Angry Lead Skies Read Online Free PDF Page B

let’s get this sorted out quickly. I’ve got to catch up with Katie.” Before she developed an attitude toward me that I was sure to regret.
    Dean scowled as he headed toward the kitchen. Katie isn’t one of his favorites. He doesn’t approve of Katie. He hasn’t been able to charm her the way he did my few other, occasional female friends.
    I fear Miss Shaver will have to wait, Garrett.
    “No. Not hardly. Right now there’s nothing more important than Miss Shaver.”
    Playmate and Kip appeared startled. Old Bones hadn’t included them in his message. Though Kip did look baffled and kept rubbing his head and looking around like he knew something was going on.
    I have exceeded myself somewhat, ethically, in reviewing the boy’s memories. There being so many questions accompanied by so few answers it seemed possible that the best course was to see if he might not know something without being aware that he knew it.
    Plausible, if prolix. I had used that argument on him a time or three, trying to prod him into becoming a little more aggressive in mining the thoughts of visitors and suspects. “And what did you discover?” You have to give him his line or he won’t communicate.
    Very little, to tell the truth. This boy has no more than two toes anchored inside our reality. His head is occupied by a totally eclectic jumble of fantasic nonsense and it is amidst that that he lives most of the time. He is always the hero in his own tale.
    Well, aren’t we all?
    Some of his fantasies recall well-known epics and sagas. Some have their genesis in common storytellers’ tales. Some are mutant versions of historical events. And even a few things might possibly have some basis in truth  — behind the fantasy stuff he has built on top of genuine events. Inside his head it is impossible to discern the real from the imagined.
    “If most of it concerns girls it sounds like the inside of a normal boy’s head.”
    You would think that way. And you would be incorrect. While it does concern girls, some of it, it does so principally in the clever and daring methods by which he rescues the enchanted princess or other damsel in distress. While there are several of them I have yet to discover any of his fantasy women less than chastely clad or treated.
    I gave Kip a quick glance consisting of about eighty percent worry and twenty percent accolade. Though I suspected that respect for women was not a real part of the equation. Naïveté would be the real culprit.
    The Dead Man continued, He is acquainted with creatures he knows as Lastyr and Noodiss. They are not human but the boy has not cared enough about the answer to find out what they really are. The images in his mind are not familiar to me.
    The image that appeared in my mind, then, was unfamiliar to me as well. “Inbreeding? Or interbreeding?” You need only stroll around TunFaire a few hours to see the incredible range of Nature’s artistry and her bottomless capacity for the cruel practical joke.
    Perhaps. And, perhaps, they are something never before seen. In this world.
    “Let’s not turn alarmist!” I growled. Alarmed. Once upon a time not long ago I got into a head-butting contest with something never before seen at that time: very nasty, never-brush-their-teeth and talk-back-to-their-mamas foul, elder gods who thought that the god racket would be a lot softer if they could bust out of the dark place where they were confined and could come set up shop in our world.
    There was nothing supernatural about the watcher in the alley, Garrett. Quite the opposite, I think. There was no magic in it at all. It seemed as though it stood entirely outside the realms of the magical, the metaphysical, and the supernatural.
    I gobbled a couple pints of air while I tried to make sense of that, trying to sort through the countless implications. A world without magic! A place of order and predictability, with all evil fled!
    Darker possibilities occurred to me as well.
    Playmate began