Chevie flinched as her life flashed before her eyes, just as the movies had told her it would.
She saw her teacher’s face, kind and worried, as she rescued her student from the clutches of a briar patch on the Topanga Canyon trail. She saw her father’s motorbike accelerate around a bend on the Pacific Coast Highway, and she knew now he would never return, that his fuel tank would explode as he passed through Venice Beach. She saw her friend Nikki riding a big wave on Cross Creek beach, her hands reaching toward the sky as though she could grab onto a cloud.
The images faded, and Chevie discovered to her surprise that she was still alive. Garrick crouched over her, spine curved, a grimace dragging at the corners of his mouth. A man at war with his demons.
You must prevail, Albert Garrick, he thought. Your mind is your own.
Chevie was afraid to breathe. The tiniest movement would press her tender throat against the razor-sharp blade.
Do it, Garrick told himself. Make the cut. Unto dust.
Riley tried to take advantage of Garrick’s hesitation. “Master, leave the lass be. It’s me you’re after. Leave her, and let’s away.”
Garrick rounded on the boy, pointing the switchblade at his eye. “You are plum correct there, my lad. I have come for you, and you proved yourself worthy. Now make yourself useful and check the gentlemen beyond for heartbeats.”
Riley hesitated at the door. “We are not clear of this yet, master. Perhaps a hostage would be useful?”
Garrick seized upon this notion. It gave him a legitimate reason for not harming the girl.
“Perhaps a hostage would be of use. But I fear this one will rebel when an opportunity presents itself.”
“I will vouch for her,” said Riley.
“Do you understand what you are saying?” asked Garrick. “You are offering yourself to pay for her crimes? Her punishment will be yours? And you yourself are teetering on the edge of the abyss after your escape attempt, even with that kill. I will brook not one more scrap of insubordination.”
“I understand, master. Perhaps she can help us.”
Garrick closed one eye and the other glittered. “Us, is it? There’s an us now?”
Riley waited for his master’s response with held breath. He knew that Garrick would not hesitate to kill Chevie simply to make his argument clear, but something held him back.
I was right. Garrick has changed, Riley observed. His posture, the meat on his bones. Even his tone seems different.
“Very well,” said Garrick, after a tantalizing silence. “We take the girl. But if she does betray me . . . you both pay the price.”
Riley sighed, relieved that Chevie would live, even though she would probably kill him given the chance.
Garrick gazed down at her. “You are as transparent as a window at Fortnum and Mason’s to me, girl. You are thinking at this instant that so long as you are alive, then there is a chance of escape.”
Garrick bent low over Chevie, tracing her eyebrow with the tip of his blade. “Abandon all hope,” he whispered. “For hope has abandoned ye.”
Chevie believed him, and so did the boy.
Garrick was positively ebullient to have Riley back. He had an audience again, swelled to twice its size.
“Numbers in the stalls are up by a hundred percent,” he commented to Riley as they rode in the black cab toward Bedford Square. “It must be a good show.”
Chevie and Riley sat opposite him on the fold-down seats. Chevie was traumatized from stepping over the half dozen federal corpses in the safe suite.
Duff was a jerk, thought Chevie. But he was a human jerk. Chevie had never seen so much death and was more shaken than she had imagined she would be in a combat situation. Her only consolation had been the sight of Waldo Gunn safe inside his panic pod.
At least Waldo knows I am not a murderer.
But this scrap of comfort did little to dispel the shock that crushed her spirit.
Riley, on the other hand, had lived his life in Victorian London, where murder was rare but life was cheap. Many poor children died at birth; if they did survive that first day, the odds were that cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, or whooping cough would do them in before their fifth birthday. Riley had seen the grim reaper’s handiwork more times than he could count.
Life and death are two ends of the same ride, Garrick had once told him. Nothing to celebrate or mourn.