“You could have been dumb and ugly,” I said, as she wiped her mouth with her hand.

“So could you.”

“If we both were that would’ve been okay. It’s inequity causes the trouble.”

“What if I’d been smart and ugly?”

“Initially excruciating but better in the long run. Dumb and pretty I’d have ended up killing you. Or more likely you me. Anyway go on. You’d broken down in the middle of nowhere.”

She put the glass on the bedside table and lay on her side, propped on one elbow, facing me. We were over the first miraculous wave, her eyes conceded. Now a soberer relief, and the first shadows of realism. “I’d passed a one-horse town two or three miles down the road,” she said. “A diner, a store, a handful of houses. I was pretty sure I’d seen a garage, too. At the very least there’d be a phone. I’d call Triple A and that would be that. So I walked. I must have gone about half a mile when the helicopter appeared.”

I was studying her hand, enjoying the thought of its history, relishing in the inane way one must in these beginnings the bare fact that it was hers. Full-fleshed with long unpainted nails. She wore a big opal ring on her middle finger. When she’d touched her clit, with healthy deft modern American entitlement, the sight of this ringed finger slipping with cunning purpose through the soft dark hair of her mons had almost finished me.

“It came up about fifty yards away, I guess out of a ravine. I thought it must be the police because of the searchlight. Obviously these were your WOCOP guys.”

“The Hunt.”

“Right. Well, anyway, it happened incredibly fast. I could tell they were chasing someone, something, but I couldn’t see what. It was bizarre standing there with suddenly no category to put the experience in. That’s why I just stood there, like an idiot. Then the searchlight swung and blinded me and suddenly—out of nowhere—the werewolf hit me.”

I thought back to the file I’d seen. Had the report mentioned a witness? It had not. Thank God.

“You’d hardly call it being bitten. More a scrape of the teeth. He really just ran me over. The claws did the real damage. I remember thinking, even in the split-second it took: Jesus, werewolves exist. You’d think you’d be stunned, wouldn’t you? But I wasn’t. I guess, you know, you see something enough times in the movies … I got one big gash on my chest and one on my cheek. It was so sudden, like a huge firework went off in my face. Then he was gone. I’ve never seen anything move that fast. Had never seen, I mean. These days I’m pretty quick myself.”

I almost said: We’ll see how fast soon enough, but didn’t. It would have left us both uneasy.

“Then it was over,” she continued. “The chopper was gone and there I was all alone in total silence again. I walked about twenty paces, in shock I suppose. Then I found the dart.”

“What dart?”

“For the werewolf, but they’d hit me. In the calf. A tranquilizer, presumably, since a moment later I was out like a light.”

“Did you keep it?”

“That would’ve been the smart thing, wouldn’t it? But you find something sticking in you like that you pluck it out and toss it. Or you do if you’re stupid. If you’re me.”

Darting? This is the Hunt. They don’t dart, they kill. They behead . Alfonse Mackar was one of Ellis’s. Grainer had been in Canada looking for Wolfgang. Was there anything in the file about darting for capture? If there was I didn’t remember it.

“I don’t know how long I was out,” she said. “When I woke up it was still dark but the moon was higher. I wasn’t quite where I remembered lying down, either. Must have crawled, I guess. I went back to the road and walked the two miles to Arlette. I seriously thought I’d died and this was the afterlife. By the time I got to the town the wounds had already started to heal. By the next morning there was nothing, no sign of any injury at all. But you know how all that works. Actually I do still get a slight pain in my chest sometimes. As if there’s a splinter in there. God, that tequila’s gone to the tips of my toes.”

A moment in which Manhattan quietened and turned its glittering consciousness on us. I felt the dimensions of the hotel room, the streets outside and the frayed edges of the metropolis unravelling into freeways and the newly hopeful country’s vast distances. And here we were on the bed together, warm as a pot of sunlit honey. With a very slight effort I could have settled wholly into peace. But now we’d gone through the first layer of sex all the wretched questions throbbed.

“The infection,” she said, with mild telepathy. “Why me, now, after you’re saying, what, a hundred and fifty years?”

Build a fortress. Guards. An army of dogs. Victims brought in, paid, tricked. We’d never have to leave. I sketched this and other fantasies, felt the tingle of futility, heard the world’s forces like a billion-piece orchestra tuning up. Why in God’s name were they darting Alfonse Mackar?

“I don’t know,” I answered. “My information’s WOCOP information. They’re the authority, or were. Transmission’s supposed to have been stopped by a virus, which means either the bug’s died or you’re immune. Anything special I should know about you medically?”

“Nothing. I get hay fever and I’m allergic to almonds. Otherwise, nada.”

“There’s got to be something. Anyway it’s not the priority. The priority is … Well, there are several.”

“Not yet, please. Hit me again.”

I had the long-overdue confrontation with myself in the bathroom while she made phone calls. (Three years ago her mother had died of bowel cancer and Talulla had taken on running the business ostensibly with—latterly instead of—her father. Until “it” happened. Two months after Turning she’d hired a general manager, Ambidextrous Alison, to cut herself loose.) “Honey, just ig nore him,” I could hear her saying, presumably of meddlesome Nikolai. “I’ve told him he’s out of it. He does it because he knows it pisses you off.” I lay naked on the bathroom floor. Cold marble and the starry light of inset halogens. Things had caught up with me. Chiefly the completeness of my reversal. The universe, I said, demands some sort of deal, so you make one. In my case to live without love. With out love. A hundred and sixty-seven years. Was it ridiculous to speak of love now? No, it wasn’t. Or only in that it’s always ridiculous—on Wittgensteinian grounds—to speak of love. Everything was the same and everything had changed. Outside the city and the voluble traffic and the millions of human eyes and talking mouths and crafty habituated hands testified: The accidental epic of ordinariness goes on. A godless universe of flailing contingency—now with the hilarious difference of not being in it alone. (Suddenly I missed Harley, guiltily.) Courtesy of shared specieshood—indeed sole species representation—we’d skipped the phase of incredulous delight and gone straight to entrenched addiction. It wasn’t a choice. I was for her, she for me. Wulf married us, blessed us, wrapped his arms around us like a stinking whisky-priest. What did I write of Arabella? “We would have killed together and we would have shone. ” Yes, and the warmth of that shining lay upon me now like an afterglow. Fore glow rather, since it came back through time from a future rich with murder. Talulla had looked at me when I pushed my cock into her cunt, had looked at me, I say, and sensed something of Arabella, whose spirit lived in me, whose ghost looked out through my eyes, had detected this presence and understood as she lifted her pale hips in slow and complete and victorious compliance that the betrayal whether I liked it or not of course deepened my pleasure, sold me wholly into the new female ownership, pissed on the altar, shat on the grave, dug up and defiled the beloved body in exquisite fully conscious sacrilege under the laws of Eros.