Frankenstein: The Complete 5-Book Collection

“There’s no going back, is there?”

“I won’t lie to you,” she said.

Harker moved tentatively, almost shyly toward Kathleen. “You’re so complete. I know if only I could look inside you, I’d find what I’m missing.”

Defensively, she rose from her chair. “You know that makes no sense, Jonathan.”

“But what else can I do but … keep looking?”

“I only want what’s best for you. Do you believe that?”

“I guess … Yes, I do.”

She took a deep breath, took a risk: “Then will you let me call someone, make arrangements to turn you in?”

For an anguished moment, Harker looked around the kitchen as if he were trapped. He might have snapped then, but his tension subsided into anxiety.

Sensing that she was winning him over to surrender, Kathy said, “Let me call someone. Let me do the right thing.”

He considered her offer for a moment. “No. No, that wouldn’t be a good thing.”

He looked across the kitchen, intrigued by something.

When Kathy followed the direction of his gaze, she saw the knife rack filled with gleaming blades.

LEAVING HARKER’S APARTMENT, Michael hadn’t made any attempt to get behind the wheel. He tossed the keys to Carson.

He rode shotgun – literally, holding the weapon between his knees, the muzzle toward the ceiling.

By habit, as they rocketed through the night, he said, “Stop trying for the land-speed record. The dispatcher will have someone there ahead of us, anyway”

Accelerating, Carson came back at him: “Did you say something, Michael? ‘Yes, Carson, I said, Faster, faster.’ Yeah, that’s what I thought you said, Michael.”

“You do a lousy imitation of me,” he complained. “You’re not nearly funny enough.”

WITH ONE HAND on his abdomen, as if suffering a stomachache, Harker prowled the kitchen, moving toward the knife rack and then away, but then toward it once more. “Something’s happening,” he said worriedly. “Maybe it’s not going to be like I thought it would.”

“What’s wrong?” Kathy asked warily.

“Maybe it’s not going to be good. Not good at all. Something’s coming.”

Abruptly his face wrenched with pain. He let out a strangled cry and clasped both hands to his abdomen.

“Jonathan?”

“I’m splitting.”

Kathy heard tires squeal and brakes bark as a fast car pulled to a stop in her driveway.

Looking toward the sound, terror trumping his pain, Harker said, “Father?”

INSTEAD OF THE WALK-in unicorn gate, Carson favored the driveway and slid to a stop so close to the garage door that even a wizard couldn’t have charmed himself thin enough to fit between the building and the sedan’s bumper.

She pulled her piece from her paddle holster as she exited the car, and Michael chambered a shell in the shotgun as he came around the back of the car to join her.

The front door of the house flew open, and Kathy Burke ran onto the porch, down the steps.

“Thank God,” Carson said.

“Harker went out the back,” Kathy said.

Even as she spoke, Carson heard running footsteps and turned, seeking the sound.

Harker had come along the farther side of the garage. He was off the lawn, into the street, before Carson could draw down on him.

By now he was in too public an area – houses across the street – to allow her to take a shot. The risk of collateral damage was too high.

Michael ran, Carson ran, Harker ahead of them, down the middle of the residential street.

In spite of the doughnuts and the grab-it dinners eaten on their feet, in spite of the ass-fattening time spent at desks filling out the nine yards of paperwork that had become the bane of modern police work, Carson and Michael were fast, movie-cop fast, wolf-on-a-rabbit fast.

Harker, being inhuman, being some freak brewed up in a lab by Victor Frankenstein, was faster. Along Kathy’s block to the corner and left into another street, along another block and right at the next corner, he opened up his lead.

Lightning tore the sky, magnolia shadows jumped across the pavement, and a blast of thunder rocked the city so hard that Carson thought she could feel it rumbling in the ground, but the rain did not fall at once, held off.

They traded the neighborhood of bungalows for low-rise office and apartment buildings.

Harker ran like a marathon man on meth, moving away, away – and then mid-block he made the mistake of veering into an alleyway that proved to dead-end in a wall.

He came to the eight-foot-high brick barrier, flung himself at it, scrambled up like a monkey on a stick, but abruptly screamed as if torn by horrendous pain. He fell off the wall, rolled, sprang at once to his feet.

Carson shouted at him to freeze, as if there were a hope in hell that he would, but she had to go through the motions.

He went at the wall again, leaped, grabbed the top, too fast for her to sight on him, and clambered over.

“Get out in front of him!” she shouted to Michael, and he raced back the way they had come, looking for a different route into the street beyond the wall.

She holstered her pistol, dragged a half-filled garbage can to the end of the alley, climbed onto it, gripped the top of the wall with both hands, levered up, got a leg over.

Although she was sure that Harker would have escaped, Carson discovered that he had fallen again. He was lying faceup in the street, wriggling like a snake with a broken back.

If their kind could turn off pain in a crisis, as Deucalion claimed, either Harker had forgotten that option or something was so wrong with him that he had no control of it.

As she came off the wall, he got to his feet again, staggering toward an intersection.

They were near the waterfront. Ship-chandlers’ offices, ship brokerages, mostly warehouses. No traffic at this hour, businesses dark, streets silent.

At the intersection, Michael appeared in the street ahead.