Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(61)

Running again, always running, and Lucy-Anne so wished she could simply sit somewhere and fill her emptiness with grief.

But she feared that if she did, the grief would consume her. At least running, she had something else to think about. Rook held her hand and she so loved the contact, feeling a rush of affection for him as he squeezed her hand. They had both lost and found someone.

And she refused, totally, to lose anyone else.

On the back of the news about Andrew, Nomad's talk of the fate hanging over London had felt vaguely flat, almost uninteresting. But then Lucy-Anne had thought of Jack and Sparky, Jenna and Emily, and her heart had started sprinting in her chest. No. Not them as well. They were her friends—they had been her family for every second she had been on her own since Doomsday—and she would not let them die.

Running, always running, it took some time to even consider the possibility of her own death. It meant nothing.

Nomad had vanished again, and Lucy-Anne had let her go without a second glance. She could inspire no hatred for the strange woman or anger for what she had done. Perhaps over time, as her hollowness faded, that would come.

“It's not fair,” Rook said, running with her. Birds swirled around them and took turns landing on his shoulders, and he kept tilting his head to hear their calls. They were scouting the way ahead and keeping a watch on their rear. He was doing his best to get them off Hampstead Heath safely, but with every step she sensed danger increasing. There was nothing specific—no shapes darting at them, no cries of attack—but a sense of doom had dropped over her that had nothing to do with Andrew.

It was the future that terrified her, and with every step they were closer to it.

“I guess maybe I knew he was dead,” Lucy-Anne said.

“Not that,” Rook said. “London. Everything they've done to it, what they've made it. And now…” He sounded like a child, and she could not feel angry at him. He didn't mean to lessen the impact of her brother's death. He had found a place for himself in London, and now everything was about to change again. What of Rook then? What of any of them?

“We'll get out,” she said. “Find my friends, and all of us will get out.”

“But what about my birds?”

You can set them free, she went to say, but realised that they were an integral part of him. Everyone left in London—Irregulars, Superiors, and anyone in between—belonged there now, and nowhere else.

“Maybe we can stop them,” she said. Rook did not reply. Even if Nomad had stayed with them, it was a foolish idea.

“All these streets,” Rook said. “All this city.” He tilted his head as another rook landed on his shoulder, smiling as he glanced across at Lucy-Anne. “We're close. Just down this slope and through those trees, and we'll be—”

He vanished. Lucy-Anne ran on for a couple of seconds, barely registering what had happened. Her feet stamped through long grass, breeze ruffled through her dirty hair, her jacket flapped at her hips like loose wings. Pain kicked in across the back of her hand where Rook's nails had raked her skin, and as the gashes welled blood she heard his voice.

“Lucy-Anne!”

And then his scream.

She skidded to a stop, turned back and saw the hole in the ground, the stark edges of snapped branches protruding from where they had been laid across the pit. She could not see Rook, but his birds swooped around the pit and spiralled up again, taking up his cry, amplifying and echoing it, and she couldn't tell which was more bloodcurdling. She screamed herself, but did not hear. She smelled blackberries.

Please, no one else! she thought, because she had already lost too much. She went back to the hole and looked down. She wished the sun had set a little more.

Rook's scream faded as she saw what had happened to him, and with his one remaining eye he looked up at her. She hoped he saw her, but thought he was probably dead already, because the long, pale worm-thing—with its remnant of human limbs and filthy, tangled auburn hair—was pushing its snout deep into the hole it had torn in his throat and up beneath his unhinged jaw. It shook and scrabbled at the ground as it struggled to push its mouth deeper, and Lucy-Anne could smell the stench of freshly spilled blood.

“But I saved you,” she said. “I saved you, I saved you, I—”

A rook tangled on her hair and pecked at her cheek. She swatted it away, then had to squeeze her eyes closed as two more came for her face. She punched at one and clawed at the other, and their cries as they swung away from her were heartrending. Loss rang out across that hillside. Lucy-Anne tripped and fell onto her back in the long grass, and looking up she saw the rooks circling higher and higher, an aerial dance for their dead master.

She crawled to the hole again and looked down, and the worm-thing was eating him now, chewing into his head with awful jaws. A crunching sound, a twitch of his body, and what remained of his face shifted sideways.

Unable to scream, not knowing what to say or do or think, she stood and ran down towards the trees, aimless and thoughtless, until she tripped over something hidden in the grass and smacked her head on the ground.

Vision faded, and sound grew distant. I don't want to wake up, Lucy-Anne thought as she drifted away. Let me stay down here.

Nomad is running towards her. She is in a burning street somewhere in London—buildings are aflame, a vehicle has exploded, bodies litter the road and pavements, and someone is staggering across the road, crying wretchedly as they try to gather their unspooling guts.