By Blood We Live (35 page)

I felt lousy by the time I got there, anyway. Full moon was just over forty-eight hours away and
wulf
was busting the usual tedious moves, the premature lunges and twists, the pointless clawed spasms and swipes. I hadn’t slept properly since Zagreb. My eyes were raw. The nerves in my nails throbbed.

Olek’s … what? laboratory?—was a former ashram on the edge of the reserve, but barring a few weathered statues of the smiling Buddha in the garden, you’d never have known it. The garden itself was spectacular, dense, lush, a sort of willing stereotype of the exotic East, blood-reds and splashy yellows and simmering pinks, though with the exception of bougainvillea, jasmine and oleander I didn’t recognise any of the flowers. There were two huge banyans and, dotted here and there, lemon, tamarind, guava and peach trees, all heavy with fruit. Three green ponds with long, fat, drowsy fish—koi carp?—and a paved, semi-circular patio at the front on which a large abstract sculpture—a torqued ovoid with a hole in the middle, in some kind of polished blue stone—took pride of place. The building itself was three large, intersecting, flat-roofed concrete rectangles, with three floors above ground (on arrival there was no telling how many below, but I had to assume at least one) with tinted windows and an iron-railed balcony going all the way around between the second and third storeys. He’s dug-in here, I thought. Maybe that’s
what happens in the end. The wandering stops and you just accept a place as home. No matter how many centuries you have ahead of you. I hadn’t noticed any security on the drive in, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any.

Grishma looked at his watch. “Mr. Olek will be with us shortly,” he said. “Can I offer you anything in the meantime? Tea? Something stronger?”

I’d been led through an entrance hall of white plaster walls and a terra cotta floor into a library of floor-to-ceiling books. Furniture was three green leather Chesterfields, a large glass desk and a white, futuristic recliner, all on three or four big blue and gold-fringed Indian (or for all I knew Persian or Chinese) carpets of exquisitely intricate design. A huge benign asparagus fern on a dark wooden plant stand cast a stretched shadow the full length of the room in the last of the low sunlight. A tall art deco standard lamp stood in one corner, twin nymphs holding a glass globe. There was a book open face-down on one of the couches.

“Just water,” I said. “Is it okay to smoke?”

Grishma seemed calmly delighted at the idea. “One hundred per cent,” he said, and fetched an ashtray from the hall—a pretty copper dish on an ebony stand—which he set down beside the nearest Chesterfield. “I’ll bring your water,” he said.

“Actually,” I said, feeling
wulf
giving my spine a wrench, “I’ll take a scotch as well, if you have one.”

“Talisker, Glenmorangie, Oban, Laphroaig or Macallan?”

Not bad for someone who didn’t drink.

“Macallan, please. Straight.” Here’s to you, Jacob Marlowe. It’s a library, after all. Sorry I turned out to be such a lousy werewolf. It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have died.

Grishma was back in less than five minutes with a silver tray. He turned the lamp on. “I’ll leave you now,” he said. “Feel free to have a browse in here while you wait.”

As in: Don’t leave this room, sister.

I didn’t. I lit a Camel and picked up the book next to me on the couch. Browning.
Men and Women.
A first edition. Open at “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” I’d read the poem before, in college. For no reason
I could think of, it reminded me of the dream. The vampire dream. The only dream I had, these days, these nights. I began reading.

“Marvellous, isn’t it?” a voice said.

I looked up. I couldn’t have been reading for more than a few seconds, but somehow it was now completely dark outside. The lamp’s globe had brightened.

Olek—I recognised the voice—stood in the doorway.

Not what I’d been expecting, since like it or not I’d been expecting Omar Sharif. What I was seeing was a short, dark, plump, thin-moustached man in his mid-fifties (humanly speaking) with skin the colour of milk chocolate, mischievous black eyes and a full-lipped, currently smiling, mouth. His teeth looked unnaturally white. He was dressed in faded black jeans and a white cotton
kurta.
Green suede Adidas sneakers. Big gold and garnet ring on his left index finger.

“To my mind one of the most remarkable poems in the English language.”

“I don’t really remember it that well,” I said.

He came closer, and offered me his hand. At which point I realised what I should have noticed straight away. He didn’t smell.

Or rather, he didn’t smell of his species. He smelled of patchouli and toothpaste and lemons. He read my face.

“Talulla—I may call you Talulla, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you must call me Olek, of course. No, I don’t smell as expected, I know. I’m delighted. I’ve put a lot of work in on olfactory inhibitors. But we can discuss that later. You don’t remember the poem much, you say? Please, please, let’s sit.”

I’d stood up to shake hands. He waited for me to resume my seat, then sat himself on the industrial glass desk, legs swinging. No socks. Delicate brown ankles.

“I remember it’s about a knight looking for the Dark Tower,” I said. I was yielding so easily to the casual madness of the encounter I wondered if they’d put something in my drink. “I remember a journey through a kind of nightmare landscape. I remember it’s
long.
”

“Do you recall whether Childe Roland
finds
the Dark Tower?”

I couldn’t see that it mattered, but I racked my brains anyway. “No,” I said. “I don’t. Does he?”

Olek smiled again. He had an immensely likeable face. So likeable that if this were a movie he’d have to be a psychotic villain. “I shan’t spoil it for you,” he said. “You must take that volume to bed tonight and see for yourself.”

Madder and madder. Browning for bedtime reading at a vampire’s house. In India. Okay. Why not?

“But you’ll want to freshen up, perhaps? You won’t be wanting anything to eat, obviously.”

I stubbed the Camel out in the ashtray. Mentally gave myself a slap.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but why don’t you just tell me what I’m doing here?”

“You’re here because I have a cure for your condition,” he said, not missing a beat. “Or I dare say more importantly a cure for your children’s condition. You’re here because they’re still young enough to slip through the world’s tightening net. You saw the footage. Hardship, one way or another, is coming to your species. Most likely to mine as well. Your face is known. Your children still have a chance.” He paused. I caught a sudden full stink of vampire.

“Mikhail, Natasha, come and join us.”

I looked past him. Konstantinov and Natasha were in the doorway. Konstantinov looked exhausted.

“Mikhail hasn’t slept,” Olek said. “Despite my best efforts to reassure him he insisted on sitting up all day, staring at the monitors.”

It had been almost a year since I’d seen them, but apart from Konstantinov’s obvious lack of sleep he and Natasha looked—of course—
unchanged. As, visibly, palpably, was the love between them. Utterly sufficient and self-contained and above any law, human or otherwise. Their love made them their own law. I hadn’t realised how afraid I’d been until I felt the relief of seeing them.

“I’ll give you a little while alone,” Olek said. “Please, Talulla, help yourself to another drink.”

When he was gone, Natasha, Konstantinov and I looked at each other.

“Can you stand a hug?” I said.

We embraced, holding our noses, laughing—but the mutually repellent odours were no joke. Rolling her eyes, Natasha broke out the nose-paste. “He offered us something instead of this,” she said. “But we couldn’t take the chance. Sorry.”

They’d been here for two days.

“The place is CCTV’d,” Konstantinov said. “And there
were
guards, but we told him they had to go.”

“How could you not have slept?” I asked.

“Monitors are downstairs,” Konstantinov said. “Underground. I needed to be sure. I’m fine. One day I can manage.”

When he spoke, Natasha looked at him with calm certainty. The delight in each other Jake and I had had. As opposed to the almost delight between Walker and me. That would be an awkward conversation to have with these two, I realised, with a small detonation of dread, the one that would begin with one of them saying: How’s Walker?

“So what’s the story with this guy?” I said, preemptively.

Between them, they told me what they knew. Olek was old. Very old. He was also the nearest the species had to a Chief Medical Officer. “There are illnesses, apparently,” Natasha said. “But don’t ask me.”

“I think you’ve got to have been alive for a long time to get them,” Konstantinov said. “But anyway, he’s a scientist. He’s
the
scientist. Physically, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the species. When WOCOP dissolved, the Fifty Families bought a lot of the research. All of it went through him. He was with the Helios Project from its inception. He says he’s retired from that now, but who knows?”

The Helios Project was the vampires’ ongoing attempt to find a cure for nocturnality. To which, inadvertently, werewolves had for a while
become integral. The virus we had until recently carried had stopped the Curse passing to human victims who survived the bite. But to vampires who got bitten, it gave an increased tolerance to sunlight.

“And the cure for what ails me?” I asked.

“God knows,” Natasha said. “He’s refused to discuss it. It’s for your ears only. The only thing he says is that it’s completely unscientific. What does he want from you?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. Nothing that I’m going to want to give, I’m guessing.”

“Do you remember Christopher Devaz?” Olek said. He was back in the doorway, hands in pockets. All three of us looked up.

Devaz was one of the WOCOP guards I’d Turned when I’d been detained at their pleasure three years ago, a fruity little Goan fattened on maternal love who’d been easy to seduce with a paradoxical (and not wholly invented) posture of moral reluctance and libidinal need. Turned, he’d had no choice but to help me get out come full moon. He hadn’t been happy about it, not surprisingly.

“Yes, I remember him,” I said. “What about him?”

“Christopher Devaz is no longer a werewolf,” Olek said.

I looked at him for signs of bullshit or strategy. There weren’t any. He just looked straight back at me.

“Because you cured him.”

“Because I cured him.”

The terrible thing was I knew he wasn’t lying. It didn’t help. It made me feel exhausted. Sitting there, it was as if all the miles and hours had gathered on me, suddenly, had hung themselves on me like … yes, giant vampire bats. And the tireder I was the more
wulf
tried it on. Watch it, fucker, I thought. There’s a
cure
for you here. Apparently.

“Would you like to see him?” Olek said. “He’s downstairs.”

T
HERE
WAS
A
laboratory, of course. And two basement levels. Lab on minus one. I only saw part of it. Guessed it occupied the building’s entire footprint. Not that what I saw told me much. A wall of bottled and jarred chemicals. Three big refrigerators. A lot of things that looked like slimline VCRs or DVD players, with, I intuited, technical clout inversely proportional to their number of blinking lights. (In the twenty-first century the gizmos to be scared of are the ones that look like they don’t do much.) In addition several desk monitors, a pair of open laptops, shelf after shelf of zip-drives. Cable management and a cloying medicinal smell that whether I liked it or not evoked my high school chemistry lab, my best friend Lauren, and her one-semester obsession with homemade explosives. Two doors led off. Through one I glimpsed more stacked gadgetry and the corner of a brushed steel table.

“Down another flight,” Olek said. “I hope you don’t mind accompanying me in private for this. But this part is for you alone.”

Konstantinov and Natasha had protested, but in the end my own impatience had settled it. The house, they conceded, was empty but for the three of us and Grishma, and whatever it was Olek wanted from me it plainly wasn’t my life.

The next flight down took us to a door that opened onto a more complicatedly divided space. Corridors, floors, walls and ceilings tiled white high-gloss. A hospital cleanliness that would have made the sight of two or three drops of blood on the floor particularly ominous. There were none, however. All the doors were steel—one very heavy. The air down here had a failed feel, like the air in an airplane toilet. There was a new etherish smell that made my nostrils fizz and that
wulf
didn’t like at all. I thought of the sneezing tracker dogs in
Cool Hand Luke.

Olek, a couple of paces ahead of me, moved with loose-limbed ease, but I could feel his aura hotting-up. A slight odour of his species crept out of him now, forced by tension, exacerbated by the smaller space.

“In here,” he said, opening a door to our left.

“In here” was, in effect, one of the rooms you see in movies (but which I’ve always suspected don’t exist anymore, if they ever did) where a victim gets to look through one-way glass at a line-up of suspects.

“He can’t hear us,” Olek said. “Or see us, obviously. This is just so you know it’s him.”

Devaz, on the other side of the glass, was lying in the foetal position on a fold-out bed, staring at nothing. He was barefoot (the pale soles of his brown feet affected me with a curious dreary sympathy) in sky blue pyjama bottoms and a white cotton singlet. He didn’t look injured. Just unbearably sad. Aside from the bed his small room was empty.