Nightwing Read Online Free PDF

cave roof narrowed to a thin stream and a different, greater need took hold. Others of their order might seek the twilight; these would wait for the dark. In the manner of upside-down spiders, wings mantled, padded claws reaching for rock, all the hundreds of adults moved sideways or backwards towards the ebbing light at the sinkhole. Squat faces fringed with whiskers concentrated on the mark of a dissolving day. As that mark faded, a ten-year-old female unfurled her wings and flew upward. One after another, the rest followed, in seconds more than a thousand streaming up through the sinkhole, climbing and trumpeting cries that directed them to their proper position in the flight. Biologically, they were miracles of evolution. Fourteen-inch wings, their membranes five times more sheer than surgical gloves, propelled them as fast as swallows. Downy fur, gray on the back and brown in front, cut wind resistance. Color-blind eyes magnified the light of emerging stars so that the canyon glowed for them and, ahead, the desert was brushed with silver. They drifted above the canyon ridge like a cloud but as they reached the desert they flew ever lower, until they were a tide flowing a bare three feet above the desert floor. In front and around them spread a net of silent cries and echoes that returned to large, tender ears marked by a separate tragus. Each bat flew so close to its companions that their tide seemed a solid mass, and yet the tide flowed unchecked through cactus and brush. The terrain was new to the bats but not altogether different from their Mexican home. Hungry, their flattened spade-shaped noses soaked up the animal smells on the night wind. A stream of moths approached the bats, scattered and escaped. The bats swung into the wind, where smells were rich and traveled far. A nighthawk following the moths changed its course, abruptly wheeling upward and away. Unlike birds, the bats couldn’t soar. They only flew and they flew only for the Food, their wings beating air fourteen times a second in a steady, purposeful rhythm until the warm smell they sought tinged the air. Minute particles of sweat and plasma transferred from the air to the folds of their nostrils. The tide swung again and the all-but-silent screams increased in urgency. A thousand mouths opened, revealing the distinctive chin and long canines and, unlike teeth of any other bat or animal in Creation, incisors which were as curved and sharp as blades. Biologists called the bats Desmodontidae, a name suggesting those teeth and despair. Vampires.

C H A P T E R

T W O
    T he morning sun warmed Abner’s shed, a dirty-white Public Health Service van, and five tourists who anxiously watched Youngman’s jeep drive up. Youngman put most tourists in two categories. Soul-toters, who tended to be young, scruffy, and desperate to “get into” Indian religion. And camera-toters, who were older, cleaner, and only desperate to get back to air conditioning. The three women and two men beside the van were definitely of the second category, although a little bit better dressed than most, in expensive casual outfits. One of the men had been sick down the front of his pastel shirt. Youngman got out of his jeep. He didn’t see Abner.
    When he asked if he could be of any help, one of the women put her hand over her mouth.
    “Abner’s giving you trouble?” Youngman tried a smile on her. “Don’t pay him any mind, he’s that way with everyone.”
    “No, he’s . . .” The man with the spoiled shirt pointed towards the shed. “God help him.”
    By now, Youngman wasn’t listening. He ran around the van, past the creosote bushes with their rusting trucks, and into the shed.
    The doorway and the ground around it where the rabbit had been killed were splattered with blood. A trail of blood went around the sand painting and through the ring of red sand to the drawing of the caped man, where the blood painted in a head around the mouth and crying eyes. At the figure’s