The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) by SW Fairbrother Read Free Book Online Page B

cycled up one, over the hanging bare light, and down the other side.
    I stayed in the doorway.
    ‘I’m Vivia Brisk.’
    The cyclist smiled politely. ‘Berenice.’
    ‘And your surname?’
    Her face darkened with suspicion. ‘Why do you want to know?’
    ‘So I can fill in the form.’ The attention span of the newly dead is shorter than a politician’s promise. It’s not worth bothering with detailed explanations. I’m lucky if they can follow a sentence to its end.
    ‘Oh. It’s Nazarak. N-A-Z-A-R-A-K.’
    ‘Date of birth?’
    She answered, but I didn’t hear because of the wings. A thousand wings all flapping at once. The room darkened as misshapen bodies blocked the moonlit window.
    Some of the dead are angry, most are confused, but this wasn’t the dead. There were other things here.
    Feathers squashed up against the glass, followed by a very human-looking face—a harpy. The normally docile creature bared its teeth at me and hissed. Others crowded round it, looking just about as unfriendly as the first.
    ‘What’s got you in such a flap?’ I said out loud, not really expecting an answer. They might have had human faces, but I’d never heard one speak.
    Berenice paid them no attention. She cycled down the room once more, then headed back down the stairs.
    The harpies screamed as one, a high-pitched squeal that made me clap my hands to my ears. The first one I’d seen began to headbutt the window. It cracked. Blood trickled down its forehead, but it didn’t seem to notice. Fury filled the brown eyes staring into mine. It headbutted the window again. The others jostled and fought beside it to get in.
    I reached out and ran my hand over the bedroom door, but it didn’t feel right.
    I sped down the stairs. There was no door between the kitchen and the living room. The back door in the kitchen flickered. Cheap wood, then metal. It wasn’t right either. Leaving the underworld is not as easy as getting in.
    Glass crashed as the harpies broke through the windows and flooded the kitchen. A hand-sized shard of glass flew through the fat woman’s head. She took another bite of her sandwich.
    One of the creatures landed on the table, its human face thick with dirt except for the white tear tracks down its cheeks. It bared its teeth at me.
    I ran out the kitchen and raced to the front door. Talons grabbed my hair from behind, and a line of heat hit my face as its claws tore my cheek. It screamed again. I scrabbled at my neck for my key, pulling it so hard I broke the chain.
    I pushed the key into Malcolm’s front door, and it changed to cheap hardboard, painted with red-brown varnish and covered in children’s stickers, a single cat flap at the bottom.
    My door.
    I twisted the key in the lock and shoved open the door back to the world of the living.

 
     
     
     
     
    9
     
    Air flooded my lungs. I gasped and sat up. It was the sitting up bit that made me bang my head into Little’s as he leaned over me.
    White sparks hit my eyelids. I fell back against the sofa. I reached out to my left and pulled the paper bag to my mouth. I hadn’t eaten so there wasn’t much to come up.
    My left eye pulsed against the lid. All the liquid in the hollow spaces of my body pulsed in turn, wanting out. I used the bag again, then lay back, wiping my mouth with a tissue. I don’t mind being dead—the underworld has great entertainment value—but reverse decomposition is no fun at all.
    The longer I was dead the worse it was, but as long as I came back within three hours, when rigor mortis set in, I recovered quickly enough.
    When the nausea had faded enough for me to risk opening my mouth, I said, ‘What were you doing?’
    ‘Your cheek slashed open by itself. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Little’s voice was just a little too high-pitched.
    I reached up and felt a groove, slippery with blood, about three centimetres across my left cheek. It ached under my fingers. Deep enough to be nasty, but not enough to need