Running with the Demon Read Online Free PDF Page B

snapped, her voice brittle and sharp, her eyes bright with anger.
    Nest swallowed her surprise and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just wondered, I guess.”
    Her grandmother looked at her for a long moment without blinking, then turned away. “Go make your bed. Then go out and play with your friends. Cass Minter has called you twice already. Lunch will be here if you want it. Dinner’s at six. Go on.”
    Nest rose and carried her dishes to the sink. No one had ever told her anything about her father. No one seemed to know anything about him. But that didn’t stop her from wondering. She had been told that her mother never revealed his identity, not even to her grandparents. But Nest suspected that Gran knew something about him anyway. It was in the way she avoided the subject—or became angry when he was mentioned. Why did she do that? What did she know that made her so uncomfortable? Maybe that was why Nest persisted in her questions about him, even silly ones like the one she had just asked. Her father couldn’t be a forest creature. If he was, Nest would be a forest creature as well, wouldn’t she?
    “See you later, Gran,” she said as she left the room.
    She went down the hall to her room to shower and dress. There were all different kinds of forest creatures, Pick had toldher once. Even if he hadn’t told her exactly what they were. So did that mean there were some made of flesh and blood? Did it mean some were human, like her?
    She stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror looking at herself for a long time before she got into the shower.

C HAPTER 3
    O ld Bob backed his weathered Ford pickup out of the garage, drove up the lane through the wide-boughed hardwoods, and turned onto Sinnissippi Road. In spite of the heat he had the windows rolled down and the air conditioner turned off because he liked to smell the woods. In his opinion, Sinnissippi Park was the most beautiful woods for miles—always had been, always would be. It was green and rolling where the cliffs rose above the Rock River, and the thick stands of shagbark hickory, white oak, red elm, and maple predated the coming of the white man into Indian territory. Nestled down within the spaces permitted by a thinning of the larger trees were walnut, cherry, birch, and a scattering of pine and blue spruce. There were wildflowers that bloomed in the spring and leaves that turned color in the fall that could make your heart ache. In Illinois, spring and fall were the seasons you waited for. Summer was just a bridge between the two, a three-to-four-month yearly preview of where you would end up if you were turned away from Heaven’s gates, a ruinous time when Mother Nature cranked up the heat as high as it would go on the local thermostat and a million insects came out to feed. It wasn’t like that every summer, and it wasn’t like that every day of every summer, but it was like that enough that you didn’t notice much of anything else. This summer was worse than usual, and today looked to be typical. The heat was intense already, even here in the woods, though not so bad beneath the canopy of the trees as it would be downtown. So Old Bob breathed in the scents of leaves and grasses and flowers and enjoyed the coolness of the shade as he drove theold truck toward the highway, reminding himself of what was good about his hometown on his way to his regular morning discussion of what wasn’t.
    The strike at Midwest Continental Steel had been going on for one hundred and seven days, and there was no relief in sight. This was bad news and not just for the company and the union. The mill employed twenty-five percent of the town’s working population, and when twenty-five percent of a community’s spending capital disappears, everyone suffers. MidCon was at one time the largest independently owned steel mill in the country, but after the son of the founder died and the heirs lost interest, it was sold to a consortium. That produced some bad feelings all