By Blood We Live
Page 80

Don’t drink.
But in the end I had to. You have to. You have to know.
72
Remshi
IT RAINED. HARD. One of those absurd South Asian downpours that come like a sudden burst of religious conviction. Caleb had insisted on accompanying us, much against his mother’s wishes. Partly out of fascination with my condition.
My condition.
Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all.
A lesson to be learned in choice of phrase. Because I hadn’t seen this. “This” was a farrago of booming symptoms, from the mild—hot head, peripheral vision trippily edged with cut-glass rainbows or fizzing pixels, pins and needles in my hands and feet—to the severe—sudden, coruscating attacks of thirst, hand-in-hand with boisterous nausea at the prospect of drinking. I hadn’t drunk. Not since Randolf, which seemed an age ago.
All of which I could have borne, had it not been for the continual avalanches of memory. I’m used to flashes, firebombs, fugues of recollection. But these were inundations. Floods of memory that rose in me like dark hallucinogenic waters and threatened to cut off my air. Objects, people, places, snippets of conversation, vast, asphyxiating upwellings of unassimilable detail I had nonetheless to assimilate. Occasional thrust-forward pairings—a dusk view from the roof terrace of a Minoan temple I’d been particularly fond of rammed into my mind’s eye along with a Salvadoran family living room, all six members decapitated, their bodies like broken mannequins under an ecstatic chorus of flies. The massage room of gold-inlaid ebony at Xianyang Palace, the little masseuse who was Qin Shi Huang’s favourite, not only for her manual skills but for her seemingly inexhaustible fund of dirty jokes; this image manacled to a fair-haired drummer boy with a muddy face wandering in tears through the Hastings dead, suddenly screaming at the sight of a crow finnickily plucking out the eyeballs from an archer’s corpse. The Paris skyline, moonlit, with the Eiffel Tower half-built—cheek-by-jowl with the face of a Sumerian storyteller, brown and glossy as an oiled saddle, toothless and laughing in the firelight. The only consistent theme was dead friends. I saw Amlek staked in the Greek market square. The viscous black remnants of Mim’s corpse surrounded by gawping Hittites in torchlight. The photo of Oscar’s head on a pole shown to me by an SS officer in Berlin. Gabil leaving the cave and crawling towards the sunrise …
This deluge, yes, the body’s logic going walkabout, yes—but through it all the thought that if anything had happened to Justine, if any harm had come to her it would be more than I could bear.
“He should’ve stayed at the hotel,” Caleb said. I was, from time to time, so manifestly elsewhere that he’d started talking about me as if I were deaf.
Mia didn’t answer. We’d pulled up in the Damien-sorted Transit van (rudimentary blackout facility; a sheet of hardboard sealing the back off from the windscreen) on the road at the bottom of the hill that led up to Duane Schrutt’s bungalow.
“Stay in the van,” Mia told Caleb.
He ignored her. Climbed out the passenger door, then stood looking as if he’d regretted it with the rain crashing straight down on him. The boy was woefully skinny. And would never, now, fatten up. The rain woke me, slightly, forced a welcome hiatus. Gold jugs and night skies and Kojak and neoned Cadillacs and swarming starlings and slumbering camels and Shakespeare passed out with his (not bald) head on a tavern table and the floodlit Statue of Liberty and Farrah Fawcett’s smile that always looked a little as if there were two invisible fingers tucked into each cheek, tugging, and wind simmering in dark prairie grass and a Russian peasant village softly illumined by thigh-deep scintillating snow … All this and a million things more momentarily subsided. To return, I knew.
“Are you all right?” Mia said. “Can you …?”
Stand. Can you stand. Since I was not, truth be told, doing a very convincing job. I summoned my will. And though summoning it was like trying to lift a piano with broken wrists did, eventually, get vertical. Straightened my spine. Tipped my head back and let the rain fall full into my face for a few moments. It helped. Don’t think about it. Concentrate on getting this done.
Don’t think about what? Knowing you know something without knowing what it is?
“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s go. I can feel her. She’s close.”
She was in Schrutt’s bedroom, hunched up against the wall under a garish matador-and-bull in oils, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her shins, staring into space. Her face and chest were covered in blood. She looked like something out of a horror movie. A slasher movie, in fact. Which of course was what she was.
“It didn’t happen to him,” she said, apparently not the least surprised to see us. Her dark eyes were raw and lovely. “I looked in him. It happened to Leath, but it didn’t happen to him.”
I went to her. No-fool-like-an-old-fool tears welling. Whatever it was (I knew what it was; it didn’t need telepathy) it had broken her into enlargement. When I touched her shoulder I felt all her past shrivelling, becoming hard and not quite negligible. Not quite. I was so happy she was alive. I don’t know why I’d been so certain she’d be dead. There had been such a feeling of death.
“Come on, angel, let’s go. Let’s leave this now.” It was a pure pleasure, like falling snow in a forest, to find her physically intact. All her precious details. Thank you, I thought. Thank you, thank you.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t addressed to me. It was addressed to herself. To her old self, for whom revenge had not been sweet but a sad education.
I put my arms around her, held her close for a moment. My body’s exhaustion and throb were signals coming from a padded cell a thousand miles away.
“We need to get out of here,” Mia said. Caleb was, I knew, feeling the awkwardness of his juvenile form afresh. As a vampire he was older than Justine, but he’d always look like a child to her. His energies of self-consciousness were live, a troubled little heat in the room.
“We need to go,” Mia said. She was wonderfully calm.
But Justine put her head on my shoulder, and did not cry, and for a few moments there was nothing, just the peace of holding her, alive, close, real. Caleb was poking around the room. He picked up the laptop.
“Don’t look at that,” Justine said.