No Shelter from Darkness Read Online Free Page A

all nurses seemed to carry onto the kitchen table where Beth had begun chopping vegetables. She made sure to say “hello” to them all and to thank Beth for her hard work, before heading back into the sitting room. Beth watched as she bent down beside Mary. “How are you?” she asked.
    Mary looked sheepishly at Lynne and shrugged.
    â€œI know it's hard, but if you ever need to talk …” Beth's mother laid her hand on Mary's. “It'll never replace your own house, but you can call this home for as long as you want.”
    Beth stopped chopping, frozen at the realization, while her mother stood and then disappeared upstairs. It was inevitable that Mary would be staying with them; they were the only family she had now. But Beth hadn't yet considered the loss of her own privacy.
    Theirs was a typical terraced house; it had three bedrooms and a toilet upstairs, while downstairs consisted of the sitting room (previously two small parlors), the kitchen behind that, and the scullery tacked onto the end. The Wades had moved to Bethnal Green when Beth was three, their accents sounding posh beside the cockney of East London. Unlike many families in the neighborhood, they didn't need to share their house with another family to make ends meet. As such, Beth and Oliver had their own rooms.
    Beth had enough floor space in hers for a guest, and it seemed an obvious choice. But while she felt sorry for Mary, she was certain that sharing a room with her wouldn't do either of them any good.
    As if to remind her why alone time was particularly precious, Beth's lower abdomen painfully tightened with another cramp. Shelaid the knife down on the board and leaned on the table, placed her left palm over her pelvis and breathed deeply. It didn't help, but it felt like it should have.
    Then she sniffed the air.
    There was a new smell. Barely noticeable, but it was there. It was familiar, but not instantly recognizable. The closest thing she could associate it with was rusted metal, and she glanced around but saw no immediate culprit. Maybe it wafted in from outside , she thought, through one of the blanketed windows? But as quickly as it had drifted in, it disappeared. In its place Beth's pain came back to the fore, accompanied by a new sensation: dampness. Her head dropped and she looked at the floor, at what she determined to be the source of the phantom scent.
    There, between her feet, was a single red dot.
    Blood.

TWO
    UNTIL THREE DAYS AGO, Mary had lived her whole life at number ten Moravian Street. She'd even stayed home with her mother and father when war was first declared, instead of vanishing off into the countryside with what seemed like every other child in London … except Beth. She'd stayed too, which wouldn't have been unusual if not for the fact that Oliver had been evacuated. Not that it mattered. Within months, half of those who had gone were back—Beth's brother among them. With a stigma attached when the threat from overseas turned real and evacuations took place again, fewer children left. Oliver stayed that time; she could only guess that he didn't want to repeat his previous experience. But by then, Mary's friendship with Beth had ended.
    With a battered tin lunchbox in her hand and a tattered gray gas-mask box hanging from her neck, Mary followed the mismatched sister and brother as they walked and talked up Royston Street. It was Wednesday for them and everyone else, but it felt like Monday to her. This time yesterday, she'd been picking out the cleanest of the clothes that had been salvaged from her home before preparing to bury her mother. It had been a small, quick and quiet service, typical of so many since the bombs started falling. The few neighbors able to come joined the Wades and gathered around the plot in which her mother was laid to rest, alongside her fallen father. Mrs. Wade, who'd been a good friend to her mother, sniffed back tears and tried to comfort her, but Mary felt cold