Knights of the Borrowed Dark by Dave Rudden

Author:Dave Rudden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

MOMENTS. LITTLE SCRAPS of moments and Denizen a piece of them, drifting.

Hands gathering him up off the pavement, a spot of blood falling from his nose.

“Don’t.”

He didn’t know who was speaking.

“Don’t be dead.”

There was blood on his hands too. Where had all of it come from?

Denizen had a vague sense of motion—of coiled power somewhere close by, the roaring of a great beast—but at least it was warm. He would have liked to stay there, feeling the vibration of the leather on his face, but suddenly hands were dragging him again out into the cold.

There was an arm under his shoulders. His feet scraped along the floor.

“Home now, Denizen. You’re home. Come on. Don’t fall asleep. You have to—”

And then there were blankets over him. A pillow against his back. Denizen blinked. Someone was staring down at him, cold and imperious, eyes as gray as his.

“Are you insane?”

Denizen could barely keep his head up. A handkerchief dabbed at his nose roughly—coming away red—and slowly his thoughts reassembled, memories stitching themselves together with each scrape of the cloth.

The village. The Higher Cant. The woman in white burned to clockwork.

Denizen groaned. He felt like someone had packed every bit of him in cotton wool and then beaten him with a hammer. Feeling returned in a rush of pins and needles, and part of him almost missed the disconnected numbness because now all his body wanted to do was torture him with all the pain he had been missing.

His hair hurt. How can hair hurt?

And through all the muzziness, Denizen knew the truth: this was only a prelude. The pain he was feeling now was just the extended trailer. Any moment now, he’d be getting the feature-length presentation.

His aunt was shouting at someone. He could vaguely hear it through the cotton wool filling his brain. Glad I’m not them, Denizen thought.

“Denizen.”

Oh. Right.

“What in the name of black terror possessed you?”

Vivian Hardwick stood above him, her voice thrumming with fury. Her scarred lips twisted, and he had the distinct feeling that if the desk hadn’t been too far away, she would have thumped it with a fist.

At least she’s not wearing the armor. I don’t think I could handle the armor.

“You could have been killed. Worse than killed,” she snarled, jamming both hands in the pockets of her trousers as if to take her mind off the lack of desk-thumping. The way Denizen felt, he might have offered his head as a substitute.

“Worse than dead?” he said in a faint voice. “Is that—”

Vivian’s eyes narrowed. People probably didn’t interrupt her rants very often, but Denizen was too out of it to care.

“Is that what?” she snapped.

“Is that not just a thing people say?” He was actively rooting for some cranial trauma now. Maybe even decapitation. The headache had cut through the cotton wool, and Denizen was certain his only hope of getting through the next few minutes was for his head to be as far away from his body as possible.

“Like when they say a fate worse than death.

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