The Last Werewolf (35 page)

I wrapped my left hand around the stake, bit down on Russell’s leather elbow guard, pulled. One wonders why grimacing’s a reflex, since it can’t possibly help. In any case a few Popeye gurns and gurgles later I got the bastard thing out. No blood-spurt but a fart or squelch from the wound. The sciatic nerve was heartbroken, unable to do anything to comfort itself except sob. I lay, groaning, now practically on top of the Hunter’s body—and straight back to concealed woozy frantic work on the stuck flamethrower.

“Bring the van,” Mia said. She’d taken a few paces away and was now, with her back to me, searching her skirt pocket for something.

The weapon came free of the holster.

“Nothing serious,” she said into the phone. Having extracted from her pocket a white handkerchief she held it up to her nose. Her next utterance was muffled. “Four of them.” Pause. “What do you think?”

The little fuel unit in its bulletproof case remained strapped to Russell’s back. No time to get that off. Whatever I was going to do I’d have to do from where I was. Very well. Kneeling, I lifted the gun unit and hit both triggers.

Nothing happened. Or rather, the thing I wanted to happen—the throwing of flame—didn’t. What happened was that a quantity of unignited fuel squirted out of the nozzle and spattered the back of her leather jacket. Not surprisingly, she turned to face me.

I looked down at the weapon as if it were a child of my own who’d turned me in. Then I looked at Mia. The moment I had before she came at me again was courtesy first of her surprise and second of her embarrassment: She’d got cocky, turned her back. If Don Mangiardi had seen this … Shame enriched her. The white skin didn’t blush, but the access of professional guilt sensitised it. Her stink deepened.

Meanwhile I fumbled mentally with a handful of engineering components and a sketchy cross section: fuel hose, gas pipe, fuel-release trigger, valve plug, ignition trigger, spark plug, battery, ignition valve.

Ignition valve. Lets compressed gas into the business end of the gun where it mixes with air and fuel released through small holes in the nozzle. Unopened, there’s nothing for the ignition trigger to ignite.

I opened the valve.

She was in midair when the flame-jet caught her, spectacularly, in the chest. Momentum kept her coming but I held the triggers down. She veered and crashed into the library doorway—oddly silent. Fat heat filled the landing’s space. My face felt tight-skinned. I released for a second. She scrabbled and thrashed like a short-circuiting robot, threw herself backwards into the library. I hit the triggers again. Her arms flung petals of flame. She got airborne, jackknifed, dropped to the floor. A bookcase was on fire. So was the couch. I’d taken the hose to full stretch from the tanks on Russell’s back but she was still, just, in range. I released and fired again, the dregs of the fuel, I could tell. The smoke alarms went off. Into
perhaps the last margin of her strength, she launched herself straight at the window, crashed through it and disappeared, upwards.

Fire was thriving in the bookcase, living it up on the couch. The room was a box of priceless kindling.

Sorry, Harls.

No time for elegy, however. The couch’s conflagration had spread to the rug, where my journal (this journal, dear reader, dear finder and I pray honourer of the dead) lay within a hand’s span of the flames. I leaped in, snatched it, leaped out again. A quick frisk of Russell’s carcase yielded his phone. Ditto headless Wazz’s after I’d more or less fallen down the stairs. I grabbed an overcoat of Harley’s from the hall, threw a chair through the kitchen window (the boys had kept the place locked and there was no time to hunt for keys), cut my shin on a shard getting through and, with
on top of all this
the Hunger raking my guts, made my escape through the sodden back garden.

A
N HOUR LATER
I lay on a king-sized bed in a double room at the Grafton Hotel in South Kensington. Checking in had been delicate. Harley’s overcoat hid most of the bloodstains but the singed hair and four diagonal stripes across my face, though already semihealed, gave the desk clerk pause. “Don’t ask,” I said, snapping the Amex Platinum (Tom Carlyle) down on the counter. A tactical simultaneity: brusque tone and class plastic. It worked, just.

“What the fuck, please, is going on?” Ellis asked, very calmly, on the Ellis phone. (I now had the Ellis phone, the Grainer phone, the Russell phone and the Wazz phone. The Grafton phone—untapped!—had made the latter two redundant.) His team hadn’t called in. He’d rung
their
phones, obviously. I’d deemed it prudent to answer only the one I was supposed to have. “I mean,” he said, still very calmly, “what the fuck,
please
, is going on?”

I told him about the Attack of the Vampires. I did not tell him that I’d already called my contact at Aegis (the U.K.’s version of Blackwater, former SAS, MI5, army and navy) and woken the dozing funds at three of the Swiss banks.

“You’re a lucky sonofabitch, Jacob,” he said.

“Yes, well, I recommend you make flamethrowers compulsory kit.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re lucky we had one of our guys in the local force.”

“The police?”

“Think about how this would look: four Hunters dead and Jake Marlowe miraculously at large in perfect health. It would look, would it not, as if you’d done my boys in yourself and fled.”

This hadn’t occurred to me. A worry: What else hadn’t occurred to me? The hotel room was deep-carpeted and thick-draped. A small part of me thought how wonderful it would be to lie down to sleep here and never wake up.

“Fortunately for you,” Ellis continued, “our agent verified the vamp remains, once they’d got the fire out. There’s not much of Harley’s library left, I’m afraid.”

I opened the curtains a couple of inches and looked out. There was a break in the rain. Wet London breathed, half asleep, twitching here and there where night-drama neurons fired: a woman getting raped; a junkie expiring; someone proposing; a baby slithering out. In the daylight the city’s all brash bounce, no question of not going on. Nights you feel the exhaustion, see the going on for what it is: terror of admitting the whole thing’s been a mistake.

“I’m not in perfect health, as it happens,” I said. “I got staked in the leg. I’ve got a gouged skull and a hole in my chest the size of a tennis ball.” All of which were healing—the whispering knitting circle, the cellular cabal—even as I spoke.

“I should have been there,” Ellis said. “I would have made a difference.”

“Maybe. It happened very fast. Did you get a trace on the Land Rover?”

“What? Oh, that. No. Guess Russell flaked on it. I clean forgot myself. Anyway it was the vamps, evidently.”

“Looks that way,” I said, although Mia, I quite clearly recalled, had said “bring the van” not “bring the car.” Competition for my attention was fierce, however, and the Land Rover question was lightweight.

“We’re going to have to redirect the pickup,” Ellis said. “Where are you?”

“Tell your guy ten a.m. outside the Masonic headquarters in Long Acre.”

“Jake …”

“Listen, Ellis, I’ve had more than two weeks of not being able to go for a piss without someone’s say-so, and then with someone else listening in while I’m having it. You can give me one night of privacy. You know I’m not going to run. You’re still holding the cards. I just need to get my head together. What’s your driver’s name?”

Over the phone I could feel his will to autonomy. There was someone he should okay it with, someone he didn’t like. Whoever this person was their days of unchallenged leadership were numbered. Ellis liked
me
more than he liked them.

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t dick me, Jacob. You know the cause-and-effect reality.”

“Hundred percent.”

“Driver’s name is Llewellyn. He’ll know you, but just in case, he’s in a BMW four-by-four license plate Foxtrot Tango six seven two Echo Uniform Delta. Code word is
lupus
. Ten a.m. Don’t let me down. Don’t let your lady down. And no”—as I drew breath to ask—“you can’t talk to her now. You’ll see her tomorrow. Trust me, she’s fine. She’s comfortable.”

I spent what was left of the night on the hotel phone.

T
HE DRIVER
, L
LEWELLYN
, young, fair, leanly muscled, with the cleanliness and near-skinhead haircut of a Mormon proselytiser, was precisely on time. The code word seemed redundant but I asked for it anyway and received “lupus, sir” in reply.
Sir
. Okay. Picked for this job because he followed orders to the letter.
You will treat Mr. Marlowe courteously, but you will not engage in conversation
. Fine. I was in any case itchy with sleeplessness and inwardly ajabber with Hunger. “I’m going to have to chain-smoke, Llewellyn,” I warned him. “I hope that’s not going to be a problem for you?”

He opened the rear nearside door. “Not a problem, sir,” he said. “We’re partitioned in any case.”

Indeed. Bulletproof glass, by the look of it. Ditto the windows. “Are we expecting to be shot at?” I asked him, giving it a rap.

“Fitted as standard on these, sir,” he said. “Do you want the radio on or anything?”

He called in to let whoever it was (not Ellis, the ether said) know I was on board, then we were on our way. It was a pretty morning. Blue spring sky and lively sunlight and a breeze that shivered the puddles and set London’s buds nodding on their stems. Not that much of it got through to me, quietly bearing up as I was with the Curse’s foreplay, the phantom elongation of snout and finger, the compressed spasms, the importunate erections, the occasional prescience in toenails and eyeteeth. My teeth
chattered
, actually, as in the first phase of the flu, prompting Llewellyn to remind me I had my own heat controls in the back. Meanwhile Piccadilly, Park Lane, Marylebone, the Westway, the M40. I tried to sleep. Failed. Instead pictured the effects of the dumped money, the fertility of the down payment. Impossible to know yet how many men a breakout would need, but I’d paid Aegis for a squad of fifty up front, nonrecoverable. My guess was that wherever they had Talulla there wouldn’t be a large defence. Ellis’s London
renegades couldn’t number more than five hundred and the majority would be carrying out regular WOCOP duties as normal. Poulsom’s installation would rely on concealment rather than a standing force.

Alongside these ruminations I kept up a more or less continuous self-harangue. You fucking idiot, you’re going to get yourself killed. They’ll torture Talulla and rape her and do experiments and mate her with animals and if you’re not already dead force you to watch and this whole fantasy of rescue and survival you’ve cooked up is obscene and preposterous and even Charlie at Aegis had trouble not laughing at you down the phone and only didn’t because he knows you’ve got the money and it’s your fucking funeral you stupid cunt she’s going to die and so are you—

The Ellis phone rang.

“Jake, you’re en route I hear.”

“Is she with you?”

“Not yet.
Calmez-vous
. You’ll see her tonight. Now listen. To confirm: Moonrise is 18:07 tomorrow. It’ll just be me and Grainer. He’s already up there, so don’t deviate: Stay in the hotel. Llewellyn’ll pick you up at 14:30 tomorrow and drop you in Beddgelert. You’re on foot from there. Obviously you know the way.”

“Aren’t you going to be on the drive-by tonight?”

“Can’t. I’m going up to meet Grainer now. After that he’ll want me with him. I do the weapons check. There’sa routine, a set of rituals. Don’t worry, Jake, she’s in safe hands, I promise. Just stay in your hotel room until you get the call.”

The rest of the journey was febrile peaks and troughs. Moments of vividness—the huge wheels of a truck very close; a crow flapping up from fresh roadkill; a green verge covered in crocuses—and long blurred stretches, pre-Curse hypersensitivity that amounted to perceptual distortion or fuzz. My face tingled, eyes itched, limbs lost their edges to the pins-and-needles ghost of the wolf. The memory of killing with Talulla was a root that clutched from balls to brain. Neither fear nor fatigue obscured it.
Wulf
went out from it, ranged to tearing point, searching. She was here, somewhere, close, somewhere …

Just after three o’clock, under a pied sky of cumulus and silvery blue, we arrived in Caernarfon.

I
MANAGED AN
hour of reiterative calls to Aegis before the batteries on Russell’s and Wazz’s mobiles died within minutes of each other, like an ancient couple who couldn’t bare to be parted. Daren’t risk the room phone. It’s probably bugged, but there’s also the possibility they’ll call in on it for the drive-by with Talulla. Either way I’ve left it alone.

Of course
without
the calls there’s nothing to do but wait. Smoke. Pace. Write. Look out. Drink. I’ve allowed myself one bottle of Scotch between now and tomorrow afternoon. Eighteen-year-old Talisker’s the best the Castle’s got. Shame not to go out on something classier, if going out’s what I’m doing.

The room is as I remember it. Seems a decade ago. Poor Maddy’s white shoulders hunched and her face full of immediate belief though she’d said, Is that real? That’s not real, is it?

It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.

I’m sorry, Harls, for the mess I made of your life. For
costing
you your life. Vengeance, now, late, shamefully overdue, but vengeance nonetheless. Grainer. Ellis too, eventually. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’m sorry the bare fact of what they did to you wasn’t enough. I’m sorry it took loving someone. Someone else.

•

Dark. I watched the last of the light over the Irish Sea. Now the window shows only the street. No call.

•

The whole of one’s being reduces to listening for the sound of a ringing phone.

•

Something nags when I think of Madeline here. This room’s hauled it to the edge of memory but can’t quite heave it over the border.

•

22:50. Still no call. It’s raining again. I’ll have to open the window to see her clearly.

•