DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle Read Online Free

lived here too?”
    “And I had sisters.”
    “How many?”
    “One hundred.”
    “Wow, a lot. Did they all fit?”
    “They are little,” Sam said, and held up a thumb and finger to show the size, a small, a very small gap, she raised the fingers
     to her eye to squint at the microscopic smallness they measured. “Teeny TEENY tiny.”
    “And they all lived here.”
    “No,” said Sam with instant certainty. “No, in the ball. Go sit there.”
    She pointed to the throne. Allan and Rosie looked down on her. She kept her pointer up, for their information. “There.”
    “Maybe we should look around a while.”
    “Sit,” said Sam, minatory. And waited while her mother and her lawyer mounted the steps and sat.
    Why, Rosie wondered, had they just walked away? The owners, the staff, leaving all this behind. Maybe it wasn’t thought to
     be worth anything then, old stuff, weather-beaten. It didn’t look worthless now. People in the past had been willing to go
     to trouble they never would today; not content with a river island, they had gone and built there a whole false place, of
     real stone and wood though, realer than any stage set. The seat where she sat, as richly detailed as the Queen’s in
Snow White
or the big cobwebby furniture in a vampire movie.
    “I wanted to tell you,” Allan said. He had not sat, stood at her side, minister or wizard or gray eminence. “Just before I
     came out to pick you up. I got a call from your husband’s attorney.”
    “Oh yes?”
    “It was a strange call. She seemed a little hesitant. But what I gather is that Mike wants to reopen some aspects of the agreement.”
    “Oh.”
    “He wants to talk about custody.”
    Rosie’s hands lay queenlike along the arms of her throne. The smell of the sun-warmed gray wood was strong. Why had she known
     from the beginning that she would hear this? Sam, who had ignored them after she had them enthroned and gone exploring around
     the litter of the open yard, now stopped. She looked down at her feet, at the ground between her Mary Janes, where she had
     spied something of interest, and then squatted there to get a better look. The beauty of her bare brown legs, of her attention
     to earth’s minutiæ. Through Rosie’s soul there blew a wind, an awful certainty of loss.
    “We’ll have to talk,” Allan said. “Not here, not now.”
    They explored the rest of the place. They pushed open the doors of the small theater that occupied the central tower (THE
     KEEP it said over the doors, in letters carved to look shaggy and twiggy, like logs) and found it filled with things, chairs
     and tables, ancient kitchen equipment, canvas awnings, piles of trays and wooden crates of steins and cups; some whole towers
     of such crates were sunken and the dishes smashed in dust-covered archæological heaps. Rosie’s flashlight reached inward to
     finger the stage draperies, the stacks of benches. Sam under her arm looking in too.
    “Bats,” said Allan, unwilling to go in.
    She made him climb to the battlements with her, though, the old stairways still sound, they built so solidly then; the walkways
     at the top were less certain, but Rosie and Sam climbed up into a belvedere to look out.
    “Rosie,” Allan said. “We don’t have to get crazy.”
    “Allan, I know what I want,” she said. “I just figured it out.”
    “You did,” Allan said, one level below her, a hand on the ladder by which they’d gone up.
    “I want to have a party.”
    “Not here.”
    “Here,” Rosie said. “Really big. On Halloween. For a lot of people. Everybody.”
    “Yay,” said Sam.
    Allan said nothing. Rosie turned to look down on his patient upturned face.
    She had come here to see her castle, hers, and to decide about it or begin to think about deciding, before it died of neglect
     and slipped into the river and was lost. And she had decided, or it had been decided for her as she stood there.
    “It ought to be given to the town,” she said. “You’re