Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller Read Online Free Page A

watched it fly at his neck.
    Only it didn’t.
    My hand was empty.
    I looked down to see the knife I had dropped protruding from under one of the seats at my side.
    He ducked as if a missile had been thrown and, head down, used his forward momentum, and my stupor, to rush me.
    Amber light filled the room and every action seemed swathed in molasses, seconds took evolutionary aeons and I noticed every minute detail. I saw his eyes were wide. Spittle flew from his curled lips and his lank, greasy hair sprang to life, a nest of black oily vipers, as he hurled himself at me. I watched as I spat chewed candied peanuts into the keening whites of his eyes, watched myself pull the syringe from my leg, saw me pushing through his outstretched arms to plunge the hypodermic up into the dirty, tender, taught, unshaven mile of skin between the thyroid cartilage of his larynx and chin. I watched him try to scream then gurgle, drop his other club, fall to his knees and begin to scratch at his own throat, his tongue pinned to the floor of his mouth by the bloody needle. I saw my own front kick to his throat. It connected with the end of the hypodermic. Or maybe it was his jaw. He crumpled to the floor.
    I looked around again but could not see the last man. I could not see anything. Faces span into a pink mass, noise swelled and the amber light pulsed as if it were the room’s heartbeat.
    Then everything started to fade, spiral down into grey. The tunnel I was looking through tightened to a miniscule aperture. I squinted through the small hole trying to find a way back into the world. I felt the littered floor rushing to meet me and I wondered why it was standing up.
    ‘Pan!’ I shouted into the waterfall of noise.
    I wondered where the last man was, if he had reached her. Then I felt clammy hands around my throat.

    Quiet rushed up to meet the darkness. They collided like two black velvet pillows and smothered me.

As there is time eternal for fear and war,
    So is there warmth at my brother’s door.
    Book One: The Nimbus Foundation Principles

CHAPTER 3
     
    ‘How’s it look?’ Winced Mckeever.
    ‘Unsightly,’ said Croel looking into Mckeever’s bloody eye socket, stifling a laugh.
    ‘There is nothing funny about it. The painkillers are wearing off.’
    ‘Shame, you are less talkative when you are drugged up.’
    ‘I swear one day I am...’
    ‘You are not the only one with more holes than you started with.’ Croel tilted his chin down to get a better view of his shoulder wound, the bolt now removed and then looked up again, unsure it was comparable after all.
    ‘Mckeever, let’s get this…’ he paused to look at Newton's body ‘ah, dead thing inside so we can sort our wounds out.’
    Holding Newton’s legs, Mckeever walked backwards, using his considerable bulk to push the large double doors open as he went. Croel supported Newton’s upper body weight with two hands, hooked under Newton’s armpits and followed his colleague into the drafty entrance hall of the abandoned library. Their efforts, grunts and shuffling footfalls echoed off the high ceiling and cracked, mosaic tiled floor. There had once been an inscription set within the floor’s mosaic, proffering some sagely incantation, no doubt about the relevance and reverence of the written word, but it had long since been eroded by the passing of time and far too many heavily shod feet.
    And dragged bodies.
    ‘Do you know, it will soon be five years we have lived here in this, our Nimbus Edgelands hole? This forgotten realm of book lending and….’
    ‘Ssssh!’ said Mckeever.
    ‘What? What is it?’ said Croel.
    Mckeever used a meaty hand to point to a warped, wooden sign hanging by two rusty chains from the centre of the library’s domed ceiling that read ‘Quiet Please’.
    ‘Got you again.’
    Croel heaved a dramatic sigh and dropped Newton’s head with an unceremonious smack onto the grubby floor.
    ‘Mckeever, if you devoted as much time to honing your