Page 6

Chapter 2

Lucian

Sixteen years ago …

Drawing back the rock I’ve tucked into the pouch, I line my slingshot up with an acorn hangs from a limp branch, one mostly hidden in the early morning darkness and thick foliage. Snapping the rubberband, I let the shrapnel fly through the air, until it hits its mark, and something black, far bigger than an acorn, falls to the ground with a thud.

“Oh, shit, you hit a bird!” My best friend Jude scrambles to his feet over the crackling brush, and I follow after him as he slides to the ground beside what looks like a large raven. “Shot his eye out! Look!” he adds in his native British accent.

Where there should be an eyeball sits the fleshy remains inside a bloody socket. The mutilated organ lies a couple feet away from the animal.

“It was an accident.”

“Fucking hell, that’s disgusting! Pretty sure you killed him.” Jude’s lips stretch into a smile as he looks up at me. The delight in his eyes reminds me of a child, instead of the sixteen-year-old I’ve grown up with most of my life. “Couldn’t do that again if you tried. Nailed the bastard.”

I kneel down alongside the fallen creature, studying the lack of movement in its chest. Some believe it’s a bad omen to kill a bird. Seagulls are said to carry the souls of fishermen. Killing an albatross means getting lost at sea. I’ve no idea what it means to kill a raven. “It’s bad luck.”

“Nah. That’s crows. Ravens are just evil shit-eaters.” Nabbing a stick beside him, Jude lifts the bird’s tiny, dark eyeball and flings it at me.

I leap back, but not before it lands square on the crotch of my pants. “Asshole!” The eyeball tumbles to the ground, and I grab a nearby stone to chuck at him.

He chuckles. “Your face! Priceless.”

A flash of black knocks him in the head, and Jude lets out a screech. Black wings flap over him, the bird pecking and clawing as it squawks.

“Get it off of me! Get it the fuck off of me!” He flails his hands, and when I grab a stick to fend it off, the bird abandons Jude for me.

The sharp sting of its beak blazes across my skin, as I raise my arms to shield my face. It caws, its nails digging at my flesh while it needles past my limbs to my hair, ripping strands from my head. “Grab a fucking stick!” I manage to belt out, and as the first swing knocks into my elbow, I cry out, lowering my arms to cradle the vibrating ache in my bones. Opening my clenched eyes shows Jude standing alongside me, crouched and ready to swing again. “Not me, stupid bastard, the bird!”

Except, there is no bird.

“Didn’t see it fly off. Did you?” The harrowing tone of Jude’s voice sends a tickle down my spine.

“No. Must’ve … just vanished.” I glance up at the canopy of trees above us, toward the small bits of sky peeking through the leaves, but find no sign of the bird.

“Vanished. Yeah, right.”

When I lower my gaze toward my friend, I notice where a long slice of skin at his hairline hangs by a thread of torn-away flesh.

Like he just realises the pain, he reaches up to touch the wound. “The cocksucker tore into my skin!”

At a lingering burn on my arms, and I lift both limbs to find pocks, and deep grooves filled with a dark red blood, where the bird nipped at my flesh. I look like I’ve survived a war, with all the marks marring my skin. “My mom will have my ass for this. Family portraits are tomorrow afternoon.”

With a snort, he swipes up my sling from where I threw it on the ground. “Fitting, then, for your macabre family.”

Much as I know my mother will be upset, I can’t help but chuckle at the visual of standing alongside her, coated in blood, while my father looks on behind me, pissed off and stern, as always. “The locals would surely have a field day with that one.”

“Speaking of which, I thought, surely, you’d be a more gracious host and gift an old friend some pussy while I’m stuck here.”

Jude and I met at the boarding school my father shipped me off to, up until I managed to get myself expelled for setting the headmaster’s couch on fire. Now I’m forced to slog through boring lessons with a tutor every day, with only the occasional visit from my friend when school is out of session.

“One of the local girls?” I say. “You’d end up with crabs.”

A bellow of Jude’s laughter echoes through the forest, while we trek back to the castle grounds. “Still, a little T and A would’ve been a nice touch.”

“Touch to what?”

Shoving his hands into his shirt pocket, he pulls out two perfectly rolled joints.