Darkborn Read Online Free PDF

to get help —”
    “He did?”
    “Sure he did.”
    But Will remembered being left there afterward .   .   . being left all alone. They had abandoned him to his shame, he thought. His friends didn’t want anything to do with him. Nada .
    Or maybe I’m reading that wrong, Will thought. Maybe they were just hurrying to their class and —
    And he thought of Ted Whalen, his hair slicked down by the shower. Making a joke that Will was sure was about him.
    Maybe I’m just paranoid, Will thought.
    “Give me a break,” Tim said one more time, giving his black-frame glasses another push.
    Will nodded. Then he smiled, just a bit. “Okay,” he said.
    “You’re still coming this afternoon — to the luncheonette?”
    “Right after detention.” Will grinned.
    Tim spun around to see Father Ed come up the hall.
    “And we’d better get to fucking Latin class, Dunnigan,” Tim whispered, “or our ass will be grass.”
    And for a moment, Will felt a bit better.
     
    Detention was conducted in Father Gately’s small antechamber — a dark, windowless room done in a spooky blackish wood, filled with glass-enclosed book cabinets that held oversized books that looked as though they had never been read.
    Ever.
    Gately was, according to the popular wisdom, insane. What other kind of priest would make a career out of discipline?
    The headmaster might run the school, but Gately, the Prefect of Discipline, owned it.
    The seniors joked about Henkel. By their fourth year at the school, some of them could probably beat up the bowling-ball-shaped man.
    But nobody ever joked about Gately.
    And the priest with a face that made Boris Karloff look handsome had a wicked sense of torture.
    Like now, Will thought. He had set D’Angelo and Will facing each other.
    So Will had to sit there, look at D’Angelo, and just imagine all the things the Big D might want to do.
    Gately gave orders to sit up. Nice and straight. Any slouching, and he’d have us on our feet, Will knew. Maybe with our arms out. Holding some books.
    He was a fun guy.
    Used to be a boxer, the rumor mill said. Before becoming a Jesuit. Good career preparation .   .   .
    Will tried to look around at anything but D’Angelo’s pug-nosed face. Anything.
    Is it my imagination, Will thought, or is D’Angelo breathing heavy, snorting? Making weird piglike noises.
    He heard Gately typing inside his office. The minutes crawled.
    And you could do nothing, Will knew. No homework, nothing.
    But then — a welcome relief — the phone rang and Will heard Gately talking. The silence had been horrible. Gately spoke, a whispery garble. His voice had the vocal consistency of sandpaper.
    He heard Gately push his chair away from his desk, the legs screeching on the polished wood floor. Then Gately opened the door wide to his office.
    The Prefect of Discipline cleared his chain-saw throat.
    Will imagined that the priest might hawk a louie in his direction.
    “You may go, D’Angelo. Mr. Henkel wants you on the field.”
    Great, Will thought, the creep does ten minutes’ time and I still have fifty more. Can’t let anything interfere with football. No, sir, sports fans, the big Thanksgiving game is only weeks away.
    But D’Angelo made an unfortunate mistake.
    As he stood up, still staring at Will, he smirked.
    An ugly sight if ever there was one.
    And Gately didn’t like that.
    The priest suddenly moved across the floor with all the speed and grace of a leopard. With pinpoint accuracy, Gatley’s hand shot out and grabbed at D’Angelo’s hair. There wasn’t much of it. Crew cuts were out and there was a neat forelock, a sheaf of long greasy strands that Gately’s hand closed on.
    For a second Will thought that the hair would just slip through the priest’s powerful fingers.
    But no. The grip was much too strong. Too solid.
    Gately held, and now he rattled D’Angelo’s head back and forth, faster and faster. The football star looked like Wile E. Coyote after getting hit by one of