Dimwater's Demons Read Online Free PDF Page A

start digging to deepen it while I,” she started wringing mud out of her hair, “see if I can get any of this muck out of my hair!” With that, she playfully tossed a handful of the sticky stuff at Leatherback, succeeding only in catching the outside of his wing as he blocked her. “Even Gorliad was willing to get his claws dirty excavating his home, remember?”
    Leatherback happily stepped to the center of what had, only an hour before, been a quiet mountain stream, and began pulling out chunks of water logged mud and rock with his claws. Kyra laughed as she headed upstream to where the water still flowed clean, and bent down to wash her long, black hair in the stream as best she could. Whoever lived downstream would not be happy about the disruption in flow for the day, but this was the most fun she had had since she had come to school. She and her mother had often enjoyed silly activities together as her mother tried to find inventive ways to teach Kyra spells and creative applications for them.
    The first time Kyra had successfully cast a simple ward at age six, they had been in the large kitchen at Caspen Manor. Her mother had sent the servants out for the day, and had spent the afternoon helping Kyra to hand mix a warm, sticky mess of any ingredient Kyra chose to add to the large batch of bread dough the cook had left behind to rise. When the dough was so discolored, and so full of strong, spiced aromas that her mother assured her it was completely inedible, her mother had begun tossing bits of it at her, giving her instructions before each throw to help her try and deflect the sticky blob with a ward. They had been laughing so hard, tears had been making their way out of her mother’s eyes, but when Kyra unexpectedly conjured the ward, she had dropped the entire bowl of dough on the floor in her motherly excitement. Kyra’s hair had been full of sticky substance that day too.
    The memory brought a smile to her lips, but also made her whole chest ache. How would she ever stop missing her mother? At this moment, it felt like that empty feeling in her chest would be there forever, and the thought made her angry all of a sudden. She was going to find the shade who had killed her mother. She was going to find him, and she was going to destroy him and any other creature that might have been working with him. In answer to the anger inside of her, she inadvertently conjured a little spark of lightning and gave herself a little shock when she closed her fist as she imagined pummeling anything that got in her way. She jumped a little at the sensation and then stood up and decidedly wrung her hair out.
    When she returned to the place where she had left Leatherback to work, she was amazed at the progress he had made in such a short amount of time. Piles of mud and rock as tall as she was had been thrown up all around the place where the eddy had been. She came up on Leatherback from the middle of the stream, rather than trying to scale the slippery mounds of streambed that would otherwise have separated her from his work space.
    “Been having fun?” She asked with a sweep of her arm, indicating the area which now seemed expansive enough to accommodate Leatherback’s length twice over, and, if it held water, would allow him to swim a little as long as he tucked his legs up under him.
    “I could ready my own mountain. Like Gorliad,” he said proudly, stretching his wings out and shooting a single flare of fire into the air.
    “I believe that! Maybe someday we will find you a mountain. For today though, we may need to be done.” She looked at the water that was beginning to pool up around Leatherback’s feet and realized that they would have a proper mess if there wasn’t an outlet for the water that would allow it to follow its original path down the mountain. More than that, they might have someone miss the water downstream who would follow the stream back up to them and cause trouble.
    “Let’s put our fire to