The Last Werewolf
Page 47

“I don’t want you to get on the plane,” I said. “But we have to be sure they don’t know about you.” We were “we,” already. Of course we were.
“Was it you in the desert?” she asked.
“What?”
“California. Nine months ago. When I was attacked. Was it you?”
I’d seen the file. In late June 2008 the Hunt had killed werewolf Alfonse Mackar in the Mojave Desert. Which had left just Wolfgang and me on the books. Or so WOCOP had thought.
“No, it wasn’t me.”
She bit the inside of her lip for a moment. “No, it wasn’t you. I can … feel it.” A mix: pleasure, embarrassment, relief. Suddenly, with the two of us in the same room, even a room as expansively joyless as check-ins, she could feel all sorts of things. So could I. The intimacy was, literally, laughable. Laughter was laughably available.
“How many are there—of us?” A struggle for her to choose which question first, suddenly faced with the possibility of answers.
“I was supposed to be the last,” I said. “But now there’s you. I don’t know how. I don’t know what it means.” We kept looking away from each other, then back, away, back. It was hypnotic. For her as for me there was a vague awareness of all the things we didn’t, in our perfect certainty, need to say, as if pages of TV movie script— I can’t believe this is happening … I knew from the first moment I saw you —were scrolling on an autocue both of us were ignoring.
“I can’t go now,” she said. “You can’t ask me to do that. It’s ridiculous.”
Imagine if a hundred and sixty-seven years ago I’d run into another of my kind at a railway station. Someone who’d lowered his copy of the Times , looked over his spectacles and said, Yes, I know all about it, but you’ll have to wait.
“I know this is hard for you,” I said. “It is for me too—” Our eyes met again and there it still was, hilarious mutual transparency, raging collusion. “But there’s no other way to be sure. Please trust me. I just want to know you’re safe.”
“What do they want you for? Us for.”
I told her what I knew, skipping all but the consequential chunks. Helios, the vamps, the virus. She listened with a slight frown, one arm wrapped around herself. She might have been a young mother hearing a report of her child’s out-of-character misbehaviour at school. The dark hair framed her face in two soft crescents. A vaguely 1970s sub– Charlie’s Angels look. I was thinking, with a mix of bitterness and joy: All these years. All these years .
“I’ll leave the airport,” I told her. “You stay. If they don’t know about you they’ll follow me. You take your flight to New York. I’ll join you when I’ve ditched them. Shouldn’t take me more than a day or two.”
“Wait. This is crazy. What if they don’t follow you?”
“They will. If they don’t, I’ll come back and we’ll rethink.”
“What if there are other vampires?”
“I’ll call you in thirty minutes. If there are others here you’ll still feel sick, and if one of them gets on the plane with you you’ll feel really sick. But that’s not likely. If they put anyone on the flight with you it’ll be a familiar, a human. They won’t do anything as long as you stay in public places, but keep your eyes open.”
“What about these WOCOP guys?” she said. “How will I know if they’re following me?” The charming frown of concentration remained. She looked now like a secretary taking in an astonishing amount of new instruction, forcing herself to stay calm, forcing herself to be up to the inhuman demand.
“You won’t. But there’s nothing we can do about that just now. In any case they won’t make a move yet. They’re trophy hunters. They’ll wait for the next full moon.” The words “full moon” made us look at each other again. All the big things we’d said nothing about. I was down to my last pound coin. I memorised her New York address.
“I can’t just go ,” she said. “I need answers.”
“You’ll get them, just not like this. I have to know you’re safe.”
A piercing sweet catch in my chest when I said that, for the simple reason that it was true. Suddenly something mattered. In films someone finds a spaceship that’s been buried for thousands of years and switches the power on—and the whole system flutters magically back into life, lights, gauges, indicators, drives. The lovely thrilling thought that this capacity’s been there the whole time, waiting.
“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Is there a cure?”
“No.”
She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Absorbed. She’d grown a new glamorously deformed personality to accommodate werewolfhood but there in the closing of the eyes and the swallow was an indication of how much of the old personality remained, allowed to stay on condition she could pretend it wasn’t really there. Even this pronouncement—No, there’s no cure—didn’t quite kill it. It would probably live for decades, holding hope in its hand like a hot coal.
“Don’t be alone after sunset and don’t sleep at night,” I said. “You’ll have to go to a club or a bar or whatever. Sleep during the day. With someone, if that’s an option, but only someone you know well.” Now, imprudently, we were staring at each other. The wulf certainty between us was as ugly and exciting as a massive haemorrhage on a white tiled floor. But there was the other certainty too, human, a shock to us both. Anachronistic in this day and age, almost embarrassing. I had an image of Ellis and Grainer and a crew of tooled-up Hunters surrounding us, laughing their heads off.
“You better fucking come after me,” she said, quietly. The composure wasn’t absolute. Desperation was right there, waited only her nod. The dark eyelashes and that beauty spot were her face’s erotic accents.
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“This is insane. There’s so much … I don’t know anything. ”
“You will. Everything I know, which isn’t much.”
“You’ll phone me in half an hour?”
“Trust me.”
A pause. Eyes meet again.
“You know I do.”