The Last Werewolf

killed myself—literally, I’d torn my own flesh off; if it hadn’t been for the howler’s accelerated healing I’d have bled to death), but there are two reasons for not doing it. First, it’s the worst suffering a werewolf can go through. Second, it’s pointless, because whether it’s this month or the next or the one after that, unless you commit suicide you will certainly kill again—and again and again and again until you die of old age or silver finds you. I’d told her all this.

“I don’t find it strange,” I said. “You see the logic. Morally a month’s abstinence here or there’s meaningless.”

“That’s not why I haven’t tried it,” she said. “I haven’t tried it because I remember what those first three times were like and the thought of going through that again terrifies me. It’s not seeing the logic. It’s cowardice.”

“I’m no different. It terrifies me, too. Plus the last time I tried it I failed.”

“But you’ve done good in the world. You’ve counterbalanced.”

“Money gestures. Which is nothing if you’ve got the stuff to burn. Besides, it doesn’t work. Money’s not legal tender in the moral world.”

My cock had stirred next to her hand. I knew she knew. Was readying herself for the exquisite capitulation. Through sorrow and shame into warmth, and the peace of having no one but each other.

“It doesn’t change,” she said. “I keep thinking there’s some way around it, but in the end it’s still either kill yourself or get on with being what you are.”

“Don’t kill yourself,” I said.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Yes.”

Just stay.

“I might kill myself,” she said. “It’s hard to say.”

“Will you promise not to kill yourself without telling me first?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I promise not to kill myself without telling you first.”

That night I had a tumble of vivid dreams. I think we made love again, in the half-asleep way that comes close to magic. Then more dreams. One of being repeatedly stung in the neck by an elusive insect. I thought, I must tell Talulla about this when I wake up. I must—But the thought fell off suddenly into darkness.

And when I woke, late, the room was filled with sunlight and a sea-smelling breeze, and before I lifted my head from the pillow I could feel the emptiness in the bed where her body should have been and Ellis’s voice said: “Jeez, Jake, it’s about time.”

47

HE WAS SITTING in the room’s one rattan chair at the foot of the bed with his back to the French windows that opened onto the veranda, hands clasped over his belly, one leg crossed at a wide angle over the other. Trademark black leather trousers, steel-toe-capped boots, pale denim jacket. The waist-length white-blond hair was down today. A movement of air brought me his marshy foot odour. A tuning-fork hum in my teeth brought me silver rounds in the shoulder-holstered firearm. I sat up to face him.

“We’ve got her,” he said. “Do you want Q&A or shall I just roll it out?”

“Tell me,” I said.

Ellis nodded, briefly, as if to confirm his private guess at my reaction had been correct, then he got to his feet, made a just a sec gesture, went out onto the veranda and came back a moment later with two cups of freshly brewed coffee. He handed me one then returned to his seat.

“First, let me reassure you,” he said. “Talulla’s alive, well, completely unharmed. She’s far from here, in a location I can’t disclose yet, but you need have absolutely no anxieties about her comfort. This I promise you, Jake.”

I set the coffee down on the bedside table. My hands were trembling. Walking back from the beach last night under the stars she’d taken my hand. Neither of us had said a word but the gesture had made both of us think, gently, of death. Now I had an image of her sitting with her knees drawn up on a spartan bunk in a windowless cell. Alive, well, completely unharmed. I had to believe him because not believing him left me nothing.

“I can’t do this naked,” I said.

“I understand. Go ahead.”

I got to my feet, felt the perfect vacuum where any concession to or interest in my nakedness would with anyone else have been, and dressed, quickly, in yesterday’s clothes. Then sat on the edge of the bed and lit a Camel. My in-love self like a straitjacketed lunatic sobbed and rocked back and forth repeating They’ve got her. They’ve got her. They’ve got her. There was a sore spot on my neck I couldn’t resist rubbing.

“Still stinging?” Ellis asked. “Tranquilizer dart. We’ve got this new guy, calls himself the Cat. Justifiably, if he got up onto your balcony without waking you. You didn’t hear anything?”

A dream of being stung by an insect. My own uselessness lay on me like a passed-out drunk.

“Just give me the information,” I said.

“Right. So we’ve got her. You can have her back and live happily ever after. All you’ve got to do is kill Grainer.”

I looked up at him. His face was peaceful, dark blue eyes lucid. He returned my stare. “You heard me correctly,” he said.

“Why Grainer?” I asked.

Ellis took a sip of his coffee, swallowed; his Adam’s apple moved in his gullet like a little elbow. “Jake,” he said, “it’s like this. For some time now I’ve been involved with a movement within the organisation. This is a group of people—some from Hunt, some from Tech, some from Finance—who’ve read the writing on the wall. I mean it’s pretty big writing on a pretty big wall: We need you. Literally, you’re our reason for being. Not just you, obviously. The vamps, the demons, the reanimated, the voodoo kids, the Satanists, the djin, the poltergeists, the whole crowd. Problem is the crowd’s getting a tad small. You see this, right?”

Post-9/11 wacko-rumour said the Bush administration had launched the attacks itself, the reward being carte blanche for oil-savvy aggression and a shot in the already steroidal arm for the military-industrial complex. No fear, no funding. Ergo al-Qaeda. Same principle here.

“The guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job,” I said.

“Exactly. My friends and I aren’t prepared to let it happen. It’s okay for Grainer, he’s got money and he’s sick of all this shit anyway. But what’s a guy like me going to do? Flip burgers?”

Not just funding, then. Identity crisis too. Ellis didn’t know anything else. Porn stars talked of the industry as a loving family. The Hunt, I could well imagine, played the same role.

“FYI,” Ellis continued, “there are now two WOCOPs. World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena, and World Organisation for the Creation of Occult Phenomena. We’re not out. In all likelihood we never really will be. But under our influence things are going to change. We’re going to save what’s in danger of being lost forever.”

“By killing Grainer?”

“You have no idea, Jake, how much clout the guy has. It’s not just him. There’sa nucleus, a damned junta. They’re controlling funding, recruitment, research, policy, media. Half of them are cynics robbing the organisation blind and the other half are zealots who don’t realise they’re cheerleading themselves into redundancy.”

“I had you pegged as a zealot,” I said.

Ellis shook his head with a sort of benevolent disappointment. “I’m a pragmatist, Jake. Always have been. I thought you knew that.”

“And when you kill Grainer—sorry, when you get me to kill Grainer—what then? A coup d’etat? Or are you picking the generals off one by one?”

“We don’t want a bloody revolution,” he said, then swallowed the last of his coffee and put the cup down on