By Blood We Live (6 page)

“Don’t be ages,” she said. “I need to talk to you about the club.”

I walked. Staggered, rather, once I was out of sight of the house and free of the need to dissemble. I chased the dream images, never quite … never
quite
 … My hands and feet and face had discrete little fevers. The world’s gears had shifted while I slept. A dream! All these years. All these
years.

The first dream since Vali died.

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

I had waited.

Hadn’t I?

The footage threatened. The dense montage of my life that was like a cliff-face uprushing past because you’d fallen and were now plummeting down the sickening drop. More sickening still, you were abruptly and randomly stopped and forced for a split second that opened onto infinity to confront something vivid—your neck craned to see Michelangelo’s bare paint-spattered foot poking over the edge of the scaffold and the chapel’s contained heights filled with the smell of oils and plaster; a mob-capped young housemaid with red curls and a copper warming pan looking up and seeing you, her blue eyes fractured by the understanding that this was her death; Viking longships on the black Volga in the small hours, helmets and spears moonlit, one—just one—of them seeing you standing and observing from the bank, the curiously tender exchange of consciousness, then the window of connection closed; sodden soldiers in a trench full of blood, the stink of wet leather and rotting flesh, a rat swimming, chevron ripples from the lovely little head; a toilet in Rwanda with a Tutsi baby cut in half and shoved in it—before being just as violently yanked back into gravity’s grip and the nausea of all the time and weather and extremes and approximations—

I stopped and lay down on the forest floor. Sometimes lying down is just the thing. (Millions of people’s bad days would be improved if they listened to the impulse to lie down for a few minutes on the office carpet or bathroom tiles or pleasantly chilled pavement. Drunks and children know the wisdom of this—but who listens to them?) I lay down on the forest floor and the softness of the ferns and the odours of earth and evergreens gave me solace. Don’t be ages, Justine had said; but it was very hard to imagine moving anytime soon. Empty sleep for millennia, now this: a dream like a furious disease, an inverted plague that had swept life instead of death across my inner continent in a single night. I turned my head to the left and for no reason (no reason except the currently flashing narrative insistence) parted the undergrowth and looked down the slightly inclined forest floor.

Which is when I saw her.

Them, rather.

Two werewolves, a female in front, a male a dozen paces behind. They were thirty metres away, downwind—

Her scent hit me. Eliminated all time and space between now and then. Tipped the world like a kids’ ball-bearing puzzle and dropped me back to where … to when it had … Oh God. Oh
God.

It was Vali’s scent.

Which was impossible.

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

For a moment I think I lost consciousness. At any rate I had, a few seconds later, the feeling of emerging from profound darkness, a feeling of shocked, sudden birth. Or rather,
re
birth.

I will come back to you.

The female—Vali, Vali,
Vali
—stopped and lifted her elegant muzzle to the moon. Light silvered the long throat, the wet eyes and snout.

My heart almost refused. Even in the midst of its own upheaval my heart knew what was at stake and tried to refuse. If it’s not … If it’s a trick, if it’s an illusion—

But a thread of blood in my cock twitched. My cock! Which, since her death, had been of no more consequence to me than the fluff in the seam of my pocket.

Desire.
Desire.

Was it possible?

I breathed the carried scent of her and my cock leaped. The smell couldn’t lie. Her smell.
Her
. My eyes filled. Joy for the return, sorrow for the years of loss. It was an eviscerating happiness, left me empty and frail with hope. Left me with all but disbelief in my own hands and feet and teeth, in the forest and the night, in the real, solid world.

Moonlight salved her hard breasts and lean belly. Her navel was a well of shadow.

Just as I remembered. Just as it had been. Vali. My beloved.

The joy moved up into my mouth, which opened involuntarily to call to her.

But at that moment the male came close behind her and wrapped his
arms around her and she tilted her head back so their muzzles and tongues could touch.

I followed them. With sickness expanding. With sickness making me giant. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Of course they couldn’t. I knew how it was for her. I knew how it was for her because with her that was how it had been for me. For us. Killing. Together.

Their victim was a neighbour of mine, a music producer, Drew Hillyard. I climbed a plane tree at the edge of his high-walled front yard and watched. Grabbed my own giant sick head and rubbed my own giant sick nose in it.
America’s Next Top Model
played on the flatscreen to a room wild with blood. Hillyard’s white leather couch became a canvas for his frantic red swipes. Vali opened his chest and rammed her snout in. Her hindquarters shivered as the male entered her, his hands roaming over her flanks and belly and breasts. The open chest was mine. The sternum cracked cleanly and prised apart, the heart plucked out and tossed in the dirt. A thing of no importance. A negligible thing. A joke.

It seemed to last a long time. It occurred to me that if the wind shifted slightly they’d catch my scent. There was an appeal in that, the rushed confrontation, the surrender to chaos, the relief of rushing the male, of killing or being killed. It would consume me, at least, eclipse the unspeakable wealth of detail, of sordid, brilliant particulars, of her tongue curled in martial or erotic delight, his dark moist cock giving rhythm to my misery, in, out, in, out, her body warm and full of cunning welcome. I knew how it was. I knew, I knew, I knew.

He lied in every word.

The dream images burgeoned and died, repeatedly, bled through by the other dream, sent to me by Vali or the liar in every word the night she died.
I will come back to you. And you will come back to me. Wait for me.

And here she was, and I had waited, and now become a giant, laughable sickness. Because apparently it wasn’t me she’d come back for after all.

I tailed them, unseen, all the way to where they’d left their gear hanging high in a tree, the packed rucksacks, the clean-up products, the car keys. Justine would be pissed—but there was no going back until I’d seen it, seen her, in human form. Short window between moonset and sunrise. I’d have to move fast when it was over—but I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t
thinking
, period. I was caught in the slipstream of the living dream.

They lay a little apart on the ground. Here were shivering ferns, nodding bluebells, the tree roots’ knuckles breaking the earth. The scene had a quality of appalling familiarity. Hadn’t I been here before? Those three small pale rocks there, blotched with yellow lichen? Those twittering leaf-shadows?

She regained her human form quicker than he did his. Hers was seamless CGI, his clumsy stop-motion. I watched her skeleton’s fluid shrinkage, the impossible resizing of muscle and skin, the human head resolved out of the lupine’s compressed implosions. Her hands were the lovely hands I remembered, touching me, idling on my chest, tracing the outline of my jaw, buried in my hair. The body was the body I knew, the pale breasts and belly, the small shoulders, the tenderly functional knees. Her shins were wet with dew. The last phase of the transformation turned her face-down in the ferns. Her spine rippled, hooked—half a dozen vertebrae bulged like buboes, then settled, straightened, found their place, stopped their squabble—and there was the smooth and deep-grooved back I’d run my fingers down a thousand thousand times (the journey never got old, renewed its mystery with each passage of discovery) and the sacrum’s flare, and the beautiful rear, upthrust in fabulous diptych, as it had been for me, for me, for me.

She lifted her head. I saw her face. The dark hair and self-accommodating eyes. The full mouth.

I knew her.

It was Vali.

It
was
Vali.

I
WOKE UP
in the vault, in bed with the vampire.

I woke up in the vault—a vampire.

A vampire.

You can’t imagine what it feels like.

No matter how much you’ve talked about it or thought about it. You really can’t.

The weird thing (like there’s one weird thing; like the whole
thing
isn’t the weird thing)—the weird thing is you know straight away how soon it’ll feel completely normal. Like the first time I drove a car I knew that by the third or fourth time it would feel totally familiar. My hands on the wheel remembering something from a former life. Second nature.

This is my second nature.

I didn’t like my first, so I changed.

Vampire. Vampire.
Vampire.

That thing where if you keep repeating the same word it just becomes meaningless sound.

No going back.

Ever.

There were empty MRE bags scattered around. Spots of blood on the sheets. Fluff told me once that in the old days they used to hang the new bride’s bloody sheets out the window to prove she’d been a virgin. And the ones who weren’t virgins used to shove pellets of goat’s blood up themselves to fool everyone.

I sat up, slowly. Thought back to what had happened. Tried to put it together.

Last night I’d woken in the study to find Stonk slumped across me. White, cold, not dead—but dying. I could tell. It wasn’t just the way he was breathing. There was something else, like I could feel his life inside mine.
It took a weird effort to feel it. Like the effort you have to make with those Magic Eye pictures, the trick of sort of looking and not looking at the same time. I can’t describe it. It was like there was a bigger body squeezed inside mine that any second was going to tear through, like the Hulk ripping through his clothes. All my sensations were big and soft and heavy. Everything—the chair, the rug, the lamp on the floor—was somehow too much itself, like all the dials had been forced up past max.

I seemed to get to my feet without getting to my feet.

Then I felt it.

Sunrise.

Minutes away.

I didn’t know how I knew, since the drapes were closed, but I did. You just do. You feel it inside. It’s like a shadow made of pure light rushing towards your heart.

I had to get blood into him. Hide the bodies. Get us underground. I knew I had to do these things and I knew there wasn’t time. There just wasn’t. It was impossible.

When I moved it was like I was constantly catching up with my body. I kept finding myself doing things: running through the hall; opening the fridge; carrying him over my shoulder (he weighed nothing) down the vault stairs. And the whole time the sun was coming. I pictured myself caught by daylight halfway to the garage, dragging three corpses out to the cars.
You’ll burn
. Your skin knows. Your skin screams when you even think of it.

I managed to find four pouches. I laid him on the bed. Raced back upstairs—but moving got harder. Space went syrupy, like in those dreams where you’re running but it feels like you’re wading through treacle. The sun loved it. The sun wanted me slow. I was thinking how weird it was that the sun straight away became your enemy, really an enemy, like an evil old man, like a god who hated you.

Two minutes till it came up.

One minute.

Thirty seconds.

My head and arms and legs were hot and everything had a confused edge. All I could do was throw the corpses into the hidden place that led
down to the vault. I couldn’t stand the thought of bringing them
into
the vault, to spend the night with us. There was nothing I could do about the blood all over the study. Just had to hope no one came snooping.