had been bad. The pedestrian underpass had been worse. The worst bit had been crossing the River Thames. At least he’d had the foresight to roll up all the windows.
Still, he was here, now.
In a few hundred yards he’d be on the M40; a fairly clear run up to Oxfordshire. There was only one snag: once more between Crowley and the open road was the M25. A screaming, glowing ribbon of pain and dark light.48 Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive.
Nothing mortal, anyway. And he wasn’t sure what it would do to a demon. It couldn’t kill him, but it wouldn’t be pleasant.
There was a police roadblock in front of the flyover before him. Burnt-out wrecks—some still burning—testified to the fate of previous cars that had to drive across the flyover above the dark road.
The police did not look happy.
Crowley shifted down into second gear, and gunned the accelerator.
He went through the roadblock at sixty. That was the easy bit.
Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone’s quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there’s a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.
Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.
The leather seatcovers began to smoke. Staring ahead of him, Crowley fumbled left-handedly on the passenger seat for Agnes Nutter’s Nice and Accurate Prophecies, moved it to the safety of his lap. He wished she’d prophecied this.49
Then the flames engulfed the car.
He had to keep driving.
On the other side of the flyover was a further police roadblock, to prevent the passage of cars trying to come into London. They were laughing about a story that had just come over the radio, that a motorbike cop on the M6 had flagged down a stolen police car, only to discover the driver to be a large octopus.
Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain.
It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.
It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour.
That would do it every time.
THE QUARRY WAS THE CALM center of a stormy world.
Thunder didn’t just rumble overhead, it tore the air in half.
“I’ve got some more friends coming,” Adam repeated. “They’ll be here soon, and then we can really get started.”
Dog started to howl. It was no longer the siren howl of a lone wolf, but the weird oscillations of a small dog in deep trouble.
Pepper had been sitting staring at her knees.
There seemed to be something on her mind.
Finally she looked up and stared Adam in the blank gray eyes.
“What bit ’re you going to have, Adam?” she said.
The storm was replaced by a sudden, ringing silence.
“What?” said Adam.
“Well, you divided up the world, right, and we’ve all of us got to have a bit—what bit’re you going to have?”
The silence sang like a harp, high and thin.
“Yeah,” said Brian. “You never told us what bit you’re having.”
“Pepper’s right,” said Wensleydale. “Don’t seem to me there’s much left, if we’ve got to have all these countries.”
Adam’s mouth opened and shut.
“What?” he said.
“What bit’s yours, Adam?” said Pepper.
Adam stared at her. Dog had stopped howling and had fixed his master with an intent, thoughtful mongrel stare.
“M-me?” he said.
The silence went on and on, one note that could drown out the noises of the world.
“But I’ll have Tadfield,” said Adam.
They stared at him.
“An’, an’ Lower Tadfield, and Norton, and Norton Woods—”
They still stared.
Adam’s gaze dragged itself across their faces.
“They’re all I’ve ever wanted,” he said.
They shook their heads.
“I can have ’em if I want,” said Adam, his voice tinged with sullen defiance and his defiance edged with sudden doubt. “I can make them better, too. Better trees to climb, better ponds, better … ”
His voice trailed off.
“You can’t,” said Wensleydale flatly. “They’re not like America and those places. They’re really real. Anyway, they belong to all of us. They’re ours.”
“And you couldn’t make ’em better,” said Brian.
“Anyway, even if you did we’d all know,” said Pepper.