Running with the Demon - Terry Brooks [69]
What was Pick trying to say?
She knew she would not find out today. She had seen that look on his face before, stubborn and irascible. He was done talking.
She felt suddenly drained and worn. She lowered Pick to the ground, waited impatiently for him to step out of her hand, and then stood up again. “I’m going home after all,” she told him. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Without waiting for his reply, she turned and walked off into the trees.
She didn’t go home, however. Instead, she walked through the park, angling down off the heights to the bayou’s edge and following the riverbank west. She took her time, letting her emotions settle, giving herself a chance to think through the things that were bothering her. She could put a voice to some of them, but not yet to all. What troubled her was a combination of what had already come about and what she sensed was yet to happen. The latter was not a premonition exactly — more an unpleasant whisper of possibility. The day was hot and still, and the sun beat down out of the cloudless sky on its slow passage west. The park was silent and empty-feeling, and even the voices of the picnickers seemed distant and subdued. As if everyone was waiting for what she anticipated. As if everyone knew it was coming.
She passed below the toboggan slide and above a pair of young boys fishing off the bank by the skating shelter. She glanced up the long, straight, wooden sluice to the tower where the sledders began their runs in winter, remembering the feeling of shooting down toward the frozen river, gathering speed for the launch onto the ice. Inside she felt as if it were happening to her now in another way, as if she were racing toward something vast and broad and slick, and that once she, reached it she would be out of control.
The afternoon wore on. She looked for feeders, but did not see any. She looked for Daniel and did not see him either. She remembered that she had forgotten to ask Pick if he was making any progress in the search for Bennett Scott’s cat, Spook. Leaves threw dappled shadows on the ground she walked across, and she imagined faces and shapes in their patterns. She found herself wondering about her father and her mother, both such mysterious figures in her life, so removed in time, almost mythical. She thought of Gran and her stubborn refusal to speak of them in any concrete way. A cold, hard determination grew inside her. She would make Gran tell her, she promised herself. She would force her to speak.
She walked to the base of the cliffs, staying back from where the caves tunneled into the rock. Pick had told her never to go there. He had made her promise. It wasn’t safe for her, he insisted. It didn’t matter that other kids explored the caves regularly and no harm came to them. Other kids couldn’t see the feeders. Other kids didn’t have use of the magic. She was at risk, and she must keep away.
She shook her head as she turned and began to walk up the roadway that led to the bluff. There it was again, she thought. The realization that she was different. Always different.
She reached the heights and turned toward the cemetery. She thought she might visit her mother’s grave. She had a sudden need to do so, a need to connect in some small way with her lost past. She crossed the road in front of the Indian mounds and turned in to the trees. The sun burned white-hot in the afternoon sky, its glare blinding her as she walked into it. She squinted and shaded her eyes with her hand.
Ahead, someone moved in the blaze