Shadow Creatures Read Free

mysterious multinational company had tracked her down and harassed her there a few months before had freaked
her out, and she now felt that the stacks of books towered over her like toppling tombstones if she sat among them too long. So she had tried various coffee shops in the area until she’d
found this one.
    She hadn’t quite recovered yet from the few days that she had spent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in search of the fabled Almasti. It had all happened so quickly. At the
beginning of one week she was a lonely student in London who spent most of her time trawling the internet, and by the end of the week she had a group of new friends and she was in a foreign country
being held captive by Neanderthals, or whatever the Almasti were. She still felt breathless.
    And her friends. What an odd bunch. There was Calum, with his partial paralysis and his iron will to keep moving and not accept any help; Gecko, with his gymnastic ability to get over, under and
around obstacles, usually at height; Natalie, whose flashes of honesty and decency shone through her normally prickly and spoilt demeanour like rays of sunshine through rainclouds; and the solid,
dependable but slightly distant Rhino.
    Natalie was flying in with her mother tonight. Tara wasn’t sure whether or not to head over to Calum’s apartment. She liked hanging out there, but she didn’t want to overstay
her welcome. She’d done that before, with groups of people that she thought were friends but who turned out just to be tolerating her. One of the most hurtful things that had ever happened to
her had been when she had been at a sleepover and overheard two supposed ‘friends’ talking privately about her. One of them had said, ‘Well, we only let her come in because
she’s your friend,’ to which the other one replied,
‘My
friend? I thought she came here with
you?’
    Tara had left then, and never gone back.
    Would Rhino be there at Calum’s? That was the big question. He had turned up a couple of times over the past few weeks, mainly to finish up some paperwork and give Calum an invoice for
‘services rendered’, but he wasn’t really part of the group. He wasn’t really
integrating.
Maybe he was feeling isolated, left out. Maybe it was because he was older
than the rest of them.
    Maybe she should just keep herself to herself and let him make his own decisions.
    She took another sip of green tea, and grimaced. The idea of giving up caffeine was great, but the taste didn’t match the smell, even sweetened with honey. It didn’t do much to keep
her awake either. Maybe she should just cave in and go back to the coffees she used to drink, and put up with the trembling and the heart palpitations.
    Calum managed to put away a fair amount of that special Mexican Coca-Cola that he drank, she noticed. That had a lot of caffeine in it. How did he manage to process it all without showing any
symptoms?
    Her tablet beeped. Putting down her green tea, she tapped the screen to bring it back to life. The ‘Notifications’ tab indicated that she’d had an email. She quickly checked
it, and found that it was actually an automated notification from one of the many software search-bots she had created and sent roaming around the World Wide Web like little scavengers, looking for
particular things. One of them had found something.
    She booted up the search-bot controller app that she’d written, and selected the particular bot that had sent her a successful
ping.
The other search-bots were looking for phrases
in emails or on websites that might match things that Calum Challenger was interested in – cryptids, Neanderthals, monsters and so on – but this one was particularly interested in
images. It scanned through thousands of JPEGs, GIFs or whatever every second, looking for particular shapes. A few years ago Tara would have been lucky if a search-bot could locate a shape like a
dog in a photograph labelled ‘dog’, but they were