Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (top ebook reader TXT) 📕

for Frank Sinclair and his friends. Mark my words: they’ll all be dead or begging on the streets by the end of the year.”

Adam feels a little of the tension gripping him loosen. “Good,” he says. And when Frank Sinclair is dead, he will go and find Fox’s tail, and bring it back to the stadium to reunite it with her coat.

Adam raises his binoculars and focuses them on the funeral. The river is a rushing silver sliver, making for a kinetic backdrop to the chaotic and colourful remains of the ruined gathering. Pieces of chairs, and vases, and trampled flowers lie in splinters everywhere, and though the dead have mostly been removed, there are plenty of white-clad forensic officers still struggling with some of the heavier corpses. A few horses are being towed on trolleys along the track. The scene is a muddled rainbow of destruction, with petals still coating everything, but the dominant colour is a vibrant shade of scarlet. Near the stage, Adam spots the portrait of Crow, smashed into a crumpled canvas heap.

Such a waste.

“Worm?” Magpie offers his selection.

Accepting the packet, Adam fishes out a blue specimen, but when he places it in his mouth it’s strangely gritty. He checks the sell-by date. “These went off a decade ago.”

“Did they?” Magpie raises his binoculars. “I should really empty my pockets more often.”

Adam hauls himself to his feet and checks over his wounds. Most have stopped bleeding, but the gunshot wound in his shoulder is still seeping red. “We should head to the hospital and check on Owl. He got hit pretty bad.”

Magpie shakes his head. “No time. We need to get back to work. We only have a window of a few days in which to steal another piece of Eden from Frank Sinclair.” Upending the packet of worms into his mouth, he grinds his jaw around to chew at the gelatine mass. Then, sliding his sleeve back, he checks his watch. “I still need to show you it. And if we leave now, we can get in before closing.”

“We should really check on Owl.”

“And do what, Adam?” Magpie fastens his coat. “Did you ever learn medicine?”

“No. That was Eve.”

Magpie sighs, and his expression softens. “Look. Owl’s in the best possible hands. Rook will see to that. So how about you and I finish what we started? Then, when we’re done, we can show Owl my little collection. Surely that would be a better use of our time than pacing hospital corridors?”

Adam remembers how good it felt to see the stadium for the first time. To realise what it all was. And besides, Magpie is right. All Adam’s good for is his strength. He never had Eve’s gift for healing. “All right,” he says, at last.

Outside, the winds have picked up, and there’s a sharp chill in the air, rustling the trees and sending yellow leaves spinning. Adam follows Magpie along a thin and winding track, away from the ruined funeral. As they go, he catches sight of creatures moving among the shifting branches: squirrels, and foxes, and crows. And as they exit the valley, he spies an especially large black bird high up in an orange oak, observing them with its beady black eye. When it takes flight, he notices that it only has one leg.

* * *

Adam appreciates London from afar. The city is a jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces from dozens of different jigsaws, where no two pieces quite fit together comfortably, and at a distance it has a colourful charm. Up close, however, the city makes him feel lost, and he thinks that its people seem lost as well, as if their lives have taken on that flawed jigsaw feel, and their identities have become as fractured as their city.

Magpie has managed to navigate the car to Piccadilly, where they have become wedged between two tall red buses in the middle of a traffic jam. The traffic lights ahead keep changing from red to orange to green to orange to red, but nobody is moving. Crowds flow around the car and buses, and the noise of the city is almost suffocating as it rushes in through Magpie’s open window. Magpie himself has fallen asleep, with one hand still curled around the wheel of his idling car. On the back seat is the barrel full of gunpowder, which has been rolling precariously from side to side the entire journey south, and Adam has been kept wide awake by it – waiting for an errant spark to ignite it and turn his world bright.

With a start, Magpie wakes up. The bus in front of them is moving. With a few clever manoeuvres, which jostle the barrel, he steers the car through gaps in the crowds and down to Pall Mall.

The apartments here are all tall, and composed of exquisitely maintained architecture, with glittering chandeliers visible beyond the net curtains of the high windows. Shining, sleek cars are parked everywhere, and men and women in expensive clothes are helped out by doormen in well-tailored suits. Adam has never liked the strutting of the wealthy; he has spent a great many of his lives being summarily dismissed, or treated like property, by the kind of people who live here.

Pulling up beside one of the apartments, Magpie is helped out of his car by a doorman. Hefting the barrel out of the back seat, Adam follows them up the marble steps and into a lavishly lit reception. “You have a place here?”

“Mostly for the parking,” says Magpie.

Even the light fittings are gilded, Adam observes. “Why are you spending Rook’s money if you can afford this?”

“I have a little put away,” concedes Magpie, “but buying stadiums and transporting pieces of Eden halfway across the world is slightly beyond what I can afford. Trust me: Rook won’t miss the money.”

“He sent me to find you.”

“Of course. But I imagine he did that out of curiosity – not genuine concern about his pockets being emptied. Let me put it