[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind Read Online Free Page A

jammed her hands on her hips. "I don't believe it. My god, I don't believe it."
    She kicked at the door with the side of her foot and boxed an ear with an open palm. Then she stalked back to the driver's door and yanked it open, slid in with a scowl. It took her several moments before she could insert the key and fire the engine. Another full minute before her hands stopped trembling in rage. It certainly wasn't the first time she'd drunk too much at a party, but she had never before been so befuddled that she'd endangered herself to the point of having an accident without even knowing it.
    She thought of the wind, of the grumbling, of the snow.
    Her anger turned to Greg —why had he permitted her to drive home in her condition? She didn't recall him emptying his glass so terribly often. So why the hell hadn't he stopped her? Why hadn't he at least gone with her, or forced her to walk home, or filled her with black coffee before letting her out?
    She held her breath, her cheeks puffed and her fin gers strangling the beveled steering wheel.
    Her eyes closed tightly and she directed herself to review the drive home, from the moment she had backed cautiously onto Chancellor Avenue to the moment she had backed into the driveway. And her eyes snapped open as she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek — she could not remember. Somewhere during the drive she had struck something hard enough to damage her car. But she could not remember it. Unless it was . . . the garbage can. Instead of narrowly missing it, she must have sideswiped it. She must have. But the memory of the impact was just not there.
    Her shoulders slumped as a slithering cold not born of the winter or the snow made its way into her stomach and curled there, aching. It was the pressure, of course. Bucking the system and fighting her memories and battling her parents and fending off Greg —it was the pressure, just the pressure that had lashed down her caution and allowed her all that drink.
    And the consequence of that was a kind of selective amnesia induced by the liquor, and made firm by guilt. She did not want to remember having the accident because it was stupid and it was embarrassing and it underscored something that might possibly become a problem.
    With no desire to remember . . . she didn't.
    "Yes," she whispered, and grinned her relief. "God, what a fool!"
    She shifted to a less rigid, more comfortable position, glanced around the car, and scowled at the small peb bles lying on the black mat on the passenger side. Figures, she thought; for all the work she put into keeping the car clean, her stumbling around the last few days had soured even mat. She thought to open the other door and brush them out, changed her mind and decided to do it later. After she came home and apolo gized to Stillworth . She would offer to buy him a new garbage can, and he would be furious, as usual, but she would take the fury as part of her punishment. For now she was thankful she hadn't found any blood.

3

    SHORTLY after the turn of the twentieth century, Ephraim Hawksted and a handful of his closest associ ates decided the children of Oxrun Station should not have to be denied a superior post-secondary education simply because they happened to live in a remote sec tion of the state where travel was difficult and expecta tions high. He was also the guardian of a long-standing grudge born the afternoon he'd been refused entrance to both Harvard and Yale (Princeton, of course, was out of the question, being out of New England). Though he could have attended any one of the smaller and no less presti gious colleges in the Northeast, the gall of the twin giants in forbidding him study soured him to the point that he'd made his fortune without a degree. He regret ted it. He felt incomplete. And despite any number of examples of similar men with similar successes, he felt almost embarrassed there was no sheepskin on his wall.
    He called in debts, then, favors owed and obligations