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

fighting skills as you did to catching me out with your badly timed fuck-wittery, you may still be able to use binoculars, spectacles and goggles. Instead you have consigned yourself to a life of monocles, telescopes and squinting, that somehow succeeds in making you seem far less intelligent than you actually are, which in turn, is far less intelligent than you needed to be to hang on to both eyes IN THE FUCKING FIRST PLACE.’
    Mckeever looked down and hauled Newton by his feet across the cold floor, then spoke.
    ‘I know I am not as smart as you, I’m not even as fast as you, but you know when it comes to flying…’
    ‘Sssssh!’ Croel pressed a finger to his lips and pointed at the sign.

    Croel watched Mckeever drag Newton around the admissions desk and the rest of the way across the empty main floor. Newton’s head was tilted back, like he had died looking up and as his head bumped and scraped along the abrasive floor, his eyes fixed on Croel. Croel stared right back looking for some flicker of accusation or sorrow or possibly some tattered remnant of death itself, but saw nothing. Newton’s head thud-whacked on the heavy edge of each of the twelve stairs, as Mckeever continued to pull him, feet first, down towards the archive department in the basement. Only when Mckeever reached a door he could not negotiate with his rump, did Croel once again offer his assistance, which was begrudgingly accepted with a perfunctory grunt. They dropped Newton on the floor.         
    Some minutes had passed without a word or glance exchanged between them.
    ‘We have to prepare him like they said,’ said Croel.
    Mckeever winced and held his hand up to where his eye used to be.
    ‘Cocksucking piece of shit mother fucker.’ He spat heavily into Newton’s face then volleyed him in the ribs. Air escaped from Newton’s punctured lung and bubbled in his stretched throat. It sounded like something gurgling up through a plughole.
    ‘That was not quite what I had in mind but he had that coming, I suppose.’
    They hefted Newton up onto a low, fat bookcase then Mckeever stomped out of the room, swearing and shouting something to do with more painkillers as he went.
    Croel pulled up a plastic chair, swept some dust from it and sat down facing Newton.
    ‘You hurt him, you hurt us.’ He idly kicked a foot at Newton’s head, ‘Newt.’
    Croel spat the name out like it was something disgusting he had failed at trying to chew. ‘We are a unit, a package; an all singing all dancing spanner in the works of life and you nearly ended our partnership. Put an end to us,’ he shook his head. ‘If that knife had been thrust on a slightly more horizontal plane…’ He left the sentence unfinished, as though that would leave the sentiment it was trying to capture incomplete too.
    ‘And now here you are, covered in sputum and lying on your back on a dusty library bookcase, all deaf and dead and discovering one inescapable truth, and there are not many of them in life, or death, I hasten to add. It is a truth you should heed and take with you into the afterlife, a mantra on your rotting, greying slack lips.’ He leaned closer, placing his mouth next to Newton’s blood covered ear and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘You don’t fuck with us.’
    Croel stood.
    His expression twisted, his face flooded with black rage. Malice and hatred crackled like electricity, charging the air with negative energy and blackening the sky. He kicked the plastic chair and sent it careening into one of the empty filing cabinets with a massive clatter.
    ‘You do NOT fuck with us.’
    The night pressed at the high, grimy windows of the archive room and the falling moon tried to shove its way inside, like an uninvited guest. Sombre, entrenched shadows settled across Newton’s face where he lay atop low squat shelves that had once housed outsized volumes A to C, on a bed of his own splayed wings.

    Croel turned away, spat, then went to fetch the bolt