Read Online Angel Fire East by Terry Brooks - Free Book Online Page B

devices and walked up the drive to the front of the house. Leather-bound book held in both hands, he stood surveying the old building, wondering at its endurance. It was sagging and splintering and cracking at every corner and seam. He thought that if he took a deep breath and exhaled sharply enough, it would simply collapse.
    He shook his head. It was just another crumbling, pathetic edifice in a crumbling, pathetic world.
    He walked up the steps and through the front door. The hallway was dark and cool, and the house silent. It was always like that when Penny was out. The other two never made any noise. He wouldn’t have known Twitch was even there if he hadn’t listened closely for the television, which Twitch watched incessantly when he wasn’t hanging around bars, looking for someone to traumatize.
    Findo Gask frowned. At least with Twitch, there was the television to home in on when you wanted to know if he was around. With the other . . .
    Where could it be, anyway?
    He glanced into the living and dining rooms out of habit, then started upstairs. He climbed slowly and deliberately, letting each step take his full weight, making certain the creaking of the old boards preceeded him. Best not to appear too unexpectedly. Some demons didn’t like that, and this one was among them. You could never be certain of its reaction if you caught it by surprise.
    Findo Gask searched through all the bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, nooks, and crannies. It would be up here rather than in the basement with Twitch, because it didn’t like Twitch and it didn’t like lights or television. Mostly, it liked being alone in silent, dark places where it could disappear entirely.
    Gask looked around, perplexed.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
    Findo Gask didn’t like Twitch either. Or lights or television or Penny or anything about this house and the time he spent in it. He endured all of it solely because he was intrigued by the prospect of adding John Ross to his book.
    And perhaps,
he thought suddenly,
of adding Nest Freemark as well.
He nodded to himself.
Yes, perhaps.
    A small noise caught his attention—a scrape, no more. Gask peered up at the ceiling. The attic, of course. He walked down the hall to the concealed stairway, opened the door, and began to climb. The ceiling light was out, so the only illumination came from sunlight that seeped through a pair of dirt-encrusted dormer windows set at either end of the chamber. Gask reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Everything was wrapped in shadows, inky and forbidding, layer upon layer. The air smelled of dust and old wood, and he could hear the sound of his own breathing in the silence.
    “Are you up here?” he asked quietly.
    The ur’droch brushed against him before he even realized it was close enough to do so, and then it was gone again, melting back into the shadows. Its touch made him shudder in spite of himself. He wished it would talk once in a while, but it never said a word or uttered a sound. It rarely even showed itself, and that was all to the good as far as Gask was concerned. There weren’t many demons like the ur’droch, and the few he knew about were universally shunned. They didn’t take the forms of humans like most demons; they didn’t take any form at all. Something in their makeup made them feel more comfortable in a substanceless form, a part of the shadows they hid within.
    Not that this made them any less capable of killing.
    “We’re going out tonight,” he advised, his eyes flicking left and right in a futile effort to find the other. “I want you along.”
    No response. Nothing moved. Findo Gask was tempted to have the whole house lighted from top to bottom just to expose this weasel to a clinical examination, but the effort would be pointless. The ur’droch was useful precisely because of what it was, and putting up with its shadowy presence was part of the price paid for its services.
    Gask turned and walked back down the stairs and