The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (21 page)

Bohr nodded, as if to himself. “Good, good. No harm done.”

“There’s a couple of dead gangsters that might argue with you,” I said. “If they weren’t dead, I mean.”

Bohr frowned. “Not something to joke about. Expected better of you.”

Something slipped in the Tunneler’s Pin Hole, and an extra burst of energy sprang loose. A couple of the spider-dogs snapped at each other before the Tunneler got them back under control. Sweat made rivers on her forehead. Sloppy.

I folded my arms across my chest. The blood pooling on my fingertips touched my shirt, leaving a stain. I smiled and half-closed my eyes, letting my instinct guide me. I was going to run out of shirts if I kept ruining them like this. A red triangle formed on the fabric above my heart, hidden from the gangsters by the position of my arms.

Bohr continued to pace, jerking like the breeze was blowing him around. He stabbed his cigarette toward Aran and the others. “And why rescue these three, hmm? Dangerous. Cost you time. Might have got away without them.”

I saw Lucetta shooting me a glare out of the corner of my eye, but I ignored it. I sketched a couple more symbols in blood, improving the design I’d reverse-engineered.

“Not much to say now?” Bohr asked. He came closer. “I understand. You got your hopes up. Hope is dangerous. Is that it?”

“Nope,” I said. “Just letting you talk yourself out while I wait for the cops.” I pointed over his shoulder, the broken handcuff bracelet still hanging from my wrist. “Oh look, here comes the cavalry.”

A dozen gangsters spun on the spot, pointing their guns toward the road. Aiming at nothing. I snatched my Kemia from my pocket and splashed it on the triangle I’d painted on my shirt. The liquid felt like ice as it soaked through to my skin.

“I can’t believe you fell for that,” I said. The gangsters pointed their guns at me again. Bohr’s eyes widened as his gaze came to rest on my shirt. The cigarette dropped from his mouth.

The Tunneler shrieked. “He’s trying to gain control of the animals!”

I grinned. “Not trying.” The Pin Hole opened, filling my mind with fear and rage and hunger and hot blood pumping through a quick heart. It soaked up the Tunneler’s excess energy like a sponge. I severed her connection. “It’s already done.”

It was incredible. I existed in twenty bodies at once. My vision fractured into a hundred separate images, overlaid with a sense of hearing that was both broad and sharp. But the smells, Christ, the smells. They were everywhere. And I could smell fear. I bared two dozen sets of teeth and growled.

I had to grab hold of my human component like a life preserver in a storm of animalism. I blinked, and felt Lucetta grabbing my arm and pulling me away from the chaos. Then I blinked again, and my teeth dug into flesh and hot, salty blood filled my mouth.

Gunfire popped, and pain ripped through me. I screeched as I died, confused, both understanding and not understanding. Then one set of eyes went blank, and the other primitive minds squealed in rage. The shooter screamed and fell under a pile of ripping, tearing bodies. I couldn’t wait to see the eyes fading, blood pooling, cartilage crunching as I bit down and tore the human’s throat out and fire filled my muscles and I snarled and squealed and went after the next prey.

No!
The spider-dogs seemed confused by my cry. One of them paused with its jaws over the gangster’s throat.

They were killing because that was what they did. They had no morals, no strange human constructions about whether killing was
right
. Killing just
was
. But I wasn’t an animal. And I’d killed enough people with Tunneling.

Stop.
It was like trying to stop a steam roller by building a wall out of toothpicks. The spider-dogs didn’t want to listen; they wanted to rip and tear. I pushed more energy into the Pin Hole, forcing more of myself on them. Their rage dimmed a little. There was no negotiation here, just pure strength of will. Jaws loosened their grip on the Collectivists’ flesh.

“Franco.” It took me a moment to remember that was my name. I blinked again, and the vision I saw came from the eyes of the human Miles Franco, not the black eyes of a monster. Lucetta was dragging me to my feet. “Our ride is here. Come on.”

Our ride? What was she talking about? It was difficult remembering how to walk on two legs instead of six, but I got the hang of it after a few seconds. I let the Vei woman lead me past the wounded bodies of the Collectivists who hadn’t fled. Aran and his brothers were nowhere to be seen. Had I killed them, crushed their bones between my teeth? No, I had enough control not to do that, didn’t I? I couldn’t see Daniel Bohr either, but I could smell the stench of his cigarette. The spider-dogs watched me as we passed, making slight whimpering noises. The Pin Hole was still open, but I couldn’t keep this up for much longer. I was ready to fall asleep standing up. I just had to hope the remaining gangsters could get away before the animals returned to their natural instincts.

My feet kicked against each other as I walked. My vision was so hazy I could barely see the concrete in front of me. Then I saw the car, and the face that always had a grin for me. But not today.

“Hey, Des,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper. “You’ll never guess what I’ve been up to.”

TWENTY

Desmond ended his call, stuffed the cell phone in his pocket, and put the steering wheel in a death grip. “I finally managed to get through to the cops and let Detective Reed know you’re alive. Sounds like there’s been at least three Limbus attacks all over the city. They’ve only just got them under control. I gave them the Collective’s address. They’ll do a raid as soon as they’ve got people together.”

“They’ll enjoy that,” I said.

“Goddamn it, guy. God fucking damn it.”

I lay in the back seat, my shirt undone so I could inspect the damage from the shotgun blast. It looked like another trip to the doctor was in order. Lucetta was in the front passenger seat, tending to a graze on her hand. She hadn’t said a thing since we got in the car and tore away from the old factory.

“You know how lucky you are?” Desmond said. He jerked the steering wheel to the side and passed a slow-moving van. “If Lucetta hadn’t called me, you’d be dead by now.”

“A slurry.”

“What?”

“They were going to turn me into a slurry.”

He tugged his fingers through his sandy hair. He was a Tunneler, so he must have sensed what I’d done with the Limbus animals. But he hadn’t mentioned it. He was too busy playing the angry mother bit.

“You couldn’t just let the cops handle this, could you? You had to get involved.”

“Hey, I didn’t walk to that factory by myself. I was bird-napped. From the same goddamned police you’re so fond of.”

He shook his head. “You’ve been digging yourself a grave since this thing started. Are you trying to get yourself killed? You really think that’ll make up for whatever sins you think you’ve committed?”

The sun flickered between buildings as we passed. It made me nauseous, so I closed my eyes.

“I’m trying to get answers.”

“By yourself? I don’t think so. You’re trying to be a martyr.”

I was too tired for this. “I’m not trying to be anything.”

“Then why aren’t you working with Detective Reed on this? She contacted me. She told me about the—”

“Look, thanks for the save, Des, but I’m fine,” I said without opening my eyes.

“Then you’re going to drop this?”

I said nothing.

“You need that shoulder looked at,” he said.

“Screw that. Take me home.”

“You need—”

“I don’t need a hospital. I’m fine.”

“No, guy, you’re not. I’m taking you to the hospital, and then I’m calling Detective Reed.”

“You do that, and I tell the cops about all this quasi-vigilante stuff you’ve been up to.”

He hit the brakes. The car skidded to a stop, making my stomach lurch. Des twisted around to stare at me. His eyes were hard. Mine were harder. I wasn’t going to a hospital. I couldn’t afford to waste a second. No matter what—or who—it cost me.

“Do you mean that?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Des nodded slowly, turned back to the road, and started driving again. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, emotionless. “Then you can hold on a few minutes. I need to do something first.”

We fell quiet for a while, and I slipped in and out of a dozing sleep. The rumbling road beneath me was like a cheap massage on my aching muscles. I’d escaped death again, at least for a little while. But I could feel it in my gut now, I could feel the poison in me.

I opened my eyes as Desmond pulled up outside his place, one of a dozen apartments in a gated complex near Lavender Park. He turned around and leaned over the seat.

“You still alive?”

I grinned. “Barely.”

He didn’t smile back. “I need to get Lucetta out of town. They’ll be gunning for her. I’m going to run inside to grab my bug-out bag and let Rob know I’ll be gone for a few hours.”

“Don’t tell him about all the wild hijinks I got you into,” I said. “He dislikes me enough as it is.”

“I’ll be back in a minute. Stay put.”

“Don’t worry, Des. I’ll look after your girl here.”

“Somehow,” Lucetta said, “I think I’ll be looking after you.”

Desmond and Lucetta shared a knowing look, then Des got out of the car and jogged inside. I stretched out as far as I could in the backseat and tried to arrange my shoulder so it didn’t feel like it was being poked with rusty nails.

“So, I got a question,” I said. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

Lucetta stared out the side window. Even after all the hell we’d just been through, she didn’t so much as tremble. “I told you who I am.”

“No, you told me your name. The look on Bohr’s face back there when he saw you, I thought his eyeballs were going to pop. Were you and he a thing?”

She bared her teeth in a wild grin and croaked out what passes for a laugh among Vei. “A thing? With that man?” She laughed again. “I was his lab assistant.”

“That’s some handy shooting for a lab assistant.”

“I’ve been more than a lab assistant in my life, Franco.” She turned in her seat to face me. “You don’t understand how desperate they are, do you? How far they’re willing to go.”

I glanced at Claudia’s ghost standing outside the car, looking in at me. “I’ve got a fair idea.”

“You’ve only seen a fraction of their work. A microsecond. Bohr, Kowalski, the others, they’ve been working on this for twenty years. And for a while, I was with them. I saw the potential in what they were doing. You cannot comprehend it, human.”

“You’d be surprised what I can comprehend. Spill the beans. Tell me what was so great about their little research group.”

“You’ve read the papers they put out?”

I retrieved the crumpled articles from my jacket pocket. “I’ve skimmed them. Theories on parallel worlds, reflections, alternate universes. Equations that suggest the potential for infinite worlds. But it’s all numbers and guesswork.”

“Not all,” Lucetta said. “Not all. That—” She gestured dismissively at the papers. “—that is mostly Kowalski’s trash. Bohr was the driving force, the one who actually understood. He was the one with the ideas, the math that made it all fit together. He worked out that weak Tunnels, unstable Tunnels, could be used to get data on the other worlds. When the Tunnel is unstable, hints and whispers of the other universes can be transmitted. The information was a mere echo of an echo. The scientific community rejected it, of course. But I was there. I saw the data. And now the truth is finally coming to light.”

I thought back to last winter, when I got caught in a collapsing Tunnel. When the link to Earth was severed, the Tunnel recoiled like a stretched string, all the walls losing their tension. And through them came other feelings, other things. It was there I first felt the raging heart of Limbus, first began to learn how to open a new kind of Tunnel. It made sense that if a dumbass like me could pull that kind of information out of a broken Tunnel, some interdimensional physicists might be able to do the same. But there was something in the twitch of Lucetta’s wide mouth that told me that wasn’t the whole story.

“Out with it, then,” I said. “What’d Bohr do?”

She bared her teeth. “It wasn’t what he did. It was what the others did. Kowalski and a few others slowly became isolated from the rest of the group. They stopped sharing their results with the others. Bohr and I didn’t care. We had our own work to do, and we were finally managing to piece together solid evidence of a few of the strongest worlds. Nearly enough to go public with.”

“But?”

“But Bohr and I were working late one night. Bohr heard the noise. He has the ears of an airsnake. The sound came from Kowalski’s lab. Scuffling, shuffling, like your mice. Then shouting in Vei. ‘
Khrah
,’ someone was saying.”

“Help,” I translated, my guts feeling cold. But it didn’t mean quite the same thing in Vei as in English. It wasn’t a word you used everyday, like, “Hey man, help me shift this couch.” No, it was more like, “Help, I’m getting my eyes gouged out and it really hurts.”

Lucetta must’ve seen something in my face, because she nodded and her eyes narrowed into slits. “Bohr and I were supposed to be the only Vei in the building. We ran into Kowalski’s lab. His little group was there, including the lab’s main Tunneler. And an old Vei woman, ugly, so weathered she was starting to form scales on her face. She shouted once more through the gag. Then Kowalski pushed her into the Tunnel in the center of the floor. And the Tunneler severed the link with the woman still inside.”

I swallowed. To die with reality collapsing around you, to fall into the emptiness between worlds… “You’ve got some sadistic colleagues. I’d bring that up with HR.”

“Vei minds operate differently to humans’. They are guided by and projected onto the world around them. It’s partly what shapes Heaven. Kowalski discovered that if a Vei was in the Tunnel when it collapsed, the signal from the other worlds was magnified. Superb resolution. Massively amplified. They’d begun to discover the power of the other worlds. And they’d nearly worked out how to get a Tunnel there. But when Bohr and I stumbled across what they were doing…”