Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City) by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online

at stars bursting across her vision. In the distance she heard the woman saying something, and then hands grasped her beneath the armpits and she was lowered gently to the ground.
    Don't go don't go , she thought, but then her vision darkened, and all sounds receded until they were little more than echoes.
    She can smell blackberries, and she looks down at her hands, expecting the familiar purple stains from when she'd used to go blackberry picking when she was a little girl. That had been when Andrew was barely a teenager and her parents had loved them both equally. But her hands show no sign of berry juice, and the sun is scorching her scalp. It is still the height of summer, the wrong time for blackberries.
    She cannot not see very far because of the bushes and trees. Her surroundings are wild and overgrown, yet there is a definite sense that this was once a maintained, ordered place. A large back garden, perhaps, or a park. There is a wooden bench subsumed beneath one wall of shrubs, and a spine of coiled wire splayed across the ground, once used to mark the edge of a planting bed.
    Something swings down from one of the tall trees. It is a man, naked, smeared with some sort of dye, and wearing twigs and leaves in his hair. Plant fronds seem to turn towards him as if he is a new kind of sun. He swipes at her, she ducks, and then he is away through the branches.
    A woman sniffs along the ground like a clothed dog. Her nails are incredibly long, and she squats by a tree and urinates. She glances up suddenly, growls, then lopes away.
    Rook appears from the shadows and rushes towards her. She knows that he is in danger, she can sense it, yet when she raises a hand to warn him back he only waves. His birds flit around him. At the last moment she finds her voice, but what emerges is a name rather than a warning.
    Nomad!
    The ground crumples and Rook falls into a deep pit. She hears his cry, and knows as she rushes forward that he is already dead.
    What she does not expect is the sight of what is eating him.
    She screams—
    —and jarred awake, sitting up, panting hard, hand fisted against her chest and feeling her heart's terrified sprint.
    “Calm down, calm down,” a woman's voice said. It was loaded and distant.
    Lucy-Anne was on the floor of an old bus, and in the seat beside her sat Rook. He only glanced at her as she caught her breath.
    “What happened?” she asked.
    “You fainted,” the woman said. “I took you in.” She was sitting on the stairs heading to the top deck, gun leaning against the wall beside her. She stared intently at Lucy-Anne.
    “Took me in?” Lucy-Anne looked around, more to escape the woman's gaze than out of curiosity. It took only a moment to ascertain that the woman lived here. One double seat was piled high with a ragged assortment of clothing, another with blankets and pillows. There were plastic bottles filled with water, tins of food, and farther along the bus she thought she saw a pile of stuffed toys peering over the metal railing of a seat's back.
    “Yeah,” the woman said. “Hey.”
    Lucy-Anne looked back at her.
    “You're seventeen,” the woman said. “Looked after yourself since Doomsday. No virgin, but you haven't loved for a while. Time of the month in…” she shrugged. “Six days.” Her eyes narrowed and she glanced aside, displaying the first sign of emotion. “You just found out your parents are dead.”
    “And my brother's alive!” Lucy-Anne said. “That's why Rook brought me here, because you can help.”
    “Somewhere to the north,” Rook said.
    “Yes. The north. And you'll not want to find him,” the womansaid. “Better off dead. Ever heard that saying, girl? I think it all the time, but don't have the fucking guts. Huh.”
    “Lucy-Anne, meet the charming Sara.”
    “I do want to find him!” Lucy-Anne said. “And if you know where he is you have to—”
    “Have to nothing,” Sara said. She stood and climbed the stairs, disappearing quickly from