Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series by Catherine Webb Page B

impatient of others’ suffering.

    This is what comes of interfering
, he thought sourly, before pitching forward on his face.
     
    He’d woken in a place that stank of death, and knew he wasn’t out of trouble yet. His back was searing him, and his heart was only just picking up its normal beat. His body had broken from its former state merely because the trance had been snapped by his warning wards. Danger had woken him, danger which needed him to be conscious.

    He was face down in a muddy pit, wearing the same clothes as before, soaked with his own blood. As he wondered who he was and what he was doing there, a splash of wet mud fell across his legs. Then another. With the return of awareness, he heard the sound of a shovel, and felt more mud fall. Someone was burying him, without a coffin, in an unmarked grave.

    Though every nerve screamed against it, he sat up. There was a single Frenchman burying him. In his shock the man let the shovel fall thudding to the ground.

    ‘Hi,’ said Sam. He could feel mud fall in showers from his face as he tried to work his parched mouth.

    The man ran.
Oh come on, I’m not in such a state as all that
,
he thought, before losing consciousness again.
     
    The train pulled up in Paris in the small hours, and Sam was reminded how hard it was to find a hotel that stayed open late. Eventually he found a place in a side street where the girl on the desk, who was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, was nearly falling over with fatigue. He took a grungy single room under the name of Michel Lesson, choosing it at random and hoping no one would ask for proof of identity.

    As the city’s clocks tolled two, he slipped into yet another strange bed in a musty room with a black and white TV and a window that overlooked concrete rooftops, and drifted asleep without even bothering to set his customary wards. He was simply too tired.

    As he dreamed, his mind was full of images: of snowstorms in the Tibetan mountains, Historians, Andrews, Gails, and Freya’s blood on a brother’s hands. Though he was under several blankets, he woke shaking with cold.
     
    The River Bookshop was next to a small church that, were it not for the sign declaring it a house of God, Sam would probably have missed. It was one of those modern churches built in the belief that all that mattered was praying, not where you did it. As such it was little more than a small office with polished floors and a few pretty pictures on the walls. But what the church lacked in personality the River Bookshop, established in the first year of the twentieth century of Our Lord, made up for ten times over.

    Sam pushed open the door hung with fifty-year-old posters and heard the dull tone of the old cowbell. He looked round a shop that was evidently managed by a Collector, capital C. There were a multitude of signed copies, several first editions, a whole shelf of old manuscripts and even an original copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, to be sold for thousands of euros to some prodigiously rich connoisseur. A ginger cat was curled up on one shelf, sleeping peacefully. In the corner a pile of cushions marked where children sat when stories were read to them. A tray of leaflets suggested that yes, this was a ‘community’ bookshop.

    The cash desk was unmanned. Sam made a point of browsing round before wandering up and ringing the little bell that stood on it.

    ‘Coming, coming!’

    A wizened little creature, more dwarf than man, entered the room. He had half-moon spectacles on the end of his nose and, though he had long grey hair and bulged around the waist, he moved as lightly on his feet as a child. To Sam he was unmistakable – a certain shadow followed him, perceptible only out of the corner of the eye. This man, like Adamarus, like Whisperer, was one of the Fey.

    ‘Run this shop long?’ Sam asked quietly.

    The little man looked at him, and nearly yelped, dropping his spectacles as he realised exactly
what
it was that stood inside