Some fucker stole my boots.
More outrage threatened the vicious pain spreading through my body with every calamitous movement. Boots were expensive and boring. Buying a new pair would really piss me off.
I collided with a wall. My temple split open, and wet warmth oozed down my face. “Wanker.”
Someone kicked my legs. “Shut the fuck up.”
I was propelled forward before I could react, through a badly fitted fire door and into a room that smelled like a butcher’s shop.
Blood.
No,worse than that, it wasoldblood. Stale. And the scent of it tripped something inside me.
I’ve been here before.
The realisation stuttered my pulse. I rotated under my own steam as more bodies entered the windowless room, a dragging sound and a groan piercing the eerie gloom.
Faceless men greeted me.
Two?
Three?
My head was fuzzy enough that I couldn’t be sure.What if they’re not men, Dad? What if they’re ghosts?
Willow’s tinkling voice almost sent me to my knees. Was she the ghost? Was that the fuckin’ trick?
A gut punch of fear battered me, breaking through the haze of however many blows I’d taken to my skull. I stood taller as the murky figures in front of me morphed into tangible humans.
Into monsters.
Leering, Priest loomed out of the shadows, putting paid to any fantasy of this not being real. He had a bat in one hand, a pipe in the other. I felt the blows before they landed.
Then everything went black.
3
NASH
I wore Orla’s anger like a shield. As if her rage could protect me from the raw fear in her dark gaze as she launched another chair across the room.
“It’s been two fuckingweeks!”
The chair splintered, a leg ricocheting off the wall and into my head, and I let it happen, too fatigued and fucked up to react.
“What are you doing out there every night?” Her shout rang out. “Where are you looking?”
“Everywhere.”
“Where?” She whirled to face me, her hair hanging limp around her pale face, deep shadows cutting beneath her eyes. “How do you even know where to start? Ranger’s a nomad and Folk barely rode with the Crows.”
“Ranger’s our nomad, not theirs. He rode as a Crow brother for years.”
My voice was dead, but somehow it was petrol to a wildfire.
Orla stormed across the bar, the smoky space dim in the grey light of the early morning, shoulders tight with the fury she’d been clinging to since the day Locke had been taken. “You don’t knowanything. If you did, you’d have found him by now.”
She shoved me and stormed from the bar, the door slamming behind her, leaving me in brutal silence.
