The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (20 page)

“Then who? Was it you? Was it Bohr?”

He shrugged. “She’s dead. You’re about to be dead. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” I said. Cold liquid poured across the object in my hand. A nonsense tune sang in my head. It mixed with the pain, the rage, the frustration, the desperation.

“No, what?”

“It matters,” I said. “It matters to me!”

Chaos flashed in my head, and the Pin Hole opened. In an instant, every strap binding me came loose.

I was free.

I braced myself against my wrist straps and kicked out with both feet. My shoes slammed into Stretch’s chest. He stumbled and fell, eyes bugging out. His coat flew open as he hit the ground, exposing the shotgun.

I ripped the cannulas from my arms and dived forward. At the same time, one of the gangsters by the door let out a burst of gunfire. It would’ve got me clean in the torso if I wasn’t already on the ground. The Vei woman pulled her revolver from her belt and pointed it at the other Collectivists. But I had more immediate worries.

I grabbed hold of Stretch’s shotgun. Unfortunately, he had the trigger end. With all my strength I forced it up. It went off, blowing a hole in the bathroom ceiling. The barrel grew hot against my palm. White dust rained on me.

Two more shots went off, the muzzle lighting up the room. I was damn near deaf already. Still on his back, Stretch landed a boot in my stomach and I rolled away, gasping.

I was still gripping the Pin Hole coin and vial of Kemia the woman had given me. The bottle was tiny, and I’d already used almost all of it just to free myself. Still, I might have enough for one more. I let the Pin Hole close and grabbed for my jacket where it lay discarded on the floor. I had to get my coins. But then I heard the click-clack of the shotgun pumping. I looked back at Stretch and found him sitting up, pointing the gun at me. My stomach went cold. Everything slowed.

The butt of an assault rifle collided with the side of his head. His eyes went fuzzy and he dropped to the side. The shotgun boomed. I put my hands out like they could shield me from the buck shot. But the blow had thrown his aim off. He’d missed me. I was alive.

Then I pulled on my jacket and hot pain ripped through my shoulder. I touched the skin, and it came away red. A couple of pellets must’ve clipped me.

“Christ, that stings,” I said.

“Shut up and move,” the Vei woman said. “They’re coming.”

I looked up and froze. The two gangsters lay on the bathroom floor, an entry wound in each of their heads. Blood leaked into the cracks between the tiles. The Vei woman picked up one of their assault rifles and slung it across her shoulder, then gripped the other in her hands.

“You killed them,” I said.

“What are you, the commentator?” She stuck her head out the door. Footsteps stomped from the factory floor. “Get a gun and let’s go. And take this.”

She reached into her pocket and tossed me a full-sized bottle of Kemia. I caught it in mid-air. The silver liquid glinted.

I looked at the gangsters’ bodies once more. I remembered another set of dead gangsters. Bloodied, burned, killed by my madness. I shook my head. Not now. Not here. I pulled on my jacket and fished out a couple of coins. As I got to my feet, keeping my weight off my injured arm, my shoe nudged Stretch’s short-barreled shotgun.

I paused for a moment, then I picked it up. It was heavier than I expected. Could I really shoot someone with it?

“Come on!” the Vei woman said.

Screw it. I found the safety, held down the slide release, and pumped the shotgun. A shell sprang out of the chamber. I worked the pump action again and again until no more shells came out.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked as I trotted over to her.

I shrugged. “You told me to get a gun.” I held it up by the barrel to show her how I could whack someone with the butt.

She bared her teeth, but then she glanced down the hallway. “Here they come. Go!” She fired a burst back toward the factory floor. I ducked behind her, pulled the cork out of the Kemia bottle with my teeth, and spat it into my hand.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Lucetta.” Another burst of gunfire.

“Miles,” I said, while I poured Kemia onto another coin. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

She ignored me and bared her teeth. “Can you do something useful?”

“On it. How’s this?”

The Pin Hole opened, and the air turned to thick smoke in an instant. I could barely see Lucetta in front of me. She fired off another few rounds into the cloud and jerked her head in the opposite direction. “That way.”

I jogged through the smoke, with Lucetta coming up behind, throwing cover fire to keep the gangsters away. I had no idea where we were going, so I had to pray she did.

I nearly ran straight into a wall before I realized we’d hit a T-intersection. I glanced one way and the other, but I couldn’t see anything through the smoke. “Which way?”

“Right!”

I turned to the right and started walking, but then I heard a sound in between the gunfire. Someone was shouting, back down the left corridor.

Lucetta reached my side. “What are you doing now?”

“Those three Vei they captured. Where’d they take them?”

“You’re going to get us killed—”

I grabbed her shoulder. “Where’d they take them?”

She bared her teeth again and pointed her rifle down the left corridor. “Storage room at the end. But we don’t have time.”

I pulled her behind the cover of the corridor and released the Pin Hole. The smoke disappeared.

“What are you—?”

“Just a sec,” I said. I pulled a second coin from my pocket, splashed a good helping of Kemia on, and started humming. This one was trickier than the smoke. It’d be a piece of cake on Chroma, but I wasn’t ready to go back down that rabbit hole again.

The Pin Hole opened, and reality shifted around us. The gangsters’ footsteps turned to squelching sounds, like someone poking a bowl of pudding. They shouted in anger.

“What…what did you do?” Lucetta said.

I grinned. “Turned the concrete down there back into liquid. Nice little trick of thermodynamics. Watch this, it’s even better.”

I stuck my head around the edge of the corridor and closed the Pin Hole. The gangsters cried out as the liquid concrete set around their feet, trapping them. They struggled, several of them losing their balance in the process. Somehow, after everything I’d been through—or maybe because of it—I found it fucking hilarious.

“Keep watch for me, will you?” I said. I dashed across the open corridor before she could reply. A couple of the trapped gangsters half-heartedly tried to kill me, but I was out of their line of sight too fast. The sound of crunching concrete and frustrated cries followed me. I smirked.

Without the smoke, it wasn’t hard to find my way around. Most of the offices I passed were barren, although a few busted-up desks were still lying around. I followed the sound of Vei shouting to the end of the corridor, where the sign on the door said
STORAGE
. I held the shotgun like a baseball bat and kicked open the door.

I saw everything in a flash. Aran, teeth bared and snarling. His wounded brother bleeding out on the floor, while the other stocky Vei tried to apply pressure to the wound. And a Collectivist in gray overalls pointing an ancient bolt-action rifle at Aran. All eyes turned toward me. So did the rifle.

I swung the shotgun clumsily. All that rapid fire Tunneling and fisticuffs had drained me more than I thought. I aimed to bring the butt of the shotgun down on the gangster’s head, but the blow glanced off and came crashing down on his elbow instead. The rifle swung down and a gunshot cracked. There was a puff of white dust from behind me as it punched through the drywall.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I swore I could see my own wild, teeth-baring grin in the reflection of the gangster’s wide eyes.

No time to bring the shotgun around for another swing. I set my feet and drove forward with my shoulder, slamming into his sternum. Shockwaves went through me, rattling my teeth. The gangster went down hard with me on top of him. He dropped the rifle. I dropped the shotgun. It only got worse from there.

I hated fighting almost as much as I hated guns. But the universe didn’t take into account my personal preferences very often. I smacked the gangster a couple of times in the jaw with an open fist, then when he still kept struggling, I put my knee into his gut. His fingers grabbed my injured ear. I thought I could feel the stitches tearing. I drove my elbow into his solar plexus as hard as I could. That got him to stop squirming. The fight was still in me, telling me to keep hitting, but I reined it in and rolled off him.

Then I heard the bolt action of the rifle being worked.

I jerked up, grabbed the barrel, and pushed it aside. The rifle went off a couple of inches from the gangster’s head. A flash of pain went through my ear drums. For a moment, everything sounded like I was underwater. Aran snarled at me.

“Let me kill him.” I could barely hear him through the ringing in my ears.

“Not likely.” I tapped my right ear with my palm, trying to get the ringing to stop, then got to my feet and met him eye-to-eye. He was tall for a Vei, but I still had a couple of inches on him. His teeth were streaked with blood. There was a cut on his cheek where someone had smacked him.

“Our sister is dead,” he said. “They betrayed me. Their war killed Penny. I’ll kill them.” His fingers tightened on the gun, and my muscles tensed. “I told you not to get involved where you don’t belong, human.”

“Yeah, I’ve been getting that a lot lately.” I glanced at the gun barrel and tried to slow my heart. “Look, I’m sorry about Penny. But you’re gonna lose another family member unless we go right fucking now.” I pointed at the wounded Vei, then at my throbbing ear. “I’ve still got a half a mind to leave you here. Should I have stayed out of it, huh? Should I have left you to die?”

He narrowed his eyes and spat a glob of blood onto the floor. “No,” he said after a minute. “Thank you.”

“Then get your brother up and let’s go.”

I turned my back on him, picked up my shotgun, and made for the exit, half-expecting a bullet in the back. But after a moment I heard rapid Vei whispers and a groan from the wounded brother as they lifted him up.

All right. Now we just had to get out of this place.

I spotted Lucetta down the hallway where I’d left her. She stared at me with a mixture of rage and panic on her face. She waved her gun down the corridor we’d escaped from. “They’re getting loose! Move it.”

She was right; I could hear the cracking of concrete. Maybe the Collectivists weren’t as stuck as I’d hoped. I glanced back at the Vei brothers. Aran had the rifle in his hands while the other brother had the wounded one across his shoulders in a fireman carry. I led the way, pulling out my smoke coin again, until we were on either side of the corridor that held the trapped Collectivists.

“It’s gonna get hard to see in a second,” I said to the brothers. “Keep going forward. Lucetta, we’ll follow you to the exit.”

She nodded, and I splashed some Kemia on the coin. “Go!”

The smoke returned, blinding me instantly. A few of the gangsters shot randomly into the cloud, but I didn’t think they were even pointed in the right direction. I dashed across the corridor with Aran and company close behind. I could just make out Lucetta’s dress flaring in the smoke. Behind us, there were more crunches, and then running footsteps. Some of the gangsters were free. Shit.

“Lucetta?” I said between breaths.

“Nearly there.”

The footsteps behind were getting closer. I kept glancing behind, but the smoke was too dense.
Come on.

I skidded to a halt. A door. An exit! Lucetta grabbed the handle.

“Locked,” she said.

Shit. I fished in my pocket for the right Pin Hole coin. “Gimme a second.” Damn it, where was it?

An assault rifle rattled. The smoke swirled and cleared for a moment, and then I saw the bullet holes Lucetta had put in the lock. She kicked the door open. Blessed sunlight shone through the haze. I shoved my bottle of Kemia back in my pocket, and we darted outside.

Right into a semicircle of growling, six-legged spider-dogs.

Lucetta swore in Vei. Aran matched her and raised her a scream of frustration. I slowly lowered my shotgun as I stared around at the rows upon rows of teeth and drool and animal rage. My heart deflated like a balloon at a children’s birthday party.

“Nice try,” came Daniel Bohr’s voice from behind us. “Hmm, yes, nice try.”

I let the smoke Pin Hole close. It wouldn’t do us any good out here in the open. We were in a huge open space, surrounded by a chain-link fence. An empty, pothole-lined road sat on the other side. Behind the squealing spider-dogs, a handful of Collectivists pointed their guns at us. All except for one. She was so broad-shouldered I took her for a man at first. I could sense the animal energy coming from her clasped fist. She was a Tunneler.

Daniel Bohr stepped out of the door behind us and made his way in a wide circle between us and the spider-dogs. A cigarette burned in his mouth. “Lucetta, interesting. Didn’t suspect. Not after all this time.” He bared his teeth and shook his head. “Why help this man?”

Lucetta stared at him and said nothing.

Bohr took a long drag on his cigarette and crushed it beneath his feet. “After everything we worked for. You never understood. Anyway, guns down. Come on.”

A couple more Collectivists appeared behind us. I tossed the shotgun, since it was empty anyway. It skidded to the feet of a spider-dog, but the animal didn’t react. Its many eyes stayed fixed on me. After a moment, Lucetta and Aran dropped their guns as well. My shoulder stung where Stretch had got me. Blood dripped from the fingers of my left hand.

The energy coming from the Tunneler shifted, and the spider-dogs closed in around us. But I only had eyes for the Tunneler. It was like Bohr said. A Pin Hole to control the Limbus creatures. But I could tell from here she wasn’t a particularly powerful or skilled Tunneler. Her Pin Hole was leaking energy more like a hose than a sieve. A germ of an idea put out roots in my mind.