Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t they all be?

“Okay,” the Hunter said, having wrapped up another fifty-yards-away cell phone call. “It’s time. Get her hooked up in the van. No, wait …”

He walked over to me and pulled the duct tape out a second time.

58

THEY MUST HAVE given Poulsom another shot because he was unconscious when I resumed my place with him in the cage. I had to work hard not to let the tape over my mouth drive me crazy. Incredible the difference it made, being denied speech. In combination with the restraints (this time both hand- and foot-cuffs were attached to the cage) it felt like being buried alive.

The journey wasn’t long but it wasn’t easy. Standing was the best position, but with the short length of cable from my ankles to my wrists I could only hold on to the bars at navel height. Jolts and sudden turns flung and yanked me. Poulsom, tossed around, as the motorcyclist would have said, like a lettuce, would be covered in bruises when he woke up. If he woke up.

Five minutes before we stopped, the terrain got rougher. What had already felt like a primitive road turned into what can only have been a dirt track, full of ruts and potholes. Keeping my balance was impossible. Poulsom was the better off, loose-bodied, out of it.

We stopped. Executed a cramped three-point turn. Stopped again. The rear doors opened. The Hunter stood with his hands on his hips, looking at me. Through the bars I saw we were on a dirt road barely bigger than a bridleway that threaded between thinning trees before curving to the right about twenty feet away to run parallel with the bank of what I could hear and smell was a stream. On the opposite bank a narrow strip of grass, a few lilac bushes, then trees again. There was no sign of the motorcyclist or the Securicor guy.

“Getting hungry?” the Hunter said.

I looked past him. Concentrated on breathing through my nose. The air was loamy and damp. The cloud cover had broken and the evening star was out. My nostrils were hot and tender. Moonrise was less than two hours away. The first inkling of animal clarity was already there, a kind of vicious joy in the power that would come up through the soles of my feet into my ankles, shins, hips, elbows, shoulders. If I lived that long.

“Come on,” the Hunter said. “You’ve got meals-on-wheels in there. Couldn’t be handier.”

Poulsom, he meant, obviously. Poulsom says they’ve got it covered , I’d told Jake when we’d discussed full moon, the Change, the need to feed, whatever that means . Whatever it had meant to Poulsom, it hadn’t meant this. It cost me a lot to hold on, teeth jammed together, the tape on my mouth still imprinted with the heat and weight of the Hunter’s hand.

I looked directly at him. Very slowly gave him the finger. He laughed, quietly. Then slammed the van door shut.

59

POULSOM WOKE UP, shivering, in a sweat. As far as I could tell in the little light that made it through the frosted glass his night and day in the van hadn’t agreed with him. He murmured behind his strip of tape, pointlessly. Then looked at his watch.

I didn’t need his reaction to what he saw to tell me how close transformation was. The last hour had taken me into the penultimate phase, the wolf looking out through human eyes with quiet blazing animal alertness. My wrists and ankles were bloody from where Hunger spasms had cut me against the cuffs, but my limbs had calmed in spite of the pain.

Had calmed. The penultimate phase was passing. Any moment the final phase—cramps, sickness, hot and cold, half an infinite minute of casually ripped-up muscles and rearranged joints—would begin. The cuffs would either burst or slice clean through me. I had an image of myself Changed but with four bleeding stumps. I knew just the sound the stumps would make, knocking against the floor and walls of the van.

I looked at Poulsom. He was shaking his head, no, no, no. Very soon, when things began visibly happening to me, he’d start thrashing and screaming into his gag and all his life would rush to the surface of his flesh and be there sweetly for the taking. It was a relief, the Hunger, its refusal to negotiate, something solid to hold on to in the uncertainty.

Suddenly I caught Jake’s scent. My legs nearly buckled. I twisted myself as close to the rear door as I could get. Overrode the impulse to make as much noise as possible. It’s me! I’m in here! Jake!

Wait. Be smart. Listen. There were voices.

“I thought you said we’d be alone,” Ellis said.

“I know,” a second voice said. “But something occurred to me after we last spoke.”

Poulsom, presumably at the recognition of Ellis’s voice, began kicking about.

“Who’ve you got in there?” Jake said. “What the fuck is this?”

The van’s rear door opened. Standing twenty feet away were Jake, Ellis and a third man in Hunt fatigues. Mid-forties. Dark hair flecked with grey. Broad cheekbones. He looks like a Native American , I remembered Jake telling me—and realised I was face-to-face with Grainer.

The other Hunter, to whom Grainer, it dawned on me, was “the boss,” stood close to the cage with the automatic pointed directly at me.

“Nothing silly, Jake,” Grainer said—then something extraordinary happened.

Grainer took a pace backwards and another half pace to his left. He did it as if woodenly executing a formal dance step. For a second everything froze. Jake’s mouth was slightly open. The shirt buttons were still wrongly done-up. Ellis seemed to very slowly reach around for the rifle that hung slightly behind him on its shoulder strap. Grainer’s right hand went up and behind his head. There was a soft rasp and a flash of bright metal. Everyone observing jumped, as if we’d all been given a small electric shock at exactly the same moment: the moment the blade, a brilliant broadsword, swung—with a sound like a wet branch snapping—through Ellis’s neck.

The head toppled a fraction before the legs went. The long blond hair snagged on the rifle. The corpse’s collapse was curiously neat. It dropped to its knees, hesitated, then fell forward as if in a gesture of complete worship. The head, still attached by its hair to the gun, lay facedown just next to the hip, as if it didn’t want to see anything anymore.

“Lu?” Jake said. “You all right?”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“How did you know?” Jake asked Grainer.

“How do we ever know? We got a good gal on the inside. I’ve always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It’s hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever it felt like it you’d learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can’t blame the women.”