My tongue was dry, knees liquid. Lose possession of your child once and the fear it’ll happen again becomes your resident hair-trigger insomniac. Once a bad mother, always a bad mother. It’s like being an alcoholic: you only ever haven’t fallen off the wagon yet.

“What?” Walker said, when I arrived, hot, at the top of the stairs. He was standing—also naked—in our bedroom doorway, scratching his lean belly. Lycanthropy hasn’t touched his human charms, green-eyed dark blond boyishness, the look of readiness to laugh at himself. (I’ve wondered when it was I first saw the finiteness of us, us as a specific portion of wealth to be gone through. Maybe from the beginning. Certainly from the night two years back when the vampire came to call. The vampire came to call and left behind him spores of sadness, irritation, desire.) Beyond Walker the curtained window was an oblong of sunlight. The room had the fatigued smell of the night’s drunk and silently argumentative sex, shot through with the ribald stink of our share in imminent wulf.

“Lula?”

I ignored him and went straight to the twins next door. Zoë and Lorcan were both in their beds, sleeping, Lorcan (whose pre-transformation symptoms were getting worse: nightmares, tantrums, a shocking malice towards everyone except his sister) with unchildlike composure, arms by his sides, Zoë with hers up above her head, as if someone had just relieved her of a little dumbbell. Both here. Both safe. Thank God. Gods. Ex-gods. Nothingness.

“Stay with them,” I told Walker, unnecessarily, since species telepathy was giving him the gist. He grabbed a Beretta from under our mattress and went to the window between the children’s beds, cracked it an inch to check for scent, peeked round the edge of the curtain for a sweep of the back garden. Throbbing blue sky and an anarchy of birdsong. All clear. He nodded: I’ve got this. Be careful. I clamped the phone between my shoulder and chin (thinking, since consciousness can’t help it: violinists must really fuck their necks up), pulled on last night’s jeans and shirt and plucked the Smith & Wesson from my purse.

“Who is this?” I said into the phone. “Answer me or I’m hanging up right now.” In the old life I would’ve been wondering how a stranger had got my number. Not anymore. Privacy’s an illusion. In my world it’s always only a matter of time. Yours too, if you want the truth.

“My name is Olek,” he said. “I’m a vampire—but please try not to hold that against me. I’m not your enemy. I have a mutually beneficial business proposal I’d like to discuss.”

I was hurrying on tense bare feet back down the stairs, hugging the wall. Kept hugging it all the way to the locked front door, which was oak, thick enough, I reminded myself, to stop a bullet, silver or otherwise. The Jiffy bag was addressed simply to “Talulla” in black italic marker. Neat, perfectly straight printing.

“Do you have the package?” he said.

“Do you seriously think I’m just going to pick it up and open it?”

A pause. A cigarette being lit. Again the image of Omar Sharif, the cuboid head and plump black eyes and gap-toothed smile. “Well,” he said, exhaling. “I’ll leave that to you. I imagine your instincts are good. Consult them. It’s not a bomb, or silver, or anything that will do you or anyone you love any kind of harm. I can only give you my word, but believe me, I’m old enough for that to mean something. If it helps I can tell you it’s a document. One Jake would have wanted you to see.”

Lucy and Trish had appeared at the top of the stairs, Lucy in a pale green silk nightie, Trish in boy-cut panties and Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt. Both slapped awake by my fear. Cloquet, my familiar and the only human member of the household, hadn’t stirred.

A document. One Jake would have wanted you to see. Jake Marlowe. My ex. My late ex. My late werewolf ex. The love against which all others were measured. Ask Walker.

“Take your time,” Olek said. “I’m not going anywhere. In the package you’ll find a note from me and a number to call when you’re ready to talk. And again, I swear to you: you have nothing to fear.”

The line went dead.

Look at her, I imagined my Aunt Theresa saying, disgusted. She’s excited. Like when the Twin Towers went down. Like with the riots in those ugly English towns. She sees another serial killer victim in the newspaper and it gives her a sick thrill. She’s not normal. (Well, Aunt, no, she’s not. Not now.)

“What the fuck?” Trish said, starting down the stairs. At twenty-four she’s the youngest of the pack, not counting the twins. Short, punkily chopped maroon hair and big green eyes and a supple little body full of delighted and occasionally catastrophic energy. I motioned her to stay put. Caught myself thinking: It doesn’t look like a bomb—followed immediately by the admission that aside from cartoons and war footage I had no clue what a bomb looked like. For all I knew they could be making them the size of postage stamps these days. A werewolf can survive a lot of damage, but I doubted I’d come back from being blown to pieces. I had a vivid image of myself in bits, one severed hand walking on its fingers to find my eyeballs, a doomed attempt to put myself back together. Like the beginning of Iron Man. Or that scene in The Thing. Or was it The Faculty? Whatever it was it was like something I’d already seen. Four hundred more years of things being like other things you’d already seen. The effort finding the new would demand. I could see how Jake ended up the way he had: tired. Ready for death. Until he found love. At which point death was ready for him.

“Who was that?” Lucy asked, holding her elbows, hip bones pressing against the pale green silk of her nightie. She’s an angle-poise Englishwoman of forty-three with dark auburn bangs and a broad delicate freckled face which in the absence of make-up her features are in danger of dissolving into. She would have been voted by all her (Cheltenham Ladies’ College) school friends pupil least likely to become a werewolf. I’ve seen her punch through a man’s sternum, rip out his heart and gobble it in two bloody bites. It’s quite something to be able to say that and not be speaking figuratively.

“Lu?” she said, since I remained static, staring at the package. “Who was that on the phone?”

“A vampire,” I said. “Nobody do anything for a minute. We need to think about this.”

12

SOMETHING LIKE THIS happens and you realise you’ve been waiting for something like this to happen. It turns out things can’t go on as they have been and you admit you’d been thinking things couldn’t go on as they had been. At which point you can yield or fight. Wars start like this. Cultures gamble decadence and death will win them rebirth, watch themselves sliding into it, knowing it’s an all-or-nothing bet. Last night I’d felt Walker thinking, while I changed positions so we wouldn’t be face to face: Why are you wrecking this a little more every day?