Deadweather and Sunrise Read Online Free Page A

You filthed up your best shirt! Daddy’s going to smack you for that.”
    I opened my mouth to answer and tasted blood. As my sister stepped over me into the carriage, I put my hand to my lip and found a pretty good cut. It was either from Adonis’s fist or a shard of biscuit. I wasn’t sure which.
    “Bleed down the front, he’ll smack you twice.” Percy stood over me as he said this, and little wet gobs of my stolen breakfast sprayed from his lips onto my forehead. Then he turned, blotting out the sky over my head with his big wide butt until he squeezed himself through the carriage door and into the seat next to Venus.
    I had just enough time to wipe the blood with my handkerchief, dust off as best I could, and take the seat next to Adonis before Dad showed up on the porch.
    He was in his best coat—the blue velvet one with the tails—and the bulges on either hip meant he’d strapped on his pistol belt, too.
    That was another sign, not like we needed any, that this was an unusual trip. When we went to Sunrise Island for holidays, he always wore the coat. When he had business to do, either there or down in Port Scratch, he wore the pistols. I’d never seen him wear both at once.
    As I chewed this over—
why get all dressed up to shoot somebody?
—Percy pulled the door shut, and the carriage shuddered as Dad swung himself up onto the front seat. Then Stumpy must have reined the horses, because we lurched forward, pulling away from the only home I’d ever had.
    If I’d known then how long it’d be until I saw it again, I might have turned for another look—at the two upstairs windows, peering out from under the eaves like the eyes of some fat, sleepy giant, and the big wraparound porch with the shark’s jaws mounted over the door. It’s funny, but I wound up missing those jaws over the days to come. They made me feel safe, I think. You just knew no one was going to come after you in a house with teeth like that. No one from the outside, anyway.
    The road from the house took us through the lower orchard. The ugly fruit trees were fogged in pretty heavy, and as we bounced down the hill, a few pirates drifted out of the haze to watch us pass. In the misty half-light, they looked like silhouettes of ripped-up paper dolls—half a leg missing here, most of an arm there, a hunk of one skull gone.
    The one missing a hunk of skull was Mung. Seeing me in the carriage window as we passed, he gave me a little wink, and I managed a kind of two-fingered wave back without the others noticing and giving me trouble. Mung had worked for Dad forever, couldn’t talk (probably because of his missing slice of brain), and was nicer to me than anybody. When I was little, we played catch. We’d toss an ugly fruit back and forth, pretending it was a ball, until one day Dad caught us doing it and smacked us both for wasting time. That pretty much turned us both off sports, but I still liked Mung a lot.
    Percy, jolted into action by a nasty bump in the road, announced, “Time for lessons, children.”
    Adonis rolled his eyes, and Venus pushed out her bottom lip in a pout. “But, Percy! We’re traveling.”
    “Nonsense. Learning never stops, not for travel, not for nothing.”
    He said it with a straight face, even though we all knew the “learning” was just for Dad’s benefit, in case he was listening from up in front.
    “Now tell me: what makes fog?”
    No one answered.
    “No? Nobody? Very well. I’ll tell you.” Percy raised a stubby finger, then paused dramatically. He always did that when he answered his own questions. To anyone who didn’t know him, the pause made it seem like he was emphasizing how important the lesson was. But the truth was he needed the pause to give himself time to make up an answer.
    “Volcanic activity. The same forces that make the volcano smoke… seep up from the ground in the night, and—”
    “Why don’t it stink?” Sometimes, Percy’s facts were so outlandish they even made Adonis