Seven Sorcerers Read Online Free PDF

kept watch. You never know if a kid’s going to get away.’
    ‘BM?’
    ‘Bogeyman. Anyway, your brother went and you seemed like a possible too, so I waited to see if the BM came back. Got nothing better to do. Course, I didn’t realise then it was Skerridge or I might not have bothered.’
    ‘I’m glad you did.’ Shivering in the darkness, Nin sneaked out a hand. Jonas must have known because he took it and gave her fingers a friendly squeeze. She inched close enough to feel his shoulder, solid against hers. She was cold, although it was a mild night, and she ached with the hugeness of it all. The next question struggling out of the maelstrom in her head was, ‘What exactly is this place anyway,’ but something bigger got there first.
    ‘How many kids go missing like this?’ she gasped. ‘I mean, how many have disappeared that nobody even knows about?’
    ‘These days, there are only a couple of dozen BMs left and mostly they like to hang around scaring a kid for weeks before they do the snatch. So, I dunno … say … up to a hundred kids every year? Of course, that’s peanuts in a population the size of Britain, but …’
    ‘That’s
awful,’
gasped Nin. ‘Can’t somebody do somethingabout it?’
    Jonas burst out laughing. ‘Like who? The police? Round up the BMs and bung them in the nick, I s’pose? If they could see them to round them up, of course. Not to mention they’d be toast in a second.’
    ‘Toast?’
    ‘Bogeymen have Firebreath. I mean,
real
Firebreath, not just post-onion firebreath.’
    Nin blinked at him. It was getting lighter. On the horizon, at least the bit of it she could see from under the hanging branches, the sky was tinged with soft gold.
    ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘BMs don’t just go for any kid, they like a particular sort. The shy or nervous or thoughtful ones. You know, the sort who see faces in the pattern on the curtains, or make sure the cupboard doors are closed at night so nothing can come out. And if they find a kid with brothers and sisters who are the same, they, or one of the others, tend to go back.’
    ‘Like me and Toby?’
    ‘Uh-huh. So although most families get away with nothing, others can lose every single kid. Now that is truly awful!’
    ‘What happens to the ones that don’t escape? Like Toby?’ cried Nin, suddenly afraid. ‘What happened to him?’
    ‘Kids that don’t escape, which is most of the ones that get stolen in the first place, get dropped off at the Terrible House,’ said Jonas, watching her carefully. ‘After that –’ He shrugged – ‘nobody ever sees ’em again.’
    ‘The Terrible House?’
    ‘Uh-huh. They get handed over to Strood …’
    ‘Strood?’
    ‘And that’s it. Gone.’
    Nin opened her mouth and then shut it again. She had been about to say ‘gone?’ but she was starting to feel like some kind of echo so she bit it back.
    Her confusion must have shown on her face because Jonas grinned at her in the half-light.
    ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know, but not just now. By the feel of things, the sun is about to come up and I don’t think you’ll be paying any attention to me for a little while.’
    Nin raised an eyebrow and turned to look towards the horizon. It was deep gold by now and along the edge of the world, where the land curved away against the sky, burned a rim so bright she could barely look at it. She got up and took a few steps forward, coming out from under the trees to stand in the open where she could see better. She had a weird feeling inside, like caged electricity, as if something huge was about to happen.
    The dawn ignited.
    Even in the face of everything that had happened to her, it took Nin’s breath away. It honestly looked like the sky was on fire.
    ‘It’s all right,’ said Jonas, ‘the sky is on fire, it’ll calm down when the sun’s up properly.’
    Nin shifted her gaze to him. But only for a second. Overhead the flames burned on, lapping up the night