By Blood We Live (42 page)

An hour before sunrise Olek surfaced. “He’s conscious,” he said, “but very disoriented. I’ve given him a lot of blood, but he’s not metabolising properly. I don’t know. I’ve never really seen this before.”

Justine and I had come in from the garden. Mia and Caleb, showered and changed, were sitting at the bottom of the stairs. Konstantinov and Natasha were boarding up the window in the library.

“Can I see him?” Justine asked.

“Go ahead,” Olek said. “He’s very heavily sedated, however. I doubt he’ll know you. Mia, Caleb, there’s plenty of room below stairs. Please make yourselves comfortable. Do you need to drink?”

“Tomorrow,” Mia said.

“Fine,” Olek said. “I have everything. Talulla, you and I need to—”

“I need to go to bed,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then smiled. He took the envelope containing the remaining pages from Quinn’s journal and handed it to me. “Corroborative reading,” he said. “Just so you know I wasn’t making anything up.”

I was thinking: I’ll go upstairs, get my things, give it a couple of hours, then walk away from here.

I was thinking this.

I
WANTED TO
stay awake, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to. The sun comes and sleep’s like the ground sucking you in. Like magnetism from hell.

“I promise you, my dear girl,” Olek said, laying out a comforter and pillows on the corridor floor, “I’ve done absolutely everything I can for the time being. If he makes it through the daylight hours he’ll be much stronger. Then we can re-assess. Now you’re sure you wouldn’t like one of the other rooms? I feel an absolute barbarian letting you sleep here like a little cat, albeit a lovely one, with personality.”

“I want to,” I said. “I’ll feel it if he wakes up.”

He squeezed my arm and gave me a neat little smile. He was one of those guys you couldn’t tell whether you hated. So polite and charming you thought it had to be a cover for something.

“Of course,” he said. “I understand. Well, if you have everything you need, I’ll take my leave for now. I’ll be one floor below if you need me. Bottom of the stairs, second door on the left. Just knock.”

So, I thought, after he’d gone, that’s her.
Her
. I guess I shouldn’t have felt happy when she told me she didn’t believe she was anyone’s reincarnation. For poor Fluff’s sake I should’ve been sad. Except of course she
hadn’t
said she didn’t believe in it. Not exactly. No such thing as destiny. But Fluff had come after me, not her—and it had brought the two of them together anyway. It was impossible to believe it was all part of some invisible scheme of things, like God’s plan, like a fucking
story.
And just as impossible to write it off as a series of accidents. Both ideas impossible to believe and impossible to dismiss. Which is what he’s told me Christ knows how many times before, about the signs, the connections, the correspondences between things, the goddamned
beguilement.
You have to both believe it and know it can’t be true, he’d said. You have to learn how to be the wry servant of two masters. I’d been so annoyed, I’d said: Yeah. I’ve never known what the fuck “wry” actually
means.

And now this.

Him. Sick. Again.

I lay on the comforter on my side with my knees drawn up. The house hummed, quietly. I was thinking: Just let him be okay. If you let him be okay … If you let him be okay I’ll never … Just let him be okay and I’ll be bridesmaid at their fucking wedding. Please … Please … Please …

You think like this. As if there’s someone you can plead with. Even when you know there isn’t.

Then suddenly I thought of what my world would feel like without him in it. The cold fact of it. All the countries and faces and skies and cars and TV screens and people. Without him to make it bearable.

And it was like the earth falling away underneath me.

I
N MY ROOM
I packed my rucksack.

Then sat on the edge of the bed looking at it.

It was a beautiful morning. The window was open. Blue sky. Furious birdsong. The garden’s perfumes. A very slight, sporadic breeze brought, at moments, the faintest whiff of the ocean. It seemed odd to think of it so close. Barely a couple of miles.

I took out my phone. Time difference. They’d be asleep. The kids, at any rate, would be asleep. Walker might be awake.

In bed with Madeline.

I hoped he was. And the hoping put another fracture in my already crazy-glass heart.

I could give my children the chance of a normal life.

For Christ’s sake, Lulu, I imagined my mother saying, either think it through or shut it down.

My mother. Jake. Cloquet. Fergus. Trish. The dead were an unimaginably long way away. A distance that defined loss. The living were only a little nearer. The distance that defined sadness.

I picked up the envelope, tore it open and read.

It was exactly as Olek had summarised. Of course it was. I hadn’t expected anything else. He had no incentive to make it up.

Gods. Souls. Bargains. Sacrifices. A hidden scheme of things.

Absolutely every part of me—except one—rejected it, utterly. The one part of me that didn’t was the memory of knowing exactly what Olek was going to say before he said it. The part of me that recognised it, as something I’d known all along. I thought of the Apostles at the Last Supper, hearing for the first time the words that would become the rite of Transubstantiation:

To them it wouldn’t have felt like something new. It would’ve felt like something they’d once known and subsequently forgotten. The neural pathway or soul’s grammar would’ve opened to receive it, to welcome it home in an act of giant, terrible, thrilling recognition. If it hadn’t, Christianity would never have got started.

Grishma (presumably) had left a new bottle of Macallan and a clean glass on the nightstand. An unopened pack of Camels, too, next to “Childe Roland.” I put the pages back carefully in the envelope, poured a drink, lit up and went to the window.

The chance of a normal life.

Put the all but total scepticism on one side. What sort of normal life? One that would depend on them not remembering anything from the life they’d already had. Was that likely? Certainly not unless I took the cure as well. If I didn’t, I’d have to let them go. Elsewhere. Adoption. A brand-new start with human parents. Either way the therapists of ten or fifteen years in the future were looking back to my present and beaming.

At which point I knew, very simply, that even if I believed the ritual would work I wasn’t going to do it.

It was a funny, liberating thing to be able to reject what you knew to be true.

Besides
, Remshi’s voice said in my head,
that’s not what you were brought here for.

I
WOKE JUST
before sundown feeling better than ever. Notwithstanding I hadn’t the faintest clue where I was. My opened eyes (I felt not just well, but
reborn
) showed a white ceiling with three fluorescent striplights. My (what felt like virgin) nostrils reported chemicals and processed air. My sentience (washed, primped, ready for devil-may-care action) said wherever I was it was exactly—it was precisely and wholesomely and inevitably—where I was supposed to be. I sat up.

Fine. A laboratory.
Vaguely
familiar. Teasingly filed somewhere in the crammed mental cabinet. The thing to do was not to try to remember it. Think about something else and it would pop right in like magic. I got to my feet. I might as well have been Lash-sated, because even that humble physical action filled my molecules with glee. Look at me! Standing up! A marvel!

A big memory door swung open on a vision of Justine sitting in the corner of a large bedroom, knees up under her chin, covered in blood.

Schrutt. Duane Schrutt’s house.

Bangkok.

Mia, Caleb …

I stood there for a few moments, following the image-trail backwards. The jet. The devastated
Militi Christi
base. Leath’s place in North Vegas. Justine’s note. Turning Justine. Near-death darkness. The attack on Las Rosas. Porn king Randolf. The two lost years.

Vali.

Talulla.

Vali.

I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.

Perversely, I hadn’t had the dream. The beach, the twilight, the someone behind me, the knowing that I knew something without knowing what it was. Nor, thank God, had I woken with
He lied in every word
gad-flying around my head.

What’s the last thing you remember?
As I’d trained Justine to ask.

Schrutt’s bedroom. Not being able to stand up.

It seemed absurd, given how beautifully I was standing up now. I was the Platonic Form of Standing Up. You could go a long way, my singing legs and spine and head said, before you’d find a better example of standing up than the one we had right here.

In the room next door—more bottled chemicals, fridges, unnervingly thin gizmos—I found Mia and Caleb, still sleeping, spoons fashion, on blankets on the floor, mother behind son, her left arm wrapped around him. He was frowning. Poor lad had a busy dream life, I knew. The stunted subconscious forever wrestling with the unchangeable fact that he’d never be a grown-up, no matter how many millennia he lived. I felt a great flowering of tenderness for them. I must make sure and transfer more money later. I must make sure they had no material worries. The image of the two of them making a home of the house in Big Sur was a warmth and a comfort to my heart.

Justine was asleep, curled up on a comforter in the corridor. She looked beautiful. I put my hand out to wake her—then didn’t. There was the loveliness of her, just now, the sweetness of her unconsciousness, but there was, too, my reluctance to disturb my own state of quiet benevolence, my feeling of privileged watch-keeping. If I woke her now there would be questions, her ravenous intelligence and fiery heart; there would be the (albeit joyful) clatter of narrative, of talk, of connecting and making sense. Her energies would wake the others, and the happy problem would be compounded.

Suddenly my own heart hurt. Not cardiologically, but with the need—in spite of everything I’d just thought—to hear her voice, see her awake and animated, in full flight, my little Justine with her smart mouth and her courage and her sometimes terrifying silence. It was a bizarre, urgent upwelling of love for her, for all the ways in which she was precious to me, from the shy, secret way she sometimes took a book from the library to read without wanting me to know, without wanting me to start
asking
her about it, to the speed and obliviousness with which she habitually tucked her hair behind her ear. Her particularity—the uniqueness cashed-out in fingernails, daydreams, coughs, memories, glances,
regrets—brought such a surge of need for her that I reached out again to wake her.

But again, didn’t.

There was time. There would be plenty of time.

At the top of the stairs a door led into the pleasantly underfurnished hall of what, it was becoming increasingly obvious, was a large and wealthily looked-after house. A memory-bell
tanged
, faintly … But no. I knew this place, I really did, but it wasn’t quite ready to come clean. There was a last sliver of low blood-orange sunlight running across the oak floor between me and the stairs. It was the flamy centrepiece of the hall’s stillness and beauty. And (Berkeleyan idealism notwithstanding) had been here, gradually narrowing and deepening its gash of colour on the oak’s golden grain even though no one had been there to see it. I remember thinking a long time ago—perhaps the first time I ever observed the growth rings in a tree-stump—that if there was a Creator then he was a compulsive and promiscuous artist: not content with filling the big canvases of skies and oceans (a different one every day, every millisecond), he must doodle rings in the secret bodies of trees that no one by natural rights should ever even see.

For all its beauty the sliver of light cut off my route to the stairs, but three other doors were accessible without roasting myself, so I went to them and peeked into the rooms beyond, one by one. A kitchen with a big window giving onto a lush—and manifestly not Western—back garden. A lounge, with three huge couches and a wall-mounted flatscreen plus a small walnut coffee table bearing a half-finished game of chess. A Persian rug–strewn library with one boarded-up window and several books scattered on the floor. The books, naturally, called to me. There was an early edition of
Swann’s Way.
A
Don Quixote.
A
Northanger Abbey.
An Arden paperback
King Lear—O, let me not be mad, not mad sweet heaven
—and (the ether winked) an early hardback—
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me
—of Bellow’s
Herzog.

The delighted contraries called to me, but I didn’t go. As with Justine, there would be time. There would always be time. The upset volumes reminded me of the night we were attacked at Las Rosas. Browning’s
Collected Works
would still be lying face-down where it had fallen. It would
be a small, distinct pleasure, when we got back there, to replace it on the shelf. I hadn’t read Browning in years. But there would be time.

I thought I’d only been standing there a few seconds, but when I went back into the hall the last of the light had vanished from the floor, liberating my passage to the stairs. Time—why not?—to have a poke around the upper storeys. Let the others sleep. I felt such love for them I sent it as an imperative: Sleep.
Sleep
, my darlings. The world—so various, so beautiful, so new—will still be here when you awake. I was deeply happy. Happy in the blood. Happier than … than I could remember being for a long time. An unaccountably long time. Not since I was very young.