The Wounded Ones by G.D. Penman

Author:G.D. Penman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Meerkat Press, LLC
Published: 2020-04-07T14:43:52+00:00

November 9, 2015

The flight to England had been pretty unpleasant the first time that Sully had flown there, what with the cold and the demon beneath her. This time the company was more aesthetically pleasing, but the conversation was worse, not to mention the putrid smell. She had tried asking Alecto a few questions as they traveled but the answers had been abrupt at best. She had been around for as long as there had been humans. She had been cursed after a little misunderstanding regarding an evisceration. She had kept to herself for a while after that, hiding from the sight of mankind, whom she considered to be inferior to herself. She had met the other immortal creatures during the long silence following the war, when the demons had started to cause trouble. Sully got all of these answers in quick succession, but very little more. Maybe the long periods of isolation had made the Fury socially inept. Besides, Sully didn’t feel like she had anything more to say to the monster that was dragging her off to execution or worse. Somehow the boredom, combined with the intensity of the last few days, lulled Sully off to sleep somewhere above the Atlantic. Sully had seen it many times at the IBI—when she finally caught the bad guy and they knew that they were going to be executed, all of the stress that had been haunting them faded away and they slept like babies.

The tightening of Alecto’s grip when London came into sight stirred Sully from her dreams.

The gothic spires rose up ahead of them, as tall as any great skyscraper that New Amsterdam could boast, but grown rather than built, born from the curse that kept the city spreading ever outward, consuming all in its path. Someday, unless the curse was undone, all of mainland Britain would be London and it would stretch tenuous bridges out to all of the islands nearby and consume them too. Nobody was certain which of Britain’s enemies had cast the curse. The more poetically inclined said that it was the Romans who flung it out as a final vengeance as their cities burned and the Veil was erected. The prosaic strategists placed the blame on the Mongolians, whose spies had reported back that the Empire was close to overspending its resources, even without the strain of an ever-expanding city. Sully didn’t care for either of the political theories. To her it felt personal. Somebody had fallen in love with London once upon a time, just like Sully had fallen for New Amsterdam, and when the relationship finally went sour, they lashed out in the way that people do. There were rumors of a second curse, one that made all the people who lived within the city forget about the very existence of a world outside, but that just sounded like living in a city to Sully.

Having spent a lifetime in New Amsterdam, the spread of London beneath her shouldn’t have felt so impressive.

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