Read Online Bloodrush (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 1) by Ben Galley - Free Book Online Page A

paces. Turn the steel of your rifle hot as hell, ’til it burns your hands or explodes. Take your soul, too, if they lay hands on you. A little chanting, a little blood, and you’re theirs.
    Merion’s own voice surprised him, so much so he could not help but squeak halfway through his last sentence, so that it came out as more of a question than a fact. ‘My father said that magic is only what science can’t yet explain. That it’s all a trick.’ He heard Rhin muttering something derogatory in the pack, and immediately wished he had kept his mouth shut. Perhaps it was his nerves, or the need to be noticed that had made him squawk. He did not even agree with his father. He had a faerie for a best friend, after all.
    The laughter started slowly at first. A few chuckles here and there to get the ball rolling. One man started wheezing, and slowly but surely the carriage erupted into uproar. Merion looked at the floor and wished he would melt. He wished he had Rhin’s powers.
    As the laughter finally died away, one of the nearest men slapped his hand on his thigh. ‘Shit, son, your father’s got some balls. All a trick, hah!’
    Merion was not sure what the ownership of a pair of testicles had to do with the matter, but he nodded anyway.
    ‘Just wait until he meets his first railwraith!’ somebody else cackled.
    ‘Or sandstrike!’
    And the laughter began afresh.
    In the pack, Rhin winced as the men yelled out each individual peril of the wilds. He swore he could feel Merion trembling with fear through the cloth walls of his little sanctuary. The faerie racked his brains for something useful to say, but he couldn’t think of a single word. He only had words for himself.
    ‘Poor lad,’ he mumbled.
    *
    One by one, the green shrubs that had brightened Merion’s morning died away until there was barely anything but rock, sand, and brown scrub. Merion sighed. Even the terrain wanted him to feel unwelcome.
    As the train reverberated around him and made his teeth jiggle, Merion’s mind once again turned to its dark corners. He wondered what he had done to his father to deserve this. He wondered whether he should start cursing his name, whether it would make any difference.
    Merion had left London in a muggy cloud of confusion and disbelief, almost as if he were still dreaming. But with every mile west he’d crawled, that disbelief had melted away and left something very solid in its place. His father had been murdered, and he had been banished to live with his aunt, the undertaker. His whole life hung in suspended animation, ripe for greedy claws to pick at. That disbelief had become a very chilling reality.
    The young Hark may have been trembling, but he had no tears to shed. Along with the fear there came a burning, indignant anger. And as we all know, anger must have an escape route, otherwise it boils up into something a little more dangerous. So it was that Merion’s anger gave him an idea, a purpose to shield him from this awful new reality of his. He swirled it around inside his head, and let it keep him warm.
    As they steered a course north and west, the scenery swapped between the unbearably flat and the worryingly steep and craggy. Merion had one thing to say for the cobbled-together locomotive: it was as strong as the sea. During the ten hours between Cheyenne and Fell Falls, it never broke pace once, not even on the hills. It was an unstoppable force that dragged him ever-onwards.
    The sun was just setting when they crested a hill only a handful of miles from Fell Falls. For a moment, Merion couldn’t bring himself to look, before he remembered some more of his father’s cold words: We must always stare our opponents square in the face, whether in the street, the ring, or amongst the Benches.
    ‘So be it,’ Merion spat, and turned, daring Fell Falls to inch closer. And so it did.
    Close up, the town looked like a monster, sprawling and leaking charcoal smoke from its pores. Its veins were dusty streets