Читать книгу Hero Rising - Shane Hegarty, Shane Hegarty - Страница 18

Finn woke on a stone beach, while being pecked at by a seagull.

It ate a touch of the dust that surrounded him, immediately regretted it, gagged as it flew away.

Shocked, Finn jumped to his feet, saw the outline of his body in dust on the shingle. The sea lapped at his feet, washed the dust away. He slapped the rest of it from himself, felt his head to make sure his mind was still there and briefly wondered if he had been in a dream.

But that smell couldn’t be imagined. He stank very badly – the stench of the Infested Side. Of sweat. Of the breath of a belching sea monster. He briefly considered jumping in the water to be free of it, and only then realised it was raining. Heavy drops, but already easing off.

The dust was also evidence that he had been on the Infested Side. He remembered one other thing, patted around his pocket until he found the shell tube attached to his leg. This was the Gatemaker, the way back to the Infested Side when he wanted it. Scaldgrubs squirmed inside. Finn’s stomach squirmed with them.

The task they’d given him was a crazy one. Should he do it? He reckoned he could pull it off. After all he’d done before, everything he’d been through, he thought he’d find a way. Somehow. He just wasn’t sure he should.

Finn started to move on up the beach, the loose shingle giving way beneath his feet, adding to his general exhaustion. He reached the grass between the beach and the road just as, from further up the coastline, he saw the arrival of three assistants. They must have been alerted by the brief flickering of the gateway that had released him back home.

He hid out of sight, crouched behind a wall as they passed. And once they were gone, he darted low across the road to an alleyway to start back to the house he still refused to call home.

“Where have you been all day, Finn?” said Emmie, appearing around a turn behind him. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. And Lucien was acting very weird, and he’s talking about kicking you out if there’s any more trouble, and me too, and what on Earth is that smell?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

Finn didn’t quite know where to start.

The hours in the mouth of the Leviathan. The boiling sea. The mountain. Cornelius and Hiss. The Legends. The destruction. The attack. The kind-of-Cyclops. The Gatemaker hidden in his sopping jacket.

Being asked to steal Gantrua.

Any of these on their own was enough to have him banished from Darkmouth for good. And Emmie too.

“I just went for a big walk to clear my head but fell into the sea,” he told her. “Seaweed. Crabs. Fish heads, and all that.”

She looked at the back pocket of his trousers, saw a shell sticking from it, and seemed stuck between suspicion and trust.

“Fish heads?” she asked.

“And all that.”

He walked on, the lie burning in his throat.