The Last Werewolf

face like the hot tears of childhood.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” a female voice said.

I spun left. The blond vampire, Mia, stood on the landing maybe fifteen feet away. The bottom half of her face was covered in blood in just the supposedly endearing way a Kodak toddler’s is covered in chocolate (or a scat star’s in shit, I always think every time I see one of these revolting infants) and in her hand she held the raggedly severed head of the unfortunate Wazz. His tongue protruded lewdly from between his lips and his eyeballs had rolled back in their sockets. He looked as if he’d died just as he was about to blow a halfhearted raspberry, to express extreme tedium.

Mia, on the other hand, in black boots, black suede skirt, black nylons, black satin blouse and black leather jacket, appeared superabundantly alive, smiling through the blood mask. Her blue eyes—not the dark lapis lazuli of Ellis’s but somewhere between periwinkle and turquoise—glittered with what looked like joy. A vein in her temple showed. She was white, even by vampiric standards. From her name and the company she’d been in at Jacqui Delon’s I’d made her Italian, but now that I mentally replayed Is this what you’re looking for? the accent, though elusively mixed, put her roots a long way east of Trieste. A Russian with Norse colouring—but why not? Scandinavian marauders sailed down the Volga and took charge of Novgorod more than a thousand years ago. For all I knew she’d been there when the Vikings raided Constantinople.

All of which redundant speculation laboured under the perceptual paradox of a beautiful woman exuding a smell of decomposing meat and ripest pigshit. Initially her teammate’s odour—less faecal but gamier—had obscured hers. Now I got it clear and unmingled. I sank to my knees, put a hand out to stop myself from complete collapse, slipped in Russell’s lake of blood and fell facedown next to his corpse.

There was very little time. No time, really. Any moment now she’d drop Wazz’s head and be upon me. Any moment now it would already have happened.

Nonetheless I’d made certain calculations. (Whatever is happening, something else is going on.) Russell had ended up on his front with his right arm trapped under him. That put most of the kit—including the UV stick he still had in his hand—out of reach. The Staker’s holster was empty, the Staker itself lay five feet away in the library doorway. Getting at the stake, still buried in his throat, would require three seconds more than the one I’d actually have from the moment I made my move. The only weapon within reach was the flamethrower, and I wasn’t sure how to—

I heard the head drop and felt the air shift. She Is Coming. Hopeless hopeless hopeless but I rolled and plucked at the BBs’ gun-unit holstered at Russell’s thigh—not fast enough. Her boot heel gouged a divot from the side of my skull as she went past in a blur. I collapsed a second time.

Stay put.

Not only because the blow, a rude and deafening bok, had dazed me but because the position concealed my Braille navigation of the flamethrower. She hadn’t seen that. Didn’t know the weapon was there. What I needed from her now was the Bond villain’s soliloquising delay. I wasn’t going to get it. She was here to kidnap, not to kill.

“Uhhhr,” I said, not entirely faking. The head gouge was in the transitional stage between very cold and very hot. The wound in my chest was a rose of fire. I opened my eyes to see her descending gently to the floor. Flier. Fuck. Closed them again. Forced nimbleness into my fingertips. It’s basically a glorified water pistol, Harley had said, knowing not whereof he spoke. Two triggers, one for fuel release, one for ignition. Ergo I’d need both hands. The odds had just worsened.

“Phil?” Mia said.

Flying over me she’d passed the library doorway. Peripherally registered its lone occupant. She hadn’t known.

Two-thirds out of the holster.

She stood with her feet apart and an ugly hang to her limbs, face slack, staring at the crisping corpse by the hearth. Rain was a continuous exhalation against the house.

The weapon’s nozzle was caught on something, I couldn’t tell what. Talulla’s voice said quietly in my head: You’re running out of time.

Closing my eyes would’ve helped my fingers but Mia turned in the doorway and looked at me. “You?” she asked. I opened my mouth to lie but she said: “Don’t bother.” In the brighter light of the library her face’s colours vivified: red; blue; white. Very calmly she bent—one nyloned knee ticked, humanising her—and picked up the Staker that lay by her feet.

“You want me alive, don’t forget,” I said. She stood over me. I looked up at her. Here was the submissive’s camera angle of choice for his dominatrix, the perspective all boot and thigh and hip narrowing to the remote worshipful contemptuous head like a mountaintop divinity. I took a breath for reiteration—and she shot a stake through my left leg.

Pain, yes, sheet lightning, but also a peculiarly schoolboyish sense of injustice. She’d clipped the femur but not broken it, gone instead at an angle through the quadrilateral and vastus externus. No major arteries, but the sciatic nerve violently wronged already playing the Psycho shower scene strings in shock, a sensation that went all the way up to my molars.

Paltry vandalism as far as her ladyship was concerned. Something to keep me busy while she, tossing the Staker downstairs and turning with an expression testifying to the effect of my odour on her, took out a mobile and dialled. “It’s me,” she said. “I’ve got him.” Pause. “Phil’s dead.”

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.