Free The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) by Chris Strange Page B

about you being smart.” I shuffled on the spot. She was closer than I normally like people to be, close enough for me to smell her vanilla-scented perfume. And since she was a beautiful woman working for a company that might or might not be engaging in mass murder, I’d have preferred at least a couple of sheets of bullet-proof glass between us.
    But she wasn’t going anywhere. I stood there like an idiot for another couple of seconds, then pointed to the bench. “Seat?”
    She tucked the hem of her dress in around her legs and sat down, knees together. I sat next to her and glanced back at the garden. The shadow was gone. Hell, maybe it was never there to begin with, me being a madman and all. I put the glass of Coke against my forehead, hoping the condensation would calm me down.
    “What happened to your ear?” she said.
    “Cat got me.”
    “A cat?”
    I held my hands a couple of feet apart. “Big one. Fangs like razor blades.” I bared my teeth to show her.
    She giggled, and it was like the sound of rain on a window. The knots in my muscles began to relax.
    “So what does a chemical analyst do in a place like AISOR?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “Nothing at the moment. I’m a field analyst, but we’re not going anywhere right now. Not since our lead Tunneler disappeared.”
    “What do you mean, disappeared?”
    She mimed a little explosion with her fingers. Her nails were painted red. “Poof.”
    I took a drink of my Coke. Disappearing Tunnelers. And they said Bluegate had changed.
    We sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Then: “Did you really do those things they accused you of?”
    “Which things?” I said.
    “Killing those gangsters.”
    I took another long drink. Something shimmered in the corner of my vision. No, no more hallucinations.
    “Pretty much, yeah,” I said.
    Another weak laugh came from the audience inside. We were the only ones still in the courtyard. I waited for Zhi to get scared and make an excuse to leave.
    “This isn’t really my scene,” she said. “I make sixty grand a year if I’m lucky. It’s enough, but I don’t exactly have a trust fund. You want to go somewhere else?”
    I’ve been hit with sucker punches that were less surprising. I gaped for a moment, trying to find the right gear for my brain. “Uh…”
    “There’s a Mexican place a couple blocks down,” she said. “Margaritas and nachos until three a.m.”
    I met her eyes. Ever get that feeling when you’re on top of a cliff, looking down at the jagged rocks below, and your chest tightens, and you know without a shadow of a doubt that you’re going to fall?
    Yeah.
    “Nachos, huh?”

EIGHT
    Zhi Lu had good taste in nachos. We sat in a corner booth and shared a large plate, blocking out the sounds of the busy restaurant with our own conversation. She told me a little about work at AISOR, while I tried to deflect questions about what it was like to cross worlds. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of Tunneling. I just didn’t want to dwell on what I’d done with it last winter. I’d had enough of that, enough of the letters from screwed-up women seeking some danger in their life by trying to screw a mass murderer.
    Zhi was different, though. She didn’t focus on the destruction and the Chroma and all that other stuff. She just asked me about Heaven, and about the old days when I got in good honest trouble. Slowly, the tension went out of my shoulders and I started to relax around her. Of course, that might have been the booze.
    We started getting buzzed on tequila and margaritas—her idea, not mine. She could hold her liquor well. Within a couple of hours we were giggling together, our knees pressed together beneath the table, her hand touching my shoulder. Her scent was making me feel things I hadn’t felt in months. So around two a.m. I finished off my margarita and said, “Hey, so, hey, you want to get out of here, or something?”
    And she took my hand and we caught a cab and we went back to