Dragon Shield Read Online Free

her finger to her lips and looking round.
    ‘What?’ he whispered. ‘What can you hear?’
    ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s so creepy.’
    He listened. The city was silent. And that was definitely very creepy. London is never silent. There was no background growl of traffic. No street noise, no sirens in the distance, no slap of feet on the pavements, no laughing, no talking, no anything.
    Just a blanket of silence, the kind of silence you get in the middle of the night after a heavy snow fall. The world was . . .
    ‘Asleep,’ said Jo. ‘It’s like the world has just . . . gone to sleep.’
    ‘We’re not dreaming,’ Will said. It was so real and yet so creepily un-real that he wished they were.
    ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It all hurts too much. Much worse than pinching. If we were dreaming I’d definitely have woken up by now.’
    The road in front of them was a back street with just a van on it. A motorcycle dispatch rider had pulled his bike onto the pavement and was frozen in the act of taking a package out of the box on the back of his bike. His helmet was balanced on the seat. Will picked it up. It was easier to do something, to keep moving than it was to just sit there and think about what a weird place they found themselves in.
    ‘What are you doing?’ said Jo.
    ‘Put it on, get back in the chair,’ said Will. ‘We’re going to go fast. Like you said.’
    Jo looked at him for a beat, then nodded, put the helmet on and sat back on the chair. Will got behind it and started to push, slow at first, then faster and faster, until he got up to running speed.
    ‘Where are we going?’ shouted Jo, her voice muffled by the visor on the helmet.
    ‘Find Mum,’ he said. ‘Where she put the car. By that park.’
    As he ran he tried to get his bearings. They had left the car by a park called Coram’s Fields. It was a short walk from the hospital and he knew its name because they used to have their sandwiches there and Mum had told them the story of the park and why it was for kids and their parents or guardians – but no one else. It was the only park you couldn’t go into without a kid. Coram had been a rich man who’d left all his money to orphans a long time ago. Mum liked old stories and told them all about it the first time they went there.
    That first time they’d come to one of these appointments she had tried to dress it up like a treat: they’d gone to a museum in the morning, done some sightseeing and after the appointment they’d been to see a musical at the theatre. Will hadn’t found the museum very interesting and it was too full of other kids on school-trips to really see anything, and going to see a musical was more for Jo than him.
    The bit he’d enjoyed most had been rummaging through an antique shop close to the museum that had a lot of swords and spears and things, but he had not been allowed to touch them, let alone buy one. All they’d been able to afford was three old beads that Jo had chosen from a bowl full of random things. They looked like little coffee beans, but the shop owner, who looked almost as bored as Will had felt, said they were ancient beads.
    ‘Ancient beads made in China last month,’ his friend Jack had said when he saw it. ‘Ancient people didn’t have coffee anyway.’
    The bead did look like a sort of coffee bean, though the man in the shop had said it was an Ancient Egyptian sacred beetle, a scarab. Will had it on a friendship bracelet that Jo had plaited when they got home. She wore the matching one. Her mum had the third bead, but she had it on her key ring instead. Jo said it was for luck, so he had not taken it off for nearly a year. It was meant to fall off naturally. He’d got used to it. Secretly he hoped that when it fell off he might stop feeling angry and guilty about being a coward and a liar. He looked down at Jo’s hand gripping the arm of the chair: her bead was almost invisible, hidden in a
whole bunch of bracelets