Black Onyx Duology by Victor Methos Read Free Book Online Page B

yers he had on, but there was an exhilaration to it that he was so familiar with, he wasn’t sure he could live without it. That’s what was most shocking about James’ retirement: what exactly was he going to do with the inevitable boredom that was coming?
    The hike was torturous. Each step seemed to be more difficult than the last. His hands felt numb and he had lost sensation in his feet a long time ago. Frost was building up in his nose and he’d have to stop and snort it out every ten or fifteen minutes. But the view was incredible. A dark, icy landscape lit by moon and stars. As he climbed higher, with nothing else around him, it felt as if he were climbing into the sky.
    He reached the top and found the opening. It took a moment to bolt in the cables and ropes as the ice felt much harder than during the day, but he finished and harnessed himself in. As he lowered, he looked down the mountain to the small candle flame of the fire in the distance.
    The cavern became pitch-black only twenty feet down and he flipped on his headlamp. He repelled down the rest of the way. The cavern seemed smaller in the dark as the illumination from his lamp only went about a dozen feet. It was quiet down here except for the echo of his crampons digging into the ice and snow.
    Over the bridge, now without the sounds of others, he could hear a slight wind blowing , though it didn’t appear like there were any openings in the cavern to let it in. He stayed in the middle and didn’t look down over the sides into the gaping maw of blackness.
    He could see the shadows of the buildings as he came out of the corridor. It felt like people could still live here and he stood quietly a moment just to make absolutely certain no one was. He went inside a home near the tower. It appeared identical to the one he had been in before, down to the vase on the table. He went into the bedroom and the bed was the same hard, uncomfortable gray material as the other. He lay down in the groove—and felt something.
    Heat. Almost like a furnace. Dillon sat up and it was cold. He lay back down, and the heat overtook him again. Taking off his gloves and raising his hand, he could tell the exact moment when it went from hot to cold. It was a heat field of some kind, just over the bed. Without any holes in the gray material, he didn’t know where the heat was coming from unless there was someth ing just underneath it.
    He sat up and left the house. Wandering through the streets, he felt like an invader. He hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to be here, to be in their beds or looking through their homes. Reminding himself that this was a town of ghosts, he walked to the tower.
    Looking in the same place as before, he could have sworn the symbols had changed. But perhaps he was misremembering because o f the excitement the first time?
    He reached his hand out and touched it. It went straight through, inside the tower.
     

13
     
     
     
     
     
    Dana was sitting in her office when she decided to check on something. One of the boys in the pequeños locos was going to flip. A gang made up of ten to fourteen-year-olds, they had been incredibly difficult to penetrate. Knowing that they, at worst, would serve time in juvenile detention, which was run by their gang, they had no fear of the law.
    She wheeled out past the cubicles to the conference room on the other side of the floor. It was morning and people were just rousing themselves out of sleep with coffee and the sugar rush from donuts. Looking out the windows, she saw the streets of El Paso below her ; an armadillo was flattened on the road in front of their building. None of the cars were stopping to move it to the side of the road.
    Dana continued to the conference room. Inside, Special Agent Pablo Trujillo was there with twelve-year-old Mateo Salas. The boy was staring at the conference room table, an opened soda in front of him.
    “Mateo,” Trujillo said, “this is Dana. My boss.”
    “Hello Mateo,”