Vicious Circle

I put on a fresh spurt of speed, but they still reached the corner well before me and disappeared around it with a whump-chunk sound as the car rocked and yawed on its wheelbase. When I got there, I saw Peace running hell for leather along a narrow stretch of road where the pavement all but vanished. Faceless low-rise office blocks hemmed him in on both sides, with no alleys or breaks that he could duck into. Up ahead of him, though, the street opened out on one side onto the broad, asphalted plain of a car park. It was laid out as a mazelike grid of two-foot-high concrete bollards, some of which were linked by chains.

The Jeep was only a few feet behind Peace when he reached the first of the bollards. He jumped right over it like a hurdler and kept on going: the Jeep was forced to swerve wide, back out onto the street, first of all keeping pace with him and then accelerating past him. When it got to the far end of the open space it swerved to a pinwheeling halt and the passenger door was thrown open.

Po clambered out, at first human but unfolding as he moved into something that looked like it never had a mother. His arms elongated and thickened and he bent from the waist to lay them on the ground. His mouth gaped, and kept on gaping, deforming into a fang-ringed muzzle like the maw of a shark. I’d been right after all about him being an exotic, but he was no gorilla. He was a hyena, or something that had been a hyena once, and even on all fours like this he was as high at the shoulder as a man.

Peace saw that he’d been outflanked, stopped at a skid, turned, and went into full reverse, his arms and legs pumping. Po loped after him, slow at first but gathering speed. Meanwhile the Jeep heeled around, passenger door still flapping and banging, and headed back down the street toward me. Again it came alongside Peace and then accelerated past him. If it hadn’t been for the bollards it could have just moved in and cut him off. As it was, the driver had to brake again and jump out himself. It was the other man I’d met last night—Zucker, the one with the deep, growly voice and the fondness for sharp edges. I was barely twenty yards away now, and running toward him, but he only had eyes for his quarry. He jogged forward to meet Peace, completing the pincer movement.

But Peace turned in a wide arc, heading for the back of the car park where a high wooden fence separated it from the watersports dealership it presumably served. The fence looked too high to climb, but Peace’s two pursuers saw the danger that he might somehow slip away from them and pushed themselves harder, narrowing his lead.

I reached the Jeep, and saw from the slight vibration of the bonnet that the engine was still running. Without even thinking about what I was doing, I jumped in and backed it out onto the street.

Peace was almost at the fence, the two were-kin were only a few yards behind him. I gunned the engine, slammed it into second, and roared forward. The two bollards directly in front of me were linked by one of the chains: I hit it full-on and it parted with a crunch, the loose ends snapping away like steel whips to either side. I kept on going, swerving to avoid the barriers where I could, smashing straight through them when I had to. Something caught in one of the front wheels and the Jeep started to lean to the right; I turned the wheel frantically to compensate.

Up ahead of me, Peace had reached the fence, and he tensed for a leap that would take him some of the way up the side of it. Before he could, Po closed the last few yards and was on him in a frenzy of claws. They both went down. There were two gunshots, so close together that the second sounded like the echo of the first. Peace kicked Po away from him—a pretty amazing feat in itself—and scrambled up again. The were-thing was hurt, blood on its face seeming to blind it so that although it swiped out with one obscenely long, clawed forelimb, it missed Peace by a good few inches.

Zucker was closing fast. Seeing how bad the odds were about to get, Peace turned and made a powerful leap, hitting the fence about four feet off the ground and hauling himself up with his hands. Close behind, Po gathered himself on his haunches to do the same thing—but his leap would bring Peace off the wall in the way a cat would claw down a low-flying bird. At the same time, Zucker was groping in his pocket, probably for his knife. One way or another, Peace didn’t have a chance in hell of making it to the top.

I clamped my hand down on the horn. The harsh, diminuendo blat of sound made the loup-garous turn, and they saw their own car bearing down on them: four thousand pounds of metal, give or take, tearing out its engine as I pushed it up to fifty in second gear.