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.

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.