The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (39 page)

Maybe I should write myself a note, remind me to go visit Claudia in hospital.
I glanced around, but I couldn’t find a pen in my immediate vicinity.
Ah, to hell with it.

Imagine that, Claudia being worried about me, apologizing to me. She was a good kid. I hoped she’d be okay.

Darkness took me.

I opened my eyes. I’d only been out a few seconds, but it felt like I’d been reincarnated. The goggles turned the swirling colors of the Tartaran fluid into streaks of black and white. The liquid pressed against my mouth, my nose, my skin, trying to get in. Trying to use my body. But it wasn’t inside me yet.

The dream—memory—played inside my head. I’d thought Claudia had called me to ask for help. But that wasn’t it at all. McCaffrey and her goons had already knocked her out and brought her to Tartarus. Injected her with fluid, probably from this very pool. And then they’d returned her to her home, to wait until she died. To draw me out.

It wasn’t my fault.
I felt Claudia next to me, her hands keeping the fluid out of my mouth, her whispers in my ear telling me to stay alive. I sunk to the bottom of the pool, my body coming to rest on the smooth stone bottom. My hand touched something that felt like plastic.

Claudia was dead. That was irreversible. I was a fuck-up, a drunk, a loser. But I could forgive myself. I’d done everything I could.

Well, almost everything. There’s still one more thing to do.
My hand wrapped around the grip of the machine pistol that Aran had tossed in the pool. I planted my feet on the pool floor and pushed off, swimming back toward the surface.

Though my lungs were burning, I forced myself to come up slowly, just breaching the surface with the top of my head. When my nose came clear of the fluid, I sucked in air and let the fluid drip out of my ears. I could hear shouting. As quietly as possible, I stroked forward and rested my arm on the edge of the pool before raising the gun out of the fluid and shaking it dry.

The fluid on my goggles obscured things, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. McCaffrey was pacing back and forth, the gun gripped in her bound hands. Wade tried to get to his feet, but McCaffrey pointed the tiny pistol at him, yelling at him to be still.

“You have to help me get him out,” Wade shouted. “You want to live, we need a Tunneler. Put down the gun.”

“Be quiet,” she said. “Miles has Tunneler friends. They’ll know he’s here. When he doesn’t come back, they’ll open a Tunnel to get here. I just have to wait.”

“Even if you’re right, you’re still screwed. You think they’ll let you walk out of here free?”

She stopped pacing and turned toward him. “Do you think your police force will risk one of their own getting killed? You, Detective, are my pass out of here.”

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Aran was turned toward me a few feet away, his arm stretched out. The rise and fall of his chest was quick and shallow. Without medical care he wouldn’t be sticking around much longer. He met my eyes and opened his mouth. I pressed a finger to my lips, and he nodded slowly.

McCaffrey turned her back to me, still shouting at Wade. I dug my fingers into a crack in the ground and slipped out of the water. The fluid drained off me instantly, sucked back into the pool. The pain roared again in my leg. I hoped Aran’s makeshift bandage had kept most of the fluid out of the wound. But right now I had more pressing concerns.

I tried to stand, failed. Fine. I dragged myself along the ground, the stone scraping me with every movement.

Bohr’s body lay fallen and twisted between me and McCaffrey, his jacket open, his head facing away from me. I dragged myself toward him, gripping the machine pistol and gritting my teeth. I could shoot McCaffrey from here. It’d be hard to miss. But there were enough bodies already, and a burst from the gun would be too clean, too easy for her. I pulled myself along until I was alongside Bohr. The sleeve of his outstretched arm touched against my side, along with something cold and sharp.

Then McCaffrey turned back toward me and froze. Damn it. I guess a bit of luck was too much to ask for.

“Miles,” she said, pointing the tiny pistol at me. “You are a survivor, aren’t you?”

Heart hammering, I carefully moved forward so my body covered the machine pistol. I prayed that with Bohr’s body in the way, she hadn’t spotted it.

“This makes things much easier,” she said, striding toward me and Bohr’s body. “I’m sorry for shooting at you before. But now we can get back to making that Tunnel out of here. Take us somewhere away from AISOR, where the police won’t look for us right away.”

“Jesus, don’t I even get a minute to catch my breath?” I said. I inched my fingers back toward Bohr’s hand and looked past McCaffrey at Wade. “Hey, Detective. You’re not in a rush to get home, are you?”

“No more stalling,” McCaffrey said. She stopped on the other side of Bohr’s body, barely three feet from me, and pointed her pistol at my head. “The crystals may not work, but I’m not going down. You make the Tunnel now, or I kill you and take my chances.”

Her voice had lost all hint of softness. I froze, one hand wrapped around Bohr’s cool fingers, the other shielding the machine pistol from her view.

“I heard you talking before,” I said. “You were wrong. My friends aren’t coming. They don’t even know how to make a Tunnel to Tartarus. I didn’t want to give you any more chances for escape than I had to. You’re screwed, Doc. Kill me, and you’re stuck here.”

Her fingers twitched over the trigger. “Well, in that case, I’ll kill the detective.”

She turned toward Wade. He raised his hands in front of his face, like he could stop the bullet.

I ripped the ivory-handled spike from Bohr’s hand. At the same time, I shoved myself up onto my good knee and hurled the machine pistol across the cavern toward Wade.

“Do something stupid,” I said.

McCaffrey seemed to hesitate, her head tracking the gun as it clattered across the ground. Then she aimed her pistol at Wade’s head. Too slow.

I drove the spike into the back of her leg. The Heaven-derived metal pierced her skin and bone like water. She screamed. I kept pushing, putting all my weight into it. Her gun went off as she fell, killing an innocent bit of rock. The spike went out the other side of her leg and kept going through the stone of the cavern floor. I drove it to the hilt and shoved her down, pinning her by the leg to the ground.

Wade was already moving. He’d snatched the machine pistol from the ground with his good hand, and now he was moving toward us, using his forearm to steady his aim.

Still screaming, McCaffrey pointed her gat at him. Wade stomped on her hand. Bones cracked. She screamed louder. The pistol came loose. Wade kicked it away, keeping the machine pistol trained on her. He was panting.

“You were right, Franco,” he said. “That was very fucking stupid.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve. “I aim to please.”

McCaffrey writhed on the ground. There was surprisingly little blood leaking from the wound in her leg where Bohr’s spike pinned her down. I could see her trying to move her leg, but she wasn’t getting anywhere. It was almost pitiful, really. I resisted the urge to break her other hand for good measure.

“Help me up, huh?” I said to Wade. The cop tucked the machine pistol under his shoulder, gave me his good hand, and pulled me to my feet. Well, foot. I wasn’t going to be putting any weight on my left leg for a while.

Wade went to tend to Aran’s wounds. I stood there for a few seconds, breathing like a ninety-year-old with emphysema. I looked over the scene of carnage. Bohr’s lifeless form, mouth open. Aran, slowly bleeding out, groaning softly. And now McCaffrey, pinned to the ground like a butterfly specimen. Wade was shot, and so was I. I needed to start keeping my own personal trauma surgeon on retainer.

“This place is giving me a headache,” Wade said as he pressed his hands against the wound in Aran’s chest. “Get us out of here.”

“Say please,” I said.

“Fuck you, Franco.”

I hobbled across the ground and reached down for the bottle of Kemia I’d left lying there, but I shouldn’t have bothered. At the other end of the cavern, where we’d come in, a series of four intersecting circles began to glow on the ground. The light grew brighter, and then the stone floor gave way in the center as the Tunnel formed. I smiled.
Nice work, Des.

Wade looked at me, and I shrugged.

“I was bluffing,” I said. “You think I was going to risk getting stuck here without having someone back on Earth ready to open a Tunnel if I took too long? Screw that.”

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

I pointed to Aran. “We can make a sled to drag him if we need to.”

“What about her?” he said, nodding at McCaffrey.

I studied her. She’d finally gone silent, but she still moved around, her left hand opening and closing on the ground. “We can come back for her. I want to talk to her first, though.”

Wade nodded and turned back to Aran. It didn’t look good for the Vei, but we had to try to get him back. McCaffrey, on the other hand…

I sat down in front of her, giving my leg a break. She was breathing hard, but she seemed lucid. I hoped she wasn’t going into shock.

“This is your one chance,” I said. “I could leave you here. I could return to Earth, get my friend to close the Tunnel, and then no one would be able to come get you. You’re done, Doc. Most of your goons have been killed by the Collectivists, and the cops are rounding up the rest. Same with Bohr’s boys. If I take you back to Earth, you’ll get prison. Three meals, four walls, all that good shit. If I leave you here, you’ve got about a day or two before you die of thirst. That’s if you don’t bleed out first. Understand?”

She nodded, panting.

“Good,” I said. “So here’s your chance. I just wanna know one thing. Why did you want the crystals so badly? What did you want to do with them that made all this worth it? Convince me you deserve to live.”

She licked her lips. “Years ago, my husband was with our daughter in Heaven. A sightseeing trip. I was back here, working. Too busy, and I’d been to Heaven before.” She took another labored breath. “On their way back to Earth, the Tunnel collapsed. We never found out what happened. The design was probably poor. You can’t trust these government-sanctioned Tunnelers.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“My husband, my daughter. Neither of them were recovered.” She held up her hand, where her wedding ring still sat. “I wanted them back. That’s all I wanted.”

I couldn’t see her eyes behind her goggles, but I could picture them. Fatigue hit me like a truck. It was over. I pushed myself to my feet, gritting my teeth against the pain.

“You done, Detective?” I called to Wade.

He’d taken his jacket off and placed it under Aran. He dragged the Vei toward the Tunnel, both of them groaning with each step. “Help me with this before I pass out,” Wade said.

I hobbled over and took hold of the other side of the jacket. It was awkward as hell, but we got Aran to the edge of the Tunnel.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Get him into the Tunnel. I’ll be there in a second.”

He nodded, looking like he was about to say something, but he shut his mouth again and grabbed hold of the jacket. He stepped out over the edge of the Tunnel and swung down below the surface, dragging Aran with him.

I’d kill for something to make a crutch out of, but this place wasn’t exactly brimming with timber. I turned toward McCaffrey and stared down at her.

“Take it out,” she said, gesturing to the spike in her leg.

“No,” I said.

She stared at me. “You wouldn’t leave me here, Miles. Would you?”

I crouched in front of her. “Yes. You were lying to me, weren’t you? About your family.”

“If I die here, you’ll never know.”

I wanted to laugh, but I just didn’t have it in me.

“You’re really going to leave me, aren’t you?” she said. “What could I have said?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing you could have said would have saved you. No excuse, no reason would be good enough. You killed my friend. That is unforgivable.”

I got up and limped back toward the Tunnel. When I entered it, I couldn’t hear her screaming at me anymore.