Murder of Crows (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

dumping me with an awful woman and her rapist husband.
    Yet, here I was. So, I wanted to say, how ‘bout them murders? I repressed a nervous giggle.
    “Thank you,” Jasper said, looking over at me finally. “For coming. Sky Heart won’t admit it, but he has grown old and tired. I am not sure he can keep us safe this time.”
    Em looked up at him with a gasp. “Dad,” she said. I guessed she didn’t hear him talk negatively about the supreme leader very often.
    “Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘this time’? Has this happened before?” That would have been, you know, good to know. My frakking family and their frakking secrets. It was getting old.
    He and Pearl exchanged a look, then both glanced at Em, then turned their gazes back to me. Again it felt like players on a stage, moving from cue to cue for an audience, only now it seemed the play was hitting the climax, but the actors couldn’t remember their lines. Jasper’s thin shoulders hunched and he looked a decade older as he opened his mouth to answer, though his eyes told me what his words would say before he spoke.
    He didn’t get a chance to speak.
    Screams tore through the quiet clearing and a woman ran toward the big house, crying out for Sky Heart.
    We bolted from the cabin and across the gravel drive. My family’s house was close to Sky Heart’s, given their direct blood ties as well as status in the tribe. Close enough that I had made it onto the big house’s porch by the time Alek and Sky Heart came through the door.
    Close enough to hear the woman’s first coherent words.
    “He’s dead. It’s happened again. He’s dead. Dead.”

The body was staged just beyond the furthest out trailer in a recently cleared area at the edge of the older trees. There were a couple of large rocks and a tree stump that had been dug around but not cut from the ground yet and hauled away. It was next to that stump that the man’s body was staked out.
    I felt an odd tingle on my skin as we crossed into the clearing and filed away the sensation for examining later. The air was eerily still and the sinking sun shot weak red-tinged light through the trees, spearing the corpse.
    “Back,” snarled Sky Heart as other people tried to follow him closer. Jasper and two other men turned and held out their arms, pushing away the growing crowd.
    Alek and I ignored them all and approached the body. He was middle aged, which meant he was one of the older residents. His face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place a name to it. His eyes were open, clouded and reflecting only sky. There was a tiny trickle of blood dried at the corner of his pale lips.
    The air was thick with the sweet smell of blood underpinned with feces and dirt. The man’s plaid shirt was ripped, his hands staked through with large iron nails but there wasn’t much blood on them. His nails were dirty and broken. My brain took in details, eyes looking everywhere but at the mess of his chest. Until his chest moved.
    “Fuck,” I yelled, jumping back.
    Alek, cool as always, didn’t even flinch, just gave me a sideways look before bending over the body. I moved back up beside him and forced myself to look, to really see.
    His chest had been ripped open, like something from a B-grade horror movie, his ribs grey and brownish with drying blood, broken and protruding into the open air. Pinned inside his chest, where his heart and lungs should have been, was a live crow. Its beak was wired shut and its wings were stuck through with crude iron nails, but the poor thing still struggled, its feathers soaked and sticky with blood.
    Alek reached into that nightmare and broke the crow’s neck.
    “Were they all like this?” he asked Sky Heart.
    Sky Heart nodded, fingering a small leather and bead bag that hung around his neck. “Yes,” he said. He looked in that moment as Jasper had described. Old. Tired.
    “Is this how it happened before? Years ago?” I asked. It was a guess, going off what my parents