The Man Who Crossed Worlds (A Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Page 27

  I started nodding, eager to go any place with a bed, but then I froze. “No. We’ve got to go to Vivian’s place.”

  “The detective? The hell for?”

  I planted my palms on the floor and pushed myself up. Desmond made noises of protest, but the look I gave him must have scared the shit out of him, because he settled for putting an arm around my shoulders to help me up.

  “I made a deal,” I said, and brushed away his arm. “I can walk. I’m fine.” I tried to prove it, and found myself leaning against the wall. “I need you to take her.” I pointed to Caterina.

  “How come?”

  “She’s got a hot date.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I don’t remember much of the ride to Vivian’s apartment. The night was black with no sign of dawn. Desmond drove—I could barely keep my eyes open, let alone operate heavy machinery—and we had Caterina in the back, trussed up with some bed sheets. The bonds wouldn’t do much good if she came to with enough Chroma left in her system to attack us, but there wasn’t much we could do about that.

  I directed Desmond to pull up directly outside Vivian’s place. No need for subtlety now. I fumbled my seatbelt off, stumbled out of the car, and made for the door. Desmond had already got Caterina across his shoulders by the time I got to the building’s main entrance.

  We took the elevator up, the rickety shaking nearly sending me right off to sleep. When we reached Vivian’s floor I wrenched the gate open and stumbled out as fast as my broken body could manage, makeshift bandages growing a little redder with every step. Desmond stayed silent, watching me walk with a skeptical eye. I didn’t look that bad, did I?

  I made for Vivian’s apartment, already trying to brace myself for what I might find. How long had I been gone? It could’ve been minutes, it could’ve been days, and I wouldn’t have a clue. Oh God, let her be alive.

  “Todd!” I yelled as I shoved open the door. “Where the hell are you?”

  The living room looked the same as before. I heard Desmond coming up behind me, Caterina slung over his shoulders. I had no energy left to spare to help him. I lurched forward and shouldered through the door to Vivian’s bedroom.

  The bed was empty. The handcuffs that Todd used to secure her dangled uselessly from the headboard. I sucked in air, smelling smoke and stale sweat, and gasped like a fish hauled onto land. My eyes bored into the place where Vivian had been. A trickle of blood stained the pillow. My throat closed up.

  “Miles.” Todd’s voice came floating through the fog to me. I turned and found him sitting on the floor with his back against the wardrobe door, with several cigarette butts scattered around him. A handheld radio lay next to his hand, quietly muttering to itself. He plucked an unlit cigarette from his lips and gestured to it. “My lighter ran out of gas.”

  I staggered to him, dropped to my knees, and grabbed him by the collar. “Where is she?”

  He didn’t even raise his eyes to look at me. His arms hung at his sides, doing nothing to brush away my hands. Despite his bulk, he looked like a little kid. “I let her go.”

  I socked him in the jaw, sending his cigarette flying. “Lie to me again, you asshole. I dare you.”

  Desmond’s hands grabbed me by the shoulder, gently but firmly pulling me away before I could tag Todd again. Caterina was lying on the floor, bound and unconscious; Desmond must’ve put her there. I pointed to her, snarling at Todd. “I brought you this bitch. She’s the one who’s got your Chroma. Now I’m going to ask you again, where is Vivian?”

  Todd rubbed his jaw, bringing away a trickle of blood. “I’m not lying. She left about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Yeah? I guess she just walked out of here with a lethal dose of Chroma in her system, huh?”

  He shook his head, looking lost as a kid on his first day of school. “I didn’t give her any Chroma.”

  I tried to break free of Desmond’s grip to kick Todd in the ribs, but I was so weak he could hold me back with one hand. Instead, I settled for spitting at his feet. “I saw her, you stupid fuck.”

  “It was a sedative. Something Davies gave me. I didn’t have any Chroma on me, I’m not that stupid, and when Andrews’ gangsters struck they cut off my supply.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged and pulled another cigarette from the packet in his jacket pocket. “You’ll find out soon anyway. She’s coming for me. Can’t you hear?”

  I frowned, trying to figure out a way I could get away from Desmond long enough to put in a couple of good kicks. But then I heard it. Sirens cutting through the night, coming toward us.

  Todd put the cigarette in his mouth, but didn’t even bother trying to light it. I brushed off Desmond’s hands, and he didn’t try to stop me. I slumped down to the ground, leaning against the bed opposite Todd.

  “We won, didn’t we?” Todd said. “We beat them.”

  “What?”

  “You brought the fuckers down. It’s all over the squawk box.” He jerked his thumb to the radio beside him. “They say Andrews’ mansion is in ruins.”

  I wiped the blood out of my eyes. It was getting hard to think. “I killed a lot of gangsters. But that don’t mean you won. It don’t mean shit.”

  “They won’t hurt any more innocents.”

  “Those ones won’t, sure. But others will. They’ll come back. Bloodshed was never going to change this city, Walt. You should’ve known that.” I shook my head. “You stupid fuck.”

  Some stirring noises came from Caterina, and Desmond went to her. Hell, I wasn’t sure any of us had won. It sure didn’t feel like I had.

  Then again, my friends were safe. In the end, that was all that really mattered. Maybe it was enough.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why’d I let Vivian go?” Todd said

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “Because she’s good police.”

  “She is.”

  “I think I loved her a little,” he said.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  I leaned back, resting my head on the bed. It was so comfortable. The sirens were coming closer now, but I wasn’t sure I’d be awake to see if Todd was telling the truth. If he was, and Vivian was alive, she’d find an interesting bunch of folks sitting in her bedroom. I was sad that I was going to bleed out all over her floor.

  “You ain’t looking too good, Miles,” Todd said.

  “Fuck you, Detective.”

  Desmond appeared at my side, his hands moving to my makeshift bandages. “He’s right, Miles. You’ve had your little trip. It’s hospital time now.”

  His voice was fading out, just like his face. Somehow I’d pushed myself to keep going, but now that there was nothing left to do, all I could think of was sleep.

  I knew what that meant. I wasn’t stupid. But it was okay. I could go now, for real this time.

  “Des,” I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere else. “You there?”

  “Yeah, guy.”

  “You look after Tania like I told you, right?”

  There was a pause. Then, “No.”

  I tried to open my eyes again, but the lids were too heavy. “Whadya mean, no?” I slurred.

  “You want to keep Tania safe, you do it yourself. You ain’t getting out of it that easy.”

  “You asshole.”

  “I love you too, guy. Stay with us. Hear those sirens? They’re almost here.”

  I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything anymore, except my heartbeat and the sound of my breathing. “Heh,” I said. “My landlady’s not gonna get paid. She’ll be pissed.”

  And then there was nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I’d had a lot of people tell me I was a failure over the years. Teachers, foster parents, hell, even gangsters. They must’ve been onto something, because I couldn’t even die successfully.

  I came to with an antiseptic smell filling my nostrils and a God-awful artificial light trying to claw its way throug
h my eyelids. There was no pain, which was a plus, but I felt like I’d run a marathon carrying an elephant on my back. I considered slipping back off to sleep, but curiosity got the better of me. I opened my eyes. The ceiling was kind of boring, just a bunch of white tiles with holes in them. I didn’t know why I’d even bothered waking up.

  “Well, look who decided to stop napping.”

  I rolled my head to the side to find the source of the voice. “Christ, are you still here? You’re like a goddamn puppy dog. I just can’t get rid of you.”

  “Asshole,” Desmond said. “You still look like shit, you know, guy.”

  I tried to sit up, then abandoned the idea when my head started screaming. I had more tubes going in and out of me than I knew what to do with, including something pouring fluid into the vein in my arm and another one snaking under my blanket that I guessed was draining more fluid from my nether-regions. A curtain was half-pulled around the bed, and I could make out people in scrubs moving past outside.

  I tried to work through my jumbled thoughts. I was having trouble getting my head straight, and the painkillers they were pumping into me didn’t help any.

  Then I remembered. “Vivian? Is she…”

  “A lot better than you.” Desmond nodded. “Todd was telling the truth. She showed up a few minutes after you couldn’t be bothered keeping your eyes open with half the police department behind her.”

  “Is she here? I want to talk to her.”

  Desmond dropped his eyes. “She…had work to do.” He paused, then pulled a crumpled envelope from his pocket. “She left this for you.”

  What the hell? All I got was a letter? I took it and turned it over in my hands. It was thin, with my name scrawled across one side.

  “This better be a check,” I said.

  Desmond smiled, but said nothing.

  I tried to sit up again, and it went a little better this time. A dull ache pounded through my head, and fatigue threatened to drag me back off to sleep, but I sure as hell wasn’t ready to go yet.

  “I’ve got a present for you,” Desmond said in a too-cheerful tone.

  “Yeah?”

  He got up, peered around the curtain conspiratorially, then pulled it closed. He returned to his backpack and pulled out two bottles of German beer. “Sorry, they’re kinda warm.”

  “Des,” I said, “you are Jesus returned to life. Think I’m allowed to drink with all this new plumbing?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Touché.”

  He popped the tops off the beers and handed me one. I untangled myself from the pipes pumping air into my nose and took a sip. It tasted like life itself.

  “So are we in Bluegate, or did they decide to abandon it and start over?”

  “It’s still standing, for the most part,” Desmond said. “The slums and the Avenues got hit hardest, there’s a lot of people that got displaced. Hundreds of millions in damage. Billions, maybe. But the war fizzled out. The first shipment of Chroma was limited, most of it got shot up within hours of it hitting the street. Todd probably had plans for distributing more, but when that precious girl of yours got hold of it and you tore her husband’s house to pieces, well, that put a bit of a damper on things. Now the cops are working with the Vei to hunt down the last of it and find the manufacturers in Heaven.”

  “Did Todd get hauled away?” I asked.

  “Yeah. The cops have been working him over all day. Vivian said he confessed straight up, laid out his entire plan. No lawyer, no nothing.”

  I took another long pull of my beer. “And Caterina?”

  “She’s being more shifty. She was careful, there’s not much to tie her to everything.”

  “Tell me she’s not gonna walk.”

  He shrugged. “I ain’t no expert. Maybe if the cops get her people to roll on her, they might have a case.”

  Goddamn it. That was the problem with the law; it imprisoned the innocent and set the guilty free. I polished off the rest of my beer in one hit. I could do with another, but I didn’t ask Desmond if he had more. Instead, I squeezed the bottle in my fist and asked the question that had been burning a hole in my mind since I woke.

  “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “When I attacked Andrews’ place. How many did I kill?”

  “Ah.” He didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked older than I remembered. Hell, I probably did too. Finally, he spoke, going a little pale as he did. “Twenty. Maybe more. Vivian said some of the corpses…some were too badly charred to…you know.”

  I closed my eyes. So many. “I’ve never killed anyone in my life. Not until now.”

  “I know, guy. It was a mistake. You were on Chroma, you—”

  “No,” I said. “I’d do it again if I had to.”

  “What?”

  My head pounded, but I took a breath and forced myself to speak anyway. “I hate what I did, and I gotta live with it. But what the hell good is some moral code if you let the people you care about die?”

  Desmond didn’t seem to have an answer for that. Sticking to what you believed in was the easy bit. Having to abandon all that…

  “I guess the cops will be dropping by to arrest me soon,” I said.

  “You remember my offer, the one I made when you showed up at my place? It still stands, guy. There’s my car keys.” He pointed to the little table beside my hospital bed. “Maybe I’ll leave them here while I go have a coffee. Maybe my car will be gone when I get back.”

  “Stolen by some dastardly fugitive?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  I thought about it for a moment. A long moment. There would be walls if I stayed, lawyers and courts and probably a box for me to spend the rest of my life in.

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but no. I got a promise to keep.”

  “Miles—”

  “Is Tania around?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll get a chance to talk to her. Apparently, her mother has taken a disliking to you.”

  “Can’t imagine why. I’m such a charmer.”

  He grinned and stood up. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks for everything, Des. Really.”

  “Someone’s gotta keep you out of trouble.” He raised a hand and left me alone.

  I settled back in my bed and closed my eyes. I felt like a truck had driven over me then reversed. I doubted I’d be getting out of this hospital in a hurry. Maybe the cops would be kind enough to wait until I was a bit healthier before they started in with the handcuffs and the interrogations.

  I could hear nurses and patients shuffling past on the other side of my privacy curtain, but none of them came to visit. I wondered if any of them had any idea how much their world had been changed.

  I pictured the new Tunnel I created in Andrews’ mansion. I could still feel the animalness of that energy pulsing through me, throbbing in time with the spider-dogs’ screams. I wondered if I was the only person who felt that. If there had been any decent Tunnelers within a mile or two, they might have picked up on it. Even if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t be long before knowledge of it leaked out. Information like that never wants to remain secret.

  In one reckless, idiotic moment, I’d changed everything we knew about Tunneling. There were more dimensions than Heaven’s universe and ours, there was no denying it now. Who knew how many? I was feeling an awful lot like Pandora right now, holding an open box and wondering who I could blame this on.

  I stopped pondering long enough to remember the crumpled envelope in my hand. It wasn’t sealed, so I lifted the flap. The letter written was short and written in Vivian’s barely-readable handwriting.

  Mr. Franco,

  I’m not sure why I’m writing this. I guess I felt I owed you some explanation. And an apology, I guess. Your friend Desmond told me what you did to try to save me and stop the gang war. You risked your life. Thank you.

  But damn it, Miles, you nearly destroyed everything we worked for. I can’t forgive yo
u for that. Not yet. I can’t comprehend the destruction you left.

  I won’t deny that I am angry with you. Still, you were pulled into this mess against your will, and I’m responsible for that. For that, if nothing else, I’m sorry.

  It’s best if we don’t speak again until after the state prosecutor has decided what charges to lay against you. But I’ll make sure he knows the truth. Perhaps then we can meet and talk about what happened.

  Until then, Mr. Franco.

  Vivian

  I read through the letter two more times, trying to make sense of it. Christ, why did women have to be so complicated? Did she hate me, or was she grateful? It made my head hurt just trying to untangle the meaning from her words.

  I was considering getting some code-breakers to have a go on it when something moved out of the corner of my eye. “Hi, Miles.”

  I looked up to find Tania standing over me. She had bags under her eyes, but a cautious smile softened her face. I returned the letter to its envelope and stuffed it under my pillow along with my empty beer bottle. Hell of a role model I was.

  “Hey kid. How you feeling?”

  “Way better than you look.” She smiled and took a seat beside the bed. “Desmond said you wanted to talk. Mom will kill me if she finds me here.”

  I smiled despite the pain it sent shooting through my cheeks. “This won’t take long. I got something for you. Not here, though. You can still get into my apartment?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s a box of books under my bed—”

  “Ew, Miles, I don’t want to know about your nudie mags.”

  “They’re textbooks!” I said, a little louder than I intended. Tania giggled. Christ, it was good to see her laughing.

  I smiled again in spite of myself, took a breath, and continued. “My old Tunneling textbooks. You still want to learn, right? Before we get started, I want you to take them home and read them all. Cover to cover, understand?”

  Her face lit up like the world’s tackiest Christmas tree. “You’re really going to teach me?”

  “Hell, someone’s got to, right?”

  She threw her arms around me, making me hurt in places I’d forgotten I had. “Thank you, thank you!”