Read Online Light Errant by Chaz Brenchley - Free Book Online Page B

no stampede or cattle-drive; and I’d half expected one or the other. With Uncle James head of the family now, I’d thought greed might finally unbalance what had always teetered on a very fine edge. I’d thought disaster was all but guaranteed, and one of my favourite scenarios would have brought me back to a ghost town, with all the civilians fled or chased away and Macallans taking in each other’s washing for lack of anyone else to do the work.
    Not so, the streets were heaving. Serious contrast to the night before, when my father had been apparently the one, the only, the odd man out.
    But this was where the difference lay, in the people, in their faces and the way they carried themselves. Not for nothing had my family named them cattle, all these years; and not for arrogance either, or not entirely. Arrogant it was, to be sure, but perceptive also. Generations of repression left their mark. When I left this city, the citizenry had been subdued, passive, a people long defeated and only making what poor best of life they could manage beneath a tyrannical heel. Oh, there had been hotheads, of course, there had been rebels; but never many at once, and never for long. Few indeed, among those born here. They learned young, in the cradle maybe, maybe even in the womb, picking up vibes from the amniotic fluid. Trouble usually came in from outside, and never lasted.
    Now, though: now shoulders that had been perennially slumped were tense instead, faces were drawn and watchful. When they saw me—when they saw my big nose, my heritage blazoned on my features—eyes didn’t look down or flicker away. They stared, they watched me, the people that owned the eyes stiffened and turned towards me, sometimes took half a step to follow. Voices muttered, there were even fingers that pointed.
    No one would have said that these people were doing well, that they were comfortable in their lives, in their city; but they were not the cowed folk that I had abandoned to a predictable fate. Undoubtedly, things had changed here.
    Changed so much, indeed, that I was grateful not to be alone. Not my presence that offered protection to Janice and Jon; the world had turned on its axis, everything was reversed, and I was very glad to have company.
    Glad also to be walking in sunshine, to have that tingle on my skin that said my own talent was active, on a hair-trigger, there to be reached for if tension and watchfulness resolved into genuine threat.
    My face was my fortune, as it always had been on these streets; and for the first time in my life, that fortune felt dangerously uncertain.
    A man coming towards me, glowering behind shades: as he passed his shoulder jarred mine, and there was nothing accidental about it. I whipped round, anger doing its traditional thing and overriding good sense and discomfort both. He likely heard me gasp as my bones jarred, but all the acknowledgement I got was to see him turn his head and spit aggressively into the gutter.
    And this no crop-headed yob, no tattooed youth with a fatal dose of bravado; he was a man in his forties, in a suit. In danger of his life, though he might not have known that.
    A hand closed on my arm in warning, but it wasn’t Jonathan’s, and it wasn’t saying don’t do it, Ben, don’t roast him, a little jostle isn’t worth a death sentence whatever your pride is demanding...
    Janice it was who was gripping me, tugging at me, hissing, “Don’t, Ben. Don’t get involved. Start trouble here, you’ll have a dozen of them on you as soon as they raise the yell, that there’s a Macallan caught out in daylight...”
    Maybe Jon hadn’t told her everything after all, what I could do in daylight; or maybe she was only trying to forestall my having to, fearful of a dozen human torches blazing my way through the city. Whichever, I didn’t want a showdown either. And true enough, a wee shove on a sore shoulder didn’t merit