By Blood We Live
Page 67

I hung up.
“How far are we?” I asked Mia. She was a fast, utterly confident driver. Her white hands looked lovely on the wheel and gearstick.
“Twenty minutes,” she said. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong with you?”
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Except he lied in every word. And the stream was filled with bodies.
“Do you two have passports?” I said.
Caleb looked at Mia.
“Yes,” she said. “Several. Why?”
I thought of the fear Justine was up against. Night flights. The real world. Small windows to get undercover. All the way to Bangkok, the hard way.
“Because we’re going to Thailand,” I said, redialling Damien’s number.
60
Talulla
I WOKE UP in bed in my underwear in a room in the Last Resort. So christened by poor Fergus, who would never have need of it again. I remembered Trish getting childishly excited over the architectural drawings. Sweet Trish who always looked too small for whatever motorbike she was riding. And for whatever helmet she was wearing. I know I look like a science fiction dwarf, she said, but I don’t want my feckin brains all over the central reservation, do I? Zoë, who had a passion for headwear of all kinds, once put one of the visored helmets on. She was sitting on the floor. When she tilted her head back to look up at us the weight of the thing made her keel over. It was, we all agreed, just as well she was wearing a helmet.
You might not want it for yourself, but you’ll want it for your children.
I lay there in the first minutes of coming-to with Olek’s words running through my head. Jake was dead. Cloquet was dead. Fergus. Trish. I’d been close to death a dozen times or more in the last three years. My son had been kidnapped, my daughter incarcerated with me. WOCOP was gone, but the Militi Christi had picked up where they’d left off. I thought of Bryce’s Big Brother with werewolves format. There would be other shows. Hunting shows. Game shows. Gambling shows. The world was turning its gaze on us. The world was realising that something would have to be done. The noose, as Olek had suggested, was only going to get tighter.
“Hey,” Madeline said.
I opened my eyes. White ceiling with inset yellowy halogens turned low. I was in a crisply made bed, linen fresh out of the packaging. It smelled of department stores, human civilisation, the old life, mixed with the room’s comforting odour of new plaster and paint. Pale oak floor, no windows. (Most of the Last Resort was underground, for obvious reasons.) Skirting uplights opposite. A green leather recliner next to my bed, with Maddy in it. She was, as usual, accurately made-up. She wore slimline khaki combat pants and a black t-shirt that had belonged to Cloquet. Red flip-flops showing off her pretty feet and scrupulous pedicure, toenails vermillion. She’d caught the sun in Italy. There was a tan line where her watch had been.
“Zoë’s fine,” she said. “She’s here, she’s safe. She’s playing snakes and ladders with Lorcan and Luce upstairs.”
I hadn’t known I’d got up on my elbows, my whole body tensed, until I felt it relax now.
“Know where you are?” Madeline asked.
“Croatia?”
She nodded. “Whatever the fuck they shot you with, there was a lot of it. You’ve been out for two days. We had to tell passport control you were zonked on painkillers. Still cost us three hundred quid. How are you feeling?”
“Thirsty.”
There was a bottle of Jamnica mineral water on the floor next to her. She handed it to me. I drank the lot.
“More?”
“In a minute. What happened back there?”
Back there. When I was captured. When I risked my children’s lives. Again. Part of the question—oh, part of it—was: Did you fuck Walker? I could feel her screening a little for a moment, then giving up. “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
It was the truth, but it was also an admission of how close she’d come.
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s …” I let it go. “How is he?”
“Physically he’s all right. He didn’t get a scratch, apart from apparently he nearly got stabbed in the throat.”
“How did you find me?”
“Oh Christ, Lu, that’s a long story. We had help. Blimey, I don’t know where to start.”
She didn’t have to. The door opened. Walker. Unshaven. In black jeans and a denim shirt. The shit-kicker boots he hadn’t worn since the WOCOP days. He looked like he’d lost weight.
An awkward exchange of not quite direct looks between the three of us. Then Maddy got up from the recliner. “Well,” she said, “now you’ve decided to rejoin the land of the living, I’m going to pour myself a bloody huge gin and tonic. We’re still waiting for half the furniture, but the booze and fags arrived today, thank God.”
61
WHEN SHE’D GONE, Walker came and sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand around my ankle through the comforter.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The lingering drug had tears ready for me, if I wasn’t going to be ruthless with myself.
Walker gave my ankle a squeeze, then took his hand away. I thought: That’s the last time he’ll ever do that. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. Looked at the brand-new floor. It was all there between us, the innocent reality, that this was us—us—and yet this was still happening. All love’s details burned bright. Surely they meant something? Surely they were enough? But they came and went and there we still were, with new unfillable space between us. I felt old and tired. Sometimes your coldness thrills you. Sometimes it’s just a wearily disgusting tumour. Not for the first time, nor did I imagine the last, Aunt Theresa’s voice came back: Talulla Demetriou, you are a dirty little girl. A dirty, filthy little girl.
“Thank you for coming for us,” I said. The power of plain words. Thank you. I swallowed, swallowed, but the tears came anyway. Shocking to feel them hot and intimate on my cheeks. My mother had always grudged her own rare tears. The harder you are the more they undo you. It’s the price you pay for being hard. I was sick of myself, suddenly.
But not sufficiently. My self always wins. Sits out the sickness, drumming its fingers, until I come back, then says, Right. All done? Can we continue now?
“We had help,” Walker said. “Vampires, if you can believe that.”