Read Online The Banshee's Walk by Frank Tuttle - Free Book Online Page B

and entering the House grounds was such a subtle change I’d almost missed it. The shade was the same, cast by the same enormous old blood-oaks that ruled this patch of the forest. The road merely widened a bit, and there it was, the House Werewilk, shaded on all sides by trees that hung over it and kept its peaked roofs in dapples of shadow.
    The House was old. Very old. You don’t see those roofs anymore, except in paintings. Slate tiles covered them, at angles so steep the moss could barely grow. The idea was to make it hard for Trolls or Elves or ambitious neighbors to climb around up there, and for flaming arrows or the like to slide quickly off.
    The House was tall and square. It rose up five extra-tall pre-War stories, with a six-story turret at each corner. The tiny turret slot-windows provided for archers were all bricked up, but I could see plain where’d they’d been.
    The whole place was brick and stone. Any wood that did show was ornamental. The old places had been built to resist burning, whether caused by careless cooks or oil-soaked missiles.
    The tiny glass windows, set way back in their barred iron frames, were small and so thick they showed nothing but blurs behind them. I wondered if it was dark inside then decided it always looked like midnight, behind those doors.
    The doors themselves were massive iron-banded garrison gates that someone had painted a merry and highly inappropriate bright red. The knocker in the middle had been given a garish coat of sunflower yellow. Such décor in Rannit proper would have brought out the Historic Preservation Society with battering rams and whole battalions of grim-faced lawyers.
    Gertriss gawked and forgot herself and put a hand on my arm and then snatched it quickly away.
    “That’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen, Mr. Markhat,” she said.
    I chuckled. She’d seen places far bigger in Rannit, but I guess seeing Rannit’s houses crammed together made her think of them as less than this.
    “It’s a nice place for a summer home,” I said. Marlo climbed down and started fussing with his ponies, Gefner followed him, yammering suddenly away and the kids Scatter and Lank vanished like yesterday’s dew.
    I grabbed up my rucksack and offered to take Gertriss’s bag, but she leaped down with it in hand before I could say a word.
    I laughed and nodded at the bright red doors.
    “I guess we’ll just show ourselves in,” I said.
    She nodded, listening to something.
    I listened too.
    There was music coming from inside the house. Music and clapping and probably two dozen people laughing behind those massive shut doors and those thick, bolt-proof glass windows.
    Gertriss frowned.
    “Does anyone work around here?” she asked.
    “Just us tireless finders,” I said. We set out across the weedy lawn, past ward statues covered in vines and neglect, over stepping-stones that had sunk into the grass so deeply they were nearly covered over. I noticed that someone had painted smiles on the faces of the more somber yard wards, which is not only not seen in Rannit’s better neighborhoods but is actually illegal even in the shabby ones.
    Bold red fox squirrels chattered and barked above us as we passed beneath them, and their shadows flew as they flanked us. The canopy was tall and thick, and the military part of me groaned at the thought of trying to ever defend this place now—the carefully planned fields of fire afforded by the corner towers were useless, cluttered up by limb and bough, leaving the house vulnerable to an easy assault on the doors.
    Gertriss frowned. “You don’t much like this place, do you, Mr. Markhat?” she whispered.
    I shrugged. Being in the woods was enough to spook a city boy, even one without crossbow bolts buried in his rucksack. And maybe there was something to Mama’s claims of Gertriss and the Sight.
    “It could use some work,” I said. We were a stone’s throw from the red door now, and the laughter and music from inside was loud