About the Dark Read Online Free PDF

and then a man walking strictly
behind her back. Since I hadn’t seen many women here, I gawked at
this one through Rig’s eyes. Fleshless and spindly, she reminded me
of a dried-up butterfly, but a butterfly with the terrible past,
for the woman’s face had no smile lines. Her dull brown hair
flopped listlessly over her shoulders, her gray eyes stared into
space, and her baggy, mud-colored pantsuit hung crumpled off her
bony shoulders. In her pale fingers she clutched what constituted
the only bright spot on her figure: a dazzlingly white plastic
folder.
    I wondered what her gift was. It couldn’t be
godliness—she was much too scrawny for that, and besides, her suit
didn’t seem like it could stretch. And it wasn’t anything connected
with grace or dance because she slouched. And there was no way she
could be a color—if she were, I was sure she would have changed
that drab hair color to something more interesting. Well, maybe her
gift was holding something tightly, I joked to myself, because the
woman was clasping that thick folder with more feeling than there
was in the rest of her body. Which all of a sudden made me wonder
if her indifference was just a pretence.
    Since I couldn’t infer anything else about
the woman, I abandoned Rig’s eyes and found a different pair of
peepers. These were aimed at her male companion, and when I saw
him, I barely managed to choke off a shriek. Because it was Don
Horgreth, the Permanent President of the United States and the man
on whose orders I’d been locked in here for fifteen years. After a
moment of breathless rage, I exhaled. Horgreth would pay for my
suffering, and soon, but today—what was this jerk doing here?
    Standing behind the butterfly woman, Horgreth
seemed to be casually waiting for someone to come or something to
happen. His posture relaxed, even nonchalant, he rocked on the
balls of his feet, now glancing at the ceiling, now at the tops of
his gray loafers. He intertwined his plump, short fingers…very
young fingers, by the way. And his face—I realized it only now—his
face looked much too young for a guy in his forties. No, really,
Horgreth looked like a smiley teenage model from a clothing ad,
except that instead of faded jeans and a tight T-shirt, he was
wearing a dark gray designer’s suit.
    After another minute of dallying and playing
with his cufflinks shaped like severed hands, Horgreth stepped out
from behind the woman. There was certainty, almost finality in his
manner, as if whatever he’d waited for had arrived. “Turn around
slowly,” he said in a low, raspy voice…finally something that
seemed right for his age.
    I whirled to face him.
    “Didn’t you hear him, bitch? He said,
‘Slowly,’” Rig snapped, his open-palmed hand shooting toward my
head, but stopping midway, maybe because the god wasn’t sure if
Horgreth would approve of his hitting me.
    Fox, Demi, and Sinna did a shuffling
about-face. Now they saw Horgreth too, and all of them managed to
stay calm, I mean, more or less, because Demi did snarl quietly,
and Fox’s hands curled into fists.
    Horgreth studied us with light-hearted
disinterest. It was as though he’d much rather be somewhere else,
and yet, for all his nonchalance, when his cursory gaze reached
Fox’s right cheekbone, it stopped and hardened, as I’d feared it
would, because there Fox had tattooed my name. I’d begged him not
to. Everyone who joined Horgreth had to tattoo DH on their right
cheekbones, and while Fox didn’t and, I knew, wouldn’t work for
that firm, Horgreth expected that from all of us; hence, our
cheekbones were his territory. But Fox had been adamant—he’d said
he belonged to nobody but me—and now, upon reading Fox’s cheekbone,
Horgreth transformed: his youth and cheer fell away, the pleasant
roundness of his face melted, and instead it was the mug of an
ageless and cruel shark.
    When Bones, one of our regular guards, saw
Horgreth’s face, he shrank by at least a foot and