Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

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 gene 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 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.’