Path of the Tiger, стр. 19

something else crept through him as well though, something dark: fear. There was so much of it that it felt as if his body were tissue paper trying to absorb an excess of spilled ink. Hernández had been right; William was afraid. He was terrified, in fact. Despite the fact that he had lived many lifetimes of mortal men, inside he still felt, more than anything, that he was nothing but the scared, lonely child he had been in a long-past century. That part of him had never died, but with the passage of the years it had somehow become surrounded by a strange and almost parasitic husk of manhood, like the gnarled roots of a tree slowly swallowing up an unyielding rock.

‘It’s just an illusion,’ he mumbled to himself. ‘We fool ourselves into thinking that these years that pass mean something, but all we’re doing is repainting the same tired, worn-out masks, the same bloody masks.’

What was more, Hernández had been right about the War as well; the Rebels were losing, and there was not even a sliver of hope of a turn in the tide.

‘Not a snowball’s chance in the fires of hell itself,’ William muttered.

The notion was a bitter truth to swallow, but what could he do but continue fighting? He would never give in to them, never. Not only for the sake of his own integrity, but for her – the one he had lost so long ago.

No.

The one they had taken from him so long ago. He had made a promise, and all the devils in hell could not keep him from fulfilling it.

Hearing police sirens howling through the nearby streets, William snapped back to the present. He took off at a jog, which became a sprint as they grew rapidly closer. As he was dashing down a side alley, an armed police officer jumped out from behind a dumpster.

‘You!’ he bellowed. ‘Hands in the air! Hit the fuckin’ ground pal, stop running, now! Stop asshole, I said! Hands where I can see ‘em!’

The cop, who was about ten feet away, had his gun trained on William’s chest, and from the icy glare in the man’s eyes he could tell that the officer would not hesitate to use deadly force. He skidded to a halt and began to raise his hands above his head.

‘That’s it,’ the cop rasped. ‘Nice an’ easy ya piece a’ shit, don’t make no sudden moves, y’hear? Now get your goddamn ass on the ground like I told ya, move it!’

William began to lower himself to the ground, drawing in a deep breath as he did so. He focused all of his mental and physical energy and concentration into a singularity: a ball of crackling blue electricity that he visualised materialising before his eyes as he prepared to use an ability that he only unleashed under the direst of circumstances.

‘C’mon jerkoff! I said get your goddamn ass on the pavement, right—’

William cried out in a wordless shout that was half aggression and half agony as he directed his intent at the police officer. In his mind’s eye, he watched the sizzling orb of blue lightning rocketing towards the cop with the speed and force of a loosed crossbow bolt, and it smashed into the man and hurled him back, as if hit by the full power of a heavyweight boxer’s knockout uppercut.

William staggered back as a wave of nausea stampeded through him and black spots blurred out his vision. A flush of bright red blood gushed from his nose, trickling over his lips and dribbling down his chin, and his legs became weak, feeling as if they would give way beneath the now-leaden weight of his swaying body. Consciousness threatened to fly from his mind with the chaos of a flock of spooked birds, but blue and red flashing lights, wailing sirens and a police car screeching to a halt at the other end of the alley forced desperate strength back into William’s veins.

‘Officer down, officer down!’ one of the cops roared as he scrambled out of his vehicle. ‘You! Get the fuck down now! Hit the pavement or I swear to God I’ll put you down!’

William ignored the policeman and the crippling nausea and took off at a sprint. A booming blast from a shotgun echoed through the narrow alley as the police officer fired on him and missed, and William vaulted over a car before darting between two dumpsters and hurdling over a surprised group of homeless men huddled around a burning tyre fire.

The threatening flickers of red and blue pursued him relentlessly, urban lightning in this grey concrete tempest, and the wail of sirens barrelled through the narrow streets parallel to him. He veered off through a narrow passageway to his left, breathing hard as his legs pumped with the voraciousness of fire-driven pistons. A chain-link fence blocked his way, but he scurried over it, skidded around a corner and then stumbled into an alley behind a crowded nightclub.

In front of the red-painted door, a loud-talking, inebriated crowd of patrons spilled out onto the street, jerking and wobbling like malfunctioning droids to the bass-heavy thumping that reverberated from within the club. Amidst curses, angry threats and insults, William shoved through the mass of drunkards who were pissing against the walls, vomiting behind trash cans and making out in dark corners. He fought his way through the throng to get to the main street, where, gasping for breath, he heaved out a sigh of relief when he perceived the aggressively seductive curves of his BMW S1000RR superbike.

With the swarm of sirens drawing nearer, he sprang onto the motorcycle and pulled on his helmet. He revved the engine, taking a moment to savour the harsh power of its cannonade bark, which ripped with metallic ferocity through the cold air. He clicked the motorcycle into gear, spun the back wheel in a banshee-howl of acrid smoke, and sped off into the night at hyperspeed, pursued by ghosts and haunting memories that