The Kingdom of Kevin Malone Read Online Free Page B

a low voice. “It will make way for you. Things weren’t supposed to be like this. I wanted to show you around a little, let you see what’s at stake—I didn’t know the Bone Men were waking here.”
    Somebody was, and more than waking. One wing of the shutters splintered under a shivering blow, and I got a look through the gap into the howling darkness outside. I could just make out a nightmare figure with tattered clothing whipping around the white rails of its arms and ribs.
    There was a voice, too, distant and crackling faintly like a very bad phone connection. Inside the static I could hear words: “Strangers, you knocked on our rooftops. We’ve come to invite you in.”
    I thought of my heels thudding on the mosaic stones of the Battle Path and my knees turned to jelly.
    Kevin shoved me inside the fireplace and reached past me with his glowing fist so that light fell on the sooty wall behind me. “There’s one of the Great Ways in here. It’ll take you to an arch and out.”
    â€œThen why didn’t Sebbian use it?” I couldn’t stop seeing the harper’s face in my mind’s eye.
    â€œThe Great Ways don’t carry common folk,” Kevin said curtly. “But they’ll take you, with the rose pin to light your path.”
    In the other room, white stick fingers clicked on the bar he’d set across the window opening. The static voice spoke inside the wind: “If you won’t come visit us, then we’ll visit you. We’ll drink ash wine together.”
    Kevin rapped the hearth wall with the knuckles of his illuminated fist, scattering velvety soot from the bricks. A section of the wall swung away.
    â€œYou wanted to go home—go! If the Bone Men get you, that’s the end. You have to be able to move back and forth, because I can’t anymore.”
    I gaped at him. Back and forth? I was supposed to come back here? In the other room, the door shuddered under a thunderous impact and another piece of planking clattered onto the floor.
    â€œIt won’t be like this next time,” Kevin shouted. The rushing noise and static filled the air now. He grabbed my shoulders and turned me. “Now go, go on.”
    â€œ Where? ” I said, pulling back from the inky opening in the wall. It looked like the mouth of a bottomless pit.
    â€œFollow the passage,” he said in my ear, “to the Inscope Arch. You can go home through there. Then you’ll be able to use any arch but Willowdell to return to the Fayre Farre, so long as you have that little brooch with you. You’ll come back, Amy—the prophecy speaks of you. Sebbian said so. That’s why the pin sought you out for me today. You’ve a part to play here; you’re needed. Swear you’ll come back.”
    A racket of hammering broke out on the roof. “God,” I said, “are you crazy? ”
    He said, “I gave you your brooch back, didn’t I?”
    â€œWho asked you to steal it in the first place?” I yelled.
    The whole building began to rattle like a giant snare drum played by a maniac.
    â€œDamn it, GO!” Kevin shoved me into the passage and the stone wall crashed shut behind me.
    The barrage of outside noise was cut off completely. Silence and darkness made my head spin. I have never seen blackness so black or heard silence so thick. I was buried alive and alone, except for the faint glow of the rhinestone brooch.
    I fumbled it free and held it up, swinging my skates by their laces in my other hand as a sort of weapon, I guess. The gleam of the pin lit up a squarish passage with walls of rough-cut black rock running straight away in front of me. Better that than a toast with the Bone Men in ash wine, whatever that was.
    I padded down the stone passage a little way, hearing only the whisper of my own breathing and the soft brush of my matted socks on the hard floor. What was lurking just past the faint beam of