Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(12)
“A museum.”
“Right. Cool.”
“We need to see someone.” He stood from his crouch, and suddenly seemed taller than he had before, darker. I have no idea who he is, Lucy-Anne thought, and for the first time since fleeing her friends at the hotel she was truly afraid for herself. There was no one else around. Rook could do whatever he wanted to her, here and now, and if she fought back, he had his birds to fight for him. She had dreamed of them attacking her. Not all dreams come true!
“Who do we need to see?”
“Oh, her name doesn't matter. Come on.”
“My brother! Andrew! You said we'd be going north to find him, and—”
“North is a big place,” Rook said. “And if you think what you've seen so far is dangerous, and awful…well, get ready to have your eyes opened.”
Unsettled by this strange boy, and with her brief madness now diluting to allow true fear to settle, Lucy-Anne followed.
Rook led them inside the London Transport Museum, looking casual but alert, and he held an entrance door open long enough for a dozen rooks to drift in past him. They moved silent as shadows, echoing his caution.
The huge building was quiet and cavernous. Rook surprised Lucy-Anne by taking her hand and guiding her across a wide walkway, glancing back and putting a finger to his lips when she tapped him on the shoulder. His grin troubled her. Not because it was frightening, but because it was…
It was beautiful. Her heart skipped a little. She was confused. But in truth, perhaps someone like Rook was what she had always wanted. Jack was sweet and sad and would always be one of her best friends. But he was not dangerous.
Lucy-Anne's rebellious nature had only grown deeper after Doomsday, and Rook seemed to embody everything she had wished for.
A rook landed on the boy's shoulder. He tilted his head and listened to its call.
“She's still here,” he said. “Come on. Slowly. Stop when I tell you. Last time I came, she'd found a machine gun somewhere.”
Lucy-Anne, still full of questions, merely listened to what Rook said and let him lead her.
In the great display hall, they moved slowly between an array of old London buses until a shadow appeared in the doorway of one.
“You come back to taunt me again, you bastard?” the woman shouted. Her voice shocked the silence, and several rooks cried out and spiralled up into the high rafters. “I'll shoot ’em! I'll blast your birds from the sky, you freak!”
“Shoot away!” Rook said, and Lucy-Anne knew that he meant it. He seemed to have no love for the birds he was so close to. She'd seen him direct hundreds of them against a helicopter's blades and engines, the resultant stew of blood, bone, and feather dropping the aircraft heavily to the ground. He'd done so without compunction, and with no sign of regret.
“Who's that with you, bird boy?”
“A friend who needs your help.”
“Ha!” The woman stepped forward, and Lucy-Anne caught her first good look. She must have been fifty or sixty years old, short and thin, her hair bound with thousands of colourful beads. The gun in her hands looked ridiculously large. But she looked capable and confident, and nowhere near friendly.
“So…what can you do?” Lucy-Anne asked. Rook squeezed her hand hard, as if to say, Shut up! But the woman grimaced and raised the gun.
“Nothing for you Superior bastards,” she said.
“He's not one of them,” Lucy-Anne said, ignoring another squeeze from Rook. “And neither am I. I'm from outside, and I've come into London to find my brother.”
“Outside,” the woman said. “Outside?” She raised her head and took in a deep, loud breath.
Lucy-Anne felt suddenly dizzy, leaning sideways against an old vehicle and blinking at stars bursting across her vision. In the distance she heard the woman saying something, and then hands grasped her beneath the armpits and she was lowered gently to the ground.
Don't go don't go, she thought, but then her vision darkened, and all sounds receded until they were little more than echoes.
She can smell blackberries, and she looks down at her hands, expecting the familiar purple stains from when she'd used to go blackberry picking when she was a little girl. That had been when Andrew was barely a teenager and her parents had loved them both equally. But her hands show no sign of berry juice, and the sun is scorching her scalp. It is still the height of summer, the wrong time for blackberries.
She cannot not see very far because of the bushes and trees. Her surroundings are wild and overgrown, yet there is a definite sense that this was once a maintained, ordered place. A large back garden, perhaps, or a park. There is a wooden bench subsumed beneath one wall of shrubs, and a spine of coiled wire splayed across the ground, once used to mark the edge of a planting bed.
Something swings down from one of the tall trees. It is a man, naked, smeared with some sort of dye, and wearing twigs and leaves in his hair. Plant fronds seem to turn towards him as if he is a new kind of sun. He swipes at her, she ducks, and then he is away through the branches.
A woman sniffs along the ground like a clothed dog. Her nails are incredibly long, and she squats by a tree and urinates. She glances up suddenly, growls, then lopes away.
Rook appears from the shadows and rushes towards her. She knows that he is in danger, she can sense it, yet when she raises a hand to warn him back he only waves. His birds flit around him. At the last moment she finds her voice, but what emerges is a name rather than a warning.