The Puppeteer King Read online

  The Puppeteer King

  Tales of Crow #3

  Chris Ward

  Contents

  Preface

  Also by Chris Ward

  About the Author

  Contact

  Copyright Information

  Prologue

  Part One

  1. Jun returns to the world

  2. Peter investigates an intruder

  3. Jun visits Ken

  4. Jun meets an old friend

  5. Park leaves the labour camp

  6. The little girl with the bad memories

  7. A greeting for the tourists

  8. Teething problems

  9. Trouble on Las Ramblas

  10. The making of dark plans

  11. Depressions in the bedclothes

  12. Dave Balls meets some non-friends

  13. Nozomi makes a friend and loses a friend

  14. Intruder in the darkness

  15. Peter calls a council

  Part Two

  16. A secret liaison of lost love

  17. Kurou takes notes

  18. Jennie makes a new friend

  19. Peter faces an inquisition

  20. Nozomi considers her future

  21. Jennie takes a day off

  22. Battle on the rooftop

  23. Bad days brewing

  24. The secret room

  25. Spiders and crows

  26. Screams and whispers in the dark

  27. Lost boys and scuttling things

  28. In the shadow of the tower

  29. Riots and black magic

  30. Horses and spider webs

  Part Three

  31. Professor Crow spins his webs

  32. Scuttling things in the darkness

  33. Nozomi in trouble

  34. A meeting with old acquaintances

  35. The cast of characters

  36. The circus of machinations

  37. Enter stage left

  38. The puppeteer king

  39. The circus leaves town

  40. The loveless young man and the river god

  41. Water levels rising

  42. A lake of fire

  43. Battle on the balcony

  44. Survivors

  Epilogue

  Where did the Crow go?

  Contact

  Available Now

  The Puppeteer King

  Tales of Crow #3

  * * *

  Once-human monsters, giant robot spiders, human statues and a madman with a thirst for destruction … Professor Kurou is back and more dangerous than ever.

  * * *

  After five years of incarceration, Jun Matsumoto is released from a mental hospital. With his hatred for Professor Kurou still consuming him, he enlists the help of some old friends and tracks his old nemesis to Barcelona, where he hopes to rescue Ken’s missing daughter, Nozomi.

  * * *

  Kurou, however, has a master plan that will not only destroy one of the greatest landmarks in mankind’s history, but bring war to an entire nation. Jun must battle not only ghosts from his past and his own failing mind, but a man who is now the undisputed Puppeteer King….

  Also by Chris Ward

  Novels

  Head of Words

  The Man Who Built the World

  * * *

  The Tube Riders series

  Underground

  Exile

  Revenge

  In the Shadow of London

  * * *

  The Tales of Crow series

  The Eyes in the Dark

  The Castle of Nightmares

  The Puppeteer King

  The Circus of Machinations

  Also Available

  The Tube Riders Trilogy Boxed Set

  The Tube Riders Four Volume Complete Series

  Tales of Crow Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set

  About the Author

  A proud and noble Cornishman (and to a lesser extent British), Chris Ward ran off to live and work in Japan back in 2004. There he got married, got a decent job, and got a cat. He remains pure to his Cornish/British roots while enjoying the inspiration of living in a foreign country.

  He is the author of the The Tube Riders series, the Tales of Crow series, and the upcoming Endinfinium YA fantasy series, as well as numerous other well-received stand alone novels.

  Chris would love to hear from you:

  www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net

  Thank you for your interest in my work.

  * * *

  Please join my READERS GROUP to get exclusive news, offers, and special discounts.

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  Readers Group - click here to join

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  You can also chat to me on Facebook at

  * * *

  Chris Ward (Fiction Writer)

  * * *

  and follow progress on new books on my website at

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  www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net

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  Thank you for reading!

  Copyright Information

  “The Puppeteer King (Tales of Crow #3)”

  Copyright © Chris Ward 2015

  * * *

  The right of Chris Ward to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author.

  * * *

  Cover design by Su Halfwerk @ Novel Prevue

  Editing by Emily Hetherington at Emily Eva Editing

  * * *

  This story is a work of fiction and is a product of the Author’s imagination. All resemblances to actual locations or to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  Prologue

  Jimmy Leaves meets a stranger

  * * *

  The seafront at Monte Carlo was always rich for pickings on summer evenings, Jimmy Leaves thought as he strolled down the promenade, chin jutting confidently, walking with the swagger of a rock star on vacation or an actor between shoots. Twenty-one, carefree, and with the clean, angular looks that had fooled many a naïve young lady into parting her legs or parting with her money, Jimmy looked and acted like something special.

  In fact he was drifting, thrifting, and thieving his way across Europe for want of anything better to do. Fortune favoured the ballsy, and Jimmy Leaves had balls so big they gave him backache. There was no car he wouldn’t try to steal, no home he wouldn’t attempt to infiltrate, no woman he wouldn’t try to lay.

  Look at them, he thought, peering out across the water at the yachts moored up in the bay, some of them lit up with lights and jumping with music. Not a care in the world, these rich pricks. Every single one of them could feed a third-world country, but here they are pissing their money away on poncey champagne and overpriced hookers.

  The waterfront was lined with valet parking lots, no one wanting to take any chances. They felt that a couple of cameras and some chump in a suit would stop their cars being lifted, and to a certain extent they were right. While Jimmy enjoyed a little pickpocketing in expensive clubs from time to time, the super-rich were generally out of reach for his limited resources. Sure, he had a car alarm immobilizer to help him get them off the lot, but there was nowhere to go, and you could hardly flog these cars on. Most of them were limited edition.

  No, the super-rich weren’t Jimmy’s target. He had another, far easier source of income.

  The gapers.

  The tourists, over on their weekend breaks to do some celebrity spotting, to pretend they were something more than school teachers, o
ffice workers, salespeople. They came over on low budget flights that dropped into one of the regional airports that had sprung up around Monte Carlo like satellites around a big, bloated moon, got their shuttle buses into town, and for a couple of days tried to forget the astronomical costs of everything from bus tickets to a cup of coffee.

  For the most part, once they arrived, their own relative poverty began to spit at their feet in disgust, and they spent the majority of their holiday walking up and down the streets, taking pictures of rich people, yachts owned by rich people, and the buildings the rich people lived in.

  And they didn’t think for a moment that there might be any crime.

  Climbing over a fence onto one of the small private beaches along the promenade, he found several tourists had also done so, and helped himself to some money from the wallets they had left buried under piles of clothes in hollows dug in the sand while they swam out towards the yachts, hoping to get a look at some celebrities. With night fallen it was easy for him to blend with the shadows, and even if he was caught on camera—there were cameras everywhere in Monte Carlo—he would be difficult to apprehend unless they were really quick in getting down here to pick him up. He had no address, no criminal record, no footprint.

  After a twenty minute stroll along the sand he was roughly five hundred Euros richer. He was a clever thief, never taking the wallets themselves or the cards inside, or indeed all of the money. Half an hour of hesitation while a tourist pondered whether she’d spent that last fifty note was plenty of time to let him get away. Cash was untraceable; cards and all the rest were like little fish hooks caught in his jacket.

  He left the beach and headed into the warren of backstreets behind the promenade. He found a couple of tourist chalets unlocked, their occupants gone to wander the streets or spend a month’s savings in one of the bars, and helped himself to a little bit of money he found under a pillow in one, and a generic Nikon camera in another. Tossing the SIM card into a drain, he estimated he could get a safe hundred for it in one of the junk shops a little further inland.

  At the end of the street he paused, considering his options. He’d done pretty well for the evening, and a glass of wine on the balcony of the abandoned villa where he was squatting might go down well. He hadn’t been laid in a few days though, and it was Friday, so there would be a fresh lot in off the planes, looking to get juiced up and have a good time in starlet-land. He paused, wracked with indecision. Sometimes life seemed too good to be true.

  ‘Sir?’

  He jumped as someone tugged on his arm, spinning around, fists coming up. He breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of a little girl standing there, looking up at him out of a pretty face framed by straight black hair. She looked about twelve or thirteen, and had large oval eyes and thin lips, a petite nose and high cheekbones. As he looked down at her she gave a half smile out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes relaxing a little.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sir, I need your help.’

  ‘I’m not for hire.’

  ‘I’m hungry. Can I have a little money?’

  The way she looked at him made Jimmy excited and uneasy at the same time. She was on the cusp of her teens—old enough if no one finds out—and here she was, asking him for help on a dim backstreet in Monte Carlo. She looked Asian—Chinese or Korean, maybe—probably a refugee or a trafficked sex worker who’d escaped. It didn’t matter where you went in the world, he thought with a wry shake of the head, whatever the concentration of bloated, rich wankers, there were always the impoverished, the poor, the put upon, laying a base for everything like a rotten, unstable foundation.

  ‘What do I get if I lend you some money? Not got a lot to spare, you know.’

  The girl’s lips parted in a thin smile. ‘So you have some?’

  ‘Depends.’

  The girl took a step closer. A small hand brushed the inside of his thigh, moving up a few inches before pulling away. Her eyes never left his face.

  ‘I’ll earn it.’

  Jimmy nodded, trying to concentrate around the volcano brewing in his pants. ‘Yeah, you will.’

  The girl smiled again and skipped off, back up the street he had come down, turning quickly into a side street that led between two tall townhouses. It was darker than he would have liked, but when he reached it the girl was already near the far end, and there was no sign of anyone else. The last thing he wanted was to get caught in a sting trap, lured into some old building and jumped by a group of her refugee mates. It could happen, even here.

  At the end of the street the girl turned to look back. She put her hands on her hips as if telling him to hurry up, then turned out of sight, heading uphill away from the waterfront.

  Jimmy felt a sudden pang of fear. If she had real plans to earn a bit of his hard-stolen coin, she was being a little too carefree about it, almost as if she was excited.

  Damn it, if this is a trap….

  He strolled up to the end of the street, half hoping she had gone. After all, there would be plenty of loose tourists wandering around further down in the town. Jimmy paused a moment, then carried on, his feet making their own decision. The girl had had a look about her, something that just appealed. She was edgy, dangerous. Jimmy lived his life on the edge; it was in his blood.

  She was waiting a few doors further up the street. She smiled and waved him forward, this time waiting for him to catch up.

  ‘Here,’ she said as he reached her, and thumbed over her shoulder at the entrance to a little park.

  ‘Out in the open?’

  ‘Why not? No one cares what we do. Aren’t you interested? I can find someone else.’

  Jimmy frowned. At some point their whole dialogue had shifted to her doing him the favour. How had that happened?

  ‘Look, I don’t want to get caught.’

  The girl turned and headed through the entrance. ‘Your choice.’

  The way she said it, as if she couldn’t care less whether he followed or not, was the push on his danger button that he needed. ‘Wait,’ he called, hurrying after her.

  The park was sparse, a handful of trees scattered across a patch of grass that had to be worth a fortune in prime real estate. It was probably privately owned; very little green space in Monte Carlo escaped development for long.

  The girl sat down under a large tree and began unbuttoning her shirt. As Jimmy reached her, she said, ‘I want five hundred.’

  ‘Five hundred? Are you fucking serious? You’re what, twelve?’

  ‘Thirteen. And I’m a virgin. That means I don’t have anything you can catch. Do you want it or not?’

  Jimmy did. He squatted down on the ground beside the girl, who reached over and pulled him forward. For a moment his lips met hers, and he drank in the sweet aroma of forbidden pleasure.

  Then something heavy landed on his back, his head struck the ground and he rolled over, groaning as his vision blurred.

  ‘Perfect, my dear,’ came a reedy, hissing voice.

  Strong hands pulled Jimmy’s arms behind his back. He caught a glimpse of something hideous and twisted, then a brief look at the girl as she patted his shoulder, smiling as he rose up into the air.

  The last thing he saw was the park falling away below him as he was sucked up into the tree as if the thing itself was a giant, organic vacuum cleaner. The hands of the ugly man were still holding his tight, and the girl stood on the ground below him, watching as she did up the buttons on her shirt.

  Then pain exploded in the back of his head and everything went dark.

  Part One

  Shadows on the Streets of Barcelona

  1

  Jun returns to the world

  ‘Are you ready to go?’

  Jun Matsumoto looked up. One hand ran across the bedspread that had become a comfort blanket over the last five years, the other rested on the handle of the packed suitcase lying on the bed beside him.

  His head ached. Last night’s dream had been the most vivid he coul
d recall, like a parting shot, a ghostly waving hand. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, waiting for his vision to clear, wondering whether he would find himself still in his room, or somewhere else altogether.

  The orderly, standing in the doorway, craned his head forward and gave it a patronising little shake. ‘Um, Mr. Matsumoto, your taxi is waiting.’