Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels) Read Online Free PDF

shouldn’t have tried to tear cousin Lauren’s face off with my teeth; but Lauren shouldn’t have called my father ‘the Dead Drunk, Literally’ within a
thousand miles of my hearing. Not only was he not a drunk, he wasn’t dead, and I knew it with all the desperate intensity of someone who didn’t have a clue if that was true, or who he
was, or why he’d gone and left me with such a useless un-maternal tramp.
    He had his reasons
.
He did
.
Bloody hell,
one
of my parents had to have a decent excuse. One day our eyes would meet across a crowded room and I’d
know
him
, I was convinced of that. And after I hugged him, and after I slapped his face hard, I’d be asking for a few answers. I shouldn’t have confided all this in my diary, but then
Lauren shouldn’t have broken the padlock with a screwdriver and read it.
    The bite marks on Lauren’s face were red and savage and magnificent, and I wasn’t planning to deny it anyway, so Marty had cornered me in my room on the pretext of giving me a
talking-to; it was more than clear – and this is how close he got – that he’d have preferred a seeing-to. I was big, mean and vicious enough now to call his bluff and scare him
off, but I knew one day he’d call my bluff right back, and I’d lose my nerve. I didn’t want to lose it at a bad moment, like when I was alone with him in the house. Like next
Friday.
    I scratched the back of my neck, and turned again to look at my friend with the psychopathic eyes. It wasn’t that they made me uneasy, however hard they burned into mine. He looked
positively understanding. He was more a father figure than the real one.
    And that was quite enough soul-searching for today. I shook myself and decided that what I
really
wanted now was to go to the stables.
    Funny how much I wanted to get there. So much, I nearly ran.
    They’d rebuilt the stone walls and the stalls, they’d put on a timber-and-turf roof and laid some hygienic-looking straw on the old cobbles, and they’d installed a couple of
ropey life-size figures in sixteenth-century fancy dress – I suspected old department store dummies – together with an unrealistic carthorse, its mane all plucked and moth-eaten.
    I thought: if I do a runner, I could bunk down here. The place wouldn’t be too spooky; it wouldn’t even be that cold. And it would certainly beat The Paddocks (I ask you – in
the middle of suburbia) during Aunt Sheena’s forthcoming Girls’ Weekend Away, which would inevitably also be Groper Marty’s Boy’s Night In.
    The elderly tourists were trailing into the stables now. There was no getting away from them, or indeed from the imperious little guide, who looked very much as if he was going to ask to see my
entry ticket. I sidled behind a fat man chewing a Mars bar, so that even when the guide bounced on his heels, he couldn’t catch my eye. He soon forgot about me – it was a talent of
mine, making myself unobtrusive – and launched into a long-winded drone about conditions for rural workers in the eighteenth century.
    Time to go.
    I wriggled through the throng towards the last row of stalls, which I happened to know backed onto the toilets, that led to the café, that was home to the fridge, that held the beers. I
nearly jumped out of my skin when I backed into a guy with wild eyes and hair like a bogbrush, until he swayed and I grabbed him and realised he was a dummy. All the same, he unnerved me, and I
suddenly needed fresh air. I steadied Bogbrush Man, put my finger solemnly to my lips, and turned towards the toilets.
    I halted, amazed.
    ‘Shit,’ I couldn’t help exclaiming. ‘That one’s good!’
    Silence fell. The guide’s jaw opened, then shut, and the tourists stared at me. With grudging admiration, I pointed at the life-size horse in the end stall.
    ‘Now that is clever,’ I said. ‘That is really clever.’
    The guide’s face was stiff with contempt. ‘I don’t know what you…’
    ‘That blue one.