Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  ALSO BY CHRIS ROBERSON

  NOVELS

  COMICS

  BONAVENTUKE-CARMODY

  Here, There & Everywhere Paragaea: A Planetary

  Romance

  Set the Seas of Fire

  End of the Century

  Book of Secrets

  Cinderella: From Fabletown

  With Love

  Cinderella: Fables Are Forever

  with Shawn McManus

  iZombie

  with Michael Allred

  CELESTIAL EMPIRE

  The Dragon’s Nine Sons

  Three Unbroken

  Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

  Further: Beyond the Threshold

  Memorial

  with Rich Ellis

  The Mysterious Strangers

  with Scott Kowalchuk

  Sovereign

  with Paul Maybury

  Elric: The Balance Lost

  with Francesco Biagini

  Hellboy and the BPRD

  with Mike Mignola and

  various

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2016 by Monkeybrain, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

  Visit our website at www.nightshade.start-publishing.com.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-879-8

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-593-3

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Jeremy Lassen, the sharpest-dressed man in publishing

  PROLOGUE

  FIVE YEARS AGO …

  The killer wouldn’t stop apologizing as he dismembered the corpse.

  “I’m so sorry. I never meant for anyone to get hurt. One more and I’ll be done.”

  Special Agent Isabel Lefevre lay on the rusted metal plates that formed the floor of the lantern room at the top of the lighthouse. It felt like there was a seam of burning ice on her leg where the killer’s blade had bit into her flesh, which only burned colder when Izzie tried unsuccessfully to stand.

  “I’m sorry.” The killer’s voice was muffled behind the silver skull mask he wore and sounded labored as he wrenched the corpse’s left arm free of its socket. “It’s too late to stop now.”

  Izzie had fired two rounds before the killer slashed the pistol from her grasp. The downward arc of the killer’s forward-curving blade had continued, cutting deeply into her leg, and he had kicked her gun away from her when Izzie had collapsed on the floor. She pressed her right palm hard against the cut on the back of her left hand, trying to stanch the flow of blood, but without much success. Her radio was smashed to bits on the floor beside her. She hoped that Detective Tevake and the others had heard the shots, but with the rain pelting hard against the windows outside and the discordant speed metal blaring from the speakers at the bottom of the stairs, it didn’t seem likely. She considered calling out for him, but there was the killer’s blade to consider.

  “You don’t have to do this.” Izzie’s voice cracked as she spoke, and she tried again louder to be heard over the din. “You don’t have to do this, Nicholas. You’ve won.”

  At the sound of his name the killer paused, and his eyes shifted behind the mask as he looked in her direction. “What did you say?”

  “You’ve won, Nicholas. Whatever your disagreement with the others was about, it’s over now. You got what you wanted. There aren’t any left.” Izzie made herself move her gaze to the mutilated corpse, the wide cut across the abdomen, the organs and intestines strewn across the floor, the severed limbs stacked like firewood. “Francis Zhao was the last one.”

  Holding the handle of his curved blade with his right hand, the killer used his left to push the skull mask up onto his forehead. Izzie saw tired, haunted eyes in the face of the man the news reporters had dubbed “The Recondito Reaper,” but who she and the rest of the task force knew to be Nicholas Fuller, former researcher at Ross University. The dead man lying in pieces on the floor in front of him had been a coworker, years before.

  “You think I wanted this?” There was a desperate edge to the killer’s voice. If he was surprised that Izzie knew his name, it didn’t show. “I warned them!”

  “I know. The university administrators told us all about it.” She decided to try a different tack. “You have the power here.”

  “The power?!” The killer stood up, gestured to the windows with the long, forward-curving blade, and then pointed to the floor. “The power is what I’m worried about! You think these will protect me for long?”

  Intricate patterns had been inscribed on the thick glass with a black marker, a riot of mathematical formulae, tight blocks of text, strange sigils. On the floor a ring of salt surrounded pentagrams, hexagrams, spirals, and a confusion of other occult symbols etched in chalk, including a veve for protection that Izzie recognized from her childhood.

  “They are out there in the dark. More of them. Waiting.” The killer pulled the skull mask back down over his face. “And I have to stop the ones that are already here.”

  For a confused moment, Izzie thought that he meant the other police who were already on scene. Detective Tevake was downstairs and the other two Recondito police officers were searching the living quarters next door with Supervisory Special Agent Henderson. But the killer couldn’t have known about any of them. He was talking about something else. Something that had him terrified.

  “I want to understand.” Izzie tried to shift into a sitting position, then slammed back hard on her shoulder when the cut on her leg objected. She was light-headed from the blood loss, and having trouble focusing. She just needed to keep him occupied until the others came looking for her. “Explain it to me.”

  The killer knelt back down and grabbed the dead man’s hair with one hand, and started sawing at his neck with the other.

  “Gravity leaks into other spaces, but doors swing both ways. They went down into the dark, and the dark came back with them. Ridden. Passengers. I saw it, even if no one else did. I didn’t understand it myself, until the old daykeeper gave me the key. He showed me how to walk through the fire, and see the shadows for what they are. But now he’s gone, and there’s just me. I only have one more to go and my work is finished. Just one more.”

  The killer seemed to have forgotten she was there. His voice was little more than a murmur as he sawed and hacked at the dead man’s neck, and she struggled to hear him over the music blaring downstairs.

  “One more what, Nicholas?” Had he targeted another victim? Was there a member of the university’s Undersight team that the task force had failed to identify?

  The killer stood up, holding the dead man’s severed head by the hair.

  “The student. I have to find him, and then I will—”

  “Freeze!”

  Detective Patrick Tevake stood on the top step of the spiral staircase, aiming his pistol at the killer’s back.

  The killer turned, severed head in one hand, blade in the other. When Izzie had entered the lantern room he had been behind the door, catching her off guard, but now he was too far away for his blade to be of much use against the police officer’s semi-automatic.

  “I said don’t move!”

  “You can’t stop me now.” The killer took a step forward, bringing him closer to where Izzie lay on the floor. “It’s almost over—”

 
; Five rounds slammed into the killer’s torso. As he staggered back, his blade fell and clattered on the metal plates while the severed head rolled across the floor, coming to rest at Izzie’s side.

  “Almost—” The killer’s voice gurgled as blood welled at the corners of his mouth.

  The killer fell backwards, shattering the window on impact. Broken symbols and ruined formulae rained down as he fell through.

  Izzie looked over at the severed head on the floor beside her. The dead man’s eyes were closed, and his expression seemed strangely tranquil. She couldn’t help but gasp.

  “Now it’s over.” Detective Tevake had crossed the floor to look down at the killer’s body on the white rocks below. He glanced over his shoulder at Izzie. “Agent Lefevre, you hanging in there?”

  Izzie could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. Her head swam. Darkness crawled at the edges of her vision.

  “Agent Lefevre?” The detective was coming towards her now, holstering his pistol. “Izzie?”

  The dead man had opened his eyes and was looking directly into hers. Now his mouth began to move, lips clearly forming words, though with no lungs to push air through his larynx he made no sound. Then the darkness closed in around her.

  “Izzie, can you hear me?”

  NOW …

  “Can you hear me?”

  Special Agent Isabel Lefevre sat at her desk in the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, holding the cold plastic of her phone against her ear, listening to a voice she’d not heard in five years.

  “Yes,” she finally managed. “I can hear you.”

  “You have to come back to Recondito, Izzie.” Patrick Tevake sounded stricken. “It isn’t over.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Business or pleasure?”

  Izzie stifled a sigh, and immediately regretting taking the earbuds from her ears as the plane began its descent. From the window seat, she could see the skyline of Recondito coming into view below, the swirling waters of the estuary bay separated from the expanse of the Pacific Ocean by the narrow isthmus.

  She turned to the passenger in the middle seat and managed a wan smile. “Business.”

  “What kind of work are you in?”

  He was middle aged, dressed in business casual, and was probably in management or sales at some big corporation. Since finishing the paperback novel that had kept him occupied since they boarded the connecting flight in Chicago, he’d been leafing through the inflight magazine that he’d borrowed from Izzie somewhere over Utah. The cover story was about Martin Zotovic, who’d gone from college dropout to self-made millionaire in the last few years after his software company, Parasol, released a series of killer apps for the mobile market. Izzie had several of the company’s apps installed on her own phone but had never heard of the Recondito-based entrepreneur until she read the inflight magazine herself before giving it to her fellow passenger. That bit of trivia and the fact that Parasol had recently finished renovating Recondito’s landmark Pinnacle Tower were the only points of interest in the article, which was only marginally more diverting than the crossword puzzle that had been left half-solved by some previous passenger, so she hadn’t minded giving it up when the man had failed to find his own copy in the seatback in front of him.

  Izzie had been grateful that he didn’t seem to be the chatty type, preferring to sit in silence with her own thoughts. But apparently he was instead the sort to wait until the safety of the final moments of a flight to engage with the passengers around him. Normally she might have hidden behind a book or magazine herself, but he had taken away her sole defense. The only reading material she’d brought were case files, but she didn’t feel comfortable bringing those out into the open where prying eyes might see things the public probably shouldn’t, and so the files remained safely stored away in her bag along with her FBI credentials and badge.

  “I’m an analyst.” Like many Bureau agents, Izzie was usually less than forthcoming about her employment when talking to strangers. It was easier in most situations to let a half-truth suffice than to be drawn into a conversation about sensitive matters with people who might ask questions that she couldn’t answer.

  “What, like a psychologist?”

  “Something like that.” Izzie’s faint smile made a brief, flickering return, and then she broke eye contact to shift her gaze back out at the city spreading out below them. As the pilot banked to the south towards the airport situated at the bay’s southern edge, she spotted the lighthouse that rose above the white rocks of Ivory Point. It was low tide, and the tiny island was connected to the isthmus by the muddy land bridge.

  “First time in Recondito?”

  Izzie’s sigh was harder to suppress this time. Having ridden in silence since O’Hare, he was clearly intent on getting as much social engagement out of the flight’s final moments as he could manage. She answered without looking away from the window. “No, I was here once before, but it’s been a while.” The scar on the side of Izzie’s leg itched, and she resisted the temptation to bend down and scratch. “Five years.”

  “Five years, that’s all we’ve got.” He chuckled. “Earth is really dying.”

  Izzie’s head snapped around and she narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

  He smiled. “Like the David Bowie song, right? The one about the end of the world?”

  Izzie realized that her hands were tightened into fists in her lap. She concentrated on relaxing them. “Oh. Right.” She knew her smile had to be even less convincing this time than before.

  A flight attendant appeared in the aisle, her hand brushing the man’s shoulder. “Sir, can you return your seat to the upright position?”

  While he fiddled with the seat controls, Izzie slipped her earbuds back in, and by the time he turned back around she was busy acting as if she were engrossed in a stupid game on her phone. He tried once more to get her attention, but when she pretended not to hear, he turned and began pestering the passenger in the aisle seat, instead.

  Izzie absently poked and swiped at the phone’s screen, but her mind was elsewhere. Five years …

  Izzie had only been with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for a short while when she first traveled to Recondito. What little she knew about the city, outside of what she’d read in the case files on the ongoing investigation, she’d gleaned from popular culture. When she was in high school she’d been a regular viewer of Behind the Lines, a primetime sitcom about a cartoonist that was set in the city, though all but the exterior establishing shots were clearly filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood. In college she’d seen an old made-for-TV movie about the Eschaton Center on the outskirts of town that had been popular among film stars and rock musicians until a notorious mass murder-suicide closed its doors forever. Izzie knew a little about the city’s music scene in the nineties, from listening to every CD that Ciren had ever recorded, over and over again, and had briefly considered a road trip to see the singer-songwriter perform live on the very stage where she’d begun her career, but in the end Izzie decided she couldn’t afford the expense on a student’s budget.

  All of this served to give her a vague notion of what the city would be like when she first arrived: a small coastal city, with picturesque fish markets and streetcars and museums like she’d seen in the opening credits of the Behind the Lines sitcom, coffee shops and theaters and gardens like Ciren had sung about, and maybe even a few leftover hippies and counter-culture types who had orbited the Eschaton crowd. Row houses and Mission Revival architecture and gleaming towers of glass and steel, the Pinnacle Tower and the docks, and the Hyde Park green.

  And she’d found all of those things, just as she’d expected. But that was just surface, and the city was so much more.

  The locals sometimes called it the “Hidden City,” in part because of the bay around which Recondito was built, where the freshwaters of the Varada River mixed with the salty waters of the ocean. Early explorers had named the estuary the “Hidden Bay” when they nearly failed to notice it as
they sailed along the coast, the narrow entrance almost completely obscured by the rocky white cliffs that rose on either side. But residents considered Recondito to be hidden in another sense, as well. Bound by hills on one side and the ocean on the other, with the bay in between, there were limits on how large the city could grow, which could have served to make the city quaint and insular, but Izzie found that the opposite was true. If anything, it boasted a richer and more varied culture than cities ten times its size.

  The hidden bay had been home to a community of pre-Colombian hunter-gatherers in the days of the pharaohs, and in the millennia since then, visitors to the area had included Spanish explorers, British sailors, New England whalers, Russian missionaries, and more. After a brief gold run in the nineteenth century, Recondito had become a home for immigrants, welcoming waves of newcomers from Ireland, France, the South Pacific, and elsewhere, all of them infusing elements of their own cultures into the city.

  Izzie saw evidence of that long history of cultural mixing and melding everywhere. The food was the first and most noticeable feature: espresso in the sidewalk cafés along Rue Des Livres, so strong that after one sip Izzie thought she would stay awake for a week; savory pirozhki from the bakeries in the Kiev; rashers of bacon at an Irish pub in Ross Village that refused to serve stouts at anything colder than room temperature; mouth-watering Polynesian pork and rice at a hole in the wall in Oceanview that she’d ducked into just to get out of the rain; taquerias and sushi bars and Thai restaurants and pizza joints and on and on. If not for her habit of running three miles every day at dawn, she was sure she’d have gained thirty pounds by the time she left.

  But the city’s cultural heritage ran far deeper than items on a menu. During the months she was in the city as part of the Reaper task force, Izzie had interacted with any number of people who were Recondito natives: police officers and criminals, millionaires and vagrants, cab drivers, shopkeepers, college professors and construction workers. Each of them clearly had a unique experience with the Hidden City, shaped in their own particular way by the place. The bookseller who still proudly displayed the spiraling tattoos on her face and neck that she’d inked in her troubled youth as a gang member, the same tribal marks that her seafaring Polynesian ancestors would have worn. The scientist whose family had lived in the city when it was little more than a collection of rude huts around a Franciscan mission, who spent his days investigating the mysteries of the universe.