Windmaster's Bane Read Online Free

of the low porch into the sudden glare of sun-dappled yard, his worn knapsack flapping loosely on his back as he sprinted toward the car. Little Billy was nowhere in sight.
    In the harsh light the Mustang seemed somehow to shine even redder than usual, as if the steel of which it was made had been rendered red-hot by the afternoon sunshine. Its narrow chrome bumpers glittered so brilliantly they made David blink and his eyes water. Indeed the very air seemed to sparkle in some uncanny way, as if every floating dust mote were a minute, perfectly faceted diamond that materialized out of nowhere to gyrate crazily before him in a swirl of multicolored particles like iridescent dust thrown before a wind, briefly outlining every tree and leaf and blade of grass with a glittering halo of burning, scintillating color.
    David stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth hanging open in curious incredulity, then wrenched off his glasses and stared at them foolishly. Though the lenses appeared clean, he wiped them on a corner of his shirttail and glanced up again, blinking rapidly.
    The effect had ended.
    A shrug. “Too hot, or something,” he muttered to himself.
    Little Billy came out from where he had been lurking behind the car. He stared at David uncertainly and extended the blue volume. “Here’s your book, Davy. I’m sorry I bothered you.” David blinked again, smiled absently, and ruffled his brother’s tousled hair. “No problem, kid.”
    Little Billy’s eyes were wide, hopeful. “You’re not really gonna give me to the undertaker, are you?”
    “Couldn’t get enough for you, squirt,” David grinned. “No, of course not. Thanks, though, for getting this for me.”
    As he unslung the knapsack to stuff the book inside, David glimpsed the name neatly stenciled on the fading khaki canvas:
    SULLIVAN, D.
    A chill passed over him, and he paused and looked up to see the crowds of people still clustered among the weathered tombstones and scruffy oak trees across the road. It was startling how clear the air had suddenly become, how much more sharply focused everything seemed. He almost felt as if he could read the names carved on the stones, count the leaves on the trees, see the tears glistening on those grief-stricken faces.
    And David remembered another funeral three years before. SULLIVAN, D—not himself, but that other David Sullivan, his father’s youngest brother, after whom he had been named; David-the-elder, Uncle Dale had called him, to differentiate the two.
    David-the-elder had embraced life with a burning enthusiasm not often seen in his family—and had found a sympathetic outlet for that enthusiasm in his precocious young nephew, whom he had taught to read by the age of four, and how to fish and hunt and camp and wrestle and swim and drive and a hundred other skills before David was twelve.
    Then he had joined the army.
    Two years later he was dead, blown to pieces where he wandered off duty on a Middle Eastern street. “An unprovoked terrorist action,” the government called it. A twenty-minute funeral had marked barely twenty years of life. Not enough. But that night twenty-one shots had sounded over the family cemetery at Uncle Dale’s farm, and a clench-jawed David-the-younger had fired each one into the star-filled darkness. It had been the least he could do. David felt his eyes mist over as he fished for his car keys. Once they had been David-the-elder’s keys.
    “You okay?” Little Billy asked hesitantly, concern shadowing his small features.
    David shook his head as if to clear it, and smiled wanly, feeling too good to keep long company with such dark thoughts. “Yeah, sure.”
    He got in the car, cranked it, and turned on the radio. The nasal twang of some female country singer berating her long-suffering husband about “drinkin’ and runnin’ around” that suddenly assailed his ears sent David hastily fumbling in the glove box for a cassette instead. The song reminded him too much of home,