The Book of the Crowman Read Free

went to her throat, as though he intended to throttle her. The Black Light, gravitating to sickness and death, found its lodestone.
    He felt the bullet dislodge from the woman’s cervical vertebrae and travel forwards and out towards his hands. With deft fingers, he removed the mangled lead slug and dropped it to the ground. He returned his hand to her neck and sensed the wound shrinking closed within, the flesh reconnecting, the entry hole sealing.
    The woman blinked. She coughed. Her eyes focussed on Gordon, with his hands still clasped at her throat, and she screamed. The scream of the living with no wish to die.
    Gordon leapt up and ran, no idea which direction to take and half expecting the whistle of arrows to follow him. He sprinted from the playground and from the ruined park, taking left turns and right turns as haphazardly as he could. It was the healings that brought both Green Men and Ward out looking for him, the rumours of a boy with power. The gift was a threat to his mission. Faces peered from broken windows and shelters in rubble. He knew that everyone who saw him would remember his passing. Anyone who ran among the streets of London now, had something to run from.
    “Never again,” he whispered as he fled. “Never again.”
     
    Archibald Skelton regarded the dead Wardsmen in silence for a long time. Three years of pursuing the boy had done little to reduce his cask-like paunch or the amphibious blubber of his face. However, his surviving eye was keener than ever.
    Blood had turned the churned brick and masonry of their position black, as though the three men whose throats had been cut had leaked oil. Their faces were stiff and ashen in the permanent gloom that choked the streets of the capital; each expression of horrified acceptance more like studies in stone than true death. The four men with arrow wounds lay collapsed and staring, but all of the fallen reminded Skelton of toy soldiers. Perhaps it was their youth that gave them that aspect, perhaps the casual ease with which they appeared to have been dispatched.
    “They were just youngsters,” said Skelton. “We should have sent men with more history. More guile.”
    When there was no response, Skelton glanced over at his long-serving partner. The hulk that was Mordaunt Pike might also have been dead for all the colour in his sunken cheeks, for all the movement in his limbs. Even Pike’s eyes were dim and unfocused, waiting for a true threat to rouse the power in his massive hands or a command to fire the resolute circuitry of his mind.
    “It was the boy, of course,” continued Skelton in the wheezed tones of a schoolmistress.
    At that, there was a stiffening of muscle in Pike’s huge frame, an almost mechanical creak from deep within him. Skelton smirked.
    “I wonder how many he’s taken now, Pike,” he said. “How many of our boys have gone down under that dirty little blade of his, do you think?”
    Pike straightened, eliciting further groans from the cabling of his joints. Something ignited in his eyes and he seemed to see the final position of the Ward unit, the dead men and the playground beyond, for the first time.
    “Sometimes, I think he’s too smart for us,” said Skelton. “Too… strong.”
    The machinery of Pike’s body strained beneath his grey trench coat and he turned to face Skelton. Cold rage glowed in his eyes. He was alive once more. He took a step towards his partner, towering over him. Skelton swallowed the wonderful dread in his throat but there was nothing he could do to prevent the hot stiffening at his groin. Pike’s eyes, the headlamps of some killer automaton, blazed with hate.
    “Gordon Black’s life will be a short one,” he said in a monotone. “We’re getting closer all the time. And he’ll pay, Skelton. We’ll make him pay. For all of this.”
    Skelton’s pulse beat thick and heavy at his neck. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead. As much as he adored the lethal