Excerpt: The Broken

The Broken

Prologue

Rachel Prendergast laughed, and set her bottle down on the table. The boy - what was his name? - she had been with all night smiled and leaned in, his face coming very close to hers. For a moment she leaned in too, but then she felt his warm breath on her cheek and drew away.
“Wassa matter?” he murmured, his eyes half closed.
“Goin’ for a smoke,” she muttered, and she got up and left him, stumbling slightly through the busy pub, music from the jukebox pounding through her head.
Outside in the cold London air, Rachel, who didn’t smoke, leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.
Rachel Prendergast was, basically, a good girl. She was vaguely aware of this, although right now, with criminal amounts of vodka in her system, she wasn’t feeling all that good.
“Adam,” she breathed, her eyes still closed. “Thassis name. Adam.”
She opened her eyes again and looked blearily at the doorway to the pub. At some point, she thought, she would probably go back in, back to Adam, and then proceed to “get over” her very-recently-exed boyfriend, break all the rules she’d ever set herself, and then wake up with a blinding headache and very few memories in the morning.
“Fuggit,” she growled to herself.
Not just yet, though.
Aware that where she was, she was in full view of anyone walking past, she turned down the alley to the side of the pub and staggered down it a little way. “Thas better,” she told herself blearily, and leaned back against the wall. She allowed her knees to give way and sank down, coming to sit with an unceremonious flump in the gutter. She let her head sink down, resting on her knees which were bent right up by her stomach, and sighed deeply.
It was then that she heard a noise.
She looked up, her eyes refusing to focus properly. She couldn’t see anyone, but she had very definitely heard footsteps.
“Alan?” she hazarded, then remembered that her new “friend” was called Adam, and tried that instead. “Adam?”
Still nothing.
Rachel stood up. She tried to do so slowly, with no sudden movements, without drawing attention to herself, but her balance couldn’t take it, and halfway up, she fell back down again, on her hands and knees, splashing into a puddle.
What she heard next was very definitely the sound of footsteps. This was proved beyond reasonable doubt when a pair of black shoes appeared a few feet in front of her face.
“Adam?” She couldn’t seem to lift her head up.
Whoever it was didn’t speak. And Rachel knew very definitely that it was not Adam, and without being sure why, she began to cry, her whole body shaking with sobs of fear.
The person squatted down in front of her, crouching, perfectly balanced, and held out a hand to caress her face. She forced her head up, and she looked into the stranger’s eyes, but could not make out his face through her tears.