The Last Werewolf

“How do we really know there aren’t any others?” she said, off the back of this image, rolling her head a little to ease the neck’s knots of gathering wolf. “Alfonse Mackar turned me—okay. You say there must be some anomaly in me that made infection possible. But what if it was an anomaly in him? If the thing interfering with infection really is a virus maybe he was immune to it. In which case who’s to say he hasn’t turned others? There could be dozens, or hundreds—”

“Not hundreds. WOCOP would know. Harley would’ve known.”

“A few then. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

This had occurred to me. But for no reason I can dignify with anything higher than the authority of a two- hundred-year-old gut I didn’t buy it. “It’s possible,” I said. “Of course it’s possible.”

“But you don’t think so”

“No. I’m not sure why.”

Another silence, her intelligence working. Then a very slight smile. “It’s because it would be less romantic,” she said.

We drove long into the nights, since it gave at least the one behind the wheel some distraction from the Hunger. Our scents made a dirty brew in the car, went into us, absolutely refused to let desire sleep. Sex muffled the drum-thud for an hour or two. Then the beat struck up again—worse. Diminishing returns. I could feel her sometimes looking back to her werewolf life before we’d met and feeling a kind of retroactive vertigo or nausea that she’d survived it alone so long. It was as if the sun had come up and shown her for the first time how close to the edge of a thousand-foot drop she’d been walking in the dark. Despite which reflections (I could also feel) she was daily making the aesthetic or dispositional shift: As long as you’re still considering suicide the Curse can play as tragedy. Once you’re resolved on living only comedy will do.

Unless you fall in love, Jacob.

(Harley’s ghost? Arabella’s? Whoever, I ignored it.)

I bought things we’d need. A lightweight rucksack. Binoculars. Clip ropes. Talulla didn’t ask. Not, any longer, out of avoidance, but because for the first time in nine months she was enjoying being entirely in someone else’s hands.

The early hours of our eighth day from New York found us in a Super 8 motel in Wyoming.

“The more I think about it,” she said, “the more it doesn’t seem possible they don’t know about me. WOCOP, I mean.” It was just before dawn. My head rested on her thigh. The room’s one thin-curtained window was a lozenge of smoke-blue light. We were dry-eyed, wakeful. The Hunger had forced us off regular food. This, as Jacqueline Delon would no doubt have known, is the way of it: Human appetite occupies roughly the middle fourteen days of the cycle. The rest of the time you’re winding down from the kill, or winding up to it. Now, four days from the full moon (waxing gibbous), we were reduced to water, black coffee, liquor, cigarettes. Even chewing a stick of gum felt categorically wrong.

“It’s bothering me too,” I said. “I feel sure Harley knew, and if he did there’s no reason the rest of the organisation wouldn’t. But you’ve never felt yourself being followed or watched?”

“Would I feel it? Surely not if they’re any good.”

Quite. My own sense for surveillance had had a long time to develop. She was an infant. A conviction seized me suddenly that the motel was surrounded, that any second the door would be booted in. I leaped up from the bed, unlocked, looked out. Nothing. The parking lot’s winking mica. The road. The mountains, white on the heights. Clean cold air and the predawn feeling of the earth’s innocence. I went back inside.

“Maybe I’m wrong about Harls,” I said, as she lit us a Camel each. “It’s just that when I saw you at Heathrow, the instant I saw you it seemed to complete his cut-off message. It was a tonal thing, you had to know his voice. But maybe that wasn’t what he was telling me. It could just as easily have been that he’d found out the vampires were after me for the virus. Or it could have been that he knew his cover was blown, that his own people were onto him. Christ, it could have been any number of things.”

“I’ve wondered if they even saw me that night in the desert,” she said. “I mean it was a matter of a couple of seconds. The chopper was having trouble keeping the light on him. They could have missed me. I mean they could have. Otherwise wouldn’t they have come back for me?”

“There was no mention of you in the report I saw,” I said. “And in any case they’d assume you’d be dead in twelve hours. There was no reason to come back. As far as they were concerned the only thing you were going to turn into was a corpse.”

She considered this for a few moments, staring at the ceiling. The effects of we can’t have children were still going on. She was wondering where the grief might go, what shape it might take. Anger—or rather focused malice—was a possibility. I could feel her considering it, the complete devotion of herself to only a handful of her aspects: intelligence, cruelty, destruction. She could become Kali. “Well,” she said, “that’ll teach them to be complacent, won’t it?”

Fear of pursuit grew in inverse proportion to evidence of pursuit. The back of my head and neck developed a blind hypersensitivity. I got eye ache from repeatedly checking the rearview. Abnormal scrutiny of every desk clerk and chambermaid and store manager and waitress. The world was vampire or WOCOP until proven innocent.

But the miles passed with no sign we were being followed or watched.

We drove west through the Rockies. A bad idea, wulf so close. The latent creature yearned and strained for the sheer spaces. Flaring mountain flanks gashed with snow. Big stone knees bent up out of pools of forest. When we stopped and got out the air was thin and mineral. Talulla suffered spells of fever, in the worst of them sweated and shivered, wrapped in a blanket, but passed from these fugues into picked-clean awareness, like a child after its evening bath. We needed less and less to speak. The dusk sky with the first sprinkle of stars became our element. Mile after winding mile of rich silence in the car. I watched her when she drove, her dark eyes’ incremental submission to what was coming, what she was. It was the look of a little girl who’s assimilated a secret she knows can bring the grown-up world crashing down.

Sex stopped. Without verbal agreement we found ourselves numbed, a pitch of desire so extreme, perhaps, that it nudged or bled into its opposite, as all extremes must. I could barely touch her, she me. Neither of us was surprised. Wulf had its occult necessities, demanded now that the great consummation was close a small fee of purity, a little swept-clean antechamber before the hall of majestic filth.

In the early hours of our tenth day from New York, road-burned and red-eyed, with the Hunger forcing lupine life through human exhaustion, we left Nevada’s share of the mountains and crossed, just south of keen-aired Lake Tahoe, into California.

Transformation was two nights away.

42

MY LAST KILL in the Golden State was thirty-two years ago, in the summer of 1977. Led Zeppelin had played the Oakland Coliseum and a vanload of fans had driven up to Muir Woods after the show to drop acid and screw. I’d planned to go farther north into the Napa Valley (the woods here a tad too close to the city and occasionally ranger-patrolled) but when a young hallucinating gentleman, gamine, with pre-Raphaelite blond curls that would have given Robert Plant’s a run for their money, injudiciously wandered away from his hallucinating friends and all but fell into my lap … Well. No pain felt he. I am quite sure he felt no pain. Had I not been long past the days of self-comfort I would have comforted myself with the thought that to him I’d been nothing more than an alarming— and final—hallucination. Altogether a lazy kill. I barely took pains to bury what was left of him. Of course the remains were found, three days later, but by then I was in Moscow.

Talulla was sick. We checked into a motel on foggy 68 just east of Carmel and I left her soaking in a hot bath. A risk, but unavoidable: Moonrise tomorrow would present its necessities. There was reconnaissance to be done. Besides, I’d seen absolutely no sign of pursuit since we left New York. We had new phones; check-in would be every hour. If she saw or felt anything—anything—suspicious she was to get among the public and call me. “Is it this bad every month?” I asked her. She was pale in the tub, dead-eyed, shivering. Her little breasts were goosefleshed despite the water’s warmth, nipples prettily puckered.