Black Feathers Read Online Free Page A

make the images match up—the smiling girl in the school picture with the groggy, defensive girl in the doorway that morning. It was more than the clothes and the dirt and the unwashed hair that separated them. There was something fundamentally different in her face, something that had shifted and changed the smiling, happy student captured in the photograph into the girl living on the streets.
    Harrison scrolled through the notes in the file. An investigation by the Ministry of Children and Families when she was nine. A psychiatric hospitalization when she was twelve. A fire that had destroyed the family home in mid-November, just before she ran away.
    Maybe there wasn’t that much of a change, after all. There was something there in her eyes in the photo, like her smile didn’t quite reach them.
    Or maybe he had been looking at the picture too long.
    “So listen,” Farrow said, and Harrison jumped. He had forgotten that she was there. “A couple of us are going out, getting some beers. You comin’?”
    Harrison shook his head. “No. But thanks. I’m gonna finish up here, head for home.”
    “Another busy night with the wife and kids.”
    “Yeah.”
    “All right. Flip side, then.”
    He was already lost again in the computer screen before she walked away.

    The streets were deserted. It was early in the week—Cassie wasn’t sure what day—and the moment the offices shut down and the stores closed, downtown cleared out. There were still cars on the streets, racing from point A to point B, but the sidewalks were empty. Their voices seemed to echo in the darkness.
    “Here,” Skylark said, coming to a stop and slinging her knapsack onto a bench, flopping down beside it.
    “Here?” Cassie looked around. She thought she had gotten to know the downtown area, but in the darkness it was unfamiliar. “What’s ‘here’?”
    Skylark gestured at the building behind her. “That’s City Hall. And through there”—“there” was a covered breezeway at one side of the building, brightly lit with orange lights, concrete pillars holding up the roof—“is Centennial Square.”
    Through the breezeway, Cassie could see a flat expanse of concrete with a few raised, empty planters, pools of street light and sharp, deep shadows. In the distance was a dark patch, maybe a lawn, with a huge pine tree in the centre, lit up with Christmas lights blinking blue. Between the breezeway and a building on the opposite side of the square were three stone monoliths in the centre of a low, circular barrier of white concrete. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
    Skylark turned. “That’s the fountain,” she said. “Well, not right now. They’ve turned off the water because they’re worried about it freezing.” She shook her head. “Brother Paul, he told us last night that the temperature when they turn off the fountain is actually five degrees higher than when they open the emergency shelter beds. And they keep the fountain turned off all winter. They only keep the shelter beds open until the temperature goes up a degree or two.”
    Her expression and her voice were laced with disgust.
    Skylark’s explanation allowed Cassie to ask the question that had been on her mind their whole walk. “Who’s Brother Paul?”
    Skylark’s face lit up. “Brother Paul—I guess you could say he’s …” She stumbled over trying to find a description, her eyes taking on that faraway look again. “He’s the leader, I guess. But that doesn’t really … He doesn’t … You just have to meet him.”
    Before Cassie could speak, a battered van pulled up in front of the statue in front of City Hall, belching smoke and backfiring. The van was covered in graffiti, layers of bright spray paint, images and words over words and images.
    “Right on time,” Skylark said, leaning forward on the bench.
    Two men and a woman, dressed in jeans and T-shirts despite the cold, hopped out of the van. As they opened the back doors and began to pull