The Last Werewolf

Sorry, Harls.

No time for elegy, however. The couch’s conflagration had spread to the rug, where my journal (this journal, dear reader, dear finder and I pray honourer of the dead) lay within a hand’s span of the flames. I leaped in, snatched it, leaped out again. A quick frisk of Russell’s carcase yielded his phone. Ditto headless Wazz’s after I’d more or less fallen down the stairs. I grabbed an overcoat of Harley’s from the hall, threw a chair through the kitchen window (the boys had kept the place locked and there was no time to hunt for keys), cut my shin on a shard getting through and, with on top of all this the Hunger raking my guts, made my escape through the sodden back garden.

52

AN HOUR LATER I lay on a king-sized bed in a double room at the Grafton Hotel in South Kensington. Checking in had been delicate. Harley’s overcoat hid most of the bloodstains but the singed hair and four diagonal stripes across my face, though already semihealed, gave the desk clerk pause. “Don’t ask,” I said, snapping the Amex Platinum (Tom Carlyle) down on the counter. A tactical simultaneity: brusque tone and class plastic. It worked, just.

“What the fuck, please, is going on?” Ellis asked, very calmly, on the Ellis phone. (I now had the Ellis phone, the Grainer phone, the Russell phone and the Wazz phone. The Grafton phone—untapped!—had made the latter two redundant.) His team hadn’t called in. He’d rung their phones, obviously. I’d deemed it prudent to answer only the one I was supposed to have. “I mean,” he said, still very calmly, “what the fuck, please, is going on?”

I told him about the Attack of the Vampires. I did not tell him that I’d already called my contact at Aegis (the U.K.’s version of Blackwater, former SAS, MI5, army and navy) and woken the dozing funds at three of the Swiss banks.

“You’re a lucky sonofabitch, Jacob,” he said.

“Yes, well, I recommend you make flamethrowers compulsory kit.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re lucky we had one of our guys in the local force.”

“The police?”

“Think about how this would look: four Hunters dead and Jake Marlowe miraculously at large in perfect health. It would look, would it not, as if you’d done my boys in yourself and fled.”

This hadn’t occurred to me. A worry: What else hadn’t occurred to me? The hotel room was deep-carpeted and thick-draped. A small part of me thought how wonderful it would be to lie down to sleep here and never wake up.

“Fortunately for you,” Ellis continued, “our agent verified the vamp remains, once they’d got the fire out. There’s not much of Harley’s library left, I’m afraid.”

I opened the curtains a couple of inches and looked out. There was a break in the rain. Wet London breathed, half asleep, twitching here and there where night-drama neurons fired: a woman getting raped; a junkie expiring; someone proposing; a baby slithering out. In the daylight the city’s all brash bounce, no question of not going on. Nights you feel the exhaustion, see the going on for what it is: terror of admitting the whole thing’s been a mistake.

“I’m not in perfect health, as it happens,” I said. “I got staked in the leg. I’ve got a gouged skull and a hole in my chest the size of a tennis ball.” All of which were healing—the whispering knitting circle, the cellular cabal—even as I spoke.

“I should have been there,” Ellis said. “I would have made a difference.”

“Maybe. It happened very fast. Did you get a trace on the Land Rover?”

“What? Oh, that. No. Guess Russell flaked on it. I clean forgot myself. Anyway it was the vamps, evidently.”

“Looks that way,” I said, although Mia, I quite clearly recalled, had said “bring the van” not “bring the car.” Competition for my attention was fierce, however, and the Land Rover question was lightweight.

“We’re going to have to redirect the pickup,” Ellis said. “Where are you?”

“Tell your guy ten a.m. outside the Masonic headquarters in Long Acre.”

“Jake …”

“Listen, Ellis, I’ve had more than two weeks of not being able to go for a piss without someone’s say-so, and then with someone else listening in while I’m having it. You can give me one night of privacy. You know I’m not going to run. You’re still holding the cards. I just need to get my head together. What’s your driver’s name?”

Over the phone I could feel his will to autonomy. There was someone he should okay it with, someone he didn’t like. Whoever this person was their days of unchallenged leadership were numbered. Ellis liked me more than he liked them.

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t dick me, Jacob. You know the cause-and-effect reality.”

“Hundred percent.”

“Driver’s name is Llewellyn. He’ll know you, but just in case, he’s in a BMW four-by-four license plate Foxtrot Tango six seven two Echo Uniform Delta. Code word is lupus. Ten a.m. Don’t let me down. Don’t let your lady down. And no”—as I drew breath to ask—“you can’t talk to her now. You’ll see her tomorrow. Trust me, she’s fine. She’s comfortable.”

I spent what was left of the night on the hotel phone.

53

THE DRIVER, LLEWELLYN, young, fair, leanly muscled, with the cleanliness and near-skinhead haircut of a Mormon proselytiser, was precisely on time. The code word seemed redundant but I asked for it anyway and received “lupus, sir” in reply. Sir. Okay. Picked for this job because he followed orders to the letter. You will treat Mr. Marlowe courteously, but you will not engage in conversation. Fine. I was in any case itchy with sleeplessness and inwardly ajabber with Hunger. “I’m going to have to chain-smoke, Llewellyn,” I warned him. “I hope that’s not going to be a problem for you?”

He opened the rear nearside door. “Not a problem, sir,” he said. “We’re partitioned in any case.”

Indeed. Bulletproof glass, by the look of it. Ditto the windows. “Are we expecting to be shot at?” I asked him, giving it a rap.

“Fitted as standard on these, sir,” he said. “Do you want the radio on or anything?”

He called in to let whoever it was (not Ellis, the ether said) know I was on board, then we were on our way. It was a pretty morning. Blue spring sky and lively sunlight and a breeze that shivered the puddles and set London’s buds nodding on their stems. Not that much of it got through to me, quietly bearing up as I was with the Curse’s foreplay, the phantom elongation of snout and finger, the compressed spasms, the importunate erections, the occasional prescience in toenails and eyeteeth. My teeth chattered, actually, as in the first phase of the flu, prompting Llewellyn to remind me I had my own heat controls in the back. Meanwhile Piccadilly, Park Lane, Marylebone, the Westway, the M40. I tried to sleep. Failed. Instead pictured the effects of the dumped money, the fertility of the down payment. Impossible to know yet how many men a breakout would need, but I’d paid Aegis for a squad of fifty up front, nonrecoverable. My guess was that wherever they had Talulla there wouldn’t be a large defence. Ellis’s London renegades couldn’t number more than five hundred and the majority would be carrying out regular WOCOP duties as normal. Poulsom’s installation would rely on concealment rather than a standing force.

Alongside these ruminations I kept up a more or less continuous self-harangue. You fucking idiot, you’re going to get yourself killed. They’ll torture Talulla and rape her and do experiments and mate her with animals and if you’re not already dead force you to watch and this whole fantasy of rescue and survival you’ve cooked up is obscene and preposterous and even Charlie at Aegis had trouble not laughing at you down the phone and only didn’t because he knows you’ve got the money and it’s your fucking funeral you stupid cunt she’s going to die and so are you—

The Ellis phone rang.

“Jake, you’re en route I hear.”

“Is she with you?”