The Last Werewolf

transfiguration of the mundane: luggage carts; information screens; airline logos; ugly families. Every humble atom glorified. I can miss it. Mutual certainty trims speech and here was our speech, trimmed. She would simply not get on the plane. All that was selfish and weak in me lay heavily upon the very little that wasn’t. She’d get a room at an airport hotel. I’d lose the vamp and the copper. I’d go to the room. She’d be sitting on the edge of the bed when I entered. She’d look up.

“It’s not safe,” I said. “We have to know if they’re onto you.”

“That black guy upstairs,” she said. “There’s something—”

“He’s a vampire.”

Another first, her face and silence said. But also, after a slight delay: Why not? In fact, of course, of course vampires. She’d learned: The world pulled these sudden convulsive moves to reveal more and more of its outlandish self to a random cursed elite. Meanwhile Bloomingdale’s and Desperate Housewives and Christmas and the government carried on. She was carrying on herself, in extraordinary fusion. I could see it in her tense shoulders and flushed face and the care with which she’d applied her makeup. It hurt my heart, the unrewarded courage of it, the particular degree of her determination not to fold in spite of everything. In spite of becoming a monster. It hurt my heart (oh, the heart was awake now, the heart was bolt upright) that she’d had to be brave all alone.

“Did you feel sick?” I asked.

“I still do, a little.”

“When did it start?”

“Just now when I came into check-ins.”

“But nothing before that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing ever?”

“Not like this, no.”

Good. If she’d never encountered a vampire before then chances were the boochie upstairs was for Jacob Marlowe only. Her scent would be churning his guts but without knowing there was another howler in the house he’d put that down to me.

“Don’t look until I tell you,” I said, “but there’s a Bruce Willis type in a brown leather jacket and a white T- shirt standing under the information screens to your left. I need to know if you’ve ever seen him before. Okay, look now.”

“I don’t recognise him,” she said. “Who is he?”

“You don’t know about WOCOP, right?”

“What?”

“It’s an organisation that—Shit, there’s too much to explain like this. All you need to know for now is they’re no friends of ours. Neither are vampires. We’ve got to be careful.”

A pause. Then she said: “I’m not getting on the plane.”

Which forced me to risk a look of my own. She was staring at me with wide-awake consciousness. Whatever else was true it was true this was a relief to her, a vindication of all the hours and days of fierce holding on: You’re not alone. The ease with which I could hang up the phone and walk over to her and take her in my arms was a satanically reasonable temptation. I could see myself doing it, feel the lithe yielding fit of her against me. I know what you are and you know what I am.

“I don’t want you to get on the plane,” I said. “But we have to be sure they don’t know about you.” We were “we,” already. Of course we were.

“Was it you in the desert?” she asked.

“What?”

“California. Nine months ago. When I was attacked. Was it you?”

I’d seen the file. In late June 2008 the Hunt had killed werewolf Alfonse Mackar in the Mojave Desert. Which had left just Wolfgang and me on the books. Or so WOCOP had thought.

“No, it wasn’t me.”

She bit the inside of her lip for a moment. “No, it wasn’t you. I can … feel it.” A mix: pleasure, embarrassment, relief. Suddenly, with the two of us in the same room, even a room as expansively joyless as check-ins, she could feel all sorts of things. So could I. The intimacy was, literally, laughable. Laughter was laughably available.

“How many are there—of us?” A struggle for her to choose which question first, suddenly faced with the possibility of answers.

“I was supposed to be the last,” I said. “But now there’s you. I don’t know how. I don’t know what it means.” We kept looking away from each other, then back, away, back. It was hypnotic. For her as for me there was a vague awareness of all the things we didn’t, in our perfect certainty, need to say, as if pages of TV movie script— I can’t believe this is happening … I knew from the first moment I saw you—were scrolling on an autocue both of us were ignoring.

“I can’t go now,” she said. “You can’t ask me to do that. It’s ridiculous.”

Imagine if a hundred and sixty-seven years ago I’d run into another of my kind at a railway station. Someone who’d lowered his copy of the Times, looked over his spectacles and said, Yes, I know all about it, but you’ll have to wait.

“I know this is hard for you,” I said. “It is for me too—” Our eyes met again and there it still was, hilarious mutual transparency, raging collusion. “But there’s no other way to be sure. Please trust me. I just want to know you’re safe.”

“What do they want you for? Us for.”

I told her what I knew, skipping all but the consequential chunks. Helios, the vamps, the virus. She listened with a slight frown, one arm wrapped around herself. She might have been a young mother hearing a report of her child’s out-of-character misbehaviour at school. The dark hair framed her face in two soft crescents. A vaguely 1970s sub–Charlie’s Angels look. I was thinking, with a mix of bitterness and joy: All these years. All these years.

“I’ll leave the airport,” I told her. “You stay. If they don’t know about you they’ll follow me. You take your flight to New York. I’ll join you when I’ve ditched them. Shouldn’t take me more than a day or two.”

“Wait. This is crazy. What if they don’t follow you?”

“They will. If they don’t, I’ll come back and we’ll rethink.”

“What if there are other vampires?”

“I’ll call you in thirty minutes. If there are others here you’ll still feel sick, and if one of them gets on the plane with you you’ll feel really sick. But that’s not likely. If they put anyone on the flight with you it’ll be a familiar, a human. They won’t do anything as long as you stay in public places, but keep your eyes open.”

“What about these WOCOP guys?” she said. “How will I know if they’re following me?” The charming frown of concentration remained. She looked now like a secretary taking in an astonishing amount of new instruction, forcing herself to stay calm, forcing herself to be up to the inhuman demand.

“You won’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that just now. In any case they won’t make a move yet. They’re trophy hunters. They’ll wait for the next full moon.” The words “full moon” made us look at each other again. All the big things we’d said nothing about. I was down to my last pound coin. I memorised her New York address.

“I can’t just go,” she said. “I need answers.”

“You’ll get them, just not like this. I have to know you’re safe.”

A piercing sweet catch in my chest when I said that, for the simple reason that it was true. Suddenly something mattered. In films someone finds a spaceship that’s been buried for thousands of years and switches the power on—and the whole system flutters magically back into life, lights, gauges, indicators, drives. The lovely thrilling thought that this capacity’s been there the whole time, waiting.

“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Is there a cure?”

“No.”

She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Absorbed. She’d grown a new glamorously deformed personality to accommodate werewolfhood but there in the closing of the eyes and the swallow was an indication of how much of