[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind Read Free

and she screamed to herself she'd been caught in a tornado. She'd almost flung open the door to escape, had braked sharply instead and cracked her forehead against her hands fisted around the wheel. Like a slap for hysteria the dull stinging had calmed her, and she'd driven the rest of the way home at a slow walking pace.
    The wind died when she reached her own block.
    The snowfall eased.
    She had sat trembling in the driveway for nearly an hour, convincing herself it was a freak wind-surge un derscored by the drinks. Nothing more. No one was there. Nothing was there. Yet she sat trembling in the driveway for nearly an hour and watched the street and the sidewalk, waiting for someone, or something, to pass.
    Suddenly her cup rattled harshly in its saucer, and she pulled her hand away to bury it in her lap.
    The faucet began dripping; the refrigerator coughed on.
    She looked at the window and prayed for a blizzard.
    "Pat!" she said then, very nearly yelling, and slammed a palm on the table. The cup and saucer jumped, the butter dish skittered, the plate that held her toast almost flipped over the edge. She turned her hand over and stared dumbly at the reddening skin. A moment, and she decided that as of now she was a teetotaler in the heroic mold of ancient Carrie Nation. It was that, or she would have to believe that Oxrun Station was beset by midwinter tornados and she was the abrupt subject of covert surveillance.
    And she wished her nerves were as convinced as her brain.

2

    A   BLUR of red and a darker shadow behind it. Pat looked to the window and saw the cardinal back on its perch, a blue jay on a thicker branch closer to the trunk. Neither of the birds remained there very long; the cardi nal fled first, the jay a moment later. But it was enough to quell the unsettled surging that had begun in her stomach.
    A finger to her lips, across her cheek and through her hair, and she reached blindly for her purse and the first cigarette of the day. A few seconds' fumbling and she laughed aloud, relief and abashment giving her a case of gently lingering giggles. The purse, she remembered, was on the butler's table beside the front door, and the thought of getting up, walking all the way out there and all the way back, stayed her for the present. And that, she thought with smug self-satisfaction, was precisely the idea. The longer she delayed that initial coughing spasm, the less time she had to finish her two packs a day. By March she hoped to be whittled down to one. By April, a half. That she might eventually quit al together was a fantasy she kept deftly at bay —this slow and easy method of cutting down at least managed to entertain no uncommon illusions. And it was certainly more effective than the time she had attempted an abrupt withdrawal, without any preparation but a quickly reached resolution. That had been an unmitigated disaster, not only for herself but for her students as well. Their work had suffered measurably under the onslaught of her fierce critiques, and they had only regained their sanity and their progress when one of them —she'd never learned who, though she suspected either Ollie or Ben—had left a new pack of English Chesterfields on her office desk one morning. The wrapping was undone, a cigarette halfway out, and a lighter stood beside it waiting to be used.
    It had been the most succulent tobacco she had ever tasted in her life. And when she had returned to the class not one of them had been smiling.
    Dears. They were, most of them, dears. They called her Doc with affection, formed and reformed groups around her latest work, her latest exhibitions (depending on tastes, depending on grades), though her only cavil might be their singularly unenthusiastic support for her campaign. She would have thought the creation of a Fine Arts Department devoted entirely to the visual arts would have made them rapturous —in the manner of students who were getting their own way at last. But not them. Or,