By Blood We Live
Page 85

Then Olek’s voice, raised above the racket. “Stop this immediately! Stop! All of you!”
They were in the library. The big window was smashed. The asparagus fern was on the floor in a sad little disgorgement of soil. There were books all over the floor and both couches had been overturned. The stink of vampires almost kept me from entering the room.
Natasha, with a gash in her forehead, was on her hands and knees by the glass desk.
Konstantinov had someone pinned against one of the bookcases.
A young dark-haired woman—vampire—I’d never seen before was struggling to get up off the floor. Her hands and face were bleeding.
Suddenly Caleb—Caleb!—appeared outside the broken window.
“Let her go,” he shouted, leaping into the room. “You fucking let her go right now.”
“Please, Mikhail,” Olek said, quietly. “Do let her go. Let us all immediately calm down calm down calm down.”
A fraught moment of everyone waiting to see if this was sufficient. A piece of glass from the window fell and tinkled.
Then Konstantinov released his victim and stepped back, and I recognised her.
Mia.
“What the fuck, if you don’t mind, please,” Olek said, “is going on here?”
I’m coming for you.
“We need your help,” Mia said, straightening her jacket, brushing the fierce blonde hair off her face. She and I hadn’t seen each other since the uneasy leave-taking two years ago on Crete, though I’d sensed her from time to time, keeping an eye on me, weighing up whether to kill me. I’d saved her life. But I’d also kidnapped and threatened to kill her son. We were, at a distance, peculiarly and mutually fascinated.
“Remshi’s sick,” Mia said.
“Remshi?” Olek said.
“He’s outside.” Then to Caleb: “I told you to wait.”
“Good Lord,” Olek said. “Remshi is here? My good godfathers, how utterly extraordinary! For heaven’s sake, tell him to come in.”
No one moved. The room was in shock from the violence that had just exploded in it.
“He can’t come in,” Caleb said, stung by the rebuke and his own (relative) powerlessness and the shock of seeing me. “He can’t fucking walk.”
I’ll see you again, he’d said.
Well, I didn’t think he was seeing me now, though I was seeing him.
Olek carried him down to the laboratory.
“You’re going to have to let me see what I can do for him,” he said, when he’d laid him on the brushed steel table. Only the dark-haired girl (holding her nose, occasionally gagging) and I had followed him down, without exchanging a word. “Talulla, my dear, I take it you’ll … Please don’t go anywhere until we’ve had a chance to discuss things further—yes?”
I didn’t say anything, but he could tell I wasn’t going anywhere. I was thinking—in the storm of thinking—of poor Devaz. Who’d got his humanness back at the cost of his humanity. Ancient gods or not, something still had a black sense of humour.
“I thought it was your fault,” the girl said to me, in the hallway at the top of the stairs.
“What?”
“I thought it was your fault when he got sick like this the last time. Now I’m not so sure.”
A sudden stab of her scent made me remember one of the first things I’d discovered about him. On Crete we’d been surrounded by vampires, so it had gone unnoticed, but when he’d sat only feet away from me at our last encounter I’d realised: Remshi didn’t smell.
And still didn’t. I wondered what it meant.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t know who you are. Maybe it’d be easier to talk outside. Hang on.” I went back into the library, where Natasha and Konstantinov were righting the furniture. I got a tube of the nose-block from Natasha.
“They’re in the upstairs sitting room,” Natasha told me, meaning Mia and Caleb. “What’s the story?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Stay put. I need to talk to the girl.”
In the garden, I offered her the paste. “It’s not perfect,” I said. “But it takes the edge off.” I applied my own when I saw her hesitating. “Go ahead. Seriously. It’s fine. We’re all using it.”
She put it on, but kept her distance. I sat down on a carved stone bench backed by a huge bougainvillea.
“For starters,” I said, “who are you?”
78
PARTLY, I COULD sense, because she was ragged with newness and too much too soon and exhaustion and air miles and fear, fear, fear for him, she—Justine—told me everything. Or at least told me so much so disingenuously that it was hard to believe she was keeping anything back on purpose.
“Is it true?” she asked, more than an hour later. “Are you … I mean who are you?”
The muscles in my back were full of granular crunch. Wulf, regardless of plot intrigue, was still fighting every inch of the road back to quiescence.
“You mean am I the reincarnation of his dead lover of thousands of years ago?”
She didn’t laugh, exactly, but her face acknowledged that I was acknowledging the ridiculousness of it. Or at least the ridiculousness of the way it sounded.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” I said. “I don’t believe in any of this shit. Afterlife, God, reincarnation, dreams, clues, destiny, magic. A plot. I don’t believe the world’s got a fucking plot. I really don’t. But ever since I met him, ever since those first moments on Crete, and afterwards, when he came to see me … Ever since then he’s been in my head. Ever since then I’ve been having this dream.” Our eyes met. “I know, a dream, right? But anyway I’ve been having this dream about …” I hesitated. Then thought, Fuck it: she’s been honest with me. “Oh God, well, it’s partly an erotic dream”—she looked at the ground—“but it’s mainly the two of us on this beach. Walking along this beach at dusk. It doesn’t sound like much, but there’s a weird quality to it. I know: It’s a dream. Of course there’s a weird quality to it. But this is different. I realise I sound like a lunatic, by the way. I’m sorry.”
“Do you have a cigarette?” she said.
Two Camel Filters—just two—left in my crumpled softpack. One—just one—tear-off match from an airport bar. We looked at each other. Again, didn’t, quite, laugh.