The Book Eaters(12)
“I think she’s sort of beautiful,” Devon said, a little dreamy. “She looks like a fairy-tale princess. A proper one.”
“Eh. Girl’s all right, I guess.” Ramsey shaded his eyes. “Hey now, look at them knights! That’s a sight to see.”
Below, a cavalcade of men in dark gray suits and sunglasses followed the procession at a distance, all ten of them riding pristine motorbikes.
“Maybe you could be one, someday,” she suggested, because he always seemed enamored of them.
Ramsey shook his head. “I’d rather be a patriarch of a manor. Money and a house and telling folk what to do.” He grinned to himself and Devon rolled her eyes. He was far too daft and cocky.
The knights coasted to a stop in perfect semicircle formation. Some carried an additional rider: brawny men dressed in formal suits. All of them wore full motorcycle helmets, with the visors down. Nothing of their faces or necks could be seen, the grotesque tattoos hidden from sight.
“Dragons,” Devon said, uneasy.
“Dragons!” Ramsey straightened up. “I wish we could see one up close.”
“It’d eat your brain with its giant needle tongue.” Devon stuck her tongue out at him to demonstrate.
He swatted her away. “Don’t be a dolt. Devon the Dolt. That’s what the Redemption is for. The knights feed them little pills and they don’t get hungry for brains.”
“Not true,” she retorted. “The pills help them not to starve, but they still get hungry and still want to eat your brains.”
“Can’t do it with their helmets on,” he said, dismissive.
Down below, the mother-bride cast a glance over her shoulder at the entourage behind her. For a fraction of a second, something like unease settled on her features as her gaze skipped across the dragons’ helmeted visages. Then she turned to face forward again, wearing her polite smile.
Aunts and uncles came out in greeting, Uncle Aike foremost among them. At his shoulder followed Uncle Imber, a quiet and tidy man in his mid-thirties. The designated husband.
“You must be Faerdre Gladstone.” Even from this distance, Uncle Aike’s voice carried. He swept the mother-bride into a hug and pecked each of her cheeks, taking care not to crush the expensive dress. “Allow me to introduce you to Imber.”
Devon looked down at her own clothes: a faded linen dress, the lacy sleeves ripped to shreds and the hems too short to cover her nettle-stung ankles. No shoes or socks. Her dresses suffered badly from days spent clambering across the moors, but girls of the Family did not wear shorts and trousers, so that was that.
She looked back at the tidy, well-dressed figure far below. “Do you think you’ll ever put in a bid for a wedding?” She couldn’t imagine herself as a bride. Easier to imagine Ramsey as someone’s husband.
Her brother waved a dismissive hand. “Who wants a wedding? Babies are lame.” He laughed. “I’d like a girlfriend someday. Guess it’d have to be a human one.”
“That would be nice,” Devon said, without thinking.
He shot her a frown. “Girls don’t have girlfriends, stupid.”
“Some girls do,” she said, because she’d read about lesbians in books she wasn’t supposed to touch. Like The Well of Loneliness, which she’d found in Aunt Beulah’s side table once.
“Just like some babies can live in test tubes?” he said, scoffing. “Oh hey, everyone’s already gone inside. We should go down, too. They’ll be starting the party soon.”
“Sounds boring,” she said. His dismissiveness stung, made her want to be contrary for the sake of it. “I can’t bear to eat ‘Rapunzel’ for the thousandth time.” That much was true.
“We’ve all eaten those stories a thousand times, and that’s good for us,” Ramsey said in lecturing tones. “If you eat the same books all the time, your brain will stay fast for longer because it isn’t new. But if you eat lots of different books then your brain will run slower.”
“What rubbish,” she said, trying not to sound uneasy. “I think you’re the one making things up, not me!”
“I am not, and it isn’t rubbish! It’s true, completely true. Uncle Oban ate loads of different books when he was young and filled up his brain with words. Now his head is all full-up with words so he can’t hardly move or talk.”
Uncle Oban was odd, she had to admit. Ask him a question and it would take him more than half a minute to come up with an answer, his gray eyes staring off into the distance. And walking from his bedroom to the drawing room was a laborious affair, undertaken only twice daily, his steps slow and ponderous.
“Well … I still don’t care,” Devon said, “and I have a better idea than sitting around.” She lowered herself off the chimney flues and edged across the tiles, heading for the south side of the manor.
“Hey!” A soft scrabble along the rooftop, followed by a swear word he shouldn’t have known, and Ramsey clunked after her. “Where are you going?”
“I want to get into the south library, while everyone is busy meeting the mother-bride.” Strands of her dark hair tangled in the breeze. “Are you coming or not?”
“What do you want with the south-side library? That’s where the knights leave…” He trailed off, eyes widening.