The sky was clear. The garden winked and glimmered with impassive sentience, spoke the merry silence where God’s judgement ought to be. I stood by the sculpture and let the fat moon’s light bathe me. It doesn’t wash clean. Let my breathing slow. Let the taken life find its confused way to the calling chorus of my swallowed dead.

Then I went back into the house.

“Go and look,” Olek said, outside the door to the room with the one-way glass. “So you know it works.”

It surprised me that he was willing to be alone with me. His species stink, to my nose now, was dark and thick, threatened to unsettle my sated guts.

I pointed. You first. Konstantinov and Natasha were at the top of the stairs, but deep instinct said caution. He understood. Nodded, went in ahead of me. I had to duck my head to follow him. My transformed dimensions made the small room smaller—and jammed his scent up against me.

“As you see,” Olek said.

Devaz was sitting on his bunk with his knees up, head bowed. Unchanged. Untransformed. Human.

“How do you feel, Christopher?” Olek said into the intercom.

Devaz raised his head. His eyes were raw, but apart from that he looked completely normal. He shouldn’t. He should look just like me. For a moment I wondered if the vampire had found a way of insulating a room against the effects of the moon. But I’d been deep underground myself, on more than one occasion. It hadn’t made any difference.

“Let me out of here,” Devaz said. He still sounded exhausted.

Olek ignored the request. He released the speak button and turned to me. “Well?” he said. “Are you impressed?”

I didn’t respond. Just ducked back out of the doorway. He followed.

“It’ll be tedious for you if I explain how it works now. You’ll have questions, for which, obviously, you’ll require your regular vocal skills. So in the meantime, rest, digest, consider. My home is your home, and your friends are here. Please, after you.”

Back in the hallway above ground, he lit another cigarette. “If you prefer to be outdoors,” he said, “feel free. There isn’t another property for a couple of miles around. You won’t be disturbed. And don’t worry about the mess. It’ll be taken care of. I have some work to do downstairs, but get your friends to let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

I did spend the night in the garden. Stuffed, objectlessly angry, going into and out of sadness. When I thought about Walker. When I thought about the future. When I thought about my kids.

74

Justine

I’D SEEN HIM like this before. After London. After Crete. After Talulla. His head was hot. His limbs felt swollen. His breath stank. In and out of consciousness, and when he was in, making no sense. No strength in him. You could see the effort it was just for him to raise a hand. He couldn’t lift his head.

“We have to get him into the hotel,” Mia said. “We can’t spend daylight in here with him like this.”

In the Transit van, she meant, which is where we were. Where we’d had to carry him from Schrutt’s villa. We’d pulled over halfway to the airport because suddenly he’d half sat up and seemed to be trying to vomit. But nothing had come up. Just him spasming, like someone was repeatedly punching him in the guts. There were three hours of daylight left. I was getting better at being able to tell without a watch.

“What’s happening to him?” I asked. “Is this something that happens?”

Mia shook her head. “I’ve never seen it,” she said. “I don’t know any more than you.”

It was weird, us feeling each other out, mentally. I’d got enough from Stonker through the confusion of those first moments when they came in—FRIENDS. DON’T BE AFRAID. TRUST—but we were all still testing and pulling back. She’d put a screen up, eventually, but sort of politely, as in, There’s enough going on here. Let’s just talk. The kid was wide open, but I let him alone. I didn’t even know if I could screen.

I wasn’t feeling good myself. Shouldn’t have drunk when I didn’t need to. I hadn’t needed to. But I’d had to. The air in the back of the van was heated by Fluff’s body going crazy. The kid, Caleb, had got out and was smoking a cigarette. He was quiet, freaked out, fascinated. He could feel how new I was.

“He was sick like this two years ago,” I said. “When he went looking for … He went looking for a werewolf.”

“Talulla,” Mia said.

“You know?”

She smiled, without any pleasure. “It’s a long story,” she said. “And irrelevant. Enough that I know who she is.”

“He thinks she’s …” I stopped, didn’t know how much he’d want me to say. But her face told me she was picking up the gist anyway. Obviously I couldn’t screen. She felt me thinking how dumb and fucked-up it was. He thinks she’s the reincarnation of his dead lover. I could feel her mental reflex, too, to dismiss it as bullshit. As mumbo-jumbo. As a fairy story. But then immediately the reflex to that, too, as in, Who the fuck were we to dismiss fairy stories?

I held Fluff’s head in my lap. He was shaking. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying.

“What? What is it? Tell us what we need to do!”

Suddenly he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Fluff? Jesus … What should we do? Do you need blood? Should we get blood?”

He smiled, but like he was seeing something else. Not me. Something miles away.

“Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,” he said. “So much as gladness that some end might be.”

“What? For fuck’s sake, Fluff, we—”

But a spasm took him again, lifted him almost into a sitting position like someone had yanked a chain around his throat. Then he fell back into my lap. There was pinkish snot coming out of his nose. My hands were weak. “Oh God,” I heard myself saying. “Oh God, Oh God …”

“Listen,” Mia said. “Will the pilot take orders from you?”

“What? Yeah. Why?”

“Call him and tell him to make the preparations. God only knows how we’re going to get him through the airport like this … We’ll have to find another way …”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are we going to stay here all night?” Caleb said, appearing in the van’s open rear exit.