"It's official," Fancy Pants said. "They killed the Appleloosan two nights ago. You're the last." Then after a pause: "I'm sorry."
Yesterday evening this was. We were in the upstairs library of his Earl's Court house, him standing at a tense tilt between stone hearth and oxblood couch, me in the window seat with a tumbler of forty-five-year-old Macallan and a Camel Filter, staring out at dark Trottingham's fast-falling snow. The room smelled of tangerines and leather and the fire's pine logs. Forty-eight hours on I was still sluggish from the Curse. Wolf drains from the wrists and shoulders last. In spite of what I'd just heard I thought: Rarity can give me a massage later, warm jasmine oil and the long-nailed magnolia hooves I don't love and never will.
"What are you going to do?" Fancy Pants said.
I sipped, swallowed, glimpsed the peat bog plashing white legs of the kilted clan Macallan as the whisky kindled in my chest. It's official. You're the last. I'm sorry. I'd known what he was going to tell me. Now that he had, what? Vague ontological vertigo. At a certain point one's imagination refused. The phrase was: It doesn't bear thinking about. Manifestly it didn't.
"Ms. Dash?"
"This room's dead to you," I said. "But there are bibliophiles the world over it would reduce to tears of joy." No exaggeration. Fancy Pants's collection's worth a million-six, books he doesn't go to anymore because he's entered the phase of having given up reading. If he lives another ten years he'll enter the next phase - of having gone back to it. Giving up reading seems the height of maturity at first. Like all such heights a false summit. It's a mortal thing. I've seen it countless times. Two hundred years, you see everything countless times.
"I can't imagine what this is like for you," he said.
"Neither can I."
"We need to plan."
I didn't reply. Instead let the silence fill with the alternative to planning. Fancy Pants lit a Gauloise and topped us up with an unsteady hoof, lilac-veined and liver-spotted these days. At seventy he maintains longish thinning grey hair and a plump nicotined moustache that looks waxed but isn't. During periods of psychic weakness he leans on a bone-handled cane, though he's been told by his doctor it's ruining his spine.
"The Appleloosan," I said. "Pinkie killed him?"
"Not Pinkie. Her Pegasi protégé, Fluttershy."
"Pinkie's saving herself for the main event. She'll come after me alone."
Fancy sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. I know what scares him: If I die first there'll be no salving surreality between him and his conscience. Rainbow Dash is a monster, fact. Kills and devours ponies, fact. Which makes him, Fancy Pants, an accessory after the fact, fact. With me alive, walking and talking and doing the lunar shuffle once a month he can live in it as in a decadent dream. Did I mention my best friend's a werewolf, by the way? Dead, I'll force a brutal awakening. I helped Rainbow Dash get away with murder. He'll probably kill himself or go once and for all mad. One of his upper left incisors is full gold, a dental anachronism that suggests semicraziness anyway.
"Next full moon," he said. "The rest of the Hunt's been ordered to stand down. It's Pinkie's party. You know what she's like."
Indeed. Pinkamena Diane Pie is the Hunt's Big Cunt. All upper-echelon members of EOCOP (Equestrian Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena) are loaded or bankrolled by the loaded for their expertise. Pinkie's expertise is tracking and killing my kind. My kind. Of which, thanks to EOCOP's assassins and a century of no new howling kids on the block, it turns out I'm the last. I thought of the Appleloosan, whose name was Braeburn Apple, pictured his last moments: the frost reeling under him, his moonlit muzzle and sweating pelt, the split-second in which his eyes merged dis-belief and fear and horror and sadness and relief - then the white and final light of silver.
"What are you going to do?" Harley repeated.
All wolf and no gang. Humour darkens. I looked out of the window. The snow was coming down with the implacability of an Old Testament plague. In Earl's Court Road pedestrians tottered and slid and in the cold swirling angelic freshness felt their childhoods still there and the shock like a snapped stem of not being children anymore. Two nights ago I'd eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I've been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants. My last phase, apparently.
"Nothing," I said.
"You'll have to get out of Trottingham."
"What for?"
"We're not going to have this conversation."
"It's time."
"It's not time."
"Fancy - "
"You've got a duty to live, same as the rest of us."
"Hardly the same as the rest of you."
"Nevertheless. You go on living. And don't give me any poetic bollocks about being tired. It's bogus. It's bad script."
"It's not bad script," I said. "I am tired."
"Been around too long, worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete - you've told me. I don't believe you. And in any case you don't give up. You love life because life's all there is. There's no Faust and that's Her only Commandment. Give me your word."
I was thinking, as the honest part of me had been from the moment Fancy Pants had given me the news, You'll have to tell it now. The untellable tale. You wondered how long a postponement you'd get. Turns out you got a hundred and sixty-seven years. Quite a while to keep a girl waiting.
"Give me your word, Rainbow."
"Give you my word what?"
"Give me your word you're not going to sit there like a cabbage till Pinkie tracks you down and kills you."
When I'd imagined this moment I'd imagined clean relief. Now the moment had arrived there was relief, but it wasn't clean. The sordid little flame of selfhood shimmied in protest. Not that my self's what it used to be. These days it deserves a sad smile, as might a twinge of vestigial lust in an old man's balls.
"Shot him, did they?" I asked. "Braeburn Apple?"
Fancy Pants took a fretful drag, then while exhaling through his nostrils mashed the Gauloise in a standing obsidian ashtray.
"They didn't shoot him," he said. "Fluttershy cut his head off."
All paradigm shifts answer the amoral craving for novelty. Mayor Mare's election victory did it. So did the Parasprite Invasion in its day. Good and evil are irrelevant. Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices. Nothing's exempt. One's own death-sentence elicits a mad little hallelujah, and mine 's egregiously overdue. For ten, twenty, thirty years now I've been dragging myself through the motions. How long do werewolves live? Twilight asked recently. According to EOCOP around four hundred years. I don't know how. Naturally one sets oneself challenges - Sanskrit, Kant, advanced calculus, t'ai chi - but that only addresses the problem of Time. The bigger problem, of Being, just keeps getting bigger. (Vamponies, not surprisingly, have an on-off love affair with catatonia.) One by one I've exhausted the modes: hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig. My mechanism's worn out. I don't have what it takes. I still have feelings but I'm sick of having them. Which is another feeling I'm sick of having. I just... I just don't want any more life.
Fancy Pants crashed from anxiety to morbidity to melancholy but I remained dreamy and light, part voluntary obtuseness, part Zenlike acceptance, part simply an inability to concentrate. You can't just ignore this, he kept saying. You can't just fucking roll over. For a while I responded mildly with things like Why not? and Of course I can, but he got so worked up - the bone-handled cane came back into play - I feared for his heart and changed tack. Just let me digest, I told him. Just let me think. Just let me, in fact, get laid, as I've arranged to do, as I'm paying for even as we speak. This was true (Twilight waited at a 360 bit-a-night boutique hotel across town) but it wasn't a happy shift of topic for Fancy Pants: prostate surgery three months ago left his libido in a sulk and Trottingham's rent boys bereft of munificent patronage. However, it got me out of there. Tearily drunk, he embraced me and insisted I borrow a woolen hat and made me promise to call him in twenty-four hours, where after, he kept repeating, all this pathetic sissying cod Hamlet bollocks would have to stop.
It was still snowing when I stepped out into the street. Vehicular traffic was poignantly stupefied and Earl's Court Underground was closed. For a moment I stood adjusting to the air's fierce innocence. I hadn't known the Appleloosan, but what was he if not kin? He'd had a near miss in the Everfree Forest two years ago, fled and gone off-radar in Appleloosa. If he 'd stayed in the wilderness he might still be alive. (The thought, "wilderness," stirred the ghost animal, ran cold fingers through the pelt that wasn't there; mountains like black glass and slivers of snow and the blood-hot howl on ice-flavoured air...) But home pulls. It draws you back to tell you that you don't belong. They got Braeburn twenty miles from Appleloosa. Fluttershy cut his head off. The death of a loved one brutally vivifies everything: clouds, street corners, faces. You bear it because others share the grief. Species death leaves no others. You're alone among all the eerily renewed particulars.
Tongue out to taste the cold falling flakes I got the first inklings of the weight the world might put on me for the time I had left, the mass of its detail, its relentless plotless insistence. Again, it didn't bear thinking about. This would be my torture: All that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.
I lit a Camel and hauled myself into focus. Practicalities: Get to the road on foot. Circle Line to Farringdon. Ten minutes flailing trek to the Zetter, where Twilight, Faust bless her mercenary charms, would be waiting. I pulled the woolen cap down snug over my ears and began walking.
Fancy Pants had said: Pinkie wants the monster not the mare. You've got time. I didn't doubt he was right. There were twenty-seven days to the next full moon and thanks to the interference Fancy Pants had been running EOCOP still had me in Prance. Which knowledge sustained me for a few minutes despite the growing conviction - this is paranoia, you're doing this to yourself - that I was being followed.
Then, turning into Cromwell Road, the denial allowance was spent and there was nothing between me and the livid fact: I was being followed.
This is paranoia, I began again, but the mantra had lost its magic. Pressing on me from behind was warm insinuation where should have been uninterrupted cold: surveillance. Snow and buildings molecularly swelled in urgent confirmation: They've found you. It's already begun.
Adrenaline isn't interested in ennui. Adrenaline floods, regardless, in my state not just the pony fibres but lupine leftovers too, those creature dregs that hadn't fully conceded transformation. Phantom wolf energies and their Equus ferus caballus correlates wriggled and belched in my scalp, shoulders, wrists, knees. My bladder tingled as in the too fast pitch down from a Ferris wheel's summit. The absurdity was being unable, shin-deep in snow, to quicken my pace. Fancy had tried to press a Smith & Wesson automatic on me before I'd left but I'd laughed it away. Stop being a granny. I imagined him reading the paper now saying, Yes, Fancy Pants the granny. I hope you're happy, Rainbow Dash, you fucking idiot.
I tossed the cigarette and shoved my hands into my overcoat pockets. Fancy had to be warned. If the Hunt was tailing me then they knew where I'd just been. The Earl's Court house wasn't in his name (masqueraded instead as what it was perfectly equipped to be, an elite rare book dealership) and had hitherto been safe. But if EOCOP had uncovered it then Fancy Pants - for nearly fifty years my double agent, my fix-it, my familiar, my friend - might already be dead.
If, then... If, then... This, aside from the business of monthly transformation, the inestimable drag of Being a Werepony, is what I'm sick of, the endless logistics. There 's a reason ponies peg-out around thirty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Derpy then we can't ask Bulk Biceps. If I have the kippers now then it's quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia's the sane realization you just can't be doing with all that anymore.
My face was hot and tender. The snow's recording studio hush made small sounds distinct: someone opening a can of beer; a burp; a purse snapping shut. Across the road three drunk young stallions hysterically scuffled with one another. A cabbie wrapped in a tartan blanket stood by his carriage complaining to nopony. Outside Flamingo two hotdog-eating bouncers in hats presided over a line of shivering clubbers. Nothing like the blood and meat of the young. You can taste the audacity of hope. Post-Curse these thoughts still shoot up like the inappropriate erections of adolescence. I crossed over, joined the end of the queue, with antisocial detachment registered the thudding succulence of the three underdressed mares in front of me, and dialled Harley on the secure gem. He answered after three rings.
"Someone's following me," I said. "You need to get out of there. It's compromised."
The expected delay. He'd been drunk-dozing with the gem in his hand, set to vibrate. I could picture him, creased, struggling up from the couch, hair aloft with static, fumbling for the Gauloise.
"Fancy? Are you listening? The house isn't safe. Get out and go under."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. Don't waste time."
"But I mean they don't know you're here. They absolutely do not. I've seen the intel updates myself. For fuck's sake I wrote most of them. Rainbow?"
Impossible in the falling snow to get a lock on my footpad. If he'd seen me cross he'd have got into a doorway. There was a dark-haired artful fashion-model type in a trench coat across the road ostensibly arrested by a letter coming out his horn, but if that was him then he was either an idiot or he wanted me to see him. No other obvious candidate.
"Rainbow?"
"Yeah. Look, don't fuck about, Fancy. Is there somewhere you can go?"
I heard him exhale, saw the aging linen-suited frame sag. It was upon him, suddenly, what it would mean if his EOCOP cover was blown. Seventy's too old to start running. Over the gem's drift of not silence I could sense him visualising it, the hotel rooms, the bribes, the aliases, the death of trust. No life for an old stallion.
"Well, I can go to Founders, I suppose, assuming no one shoots me between here and Child's Street."
Founders was the Foundation, Fancy's satirically exclusive club, sub-Jeeves butlers and state-of-the-art escorts, priceless antiques and cutting-edge entertainment technology, massage therapists, a resident Tarot reader and a three-starred chef. Membership required wealth but forbade fame; celebrity drew attention, and this was a place for the rich to vice quietly. According to Fancy fewer than a hundred ponies knew of its existence.
"Why don't you let me check first?" he said. "Let me get into EOCOP and - "
"Give me your word you'll take the gun and go."
He knew I was right, just didn't want it. Not now, so unprepared. I pictured him looking around the room. All the books. So many things were ending, without warning.
"All right," he said. "Fuck."
"Write me when you get to the club."
It did occur to me to similarly avail myself of Flamingo, since there it was. No Hunter would risk so public a hit. From the outside the night club was an unmarked dark brick front and a metal door that might have served a bank vault. Above it one tiny pink neon flamingo none but the cognoscenti would divine. In the movie version I'd go in and sneak out of a toilet window or meet a girl and start a problematic love affair that would somehow save my life at the expense of hers. In reality I'd go in, spend four hours being watched by my assassin without figuring out who it was then find myself back on the street.
I moved away from the queue. A warm beam of consciousness followed me. One glance at the glamour boy in the trench coat revealed him pocketing his letter and setting off in my wake, but I couldn't convince myself it was him. The ether spoke of greater refinement. I looked at my watch: 12:16. Last train from Gloucester Road wouldn't be later than 12:30. Even at this pace I should make it. If not I'd check in at the Cavendish and forgo Twilight, though, since I'd given her carte blanche with room service over at the Zetter, I'd most likely be bankrupt by morning.
These, you'll say, were not the calculations of a being worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete. Granted. But it's one thing to know death's twenty-seven days away, quite another to know it might be making your acquaintance any second now. To be murdered here, in equine shape, would be gross, precipitate and - despite there being no such thing as justice - unjust. Besides, the person tracking me couldn't be Pinkie. As Fancy said, her lordship prized the wolf not the mare, and the thought of being dispatched by anyone less than the Hunt's finest was repugnant. And this was to say nothing of my one diarist's duty still undischarged: If I was snuffed out here and now who would tell the untellable tale? The whole disease of your life written but for that last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. Faust's gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame.
All of which, my cynic said, as I stopped under a street lamp to light another Camel, was decent enough, unless it was just a fancy rationalization for the sudden and desperate desire not to die.
At which point a silenced burst hit the street lamp's concrete three inches above my head.