Travel Ban: Judas Investigations: Book Two by Edward Rose

Author:Edward Rose [Rose, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Turned out it was a bit of both, in a strange sort of way. Ezekiel had cut the rope tying my hands behind me and released me from the chair, but he’d also decided to leave me with a deep cut down one side of my face, which even half an hour later was still dribbling blood.

“That’s for threatening Mrs Jones. A little reminder next time you look in the mirror,” he’d told me, without any obvious rancour. For all the emotion he’d shown he might as well have been telling me to ‘have a nice day’.

I wasn’t overly upset about the damage to my face, I don’t use it for much these days anyway, but the constant seeping was annoying, and was beginning to get my shoulder wet. I’d patched myself up by liberally dabbing at my face with an old handkerchief, which had probably added sepsis to my ailments, and wobbled my way back across town, determined to put as much distance as possible between myself and Mrs Jones, Ezekiel, and whatever sharp implements he still had on his person.

Mrs Jones hadn’t bothered making any arrangements for how I would update her on my progress. If she wanted to find me, she could… and would. And if I wanted to find her, I just had to head to the club and wait.

All I really wanted to do was find a corner where I could sleep, possibly succumb to the terrible skin disease I’d just introduced to my face, and forget all about Daemons, gangland politics, and weird visions. But, seeing as my route home took me right past the Elevator, I decided to pop in and see Barbara instead. It wasn’t a sensible choice, but I was pretty feverish by this point, so cut me a little slack.

Besides, when I’m feeling particularly crappy, seeing Barbara normally makes me feel better about things. I think it’s the sense of stability she gives me. The rest of the City might be a hot mess of lost, lonely, terrible people, all ricocheting around, trying to make sense of the inexplicable, but Barbara was different. She’d been doing the same job since the day I’d arrived in the City and as far as I could tell, intended to keep doing it for all of eternity. I strongly suspected that, if you were able to look back hundreds or even thousands of years, whatever else the City might have been back then, somewhere amongst the stone buildings, tents, or mud huts, you would have found Barbara sitting behind her desk, calmly signing souls in and out… probably wearing the same horrible trouser suit.

It was perhaps because I have come to rely on the fact that Barbara was so entirely, comfortably predictable, that the sight that greeted me when I entered the foyer of the Elevator building was so shocking.

It wasn’t an immediate, obvious shock. There was no blood on the floor, no cracks in the wall, no army of monsters streaming out of the open doors of the Elevator… although that is definitely going to happen one of these days.

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.