Collision by Emma L. Adams

Author:Emma L. Adams [Adams, Emma L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 27265881
Published: 2015-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

10

Kay

None of us spoke as we left the Passages and walked back to Central. Raj and Iriel had stayed long enough to see the first body. Ada walked apart from the group, not speaking to anyone. And try as I might to block it out, the image of the massacre was burned into my brain.

And that symbol. I could think of two possibilities, and neither meant good news.

First things first. We had to tell Ms Weston what we’d found out. And we needed to get hold of another tracker.

Never mind those carvings or Kevar’s end-of-days prophecies. They had nothing to do with the here and now. They sure as hell didn’t seem to have anything to do with the brutal slaughter of a hundred travellers. No. The monster, the killer, wasn’t some vague myth. The gods were real, and present in Vey-Xanetha.

Magic surged, without warning, for the second time since we’d left the Passages. Must be acting up again. The swarming crowd in Central’s entrance hall confirmed my suspicions. It looked as though every offworlder in London had come to complain to the Alliance. A group of claw-footed men like Avar had even bought a flock of multi-coloured birds, which flew around shrieking and shedding feathers over the crowd.

Ada flicked one out of her hair, staring. “Wow.”

She appeared a little less dazed, at least. But I wished she’d stayed behind the door. Stupid, considering I knew full well she’d been helping people escape from war-torn worlds over half her life—but one look at her face and I knew she’d never seen anything like that close-up before.

Back to Ms Weston’s office. She was less snappish with us than earlier, though I gathered from hearing Markos talking to a couple of novices that she’d taken her rage out on the unlucky guards who’d let the girls with the griffin into the entrance hall. Turned out they’d been new recruits and had panicked at the sight of the giant eagle-lion hybrid, and had no chance to reconsider the idiocy of letting it into Central before they’d been called into the Passages.

Still didn’t mean they weren’t morons.

Careful, I thought. How much to tell her? I decided against pushing my luck any further, and explained everything we’d heard, both in the town and from Mathran and Avar at the base. But I left out how I’d used magic to track the slaughtered merchants.

My suspicion that the deities were linked to the myth of the world coming to another cataclysm earned me raised eyebrows from Ms Weston.

“You’d put stock in superstitions?”

Exactly what I thought she’d say. I’d be the same, if I hadn’t seen the magic with my own eyes and known Vey-Xanetha didn’t operate on the rules we were used to.

“It’s one possibility,” I said—after all, most superstitions had some basis in reality, however distant.

“It fits with what we’ve heard,” said Ada. She hadn’t expressed an opinion on my theory about the deity being involved in the merchants’ deaths until now, and to be honest, I half-thought she’d dismiss it as superstition, too.

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