Free Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan Page B

his head. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘It’s not much.’
    Too many things jostled: images of London from my last time there, the kill just before I met Jake; the vampire helicopter unravelling the miles; the hot sack closing over the small head; got her off, orally ; immediate practicalities – passports, identities, airlines, tickets; and in spite of myself a faint rush at the thought of Quinn’s Book, The Men Who Became Wolves , the possibility of answers. Don’t bother looking for the meaning of it all , Jake told me. There isn’t one .
    ‘Do you have a number for Merryn?’ I asked.
    ‘ Oui .’
    ‘Why would he tell us anything?’
    ‘Because we make him. You’ll have to call him. He might recognise my voice.’
    ‘Call him and say what?’
    ‘We’ll think of something. You’ll have something to sell.’
    Feeble. Both of us knew it. My skin was a settled swarm of flies. The hole in the fabric of everything was in this room, now, the window into pure nothingness I daren’t look through. It would be in every room I was in from now on, until I got him back. (You? Aunt Theresa’s voice in me said. Get him back? A dirty, filthy little girl like you, who just lay there, who just lay there and let them take him? And we know why, don’t we? Yes, we—)
    ‘I’ll go and get the stuff loaded,’ Cloquet said.
    ‘I’ll do it. You’re still woozy. Go lie down.’
    He nodded, headed for the stairs – but he was back a few moments later. As soon as I saw his face I knew what he’d realised: we’d forgotten, both of us, Kaitlyn.
    ‘She’s gone,’ he said.
    ‘How?’
    ‘The pipe was loose. There’s water all over the floor. It’s my fault.’
    She’d seen both of us.
    ‘I’ll go and look for her,’ Cloquet said. ‘Maybe she never made it to the highway.’
    I put the last of the journals in the bag and zipped it up. It had stopped snowing. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We don’t have time.’ It wasn’t that I believed she’d reached the highway safely, it was that if we found her we’d have to kill her, and for better or worse I couldn’t face it. Just couldn’t. I should never have pictured her feral bedroom and sad acceptance of the lousy demands guys made on her. ‘Go and lie down for a minute,’ I said. ‘I need to feed the baby before we leave.’
    Which I did not want to do. I hadn’t fully admitted her existence. Even through the appalling intimacy of washing her I’d kept her in peripheral consciousness only, a trick of self-misdirection that had given me the emotional equivalent of eye strain. It hadn’t worked, either. There she was, small and clean and absurd in her plastic laundry basket, radiating power to recreate the world. Every humble atom glorified , Jake had written of Heathrow’s vivification when we’d met. Now here was the soft grey sky and the pink curtain and the oak floorboards and room’s smell of dust and mothballs and old linen all wondering why I wasn’t accepting their beatification.
    I undid my shirt, tried to feel nothing, then raised her carefully to my breast.
    The physical sensation was shockingly literal, once the tough little anemone mouth had found my nipple and latched-on: a living creature sucking nourishment out of my body . ( Essentials said milk proper might take three days to come in; meantime colostrum, the pre-lacteal secretion rammed with antibodies and who knew what lycanthropic extras.) I went in and out of bearable horror, as if a six-pound parasite had attached itself to me, but also in and out of the feeling of having come bloodily into an inheritance. All those Madonnas with Child; my dad’s Compendium of Greek Mythology showing Hera’s breast-milk spurting out to create the Milky Way; connection to every female animal I’d seen with an offspring tugging at its teat (the dismal word ‘teat’); Richard coming back from a visit to his sister who’d just had a baby and me saying So how was she? And him saying ‘fucking bovine’; the