Crystal Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

front of warehouse fifteen. A trio of mongoose-men guarded the large doors, deadly long rifles held in the crooks of their arms. They surveyed the street and the ragamuffin force with cold calm.
    “Is better you wait up some,” the first mongoose-man said.
    Dihana shook her head. “I am the prime minister of this city, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails.” Over a hundred thousand people lived inside Capitol City’s walls and she accepted responsibility for them all. “You tell me I can’t go where ? ” She’d learned that particular verbal tone from Elijah, her father, well before he’d died and she inherited the position of prime minister.
    The mongoose-man nearest the door cleared his throat. “Let she through. Alone.”
    The rusty side-access hinges squealed as the mongoose-men pushed the door open. Dihana walked through, her skirt filling out and brushing the sides of the doorframe with the motion.
    In the middle of an empty expanse of dirty concrete floor, a man stood over five dead bodies. Blood settled in several footwide pools underneath each victim. Knife strokes had left tattered and sliced shirts on both the dead and the alive.
    One corpse’s throat still seeped blood from a bullet puncture.
    “General Haidan.” Dihana kept an artificially calm composure. The mongoose-men’s leader usually stayed out beyond the city’s immense walls. “What the hell have you done here?”
    “Repaying a debt, as an old friend of Elijah.” His dreadlocks
had grayed, and his face looked more leathery. A man who always braved the elements. A man who had always stood by her father. “You go listen?”
    Dihana bit her lip. This was irregular. “Okay. Go ahead.” She did her best to ignore the death by her feet.
    Haidan turned to the mongoose-man by the inside of the door. “Bring them two we got over here.” He folded his arms.
    Dihana shook her head, impatient with his cryptic approach. “Last time we met, Haidan”—just after Elijah had died and she’d been struggling to handle her new responsibilities with no time for grieving—“you said you’d honor the contract between the city and the mongoose-men. That you always would protect us. Why couldn’t you have just asked me what you needed done in the city. It’s suspicious when mongoose-men start just showing up in the city in numbers.” A mongoose-man pushed two men with burlap sacks over their heads through the door.
    “Shut the door,” Haidan ordered. The door squealed and slammed shut. Dihana flinched. She’d made a mistake, gotten trapped. The Haidan she knew as a child would never have done this. But things changed. Hundreds of mongoose-men had actually come inside the city tonight. Maybe alliances were being made in the dark behind her back.
    “The ragamuffins know where I am,” Dihana said. Haidan had encouraged her when she’d struggled to run the city after Elijah had died. She wanted to say she felt sorry he no longer felt she was the best choice for prime minister. She hoped this new Haidan would exile her somewhere pleasant, and that the bush hadn’t changed him enough for him to kill her.
    Haidan frowned. His locks swayed as he shook his head. “Don’t be silly,” he growled. She’d read him wrong. “Them man can’t even test with me mongoose. I don’t want the city, we protecting it. Me and you, we go have to reason things out. Things happening.”
    Dihana almost shuddered with relief. Deep inside, she hadn’t believed, couldn’t believe, that Haidan would do such a thing. The mongoose-man stopped in front of them
and ripped the burlap sacks away from the two men’s heads. Dihana stared at them.
    “You’re familiar,” she whispered. She hadn’t seem them since she’d become prime minister. Councilmen. They’d all abdicated the Council, disbanding it when she came to power, leaving her confused and without any help except for Haidan. They’d hoped she’d fail, she knew, and that they could return