By Blood We Live (20 page)

“Promise me something,” she said.

“What.”

“Promise me you’ll live as long as you can.”

I didn’t answer. Nothing I could say seemed right. She was aware of
that
, too.

“Just promise me,” she said.

After a long time breathing the smell of her and trying to imagine existence without it, I said, “All right. I promise I’ll live as long as I can.”

It shouldn’t have felt such a difficult promise to make.

I told Amlek about her, but not the others.

“And you’re saying … With her it’s …?”

Naturally this was the big thing. Naturally this was what he couldn’t get over.

“Yes,” I told him. “Everything. As when we were human.”

It was just after sunset on my farewell night. Vali was waiting for me in the cave three miles away. Amlek and I sat in a plane tree overhanging the river. The water was a large peacefully moving intelligence. He knew I was leaving with her. I hadn’t needed to tell him.

“How long will she live?”

He regretted it immediately.

“Not forever,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“For a little while.”

“Really, I’m sorry.”

“But she’s alive now.”

“Of course.”

For a few minutes we sat in silence. In silence saying goodbye. I felt him thinking of the time and space immediately ahead of him without me in it. Sadness, yes, but also his self’s excitement to be free of anything against which to measure itself. To be the only answer to his own questions.

We didn’t arrange anything. Time, place. We shared blood. We’d see each other again.

“Rem?” he called, when I was moving off in the darkness.

“What?”

I felt him grinning.

“She doesn’t have a sister, does she?”

When I got to the cave Vali wasn’t in it. Its smell had changed, too. Hers was still there, but mixed with a human’s, raw and acrid, discharged in fear or rage. I realised, as I followed both odours back down towards the river, that I was trembling. Here was the cruel joke: We give you bliss then take it away. I’d been right all along.

But I found her, alive, unharmed, less than a mile away. A shallow valley of turf and pale stones descended to a narrow stream with thorn trees growing on its banks. She was kneeling over the body of a man and she was holding a rock in her right hand. The man was face-down. His head was bleeding. The smell of which, though I didn’t need to drink until tomorrow night, pulled on my instinct like a child tugging its mother’s hand.

“He’s not dead,” Vali said.

I knew that from the blood. We can’t drink from the dead.

“Who is he?” I asked her. She looked beautiful. The warmth of what had happened still in her.

“His name’s Mabon. He’s from my tribe. I can’t believe he followed me all this way.”

I understood. He wanted her.

“If he’s come this far,” I told her, “he won’t stop now. Does he know?”

What you are.

“Yes.”

A little flicker of respect for poor Mabon, desire to rip his head off notwithstanding.

“I can’t kill him,” she said. “I won’t kill him.” Which meant: And I don’t want you to kill him, either.

“Tomorrow’s full moon,” she said. “I’ll be able to travel as fast as you. Soon we’ll be far from here. Too far for him to follow. He’s not a bad person.”

“He doesn’t have to be a bad person to be a dangerous one.”

“I don’t care. We’re not killing him.”

“Okay. You’re the boss.”

Pause.

“Am I?”

Said with just enough play to stir my cock.

“
You
are a bad person,” I said, moving towards her.

We kissed, and felt the option of fucking here, by poor prostrate Mabon—on top of him, why not? But she rejected it. Trivial piquancy. The sort of mean symbolic gesture someone smaller might need. Not her. Little cruelties suggested she still needed help to be reconciled to the big ones. She didn’t.

Mabon, in any case, was showing signs of consciousness, so we took our leave. It was my plan to travel east by the river, skirting the mountains. Water meant people, and the mountains meant easy concealment.

Tomorrow, it had passed between us, we would hunt together.

W
E HADN
’
T TALKED
about it. We’d known not to. It was the only thing we were uncertain of. She was afraid I’d forgotten what she turned into. I hadn’t, but still, I didn’t know: that first night in the cave, if she hadn’t returned to her human form, would I have lain with her?

“How far is the camp?” she said. It was almost moonrise. We were in a cave I’d kicked a mountain lion out of the day before. He’d put up a fight for a while, but I was too fast. I’d said to him: Look, give up, will you? You’ve lost a lot of blood. It’s only going to get worse for you. And with what was unmistakably a sigh, followed by a roll of the neck and a stretch that was meant to make it look as if boredom had got the better of him, he’d turned and slouched away.

“Less than a mile,” I told her. “Is it always this bad?”

She smiled. Stupid question. She was pale and shivering and wet with sweat. I couldn’t touch her. When it had first started I had very gently put my hand between her shoulder blades. She said: “I love you, but if you do that or anything else to my skin I’ll kill you.”

“Do you want water?” I asked her now.

She shook her head, no. When she swallowed her throat swelled for a moment—then returned to normal.

“I wish I could help you.”

“Shshsh. It’s … Oh fuck, it’s coming. Move.”

Again, I watched. The same process in reverse. More alarming this time: The beast becoming beauty relieves. Beauty becoming the beast unnerves. Her skull shuddered. Her jaw leaped forward with a wet crunch. Her legs lengthened before her arms and torso, so for a moment her head was a remote spectacle the way a stilt-walker’s is. Her dark eyes darkened. Hair hurried out with a sound like distant burning. She fell onto all-fours, rolled onto her side, clutched her gut, convulsed. Her scent pounded out of her, filled my face and limbs with wealth. The soft kernel of that smell
was between her legs. I’d found it that first time, kissing her there in her human shape. Now at the first inhalation my cock rose. At the same time I imagined Amlek saying:
It’s still basically a dog, Rem. A big dog walking on its hind legs.
Of course the romantic antidote was that it was my beloved on the
inside
—but that wasn’t true. I didn’t want the woman inside the beast. Nor did I want the beast around the woman. I wanted Vali, all of what she was, every point on the scale of her nature. This was her and the dark-eyed woman ready to laugh and kiss and see through you and fuck you was her. They weren’t divisible. Nor, it turned out, was my desire. This revelation was a warmth spreading through me. I could feel happiness in my face.
There is nothing of you I don’t want.

There would be a discrepancy … There would be practical … The discrepancy would leave us with certain practical … I laughed, quietly, seeing in her eyes she’d picked this up and was thinking,
me on all-fours, of course
, was seeing us in that position, her snout buried under the burst ribs of a victim.

The image gave her hunger a final push, and the last vestiges of her human shape surrendered.

My thirst didn’t need a push. It had been three days. One more and it would start to hurt. I kept swallowing. My fangs were live, my blood loud with the murmur of my countless drunk-down dead. You’d think it’d get old, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. Every victim’s unique, quenches in its own way and adds its way of being to yours.

They’d posted lookouts. Two, within shouting distance of the camp.

We took one each.

They didn’t get to shout.

I hadn’t known how it would be. Only that it would be unlike anything else.

Which it was.

I drank a lot, fast, alone with my drink. Partly because the thirst was three days old and at the first spurt and whiff of blood (my guard was a young man, leanly muscled, full of strength and as yet undischarged love; love was there in him, waiting, almost ready—and now would never find its way to anyone) took away everything but the need to satisfy it. Partly
too (the intractable logistics, which as much as love or art or imagination make the world what it is) because I daren’t risk a draught from her victim: if his lights went out while I was drinking, mine would too, and his lights were in her hands. But partly—let me be scrupulously honest—because now that we’d come to it I didn’t know what she’d want. We hadn’t, I repeat, talked about it. Only moved towards it via irresistible gravity.

I rose, slaked, inwardly aswirl with my young guard’s life: the dizziness when he first saw the sea, his child’s mind imagining it pouring off the edge of the earth in a giant dark green waterfall but where did the water go? He was almost sucked over the edge with it, he’d felt himself fighting its terrible pull, actually turned away and put his arms around his mother’s hips and pressed his face to her thighs, though the big open salt air of the shore was also calming, an offer of love, like his mother’s love but too big—

Vali was down on all-fours, looking back over her shoulder at me, legs spread, backside thrust up. Her muzzle winked and dripped gore. Her blood-scented breath went up in rhythmic signals, contemptuous of all restraint. It was an appallingly recognisable version of the way she looked at me when she was in human form, in that same position of brazen, insistent availability. A look of dark understanding. I know you. You know me. This. This.
This.

Her body’s aliveness when I went, cock blood-packed and aching, into her was an all but unbearable sweet assault. She was full of sly power. Drownable in. Her victim’s life flailed in her. Her greed was there in the pulse of her cunt that my own pulse rushed to join, until we were in thudding synchronicity I’d never felt before, something in time with the heart of … Of what? The universe. Life. Everything. The glimmering lode or stubborn tremor of corruption was essential, the awful fact of pleasure that increased proportional to her victim’s suffering, a relation I—lustless for centuries until now—had in my mortal days only ever glimpsed, as a ghost through smoke. But it was there with us (as the divisions between things dissolved, and the full moon swam in the river above us and the mountain opened on a vault of stars), the great spirit of cruelty, of enlargement by theft, that whether we liked it or not was close to the heart of what we were. This was what she’d had to find room for. The monster
gave, if nothing else, an honest ultimatum: Find room for this or die. And she
had
found room. She’d forced her own growth to accommodate it, let the moon month by month shrink guilt and sadness until they were only two forlorn rooms in the house of many mansions. Rooms she went to less, would go to less, would revisit with diminishing nostalgia. This, I now knew, was why we hadn’t talked about it. She hadn’t known (intimations, yes, but not certainty) whether it would be this way for me, whether
I
would find room for it.

But with her, like this, with manhood (as it were) restored, there was no room for anything else. I knew—with the negligible part of me not unstrung by ecstasy—that I would have to spend some energy after this convincing her she hadn’t done me an injury of initiation. It would take all her cunning courage to rise above
that
fear,
that
guilt. And yet I knew she would. It was the last gap in intimacy between us bridged, that she loved me and wanted me enough to risk turning herself into something I’d resent. I loved her for it.

T
HREE YEARS LATER
, we came back.

Three years. Approximately. In how many thousands?

Nothing had dulled.
Nothing
had dulled. The world was still ours. Giant skies, glamorous constellations. The sound of the sea on the shore. That mist-rain that doesn’t fall but materialises in soft suspension in the air around you. The kills knitted us. The profane matrimonial rite, renewed every month, deepening our monstrous cahoots. Only species exigencies rucked the silk. Most obviously, that I was confined to the hours of darkness. Of course she adjusted her sleep pattern and became mostly nocturnal, but it wasn’t easy. For a start, the week either side of full moon, her sleep was all over the place. But more than that, she missed the light. Of course she did.
I
missed the light, and I’d had centuries to get used to it. We had, effectively, weeks apart. Naturally, just after sunset was our window. Even if she was sleeping nights we still had hours, and the restriction made them precious.

“How was the light today?”

“Big. Hot. Broad. Yellow-white. The sky’s blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone’s hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes.”

Sometimes, kissing her, I could smell the sun and the air on her skin. It aroused me beyond reason.

The other discrepancy was that I had to feed every fourth or fifth day. But killing with her had made killing
without
her an enraging chore. I pushed it. Six days, seven, eight. It was the one thing she scolded me for. But when I timed it just right—starved myself so that the thirst reached a debilitating intensity on full moon—the reward was unholily sweet. There was nothing—
nothing
—like our union then, wedded in blood, a lawless law unto ourselves.

“We go at night,” I said. “I come with you.”

“I don’t want you to come with me.”

We’d come back because she’d dreamed of her mother, dying. Her human mother. Whom she hadn’t seen since the tribe had driven her out. Her mother had fought for her to be allowed to stay. Until her father had beaten her into silence—and near death. Now, because of the dream, my beloved wanted to see the old woman again, one last time.

Once, I said to her: “Vali, it’s just a dream.”

Only once, because when she answered “I have to do this,” and looked at me, I knew it would be pointless to argue. She believed in dreams. Not comprehensively. Perhaps five or six times since I’d known her she’d dreamed something and been unable to ignore it.