‘Here,’ I said, cutting across her. ‘Help me.’
It was the manhole we’d found earlier, the only way back up to the surface that didn’t involve getting past Asmodeus. Groping blindly in the dark, I’d finally found the outline of it, and now I put her hands on it too. ‘Push,’ I commanded.
‘It’s rusted shut!’
‘Try again!’
We braced ourselves against the tunnel floor, straightened our backs and strained against the unyielding cast-iron cover. The tunnel walls channelled a soft rhythmic sound to our unwilling ears: the sound of Asmodeus’s feet slapping the cobbles as he ran. It sounded like a barber stropping a razor.
My spine felt like it was breaking already, but I poured on the effort. Beside me, Pax growled low in her throat. The manhole cover didn’t budge by a fraction of an inch.
Pax moved away from me, and I heard her scrabbling around on the floor. Then I felt the vibration through the palms of my hands as she came upright again and drove something – one of the loose bricks that had been lying against the tunnel wall – repeatedly against the edge of the manhole cover. She was trying to dislodge the rust that had welded it into place, and it seemed to be working. It gave slightly, shifting against the pressure of my hands.
‘Push again!’ I grunted.
Trudie added her efforts to mine. With a squeal like a stuck pig, the manhole cover started to move. The light that rushed in was pale and washed out, but it was still startling. It showed the demon closing on us soundlessly in the dark, as fast as a torpedo.
With a booming clang, the manhole cover fell out onto the street. I grabbed Trudie before she even knew what I was doing, lifting her by her lower legs so that she had no choice but to grasp the rim of the hole and haul herself up. It was that or go over backwards into the dark.
Then I gathered myself and jumped, getting a grip on the edge and trying to pull myself up by my hands. My head cleared the rim of the hole, and I had a momentary, skewed vision of the road tunnel above: strip lights high overhead canted at a crazy angle, a soot-streaked crash barrier only a foot or so away, a car swerving around us and almost hitting the kerb. Trudie gripped my forearm and leaned back, using her weight to land me the way an angler lands a big fish. But something gripped my ankle hard and dragged me back into the dark. I clung desperately to Trudie’s arm, kicking out with my free foot but making contact with nothing more substantial than air. I went down heavily on my back, with a jarring impact that knocked the breath out of my body.
Asmodeus stood over me, grinning like the wicked land-lord in a melodrama. ‘It’s a mess down here,’ he said, conversationally. ‘You should have told me you were coming. I’d have made a bit of an effort.’
I scrabbled backwards, agonisingly aware that I was retreating not just from the demon but from the only exit. ‘You said . . . you’d save me for last,’ I reminded him, groping in the dark for something – anything – I could use as a weapon.
Asmodeus shook his head. ‘But you will keep putting yourself in harm’s way,’ he chided me gently. ‘What am I to do, Castor? I love our little talks, but I’ve got things to do and you keep tugging at my coat-tails like a kid who wants a lollipop. Anyway, I’m pretty much done here. Got all the ducks in a row. So I think I may go ahead and give you a spanking, just so you remember your place.’
His face went from light into shadow as he walked past the open manhole and out of the narrow, wan little spotlight it was casting down into the tunnel.
‘You know why the lion limps?’ he asked me, his voice a low, exultant growl.
I braced myself to rise as he bent forward and hit him with as much force as I could manage. He didn’t even seem to feel it.
At that moment, Trudie appeared in the hole behind and above him, head down. Dangling over the abyss, she flung her right arm out to its full extent, and there was a smacking sound as something hit the back of Asmodeus’ head. He grunted in surprise and faltered in his step. Then he raised a tentative hand to his head, which had sprouted – as if by magic – a vertical appendage. He turned his head slightly, and I saw that it was the shaft of a claw hammer, the business end of which was embedded several inches into his skull. So that was what Trudie had picked up in the dark: not a mere brick but a handy multi-purpose assault weapon.
I rolled to the side and jumped up. Asmodeus turned to keep me in his sights, but there was a drunken list to his body and a jerkiness to his movements. Still, he was between me and the manhole and there was no way I was getting up to ground level without going through him first.
I headed straight for him, then as he moved in to close me down I stopped suddenly and jabbed out with my left hand. Ordinarily the punch wouldn’t have had a chance of getting past the demon’s guard, but now it connected with his face, Asmodeus’ momentum adding to mine to give it some real heft.
Asmodeus stopped in his tracks, his knees buckling slightly, and I did what felt natural and inevitable at that moment. I reached past him, grabbed the handle of the hammer and wrenched it down and to the side, turning the bifurcated claw inside his skull like a spoon inside the shell of a coconut. The hammer came free in my hand with a liquescent crunching sound, and Asmodeus crashed down onto his knees, then onto his knees and elbows.
He was trying to rise, but for the moment Rafi’s nervous system wasn’t cooperating. The switchboard was down, and there was no way of routing messages past the crimson ruin at the back of his skull to the still functioning limbs and torso.
I dropped the hammer – reluctantly, but I needed both hands – stepped onto the demon’s back and launched myself from it towards the manhole in a graceless lunge. Trudie got out of my way just in time to avoid being headbutted, then helped me to clamber up as I got my arms and then my upper body through the gap.
‘We did it!’ she gasped, her voice hoarse with disbelief.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘we did. Now run like fuck!’
Trudie looked towards the open manhole. Judging by her face, she thought the fight was over. A groping hand thrust over the rim made my point for me. We took off down the road tunnel like two sprinters vying for gold.
We were running against the traffic. Car after car braked and slewed to avoid hitting us, then accelerated past us with a blast on the horn or a bellowed curse from the driver-side window.
We put enough distance between ourselves and the demon for me to think we were free and clear. Younger and fitter than me, Trudie got an early lead and kept it, but then as she reached the steeper ramp at the tunnel entrance she turned like Orpheus at the doorsill of the Underworld to see if I was coming. Something whipped past me, something perfectly round, flashing a startling silver-grey with reflected light so that it looked for a moment like a lightning bolt caught in a bubble. It flashed past Trudie too, missing her head by a few lazy inches but bumping her shoulder and spinning her on her axis like a skater doing a sudden unplanned bracket turn. Her eyes widened in shock and she made a sound like a gasp broken in two.
I was level with her in a second and caught her before she could fall. There was a splintering crash from somewhere up ahead of us, where the manhole cover had ricocheted off the concrete wall of the tunnel and struck the wing of an articulated truck a glancing blow. The truck jackknifed, its trailer swinging round to form a wall-to-wall roadblock. For a moment it looked as though it was going to keel over on top of us, but it rocked back on its wheel base at the last moment and settled.
Trudie’s mouth was working, but no sound was coming out. A dark stain spread out and down from her shoulder across the front of her shirt. The manhole cover had barely seemed to tap her, but it must have weighed close on a hundred pounds, and it had whipped through the air like a discus. The damage was obviously a lot worse than I’d thought. She sagged in my arms, but I took the weight and kept her more or less on her feet.