Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(26)

The bird was silent, head jerking left and right and looking everywhere but at Rook.

“What is it?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“I'm afraid,” Rook said. As he spoke the bird gave a caw-caw! and flapped its wings, but remained perched on his arm. Perhaps it was afraid as well.

The admission shocked Lucy-Anne. After she'd seen Rook in action with Reaper she'd viewed him in the same way. Despite his protestations, she saw him as a Superior, a person who considered themselves as more than human, and better.

“Afraid?” she asked.

“I can be, you know,” he said.

“I know, but…”

“Can't you sense it?” he asked, turning around to face her. The bird watched her, dark eyes inscrutable.

She tried to feel what he was feeling, sniffing the air, listening for anything out of the ordinary, and then closing her eyes. But she felt only what she had ever since entering London—dislocation, and an idea that she could never belong here at all.

“It's wild!” Rook said. He was speaking quietly, glancing about as he did so. Afraid of being watched. “I've only ever been this far north once before, and I turned back and ran. Got lost south of the river, and it felt like going home. Back to my mother's womb. Safe.”

“What's so terrible about it?”

“London changed, but this part changed more than anywhere. It's a different place now. Those left behind here don't even pretend to be what they were before.”

“And everyone else does?” she asked doubtfully.

“Even Reaper admits to being human.”

She glanced past him into the deserted street, lit only by the faint glow of dusk and the rising moon. “Then what about people here?”

“Like I said. Wild. Just…” He reached out and touched her, and it was like a feather across her cheek. “Just be warned.”

“But you'll protect me,” she said. “You know how.”

“I know how to try.”

“I have no choice,” Lucy-Anne said. “My brother's out there somewhere. That's all I am now. Searching for him defines me.”

Rook nodded once, then glanced away. “Follow me,” he said. “We'll cut across the street, then through some gardens. Then there's a wide road, and we're in Regent's Park.”

“And why are we going there?”

“It'll probably be quicker passing through the park than along streets.”

“And safer?”

“Didn't say that.”

The enormity of their task, always at the back of Lucy-Anne's mind, came to the fore then. Andrew was a needle in a haystack, a pebble on a beach. And now that they were heading into the wilder north of London, the haystack and beach were more dangerous than ever.

There were six corpses propped against the wall at the edge of the park. Each had a small fire lit in its lap, their arms had been interlocked in a grotesque mockery of dancing, and their heads and shoulders were encased in silvery-grey webbing. They were naked apart from their shoes. That's what Lucy-Anne noticed first, before the rest of the horror. That they all wore shoes.

“What's this?” she whispered. Rook squatted beside her in the shelter of a bus stop, two of his birds on the ground beside him. A third bird drifted in through the dark and settled on his shoulder, and he tilted his head.

“Don't know,” he said, answering her at last. “There'll be plenty we can't explain. But the coast is clear.” He went to stand, and Lucy-Anne grabbed his arm.

“Clear?” she asked. She did not want to see the bodies, yet that was the only thing she could look at. She wondered if they were Choppers. “Clear?”

“So my birds tell me,” Rook said. “And I trust them. Come on.”

They crossed diagonally across the street, moving away from the bodies with the fires in their laps and towards the hulking shadow of an open park gate. If they were a warning, Lucy-Anne's every atom told her to take heed. But her mind drove her on towards Andrew.

The smell of burning flesh accompanied them into the park, and she wondered how often this warning was replaced. And as she and Rook passed through the wide gates and onto the first of the curving footpaths, she froze in shock.

Empty, dead London was an unnatural place. Once home to endless bustle, with streets awash with life and millions of separate stories every day, and squares echoing to birdsong and the lilts of a hundred languages, the new silence of the toxic city was alien and unnatural. Before she left for good, Lucy-Anne had once remained behind in school on a dare, hiding until the caretakers locked her in, emerging into darkness, prowling the corridors and classrooms with every intention of performing small acts of rebellion and graffiti. But she had found the place so disconcerting—silence where once was life; breathlessness where echoes should live—that she'd smashed a window to escape.

London felt like that now.

But the park was worse.

They didn't have to go too far in before they heard the calls and hoots, the whistles and moans. It sounded like Lucy-Anne imagined a jungle would sound at night, except…different. There was an intelligence to some of these calls that sent a shiver down her spine. Strange smells assailed her nostrils, and when she tried breathing through her mouth she tasted something acidic and damp on the air. In the weak moonlight, shadows danced beneath trees seemingly in defiance of the motionless canopies. Wide swathes of lawn had grown into seas of long grasses. Things moved in there.