Read Hide Me Among the Graves for Free Online

locomotive about to hit them, compressing the air, and a sharp machine-oil smell like ozone was harsh in Crawford’s nostrils. In a convulsion of total panic, he seized the woman around the waist, boosted her right over the stone railing, and pitched her away from the bridge—she had been too breathless even to scream—and in the same motion he slapped one boot onto the wet stone bench and sprang over the railing after her.
    Then he was plummeting through yards and yards of empty rushing air, and he crashed into the cold water before he had thought to take a breath; he might even have been screaming.
    When he thrashed back up to the surface, gasping, he could see the woman flailing in the water near him, her billowing crinoline at once keeping her afloat and impeding her efforts to swim, but before struggling out of his heavy coat and starting through the water toward her, he threw a fearful glance up at the bridge high overhead. For a moment there might have been a flexing, spiky bulk visible at the railing, but if so, it had withdrawn by the time he had blinked water out of his eyes for a clearer look.
    He swam to the struggling woman and grasped her upper arm, then began kicking through the frigid salt water toward the shore. The current swept them east, past the arches and water gates of Somerset House, and he managed to slant in at the steps below Temple Place. The woman had also lost or shed her jacket in the river, and both of them were shaking as they climbed on their hands and knees up the steps to the narrow river-side pavement.
    Looking back fearfully, Crawford couldn’t make out the bridge at all in the darkness. From very far away he thought he caught a slow bass thrumming under the percussion of the storm.
    His hand slapped his waistcoat pocket, but the little jar he sometimes remembered to carry wasn’t there.
    Cold rain clattered around him, and river water dripped from his beard. “What,” he choked, “the bloody hell —was—”
    She put her cold palm across his mouth so quickly that it was almost a slap, and water flew from her stringy wet hair. “Don’t … give words,” she panted. “Don’t … draw, attract. ” She lowered her hand to grip the edge of the pavement. “We need to get indoors. Walls, a roof.”
    He was panting too. “I—live near here. Five-minute walk.”
    She nodded. “Good—but first—” She rolled over and sat up, apparently to untie one of her shoes. A moment later she handed him the metal frame that had been strapped to the bottom of it.
    â€œStrap that over the sole of one of your boots,” she said. “Quickly—even with this change in our silhouettes, we’ve got to be inside before the rain washes the salty river water off us.”
    He didn’t argue. He was still breathing rapidly, and when his shaking fingers discovered that the straps wouldn’t fit over the instep of his boot, he impatiently pulled his sopping scarf from around his neck and tore it lengthwise in half. He used the narrower strip to tie the metal sole onto his left boot, with a big wet knot over his instep.
    The woman had got to her feet. “Come on,” she whispered. “You go, lead the way—I’ll follow about twenty feet behind you. We’ve got to stop our auras overlapping.”
    â€œAuras.” Crawford stood up unsteadily on the wobbly metal sole. “We’re,” he said to her, “safe? For now?”
    â€œSafe?” The streetlamps of Arundel Street ahead of them threw enough light for him to see her wondering frown. “Go. I’ll follow.”
    The two of them weren’t much wetter than the few other pedestrians they passed, as first Crawford and then the woman crossed the muddy gravel lanes of the Strand, and the one cabbie that reined in his horse for a moment just shrugged and sped up again when Crawford waved him off. The