“Not yet.
“Aren’t you going to be on the drive-by tonight?”
“Can’t. I’m going up to meet Grainer now. After that he’ll want me with him. I do the weapons check. There’sa routine, a set of rituals. Don’t worry, Jake, she’s in safe hands, I promise. Just stay in your hotel room until you get the call.”
The rest of the journey was febrile peaks and troughs. Moments of vividness—the huge wheels of a truck very close; a crow flapping up from fresh roadkill; a green verge covered in crocuses—and long blurred stretches, pre- Curse hypersensitivity that amounted to perceptual distortion or fuzz. My face tingled, eyes itched, limbs lost their edges to the pins-and-needles ghost of the wolf. The memory of killing with Talulla was a root that clutched from balls to brain. Neither fear nor fatigue obscured it.
Just after three o’clock, under a pied sky of cumulus and silvery blue, we arrived in Caernarfon.
I MANAGED AN hour of reiterative calls to Aegis before the batteries on Russell’s and Wazz’s mobiles died within minutes of each other, like an ancient couple who couldn’t bare to be parted. Daren’t risk the room phone. It’s probably bugged, but there’s also the possibility they’ll call in on it for the drive-by with Talulla. Either way I’ve left it alone.
Of course
The room is as I remember it. Seems a decade ago. Poor Maddy’s white shoulders hunched and her face full of immediate belief though she’d said, Is that real? That’s not real, is it?
It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.
I’m sorry, Harls, for the mess I made of your life. For
Dark. I watched the last of the light over the Irish Sea. Now the window shows only the street. No call.•
The whole of one’s being reduces to listening for the sound of a ringing phone.•
Something nags when I think of Madeline here. This room’s hauled it to the edge of memory but can’t quite heave it over the border.•
22:50. Still no call. It’s raining again. I’ll have to open the window to see her clearly.•
Thank God.
I was beginning to give up hope. Just after midnight the room phone rang. Not Ellis. An older-sounding male.
“Take the handset to the window. ETA two minutes. Now hang up.”
Time, as the twee verse has it, is too slow for those who wait. I opened the sash. The two minutes swelled and warped. Car after car that wasn’t them. Then a mirror-windowed people-carrier pulled up across the road. The handset rang again.
“Hello? Lu?”
“Listen carefully,” the male voice said. “You get thirty seconds, precisely. Not negotiable. Go.”
The vehicle’s rear window went down—and there was Talulla’s face, awake, expectant, full of her nimble consciousness. Not
“Are you okay?” I said.
“I’m fine. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m getting you out, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It won’t be long, I promise.”
“Be careful. You have to be careful.”
“I will. I’m coming for you.”
“Promise you’ll be careful.”
“I promise.”
“What happened to your face?”
“Nothing. A scrape. You look so beautiful.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. You’re sure they haven’t hurt you?”
“They really haven’t. I miss you.”
“You’ll be seeing me very soon.”
“I could feel you close all day.”
“Me too.”
“I wish I could come to you right now.”
“Oh, Jesus, Lu, I—” A hand wearing a black leather driving glove took the phone from her. I saw her face’s effort collapse. You think: I should have spent days just holding her, kissing her, looking at her. The electric window closed. One last glimpse of her straining to see over it. The soft dark eyes.
“That’s it, chief,” the voice said—and hung up. Seconds later the people-carrier was gone.
SOMETHING’S HAPPENED TO ME. I’ve stopped abstracting. This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains. Madeline was right in her priorities all along.
I hadn’t realised my conversion until reading back over these pages, and now, when they ought to present themselves, conclusions desert me. For a werewolf facing what might be his last few hours your narrator finds himself woefully short of summative maxims. The great mysteries endure, unsolved, unseen-into (except love, which is really not a mystery but the force that eases mysteries into the hard shoulder); I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die. I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one
My skull aches from where the moon spent the night under its cranium, like a lozenge of slowly melting ice. In a few minutes Llewellyn will arrive to take me to Beddgelert. I haven’t slept but in spite of the pre-Curse torments I’ve showered, shaved, trimmed my finger- and toenails. There are no clean clothes so I washed my socks and underpants in shampoo and dried them on the room’s radiator. Ellis tells me there’ll be fresh gear for me when the deed is done. I drank the last of the Talisker around noon. Since then coffee and Camels, the occasional glass of tap water. It’s raining, halfheartedly. This seat by the window’s become a dreary home. Its view is of the town’s grey edge: a road, passing cars, headscarved old ladies, dog walkers, now and then a flushed jogger. Beyond this a low grey wall, a narrow strand, the shifting colours of the Menai Strait, Anglesey.
Not for much longer.
My inner dead make their presence felt now like a silent congregation. Arabella, their priestess, has gone, so lately they’re still in shock. There’sa tenderness around her absence, like the soft blood-filled cavity of a pulled-out
