Severed by Sarah Alderson Read Free Book Online

their grasp. Lucas moved, positioning himself so that they fell on him instead of her. She moaned lightly in her sleep. Her hair was falling in a dark tumble over her face. It reminded him of the picture he’d first seen of her, with a strand of hair caught like a spider’s web over her eye.
    He brushed it away. She looked like a normal teenage girl sleeping peacefully before waking up to a world where the only horror might be a looming exam. Well, not normal, he thought, she was far too unusual – too striking looking – for an adjective like normal to describe her, and even if she wasn’t a Hunter there would still be something marking her as different, something that stood her apart from her peers. It was partly her eyes, Lucas thought. The flare of challenge within the blue. The defiant way she always stood with one hip jutting forward and her chin slightly lifted. The way she took on the world expecting it to back down and not the other way around. He smiled to himself. Then slowly eased himself out of the bed and, checking once more that she was still sleeping soundly, he crossed to the door and left the room.
    Issa was back. He’d felt her return a few minutes before. She’d been gone an entire day. He hoped she’d managed to find something out in that time because they needed to move soon. The Elders were probably right this minute sat in a meeting in the Shadowlands discussing how to retaliate, lining up Shadow Warriors and sending them through the Gateway to find him and Evie and to kill anyone who stood in their way.
    Lucas walked into the living room. Jamieson and Issa were sitting on the sofa. Flic was standing with her hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently.
    ‘Finally,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Did you sleep well?’
    The inference in the word sleep didn’t pass him by. He ignored it. ‘Yes. Evie’s still sleeping.’
    Flic’s mouth was set in a grimace. ‘Well, you need to wake Sleeping Beauty. It’s time to go.’
    He ignored her again and instead turned to Issa. ‘Did you manage to find anything out?’ he asked.
    She looked up at him from the sofa, her long blonde hair hanging in a twisted rope over one shoulder. ‘I couldn’t find anything out about the prophecy. No one knows where the other fragments are.’
    Lucas studied her, trying to tell if she was lying. After all, the Sybll had no interest in the fragments being found. They were content to let fate play out while they sat and watched from the sidelines. Was Issa playing him?
    ‘Tell him what you did find out though,’ Flic urged Issa.
    He saw the wary look pass across Issa’s face. She cleared her throat. ‘The Sybll are all seeing one thing,’ she said softly.
    A static charge leapt through Lucas’s body. He knew from the way Issa was looking at him, with her lips pressed together so tightly that they were bleached as white as her skin, that whatever the Sybll were seeing wasn’t something good.
    ‘What?’ he asked Issa, his body tensing in apprehension. ‘What are you seeing?’
    ‘An army. We’re all seeing an army, Lucas. Coming through into this realm. To find her.’
    It took him a while to find his voice. ‘An army?’ As he said the words, he suddenly remembered what Tristan had told him the last time he’d seen him – that the Elders had wanted to send an army to hunt down Evie.
    ‘Yes. They’re not recruiting a new Brotherhood,’ Issa said. ‘This time they’re recruiting an army.’
    Lucas shook his head. An army? That was impossible. The Elders had trouble recruiting one member from every realm to even make up the Brotherhood. That explained the barrel scrapings like Joshua whom he’d had to train alongside. There was no way an army was coming through. He narrowed his eyes at Issa, wondering whether she was lying in order to scare him, put up to it by Flic, who had fallen strangely silent. At the very least, Issa had to be exaggerating. An army? When had the last army been raised by