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

blue sky, casting odd shadows on the wintry gray-green grass. It was a time of sleep, of the old year and its seasons passing into the new, of waiting patiently for rebirth. Nest Freemark wondered if her own life was keeping pace or just standing still.
    She pushed through a gap in the bare branches of the hedge and crossed the service road that ran behind her house. Sinnissippi Park stretched away before her, barren and empty in the winter light. The crossbar at the entrance was down. Residents living in the houses that crowded up against its edges walked their dogs and themselves and played with their kids in the snow when there was snow to be played in, but there was no one about at the moment. In the evenings, weather permitting, the park opened from six to ten at night for tobogganing on the park slide and ice skating on the bayou.
    If the temperature dropped and the forecast for snow proved out, both would be open by tomorrow night.
    She hiked deliberately toward the cliffs, passing through a familiar stand of spruce clustered just beyond the backstop of the nearest baseball diamond, and Pick dropped from its branches onto her shoulder.
    “You took your sweet time getting out here!” he snapped irritably, settling himself in place against the down folds of her collar.
    “Church ran a little long,” she replied, refusing to be baited. Pick was always either irritable or coming up on it, so she was used to his abrupt pronouncements and sometimes scathing rebukes. “You probably got a lot done without me anyway.”
    “That’s not the point!” he snapped. “When you make a commitment—”
    “—you stick to it,” she finished, having heard this chestnut at least a thousand times. “But I can’t ignore the rest of my life, either.”
    Pick muttered something unintelligible and squirmed restlessly. A hundred and sixty-five years old, he was a sylvan, a forest creature composed of sticks and moss, conceived by magic, and born in a pod. In every woods and forest in the world, sylvans worked to balance the magic that was centered there so that all living things could coexist in the way the Word had intended. It was not an easy job and not without its disappointments; many species had been lost through natural evolution or the depredations of humans. Even woods and forests were destroyed, taking with them all the creatures who lived there, including the sylvans who tended them. Erosion of the forest magic over the passing of the centuries had been slow, but steady, and Pick declared often and ominously that time was running out.
    “The park looks pretty good,” she offered, banishing such thoughts from her mind, trying to put a positive spin on things for the duration of her afternoon.
    Pick was having none of it. “Appearances are deceiving. There’s trouble brewing.”
    “Trouble of what sort?”
    “Ha! You haven’t even noticed, have you?”
    “Why don’t you just tell me?”
    They crossed the entry road and walked up toward the turnaround at the west end that overlooked the Rock River from the edge of the bluffs. Beyond the chain-link fence marking the park’s farthest point lay Riverside Cemetery. She had not been out to the graves of her mother or grandparents in more than a week, and she felt a pang of guilt at her oversight.
    “The feeders have been out,” Pick advised with a grunt, “skulking about the park in more numbers than I’ve seen in a long time.”
    “How many?”
    “Lots. Too many to count. Something’s got them stirred up, and I don’t know what it is.”
    Shadowy creatures that lurked on the edges of people’s lives, feeders lapped up the energy given off by expenditure of emotions. The darker and stronger the emotions, the greater the number of feeders who gathered to feast. Parasitic beings who responded to their instincts, they did not judge and they did not make choices. Most humans never saw them, except when death came violently and unexpectedly, and they were the last