Shadows of Sherwood Read Free Page A

her PalmTab screen, reconciling the number of bodies in the trucks against the list she had in hand. Things didn’t add up. Thirty-nine names, thirty-eight accounted for.
    At twenty minutes past, each truck received a blinking message on its dashboard screen: COUNT AGAIN.
    By twenty-five minutes past, things still didn’t add up, but the leader had figured out who was missing.
    Her name was Robyn. A girl. Age twelve.

    Things were not in order upon Robyn’s return to the manor house. A faint light glowed from the kitchen, where no light had been on when she’d left. She didn’t want to get caught. So she climbed the white stones stealthily and pulled herself through her window, holding her breath. The sound of a large vehicle driving off down the street caused her to duck her head low. Instinct.
    She crouched beneath her window, feeling the wrongness in the air. She found her bedroom door standing open, which it hadn’t been when she’d left. The red lightbulb beside her bed was blinking. Her intruder alarm had been triggered—someone had been in her room.
    Her first thought:
Busted!
But there was no sound, no sign of wakeful, worried parents. Just an unnatural, eerie hum in the air, a feeling that something strange had happened. And an unusual scent, a sort of metallic tang mixed with a whiff of sweat, as if from men’s skin.
    Robyn walked into the hallway. Her parents’ bedroomdoor stood open, too. The room was empty, their covers mussed and slept in, but all was dark. Her heart pounded. She gripped her backpack straps in tight fists and went downstairs, following the soft glow of the kitchen light. Certainly she would find them there, awake, sipping hot chocolate, waiting to pounce and punish her.
    Instead, she found something else.
    A white light from within the fridge, door standing open.
Why?
    Smeared handprints on the fridge door.
Smeared in what?
    Robyn flipped on the overhead light. Her body bent toward a scream, but no sound came out. She doubled over and collapsed onto her knees, the scene before her now lit and fully awful. The handprints on the fridge door were bloodred and dripping. The smudges and smears led to the center of the floor, near where she now knelt. A pool of blood. No, a lake of it.
    She reached out. First her fingertips caught a bit of it, and it felt strangely warm. So she pressed her whole hand into it, like she was checking the temperature of a bath. Later, it grossed her out, the fact that she had done this. But she never wondered
why
. As if she knew it was the last she’d ever touch of them.
    Then she ran straight to the bathroom sink and scrubbed and rinsed until the basin was free of any tinge of pink and the water draining away was as clear as her tears.

    The leader in the truck closed her eyes, thinking it through. Anything less than perfection was unacceptable to Crown. To return one body short meant returning in failure. To retrace steps and continue the search meant returning late, which would require an explanation.
    After listening to a round of stammering, unhelpful suggestions, the leader ordered her men into silence. Their opinions didn’t matter. It was all her responsibility in the end.
    â€œI’ll take care of it,” she told the men. “Never speak of this again.”
    She directed the trucks to proceed to the surrounding counties: Sherwood, Nottingham, Excelsior, Block Six. There were more houses, more dissidents to confront, and no time to waste.
    To the driver of her own truck, she ordered, “Take us to Loxley Manor.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    Intruder Alert
    Robyn shut off the faucets and dried her hands and face on a small towel. As she brushed away the water and the tears, she became aware of a sound other than the soft sloughing of terry cloth against skin. A sound from beyond the closed bathroom door.
    She opened it a crack and listened.
    Floorboards creaked in the foyer. A long, wide shadow emerged through the