Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels) by Gillian Philip Read Free Book Online Page A

sidelong suspicious look and sat down heavily on the nearest rock. I decided I wouldn’t indulge him by asking.
    ‘Impressed?’ he prodded. ‘Bet you don’t know anybody else who can tear the Veil. What’s your name, Red?’
    ‘Hannah Falconer,’ I snapped. ‘Call me Red again and I’ll rip out your throat. Now. Shut up and let me think.’ I thought for all of two seconds. ‘Click your
fingers.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I have to get home. Click your fingers. Isn’t that how it works?’
    ‘No. How what works?’
    ‘Hypnosis.’
    ‘It’s not hyp – it’s not that.’ He blinked. ‘Don’t be mad.’
    ‘Don’t piss me about or I’ll tear your pretty head off.’ I thought hard and wished I had a cigarette. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the shimmer in the air, and the
fleeting glimpses of car park beyond it. I moved my head. The car park disappeared. And reappeared.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be okay with this. And I do know the safe places.’
    I moved my head again, and shifted my mind sideways while I was at it. I wondered what had been in that beer. ‘The safe. Places. There are places that aren’t?’
    ‘Well. There’s a war on, after all.’
    My eyes darted to the derelict castle, the deserted moor, the louring sky and the black forbidding loch. Rory and I might be the only human beings in a hundred miles, except for the sliver of
car park that was starting to blur and fade. As I watched, it vanished altogether, and that was when I remembered the curtain that never was, the curtain he’d drawn back and shuffled behind.
The one I’d explained to the enraged Sionnach when he returned looking for Rory; Sionnach, who had called me inventive names but who had never once accused me of lying. Who had, with what I
had considered outrageous gullibility, believed every word I told him.
    I felt sick. Invisible curtains, homicidal horses, a landscape from a hundred years ago. The beer had finally got to me; either that, or this was for real.
    Yet when I tried to be surprised I found I couldn’t; it was like I’d always known about this, somewhere in the back of my mind, and I’d just forgotten.
    ‘So,’ said Rory, and blew his hair out of his eyes. ‘Want to come home with me?’

    The only reason I went with him – or rather, after him, since he strode off as if I had no choice, which of course I didn’t, since I had no idea how to get back to
The Paddocks – was pity.
    ‘What’s your dad going to do?’ I asked him as we stumbled down a heathery slope. Well, I stumbled.
    ‘Nothing. He’ll probably leave it to my brother.’
    ‘What, he’ll get your brother to leather your arse?’
    ‘Nah, that would be preferable. I’ll get an earful. All my mother’s sacrifices, how disappointed he is in me, that sort of thing. And Dad getting shot saving my backside,
that’s his favourite bit.’
    ‘Well, I don’t think it’s…
what?’
I don’t think I’d ever done a proper double take before.
    ‘Unless Dad’s
really
mad about the horse. Which he will be. Sorry about that, by the way.’
    I shrugged. ‘It was only a horse.’
    ‘It’s my father’s horse. Nearly killed you. I really am sorry.’
    ‘God. Sometimes I think a father would be just too complicated.’
    ‘Well, yours can’t have been that complicated if he just buggered off.’
    I stopped dead. ‘What?’
    He turned, a flush creeping across his cheekbones. ‘Sorry.’
    It all made instant, blinding, nauseating sense. ‘Did Lauren put you up to this?
Did she
?’ I clenched fists and teeth.
    ‘No!’ He squinted hard, eyes boring into mine. ‘I – is she your cousin?’
    ‘You little
shit
.’ I flew at him, and he caught my wrists just before they tore into his face. He danced backwards, ducking my headbutt.
    ‘I don’t know Lauren!’ he yelled, wrestling me to the ground. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
    I was flat on my back again, humiliated and in pain, a heather root digging into my