The Storm Giants by Pearce Hansen Read Free Book Online Page B

Everett was picking up on.
    The child in Everett scanned his environment with every sense on overdrive. With blood spilled by person or persons unknown like that, he’d checked the surroundings in frantic paranoia, to make sure he didn’t fall prey to the same unseen threat.
    W hen the phone rang in the depths of Chopper’s room, Everett’s younger self jumped, both feet leaving the floor. When he landed, he’d whirled and ran as fast as he could from that room of death. No shame, Everett had been a teenager after all; he’d never over react like that again.
    In the here and now Everett was glued to the boob tube, and sleepless in the bleak. Raymond snored his little boy snores on his chest, arms too short to reach all the way around as he hugged his daddy in his sleep.
    On the tube , some random disposable character had just bitten the dust. Some snitch tossed screaming from the roof of a parking garage. The murder was antiseptic, no blood, no emotional response by any of the show’s main characters, but it punched Everett in the gut like he never would have allowed it to in real life.
    Everett lay on the couch crying and crying for the first time since he was a child. The tears flowed silent from his expressionless face, Everett was unable to stop and not understanding why, keeping still so as not to awaken Raymond.
    What was this? Everett asked the self in wonder, analyzing this pointless grief as if it were happening to someone else. What did it mean?
    How ridiculous for a man like Everett to be crying in the night. Crying in response to this cheesy flickering television conduit. Crying for some throwaway fictional character in a two bit piece of period dreck.
    L ater, Everett tucked Raymond into bed and lay down next to Kerri. He reached out a hand and laid it on her hip. She turned to him and flowered.
    As the loving hit high gear she remembered when she was a little girl, and her brothers taking her to the San Francisco Zoo, visiting the Cat Kingdom. She felt a thrill when she realized those big beautiful flat eyed beasts would make a meal of her if the bars weren’t in the way.
    She felt that sam e thrill with Everett, when they made love. When she was out with Everett and people walked by without paying any especial attention to him, she thought ‘If only they knew.’
    She knew. Or rather she thought she knew, which is enough for most people.
    “My own private panther,” she whispered. “My secret wild thing.”
    She smiled wide open at the ceiling, believing she had Everett wrapped around her finger. She bit her lip to keep her moans of pleasure and release from waking Raymond. Maybe it was the other way around, and Everett was the one who had her under his thumb.
    They slept, after, and there was peace for a bit.
    A t one point during the night lightning flashed outside, bright enough to light up the bedroom. Thunder rumbled as Kerri awakened gasping and sat bolt upright in bed. Everett stood naked at the window as lightning flashed outside a few more times. As Kerri watched, he listened closely to every mumbling roll of thunder, as if to a conversation.

Chapter 13 : The Line Points the Way
    Just after dawn came a knock at the front door and Everett stood up, buck naked and awake. Kerri thrashed around in bed behind him, and her gaze made his back tingle as he rewound the mental tape recorder that ran even during his sleeping state.
    N o memory of untoward noises. There’d been none of the psychic radar traces that would have made the danger sense clang. Whoever this visitor was, they were stealthy motherfuckers. Unwelcome news, it implied capability.
    Everett wrestled on his pants and strolled to the front door.
    The low ra ys of the dawn sun silhouetted the familiar shadow darkening the other side of the curtained window. But as Everett had the kind of somatic memory allowing recognition of someone by the shape of their earlobe from behind in a crowd years after meeting, that familiarity didn’t