked
‘What
did you just say?' coincided so perfectly with Luke's roar of ‘Now just a fucking minute' that Duncan heard it as a kind of barber-shop duet. He shook his head. After three decades of uncertainty, he'd never been more sure of anything in all his life.

‘Sorry, mate,' he said, as Luke lifted his head a good three inches and glared murderously at him. ‘You're my best friend and I'll miss you a lot, and if there was anything else I could do, I wouldn't think twice about it. But not that.' He shuddered. You can shudder really well if you've got a long bushy tail. ‘I've been there, and I'm buggered if I'm ever going back. I'll probably tear myself apart about it for the rest of my life, but I'll just have to deal with that somehow. So long, my old mate. And I'll get her for this somehow, one day, you can bloody well have my word on that.'

‘You
shit
,' Luke howled. ‘Are you out of your frigging skull? You can't just stand there and let me die—'

Duncan clicked his tongue. ‘Sorry to seem so callous about it,' he said, ‘but yes, I can. Watch me. But it's all right,' he added. ‘Now that I'm free of her, I can figure out some way of making these estate accounts balance and then—' He turned to the unicorn and grinned. ‘That'll be that, won't it?' he said. ‘Goodbye Bowden Allshapes, this was your grotesquely overextended life. Because that's all it'll take, isn't it? Two identical numbers at the foot of a piece of paper, and you're history. Well,' he amended, ‘mythology, anyway. That's why it had to be me, I already knew that. If anybody else adds up those numbers, you're finished.'

‘I don't think so,' the unicorn said, and he had to admit that she was superb. Every cell in his body wanted to believe her.

‘Well,' Duncan replied, ‘we'll soon see. But I think I'm right. I think that's why you had me locked up in that tower on my own, so you could be sure nobody who counts in Base Ten ever came near your precious file ever again. I think that's why you got me the job at Craven Ettins, so I'd be there on tap when the special file came in. Oh, you were pretty smart about that, I expect. Lovely piece of creative fiction, that file. Specially compiled so that anybody looking at it would see straight away that it was one of those jobs that's been screwed up beyond all possibility of salvage by whoever had the running of it last; which means it'll be nothing but aggravation to whoever gets landed with it next. Which meant, inevitably, that it'd end up on
my
desk, and nobody else could ever be persuaded to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Well? Am I right, or am I flattering you?'

‘Both,' the unicorn said. ‘But—'

‘No,' Duncan snapped. ‘This time, you shut up and listen. Here's the deal. I'm through with you, for ever. Find someone else to do your stupid sums for you, or just roll over and die, I don't care. But I can promise you this. Unless you fix my friend there, and no pissing around with silver bullets, because I'll be watching, then I'm going to take this file and I'm going to buy a maths textbook and a calculator, and you're going to be a very endangered species indeed. You got that? Or do you want me to draw you a Venn diagram?'

There was a slight disturbance in the light, and she turned into a woman. Not the gorgeous-instantly-forgettable one he'd come to know and not remember, but a small, dumpy, middle-aged female with very bright blue eyes and a sort of office-manager look on her face that told Duncan he hadn't just made a new friend. ‘Don't be stupid, Duncan,' she said. ‘I'm not some little fat kid in the playground, you can't bully me. I, on the other hand, can make life really tiresome for you. For instance—'

A car appeared out of the darkness and slowed down. Duncan could see the driver peering thoughtfully at him before he speeded up and moved on.