Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and realised exactly
what was missing on this plantation: the sound of laughter and idle
chatter that was characteristic of places as heavily populated as
this. I heard only silence and a soullessness that made me feel as
if I had walked into a ghost town.
    I moved to the bed and lay
down.
    The slave girl’s words, or, more
precisely, the fear she had displayed rose to the fore of my mind.
I pushed it aside and closed my eyes, meaning to give myself a few
moments to resettle my thoughts. I was soon fast asleep.
    I was startled out of sleep by an
anguished cry, like that of a wounded bird. I sat up with a jolt,
dazed and unsure if what I had heard was rooted in reality or the
remnant of some dream. Then I heard it again.
    “ Avery !”
    Fear thrilled through me when I
recognised the voice. I leapt to my feet and ran to the door. I met
Julia in the foyer. If what I had heard in her voice had shaken me,
it was nothing compared to the state she was in. She was a ghostly
white, tears were streaming down her face and she was trembling.
One of the male slaves was half-carrying her and she clung to
Phillis's hand.
    “ Avery !”
    She tore loose from them when she saw
me and ran into my arms. She was hyperventilating, caught in a wild
panic as she fought to speak.
    “ You have got to make them
stop!” she gasped.
    “ Stop what? What
happened?”
    “ The...the screaming
and...and...they... The blood...so much blood...”
    Blood ?
    It felt as if all the heat had been
sucked out of the mansion, leaving me shivering. Julia’s voice
trailed away and she no longer focused on me but on whatever had
scared her so. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she
lost consciousness. For a few moments I stood holding a dead weight
in my arms, and the situation was so peculiar I almost felt for her
pulse to see if she was still alive. Instead, I faced the two
Negroes.
    “ What happened? What
frightened her so?” My voice rose with each word.
    I was left with a wall of silence,
their gazes meeting the floor.
    “ Tell me! ”
    The female at last met my gaze. She
opened her mouth as if to speak but then closed it again. I noticed
then that she was clasping her hands together with such force it
seemed she might break her own fingers. Then she pulled her gaze
away from mine and toward the window, focusing on a large wooden
structure farther down the path. Her gaze was steady when it met
mine again, but I understood her unspoken message. I placed Julia
in the arms of the male slave, directing my words to the
female.
    “ Take care of
her.”
    I was out of the door and walking
toward the structure, a barn by the looks of it, panic rising with
each step. As I got closer, I heard a noise coming from the barn, a
steady, rhythmic snapping noise, like the sound of leather against
leather. For some reason it made the hairs on the back of my neck
stand up and the sound seemed to snap at my heels as I moved toward
the barn. The Negroes I passed looked surprised when they saw where
I was headed, but no one made an attempt to stop me as I
entered.
    The first thing that assaulted my
senses was the heat. Then the stench of rotting flesh mingled with
fresh blood filled my nostrils. It reminded me of a hunting trip I
had been forced to go on with my father. Many years had passed
since that trip and I could still remember with painful clarity the
frozen eyes of the dead deer along with the blood—so much blood.
For a moment I couldn’t move, I was so caught in the memory and the
terror. And then my mind was able to make sense of what I saw and
it was far worse than anything I had seen on those hunting
trips.
    A woman was hung naked by her arms
from one of the beams. Her dark skin glistened with sweat in the
sunlight that cut across the barn diagonally from the slats in the
roof. She appeared to be only half-conscious and her eyes had
rolled so far back in her head that only the whites were visible.
The most shocking sight of all was the skin on her back,