Nothing, I averred, breathing with quivering drunk dignity through my nostrils, had changed. Be Quinn’s book true or be it false its existence wasn’t going to alter my course. If you can live two hundred years without the solution to the riddle of your nature you can die without it too. Humans go to their graves with none of the big questions answered. Why should werewolves fare better?
A fresh pack of Camels had arrived as ordered with the wine. I lit one up. The greatest gift of lycanthropy is knowing smoking won’t kill you. I poured the last glass of the night. Peace returned, somewhat. Nothing, I repeated, had changed. I would sit out the twenty-nine days to the next full moon, whereupon Grainer—
Ah, yes. With cruel belatedness the image of Harley’s murderer bloomed. Naturally his appearance on the chopper was a calculated provocation, the ease of body, the joyless Navajo smile, the mock salute. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick. Come off it, Jake, I could hear him saying. You telling me you’re really going to let me get away with that? It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.
Enough. I finished the cigarette. Turned out the light. Lay down on the bed. How long since I’d slept? Forty- eight hours? Seventy-two?
Wolf-silt churned in my shoulders. When I’d ripped through the junkie’s throat his body had jerked as if in violent ejaculation. Now his spirit shuffled through the packed underworld of my bloodstream, friendless in the murmuring crowd. It’s official. You’re the last. I’m sorry. I closed my eyes.
THREE WEEKS HAVE PASSED
Everything’s changed.
Jesus fucking Christ.
THE MORNING FOLLOWING my night at the Hotel Eugenie I took a train to Paris and spent the journey bringing these pages up to date. I clocked two WOCOP agents after transferring at Bordeaux, replaced by two more in the capital. A matter of indifference to me—or perhaps not quite indifference, since their presence was keeping the undead in check. Naturally the boochies were watching me, via human familiars during the day, in person(s) by night. Ordering a Long Island Iced Tea in a Montmartre night club at three in the morning a wave of vamp-nausea hit me hard enough to make me reel. I turned. Blond blue-eyed Mia at the opposite end of the neon-lined bar raised her glass (a prop, obviously) with a smile. Calm intelligent white hands and oxblood lipstick. A strikingly beautiful woman who smelled like a vat of pigshit and rotten meat. You appreciate the cognitive dissonance. Anyway, she made no move. I stayed in Paris a couple of days, too dull-hearted even to take a farewell turn around the Louvre. I hired a red-haired, big-breasted athletic escort and surprised myself with the vehemence of my climax. Postcoitally I tried, from a supposed correspondence between volcanic ejaculation and the capacity to affirm life, to work up a bit of feeling for still being here. Failed. Libido, I was forced to conclude, was a lone warrior flinging itself around the battlefield everyone else had deserted.
At last, five days since waking in the
Which is where everything
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—
I know what he was going to say now.
(“And you don’t believe in fate?” she said to me.)
(“I’ll believe in anything you tell me,” I said.)
Big coup for the
(“Not according to Stephen Hawking,” she said. “I watched this programme on PBS. He sees space-time as a four-dimensional, closed manifold, like the surface of a sphere, with no beginning and no end. It’s a nifty idea, but I still can’t stop seeing it the old-fashioned way, as if space-time’s a blob floating around in, you know, some other space, with some other time going on.”)
(“Come here,” I said. “Come
She was getting off the train, I was waiting to get on. Three carriage doors up from me she stepped high- heeled down onto the platform and in a moment found herself being helped up from the floor by the large-limbed Nordic couple in front of whom she’d inexplicably crashed to her knees.
Inexplicable to her. Not to me. I lip-read her going through the motions—Oh, my gosh … Oh … Thank you, thanks, yes I’m fine, I don’t know what happened, I’m such a moron, thank you so much—as the enormous Swedes or Norwegians or Finns covered in blond fuzz with gigantic sunburned gentleness helped her to her feet and handed her her wheelie case and purse—she went through these motions, yes, but she was looking elsewhere, everywhere, with a contained wildness bordering panic for the source of the power that had momentarily upended reality like that.
Me, in other words.
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.
Werewolf.
No preparation. No warning. Just the whole slab of myself fallen flat before her and all my eaten dead shocked into stillness. They’d thought the end of things—release, final dissolution, peace—was near. Instead this betrayal, Marlowe wrenched awake in a world blasted into renewal …
Meanwhile, back on her feet and free of helping hands she stood trembling, gripping her purse, face moist, body discernibly awry. She had the look of a foreign correspondent caught off-guard mid-report by an explosion. Early thirties, eyes the colour of plain chocolate and similarly dark hair in two soft shoulder-length waves. A single mole or beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. White-skinned but with a warmth and suppleness that betrayed— surely?—Levantine or Mediterranean blood. Certainly not “beautiful” or “pretty” but Salomeishly appealing, visibly smudged with the permissive modern wisdoms. This was a girl who’d been loved by her parents and grown vastly beyond them. She thought of them now, with a little searing pain of celebration, as children or simpletons. I had an image of generic homesick immigrants in the U.S. standing in a tenement doorway, waving her off, full of heartbroken pride. She wore a beige mackintosh over a white blouse and brown pinstripe skirt but with no effort at all (since there was no stopping me) I could see her dancing naked but for a veil and a navel ruby. Lip-reading her with the helpful Nords I’d made her American, and something about her relationship with the luggage and the raincoat and the purse reinforced this, the casual entitlement to useful things. While I was soaking all this up her consciousness was hurrying around the tunnel hastily manhandling the dispersing crowd, knowing that somewhere … somewhere very close …
I backed into one of the platform’s exits, managed—just—not to bound up and lay hands on her.
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s a female.
She swallowed, plucked her blouse away from herself. Her scent was a hot perversion, a dirty cocktail of perfumed
A shaven-headed WOCOP agent lurked at the end of the platform. In the absence of vamp odour I had to assume a human familiar somewhere on the scene, though I hadn’t ID’d him yet. Could either Hunt or Undead know about her?
Her nostrils flared. Becoming a werewolf had nearly destroyed her, but hadn’t. Thus she’d discovered the
