Free Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan

when your body tells you you’ve hurt it with too much booze or coke or whatever poison. You understand?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It’s like that – but my soul. I feel sorry for what I let her do to my soul. I was nothing. I was un drogué , a fucking useless junkie.’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘ Je suis libre .’
    ‘I understand.’ I did understand. He’d replaced Jacqueline with me. Not a beaten addiction, just a different drug. And I wasn’t even sleeping with him. Maybe I should sleep with him, haul his sexual self back to the land of the living to seal the allegiance, fuck his brains out and to hell with the werewolf protocols. Either that or kill him. I’d have to if I couldn’t trust him. Meanwhile distance unravelled in the helicopter’s wake. Miles already. Hundreds. I thought of all the things the vampires knew that I didn’t, all the preparations they would have made, all the powers they had at their disposal. Their advantage was laughable. It was a joke. Couldn’t I just forget him? Take my chances with my daughter and run? I conjured the first recurring daydream, the two of us a few years from now in the white Los Angeles villa – Brentwood or Marina del Rey or the West Hollywood Hills – with bougainvillea and the cactus garden and the turquoise pool, quietly going on with our life. We’d get tennis lessons and take trips to the mall and have occasional parties and somehow manage to kill and feed once a month without anything going wrong or anyone finding out what we were. I’d love her tan legs and arms and good balance and shyly-worn jewellery and her plucking up courage to ask me difficult things.
    But the first recurring daydream only brought the second, of the little werewolf boy in a shredded school uniform, covered in blood.
    And the second brought the third. With compliments of Delilah Snow.
    Cloquet closed his drained eyes. Right up until I opened my mouth I didn’t know what I was going to say.
    ‘I’m going to get him back,’ I said.
    As soon as I’d said it I knew it was hopeless. Knowing it was hopeless was a relief. The relief of discovering after all your rushing and madness to get to the departure gate you’ve missed your flight, and now there’s just the weight and heat of your own body and time stretching ahead.
    ‘Yes,’ Cloquet said, opening his eyes. ‘Of course.’
    ‘If you don’t want to help me against her, I understand.’
    He stared at the floor for a few moments, as if receiving something from the underworld. Eventually blinked, took the bottle’s last mouthful, smiled – then abruptly stopped smiling. Looked at me. ‘She’s dead to me,’ he said. ‘ C’est tout .’
    With a struggle I managed to get the jacket on and myself into a sitting position, the baby cradled in the crook of my left arm. The placentas slid to the floor. They looked like a pair of revolting purses. (I had wondered if I’d want to eat them. Animals did. Some humans too, I’d read. I didn’t.) My wounds ached, but had stopped bleeding. In an hour or two there would be barely a sign of them. Twenty thousand years, you think you’ve seen it all . Blood in the eardrums. Aural hallucination. Wulf fucking with me. One of my victims talking in his sleep. Whatever it was it shrank next to what lay ahead. I dismissed it.
    ‘I know you’re hurt,’ I said to Cloquet, ‘but do you think you could boil the kettle and sterilise a knife? I need to cut this. If you open the door the wolves will go out. It’s okay, they won’t do anything to you.’ The animals stood en masse as I spoke. Cloquet wobbled to his feet and let them outside. The majority would stay close to the house. A few would patrol. The black stayed inside with me. My will was still loose in him a little, like last wriggles of electricity after a giant shock. Cloquet worked gingerly but efficiently, and took a moment while the kettle was boiling to hand me a throw from the couch. He also dug out the lodge’s First Aid kit I