Sorrow's Crown Read Online Free PDF

roll as if he remembered the taste of the guy's throat in the park, and wanted a lot more.
    "Jesus, no," I said. "No, Anubis, settle."
    Crummler kept cavorting, still doing the dance Broghin and the kids had joined him in. I tried it out too, hoping it would calm him. I bounced around while he capered toward me. The edges of his beard stuck out, highlighted with red where his hair had draped onto his long, stained coat.
    When he was ten yards from me I realized he was covered in blood and carrying a broken shovel, his hands filthy, and the coat still very wet.
    I jogged down the knoll to him. "Are you hurt?”
    â€œNo!"
    "Then . . ."
    That acrid, burning stench. Nothing else like it in the world. I moved around one of the broad, groomed bushes and nearly stepped into the dead kid's mouth.
    Parts of his teeth and features lay nearby. Someone had repeatedly used the shovel on him, making sure they took off every inch of his face. I couldn't tell much about him except that his clothes seemed to be the kind a teenager would wear: faded jeans, sneakers, black T-shirt, and an oversized leather jacket. Anubis stared at the corpse warily but with a strange calmness that unnerved me, as if this were nothing new. Crummler kept pirouetting. His wild, fevered energy and happiness had drained and been replaced by a maddening look of ... sanity.
    He smiled. "I am here, Jon."
    "Oh shit," I said.
    "I have been in battle . . ." His face fell, and he suddenly began moaning.
    His mania meant something different now, with dark streaks of crusted blood on his hands and clothes. The same smile took on new connotations.
    â€œâ€¦ with myself."
    He brought the shovel up, like offering a gift, hefting it too quickly so that the blade angled sharply toward my face.
    A part of me wanted to shout, but for a man too impractical to practice safe sex in the age of AIDS, I wasn't foolish enough to let Crummler get another step closer with his wild grin and bloody shovel. .
    This time I didn't slap like a nine-year-old girl. I punched him directly on the point of his hairy chin and he went flying backward to roll next to the body of the dead, faceless boy on the ground. He started sobbing, and I didn't know what the hell to do next.

THREE
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    Lowell Tully arrived first, with the wig-wag lights on but no siren, so that a strange red sheen from the cherry top spun against my legs and the array of whitewashed angels behind me. He stared at the scene for a minute, squinting as his hair tousled into his eyes, taking in every detail before silently returning to his car.
    He made a few murmured calls on his police radio, the wind snapping at his brown deputy's shirt across his broad, muscular back. Crummler had fallen into a deep but fitful sleep not far from the corpse, his arms wrapped around his knees as though he couldn't quite fit into the fetal position. His fingers scratched at the dirt on occasion, like a dog chasing rabbits in his dreams. Anubis gazed about serenely, seated on a grave, comforted by the fact that he hadn't done anything this time. I was sweaty from chasing birds away from the dead kid.
    Lowell handled the situation—macabre as it was—the way he handled everything: with the relaxed, easy assurance of a man with four percent body fat and a working knowledge of the body's nerve clusters and major arteries. He still had a football hero's swagger, back from when he'd fractured his pelvis in our last homecoming game. He went to one knee beside the corpse, carefully inspecting the faceless kid without touching him.
    He stood and put his fists on his hips, and I decided if there was anything in this world that could rattle him I didn't want to know what it was.
    "How are you holding up?" he asked.
    "Oh," I said. "Fine."
    Lowell took firm hold of my shoulder with one of his massive hands and led me a few yards off. Crummler , Anubis, and I had already done a proper job of fouling the crime scene, and he tried to save whatever