Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(36)

Something passed above them. Lucy-Anne gasped and looked up, unsure how she had sensed it—smell, or motion, or sight, or perhaps a combination. She saw nothing, but the sense of being watched increased to an overwhelming extent, and she waved her free arm over her head, terrified that she would feel something above her. There was only air.

The rooks started caw-cawing, flapping their wings but not taking off. Lucy-Anne squinted as a wing slapped across her eyes and stung, blinding her for a moment. It made little difference. She blinked rapidly until she could see again, and Rook was steering them across the street towards a hulking shape.

More shapes passed overhead, and something reached down and snatched at Lucy-Anne's hair. She screamed as a tuft of hair was ripped from her head, and felt the warmth of fresh blood spreading across her scalp.

Rook whistled, and above them Lucy-Anne heard rooks impacting something larger and more vicious. Birds cried out and immediately started raining down around them, broken and torn. She stepped on one and felt the gentle give as its bones crumbled beneath her foot.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she said. Rook tugged hard on her hand, urging her onward.

More birds swooped in and something else screeched above and to the left. It was a terrible sound—pained, angry, and undeniably human.

“In here!” Rook said. He shoved her towards the shadow, and she saw it was a vehicle of some kind. The door scraped as he pulled it open, then she was thrust unceremoniously into the driver's seat and the door slammed behind her.

Silence. And the smell of decay.

“Oh my God,” Lucy-Anne whispered. The passenger door was opened, the sudden sound making her jump, and Rook tumbled in. He held the door for a moment and whistled again, and the inside of the car was suddenly filled with flapping, panicked shapes. He closed the door, the shapes quickly settled, and the silence was shocking.

Something scraped along the roof, like nails on a blackboard. Lucy-Anne shrunk down in the seat, holding her head, bending forward, wishing that everything would go away. I'm back in Camp Truth with Jack, she thought. We've just woken up from a snooze, I've dreamed all of this, all of it, and there's an hour before Sparky and Jenna will arrive. We'll kiss each other, and perhaps more. We can do whatever we want, because I'm just so glad this was all a dream!

But it was not a dream. The big flying things were circling the car and skittering their claws across the roof. And inside the car, something dead sat behind her.

Rook spoke as soon as she shifted.

“Don't look back,” he said.

“Can they get in?”

“I don't know.” He sounded calm, but he was looking around like a startled bird.

The urge to turn around was huge. She could smell the mustiness of old decay, a stench that had become familiar since she'd entered London with her friends, and she knew that someone dead shared the car with them. Or we're sharing their car, she thought. Sorry. Sorry to sit in your car.

Then she saw the key in the ignition, and her thoughts of the dead person vanished.

“I can drive this,” she said.

“What? No! Don't be ridiculous.”

“Hey, there's plenty you don't know about me. I've nicked a car or two. Can drive. Even if the key wasn't there, I could probably start the thing given time.”

“No,” Rook said, and he grabbed her shoulder. It was a surprising gesture, but one she welcomed. “I mean, no one drives cars apart from the Choppers. Too dangerous. Too easy to see or hear.”

“You really think there are Choppers here to see or hear?” she asked.

He was watching her in the darkness. She could just make out the faint glint of his eyes, and his shadows sitting beside her was solid reality. Everything else was ambiguous.

Claws raked across the car roof again, and something big flitted in front of the windscreen.

“Whatever, I'm not going out there,” Lucy-Anne said. A dozen of his birds had entered the car with them, and glancing in the rearview mirror she could see several silhouetted against the rear window. She also caught sight of a larger shape and glanced away again.

“Try,” Rook said at last. “The battery will be flat. The tyres will be down. Water in the engine. Something.”

Lucy-Anne grabbed the key and felt the fob, running her fingers over the cold metal. “Mazda,” she said. “Mum and Dad always swore by them.” She made sure the car was out of gear and turned the key. The engine coughed, hacked a few times, and then caught. She pressed on the gas and revved. The car vibrated with restrained power.

“Wow,” Rook said.

“Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. “Well. Where to, sir?” Laughing softly, she turned on the headlights. The street before them was flooded with weak light and she gasped with shock.

Three shapes squatted on the broken road, flinching away from the light. They were humanoid, but their bodies were thin and stringy, bare skin pale and diseased, and open sores wept across their abdomens and legs. They had what looked like stumpy wings, useless and malformed. Their faces were bulbous, each feature exaggerated. They looked like gargoyles.

“Oh my…” Lucy-Anne muttered. The gargoyle-people fled, scampering from the haze of weak headlamps and finding shadows once more

“Unnatural,” Rook said. He seemed deeply troubled, his face creased in an intense frown in the pale dashboard light. “Not right. That's not right.”