THE SAGA OF LARTEN CREPSLEY
DARREN SHAN
THE COMPLETE COLLECTION
Birth of a Killer
Ocean of Blood
Palace of the Damned
and
Brothers to the Death
HarperCollins Children's Books A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith London, W6 8JB
Birth of a Killer: Text copyright © Darren Shan, 2010 Ocean of Blood: Text copyright © Darren Shan, 2011 Palace of the Damned: Text copyright © Darren Shan, 2011 Brothers to the Death: Text copyright © Darren Shan, 2012 Cover illustrations © David Wyatt Cover images © Shutterstock.com
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Darren Shan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Source ISBNs: 9780007435470, 9780007441570, 9780007455423, 9780007478385
Ebook edition © December 2014 ISBN: 9780008126018
Version: 2014-12-09
Contents
Birth of a Killer
Ocean of Blood
Palace of the Damned
Brothers to the Death
For:
Pearse and Conall — children of the night!
OBEs (Order of the Bloody Entrails) to:
Rachel Clements — one year down, only a couple of hundred to go!!
Isobel Abulhoul and all of the Shantastic gang
in Dubai
Editorial Mentor:
Nick “the blood ninja” Lake
General Masterminds:
Christopher Little and his Princely clan
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART THREE
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
PART FOUR
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
PART ONE
“Are cobwebs a treat where you come from?”
CHAPTER ONE
When Larten Crepsley awoke and yawned one grey Tuesday morning, he had no idea that by midday he would have become a killer.
He lay on his bed of sacks packed with straw, staring at specks of dust drifting through the air. The house where he lived was cramped and dark, and the room where he slept never caught the sun except at dawn. He often woke a few minutes earlier than necessary, before his mother roared for the family to get up. It was his only quiet time of the day, his one chance to lie back idly and grin lazily at the world.
There were six children in the room, five of them snoring and shifting in their sleep. Larten came from a crop of eight, but two had died young and his eldest sister left a year ago to marry. Although she was only fourteen, Larten suspected their parents were glad to be rid of her — she had never been an especially hard worker and brought home little money.
“Up!” Larten’s mother roared from the room next to theirs, and pounded the thin wall a couple of times.
The children groaned and crawled out of bed. They bumped into one another as they tried to find their way to the bedpan, the older siblings cuffing their younger brothers and sisters. Larten lay where he was, smiling smugly. He had already done his business while everyone else was asleep.
Vur Horston shared the room with the five Crepsley children. Vur was a cousin of theirs. His parents had died when he was three years old, his father in an accident at work, his mother of some disease. Larten’s mother had been keeping a close watch on the sickly widow and moved in quickly to take the baby. An extra pair of hands was always useful. The boy would be a burden for a few years, but children that age didn’t eat much, and assuming Vur survived, he could be put to work young and earn his