Go did not know where he ran to. He dimly remembered stumbling through the garden, blundering through shrubs and bushes—his clothing was torn and full of twigs—expecting at any moment the rip and roar at his back. Then out into the street, out of the quiet suburb which had provided, through his own and Beni's folly, no sanctuary at all, and sprinting now down to the main street, not really thinking at all, just needing to get away. Sirens screamed out; he'd seen flashing lights, heading for the blazing house behind him. He remembered the swerve of a car, distant shouts. His hands were skinned; he must have fallen at some point and this, too, was a vague memory, the sudden shock of hitting warm, gritty stone, rising, running on.
Now, he was at the port, end of the line with the sea an oily blackness under the rocking lights. Everything that had been opaque before he stopped was now hyper-real: the lights, the slap and hiss of the sea, the smell of petrol and weed and rot. His heart slammed against the wall of his chest; his lungs burned.
Beni, he thought, Beni is dead. Lara killed him, ripped out his throat. They had known the danger of what they had brought to the world, summoned up from Hell, but somehow—despite the final, disastrous ritual and the reasoning that had led up to it—he had failed to take that danger on board. Lara, with her tiger teeth and her terrible temper, had still seemed somehow controllable. Face it, he thought. You underestimated her because she's a chick. A demon chick, true. But female and therefore not quite the threat that, he now realized, she should have been. And now she was after him. Knowing Lara, she wasn't the type to believe that revenge was best served cold. Piping hot, with a side order of chilies. Maybe poor old Beni was better off dead.
Then it occurred to him that Beni, though dead, was still around; at least, his soul was presumably intact, and where would that be now? Waiting to enter Hell, probably. He mouthed a silent apology, much good that would do Beni. Wherever he might be, his co-conspirator was no longer in a position to be of any help at all. Go was on his own. And that left the question of what the fuck he was going to do now.
He couldn't go back to the studio; Lara might be waiting. The house, with his possessions, would be a charred, flooded ruin by now. He had very little idea of the penalties involved in conjuring, then banishing, demons in this part of the world. Did foreign demons count? If a forensic team investigated the house, they were likely to find the mortal remains of Beni. Would they think Go had killed him? Go was suddenly thinking very coldly and clearly, shock draining out of his numbed brain. Lara was after him. The police might well be, too. What it boiled down to was: Who was he most afraid of?
Well, that was easy. An hour later, Pauleng Go walked into the station house of Harbor Precinct and turned himself in.
The person he needed to speak to, so the desk clerk informed him, was one Detective Inspector Chen.
"But he's not here at the moment," she said. "He's out on a case. I'm afraid you'll have to wait."
"Can you put me in a cell?" Go asked, hating the note of desperation in his voice. The clerk stared at him.
"Whatever for?"
"Someone's after me. Someone really dangerous."
The clerk frowned. "You said this individual is of supernatural origins."
"Yes. Indian supernatural origins. And very, very angry."
"Does he know you've come here?"
"She, and I certainly didn't tell her. But she might be able to find me. I've no idea, to be honest. I don't know what her capabilities might be."
"I can put out a call on her. Do you have a name?"
Thank God she was taking him seriously, at least. Somehow, he'd expected ridicule, disbelief. "Yes." He paused. An ensuing conversation unrolled, movielike, in front of his inner eye. There were some advantages to being a scriptwriter, it seemed:
"Her name's Lara Chowdijharee."
"Your pursuer has the same name as a film star?"
"No, my pursuer is a film star."
"I thought you said she was a demon."
"She is. We summoned her up from Hell and turned her into a star."
The clerk's eyebrows rose so far that they nearly floated off the top of her head. "Lara Chowdijharee—the movie star—is a demon. And she's after you, you say? Was instrumental in burning down your house? Tore her agent's throat out with her teeth?" Stealthily, under the desk from a different camera angle, Go watched the desk clerk's hand move toward a panic button, the one reserved for visiting lunatics.
Back in the real world, Go said, "Uh. I mean, no. She said her name was Cherry. But I don't think it was her real one."
The desk clerk nodded. "All right. I understand what you're telling me and we do take this kind of threat very seriously, you know. I won't put you in a cell, because we might need it later on, but what I will do is put you in the interrogation room. It has no windows and the door can be locked from the inside. Would you like some tea?"
With heartfelt gratitude, Go replied that he would.