Ruins Read Free Page B

the aloof manner of an alligator, stomped a brute of a man. His boots were the size of cement blocks, his hands, strapped in brown leather, as large as dinner plates. A powerful chest strained against the confines of a leather bodice. His face was like a Cubist painting; a botched nose had clearly endured numerous blows and his squashed mouth was forever contorted in a sneer.
    This was Lash. A stupid name, in Nicholas’s opinion, but fitting given his position as Jessica’s new bodyguard. Though Diltraa and Malika’s infiltration of Hallow House was being kept a secret for now (“There would only be panic, and what use is that in a war?” Isabel had told him), Lash had moved into the manor to ensure Jessica’s safety. Nicholas had only encountered him a handful of times, none of them pleasant.
    Jessica swept between the adoring masses, then steadily mounted the platform. While Lash took his place at the side of the stage, Jessica revolved to address the crowd. The voice that rang over their heads was clear as the starry heavens.
    “There is a darkness abroad and we are the thing it covets,” Jessica called. “It swells with each cycle of the moon and already great numbers have succumbed to its suffocating embrace.”
    The tiny hairs on the back of Nicholas’s neck prickled. The woman before them was a formidable creature. Proud and defiant. When he’d first met her, Jessica had been waiting for him at the house with an impish smile. He’d seen a tear in that facade, though, the night Diltraa invaded the manor. Jessica had been reduced to a sobbing child. Nicholas found that hard to believe now.
    Was this bold new image a ruse? A performance to inspire faith in her followers? Or had something happened that night in the gardens? Something that had changed her? Peering up into her heart-shaped face, he couldn’t decide either way. Whatever Jessica was doing, though, it was working. Every Sentinel had fallen under her spell.
    “For your losses, I am sorry,” Jessica continued. “Those who died did so fighting the cause that their fathers and mothers fought before them. It is a proud death, though one not free from sorrow.”
    At these words, Jessica’s gaze rested on a short blonde woman whose eyes were glistening with tears.
    “They must be honoured,” Jessica said. “Their labours remembered. No death will ever be in vain, no spilled blood forgotten. That is the reason we are collected here today, to–”
    “Tell me why my son died!”
    A voice erupted from the crowd. Shocked gasps bristled through the clearing and Lash squinted, a hand sliding to the dagger strapped at his belt.
    Silence fell.
    “Peter Carmac,” Jessica said, barely moving. The raven at her shoulder glowered into the throng, the black balls of its eyes impossible to read. “If you wish to speak, speak.”
    All faces turned toward one man. He was in his late fifties, Nicholas guessed, skin toughened by years of hard labour, a blobby nose riddled with burst capillaries. He gripped a cap in his hands but shoved his chin up at the stage.
    “My son, he was one of them found at the church, St John’s,” Peter Carmac called in a voice bitter with grief. “He’d went missing a few days before, not like him at all. He was a good boy. Then he turned up dead, shot in the face. I couldn’t even…” His voice quavered and a tear-stained woman who Nicholas assumed was his wife put a trembling hand to his shoulder. He shoved it off. “I couldn’t even recognise my own boy! And I want to know why!”
    Carmac . Nicholas didn’t recognise the name, but he assumed Peter Carmac’s son was one of the Sentinels who had been turned in Cambridge. He felt a surge of compassion for the man. Sentinels were confronted with death more than the average person – they were demon hunters, after all, and their lives were fraught with risk. Many of the faces in the crowd bore the tell-tale signs of hardship and loss.
    Jessica clasped her hands before her.