The Gods Of Gotham Read Online Free PDF Page B

seemed to be hulking pieces of stone surrounding me on all sides.
    A tiny matchstick’s worth of flame nuzzled at the woman’s red calfskin shoe six inches from my hand. That single spark angered me terribly—its smug, devious approach. I wanted to save the shoe, return it to the flying woman, but I couldn’t seem to move my arms. The index finger of my right hand twitched, the movement of a dull, brained little animal. I glimpsed the sky through a crevice and wondered how dawn had risen so quickly.
    “
Tim!
Timothy!”
    I knew that voice. I felt a flood of irritation, and also of plain, stupid fear under the shock. He wasn’t too full of morphine to be standing, then. Of course not. That would be so
easy
. Instead, he was clearly striding into the very center of the bull’s-eye, with shrapnel and brimstone raining freely down upon his person. How very like him.
    “
Timothy,
call out where you are! For the love of God, Tim, answer me!”
    My tongue stuck stubbornly to the back of my teeth. I didn’t want that voice to see me sprawled in a Chinese dancing girl’s pose, unable to so much as lift a singed shoe. I didn’t want that voice anywhere near a warehouse acting like the world’s biggest cannon, either. But all I could register was a cottony sense of
no.
    Something sticky and metallic was running down my cheek.
    Light. Too much of it.
    A flickering yellow blaze like a god-sized fireplace struck my eyes when someone began tearing away the rocks. Only my upper body had been partly buried. My legs were in the open air and soon enough my face was too, when a cleanly shaven but bearish figure tossed aside a heavy iron shutter.
    “Christ, Tim. Julius Carpenter just saved your hide, telling me which way you’d gone. There’s nary yet breathing in this street.”
    I blinked at my six-years’-elder brother, the soot-grimed mountain of a hook-and-ladder man with his ax swinging freely from his belt and his face obscured by the inferno behind him. The anger in my chest grew watery, mingled with sudden relief. When he pulled me up by the arms, I bit down on a yell and managed by some miracle to keep my feet once I was upright. He threw my arm over his coarse red shirt before setting off fast as I could keep pace with him, back the way I’d come, both of us stumbling through the rubble as if it were ankle-deep sand on a beach.
    “There’s a girl, Val,” I rasped. “She landed very near me. We have to—”
    “Gingerly, gingerly,” growled Valentine Wilde. I’d never have heard him through the pervasive ringing if he’d not been two inches from my ear. “You’re more than half hocused, aren’t you? Wait till we’re out of this and I can see you better.”
    “She—”
    “I saw a piece of her, Timothy. She’ll be put to bed with a shovel. Shut your head a moment.”
    I don’t remember much more until Valentine had reached a brick wall under a gaslight back on New Street and propped me up against it. What had been a half-deserted stone business thoroughfare was now an overturned hornet’s nest. At least three volunteer engine companies had already arrived, and a viciously tight thread of visible tension ran between each and every man in a red shirt. Not a one was brawling, or bickering over fire plugs, or donning brass knuckles. Every time one firefighter met another’s eye, his only expression was
And next? And next?
Half of them were looking at my brother, their eyes skimming toward him and then fixing.
Wilde. Wilde isn’t afraid of anything. Wilde sees his way clear. Wilde runs into infernos as if they’re rose gardens. All right, Wilde. And next?
I wanted to force them all quiet with my bare hands over their mouths, make them stop calling out to him.
    What exactly do they expect him to do about the city exploding?
    “You’re well and truly buttered, my boy. Get to the nearest dispensary,” Valentine ordered. “I’d cart you up to the hospital, but it’s too far and the boys need me. The whole