The Man Who Crossed Worlds (A Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Read online

  The elevator shuddered to a halt and I yanked open the gate. No one trod the ugly green carpet, and all the doors were closed. Good.

  I glanced around, looking for what I needed. There, a bit of the skirting board was loose. I flipped open my knife, grimaced a little at the act of vandalism I was about to undertake—I thought I’d outgrown all that—and pried the skirting board away. I put my shoe into it and the half-rotten wood snapped, leaving me with a nice little chunk in my hand. It’d do the trick. I carved myself a circle, returned my knife to my pocket, and got my Kemia ready.

  Apartment 402 was down the right side, near a small window that looked out onto the street. I put my ear against the keyhole and closed my eyes. No sound from inside. Or at least nothing I could hear over the pounding in my head.

  Okay, be cool, Miles. I just had to get in, convince Vivian not to shoot me, and tell her what I knew. Piece of cake.

  I gently turned the handle, but it was locked as well. I used the same trick with the Pin Hole to unlock it, then held my breath and pushed open the door.

  It was dark inside, but not pitch black. The front door opened into some sort of living room, with a kitchen bench to the right and closed doors to the left. Instead of a television, the couch sat opposite a bookshelf that was stacked to the brim and still had a dozen books on the floor around it. A laptop sat on a little circular table in the corner, with what looked like a textbook open next to it.

  A single picture adorned the wall; a photo of about thirty or forty young cops in sparkling new uniforms, in front of a banner that read: Bluegate Police Academy. There were only a handful of women in the group, and Vivian was easily the most beautiful. She was smiling at the camera. No, more than that, she was positively beaming.

  To be honest, Vivian’s apartment reminded me a little of my place, only cleaner. It wasn’t a home, not really. It was just a place to keep your things. No wonder Vivian seemed to spend so much time working.

  I closed the door behind me without making a sound and released the Pin Hole, then prepared my new makeshift circle. The plan was to go nice and easy, get to Vivian when she was unprepared.

  That plan got shot to hell when Vivian kicked open her bedroom door wearing nothing but a black thong. My eyes bugged out and my jaw went slack. She raised her arms and pointed a gat at me.

  “You son of a bitch,” she whispered through gritted teeth. Her grip tightened on the small revolver.

  I stopped gawking at her bouncing breasts just long enough to open my Pin Hole. I kept my arms down by my side, and by the time Vivian saw the black spot appearing in the center of the circle it was already too late.

  Her gun shimmered, and the sheen of it in the dim light seemed to change. An orange cap materialized on the end of the barrel. Vivian glanced at it, her lips peeling back in a snarl, and she pulled the trigger.

  The bang and the smoke was enough to make my heart skip a beat, even though I knew what it really was. I put my hands to my chest, double-checked that it wasn’t oozing blood, then forced a smug smile onto my face.

  “You know, it’s rude to try kill people. Especially me. I’ll overlook it this time, since you gave me a good show. How many guns you got anyway?”

  She stared at the gun, lifting it to her face. “A cap gun. Cute.”

  She hurled the plastic cap gun at my head. The toy smacked me in the forehead going a million miles an hour, the corner of it driving itself into an existing bruise. Jeez, that girl had an arm on her. I stumbled back a couple of steps, and Vivian flew at me in all her naked glory.

  I didn’t normally have a problem with girls beating me up. I was an equal opportunity punching bag, and I was doing it well. But tonight I was jacked up on caffeine and anger, and I’d had just about enough of everyone being against me.

  I took Vivian’s first punch in the cheek and rolled with it, catching her by the leg as I dropped. She was ready for me, kicking me away and giving me another good knock in the face, but my other hand was going for my jacket.

  She noticed it, but too late. I rolled along the ground before she could stomp on me and brought my arm free. “Shit,” was the only thing she said as my nightstick connected with the back of her knee. She buckled and grimaced, and I scrambled to my feet and launched myself at her. She recovered in time to punch me in the teeth again, but I kept on driving forward and tackled her head on.

  We hit the ground together, me on top with my hands pinning her arms down. My nightstick had fallen somewhere to my right, but I was too distracted by the inappropriate nature of my current position. Jesus, someone was going to get in trouble for this, and I had a funny feeling it was going to be me.

  I kept my eyes northward, looking her in the face with an ungodly amount of willpower, and started swearing. “Jesus fucking Christ, Vivian, cool it. I didn’t come here for a fight.”

  “You manipulative bastard.” She spat in my face.

  “I came here to talk, goddamn it! I was framed.”

  “I…Walter and I trusted you, you son of a bitch. You’ll get nothing from me.”

  She tried to shake me off and nearly succeeded, but I pushed her back down. I shook my head and gripped her wrists tighter. “Todd didn’t trust anybody, Vivian. It was him that iced Spencer Davies, not me.”

  She paused, then snarled. “You lying sack of shit.”

  “It’s the truth. He set me up to take the murder rap.” She struggled again, and I shoved her down. “Stay still and listen, will you? The hell would I be here for if I didn’t want to talk?”

  “To try to pass off the blame. Or just kill me outright.”

  “If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve burst your heart with a Pin Hole from outside your apartment.”

  She frowned, but she didn’t argue with me. Truth was, using a Pin Hole to manipulate anyone beside yourself was damn near impossible, but most laypeople didn’t know that.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m going to let you up on the condition that you don’t blast me. Listen to what I have to say, then if you still don’t believe me, you can try to arrest me or whatever you want to do. Sound fair?”

  She just glared at me for a moment. I really wanted to let her go because straddling her while she was nearly naked was increasingly uncomfortable and damaging to our potential friendship. Still, it wasn’t going to be me who drew attention to her state of undress.

  “Fine,” she said, in the way women use when it’s anything but fine. Still, I let her go and stood up, and she refrained from sapping me in the face again. I guess that was as close as we were going to get to trust right now.

  She got to her feet without any attempt to cover her nakedness. If I was a cynical man, I’d think she was using her body to keep me off balance. I averted my eyes, returned my nightstick to my jacket, and held up my hands to show I was playing nice. In return she picked up her gun—I kept the Pin Hole open to stop her from getting any bright ideas about shooting me—and set it on the table.

  “So,” she said, “start talking.”

  “Don’t you want to put some clothes on first?”

  She arched an eyebrow at me and faced me with her hands on her hips. I sighed. Fine. If she wanted to be naked, I might as well get an eyeful.

  “You finished?” she asked after I’d spent a few seconds staring.

  “Not quite. Give me a minute.”

  “You got three seconds before I start kicking your ass again.”

  “All right, all right, Jesus. Look, I was at the hospital with Tania when Todd calls up, wanting me to come help him sort through some of Spencer’s stuff. So I roll on down, and there’s no uniforms there when I arrive, just Todd. I find Spencer dead and beaten half to hell and crammed up in a wardrobe, and next thing I know Todd’s got a gun on me.”

  She shook her head, but I kept going before she could interrupt.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but just shut up and listen. From what I could tell, Spencer had stumbled across Chroma, but he’d seen how dangerous it was so he
shelved it.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Vivian said. “You don’t just stumble onto something like that.”

  I stroked the corner of my mouth, and managed to pass off another glance at her curves as thoughtful staring into space.

  She had a point. The way it had taken Tania, the power it had given her, it was highly specialized. “Maybe…maybe it didn’t start off as a successor to Ink. Maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way. What if Spencer conceived it as a better form of Kemia. One that focuses on the Tunneler, rather than the Tunnel.” My heart sped up, and I knew I was onto something. A smile crawled across my face. “Yeah, now that’s the sort of thing I can see Spencer doing. He is…was…a crazy bastard, but he was a goddamn genius. You saw how much more effective Chroma is to a Tunneler. Tania didn’t even need a circle to tear that wine lounge apart.”

  She snorted and shook her head. “Effective until they start hallucinating.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly my point. Maybe instead of being a catalyst on the circle, it’s a catalyst on the Tunneler. But that would introduce Heaven’s instability directly into the Tunneler’s mind.”

  “And you think that’s what makes them go crazy.”

  I nodded. It made sense. “But then Todd found out about it, and he thought he could use it.”

  “Use it? Don’t try to bullshit me, Franco. I saw how much goddamn use it is.”

  “Exactly. It has one use: to destroy. And Todd’s put the gangs in the crosshairs.”

  “What the hell are you basing this on? Idle speculation?”

  “He as good as told me.” I remembered Todd’s words just before I got away. Christ, the pain in his voice. “You never told me about his son.”

  If her face was stone before, it was steel now. She stared at me, her lips pursed so tight it would’ve taken the jaws of life to get them apart.

  “All right,” I said. “You don’t want to talk about it, maybe I will. He’d done something, hadn’t he? Done something to piss off one gangster or another. Arrested the wrong person, maybe.”

  She licked her lips. “It was one of John Andrews’ top lieutenants.”

  “There you go. So maybe Andrews wanted revenge. Everyone knows what happens to cops who are stupid enough to do their jobs in this city.”

  “They snatched the kid from school,” she said, eyes half-closed. “Last year. Tried to negotiate the lieutenant’s release. Todd was a mess, but he wasn’t willing to let that son of a bitch gangster get away. We set up a fake meet, acting as if we were going to hand the gangster over, but Andrews caught wind of it.”

  “Leaks in the department?”

  “We never found out.” She closed her eyes, taking her stare off me for the first time since I got there. “We found the boy in a dumpster the next day. Well, most of him, anyway. We never did find his pinky finger.”

  Jesus H. Christ. They did that to a goddamn kid? What the fuck was wrong with these people?

  Vivian opened her eyes, but immediately glanced away. “His wife left him a couple of months later. Now she’s with some crooked sergeant over in the South District.”

  “Ouch.”

  She nodded.

  The silence stretched out between us, only broken by the sounds of car doors outside. Despite everything, I felt sorry for Todd.

  “Todd’s angry,” I said. “He wants revenge. Now does what I’m telling you still sound crazy?”

  “Yes.” She gave me a stare so hard it could have cracked diamond. “But maybe…”

  A sound drifted through the apartment building, a creaking that had been building for a few minutes. My ears must’ve pricked up like a dog’s, because Vivian went quiet and looked at me. “What?”

  I went to the window and looked out onto the street. Four cop cars were parked outside, sirens off, no one inside. I turned back toward the door and heard the patter of shoes on the stairs.

  “You sold me out?” I asked.

  She stared at me, her brow creased in puzzlement, and shook her head. “I didn’t—”

  The unmistakable sound of a shotgun being pumped cut her off. My gut twisted, and I looked from the door to the window. It was a long way down.

  “Miles,” she whispered, “it wasn’t me. They must’ve been watching the building.”

  I turned over the bit of broken skirting board and scratched the first thing that came to my head. “Save it. I need a pillow”

  “A pillow?”

  The floorboard creaked outside the door.

  “Now, damn it!”

  She raced into the bedroom while I put the finishing touches on my circle. The floorboards outside the apartment door creaked as I uncorked my bottle of Kemia.

  Vivian returned and tossed me the pillow. I caught it, wrenched open the window above the street, and tossed the pillow onto the footpath below.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Vivian whispered.

  “Tell them you tried to arrest me and I escaped,” I said, while I splashed Kemia onto the skirting board and altered my frame of mind. “And look into Todd. You know I’m right.”

  There wasn’t time for her to argue. Something heavy slammed into Vivian’s door, and the sound of splintering wood crashed through the night. I got both my legs out the window and sat on the edge just long enough to stare down at the brutally hard concrete and contemplate what an idiotic thing I was about to do.

  “Stop!” a man shouted.

  I pushed myself off the window and stepped into nothingness. For a moment I almost seemed to hang there, suspended in the cool night, still being pelted by rain.

  Then I fell. My cheeks were on fire with the cold, and the street rushed toward me in a blur. I’m not ashamed to say I screamed.

  Somehow, through all the fear, I opened the Pin Hole. The chaos was damn pleasant compared to the rapidly approaching ground. The pillow shook for a moment, shaking off rain drops.

  And then it exploded. Every side of it ballooned out like, well, a balloon, turning into a great white bag of air.

  I hit the bag belly-first. It felt like I’d been socked for the fiftieth time that evening. The slick fabric collapsed downward under my weight, sucking me into a cushion of air with white billowing all around me. The deceleration was hard, but not as hard as the ground would’ve been.

  There was another moment of motionless when I reached the bottom, and then I started to rebound backward. The bag rolled and I fell to the side in a tumble of limbs. I bit back my scream just as I rolled off the edge of the air bag and dropped to the ground butt-first, earning myself a new bruise right at the base of my tailbone.

  I sat there, stunned and shaking, my breath coming quick and shallow. Then there was another shout from above me. I looked up to find an angry-looking cop pointing a shotgun at me from Vivian’s window.

  I scrambled to my feet as the gun went off, peppering the air bag with buckshot. It made a hissing sound and started to deflate, but I was already running. I closed the Pin Hole. Vivian might find her pillow a bit more shredded and damp than when she gave it to me. Served her right for trying to shoot me.

  No more shots came from the apartment. I sprinted down the street as fast as I could, the early morning silence broken by the barking of startled dogs. Some primitive part of me wanted to join them.

  I was panting by the time I got back into Desmond’s car, and it took me a few tries to get my shaking hands to put my keys into the lock. I climbed in, started it up, and peeled away before any of the cops could get a bead on me.

  Well, that went better than expected.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I must’ve been feeling suicidal, because an hour later I found myself parked on the side of the road, munching on a sandwich I’d bought from a gas station and picking out the more sickly-looking pieces of chicken. It tasted like it’d been sitting inside the cabinet for a month, and from the interesting-looking spots on the bread I wouldn’t be surprised if it had. I choked down the last of it and grabbed a handful of Doritos from t
he packet in the passenger seat.

  I was careful not to get crumbs all over the inside of Desmond’s car, mainly because I didn’t put it past Rob to kill me for something like that. The food I’d picked up from the gas station didn’t exactly make a well-rounded breakfast, but it filled the gnawing hole in my stomach. That was about all I could hope for right now.

  The rain was still coming down outside, hammering on the car roof like machine-gun fire from the gods. To cover the sound I switched on the radio while I took a sip of Coke.

  The newsreader’s voice came hissing through the static, and I turned up the volume. “…report that gang violence is up across Bluegate, but the police have no comment at this time. In a related story, Tunneler and murder suspect Miles Franco is still on the run this morning after allegedly beating an underworld chemist to death. Franco is also being sought for questioning over the murder of Lance Peterson, a Vei with known gang ties.”

  I choked on my drink and had a coughing fit. Christ, Peterson was dead as well? Todd was tying up all the loose ends. The son of a bitch better have left the little Vei girl alone. Even if she had tasered me, she sure as hell didn’t deserve to get rubbed out.

  The radio continued its monotone condemnation. “Franco is considered extremely dangerous, and police are advising the public not to approach him. A dedicated website has been established with further information. Police are urging anyone with information of Franco’s whereabouts to call the tip hotline at—”

  I switched off the radio and rested my head on the steering wheel. I really didn’t understand today’s music.

  I was starting to doze off when I caught a glimpse of red hair and an umbrella being opened across the street from me. I sat up, peering through the windscreen, and watched the figure cross the parking lot.

  The pink neon lights above John Andrews’ strip club were a beacon through the heavy rain. Even in Bluegate there were classier strip clubs those girls could be working at, but something told me it was the promise of more than cash that kept them in the claws of the drug lord.