Spawn of the Winds Read Online Free Page A

Franklin lost the skin off his lower lip through Tracy’s ministrations with hot coffee! But for all this she was out of luck and had to be satisfied with the knowledge that at least we were alive when by rights we ought to have been dead.
    The answer, of course, lay in the star-stones of ancient Mnar, but she didn’t know that. Besides the stone she wore about her neck there was one other aboard the plane—in the first-aid cabinet, of all places. That was Paul White’s stone. If it weren’t for those stones we really
would have been dead by then, all of us. Only their presence in the plane had forced the Wind-Walker to exercise restraint. The ancient magic of the Elder Gods was still at work.
    Like myself, this was for Whitey his first really active stint with the Wilmarth Foundation, and he had made the same mistake as I had. I had always sort of scorned the star-stones, in the way a greenhorn soldier might scorn a bulletproof vest before he’s seen the terrible mess a bullet can make of a man’s chest—or in my case, before I really knew the kind of horror a Thing that Walks on the Wind might wreak. Whitey, a do-it-by-the-book man, had brought his stone along all right but felt stupid wearing it, so he’d placed it in the plane’s first-aid cabinet out of the way. Dick Selway and Jimmy Franklin, greener in the ways of the CCD even than Whitey and I, hadn’t bothered with their stones at all! And all Tracy knew of these things, of the star-stones, was that the one she wore about her neck, which by then she’d forgotten was there at all, had been my good luck charm, my rabbit’s foot.
    In fact that star-stone was Tracy’s reason for being on the plane in the first place. It was pure coincidence that she had been staying with friends in Edmonton for a few days while I was starting out on Project Wind-Walker. The night before we started the flying program I attended a party at the home other friends. I had a few drinks and must have mentioned something of my preparatory work at the airfield. The next morning when Paul White picked me up, I forgot my star-stone and left it in the room where I had bunked down. Tracy found it. Since she intended to start the long trip back down to our home in Texas that same morning, she decided to go via the airfield and return the stone to me. Driving out to the field, she worked out a little prank to play on me.
    For some time Tracy and my father had been speculating on my work with “The Government,” and now finally her curiosity had gotten the better of her. She saw this situation as a chance to find out what it was all about.
    The Foundation had secured for my team an outlying area of the airport; a fenced-off, run-down, dusty area with its own rather worse-for-wear landing strip. But it was good enough for us and anyway, our plane was no luxury airliner. We had also been supplied with a full-time guard for the gated entrance, though I have to admit that I didn’t brief him well. I was hardly expecting trouble, certainly not Tracy’s sort. She arrived at the gates, told the guard who she was and showed
him my star-stone. She said I had forgotten it and she knew I wouldn’t want to go off without it.
    Well, Tracy’s a damned good-looking girl. She probably turned on the charm. And since the guard could have no idea just what she intended to do, I don’t suppose he could really be blamed for letting her in … .
    Delighted with herself that her plan was working out, Tracy parked her car behind a hangar and sneaked over to our plane. She couldn’t mistake it. It was the only one, standing out on the runway close to the hangar. The door was open; she climbed in and tucked herself away in the tail, and that was that.
    Some time later, together with the three legitimate members of my team, I left our headquarters shack at the other side of the field and slung my gear into our jeep. We drove to the plane and