Read Online Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey - Free Book Online

and took the paper from Iris without asking, her looped braids nearly smacking me in the face. I caught a whiff of something that smelled like expensive fruit.
    â€˜Let’s talk about something cheerful,’ Kevin suggested.
    â€˜Such as exams.’
    I groaned.
    â€˜It’s only two weeks until our midyears!’ Iris said. ‘And they’re right in the middle of the production run, which is why we keep losing everyone. Sometimes I think I’d like to just run away.’
    Kevin nodded. ‘Like Great-Uncle Robert.’
    â€˜Oh, here we go,’ I said.
    Reka went very still, and then, apparently realising her cue, cocked her head at him. ‘Your great-uncle ran away from exams?’
    â€˜Nope. World War II, according to Grandad. Robert was a pacifist, and he vanished in his first year of uni, a couple of days after war was declared on Germany. Grandad signed up, did manly, non-pacifist things in North Africa, and came back expecting his younger brother to turn up when the fighting was over.’
    â€˜And he never did,’ Iris said, far too sad about something that wasn’t her family tragedy.
    â€˜Nope. So Grandad named his son after his brother in case he wasn’t a coward. Hedging his bets.’ He pointed at me. ‘But the relevant part is that Grandad blamed the drama club.’
    â€˜Do tell,’ Reka said.
    â€˜It was only after Robert joined that he got all those weird ideas about how it might be nice not to shoot people.’
    â€˜How enlightened,’ Reka said, nudging his hand with hers.
    â€˜A better life through theatre,’ I said flippantly, and stood up, before things got any worse. ‘Well, there’s a Snickers bar with my name on it.’
    â€˜You need protein,’ Kevin said, but he didn’t stand to join me.
    â€˜Snickers are packed with peanuts,’ I said, and loped up the stairs.
    I ignored Iris’s desperate look as Reka edged closer to Kevin. It was harder to ignore my own guilt. Iris and I weren’t actually friends, I reminded myself. I wasn’t obliged to deflect her imagined competition. And whether or not he came out to Reka was up to him, but if Kevin couldn’t read the signals of interested persons and let them know he didn’t reciprocate, it wasn’t my job to fix the fallout.
    Still, warned by some impulse, I turned to look at them just before I got to the exit. Reka was explaining something to Kevin, her hand on his arm, but she tilted her head to look me full in the face.
    My skin prickled. It was probably a trick of the distance and the dim light, but for that brief moment, her eyes were dark from corner to corner, with no pupils or irises at all.

    Even after a chocolate hit, I was in no mood to watch Reka be stunning and brilliant for the rest of the rehearsal, but it was full dark outside and I couldn’t leave until Kevin did. Instead, I went to the greenroom and sulked in perfect privacy, picking holes in the collapsing couch instead of working on my Odyssey essay like a good Mansfield girl ought. This became less exciting after a while, especially when the tips of my fingers went numb with the cold. I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets and began poking around the little dressing rooms. The first two held Carla’s sewing machine, the clothes they’d rented, and the costumes she’d been making herself, neatly hung on wheeled racks or folded onto rickety steel chairs.
    In the last one, there was a bench built across two sides of the room. It was stained with make-up spills from the decades of actors who had sat in front of the four smeared mirrors to put on their faces. The box of costume jewellery sat open on the bench beside a toolbox filled with half-used make-up.
    I sat down and pulled a strand of beads out of the box. It was only plastic, but the beads were a nice deep sapphire, and polished into irregular bobbles. I pulled the necklace over my head, pulled my