The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (23 page)

She bit her lip and nodded.

“Thank you,” I said. I took a step forward. My knee buckled.

She caught me. Her arms wrapped around my torso and she drew me into her home. She smelled like bubble baths and shampoo.

I was asleep before I hit the couch.

TWENTY-ONE

I was swimming in green darkness, like the swimming pool at the apartment block of my old foster home. I was a lost soul without money to pay the ferryman, so I dived into the Styx and tried to swim without sight and without strength. My muscles locked up, fish gnawed my shoulder. I thought someone touched my cheek and whispered something.

Years and centuries floated past, and still I slept. The wet darkness turned to fire. Sweat poured from my forehead as flames licked at me, cracking my skin, singeing my hair. I tried to scream but I had no air; I tried to open my eyes but someone had stitched them shut. Thick blankets, like the skins of animals, covered my body, keeping in the fire. I kicked them off, but they kept coming back. Again the touch of a cool hand, and again the whisper. Liquid that tasted like an Arctic river dribbled over my lips and into my mouth. Something propped my head up, and I swallowed. The water cooled the crackling pain in my throat. Down I went again.

Flies buzzed around my stomach, gnawing, sucking, laying their eggs. My insides were filled with a million squirming maggots. They crawled around inside, up my throat, into my mouth. I heaved and spat them out. Someone took my hand and pressed it against something hollow and plastic, and when the next wave of maggots came out they went into the container. I felt better when they were gone. Darkness took me back into her embrace.

Basically, it was a hell of a bad trip.

I woke up.

Light cut through the window opposite me and jabbed me right in the eyes. I could make out the faint sound of traffic and construction equipment rumbling outside. A strange, sweet smell had me by the nostrils. I was lying on a short couch with my legs hanging over the end and a pillow under my head. A woolen blanket lay across me. A pink blanket. Beneath it, I was down to my boxers. There was a white bandage affixed to my shoulder, tainted with a hint of pink in the center. I poked it. It still hurt.

I blinked a few times, trying to resist the urge to drift back into sleep. I couldn’t work out where I was. Then I remembered.

I pulled the blanket up around me when Vivian came into the room. She was wearing jeans, a tank top, and a smile. It was the sort of smile I imagine mothers have for their children when they’re home sick with the flu. She placed a steaming bowl on the coffee table in front of me, along with a big glass of pulpy orange juice. My stomach growled.

“Oatmeal?” she said.

“They should name a public holiday in your honor.” I pushed myself up on my elbows, my muscles grumbling. I was too busy grabbing the bowl of oatmeal to pay them any attention. There was a swirl of honey mixed into it. I stuck a spoonful in my mouth. I’d never been so glad to taste oatmeal before.

Vivian brushed a couple of dark strands of hair out of her face. Now that I looked closer, I realized there were dark circles under her eyes.

“You’re a terrible house guest,” she said, still smiling that motherly smile.

I shoveled in another spoonful. “Sorry. But that’s what you get for handcuffing me to a chair.” I glanced at my wrist. “Hey, you took it off.”

“Well spotted, genius.”

“I was getting kind of attached to it. It made me look tough.” I lowered my wrist and looked around. “I didn’t spew on anything too valuable, did I?”

“You got most of it in the bucket.”

When my stomach held all it could take for the moment, I put down the bowl and sipped the orange juice. My lips stung when the juice hit, but I brought the glass up again and drained it. Christ, it felt good to have something in my stomach. I went back to the oatmeal with barely a pause to swallow.

“Seriously,” I said, “thanks for this.” I glanced down at the shoulder she’d patched up. “And for that. I had nowhere else to go.”

“Nice to know I’m your last resort. It’d be a full-time job being your nurse every time you get beaten up.”

She reached over and peeled back the bandage on my shoulder. The motion had a nice effect on her cleavage, and I stopped chewing to fully apply my concentration.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asked, her eyebrows raised. There was a sharp sting as she poked the skin around my wound.

“Thoroughly.”

She poked me again, harder than was strictly necessary, then she covered up the wound and sat up. “What happened, Miles? I saw you getting taken away by those…things…but none of us could get to a car. By the time we took out the last of those creatures, you were gone and we had more reports of Limbus tunnels opening nearby. Then a couple of hours later I get a call saying your friend’s picked you up from the Collective.”

“It’s a long story,” I said, “full of torture machines and daring escapes. I’m sure you can get it out of Daniel Bohr. He likes to talk.”

She shook her head. “The factory was almost totally cleared out by the time we got a team there. We’ve got plenty of trace evidence, but no Collectivists.”

I swallowed a mouthful and slumped down on the couch. “You know, one of these days we’re actually going to catch a break, and we’re not even gonna know what to do with it.” I paused for a moment. “The cop who was guarding me. Collins. Did he…?”

Her face tightened a little, and she shook her head. “He was the only serious casualty. He was dead by the time we found him.”

It wasn’t surprising, but I had to check. I mightn’t be too fond of cops, but no one deserved to die like that.
And all so they could get to me.

Vivian took my empty bowl and glass to the kitchen. I settled back down and gazed around the apartment. Extensive bookshelves occupied the opposite wall where a normal person would have their TV. I glanced along the spines of the books, but none of them seemed familiar. For some reason, I figured a cop would have more crime novels. I looked around for a clock but I couldn’t find one, and my watch—like the rest of my clothes—was nowhere to be seen. Trying to judge the time of day by the sunlight gave me a headache.

“How long have I been out?” I asked.

Her voice floated back from the kitchen. “About nineteen hours. It’s just after four in the afternoon.”

That long? I’d wasted so much time. I started to get up, but Vivian returned with a couple of coffees and pressed one into my hands. Despite everything, I enjoyed the warmth of the cup against my palms. I’d never really noticed it before. Maybe I was getting sentimental so close to death.

I filled her in on what’d happened after the Collective got hold of me—leaving out the drug-induced dream, of course. I kind of expected her to be more impressed by my ingenious Limbus Pin Hole trick, but no dice. I told her someone had flipped my apartment, looking for the fluid from Tartarus.

I craned my neck around. “Where is it? There was a white container.”

“Over there.” She pointed to the kitchen table. I could just get a glimpse of it if I stretched my neck. The bottle of Kemia I’d brought sat next to it, and what looked like my phone, keys, and wallet. “They went to all that trouble for that?”

I shrugged. “It has to be. Whatever that fluid is, they want it.”

“Why? It’s poisonous.”

“Maybe that’s why they want it.”

She frowned. “There are easier ways to poison someone.”

I shrugged again. I had nothing. Maybe it was worthless, just something for AISOR and the Collective to fight over, like the figurine in
The Maltese Falcon
.

“By the way,” she said, tucking a stray hair behind her ear, “I took the liberty of putting my number in your phone.”

“I like an assertive woman.”

“I’d just appreciate a little notice next time your near-dead body shows up on my doorstep. And while I remember, your phone rang a couple of times while you were out.”

“Yeah?” I didn’t get many phone calls. “Who was it?”

She shrugged. “The caller ID was blocked. I picked up the third time they rang, but they hung up.”

“My landlady probably just found out my last check bounced.” I realized the blanket had pretty much slipped off me, and I suddenly felt very exposed. “Say, this is great and all, but you think maybe we can continue this conversation when I’ve got dressed?”

She smiled a little too widely. “Sure. But I don’t think you want most of your clothes back. I managed to save your jacket, but the rest is a little…vomit-covered.”

“Ah.” I didn’t like the idea of doing the walk of shame in nothing but my boxers and a suit jacket.

“Hang on.” She walked away and came back a few seconds later with some thin plastic packages. “I had to guess your size.” She handed them to me.

They were department store clothes—nothing flashy, but decent. “A public holiday’s not good enough for you. How do you feel about sainthood?” I swept my hand in an arc and took on a priestly tone. “Saint Vivian. Hmm, needs a little something.”

She reached into a cupboard and threw a towel at me. “Go have a shower. The sainthood can wait.”

I nodded, got to my feet. For a moment I was lightheaded, but it slowly faded. I felt so thin you could slip me through a mail slot. Still, I managed to keep my feet under me as I shuffled to the bathroom. “So I’m guessing there’s no chance of a sponge bath? No? Damn.”

She was shaking her head when I closed the bathroom door. Just before she disappeared from view, something in her smile broke.

“Okay,” I said, tenting my fingers on the kitchen table, “here’s what we’ve got so far. Someone discovered Tartarus and liked what he saw there. He found the liquid in the pools, brought it back to Earth. Then somehow—maybe an accident, maybe intentional—the liquid ended up poisoning people. Killing them.”

Vivian nodded. “Most of the victims were below the poverty line. Streetwalkers, the homeless, long-time drug users.”

“But Claudia doesn’t fit that pattern,” I said. “There wasn’t much money for her in singing, but she got by all right.”

Vivian had her notebook open on the table. She had writing like an autistic chicken. “We haven’t been able to find any links between her and the other victims,” she said. “No signs of drug abuse either. No unusual phone calls, and all her finances were in order. She was running a little light since she lost her job, but she was doing all right.”

“Told you. She always was a good kid.”

“She was almost at the end by the time she presented herself to the hospital. Until then, there was no sign of anything amiss.”

I leaned back and stretched. The shower had cleaned me up, but I still looked like hell. Maybe worse than that. My gums had started bleeding when I used the toothbrush Vivian had bought for me. My eyes were shot with greenish-red, and each of my swollen finger joints felt like they’d been snapped in half.

“Okay, let’s skip how Claudia got involved and focus on Tartarus itself,” I said. “If AISOR’s the only one who has access to it, it’s gotta be them who’s poisoning people.”

“Not necessarily. You said Bohr was an interdimensional physicist. It could be the Collective.”

“Possible, but I don’t see it.”

“What about this war of theirs?” Vivian said.

I prodded my aching gums with my tongue. “I don’t know if Kowalski even knows he’s at war. Security’s not lax at AISOR, but they don’t look like they’re ready to fight a horde of gangsters and their pets from Limbus. Did you find out anything about that guy who tried to snatch me from Claudia’s funeral? What was his name? Gullet?”

“Anthony Gullet,” she said, and she shook her head. “His lawyer’s telling him not to talk, and with the attack on the station we haven’t had time to do much more than an initial background check. Nothing has pinged yet.”

Another mystery. I wondered how many I had to collect before I won a prize. “Okay, Bohr hates Kowalski for what he did to him, and he’s been biding his time. Meanwhile, Kowalski managed to get his research to a point where he can open a Tunnel to Tartarus. Somehow, Bohr found out about the new world. They both want the fluid, and we know the Collectivists are willing to kill to get it.” For a moment my mind flicked back to the sensation of harmony I felt as I was drowning in the pool on Tartarus. “And at least one person in AISOR is willing to kill me to keep me out of the picture. But does that person really work for AISOR? Or is it one of Bohr’s spies?”