by Lorna Reid
Rise of the Reaper
The Broken Lands:
Book One
◊
Lorna Reid
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Thank You For Reading Rise of the Reaper!
Other Books by Lorna Reid
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Author
Chapter 1
◊
BLOOD EXPLODED EVERYWHERE AND Leo hit the ground, rolling on his schoolbag while screaming and clutching his nose. Danny stared down at him, drinking in the blood, the overplayed writhing, and the satisfying stream of tears from screwed-up eyes. He had mere moments in which to savour it all before he drew attention, overriding the distraction of the smoke currently drifting from the windows of the evacuated school science lab nearby.
‘I’ve told you before. Shut your fucking mouth about my mother,’ Danny growled as a crowd of Leo’s lackeys started to mill around their friend, unsure what to do, but loathe to go anywhere near Danny.
‘You’re a fucking psycho, Stone,’ spat one girl, trying to help Leo up without getting any blood on her shirt. ‘Such a freak.’ There was a murmur of consent among the other sheep, who seemed emboldened by her outburst. Danny snorted and wiped his hand down the side of his school blazer. So much for a quiet last day. He leaned against the wall of the science block and stared out over the playing field, wishing he were anywhere else.
‘What do you expect from someone whose dad writes shitty horror books for a living instead of having a real job,’ piped up someone who was, conveniently, Danny noted, at the back of the flesh-scrum.
‘And hangs around with that bloke, that so-called “friend” of his, all the time,’ sniggered someone else. Danny’s cheeks prickled with anger. No one spoke badly of Thom. He took a step forward. Several people stepped back.
‘Jealous?’ he snapped. ‘Is your dad pissed off because he’s cruising for the arse your mum won’t give him?’ His hands balled again, and another couple of students shuffled back, while the last boy to speak went beet-red.
‘You’re a fucking mental case, Stone.’ Leo was sitting clutching his streaming nose, his snarl muffled by bloody hands. ‘My dad’s on the PTA. He’ll get you expelled.’
Danny laughed, letting the adrenalin that was now jangling through his limbs burst out. That was supposed to be a threat? ‘Tosser,’ he muttered. He’d love nothing more than to hang out at home with his dad, playing games together, or lounging quietly in his dad’s office, reading comics while his father wrote. He turned to walk away when a familiar voice roared over the noise of the thirty or so students milling around outside the lab’s fire door.
‘Stone.’ Mr Larch, fire extinguisher in hand, lumbered along the path that hugged the side of the science block and wheezed to a halt, his grey comb-over starting to slip down over his eyes. Danny eyed the black streaks on his lab coat. He’d likely get the blame for the fire, which pissed him off. For once, it hadn’t been him.
‘He hit me, Mr Larch. I wasn’t doing anything,’ Leo said, aiming a shaky finger and a sly eye in Danny’s direction.
All Danny could think about was what it would be like to bite the finger off and spit it in Leo’s face; he barely heard Larch start his tirade.
‘… and this is the last time I’ll tolerate this from you, boy. I’m sick of the sight of you. Stand over there,’ he barked.
Danny meandered along the path to the corner of the science block – slowly enough that he could feel Larch’s eyes carving hate into his back – and slouched against the wall. He examined his fingernails and watched out the corner of his eye as Larch hauled Leo up off the ground and examined his nose.
‘You going for a detention record? You know this is only the end of our first year – you should pace yourself.’ Danny looked up and saw Katrina leaning against one of the pillars supporting the awning above the cracked path. She had on the black eyeliner she’d been experimenting with recently, that she’d worn to his house a few days before. It made her dark eyes stand out against skin that was almost too pale – he liked it; it set her apart from the other glittery giggle-bitch idiots in the school. His eyes flicked down over her familiar chunky black boots, which peeped out from frayed trouser hems. She was one of the few people he could tolerate – perhaps because, in her own way, she was as much an outsider as him.
‘End of term and a half day today, so I don’t care.’ He went back to picking out his nails. The waves of hostility rippling in his direction from Leo’s cronies didn’t bother him – they never did – but he still liked the comfort of having Katrina there. She was a short, moody dark-light in his lonely, closed-in world.
He felt a brief stab of guilt at having spent most of the other evening in his room, ignoring her while she read on the sofa, but shoved it away. That day he’d seen two children on the way home from school playing with a pair of whirling silvery windmills on sticks, and had spent the evening looking through photos of his mother and him – especially the ones with the windmills. The same windmills that had been pinned to the wall above his bed since she’d vanished. He hadn’t wanted Katrina to see him cry, even if she understood.
*
Katrina sighed inwardly as Danny began the world’s most disinterested examination of his fingernails. He was a hard person to stay friends with – if you could still call it that. Ever since his mother had gone missing, he barely registered anyone’s existence outside his father, Peter, and Peter’s best friend, Thom.
The other evening, while her mother and Peter had talked and played console games, Danny had abandoned her, leaving her to read her comics on the sofa while he skulked in his room, but then it was nothing new. Not she, Russell, or even Poppy could drag more than a few begrudged words out of Danny anymore.
Katrina’s gaze travelled over Danny’s messy brown hair, the messenger bag adorned with Tipp-Exed cocks, boobs, swords, and what looked like windmills, and then over his scuffed boots.
She gave in to her curiosity. ‘What did you do this time?’
His grey eyes flickered with confusion, and then realisation dawned. ‘Oh that. Wasn’t me. Leo and one of his scabby shitheads were messing about with a Bunsen burner.’ He followed her gaze to the smear of blood on his hand and then to Leo, who was ranting at Mr Larch and gesturing in Danny’s direction.
Danny drew a breath and met her eyes a moment before returning to study his feet. ‘He said stuff about Mum. Said that Dad and I were such losers that no wonder she left.’ Katrina watched him swallow his emotions, watched them burn all the way down his twitching throat. He leaned back and gouged the rough red brick until his fingertips went white. ‘You know she—’
‘I
know. You’ve said before, and we all know – she didn’t leave,’ Katrina said, knowing he craved the reassurance. ‘I know she went missing.’ She knew all too well. She’d seen the pain burn in his eyes for the last five years, since his mother had vanished; she’d seen the recluse Danny had become, from the mischievous childhood friend that he’d always been. Despite having grown up together, she didn’t know what to say anymore. To give up on him as a friend, even despite his rages and bad moods, seemed like a betrayal somehow, so she remained. They all did.
‘I’d have hit him too,’ she said. ‘He deserves it. They say stuff about my mum, too, you know.’ Danny looked at her and she looked away. ‘They say she’s a slut, she’s sleeping with your dad, or Thom, or that her photography business is a front for a porn ring.’ She had to stop. The things they said about her she could just about handle, but the comments about her mum fizzled like acid in the blood. It must have shown on her face because Danny spoke up.
‘It isn’t, is it? A porn ring? I’ll come over more often.’
Katrina looked up in time to catch a rare grin before it faded behind his blank mask. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘She charges your dad fifty quid an hour to play Xbox with him. He’s a sadist – likes getting his arsed kicked.’
Another grin. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? Did Poppy have some sixth sense that something gossip-worthy was happening?’ he said.
Katrina giggled. ‘Knowing Poppy, she probably already knows. And no.’ She fished a note from her pocket and a slip of orange paper escaped along with it and fluttered to the ground.
‘Detention on the last day? Hypocrite,’ he said as she scrabbled to retrieve it. ‘What for?’
‘Mrs White, in the kitchen, with the food dye,’ she said. ‘Lucy James was talking crap about me; Toby Manners said she gobbed in my cake mix while I was out of the room. Don’t know if she did.’ She shrugged. Danny shook his head and his eyes narrowed as he stared down at his boots. ‘Anyway, while they were perving over the boys’ PE group in the quad, I put black food dye in her cake mix. It looked vile when it came out of the oven.’
Katrina felt herself blush. She’d never done anything like it before – this sort of thing was more Danny’s territory; he didn’t give a damn about stuff like that, but she’d been terrified. Still, she was oddly proud in a way, despite the trouble it had landed her in. Even the smell coming from the lab and the smirking looks at her and Danny from several clusters of whispering students couldn’t dampen the exhilaration.
‘Good for you,’ he said in his quiet voice. ‘Got a feeling I’ll be joining you.’ She looked over to see Larch striding toward them.
‘Heartly, what are you doing out of class?’ he demanded. She stuffed the detention slip away and held out the note she’d been given by Mrs White – an errand to get her out of the classroom. It was snatched away.
He tucked his mustard tie into his belt. ‘Get back to where you should be. And you. You can take this letter to your head of year.’ He thrust a hastily scrawled note at Danny. ‘He can deal with you. Again. You’re thankfully not my problem until next year, now.’ He stomped back down the path and rescued the fire extinguisher from two boys who were using the hose as a mock penis and chasing a group of screaming girls. Together, Danny and Katrina left the shouting behind and trailed toward the main school building.
*
Danny meandered past the decrepit art block, trailing his fingers over the weathered roughcast wall while skipping the rust stains from the old drainpipes and the handful of rotting, boarded-up windows that stood out like bad teeth among the panes around them. Somewhere inside, one of the remaining art teachers was shouting at someone. The whole building was a testament to the school’s attitude to anything creative, and Danny snorted to himself.
As he was about to peel away into the quad – a tarmacked area surrounded on all sides by ugly, squat buildings, and which was used for fire drills, PE, and break time – he spied a tiny red flower. It was struggling through the grass and weeds that had fought their way up between the path and the wall. He stooped to pick it and then sighed as he rolled the stem in his fingers.
What the fuck’s wrong with me? he thought. It reminded him of her. When Danny was little, he’d picked flowers obsessively and brought them home for his mother. He’d pick anything – he knew nothing about them, except that petals made it look like a flower; she never cared if he accidently brought her weeds.
He’d watch his mother’s face, see her eyes light up, and then help her find a vase, glass, jam jar – anything to put them in. He had lived for that smile. One time, his parents had nearly come to blows with the neighbours when Danny had scrambled over their wall and picked every one of their daffodils. His mother hadn’t cared; she had simply emptied everything she could out of the cupboards and lined every surface with pots, jugs, and bowls full of flowers. It was one of his favourite memories.
Danny turned the thing over in his hands as he walked, feeling his throat ache. He nearly bumped into Katrina, who had been waiting outside the textiles classroom for him to catch up.
‘Look.’ She nodded at the group of boys just back from a cross-country run.
He looked.
‘What?’
‘It’s Russell.’
*
Russell wheezed and gasped for air, feeling eyes on him from every corner and window in the quad. Perhaps worst of all were those of Mr Jones, burning into the back of his neck as he doubled over.
‘So nice of you to finally join the rest of us, Sherwood. Perhaps if you lost some weight it wouldn’t have taken you so long to get back here.’ The bastard spoke as loudly as possible, ensuring they were the focus of everyone’s attention, and Russell tried to hold back his rising anger.
He drew several long breaths, each one burning in his throat, and struggled upright, fighting the tightness in his chest. He knew that Jones would stretch this out as long as possible before letting him go and get his inhaler.
The man smiled around at his audience, clearly enjoying himself while winding up for his main performance. ‘Look at yourself, Sherwood. You can’t even manage a simple cross-country run. You held everyone back.’ He jabbed a finger at the watching PE group. Many were laughing or sniggering, but at least a few had the decency to look sympathetic.
‘Should have rung the dinner bell, that would have shifted you.’ He grinned again and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his stupidly tight designer shorts. ‘Instead, I had to push you most of the way back here. Lazy, useless lump,’ he sneered, momentarily dropping his voice like he always did when he thought that another member of staff might overhear his more poisonous abuse.
Russell’s anger began to bubble higher and higher the more his breathing improved. He watched spindly fingers play with a shiny whistle knotted to the end of a luxurious red cord that hung around the man’s neck.
Jones flicked the school badge, which was now adhered with sweat to Russell’s chest, and poked him in the shoulder. ‘You’re pathetic. Specimens like you are why sport in this country is in the doldrums. You’re the anti-sport. You’re sport’s enemy. Waste of flesh, and there’s certainly enough of that hanging off your useless skeleton,’ he snorted.
‘No wonder your miserable father lives on his own, managing a collection of sad little pictures. If I were your mother, I’d be too ashamed of you to have stayed, too. The less people like you in the country the better.’
Russell stopped breathing for a moment and the world went quiet, as though the sound had suddenly been snatched away. Blood sung in his ears and he soaked in the man’s enjoyment of his own cruelty. An angry calm washed over him before he exploded.
‘It’s fewer,’ he growled. The man blinked. Tiny, spiteful eyes looked momentarily confused.
‘You what?’
‘Fewer, not less, you moron.’ The silence seemed to suck the breath out of the entire quad. ‘Did you trade your few IQ points for some magic beans, or didn’t it occur to you that the s
o-called failures of anyone who doesn’t kiss your arse are more an indictment of your shitty teaching than anything else?’
The man’s mouth fell open, working flawlessly with his tan to complete his transition from human to goldfish.
‘You’re a callous, laughable spite-monger with pretensions of grandeur. Your pathetic little kingdom?’ Russell swept an arm around the quad. ‘Cracked, decaying, worthless. How apt.’ He wheezed but forced the words out. ‘If the rest of the staff didn’t enjoy laughing at you behind your back about your sad, tight-fitting sports gear, failed football career, and dyed hair, you’d probably be fired.’
As soon as Russell stopped, fear began to gnaw at the fringes of his insides, but the wall of exhilaration was just about keeping it at bay. Just. Through his haze, he could hear distant applause and what sounded like Danny’s laugh, but it all seemed far away.
Jones had turned a violent shade of purple. To cover his shock and buy time in which to seize his balance, he spun around to scream at the snickering class behind him, who piled inside the changing rooms, gabbling and laughing. Russell hardly noticed them.
Jones turned back to him, fists tightly balled – clearly itching to use them. His eyes flickered, searching for some elusive face-saving remark or threat, his shiny teeth gritted tightly.
‘Detention, Sherwood!’ he screamed. ‘Fucking detention. Get inside, get out of my sight. You … you’re useless … you. Just get inside.’ He stormed away to the equipment store, leaving Russell standing alone. A hand smacked the back of his shoulder and he turned in a daze to see Danny wander past, giving him a rare grin. Katrina’s flash of a smile made him soar.
