Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(2)

“Your friends haven't been caught,” Rook said. They were walking through St. Paul's itself now, the huge cathedral eerily quiet but for their footsteps and the flutter of rooks’ wings.

“How do you know?”


Rook did not need to answer. Two birds left his shoulders, three more landed there, spreading their huge wings to balance and breaking the silence with their cries.

He communes with the birds, Lucy-Anne thought. The idea was crazy, yet she accepted it completely. There was so much crazy stuff going on, including within her.

Those dreams she'd had. Dogs attacking, and then the pack of dogs had assaulted them in the tunnels into London. Her family buried, and then she'd learned that her parents were dead, and likely buried in one of London's massive mass graves. And Rook and the birds. She had dreamt of them as well, and now here they were.

“We need to go north,” she said as they emerged onto the cathedral's wide steps. Your brother is alive north of here, the man who'd confirmed that her parents were dead had told her. The street before them was silent and still. Nothing moved.

“And we will,” Rook said. He was a small, slight boy, with a dark mop of hair and almost-feminine features. But Lucy-Anne had seen him use his birds to kill.

“Andrew is all I have left,” she whispered.

“No he isn't.” Rook shook his head, reaching out to touch her hand. Was that affection? Ownership? She didn't know, and she flinched away. He'd said he could help her, but that didn't mean she owed him anything. Not yet.

Rook laughed softly. “Come on. East of here, there are four of them. I'll show you what I can do.”

“Four of what?” He started down the steps at a jog, without answering. “Rook? Show me what?” Still he didn't answer.

At risk of losing him to the deserted, dead streets of London, Lucy-Anne followed.

There were four, as Rook had said. But one did not belong.

“What are they doing to him?”

Rook reached out quickly and pressed his hand across Lucy-Anne's mouth, then came in close so he could whisper in her ear.

“Not a word.”

They were in the third floor of a once-exclusive apartment complex, looking out through net curtain at the wide street below. The trees and bushes down there, untrimmed and unchecked since Doomsday, had gone wild. Expensive cars sat on flat tyres along the centre of the street. And parked on the opposite side of the road, a dark blue Land Rover. She could just make out the driver sitting inside keeping the engine running, and outside stood two heavily-armed Choppers, and the man.

Rook's retinue of birds remained out of view. Lucy-Anne saw a few pigeons and, high overhead, a family of buzzards circled.

She watched Rook watching them, and wondered what he was here to do. Was he a spy for Reaper, gathering as much information as he could about the Choppers and what they were doing? Or was this something else?

Shouting. She returned her attention to the street, just as one of the Choppers shoved the man forward. He was crying and shivering. He looked very thin. Lucy-Anne wanted to reach out to help him, but knew she could not.

Rook had slipped his hand beneath the net curtain and flipped a catch, and Lucy-Anne held her breath as he eased the window open.

“Get on with it!” she heard the Chopper shout. “It's your last chance, you stupid bastard. You know what you've got to do, so do it!”

The other Chopper said something Lucy-Anne didn't catch, but the loud one shouted him down.

“You saw what he did to me in the back of the Rover. Just look! Bit me!” He held out his gloved hand, displaying nothing. He nursed his rifle in his other hand, barrel never wavering far from the snivelling man.

The man faced away from the Choppers, and that's how Lucy-Anne knew he was not feigning the tears. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen anyone looking so wretched.

“Go on! Do it! Do it!”

The man squeezed his eyes closed and seemed to gather himself, and for a moment silence descended across the street. Lucy-Anne held her breath in anticipation of what she was about to see. What can he do? she thought. But nothing happened, and the man slumped down to his knees and started crying again.

“Right, well, another waste of bloody time,” the Chopper said. “Got the camera ready?” His colleague chuckled and nodded as the soldier raised his rifle, sighting on the back of the man's head.

Rook glanced sidelong at Lucy-Anne, eyes glittering, as if testing her.

She screamed, “Leave him alone!”

Rook chuckled, then grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the window.

Machine-gun fire raked the building's fa?ade, shattering windows, bullets ricocheting, the sound unbelievable where it was channeled back and forth between the high buildings. Lucy-Anne curled into a ball and watched bullets stitching the plaster ceiling above her.

Rook was crawling towards the back of the room, and as he knelt up he whistled, a high-pitched sound which seemed so unnatural coming from a human mouth. He seemed suddenly more alive than she had seen him before, and for a moment as he raised his arms she thought he might take flight, mimicking the birds he seemed so close to, and over which he exerted such control.

The gunfire halted.

“The man!” Lucy-Anne said, but Rook was only grinning. He whistled again, attracting another burst of gunfire. They were shooting blind. The Choppers had no idea who was watching them, or from where.