The Man Who Crossed Worlds (Miles Franco #1)

Chapter Twenty-Five

I don’t know how many of the monsters’ bodies I left behind by the time I reached the center of the castle. They kept trying to kill me, and I kept killing them back. Everything was a swirl of anger and fire and lightning and blood and fear. So much fear. I was swimming in it.

I punched another hole in reality and brought a set of double doors to the ground, shredded like paper. The interior of the castle wasn’t stone like I expected, it was white walls and grotesque paintings and ancient artifacts stacked around the grand rooms. The ceilings were high, with chandeliers hanging from them.

The nature of the castle confused and concerned me. It tugged at bits of my mind, memories from another life. The voice inside my head was growing louder, more insistent. “Stop!” it said. “Jesus Christ, why can’t I stop?”

I pushed the voice aside and tore open another hole to drop a chandelier onto a monster. The glass tore through its body and thick red blood spewed across the wooden floor and soaked into an animal skin rug. The creature groaned once as the last of its air escaped its throat. I crept closer, heedless of the blood under my feet. The monster was wearing a blue suit. How odd.

Somehow, now that it was dead, it didn’t look so monstrous. In fact, its face was pale, with oversized eyes and a wide mouth. It seemed so familiar. The voice in my head screamed and begged for me to stop, but I knew I couldn’t. Not until I’d found the King.

I strode through the shredded door, fire singeing the air around me. Calling it a room would be an insult. The place was so huge you’d need to shout to be heard on the other side of the room. Couches and artifacts littered the room, coated with a thin coat of debris from my destructive influence on the place. In the far corner was a huge black table with a long stool in front of it. No, it wasn’t a table. It made sounds…music. A piano, that’s what it was called.

My head was clearing, the fog slowly diminishing. I could remember some things, little fragments of a broken past. I hadn’t been born just minutes ago, like I’d thought. I’d done something to make myself this way, something that flickered on the edge of memory. But that didn’t matter. I remembered now why I’d come here, why the monsters wanted to kill me.

“John!” I roared. “I’ve come for you, John!”

I heard wailing screams—no, sirens—in the distance, but the room remained silent apart from the clatter of falling masonry. I strode into the room, fear burned away by rage. I blinked and I was surrounded by monsters, then I blinked again and they were gone. A thin wave of nausea rolled in my stomach, and I became aware of how tired I was.

“John,” I yelled again. “You treacherous bastard, you did this to yourself.”

No response. I was getting ready to quit the room and blast down another wall out of sheer rage when something collided with my back.

It took me down hard, knocking the wind clean out of my lungs, and followed up with a raking pain across my shoulders.

I hit the ground face-first, the weight still on my back. It yelled a stream of undecipherable profanities in my ear and my back exploded in more slicing agony. I tried to roll, got halfway there, then found the shoulder of my jacket pinned to the fine mahogany floor.

The shock of the pain and the blow seemed to have knocked some more of the spiders from my mind. The room came into sharper focus, and I realized I wasn’t in a castle at all. What the hell had given me that idea?

I didn’t have much time to ponder that before I caught sight of what had knocked me down. Compared to this monster, the others looked like teddy bears. Its snout protruded from its wide, pale face, bristling with teeth that could tear a car in half. The tips of the canines were streaked with blood—my blood, I realized with a dully-registered shock.