Thicker Than Water (35 page)

As we drove back into London, Juliet maintained a thoughtful silence. I did the same thing, for a while, but then I thought what the hell: we were already on rockier ground than we’d been at any time since she decided to live on Earth instead of killing me. What did I have to lose by pushing the boat out a little further?

‘Is this thing a friend of yours?’ I asked.

I didn’t look around, but I felt the pressure of her gaze o”e ofonn me.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘don’t get me wrong here, okay? If this is another of those off-limits topics, just tell me. But if it’s not, I wouldn’t mind knowing. Does this thing that makes people cut themselves into ribbons so it can nest in the torn flesh go way back with you? Is it a friend of the family? Did it bounce you on its knee when you were a little girl?’

We’d gone another couple of miles before she spoke, and I’d stopped waiting for an answer.

‘They’re called the
Oleuthroi
. And I’ve never met this one before. In fact, I haven’t seen any of his breed for twelve centuries. And the last one I saw was an adult, very old, enormous, that I and my sisters rousted up in the fields of Varhedre and killed for sport.’ Juliet’s voice was eerily distant, as if thinking about the past had carried her back there in some way.

‘They’re very rare,’ she said, and then paused. ‘Now. Now they’re rare. It wasn’t always so.’

‘And what, you’re into conservation? They’re an endangered species?’

Juliet was silent for a while.

‘I tried my hand at exorcising this thing before I came away from the estate,’ she said at last, returning her gaze to the road ahead. ‘Without result. I’ve told you what I can, Castor. More than I should. Be grateful. Or at the very least, be quiet.’

We said no more to each other. When I pulled up in front of Susan’s house, Juliet got out without saying a word: I thought, but couldn’t be sure, that I saw her turning away from Susan’s door and heading off into the night, which embraced her as eagerly as ever.

By the time I got back to Pen’s, it was after midnight. I called Jean Daniels, which I should have done from the hospital: to explain why I hadn’t been in touch and to ask her how Bic was.

More or less the same, was the answer. He slept a lot, and when he was awake he drifted in and out of his right mind – talking in his own voice one moment and in a strange polyglot growl the next. He hadn’t tried to hurt anyone, but he was unmistakably still possessed.

‘And now you’re going away?’ Jean asked, dismayed.

‘For a day,’ I said. ‘Two days, tops. I’m looking for Anita Yeats. I think she might know something that could help both your son and my brother.’

‘Know something about what, Mister Castor?’ Jean demanded. She sounded plaintive, and it made my stomach churn to be letting her down like this.

‘Two separate somethings,’ I admitted. ‘About Kenny’s death, and about Mark’s hobby. She’s the only person I haven’t managed to talk to, and there’s one obvious place where she might have gone.’

‘Which is?’

‘Home. Liverpool. But I’ll come and see Bic as soon as I’m back. Unless you want to get someone else in, which I’ll understand. I swear to God, Jean, I’ll see this through if you still want me to. I just – have to do this other thing first.’

‘We can’t afford to get anyone else,’ Jean said, her tone bleak. ‘Come as soon as you can, Mister Castor.’

She hung up, and I finished packing, wondering how late the last train would go. They’d probably run through the night, I thought. But then I was overcome with weariness: my brain felt like it had been scraped clean with wire wool, and my chest was throbbing again. I had to sit down until the pain and weakness passed.

I woke late in the morning to find Pen putting a cup of coffee on the bedside table – next to a double chocolate muffin with a lit sparkler embedded in it.

‘Welcome home,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ I muttered, sitting up slowly. Christ on a crutch, I thought. Losing half a day wasn’t an auspicious start to the quest.

‘You slept in your clothes,’ Pen observed.

‘Didn’t mean to sleep at all,’ I muttered, taking a scalding sip of coffee.

I told her about Matt, and she filled the pauses with expletives. ‘Murder my arse!’ she said when I’d finished. ‘Your brother would do ten Hail Marys if he farted in a lift!’

‘True,’ I admitted.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m going to find Anita Yeats,’ I said. ‘All I’ve got is random facts that don’t connect. I think she might be the one person who can join the dots for me. Can you lend me some cash, Pen?’

There was a square tin box in the kitchen that had once contained tea, or at least said it had. Now it contained ten-pound notes, stored up by Pen against a rainy day. She assessed the current storm at a hundred quid, counting the notes into my hand one at a time. Then, after a short tussle with her conscience, she forked over the rest. ‘Just bring me back what you don’t spend,’ she said.

She dropped me off at Turnpike Lane station, and from there it was a short hop down the Piccadilly Line to Kings Cross. Trains for Liverpool were three or four to the hour, according to the Virgin Trains website, so there was no need to book.

Can’t help? I thought.

Fucking try me, Matty.

In England it’s not biology that’s destiny, it’s geography. London rules the roost and runs the show not because there’s something aristocratic and splendid in the Cockney g-s nene pool but because the Thames flood plain provided the geographical trifecta of rich, fertile soil, a navigable river and a billion acres of forest to make ships out of. Spread your sails and sell your surplus to the world, then come home and throw together the mother of parliaments on your days off. Before long you’re not only ahead of the game, you’re making the bloody rules.

Taking the Richard Branson Express from Kings Cross up to Liverpool, you go out through a whole string of towns that were never in with a chance of becoming the capital of England because they could never get over the accidents of birth: inland, becalmed, bucolic, they surrendered their produce and then their souls to the great maw of London: went straight from farming communities to dormitory suburbs without a protest or a qualm. Now they’re trying to bottle nostalgia and sell it to the tourist trade, but it seems like fewer and fewer people are buying. Stands the church clock at ten to three? Well, that’s bloody British workmanship for you.

Then again, maybe I was just feeling jaundiced because the pain in my ribs wouldn’t go away even though I was popping ibuprofen like Smarties. And because the guy sitting just down the carriage from me was a werewolf.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean he was making a big thing about it. He wasn’t hairy and slavering and going for my throat. In fact, he was just a young guy in an
FCUK
tee-shirt with a spiked haircut that was black at the roots and blond at the tips. He didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, apart from the impressive upper-body musculature rising out of a dancer’s waist. But my death-sense spiked into jangling chords whenever he looked at me, which was often, and having to run for the train had left a faint film of sweat on his forehead, so he wasn’t a zombie. That meant he was either carrying a passenger of his own, like Rafi, or else he was a
loup-garou
. Odds favoured the latter.

He’d boarded the train at Bedford, along with a very striking young woman in salwar kameez who got out her laptop straight away and never once looked up from it, two gloomy, overweight guys in painters’ overalls, a half-dozen suit-and-tie grunts and a couple of amorous teenagers. He’d brought a four-pack of Tennent’s Extra by way of a picnic lunch, but once he realised he was sharing his space with an exorcist he forgot about the beer and fixed his state on me with feral fascination. I’ve never even got close to working out why this is, but the death-sense thing cuts both ways: we know when we’re in the presence of the risen, and they know when they’re looking at someone who can send them down again. Once Mister
FCUK
had reached that conclusion his gaze never left my face.

I’d have been very happy to pretend I’d seen nothing. He wasn’t hunting and neither was I. But something told me it wasn’t going to be that easy. The
loup-garou
held up one hand to me in what looked like a wave, all four fingers raised and spread. Then he popped a can of beer and drained it in a couple of swigs.

When it was empty he held up three fingers. Then he opened and polished off a second can, at a somewhat more relaxed pace. A countdown.
First I’ll take my refreshment: then I’ll take you.

I pretended to take an interest in the scenery while the
loup-garou
worked on beer number three and I tried to make up my mind how to handle this› to”3″ unfortunate situation. I felt like shit: if anything, even stiffer and wearier than I had the night before. My dreams had been full of Kenny’s feeble, shrieking plea, and I’d drifted between sleep and waking with no clear sense of the boundaries.

Finally I got tired of calculating the odds.

I stood up, exaggerating my movements slightly like a mime artist doing ‘I’m going to take a little stroll now.’ I took my tin whistle out of the inside pocket of my coat, laid it down on the seat and walked away with my hands in my pockets.

I made a sortie to the dining car to buy a styrofoam container full of coffee-coloured beverage. Then instead of going back to my seat I loitered by the door in the little non-space between the carriages, leaning against the wall and looking out through the open window at the fields and trees strobing by. I had one hand on the window frame, the other holding my coffee cup.

After a few moments the door at my back hissed open. The ontologically challenged youth stepped through, the door sliding closed again behind him, and stood watching me, at the edge of my field of vision.

‘The whistle is your
thing
?’ the
loup-garou
snarled. His voice had a dry rasp to it, so loud that it sounded as though he had a skiffle board in his throat.

‘Yeah,’ I said, not looking round. ‘Music, generally, but the whistle’s the best medium I’ve found to work in. Key of D. I’m sure you understand.’

A half-second of silence, heavy with incomprehension.

‘Then why’d you leave it behind? You think I care two fucks about killing an unarmed man? Or was that your way of waving a little white flag?’

I gave him a look, keeping my expression more or less neutral. ‘Look,’ I said, mildly, ‘I’m off duty. Good news for both of us. Why don’t you buy yourself a few more beers, work on doing your liver a bit more damage, and at Lime Street we’ll wave each other goodbye? No harm, no foul. Sound good?’

The
loup-garou
stared at me. His lips peeled back from his teeth, which is never a good sign in a werewolf. I noticed that they consisted entirely of incisors.

‘You’re a toaster,’ he said, spitting out the word as if it was something unpleasant that he’d swallowed. I could have called that hate-speech, but exorcists coined the term themselves to describe their core business: ghost-toasting. Banishing the dead, with malice aforethought, whether they were threat or nuisance or just a drag on property values.

‘And you’re a fuckwit,’ I said, without heat. ‘Go and get drunk.’

‘I think I’d rather kill you,’ the
loup-garou
observed, leering. His face was flushed and his eyes, like animal eyes, had no whites. Part of that was just the animal and the human trying to reach a tense accommodation about what their shared body should look like, but I think he was substance-abusing›bst wa too. I mean, besides the alcohol.

‘Have you done it before?’ I asked.

He laughed shortly – a single exhalation pushed out through his still-bared teeth. ‘Killed? Oh yeah.’

‘Taken on an exorcist,’ I said, with heavy emphasis. His face registered the word in a micro-momentary flicker of some emotion that I couldn’t quite pin down.

But he ignored the question, or at least fended it off by throwing one of his own. ‘You got any money?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ I pretended to take a sip of the coffee.

‘You pay me – a hundred, or a couple of hundred – maybe I’ll let you live.’

I sighed and shook my head. ‘You died young,’ I said, trying one last time. ‘The first time around, I mean. Probably because you got yourself into some stupid pissing contest like this one. Learn from your mistakes, eh? Let it lie in the long grass for once, and see if there’s another way besides the hard way.’

The
loup-garou’s
fingers were curved like claws now – and actual claws had slid into view at the tips of them. He took a step back, presumably because whatever animal his flesh had originally belonged to liked to go for the run-and-jump approach, and a train carriage barely gave him room for it.

I dumped the coffee in his face. I’d asked to have it scalding hot, and I’d made the girl at the counter in the dining car put it back in the microwave twice, until it was almost too hot to hold even through the styrofoam and the cardboard sleeve. This was why I’d only pantomimed drinking it earlier on: it was for offensive use only.

The
loup-garou
gave a gargling scream, ducking and covering reflexively even though it was too late. He must have been in agony, the near-boiling liquid blinding him and filling his exquisite senses with the roaring static of pain. I knew exactly how he felt, but it didn’t affect my game plan.

I let go of the door, which I’d already unlocked and was only holding closed with my free hand. As it swung open in the train’s slipstream, slamming against the flank-wall of the carriage, I kicked the
loup-garou
in the place where nothing male, whether living or undead or anywhere in between, likes to be kicked. Then I grabbed him by the shoulders, two-handed, and pitched him forward. A hooked foot in front of his made sure that he kept right on going, falling head over heels out into the rushing noise and the world we were leaving endlessly behind us.

It was over inside of five seconds. It had to be, because if I’d let him get those claws into play even once, this would have been my arterial swansong. Leaning out precariously I caught the window frame again and pulled the door closed, just as the connecting door to the carriage swung open and the Asian woman with the laptop poked her head out.