Spawn of the Winds Read Online Free PDF

then contaminated? I suspected that my sister was not.
    Breaking into my thoughts, Tracy passed me a steaming cup of coffee. Her hands were white and they shook. I looked at the cup for a moment, then passed it right back. “You drink it, Tracy. I think you need it more than I do.”
    I shrugged out of my outsize parka and wrapped it around her shoulders over the one she wore already, zipping it up the front. Then I moved past Jimmy, on his feet now, and opened up the first-aid cabinet. The kit inside was all tumbled about but I found a clinical thermometer and put it under my tongue. I also found Whitey’s star-stone.
    I lifted the thing out of the debris of bandages and bottles, turning
to the other three. “Who does this belong—” I started to mumble around the thermometer—then dropped the star-stone. It was hot as hell! A tiny puff of steam or smoke rose up from my stinging fingers; the skin of my palm was cracked where I had held the five-pointed star.
    â€œThat’s mine,” Whitey said, sipping his coffee and starting to look a lot more human. He was frowning, plainly wondering why I had dropped the star-stone. “What’s up?”
    Tracy hurried over and took hold of my damaged hand, staring in astonishment at the redly blistering flesh, then at me, finally stooping to pick up the star-stone. I started to stop her until I saw that she plainly couldn’t feel the things heat. But was it really hot?
    I took the thermometer out of my mouth and squinted at it. The scale started at 35° Centigrade, its lowest point—useful if someone were suffering from extreme hypothermia or exposure—but the mercury wasn’t showing at that level. It had shrunk back into a silver blob at the frozen end of the scale. I was dead, or should be!
    I knew then that Whitey and Jimmy would be the same. Wherever we were, well, it could get as cold as it damn well wanted to; we weren’t going to freeze to death. But Tracy was something else again.
    Obviously the star-stone she wore had saved her from this effect of close proximity to the Wind-Walker, but it had also left her as vulnerable to normal low temperatures as she had been before, as any normal person always is. Now I could see why Ithaqua had placed this weird stricture upon us, why Whitey, Jimmy and I had suffered this incredible change. This way Ithaqua wouldn’t have to worry about our threatening him with our star-stones. We wouldn’t be able to touch the damned things.
    I looked at the others and saw a little of the panic hidden in their eyes, the grim fears hiding behind the white masks of their faces. The telepathic impressions I was getting were nervous, disorganized, bordering on the hysterical. Things needed sorting out right now, before matters got worse.
    â€œTracy,” I said, “you’d better put that second stone around your neck along with the other. We can hardly afford to lose them, and you’re the only one who can handle them.” I brought out my metal security box from where it was stowed beneath a seat and unlocked it, taking out a duplicate copy of my complete file on Project Wind-Walker.

    â€œYou’d better read this, too,” I said, passing her the heavy file of papers and documents. “Then you’ll know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
    While I was busy dealing with Tracy’s education, Whitey took a small electric heater from among the items in his personal kit, a tiny Japanese model with its own adapter. He plugged it into a battery-fed outlet. In a matter of only a minute or so warm air began to pour from the grill, driven by a hidden fan. Whitey directed the stream of warmth at Tracy where she sat turning the pages of my file and sipping her coffee.
    â€œAll right,” I said to the two men, inclining my head toward the back of the fuselage. We moved into a rather cramped huddle.
    â€œBoys,” I started, “I think we’re in a