[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind by Charles L. Grant Read Free Book Online Page A

hitting the hard stuff. Relaxes the hell out of you . . . and it's a lot safer than alcohol.''
    Pat said nothing. She had heard this same argument from her several times, and though marijuana was not as alien to her as Kelly seemed to believe, she'd never been able to enjoy the highs she'd heard so lovingly described. It had taken her only a handful of times to learn that the equivalent of a single joint only put her to sleep, and that, she'd decided, she could do just as well on her own.
    Kelly took the narrow service road around the buildings much slower than she'd driven out from town, commenting on the age of the students as if she were decades older, being slightly too uninterested in the looks of the men and the marital status of the few instructors they noted. Pat kept her comments to her self, smiling instead and wondering if she were more green-eyed than concerned about her roommate's easy conquests of men. Abbey, though Kelly's age, had always seemed to her to be far older, far more in control of her life. But maybe, she thought, that was an outward compensation for her handicap —Abbey Wagner was deaf.
    She had no time to speculate further. Kelly suddenly slammed on the brakes behind Fine Arts and began a flurry of promises to guard the station wagon with nine lives, if not more, to leave a tankful of gas when she and Abbey returned from work that evening, and an eternal vow never to leave her own car vulnerable again.
    Pat laughed and nodded through it all, slid out and slammed the door. Immediately, she hurried through the side entrance, not wanting to see how Kelly would reverse the compact vehicle and leave the campus. I may have to ride in it, she thought, but I don't have to watch it.
    On the other hand, Kelly's infectious high humor had served to dispel all the remnants of her gloom. A silent thanks, then, as she reached the second floor, and her cheery "good afternoon" to her one-thirty class sur prised even her with its firm optimistic ring.
    The studio/classroom was large and well lighted, ar ranged through several hectic semesters of trial and error to comfortably accommodate a full dozen stu dents, their workbenches and materials, and a space of her own behind a tall rattan screen she'd purchased down on Centre Street three years before.
    The class was gone.
    Oliver and her friends had sensed her need for soli tude and had left without their usual extra hour or so of talk, of gossip, of worrying over how their latest projects would be completed. They said nothing about an acci dent, and Pat assumed the woman involved had not been from the Station. Forgot it as soon as Oliver wished her solemn good luck, Harriet rose up quickly to kiss her cheek, and Ben gave her one of his rare genu ine smiles. The word was out. Though she had said nothing to them herself for fear of jinxing the outcome, it would have been a poor excuse for a campus if her efforts had gone unnoticed, and unremarked, and the day of judgement passed over without some sort of reaction.
    A lovely group, she thought as she wiped her hands on a well-used damp rag; a great bunch of people.
    She stood in front of a sculpture she'd been working on for several weeks, the stone taken from the same area where she'd found the piece for Homer. It was just under forty inches high, the base ten inches wider, an intricate series of looping curves and abrupt angles almost but not quite ready to be polished. She laid a finger on her right cheek, a thumb to her lower lip, and she studied it. Her head tilted in concentration. For those who asked she said it was untitled as yet; for herself, however, it was Greg at his desk —or rather, it was his shape, his form, barely recognizable as human to the untrained eye, a dizzying snap into focus once the subject was revealed. It had taken her too long—with too long to go for the span of her life—to study the Moores and the Segals , the O'Keeffes and the Pollacks , before she had developed a synthesis she