“You’re going to hate me in the morning,” Burris said as he climbed the stairs.
“I already do,” I said, waving as he disappeared upstairs. After he was gone, I waited about twenty minutes and then whispered the final trigger of the spell that was spun with the drops of god’s blood. “Hoc donum tibi.” Before the last syllable had faded, the working took, and I was sober, stone cold sober, and poor Burris upstairs had just inherited my drunken buzz I had spent all evening building for him.
I wandered over to the villa’s garage and was not disappointed. Top-fucking-shelf. I decided to pass on the Lamborghini and the Bugatti parked there, opting to take one of the motorcycles, a sleek, black NCR M16 Streetfighter. I eschewed the helmet—yeah, yeah, I know, but we’ve already established that I’m an idiot—tying my hair back and out of my eyes. The instrument panel included a hands-free cell phone, GPS, and a compact but powerful-looking sound system. I wondered which button fired the phasers. This thing cost a hell of a lot of money, and it was a far, far cry from the old Suzuki dirt bikes I used to ride and race when I was a kid.
I pushed the ignition, kicking the bike in the guts. It snarled back at me. I snapped on the headlight, fiddled with the satellite radio until music spilled out of the speakers, and spun out of the garage into the darkness. I followed a bumpy private road for about a quarter of a mile. It finally connected to a main road with a stunning view of the island and the sea below. I accelerated the Streetfighter and felt the wind on my face, the dance of gravity and velocity pulling me toward oblivion or balance, life or death, when I took my first curve. Fuck, yes. I finally felt free and myself for the first time in days.
I had gotten Caern’s apartment’s address from Burris while we had watched TV, and I headed northeast, back toward the city on the other side of the island. I was going to enjoy the solitude on the way there. A single supernova headlight flashed behind me. So much for solitude. Another bike broke free of the wilderness and came off the same private road I had been on.
“You fucking kidding me?” I muttered. The satellite radio was playing Kanye’s “Stronger.” I accelerated and took another turn. The bike’s headlight vanished from view only to reappear a second later as the driver took the curve fast trying to catch up. “Okay, asshole, I hope your insurance is paid up.”
There was a straightaway, and I twisted the accelerator on the quarter-of-a-million-dollar bike. The speedometer was climbing closer to ninety. The bike was light as hell, and it had a fucking two-hundred-horsepower rocket attached to it. The headlight of the other bike diminished. I slowed to take a steep turn that dipped downward as the road hugged the mountain’s edge. The turn came out into a short straightaway and then another turn, opposite of the last. The headlights were back by the time I cleared the second curb and were closing. Son of a bitch. The driver had taken those turns at close to full speed to catch up.
I gunned the accelerator, and the bike almost popped a wheelie. I was heading into another tight curve. I dipped the bike low to correct for the speed going through the turn. The grindstone of the road flashed inches from my face for a few seconds. Then I was up, loose rocks from the edge of the turn flying as I came out into another straight strip of highway and kept flooring it. The other bike took the turn, I glanced back to see the driver’s leg flash out in a spray of gravel, and then the rider was clear and back on my ass. I was pretty sure now that the other bike was the fucking red Ducati from the garage, and that made it pretty clear who the rider was. How the hell he had shaken off the spell, I had no clue.
There was the angry bleat of a car horn, and I snapped my head forward to see a convertible Jag barreling down on me. I had drifted over to the other side of the road; at this speed a split second was too long to get distracted. I swerved at 120 miles an hour and accelerated instead of braking, even though my instincts were screaming to stop. I was about six inches from the car’s paint. I managed to keep it on the road. The guy driving the car flipped me off and screamed at me; his voice was lost in the tunnel of velocity.
Another turn coming up at 140. I could feel the Streetfighter bucking like a titanium bronco, fighting against the contact patches on the tires, wanting to leave the pavement, to fly into the sky. As fucked up as this was getting, I felt the same way. I had wished a few minutes ago that I had a drink or two in me to loosen me up, but now I was high on a much stronger drug. I was going to lose this crazy motherfucker, and there was only one way to beat a crazy motherfucker. I looked over at the coast below. The waxing moon was rising, not full, but so large and bright it felt like you could touch it. The sea, the stars, the wind, the speed—I drank it all in, felt it burn in me like no pill or powder, no drink or smoke ever could. The turn was coming up, wide and sharp, dipping lower toward the rocks and sea far below.
I hit the turn at 165, a literal half-second to scan the road below and ahead, then I snapped off the headlight, plunging me into darkness. There was no thinking, no feeling. All
