The Stolen Child
Authors: Peter Brunton
Tags: #young adult, #crossover, #teen, #supernatural, #fantasy, #adventure, #steampunk, #urban, #horror, #female protagonist, #dark
The Stolen Child
Book 1 of the Exiles series
By Peter Brunton
Brain Dead Publications
2015
Copyright © 2015 Peter Brunton
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Full license terms can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode
This e-book has been supplied without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software so that you may freely enjoy it on your personal devices, and share it with others. You are free to reproduce and modify this work for any non-commercial use so long as you properly attribute the original author.
To Mum and Dad.
For everything.
“Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters, and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.”
From
The Stolen Child –
William Butler Yeats
Table of Contents
Chapter 14 – Conversations 195
This book was a long time in the making. It took a lot of work, not only to find the story I wanted to tell, but also to become the kind of person who was capable of telling it.
I will never be able to recount every single person who has helped in some way to make this a reality. Just know that I am grateful to every one of you;
to my incredible family and friends,
to every person who has ever offered a suggestion or an encouragement, to everyone who read a draft or let me bounce ideas off of them, to everyone who followed my blog and 'liked' my story as I shared it online, to everyone who in some small way encouraged me... Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
With that being said, three people deserve special mention, for being with me every step of this journey, pushing me to do more, to do better, and never letting me give up.
Frankie, Amanda, and Katie, the three of you have been a constant source of encouragement and strength, and it was because of you that I pushed myself to tell the very best version of this story that I could. Thank you for everything.
Book 2 is coming, I promise.
The city was empty
.
She wandered through silent streets, s
trangely lonely without the press of bodies, the sound of engines and the smell of exhaust fumes hanging over every
intersection
. She passed by shops and cafés, their doors open, their signs lit, but with
no one
inside. As she walked, her fingertips traced a pattern on the walls and railings that she followed at each turning; a thin line of rust, like a trail laid out for her. She wondered who could have left it there, seeming so natural, yet
so
purposeful. The trail passed over iron, stone and wood alike, not seeming to care for its own impossibility. It simply was, almost as if it had sprung into being for her alone to find.
She followed the trail as the sky above turned ashen grey with clouds and the wind picked up. She heard a lone bird's distant cries, but apart from the wind they were the only sound. One tiny voice in the
empty
city.
She walked on, following the trail of rust. Somewhere in the back of her head she
felt
sure that the streets she followed weren't quite connected up right.
O
ne moment she was on a road in Tottenham, then she turned a corner into Elephant & Castle, then another side-street that lead her out onto Tuffnell Park Road. The
London
in her dream was not the
London
she knew, but it was familiar all the same, and she became increasingly sure that her impossible path was leading her inexorably closer to the heart of the city.
At last she turned a corner and found herself faced with an ancient red-brick archway, stained black with a century of smoke and covered by a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates. The trail lead past the gates and into the deep shadow of the
tunnel
.
Again she heard a bird
's
cry, this time quite close. She looked up and saw a raven perched atop a low wall. It cawed again and cocked its head to peer at her with one glossy black bead of an eye. She
saw herself
reflected there; a tiny figure, lost in her tattered white hooded jacket and patchwork jeans. A slim face,
with
the skin pale
and
pulled tight
to the bones,
peered out at her from under a nest of tangled blonde hair that spilled out over her shoulders.
The raven danced back a step and turned to look at the gate. She looked as well, reaching out to feel the rough texture of the iron. As her fingers brushed the metal she saw tiny patches of rust
form
.
They began
to grow, eating into the metal, spreading like frost on a window-pane. The heavy iron began to shrivel, staining red and crumbling away into tiny flakes,
with a sound like dry paper, or dead leaves crunching underfoot
. Instead of falling, the flakes of rust wafted gently upwards as if on a warm breeze, though the air was cold and still. The gate continued to dissolve, flaking away a few inches at a time, the cloud of rusted metal drifting upward into the grey sky.
With a loud cry the raven abandoned its wall and landed heavily on her shoulder.
Talons
dug into her jacket, but
to her surprise
she felt no pain.
She had the curious impression that it had come to protect her, though from what, she wasn't sure.
The last fragments of the gateway dissolved and s
he descended into the darkness of the tunnel, only the touch of her fingers against the wall to guide her through the gloom. She seemed to walk for a long time without any sound other than the slight ruffling of the bird's feathers against her hair.
She emerged onto a street she did not know, but a
glance upwards told her exactly where she was. The gleaming sharpness of the Shard
Building
rose above her.
It was
like
a perfect blade of glass thrusting into the sky, as if it had somehow pierced the heart of the city and pushed out through the other side.
As she stared up at the tower of glass
and steel
, she saw lines of rust begin to crawl up the edges of the angular shape, dark red streaks that rose to the very tip of the blade.
Against the
shining
mirror
of the glass, the rust looked like dried blood
.
A
ll around her the buildings that
lined the streets
began
to dissolve into flakes of rust. Clouds of rusted metal drifted upwards into the sky as
brick and concrete
crumbled. Cracks lined the pavement, and twist
ing oak roots
began to push up between the slabs. Only the Shard remained, the panes of glass crumbling away to reveal bright shining steel underneath, a knife blade poised to carve open the grey clouds overhead.
A steady drum roll brought Rachael to her senses. Rain hammered against the roof of the cardboard box which
had
sheltered her, as the chill of the morning air worked its way into her bones. She pulled her jacket tighter around herself and tucked her knees to her chin. Breathing hard into the small space that she had made between her legs and her belly, she tried to curl herself around the pocket of warm air that formed there.
Her thoughts were a jumble, the fading ghosts of the dream still dancing through her head like scraps of paper caught on a breeze.
Hammered down to nothing by the rain,
the sides of the box gave way and her shelter collapsed around her.
S
he pushed aside the so
dden
cardboard and shook off the rainwater. Digging in
to
the trash pile by her bed, she pulled out a
threadbare old backpack
and slung it across her shoulders. She brought her hood up, pulled the drawstrings tight and hunched up against the sharp chill in the wind as she stepped out
of the alleyway
.
A flock of umbrellas drifted through the streets. Rain hammered at the fabric in a constant
rhythm
, adding another layer to the swelling sound of the city awakening. Her fingers itched and her muscles ached with the night's sleep and the cold air.
Glancing up at the buildings around her, keen eyes began to pick out a line. Then she tightened the straps on her backpack
, set her head down and
started to run
.
She wove between the crowd, vaulted the railing that bordered the road and
darted out
through the traffic
as horns blared and brakes squealed. The far railing vanished beneath her feet, and then she was leaping up to catch the lip of a windowsill.
Toes dug into
cracks in the brickwork, pushed her up to swing across to a drainpipe, and then she was scrambling upwards, ignoring the upturned faces below, ignoring the shouted complaints and muttered curses.
She pulled herself up onto an open rooftop
and
fell into a sprint.
R
ain hammered down, but on the tar paper roofs her grip was
sure
. The air always seemed clearer up above the streets as she moved from roof
top
to roof
top
, dropping down into
narrow roads
,
mantling
low walls, and scrambling up buildings to reach the hidden routes that kept her free of the crush and the press of London.
She didn't know where she was going to. She never did when she ran. It didn't matter. All that mattered was running, the thrill of every jump nearly missed, the terror in every slippery step. The feel of the wind, as if she might take flight. When she ran, nothing mattered. When she ran, she was free.
When the coldness had finally left her body and her legs began to tire, she settled down on a low wall over-looking the entrance to a subway station. Her stomach was a knot of pain, twisted tight around nothing. She hadn't eaten
since yesterday morning
.
Barely ten yards away a ragged man with a filthy beard, dressed in the remains of a blue puffer-jacket, had rolled out a mat of damp cardboard and laid a hat down for loose change. For a moment she thought of joining him. She'd heard from some of the vagrants that you could make good money in the right places. But then the police would come, as they always did. For men like him it meant little enough. They made their carefully prepared excuses as they hid their carefully prepared signs. Then they packed up, moved on, and found another spot to beg. Outsmarting the law began to look like an elaborate game, raw desperation hidden away beneath a kind of ragged pride.
