Reaper's Legacy

started blurring. David grabbed my hand. I passed out.” Rook held up one hand as if to illustrate his brother’s touch, but then Lucy-Anne realised that he had called a halt. A rook drifted down to land on his shoulder, he tilted his head, and the bird took off again.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Irregulars. Come on.” They walked on, past the entrance to an indoor market and a jeweller’s with rings and necklaces still scattered on the pavement amongst broken glass. Lucy-Anne looked around but saw no one watching them. Whoever it was the birds had seen must have been hiding.

“What happened when you woke up?”

“Everyone was dead,” Rook said. “It was like…waking in another world. London was mostly quiet. Some shouts, screams, from a couple of people stumbling about. We never saw any, though. I suppose we were lucky. We had each other. So we went home. And our mother was dead. Sitting in her armchair, and the TV was still on, then. An advert for washing powder. Her cup of tea was still warm.

“After that things are hazy. Time seems weird. We stayed together, I know that. Outside was terrifying and horrible. So silent, and when there were voices, they were screaming or mad. It might have been a couple of days or three weeks, living in our house almost as normal. David made food, washed up, and we dressed in clean clothes every day. And when the TV and radio were off, and the Internet couldn’t connect anymore, and David’s mobile had no signal and after we’d buried Mum in the back garden, under the thornless rose bush she’d planted by the back gate so that we didn’t prick ourselves on it when we were little…after that, when we did start thinking about leaving, a man told us not to.”

“A man?” Lucy-Anne prompted when he seemed to drift off.

“A black man. He looked like he was a hundred years old. I think I’d seen him before, selling flowers at the local market on Saturday mornings. He came down our street at nine forty-three every morning. Same time, exactly. He called himself a crier, like an old town crier, you know? And he told us to stay where we were, because everything was terrible. Told us stories. We didn’t believe them, of course.”

“What sort of stories?”

“I’m sure you can guess.” He stopped walking and looked at a swathe of graffiti across a shop’s side wall. It was a strange mixture of symbols and images, as if written in an alien language.

“So we stayed at home, and then I discovered that I could…” Rook waved one hand around his head, and seven rooks circled above them for a few moments before drifting apart once more. “It was amazing to me, and strange to David. His own powers were so much greater than they’d been before, and he couldn’t handle it. The day the black man didn’t come, David went out. He was picked up by the Choppers.”

“Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. Rook glanced back at her, his eyes hard, and Lucy-Anne realised that she’d asked an intensely personal question. If he did know, and it was as awful as she feared, then she had no right asking him to relive it.

“They killed him,” Rook said.

“You…” She trailed off, unsure.

“What?”

“You’re sure?” she asked quietly. “Only…maybe the Choppers were trying to help. In the beginning, at least.”

Rook walked to the kerb and stopped, as if waiting for the motionless traffic to start moving again. “You think?”

“Well, maybe. At first. I mean, I know what they do now. We’ve heard the stories, and everything. But I just don’t want to believe they were doing that right at the start.”

“Really?” He stared at her, then his expression softened a little. “I only wish you could see.”

“See what?”

“What my rooks show me. They saw. They followed him, because my powers were young, unformed, chaotic. It was David they were for back then, as well as all the other birds. But it was only the rooks that came back to me and shared what they saw. The Choppers grabbed him from a supermarket where he was trying to break in to get food. They bundled him into the back of a van, slit his throat, collected as much of his blood as they could. Then they cut off the top of his head and took out his brain.”

Lucy-Anne blinked at Rook, unable to break his gaze.

“The birds left him, then. Dead, by the Choppers’ hands.”

“And you’ve been avenging him ever since,” she whispered. It was dreadful—this poor kid, barely older than her, made into a vessel of vengeance. A killer.

“In a way,” he said. “I accepted right away that he was gone, because I already knew that I was changing, and the rooks were no mystery to me. I was becoming more like he’d been, for whatever reason. But it’s more as if I was trying to bring him back. And now, with you…”

“With me?”

“Someone else special,” Rook said, stepping forward and touching her face. “Touched before Doomsday. Pure.”

“Oh, I’m not pure,” Lucy-Anne said, shivering at his touch.

“I’ve been waiting for you ever since David died.”

“And Reaper? The Superiors?”

Rook smiled, a terrible expression. “What I do serves them, and they can sometimes help me.”

“You feel nothing for those Choppers you killed?”

“They’re not people anymore,” he said. “They’re from outside. Another world.”

“So am I.”

“Yes. But you belong here.” He turned away from her and started walking again, and just for a moment Lucy-Anne felt under intense scrutiny. She looked up and saw several rooks sitting on window sills, a few more circling gently above, and every single one of them was gazing down at her. Their eyes, black and lifeless. Then they took flight to follow Rook, like dregs of his own psyche blown apart by Doomsday. Perhaps everything he did was an attempt to hold himself together.

Later that afternoon Rook suggested that they rest in a house for a while. He said that moving farther north during the day was dangerous, and that entering the wilder parts of London would be better achieved under cover of darkness.

“Isn’t that when whatever’s there comes out?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“What, like vampires?” Rook was mocking her, but she would not rise to his bait.

“It’s just that night always feels more dangerous. And don’t birds sleep at night?”

“Not mine,” he said. “They do what I ask of them, whenever I ask. They’ll guide us in, and we’ll be shadows. Darkness will hide us.”

The house Rook broke into had probably once been worth a million pounds, but now its fine furnishings and tasteful decor held no value when it came to survival. They tramped dirty shoes across cream carpet, and he told her to wait in the living room while he checked the rest of the house.

Several rooks had entered the house with them, and one perched on the back of an easy chair, watching Lucy-Anne. She hoped she was being protected, but suspected it was more likely that she was being guarded.

Trying not to look at the bird—it was unnaturally motionless, eyes reflecting nothing—she glanced around at the room, attempting to connect with the family that had once owned this place. She skimmed over the furniture, the paintings, the ornaments and photographs, because they were more a part of the house than whoever had used to live here. The objects that did affect her were those that spoke of a human touch. On the bookshelf, an open book lay face-down, never to be finished. On the floor beneath a small table, a children’s toy car gathered dust, its brash redness subdued by time. A sheaf of papers sat on the table. A coat was draped across the back of the sofa, and a wallet hung half-out of the inner pocket. Half-finished things that would never be taken up by their owners again. They made her sad.

Rook reappeared in the doorway, and the watching bird fluttered past him and from the room with hardly a sound.

“Family’s upstairs,” he said, glancing around the room. “We’ll stay down here. Two sofas. I’ll check the kitchen, see if any canned food’s still edible.”

Lucy-Anne only nodded, and as he left again she leaned across so that she could see the staircase outside. She felt no temptation to go up.