Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(10)

The ability was shocking and felt unreal, not his to own. And yet one look at Sparky set his friend sweating, gasping for air and loosening his collar. Sweat dribbled down his forehead and cheeks, and as his eyes drooped Jack pulled back, not wishing to make his friend faint.

Sparky spilled his burger to the floor. “That was you?”

“Yeah.” Jack closed his eyes and glimpsed his expanding universe. It was utterly terrifying, and exhilarating. Nomad's touch had been the big bang, and now his inner perception was shatteringly huge, filled with swirling clouds of light coalescing into points of potential. He could move in the blink of an eye, and from one moment to the next he would be orbiting one power, or another. He knew them, and knowing scared him. This was so new. Still chaotic. Dangerous.

“Well, I'm with Jack,” Sparky said.

Jenna looked frightened, uncertain.

“Don't be scared,” Jack said, moving towards her.

“I'm not,” she said, but she waved her hands at him, urging him back. “Well, I am, I am scared. But we're together. That's it, I suppose. We're together, and nothing comes between us. So if you think you can find him and get him to help, that's what we do.”

“Yeah!” Sparky said. “Friends forever! We should cut our thumbs and be blood brothers. And sister.”

“Oh, Sparky,” Jenna said, shaking her head.

They just smiled at each other instead.





I see a woman laughing in the face of a mushroom cloud. Lucy-Anne wished she could say this to Rook, and make him understand her confusion and desperation. But it was only a dream. And surely not all dreams could come true.

Besides, it was thoughts of her brother that drove her. With her parents dead, and likely buried in those mass burial pits that she and the others had walked across only days ago (and that was something she'd dreamed as well), he was all she had left.

Andrew. Five years older than her, he'd always been the sensible one, the apple of her mother's eye even though Lucy-Anne knew that her father had a soft spot for her own mild rebellious streak. When Andrew was revising for his exams, Lucy-Anne would be out with her friends, choosing makeup her mother never liked her wearing and clothes that were really too adult for a thirteen-year-old. He played football for his school. She played hooky from school. Deep down he'd made her jealous, and she'd annoyed the hell out of him. But she'd never loved him as much as she did now that he was gone.

Rook had taken them down to the river, and now they were working their way west. He'd told her there were easier routes north from that direction. The Thames was sluggish and thick as gravy, and Lucy-Anne tried to see aspects that did not remind her of her dream. There were no bodies floating in the river today, for a start. It was also unmarred by fallen buildings. There were several half-sunken boats, and in the distance she could see a logjam of ruined craft piled against a bridge's central upright. But it was the movement of water that troubled her. Unstoppable, uncaring of what had happened in London, the water flowed towards a future she hoped she did not know.

“When do we go north?” she asked again. She'd been asking Rook the same question for the last hour, and after the first couple of times he'd stopped answering. Now he turned around and sighed, and for a moment his eyes were as black as the rooks that followed him.

“Soon,” he said. “Need to see someone first.”

“Who?”

“You want my help?”

Lucy-Anne nodded.

“Then let me do it my way. You don't know London, and have no idea of the dangers.”

“Oh, I do have an idea, you know what happened—”

“You have no idea.” He spoke softly, the words filled with such dread and certainty that Lucy-Anne could not reply. What has he seen? What does he know? Rook had been trapped alone in London for two years, surviving, living with the strange gift thrust upon him, and she knew so little about what his life had become, and what had come before. She silently vowed that she would find out.

“This way.” Rook nodded along the embankment path, then glanced up at the summer-blue sky. Rooks floated on air currents high overhead. Others fluttered from building to building. Lucy-Anne could only see a dozen birds, but knew there must have been many more out of sight.

“Don't they give you away?” she asked.

“Most keep their distance until I need them.”

“Most?”

Rook nodded up at the birds circling high overhead. “Some become so…obsessed that I can't shake them.”

“Obsessed with you?”

Rook smiled. It was the dangerous and deadly face she had first seen, and somehow it comforted her more than the Rook mourning his lost brother. It made her feel safer.

They moved cautiously but quickly along the Thames's south bank, passing the National Theatre. Hills of litter had blown against its walls and slumped there, dampened and hardened again into a permanent addition to the building. Windows were smashed. Lucy-Anne had no wish to see what might be inside.

She wondered where her friends were now. Rook had told her they had not been caught by the Choppers, knowledge presumably imparted to him by his birds. She hoped they had escaped London. But at the same time she realised that was unlikely, because Jack would never leave without his mother and Emily. A pang of guilt hit Lucy-Anne again, the same guilt that had plagued her on and off since she'd met Rook and realised that she had abandoned her friends back in that hotel.