the pale dreamer a bone season novella samantha shannon

It was a crime for which I could have faced the gallows. I looked dead, and in a way I was: my spirit was detached, in part, from my body. My last day at work.Ī life-support machine kept my vitals ticking over. And as Jax always said, better an outlaw than a stiff. My line of work was dishonest, but it paid. Either way, I didn’t regret joining the syndicate. He might have sent me to Tower Hill himself if he’d known what I really did.

What job did I have? Who were my friends? Where was I living? The only hitch was his endless list of questions. A dinner here, a phone call there, a present at Novembertide. And although my father and I had never been close, I still felt I should keep in touch. Jax didn’t twig why I needed time off – for him, there was nothing worth our salt outside the syndicate – but he didn’t have a family like I did. After a tough week at the black market, I’d planned to spend the weekend with my father. Mine was a familiar name on the streets by that time. I was nineteen years old the day my life changed.

He didn’t know that I belonged with them. He wouldn’t have understood if I’d told him why I spent my time with criminals. He thought I was an assistant at an oxygen bar, a badly paid but legal occupation. There were six of us in his direct employ. My boss was a man named Jaxon Hall, the mime-lord responsible for the I-4 area. I was a mollisher, the protégée of a mime-lord. Pushed to the edge of society, we were forced into crime to prosper. All part of a citadel-wide syndicate headed by the Underlord. I worked among ruthless gangs of voyants, all willing to floor each other to survive. My father thought I would lead a simple life that I was bright but unambitious, complacent with whatever work life threw at me.įrom the age of sixteen I had worked in the criminal underworld of Scion London – SciLo, as we called it on the streets. There were plenty of jobs in the service industry. It was expected of young men and women to scratch out a living wherever they could, which was usually behind a counter of one sort or another. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. Some of us know, and we never get caught. We live in a way you might consider normal, provided you don’t look too hard. Not outside of fantasy, and even that’s blacklisted. We are the minority the world does not accept.

I like to imagine there were more of us in the beginning.

The pale dreamer a bone season novella samantha shannon