(GoG Book 08) The Outcast Read Online Free PDF Page B

hanging from the limb in front of the one where he was perched. It reminded him of something. Yes, of course, those hagsfiends that had swooped down on him when he had first fled from The Barrens the last time. They looked like tattered owls, shrouded in shreds of gray mist. They were hagsfiends, the hellish witches from the owl hell known as hagsmire. His mother had told him frightening stories of these fiends, and now this moss reminded him of them.
    He looked up at the moss scarves waving eerily in the breeze. Reaching up, he pulled down a long piece of it. It fell perfectly over his shoulders, trailing off the edges of his wings. He flipped his head around and nipped up one edge with his beak so that it fell like a hood over the topof his head. He didn’t want to hide his face completely. The scar should show. Coryn then spread his wings and lifted off from the branch where he had perched.
    The raccoon, ground squirrel, mouse, rat, and lynx paused in their nightly bustle as they foraged for food and looked up at the strange creature that flew overhead. A tree squirrel that had just poked its nose out to go on its evening rounds for nut collecting backed quickly into its knothole. A skunk sprayed its noxious odor into the sky, but to no avail. Coryn was much too high in flight. A deathly quiet fell upon the forest. A hagsfiend was abroad!

CHAPTER EIGHT
A Fiend Comes to Life
    W hy’s everything suddenly so quiet?” the young Barn Owl asked.
    “I don’t know. It’s weird, isn’t it?” replied the other.
    “Yeah, it gives me the creelies.” “Creelies” was the owl word for deep, unidentifiable fears.
    “Well, you better get over it, you two. This is our test. Going into battle is going to give you bigger creelies than this. All we have to do is guard these eggs until Stryker and Wortmore get back.”
    Coryn had settled into a tree downwind of the three owls guarding the eggs. He hoped the wind would carry away any sound he made and would carry to him all the words and sounds coming from the three owls guarding the egg cache. And, at this moment, he seemed to be bombarded by sounds. There were the voices of the three owls and then there were the stirrings of the eggs. These eggs sounded close to hatching. He did not think there werethat many, maybe three or four. But still there was the problem of which one was the Burrowing Owls’ egg. He needed to listen more closely. The more he could learn, the better off he would be. But he did not have much time if Stryker and Wortmore were expected. What he had already learned was valuable. There were three of them. They were all Barn Owls, which meant that they were in training for higher jobs and would not be assigned to the lowliest ranks of the Pure Ones like his dear friend, Phillip. And they were nervous. Even the one who sounded so bold was nervous. Coryn could tell. He could hear the young recruit’s heart beating rapidly.
    Coryn’s hearing had never been so sharp. He could hear things he had never before heard. He continued to cock his head and scan with his ear slits for any new scrap of information. He was almost sure that there were three eggs in the cache, for he could hear the dim but slightly different heartbeats of the unhatched chicks. They were more like soft pulses than real beats. He cocked his head, and then again. Was there another pulsing sound coming from beneath the hollow that the three Barn Owls guarded? He stilled his own heart and quieted his breathing. It was as if Coryn had transmuted his entire body into one big ear. He opened his eyes wide in amazement. Thereis an egg at the base of the tree. Perhaps in a shallow pit covered with something. Of course! This is the egg of a Burrowing Owl. This is where a Burrowing Owl’s egg would be kept.
    “Did you hear something, Flint?”
    “No. You two are just getting jumpy.”
    “It…it…sounded like a very soft wind.”
    “So, it was a soft wind. Never heard of wind in a forest?”
    “I