Running with the Demon - Terry Brooks [191]
He stood tall in front of her, suddenly unapproachable, become as impenetrable as the darkness that shrouded them both.
“Do you understand?” he asked softly. “If you had failed in what was required of you, if the demon had touched you and you had become what he intended, if you had been unable to withstand him and your magic had darkened to his use ...”
He took his hands from her shoulders, his voice trailing off. Their eyes locked. “My purpose in coming here, Nest, was to stop you from becoming the creature I saw in my dreams.” He paused, letting the full import of his words sink in. “I would have done whatever was needed to accomplish that.”
Recognition of his meaning ran through her like shards of ice, and she stared at him in horror and disbelief. Whatever was needed. She tried to say something in response, to let him know what she was feeling, but she could not find the words. The chasm he had opened between them was so vast that she could not find a way to bridge it.
“Good-bye, Nest,” he said finally, stepping back from her, his mouth crooked in a tight, sad smile. “I wish I could have been your father.”
He stood there a moment longer, a lean, hunched figure in the rain-drenched night. Her savior. Her executioner. She felt her heart break with the realization.
Then he turned away, his black staff gleaming, and disappeared into the night.
Tuesday, JULY 5
Chapter Thirty-Two
By morning, news services from as far away as Chicago were reporting the story. Variations in word usage and presentation aside, it read pretty much the same everywhere. A disgruntled union worker at MidCon Steel in Hopewell, Illinois, had attempted to sabotage a fireworks display sponsored by the company. Derry Howe, age thirty-eight, of Hopewell, was killed when the bomb he was attempting to plant within the staging area exploded prematurely. Also injured were Robert Freemark, aged sixty-five, of Hopewell, a retired member of the same union; two members of the staging crew; and several spectators. In a related incident, a second man, Junior Elway, aged thirty-seven, of Hopewell, was killed attempting to plant a bomb in the fourteen-inch mill at MidCon during a break in his work shift. It was thought that the dead men, longtime friends and union activists, were acting in concert, and that the bombs were intended to halt efforts by MidCon to reopen the company in defiance of a strike order and to initiate a new round of settlement talks. Police were continuing with their investigation.
In a second, much smaller news item, the weather service reported extensive damage to parts of Sinnissippi Park in the wake of a thunderstorm that passed through Hopewell sometime around midnight. High winds and lightning had toppled a white oak thought to be well over two hundred years old as well as several smaller trees within a heavily wooded section of the park. The storm had moved out of the area by early morning, but phone and electrical lines were still down in parts of the city.
Nest heard most of it from television reports as she wandered back and forth between the Community General Hospital lounge and the lunchroom waiting for her grandfather to wake up. It had been almost midnight when she walked home through the driving rain, the park deserted save for a cluster of patrol cars parked in front of the pavilion and toboggan slide, their red and blue lights flashing. Police officers in yellow slickers were stringing tape and examining the grounds, but she didn’t attach any particular significance to the matter until she got home and found another cruiser parked in her driveway and more officers searching her home. She was told then that her grandfather had been taken to the hospital with a broken shoulder, cracked ribs, and possible internal injuries following a bombing attempt in the