He turns the redsmeared broken jar in his bloodstained hands. Just glass. Just a feather. Jemma will I see you again? We are spirits I have learned. Something in us immortal and irreducibly ourselves. But paired and forever bound? I don’t know. I fear perhaps we intersect we waltz and we move on. The music stops and we are all alone. Well if that is so I can accept it. When I set out to get you back it was because you had been taken from me. But on the way my reasons changed. It was because you had been taken at all. Taking you was wrong. Not unfair, not tragic, but wrong. A violation. You didn’t deserve to die. You don’t deserve to be there. And I don’t care what happens to me so long as I can make that right. My winning or losing no longer matters. I don’t deserve you back. I signed my soul away and can’t stand on some right to overturn that. Phil was right: a binding contract freely entered into. But you did not. They can have me. But not until we have you safely from them. That’s what’s different this time. That is what we have a chance of winning here. For even just the fact of change can be a victory.
But now that we have broken free the story’s outcome is unknown. What will happen to you when we cross that boundary again? To think that you might simply be returned to where I brought you from.
All I can do is what I do now. The rest is in the hands of the gods. Who are not known for their evenhandedness. Not to mortal men and especially not to those who set themselves against them. Even Orpheus before me did not get so far. Yet he was not blessed with such companions as I’ve had. Perhaps that was his failure, that he took it on himself. That in truth he went down for himself and not for her.
So hold on Jem. Hold on. Soon we will be home.
THE CAR TURNS off the freeway and Niko opens heavy lids. “Where are we?”
“Las Virgenes exit.”
“Go left.”
They turn left and pass above the Ventura Freeway. Up ahead a McDonald’s and a liquor store and a gas station. “We need gas,” says Niko.
“Look behind us.”
Niko looks just as the black length of the Franklin turns left off the exit ramp. Shit. Nikodemus puts the hammer down and an invisible hand shoves Niko into the seat. Mournfully he watches the gas station whip by.
The Bentley flashes by an L.A. County Sheriff car parked on a side road before a condo cluster. The patrol car kicks up dust and speeds onto the road where it is nearly broadsided by the Black Taxi before the big black car yaws into the lefthand lane and whips around the black-and-white.
“Cop,” says Niko.
Nikodemus merely looks at him.
“Yeah right, never mind.” They lean hard into a curve. “This road is sort of glued onto a mountain range. It’s pretty curvy so be careful.”
“I like this car. It’s much easier to drive than that one.”
“I’ll will it to you.”
Colored light plays about them. The sheriff’s lightbar. Its strobing backlights the Black Taxi racing between the Bentley and the patrol car and definitely gaining.
Nikodemus sticks the Bentley round a tight right curve. The tires wail as they slide out toward the precipice in a mild fourwheel drift into the path of oncoming headlights. Nikodemus backs off on the gas and cuts in and a black Ford pickup streaks by honking and goes on to barely miss the Black Taxi and the pursuing patrol car.
Whatever else Nikodemus might be he is certainly not the Checker Cab driver. The demon’s driving experience consists of three or four days driving a supernatural vehicle up a ramp full of dead people and mowing them down like grass.
Niko tries to think. Okay. So. Malibu Canyon Road runs along the hillside above the sheer dropoff of the gorge that houses Malibu Canyon Creek. Near the crest of Malibu Canyon Road there’s Mulholland Drive but few other side roads. Mostly undeveloped state-owned parkland till you get to Hughes Research Labs and Pepperdine University near Pacific Coast Highway at the Malibu shoreline where the Santa Monica Mountains drown in the Pacific. Friday traffic on the canyon road. No wonder that sheriff had been parked there. He’s gonna wish he’d baited his line for smaller fish.
Niko massages his forehead. His fingertips are cold. Okay. Stop worrying about the sheriff. He can’t stop us and if he radios for help they’ll just be waiting somewhere near PCH on the other side of the hill. Where the hell else are we gonna go?
The biggest worry is the tunnel itself. They’re not driving some tanklike Checker Cab with special buttons that enable it to do supernatural things. No sir. They’re driving a Bentley. A quarter million dollars’ worth of fine machine but a machine nonetheless. Its most supernatural controls are a GPS and personal environment controls and memory settings on the seats. When they reach the tunnel it may be just a tunnel. Not a Portal, not a Doorway to some other where. And what then? What if they drive into it and come out still on Malibu Canyon Road and heading downhill toward the highway and a row of Stop Sticks and a line of sheriff’s cars? But officer I can explain. This here’s my demon, see, and this jar contains my girlfriend’s soul, I was being chased by Death himself, you won’t believe the night I’ve had, can’t you just let me off with a warning?
If we come out that tunnel and we’re still on Malibu Canyon then the only way to cross that boundary will be the way most people do. By dying. But if we, if we die close enough to the portal the cabbie swore would be there, maybe then the Black Taxi Driver won’t have time to strip us from ourselves and trap us like fireflies in a jar and head back to his master with us in hand. Maybe.
We’ll jump that bridge when we come to it.
A SHORT BLOOP of sheriff siren brings Niko back enough to make him realize that he’s been a little gone. Now he feels a tingling warmth like when you’re so cold it burns. The Black Taxi’s less than fifty feet behind them now and the sheriff’s car is on its ass.
The Bentley’s engine lurches and sputters and catches and dies. Nikodemus stomps the gas and turns the key and whips the dashboard with a tendril and swears in a guttural reptilian tongue.
“We’re out of gas,” says Niko.
“What do we do?”
“Keep driving. It’s mostly downhill now.”
And it is. The serpentine road hugs the hillside downtending and tight turning. Niko tells Nikodemus to put the car in neutral and go easy on the brake. They’re still going so fast they barely have control as they slur around the curves and nearly trade paint with oncoming traffic. In the gliding quiet Niko hears the leonine purr of the Black Taxi’s motor and the bored out grumble of the sheriff’s car. The sheriff hasn’t bothered with the siren again.
“It’s harder to steer now,” Nikodemus says.
“Power steering went out when the engine died. So’d the power brakes. You’ll have to press harder to slow down.”
“How much farther now?”
“I’m not sure. Not far. It’s the only tunnel on this road.” They lean into a turn.
“What do we do when we get there?”
“Depends on what we find.”
They lean the other way.
“What if it’s just a tunnel?”
Niko studies his demon. His whitepatched eye and broken wings. The pursuing headlight glare bright against the back of his roughcarved head. “Then I think you know.”