Windmaster's Bane Read Online Free Page B

thought you might take me to the fair.”
    “Ha! Just ’cause I’ve got a driver’s license now doesn’t mean I’m gonna haul you around—though, now I think of it, I might ought to at that; we’d probably both live longer, considering your driving.”
    “What’s wrong with my driving?” David glared at her as he drew himself up to his full five-foot-six, then jumped as a froth of gas shot unexpectedly out of the filler and onto his hands. He blushed furiously and looked around frantically for something to wipe them on, finally settling on his pants.
    Liz raised an amused eyebrow. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it—if you happen to live in Daytona or Talladega or somewhere. But don’t change the subject. When you gonna take me to the fair?”
    “When you wanna go?”
    “Last time you asked me that we still went when you wanted to.”
    “Beggars can’t be—”
    “Hush, David. I want to go Sunday and try to catch the blue-grass show.”
    “The bluegrass show? Oh, come on, Liz. You know I can’t stand that stuff.”
    “It’s our heritage, David.”
    “ Your heritage, maybe.”
    “Yours, too, David.”
    “Look, Liz, I don’t feel like arguing music with you just now. I know better than to argue that subject with you any time.” He sighed. “But if it’ll make you happy, we can go, I guess—but I get to play my whole Byrds tape on the way.”
    “Ugh,” said Liz, mostly to harass David, though she did not find the music at all offensive. “You limit yourself too much. But it’s an even swap, I guess.”
    David snorted. “Limit myself indeed!”
    Liz’s dark-haired mother peered through the window behind her daughter. “Hi, Davy, how’re you doin’? Liz’ll be livin’ with me for the rest of the summer, so why don’t you come see her some?” She winked at him.
    “Mother!” Liz hissed, her face reddening, then turned back to David. “Oh, and David, this little trip’s just you and me, okay? None of your shadows.”
    David looked confused. “My shadows?”
    “Little Billy and young Master McLean.”
    “My brother and my almost-brother? You got something against my brothers?”
    “At some times and places, yes.”
    “Liz, if I didn’t know you better…”
    “Hush, David, not now. I’ll have to check the show time and get back to you. Just be sure to bring plenty of money.”
    “I don’t have plenty of money.”
    “Well, enchant some leaves or something. You’re the one who’s always calling himself the Sorcerer of Sullivan Cove,” Liz called back as the pickup roared to life and rumbled away.
    “Nice lookin’ girl,” observed Earl Berrong.
    David nodded thoughtfully. “She is, I guess, now that you mention it—and getting better all the time.” He handed Earl a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill, the fruit of his rather begrudged work on the farm. It wasn’t much, but it kept him in gas and comic books.
    “Sullivan’s got a girlfriend,” a male voice sang out from across the street as David got into the car.
    He turned on the ignition and revved the engine, drowning the voices in the growl of dual exhausts and the Byrds singing “Eight Miles High.”
    “Alec, my lad,” he said aloud to nobody as he shifted into second, “we gonna get at least partly that high tonight, just by walking up an old dirt road. High on life, I mean.”
    *
    Six minutes later David crested the gap between two small mountains and beheld the tiny college town of MacTyrie drowsing in the valley below. A network of fields and tree-lined streams surrounded it, and above all reared the flat-topped mass of Huggins Ridge, its lesser slopes bracketing the village like protective arms. Expensive resort homes made incongruous warts along the lower ridge lines.
    Closer in, a long curved bridge spanned one arm of the man-made lake that sent cold fingers probing far among the dreaming mountains. Many a once-sunny hollow lay drowned forever under that dark water, giving the otherwise pastoral landscape