Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Then everything went haywire. The coughing spell came on him in a series of full-body spasms, like he had been holding it in and couldn’t control the reflex any longer.
The blood went everywhere, speckling his gray sweatshirt, the splatter so dark against the fibers it was as if the void back in that library was something he had taken down into his damaged lungs—and had to expel.
“Daniel.”
THIRTY-THREE
LONG AFTER NIGHT claimed the Adirondack Mountains, Xhex went to a set of double doors that had been handmade and set in their frame in 1874. Behind her, a crackling fire set on maple logs threw out heat not just from its flames, but from the massive lake stone hearth that ran up half the entire wall of the great room. There were lamps throwing out calming light in the corners, including one that had a taxidermied porcupine posed on a stump as a base, and another that was made out of a woven basket. There was also an old desk with a strip of Persian rug as a blotter, and a collection of antique glassware gleaming on shelves that were mounted around a center window of leaded panes.
Not that she could see out of the hand-blown panes. Heavy velvet draping covered every portal to the outdoors.
The Victorian-era Great Camp had been built by humans hell-bent on escaping the summer heat in New York City—and also because it had been de rigueur for a certain class to own wilderness getaways. She had heard the stories from Rehv, about how there had been steamboats that came up from the base of the long, thin lake, carrying people and supplies to their recreational locations, and before that, the waterway had been one of the strategic military routes used by the French and the British during the battles for control in the mid-eighteen hundreds.
As she threw her back into the effort of opening things, she braced herself for the cold—and that was a smart move. The air was so dry and frigid that her sinuses burned and she hurried to put on gloves even before she re-closed the heavy painted panels to keep in the heat.
The porch that faced the lake was a good forty or fifty feet long, and in the warmer season, it was furnished with wicker seating areas. Now the expanse was bare of everything: chairs, tables, and even that plastic goose lamp that glowed like a ghost.
There had been good times on this porch, she thought… back when she and John Matthew, and some of the other Brothers, would come up here and hang out with Phury, Cormia, and the Chosen. She’d particularly liked it when Zsadist had brought his guitar and sung during the moonlit August nights.
“Voice like an angel,” she murmured.
As she tried to remember her favorite tune, the one that he always closed with… something by Sting? Or was it U2?… those evenings seemed so far away that it was as if they were stories told to her by someone else as opposed to something she had lived.
How had everything come to this? she wondered. Turning in her weapons. Taking herself out of Caldwell for the safety of others.
“Fucking mess.”
Walking down the porch, she stared out to the lake. There was a moon just cresting over the mountains to the east, and its illumination drew a line on the water, the stripe flickering on top of the waves.
John Matthew had left first, because she had insisted he go out into the field. What else was he going to do? Sit and stare at her?
She wasn’t dying.
Besides, where she was going… she wanted to be alone.
Stepping off the porch, she walked across the lawn. The grass was nothing like the lush, chemically enhanced carpets down in the Caldwell suburbs. Up here, the blades were thin as needles, and just as fun to sit on. The lack of rain, but mostly the regular frosts that had started up in late October, had pulled the green out of everything, so all you had was a pale five o’clock shadow on the hard clay ground.
She paused at the head of one of the stone walkways that wound down to the water. The house had been set up on a cliff, because back when it had been built, prospective homeowners had had the pick of the lots—and man, had they called this site. The view was a dramatic, perfectly centered framing of the mountains that dropped down to the basin of clear water, like an artist had carved the landscape just so Hudson River School painters could have both realism and symmetry.
The vista really should have calmed her.
She needed a number of deep breaths and shoulder rolls before she could dematerialize, and as her molecules scattered, she had a vague worry that there would be no reunion of her components. Then again, even if she was fully corporeal, she wasn’t all together, was she.