By Blood We Live (36 page)

“He’s not in any discomfort,” Olek said. “And he won’t be obliged to remain here much longer. But I do need to know that you recognise him. Do you need to hear his voice?”

There was an emptiness to the man on the bed that made me strangely angry, although angry at whom or what it wasn’t clear.

Olek hit the intercom. “Christopher?” he said. “How are you feeling?”

Devaz had started at the voice, slightly, but he didn’t get up. Just curled a little tighter on the bed. I tried to go out to him, mentally. As the one who’d Turned him it ought to have been effortless and immediate.

DEVAZ?

Nothing.

DEVAZ.
IT’S ME.

Still nothing. I might as well have been reaching out to a bucket and mop.

“Christopher, you’ll be out of here in a couple of days, I promise you,” Olek said.

No response. Devaz just stared.

“Christopher?”

“Please go away,” Devaz said, quietly. “Please.”

I did recognise the voice. If it wasn’t the real Devaz, it was a very convincing impersonation.

Back in the white corridor, I said: “Okay, fine, it’s Devaz. Now what?”

“Now,” Olek said, hands in pockets, “we wait for the full moon to rise. At which point you’ll see that Christopher is no longer under its spell. You’ll see, not to put too fine a point on it, that he’s human again. Ergo, the method works.”

And makes you suicidal, apparently.

“Now,” Olek said. “The method. Follow me.”

Back down the corridor to the heaviest of the doors. Vault or submarine-hatch thickness. Numbered keypad entry. Inside, another of the steel tables. On it, a black metal container a little bigger than a briefcase, also with a numbered keypad. Olek tried not to make a show of not letting me see the code and I tried not to make a show of not trying to see it.
Wulf
, to my surprise, had gone completely still.

A small hydraulic hiss and the sound of a precision mechanism—then the case was unlocked. Olek opened it. “Take a look,” he said.

The container’s interior was foam padded. In the middle of the cutaway was a flat piece of whiteish stone—the sort of thing I imagined the Ten Commandments being written on—with two pieces missing, one from the bottom left corner, one from the right-hand edge. There was a rough circular hole the size of a tennis ball in what looked like its exact centre. It was covered from top to bottom in carved symbols—a script of some kind—and stained with (my nose confirmed the visuals) human blood. Weeks old, the blood. Weeks. Not millennia.

“You’ll remember,” Olek said, “that along with Quinn’s journal went a stone tablet. This is it.”

I didn’t touch it. I was thinking of all the times I’d seen ancient things in museums. Arrowheads. Pottery. Mummies. Always under glass. Even under glass the objects gave off a calm, clear, mute energy that collapsed the space between your time and theirs, that astonished you with the proof of time itself, that it really passed, that not just individual people but whole civilisations came and went. Millions were born and lived full lives and died and some little bit of stone or clay that had lain untouched through it all testified that there had been a time before any of that had happened. The air around them had a different silence, one that had never been passed through by the racket of modernity.

… but it was not until people returned to the banks of Iteru that

“You know,” Olek said, “I’ll be honest with you. I did this as an experiment. I had absolutely no belief in it. It was, as far as I was concerned, risible, pure fucking mumbo-jumbo, contrary to every principle I hold dear. I’d like to be able to take the scientific line and say that just because
a phenomenon is unexplained at the moment doesn’t mean it’s terminally inexplicable. I’m an adherent of Ockam. All things being equal, look for an explanation in the terms you already have. Don’t start inventing phenomena to explain a phenomenon. But I have to say, this has rocked me. This has rocked and confounded me. If it’s as it seems to be, frankly, it changes everything. I still can’t really believe it …”

He was off on the little journey of his own amazement. He hadn’t been able to leave it alone, since it had happened (whatever it was that
had
happened); he hadn’t been able to
get over it.

I realised that until now I hadn’t taken the possibility of reversing the Curse seriously. Or no more than half seriously. It wasn’t belief in a cure that had led me here. It was the feeling of answering something calling from behind the surface events. As if something were asking for my help in bringing itself about. As if I was—oh, dear
God
—a necessary part of a story. Ever since the night the vampire came to call.
I’ll see you again.
When I opened my mouth to say what I said next, sickness, excitement and weariness rose up in me like a wretched Trinity.

“Not that Devaz is any kind of advertisement,” I said, “but how does it work?”

A
NOTHER NEAR-MISS AT
the hotel in Bangkok. I got there less than an hour before sunrise. I was in such a fucking state I gave the cab driver the equivalent of $100 and didn’t take the change. Just ran straight into the lobby.

“You don’t look well,” a voice said, behind me, while I stood in line for the desk, trembling. “Can I be of assistance?”

I turned. A tall paunchy guy in his early fifties in jeans, white shirt and black blazer. Side-parted brown hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. He had a moony face and an annoying little smile—and a padded surgical dressing over his nose. His face was bruised. My first thought was that he’d been in a car crash. Then, somehow, I felt sure he hadn’t. I felt sure someone had
done
this to him. With good reason. There was a smell coming off him, too: bitter cologne and some tomato sauce thing he’d eaten recently, and something else it took me a moment to identify: incense.

“What?” I said, while every muscle tightened and my dumb brain still registered the piped hotel music softly filling the air-conditioned space around us, a bad cover version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”

“You seem distressed,” he said, looking as if my distress was just about the nicest thing he’d ever seen. “I was just wondering if you were … If you needed any help?”

For a moment I stood there, mentally jammed, hands and feet and throat packed with panicking blood. The sun was a big sick smile waiting to break over the horizon. The cells in my face were screaming, silently.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

I turned my back on him but I could still feel him there, sense him smiling, as if his smile were a tiny fragment of the sun’s, one of its messengers that came on ahead of it. If my turn hadn’t come I don’t know what I would’ve done, but the businessman in front of me picked up his briefcase and headed for the elevators and suddenly there was the beautiful
Thai clerk, a girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty, smiling at me and saying “Welcome to the Sofitel. Are you checking-in?” and I had to focus on registering, though my hands were shaking so badly I could hardly sign.

And even then he didn’t budge. I could feel him behind me, a sort of smug energy coming off him. I thought again of all the stupid, careless mistakes I’d made since leaving Los Angeles. All I wanted right then was enough time to do what I had to do. It wouldn’t need twenty thousand years. Forty-eight hours should be enough.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said. “I’m getting an incorrect PIN message. Would you like to try again?”

I
would
have turned on him then—told him to back the fuck off, punched him, screamed at him, whatever, I don’t know—but his cellphone rang, and he walked away to answer it, talking in Italian.

There was no sign of him when I looked after checking-in (I was so spooked it took me another two attempts to key the PIN in correctly; I knew the number, it was just I couldn’t control my goddamned hands) and in any case there was no time. I got to my room on the nineteenth floor, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign, locked the door, killed the lights and shut myself in the bathroom.

I
FLOPPED ONTO
the bed, feeling, frankly, terrible.

“What is it that makes you think she’s in danger?” Mia said to me.

We’d just checked-in to the Novotel at Suvarnabhumi. Hardly a first choice, but even with Damien’s near-infallible jiggery-pokery we were too close to sunrise for anything further afield. It had been a frustrating few days. Commercial airlines would have been faster, but the risks of losing the night—without the jet’s blackout-room fallback—were too high. I’d been tormented by the image of Justine going up in daylight flames in her airplane seat, or the back of a cab, or in the lobby of a hotel just like this one. Three days ago Hannah had called with the necessaries on Duane Schrutt.
Duane
Schrutt. The near-misses I’d had—Dale, Wayne—were a minor irritant, a bit of grit in my mind’s eye. A minor irritant, I repeat. The major irritant was too major to be described as an irritant. It was more of a disaster. A recurring disaster. I’d suffered several more inexplicable episodes of … of what? Unconsciousness. Nausea with nothing to throw up. Periods of being—I was tiring of the phrase—
as weak as a kitten
, when the lifting of my hand or the turning of my head called for an energy that felt—in the tissues, the vessels, the bones—like a logical impossibility. I had no appetite whatsoever. The jet’s blood-stock was at my companions’ disposal. Caleb didn’t like it, that I didn’t drink. He didn’t like it in the way human children don’t like the urine-and-Vicks smell of the human old. I told him it was no biggie. I told him that when you got to my age you just didn’t need … You just weren’t that thirsty. I was becoming, I could tell, an alarming disappointment to the lad. I had, however, opened a numbered account in Mia’s name in Geneva and transferred five million dollars into it to start her off. (Her only surviving account after Fifty Families ostracisation was, pitifully, a chequing account at Chase Manhattan. You might as well put cash in a coffee jar.) Five million probably sounds like a lot. It’s not. Even in human terms, these days, it’s not.
This is, after all, the age which spawned the economist’s joke:
A trillion here, a trillion there … Pretty soon you’re talking real money.
I watch people on game shows losing all dignity and restraint when they win
One Hundred Thousand Dollars
! How long do they think that’s going to last? They think their lives have changed. They haven’t. Not unless they put the lot on a million-to-one shot at the track and it comes in. Then they might find out where their freedom takes them. Then they might find out who and what they really are … But, in any case, an indefinite lifespan makes five million nothing, makes five million
change.

“Did you hear me?” Mia said.

“What? Oh, yes. Sorry. I don’t know. She’s new. She’s … There’s an emotional investment in the victim. I promised I wouldn’t leave her. I just hope we’re not too late. She’s a bit unpredictable.”

Mia stood with her hands in the leather jacket pockets, looking down at me on the bed. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. The cold blonde hair and cold blue eyes and cold white skin and warm red mouth. A shocking, perfect contrast. I thought: Beauty just keeps coming into the world and passing away, coming in and passing away. You can’t blame beauty. Beauty doesn’t know what else to do.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “What is it? Are you in pain?”

You’re a bit fragile, Fluff, Justine had said. It felt like a long time ago. Sometimes, when I was forced to consider my sense of time, it was like looking out of a carriage window to see that the wheels were running right on the edge of a sheer and infinite drop. I forced myself to sit up, dried my eyes. Laughed a little.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Forgive me. I’m a bit … I’m sorry. Kindness hurts.”

“Kindness?”

“You and Caleb. You’ve been very kind to me.”

I felt the reflex in her, to reply that I was paying them. I felt the huge, tense, ever-ready reflex, which was to strip away sentiment at all costs. I felt her suppress it—just—with the words on the tip of her tongue. Instead she said, quietly, “I think you should give me your spare room key. In case you oversleep.”

In case you have another episode.
I was thinking of all the old people I’d ever heard say: I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. I gave her the spare. Nowadays a hotel key was a piece of magnetised plastic. It’s a mark of the state I was in that that fact made the idiotic tears well again. The thought of the human world moving forward with its shifty bravery, inspired madness, bloody inversions, deafening ignorance. It’s hard not to love your species’ dedication to craftily making things physically easier, even though you know by now it just leaves more room for getting mentally fucked-up. Corkscrews. Ironing boards. Aeroplanes. Cellphones. You kill me with these things. Walking on the moon! A group of humans sitting around discussing walking on the moon. Knowing the mathematical razor wire it’s going to roll them in, knowing the scale, the ludicrous giantness of the undertaking, knowing all this but still assuming it’ll get done because the giant undertaking breaks down into a million small things like the manufacture of single tiny components and the necessity of one minus one equalling zero. The labour you lot are willing to put in from there breaks my heart. And then as soon as you’ve done it you’re on to the next thing. Mars. The Genome. CERN. It’s a sort of nymphomania or satyriasis of consciousness, a hopelessly promiscuous
carrying on.

I’ll miss it.

At the door, Mia turned. “Are you going to be all right?” she said. “Do you want me to …?”

For a moment I thought she meant, Do you want me to stay here with you? But then I realised she meant, Do you want me to help you into the bathroom?

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m sorry. You must think …”

“I think you say sorry too much.”

Don’t cry again. Do
not
start that obscene blubbering again.