Library of Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

too.
    We’d put about twenty feet and fifty people between us and the train when the wight burst out of it, shoving commuters and yelling
I am an officer of the law!
and
Get out of my way!
and
Stop those children!
Either no one could hear him over the echoing din of the station or no one was paying attention. I looked back to see him gaining, and that’s when Emma started tripping people, sweeping her legs left and right as we ran. People shouted and fell into tangles behind us, and when I looked back again the wight was struggling, stepping on legs and backs and getting swats with umbrellas and briefcases in return. Then he stopped, red-faced and frustrated, to unsnap his gun holster. But the gulf of people between us had yawned too wide now, and though I was sure he’d be heartless enough to fire into a crowd, he wasn’t stupid enough to. The ensuing panic would’ve made us even more difficult to catch.
    The third time I looked back he was so far behind and swallowed by the crowd that I could hardly see him. Maybe he didn’t really care whether he caught us. After all, we were neither a great threat nor much of a prize. Maybe the dog had been right: compared to an ymbryne, we were hardly worth the trouble.
    Halfway to the exits the crowd thinned enough for us to breakinto an open run—but we’d taken only a few strides when Emma caught me by the sleeve and stopped me. “Addison!” she cried, spinning to look around. “Where’s Addison?”
    A moment later he came scampering out of the thickest part of the crowd, a long piece of white fabric trailing from a spike on his collar. “You waited for me!” he said. “I became entangled in a lady’s stocking …”
    Heads turned at the sound of his voice.
    â€œCome on, we can’t stop now!” I said.
    Emma plucked the stocking from Addison’s collar, and we were off and running again. Before us were an escalator and an elevator. The escalator was working but very crowded, so I steered us toward the elevator instead. We ran past a lady painted blue from head to toe, and I had to turn and stare even as my legs carried me onward. Her hair was dyed blue, her face caked with blue makeup, and she wore a skin-tight jumpsuit, also blue.
    She’d only just passed out of sight when I saw someone even more freakish: a man whose head was divided vertically into halves, one bald and burned to a crisp, the other untouched, hair moussed into a dapper wave. If Emma noticed him, she didn’t turn to look. Maybe she was so used to meeting genuine peculiars that peculiar-looking normals hardly registered.
But what if they aren’t normal?
I thought.
What if they’re peculiars, and instead of the present we’ve ended up in some new loop? What if
—
    Then I saw two boys with glowing swords battling by a wall of vending machines, each sabre clash sounding with a thin plasticky
thwack
, and reality came into sharp focus. These strange-looking people weren’t peculiars. They were nerds. We were very much in the present.
    Twenty feet away, the elevator doors opened. We poured on the speed and hurled ourselves inside, bouncing off the back wall with our hands while Addison tumbled in on tripping legs. I turned just in time to glimpse two things through the closing doors: thewight breaking out of the crowd and coming at us in a full run, and back by the tracks where the train was pulling away, the hollowgast leaping from the roof of the last car to the station ceiling, swinging like a spider from a light fixture by its tongues, its black eyes burning at me.
    And then the doors closed and we were gliding gently upward, and someone was saying, “Where’s the fire, mate?”
    A middle-aged man stood in the rear corner of the elevator, costumed and sneering. His shirt was torn, his face was crosshatched with fake cuts, and strapped to the end of one arm, Captain Hook–style, was a