The Reluctant Assassin by Eoin Colfer

Author:Eoin Colfer [Colfer, Eoin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Law & Crime, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9780141341750
Google: cjDpMwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 10915176
Publisher: Puffin
Published: 2013-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

HALF MOON STREET. SOHO. LONDON. NOW

Garrick tumbled into the pod less than a minute after his quarry disappeared and no more than ten seconds before the entrance to the quantum tunnel disappeared altogether. Just before his dematerialization, the woman, Victoria, had staggered down the stairs and shot him in the good leg with a small-caliber bullet from an almost dainty rifle, and so focused was Garrick on the diminishing wormhole that he forgot to smother his nerve endings. The sudden hammer blow of agony almost rendered him senseless, which would have been a disaster inside the wormhole. A man needed his senses marshaled and ready for duty inside the time tunnel.

The fault is mine, he thought, for allowing that woman to live.

The last sounds he heard from the twenty-first century before he disappeared were the bitter curses of the old woman, damning him to hell for a murdering scoundrel.

Garrick had an inkling that sparing Victoria was not all his own doing. The ghost of that Scot muck-snipe, Felix Sharp, was making a nuisance of itself in Garrick’s own gray matter. The photographs of Sharp’s father lining the wall and the notion of harming Victoria caused a swelling of phantom emotions that had stayed Garrick’s hand twice now.

No more, thought Albert Garrick. I will be a dead man’s cat’s-paw no longer.

Once the orange energy transmogrified his atoms, enveloping him in the sea of quantum foam, Garrick felt a calm descend over him.

I am nothing but soul now. Immortal.

Contentment draped the magician, but then he felt Riley’s fear trail ahead of him, and it snapped Garrick back to himself. He followed it to the mouth of the wormhole, borne easily as a corpse in the Thames. As the end of his journey neared, he gathered his bodily parts, reassembling himself, healing his wounds and expelling wisps of Felix Sharp’s willpower from his thoughts, while retaining his multifarious knowledge. This was a delicate maneuver and Garrick felt that he had not been entirely successful, but certainly he had expunged enough of the Scotsman’s foibles that the notion of putting an end to Agent Chevron Savano did not upset him in the slightest.

Killing that girl will cause me no grief whatsoever, he thought, and with a catastrophic loss of energy his particles coalesced, subliming from gas to solid just as Garrick wished them to, relying on his muscle memory to rejuvenate his body.

My sinews and bones are young, but my mind is full of wisdom.

His powers were not infinite, he knew. There would be no more healings or transformations for Albert Garrick, but he felt young again, with a brain full of twenty-first-century knowledge, which should be more than sufficient to ensure that his life was a long and comfortable one.

Garrick emerged from the wormhole grinning . . .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.