Read Online Thief: A Fantasy Hardboiled (Ratcatchers Book 2) by Matthew Colville - Free Book Online Page A

look back.
    "You're about my parents' age," the boy said. "You want to come by for dinner tomorrow, I'll tell them you're coming. They'd love to meet the folks I'm working with."
    "I bet they would," Rayk said mysteriously.
    She just looked at him. Eventually Aiden shrugged. “Come on,” he said. “How old do you have to be?” Neither of them said anything. "How old were you?" he asked Fandrick's back.
    "Older’n you,” Fandrick grumbled.
    "How old were you?" Aiden nodded at Rayk, who frowned at the boy.
    “Never you mind,” she said. “What’d the ragman send you for? I mean, why you?”
    “Ragman?” Aiden asked.
    “The castellan,” she said, drawing the word out.
    “Oh, right. Because he wears…I get it. Well, he didn’t say why. I don’t really know what happened here.”
    “Lotta people killed,” Fandrick said as he poked his boot into something.
    "How many?" Aiden asked
    "Thirty-seven," Fandrick growled.
    Aiden looked around the black morass of vitreous bile and mud that was once a crowd. "That's a precise estimate," he said. "How do you...,"
    "We count the boots," Rayk said, nodding to a pile of boots by the gate.
    Aiden saw and was impressed. "Sensible."
    "We know what we're doing," Rayk said.
    Aiden looked at her for a moment. "So tell me what happened here," he said.
    "Someone calls up a mess of ghouls," she said, "they eat everyone who couldn't get out. Stampede at the gate."
    Aiden nodded as though confirming a suspicion. He strolled away, looking at the ground, at the remains of the people, at the black oily mud.
    He crouched down and dipped his finger in the mud. Brought it to his nose, smelled it.
    “Any corpses?” he asked.
    “None,” Rayk said.
    From his haunches he surveyed the mud field. It was flat and, except for the gallows, there was nowhere a corpse could be hidden.
    “You’re sure,” he asked, even though he knew the answer.
    “Come on,” Fandrick barked.
    "Not ghouls then," Aiden said, standing up. Fandrick and Rayk looked at each other, and walked over to him.
    "Ghouls are animated corpses," he said. "When they die they leave a dead body behind. Even if they ripped all the people apart and then ripped each other apart, there’d still be one corpse left.”
    “There’s no corpse,” Fandrick said.
    “So not ghouls,” Aiden said. “Two more reasons. One, ghouls don’t leave this black oily whatever,” he said rubbing his fingers together and showing it to them. “I don’t know what does. Shadows maybe. Shades. We can find out.”
    “What’s the other reason,” Rayk asked.
    Aiden turned to her, looked from her to Fandrick as though they might guess.
    “There are no more deathless,” he said, as though it were obvious.
    “People who saw it said deathless,” Fandrick said.
    “They’re wrong,” Aiden said. “But whatever they were they look like deathless.”
    “Sound like deathless to me,” Fandrick said. Rayk didn’t correct him. She just watched Aiden.
    “We’ll find out,” Aiden said. “Maybe we’re meant to think they’re deathless. Throw us off the track.”
    “Not throwing ‘us’ off anything. It’s deathless, so we brace the churches, see which cults they’re dealing with, follow the trail.”
    “It’ll lead nowhere,” Aiden said. “It’s a dead-end. We…”
    “We!” Fandrick barked a laugh.
    Rayk just looked at him.
    Aiden stopped and nodded. “Alright,  I get it.” He looked from Fandrick to Rayk. Rayk seemed more open, but he was willing to believe this was a trick.
    “I’m thirteen, and I apprentice at my uncle’s scrivner’s shop,” Aiden spoke this very quickly. “I’m fifteen and the castellan comes in, he needs a copy made, I do it. I ask him questions about who wrote the thing. I’ve been looking at writing for a while, at people, at what they come in to have done, why. The castellan gives me this weird look, but he doesn’t say anything. I don’t even know who he is. He comes back a week later, more work.