By Blood We Live by Glen Duncan

Author:Glen Duncan [Duncan, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Adult, Vampires
ISBN: 9780307595102
Google: fYR3AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00EGMQIFY
Barnesnoble: B00EGMQIFY
Goodreads: 18307215
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

47

NORTH VEGAS TOLD me she’d been here but I’d missed her. I nosed the VanHome around for more than an hour before I caught (windows down, the city’s smells a stadium crowd I was searching for the one beloved face) the first strand on the ether, a psychic stink like the odour of cordite after a gunshot.

Elusive, though. I had it and lost it. I stopped the VanHome and got out. Urban deadspot. Three empty, garbage-strewn lots between an out-of-business repairs garage and a cluster of one-storey homes that were barely more than shotgun shacks. A small freight trailer lying on its side, covered in graffiti. A couch reduced by weather and fire to its rusted sprung frame. A butchered space-hopper. A defeated army of filthy plastic carrier bags. One gets used to these occasional anti-oases in American cities, with their inexplicable inhabitants and remains (I once saw a live parrot sitting in the mouth of an abandoned tumble dryer) but even I was surprised when I noticed the horse.

Not least because it had taken me this long to notice him. He limped out of the shadow by the overturned trailer, took a half-dozen unsteady steps, then stood, trembling. He didn’t appear to be tethered.

He didn’t move when I approached him. (Not knowing, quite, why I was approaching him. Except at the soft insistence—Lash-enriched—of the air around me, that even in its reek of engine oil and human shit said to approach him.) It was very quiet. One of the street lights buzzed. I was aware of time, of wasting valuable seconds and minutes in which Justine’s trail could only be cooling—but I couldn’t help it. My practical self was working through the understandable questions: How could a horse be …? Whose …? Surely a permit … And not even tied … How could …? While the rest of me had accepted the moment’s obscure gravity.

I couldn’t remember when I’d seen an animal in worse shape. Aside from his grotesque thinness and distended belly there were unhealed gashes all over him. His left eye was swollen shut by a hot, delighted infection. There were maggots in one wound on his right foreleg. Sepsis oozing from another on his haunch. When I put my hand gently on his quivering neck, he urinated, a hot arrow of blood. Via an impenetrable association he reminded me of the old beggar man I’d seen on the drive at Las Rosas. I’d forgotten about that. The crutch, the grinning face, the cryptic remark: You’re going the wrong way.

“Shshsh,” I said, though the horse hadn’t, beyond his laboured breathing, made a sound. I rested my forehead against his muzzle. His shivering was almost a thing of disgust.

I don’t quite know how long we stood together like that, out of time. I was thinking of the scene in Crime and Punishment that never failed to wreck my heart, the milk-cart horse whipped to death by his driver, the crowd laughing, egging the driver on—but there was something else it reminded me of, something …

It didn’t matter.

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