Jekyll & Hyde Inc.

Paul suddenly stopped screaming. Daniel looked back, to see the massive figure crushing Paul in a bear hug. There was an awful snapping sound as Paul’s back broke, and then the big man just threw him away. Paul hit the ground hard, and didn’t move again. Daniel threw himself at the huge figure, and hit him again and again with his baton, shouting helpless obscenities, and the man slowly turned his head to look at him. The eyes didn’t see him at all. The scalp had been half torn away from the forehead, but there wasn’t any blood. Daniel lowered his baton, and staggered backward.

He saw the teenage girl punch Nigel under the breastbone so hard that blood flew from his mouth, and the light went out of his eyes.

Daniel never knew who hit him from behind. As he fell to the floor, his last thought was, We were set up.

Chapter Two

BACK FROM THE DEAD

It was dark when Daniel woke up. He pushed the bedsheets away and started to sit up, only to stop abruptly when the pain hit him. He gritted his teeth to keep from crying out. He had that much pride left. He dry-swallowed a handful of pills from the bedside table, breathed slowly and steadily until the pain died back to a bearable level, and then carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed.

It had to be heading out of night and into morning, because enough light made it past the closed curtains for him to make out his surroundings. Not that there was much worth looking at. His flat had only ever been somewhere to come back to, when he wasn’t working. Daniel sighed, and decided he might as well get up. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep again.

His pajamas stank from the night’s cold sweats, and he slowly stripped them off and let them drop to the floor. He had difficulty getting dressed, because of what had happened to him in that terrible cellar under the bookstore. Everyone at the hospital kept telling him he was lucky to be alive after so many serious injuries, but he found that hard to accept on days when he had so much difficulty just doing up his shirt buttons. His fingers were numb this morning, which was a good thing. On the really bad days it felt like his hands were on fire.

Daniel finally forced himself up onto his feet and shuffled out of the bedroom, heading for the kitchen. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights. He preferred the gloom, so he wouldn’t have to look at what his life had become. He moved slowly around the kitchen, getting out the mug and the tea bags and turning on the electric kettle. He found the ritual comforting, even though he wasn’t sure he actually wanted any tea.

He’d been found in the wreckage of the cellar, more dead than alive. Not by police reinforcements, but by the local fire brigade responding to an anonymous call. The bookstore had been completely burned down, but the firemen dug Daniel out of the cellar in time to save his life. Daniel was still having trouble deciding whether that had been a kindness.

The investigating team found a few bits and pieces of Oscar, but no trace at all of Paul or Nigel. Daniel kept insisting that they were both dead, murdered by monstrous creatures . . . but no one believed him.

He was suspended without pay the moment he left hospital. Pending a Board of Inquiry that no one seemed too eager to set in motion. An unauthorized raid was bad enough, but an unsuccessful one? Best to let it just fade quietly away, and be forgotten. Commissioner Gill had also been suspended, for exceeding her authority. Or at least she would be, if anyone could find her.

The police review board interrogated Daniel over and over again. He told them everything that happened in that awful underground abattoir, but they couldn’t accept any of it. Not about the homeless people being dissected alive, or the Frankenstein doctors (the board really didn’t like it when he used that name), or the huge, hulking figures who’d shrugged off Tasers and took no harm from flailing batons.

They told Daniel the force had no record of a firm called The Cutting Edge. That there were no reports of missing homeless people in the area. And that there was definitely no such thing as a glass ceiling in the modern police force. They made it very clear they thought he was mad, or lying. They didn’t believe a word he said.

Especially when he wouldn’t shut up about the monsters.

So now his time in the police force was over. A cripple, and a disgrace. The man who only wanted to help others couldn’t even help himself. Daniel looked at the cup of tea he’d made, and wondered what he was going to do with his day.