The Dawnvel Druids by - (summer beach reads TXT) 📖

was yanked down, and thrown back against the unforgiving steel. Just let it be over quick. His body trembled, and he tasted bile in his throat. The thugs laughed in his face.

169

“What’s the rush, Ev?” Ollie snarled.

Evan opened his mouth to speak. Ollie slapped it hard.

“What you gonna do, mate?”

Before Evan could reply, the wind rushed out of him as Ollie’s fist slammed into his stomach. He fell to his knees, gasping for air. They were double his size. Evan knew fighting back would make the beating worse. He just hoped that after him, they wouldn’t feel the need to hurt anyone else.

He closed his eyes and braced himself. It would be over quickly. Maybe the pain could distract him from thinking about Gran for a while.

His head snapped back as Ollie’s fist smashed into his jaw and he slumped to the ground.

All three bullies shouted incoherently. Evan was silent.

Ollie stamped on his hand, a sharp flash of pain. Another punch. Evan saw a faint trail of black smoke snake across the ground. The mist appeared to be coming from Evan’s fingertips. This happened once before, he thought. The punches in his last beating had made him see mist too.

He thought he saw the mist morph into a clawed hand that crawled across the ground, but just as it looked ready to seize Ollie's ankle, the mist dissipated.

Finally Evan's torture came to an end.

“Try that again and we'll kill you. That’s a promise.”

Ollie punctuated his threat with a last kick to the stomach.

Evan covered his face, gritting his teeth and trying not to cry out at the pain.

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Their laughter haunted him as they sauntered out of the alley, leaving him curled up in a ball against the cold metal fence.

*

The sleet worsened, turning to hailstones that bounced off the ground like a gang of tiny white frogs. Evan stumbled home, hunched over, face pulled tight in a grimace. The downpour beat against his aching body and the wind crawled across his skin, cold as a corpse’s caress.

He walked through the gates of Helken Place and up the winding path to the drab children's home, stomping up the stairs to his room. He wanted to cry as he closed the bedroom door, but it wouldn’t help. Nothing would.

He stripped off his school clothes and slumped on to his bed. Just one more year, one more year and I’ll be done with school, free of Ollie. Free of everyone. Evan had to tell himself that, to keep himself sane.

He looked in the mirror to check the bruises. As usual his pale face was marred by ugly abrasions. His left cheek had swollen to near double its usual size. He lifted up his shirt and winced at the discolouration there. Evan told the staff he just kept falling over. They asked questions, but he pushed them away.

It would only make things worse.

He would've liked to call himself tall, dark and handsome. Really, he wasn’t much taller than average, his hair was a dull brown, and he wasn’t handsome.

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At least, no one had ever told him he was. Dark grey eyes, made darker by pale skin, stared back at him miserably. Oddly, tiny red scratches adorned each iris, like the grey was a stone that’d been cracked and was now bleeding. It was the only interesting thing about him.

Evan pulled up the chair by his desk and sat down to write. Writing was his favourite, well only, hobby.

Pages and pages of his scrawling littered the untidy desk, reflecting the rest of the room. He picked one at random and began reading.

This one was about his hero Alwar. Alwar was the exact opposite of himself.

Strong, courageous, amazing in every way, he was the stuff of legend. Evan loved writing about his many adventures.

With the warrior Alwar he could lose himself, forget Grandma’s death and his miserable life. He could escape. Alwar conquered terrible opponents and the most ferocious of beasts. Evan couldn’t even escape Ollie and his thugs.

He peered out of his small window. The hail had morphed into heavy clumps of snow that splattered onto the ground, lighting the garden with a ghostly sheen.

Evan forced everything else out of his head as he wrote long into the night, immersing himself in imagined worlds and allowing reality to slip away.

*

172

Winter descended upon London, its cold touch bathing the streets. Snow fell heavily, carpeting roads and walkways. Not a street lamp glowed as silence ruled the midnight hour.

In a dark alleyway, the shadowy veils of night shattered as light filtered through a gap in space and time. The beam of light flashed scarlet as it expanded into a swirling mass.

Out of the portal stepped a monstrosity not meant to touch this world.

Quickly, he distorted his features. The abomination transformed to what could pass for a man, providing no human looked closely.

He took in a deep breath, inhaling the air of Earth. Inhaling the air of men.

It appeared he’d come to the right place.

The demon’s lips hooked up. He would take great delight in killing the boy, regardless of his master’s orders.

*

Evan trudged through oceans of snow on his way to school. His body shivered and his hands grew numb as the frost bit deep.

His grandmother's face haunted his thoughts. He’d accidentally knocked her photo over this morning. The glass had shattered. She was smiling in that photo, her face kind and warm. Her face had been cold and slack when he'd found her.

Her body was there, but she wasn’t. She was gone, she…

173

Evan forced the memory away. He wouldn’t think about that, he couldn’t.

She wasn’t his real grandmother; he’d been abandoned by whoever his parents were, just like he’d been abandoned in London now.

He rounded the corner and Elfort School came into view. It was a typical English school, a mass of brown buildings, usually cluttered with litter as much as it was pupils.

But Evan was late and there was no one else around.

Except one.

A large figure stood by the school gates. He was as wide as he was tall, but hidden by a long trench coat and low-hanging hat. As Evan drew closer the feeling of dread engulfed him. For some reason, he was horrified by whatever waited at the gates. He didn’t know why. Everything just felt wrong.

He froze, not wanting to get any closer to the stranger.

With agonising slowness, the stranger’s face, half obscured by a scarf and hat, turned to look at him. Evan gazed in horror at the repulsive figure. He wanted to run away as fast as he could, but he was rooted to the spot.

Terror clutched at Evan’s mind, squeezing his stomach and constricting his chest. He had the innate feeling this stranger meant him grievous harm.

A double-decker bus, filled with raucous students, abruptly turned into the street and glided towards the school.

The stranger turned away fast and walked in the opposite direction. Soon he'd disappeared from view, swathed by the screeching wind and swirling snow.

174

The bus pulled up by the gates and the pupils filed out, complaining how the snow had made them late.

Evan breathed heavily, trying to stuff down the panic and bile crawling up his throat. He had no idea who the stranger was. He’d always had an active imagination, and right now his mind was telling him the eerie figure could’ve had something to do with Pete’s death. No, you’re being stupid. It was probably just some homeless man.

Trying to shake it from his thoughts, he headed to class.

Throughout the rest of the day, Evan couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger and the sense of dread that’d overwhelmed him.

He was so distracted that he paid less attention in class than usual. He was terrified when it came to the end of the day, not of Ollie and his friends, but that the stranger might be back. That thing frightened Evan more than Ollie ever had.

He walked out of his English class with great trepidation, trying to fight the urge to run all the way to the orphanage. He was almost relieved to see only Ollie and his friends at the gates.

Evan attempted to walk past them unseen, trying to blend in with the other students, but as always Ollie spotted him. Since Evan had first arrived and answered one too many questions in his English lesson, the thug had made his life hell.

175

The smoke of Ollie’s cigarette lingered about his nostrils, furthering his resemblance to an angry bull.

“Oi, Umbra!”

Ollie had four friends with him today and all five of them chased Evan as he broke into a sprint.

Adrenaline coursed through Evan’s veins as he darted between pedestrians and cars, cutting across the road in a desperate attempt to shake them.

The streets retreated and a park came into view. He was nearly at the orphanage.

He’d never made it home before they’d got him though.

Evan leaped over the park fence, only to fall face-first in the snow on the other side. Regaining his balance using the merry-go-round, he pushed off and continued to run. Vaulting the fence had cost him. Ollie and his thugs made the jump easily and Ollie managed to snatch the back of Evan’s coat and swing him round with ruthless force. Evan’s head whiplashed and he veered sideways, tripping over and crashing to the ground.

A cruel chorus of laughter broke out amongst Ollie’s friends, but the leader himself wasn’t smiling. Perhaps he felt especially vicious today.

Before Evan could stand, Ollie booted him back down.

“Why do you always run, eh?” he snarled.

Ollie aimed a kick, but Evan rolled to his feet.

“C’mon!” Ollie shoved him. “Do sumin’.”

176

This time he landed a punch to the jaw. Evan crumpled under the blow.

“Get up!” Ollie bellowed.

Evan’s anger rose to a crescendo within him, but he lacked the courage to let it loose. Ollie seized his coat and hauled him to his feet.

“Look at you. You’re nothing,” he spat, his nose almost touching Evan’s.

The other boys screamed abuse, threatening to beat Evan to within an inch of his life.

I don’t deserve this. He felt tears at the back of his eyes.

“Aww, you gonna cry again, mate?”

Ollie’s gang shrieked their mirth.

“Don’t see him mouthing off today, do we, boys?” Ollie looked to his peers for encouragement.

“You really are pathetic, aren’t you, Evan? Tell me, is it true you're not even an orphan; you just live in that place because your parents abandoned you? I can see why they would.”

Evan’s anger blazed to within an inch of the surface. It felt like the blood in his head was banging against his skull, trying to leak out of his ears.

“Do sumin, Evan, I dare ya.” Ollie’s fat lips spread into a wicked smile. “You know how they always say, if you stand up to bullies they’ll leave you alone?

Well, with me… it makes things much worse.” Ollie