Read Ruined 2 - Dark Souls for Free Online

or paper bags bulging with vegetables, or pungent cheeses — but there were clothes on sale as well, like winter socks and woolen scarves, and the flower seller was doing a big trade in vibrant pots of purple heather.
    The real action, Miranda discovered, was on pedestrian-only Coney Street, which curved to follow the river. This was fashion central, the store windows decorated with tinsel and baubles, and crammed with sassy party dresses — the kind, Miranda thought, that she wouldn’t mind buying but would never wear. Holidayparties did not feature big in her plans this year. Her mother tried to talk her into a gilt-edged minidress, and Miranda finally opted for a black beaded cardigan and some high-heeled suede ankle boots that would make her look about ten feet tall. Jenna would approve, she thought. Not of the cardigan, maybe, because Jenna thought Miranda wore too much black, but she’d have liked the boots. “Embrace the height, sister,” she used to tell Miranda. “Celebrate those stilt legs of yours.” Going shopping without Jenna felt weird and wrong. Too normal, in a way, when nothing should be normal anymore.
    It was hard not to get swept up in the buzz of it all, though. York wasn’t that much bigger than the college town where they lived, but it was somewhere new for Miranda, and the streets were much livelier than the small grid of student bars, diners, and half-empty stores back home. Even her father, hardly the world’s most enthusiastic shopper, seemed to be reveling in the good-natured bustle: He had to be dragged away from a rack of CDs (“Look, Peggy — they still have record stores here!”) when everyone else, weighed down with plastic shopping bags, was ready to go back to the flat.
    After they dropped off the bags, they stopped in King’s Square to watch a juggler — dressed as a jester — juggle bowling pins in the air.
    “Beyond corny,” Miranda muttered to Rob, taking a giant step away from her father: He was embarrassing them, as usual, by taking too many photographs. The bare trees shivered in the breeze; people in the smallcrowd were stamping their feet to keep warm. Peggy wriggled onto the end of a long bench seat, and Rob and Miranda managed to get a spot near the man roasting chestnuts on an open brazier.
    Right away, Miranda spotted something more interesting than the juggler. Just a few feet away, a surly group of Goth kids huddled close enough to the brazier to catch some of the warmth of its fire. Jugglers she could see any day in the pedestrian mall back home, but genuine English Goths were a more unusual sight in Iowa.
    All of them, guys and girls, wore the same heavy workman’s boots, and they were all in black, of course. Some of them were smoking, the lit embers of the cigarettes the only spot of color against their dark clothes and wan faces.
    “Oi — Nick!” shouted one of the guys, and Miranda followed his gaze. On the far side of the square, stomping toward Petergate, was another youth-in-black, raising a pale hand when he saw his friends. Miranda realized, with a strange thrill of recognition, that she’d seen him before. He was the guy who’d been lurking in the doorway of the boarded-up house in the Shambles.
    He started walking over, weaving through the crowd. The panels of his long leather coat flapped like bat wings, and Miranda wondered why he didn’t fasten it, when the day was so cold. As he got closer, she noticed he was half carrying, half dragging some kind of trash bag. And as he got closer, he spotted her looking.
    Miranda glanced away, pretending to be watching thejuggler’s antics with his silly jingling hat. But she knew that this guy Nick had seen her — worse, that he’d
known
she was staring. Miranda felt stupid, like a gawping tourist. By the time she had the courage to dart a quick look over at the Goths again, Nick was nowhere to be seen. He’d come and gone, and his friends were still standing there. One of them was mock juggling