The Iron Hunt Read Online Free PDF Page A

warehouse apartment.
    I
knew every word. Every syllable and curve. I could still feel the imprint of
her fingers through the indents of ink on the stiff pages, and the
grooves—sometimes, when I was very nostalgic—felt sacred. As though her soul
resided in paper.
    I
recalled that my mother wrote about pain. Odd, unordinary aches. She kept
copious notes. It was probably time I did the same. Not for posterity, but survival.
One day someone else would need to learn from my experiences. Written words
would be my only voice after I was murdered. The only thing I could pass on,
besides the boys.
    Such
as this fact: My mother suffered only one bloody nose in her entire life.
Accompanied by temporary blindness, sharp pain in her eyes.
    She
wrote that down, made a point of it. A separate chapter. Because afterward, a
lot of people died. Afterward, she almost died.
    Unfortunately,
except for those small tidbits, the rest of the story was lost. She had gotten
rid of it, ripped the pages out. Before I was born, I suppose.
    But
not everything. One line, just before the break in her discourse. Like a
ticking bomb found under an airplane seat, or cold laughter when you thought
you were alone.
    The
veil opened, wrote my mother. The
veil opened, and something slipped through.
    SOMETHING
always slipped through.
    No
good explanation. Just that long ago, demons lived upon the earth. Many demons.
They killed and consumed, and there was a war. People fought back. Humans.
Others who were not human. They built a prison out of air, a prison made of
layers and rings and boundaries, and they placed the demons inside, separating
them by strength and viciousness and intelligence.
    And
then they sealed the demons up. Forever.
    Except,
nothing lasted forever. Not even the boys, though they had spent the past ten
thousand years giving it their best shot.
    Someone
must have figured as much. Someone who could make a difference. Someone who
created the Wardens, men and women with the speed and power to guard this world
against a break in the prison veil. Humans, constructed to fight demons.
    Humans,
destined to save the world.
    But
the Wardens had not survived, either. They did not have the boys.
    Leaving
me. The last.
    The
women in my family had always been the last.
    And
the veil had opened.
    Again.
    HERE
was another truth: I had spent my entire life on the road. I never went to
school. My mother taught me, and based on some things I had seen over the
years, I would say she did a pretty good job. We always hit the bookstores and
libraries in every city and small town, and I learned to tell a lot about a
place by the kinds of books that were carried, or the attention given a
library. The best I had ever seen was in New York City. The worst in Paoli,
Indiana.
    Seattle
was not so bad. But the bookstores downtown cared more about literary fiction
than commercial reads, and that was indicative, I thought, of the social
atmosphere. Yuppie, a little too preoccupied with what other people thought,
and only superficially friendly.
    The
number of homeless kids was another strike against the city. University Avenue
was the worst. Maybe not as bad as Rio de Janeiro, but for the United States,
it was up there. And two hours after leaving the Coop—two hours spent walking
the streets in the rain, trying to uncover answers—I found myself in a dark
alley off the Ave, near the sprawling Gothic splendor of the University of
Washington, a child huddled near my feet.
    A lot
of children. Rain had driven them into doorways, under tattered awnings, or
here, in alleys, under cardboard and garbage bags. I smelled dog, and saw a
ruffed brown tail sticking out from under a slicker, alongside gangling limbs
and pierced noses and glittering eyes. Tattoos rocked the shadows. Not mine. My
clothes still covered me from neck to toe, my fingers snug in my gloves.
    I had
ten minutes left. Sunset was coming. I could feel it on my skin. Streetlights
were already on, sour fluorescent lines