“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s cool. I’m intrigued. I mean you’ve been around for two hundred years. I’m assuming the Death of the Heart at some point. The End of Love. I’m assuming decades of emotional … What’s the French word? Longueurs . Look at that, I surprise myself. Decades of longueurs , then suddenly zammo , this, love again.”

His tone hadn’t changed much, but it had changed enough. I remained silent. The sun and the heat like a million spider bites.

“Don’t make me make them do anything,” Ellis said, quietly. “With sulphuric acid or anything. On her leg or someplace.”

“Please,” I said—but he held up his hand.

“You don’t have sufficient power to dictate terms, Jake,” he said. “I understand the impulse, but you’re not, you know, congruent with reality.”

The leg or someplace. Someplace is somewhere else, her face or breasts or between her legs. Acid makes a sound like a sigh of relief or ecstasy. It would heal but it would hurt so much and they can just keep doing it and this is the possibility you sign up for with love as Arabella had signed up and said, It’s you it’s you , so of course this would be the long-winded justice but not Talulla just me not her just do whatever it is to me.

“You’ll get to talk to her again,” Ellis said. “And we can discuss you seeing her once— maybe —before you do your part. But Jake, seriously, come into line with things, you know? The tone, man. The tone ’s all wrong.”

In films a soldier looks down between his feet and sees he’s millimetres from a mine. He looks farther. Mines everywhere. From now on every step is a matter of life and death.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Emotions. I understand. But can I just make a suggestion, an observation?”

“Of course. Shoot.”

“You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to keep her. Let me explain. In fact let me ask you a question: Why was Harley killed?”

“To get you riled up,” Ellis said. “Although between you and me I thought we’d have done better to hold him, alive, until you were willing to play ball.”

“Exactly. Harley was killed because you knew I needed an incentive to make a fight of it. And you were right. A month ago I’d had enough. A month ago I didn’t want to live.” He was already nodding, slowly, with a smile. “Now everything’s different. Now I have her. I’ll kill Grainer anyway, with satisfaction and relief, because as long as he’s alive he’s a threat to the woman I love.”

The smile wasn’t just advance comprehension. It was the recognition of a fellow strategist. “That’s nice again, Jake,” he said. “The logic’s sound. I like it. And for what it’s worth I believe you. But you know it’s not going to fly. Aside from the fact that it’s still just you trying to negotiate a concession we have zero reason to make, it’s not even my call. As I said, I’m not running this.”

Silence. Mentally the equivalent of someone trapped in a room repeatedly trying the doors he already knows are locked. Blood and urine. Why? Everyone’s very solicitous. Solicitous captors worse than brutal ones in the long run. We know this. She knew it. It had been in her voice.

For what seemed a long time Ellis and I stood without speaking, him looking out into the blue-silver bay, me with my face and wrists and fingers full of useless life. He had the air of a man thinking sentimental thoughts. Engendered, perhaps, by the memory of being abandoned in a Kmart. Then he turned to me and stretched out his hand. Sunlight blazed in his white-blond hair. “So,” he said. “Do we have a deal?”

49

THERE WAS NO talking him out of the three-goon bodyguard but I managed to get a break on London quarters: After a low-voiced call to whoever was running the show it was agreed I could hole up at Harley’s place in Earl’s Court—and thus, after passing through the first hours of pointless incredulity, I’ve spent thirteen of the seventeen days confined here, brought takeout food by the agents (a fourth drafted in for rooftop duty when the attic skylights were discovered), working my way through Harley’s whisky, bringing this journal up to date and living for the rationed phone contact with Talulla.

“Half the problem’s boredom,” she said, yesterday. “You know what the other half is.” Three-quarters into the lunation she, like me, had stopped eating. I’d told Ellis she’d need cigarettes, booze, water, and he’d promised me, apparently in good faith, to make sure she got them. But a higher authority had intervened. Poulsom, I inferred, the sound of whom I liked less and less. Water, yes, but no alcohol, no nicotine. Instead she was offered sleeping pills and muscle relaxants, which, after two nights on the Hunger’s rack, she’d accepted. Aside from the loss of her liberty this was, according to her, the first hardship she’d suffered in their custody. (Unless one counted kidney ultrasounds, of which she’d had three. Poulsom suspected stones.) She’d had the situation explained to her (by Ellis, whom she said treated her with a sort of ludicrous medieval politesse), understood there was no (avowed) intention to harm her, and that as soon as I’d delivered on my part of the deal she’d be released. Aside from the ultimate question of whether either of us would make it through this alive was the nearer mystery of what they were going to do with her come full moon.

“Poulsom says they’ve got it covered,” she told me. “Whatever that means.” False uncertainty. We knew what it meant. Either they were going to kill her or they were going to restrain her or they were going to put her in a cage with a live victim—and most likely record the spectacle for the breakaway WOCOP archives.

“Anyway, they’re taking care of me,” she said. “I’ve got Luxury Bath and Shower Gel from Harrods and a brand-new set of enormous white towels. Also a hundred-plus TV channels. I’m now an aficionado of East-Enders and Coronation Street and—”

The line went dead. Sudden amputation lest we forget who’s in charge, lest we forget by whose grace we live, lest we forget there’s a job to be done.

To deal with the obvious matter first. Ellis has no intention of letting Talulla go. And if he does, Poulsom doesn’t. Assuming there’s a genuine agenda to kick-start a new lycanthropic generation (and this I can believe), the science is in its infancy. Talulla survived the bite and—courtesy of the antivirus, apparently—Turned. Very well. But the big question, by Ellis’s own admission, is whether she can Turn victims of her own. And that question will be tackled in the laboratory. Poulsom et al. aren’t going to release her into the field when they can feed her test victims in a controlled environment.