[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind Read Online Free

evergreen shrub. The steady clanking of a snowplow several streets over. The frigid call of a bird. The brittle slam of a door.
    Nothing had changed during the night, then. It was definitely safe to leave. The ritual she'd inaugurated the day she'd moved in was completed in the space of a few familiar seconds.
    She took the steps cautiously, one hand out for bal ance while the other held her purse. Goldsmith had already cleared the inlaid stone-block walk to the pavement, had already overspread patches of ice with lumps of salt. She shuddered when she estimated the hour he must have risen in order to do it before the others had left for work, and she decided the man should be struck a special medal. Not that he would accept it, even in. jest and good humor. He was very much the recluse, keeping to his own rooms most of the day as far as she could determine, shambling out only when there were repairs to be done, grass to be mowed, the back garden to be weeded.
    He was indeed amazing —just like her performance the night before.
    She had been at the Chancellor Inn with Greg, Ste phen DiSelleone and Janice Reaster . It was Janice's twenty-ninth birthday, and the intention had been to have a quiet celebration while Janice —who was a lec turer and art historian—bemoaned her imminent plunge into the infamous thirties. Within an hour after they'd ordered, however, as more of the faculty had wandered in with spouses and dates, the party had blossomed to a boisterous two dozen. DiSelleone took to the piano, Janice to her quavering voice, and what had once been a grand farmhouse trembled for hours.
    She had drunk too much, flirted too often, had eased her car from the parking lot just after midnight so incredibly slowly she hadn't believed she was really driving. It hadn't been a long ride —one block north to Steuben, right one block to Northland, and a time- frozen skid as she wrenched the station wagon left.
    The snow. And the wind. And someone . . .
    A clumsy U-turn to remind her of her condition, and a near-collision with Stillworth's tin garbage can to send her further into panic.
    Amazing she had not slammed into a tree.
    Amazing she'd been able to get into the driveway at all, much less manage it so the car was facing back out toward the street.
    God takes care of little children and idiots, she thought as she walked, and was halfway up the drive when something about the car struck her as being wrong. It was small, squared, all of a dove grey with a chrome luggage rack on top. And it was clean. Perfectly clean. She looked over her shoulder and saw only the tracks of her boots in the light dusting that covered the blacktop. There were no tire marks, no bird tracks, no indication of any kind that anything mechanical or otherwise had come back here since the end of the flurry. Kelly and Abbey, she realized, must have parked their cars at the curb instead of in the garage, though she did not recall seeing it when she'd come home last night. And Lin coln had evidently decided a good wind would do his work for him before the next fall broke from the clouds.
    She shook her head once and sharply, dispelling an image of a giant picking up the station wagon and carrying it safely back here. That was foolish. She had driven it here herself. And it had been snowing; it had been windy, and she had sat here watching it while she'd tried to rein her nerves.
    So it must have been the wind that had erased the car's tracks. That only made sense. Nevertheless, the unsettling sensation prodded her into walking around the vehicle slowly, checking the tires, brushing stray flakes from the edges of the window . . . and stopped when she saw the dent in the passenger door.
    "God . . . damn!" She crouched and traced the con cavity with a finger. The surface hadn't been cracked, nor were there any signs of whatever it was she'd struck: no pieces of bark, no chips of chrome or paint, just a shallow indentation centered and oval. She straight ened and