Angel Fire East by Terry Brooks Page B

grandeur and old money gone elsewhere. The name on the list for this home was smudged, and no one could quite make it out. Hattie or Harriet something. It wasn’t a name or address anyone recognized, but it might be a church member’s relative. They climbed out of the vehicles, walked to the front entry, and arranged themselves in a semicircle facing the door.
    There were lights on, but no one appeared to greet them. Allen stepped up to the door, knocked loudly, and waited for a response.
    “Creepy old place, isn’t it?” Kathy Kruppert whispered in Nest’s ear.
    Nest nodded, thinking that mostly it seemed rather sad, a tombstone to the habitation it had once been. She glanced around as the kids whispered and shuffled their feet, waiting impatiently to begin. It was a neighborhood of tombstones. Everything was dark and silent along the rows of old homes and corridors of ancient trees. Even the street they bracketed was empty.
    Someone came to the door now and inched back the curtain covering the glass. A face peeked out, its features vague and shadowy in the gloom.
    The door cracked open, and a frail voice said, “Goodness.”
    Taking that as a cue to begin, Allen stepped off the porch, and the youth group began singing “Joy to the World.” Their voices rang out through the darkness and cold, and their breath clouded the air. The door remained cracked, but no one appeared.
    They had begun the refrain, “Let heaven and nature sing,” when the door burst open with such force that it shattered the glass pane, and a huge, hulking figure stormed through the opening and down the steps. Albino white and hairless, he stood seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds, but he moved with such quickness that he was on top of the group almost as quickly as their singing turned to shrieks of fear and shock.
    “Joy to the world! Joy to the world! Joy to the world!” the big man shouted tunelessly.
    The kids were scattering in every direction as he reached Allen Kruppert, knotted one massive fist into the startled realtor’s parka, and snatched him right off his feet. Holding him aloft with one arm extended, he shook Allen like a rag doll, yelling at him in fury.
    “Joy to the world! Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
    Fists pressed against her mouth, Kathy Kruppert was screaming Allen’s name. Marilyn Winthorn was herding the kids back toward the vehicles, intent on loading them in as quickly as she could manage, her face tight and bloodless.
    Allen was kicking and shouting, but the big man held him firm, continuing to shake him as if he meant to loosen all his bones and empty out his skin.
    “Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
    It all happened in seconds, and for the brief length of time it took, Nest Freemark was frozen with indecision. Her first impulse was to use her magic on the big man, the magic that caused people to lose control of their muscles and collapse in useless heaps, that she had used on Danny Abbott and Robert Heppler all those years ago, that she had used on her father.
    But if she invoked it now, she risked setting Wraith loose. It was the reality she had lived with since she was nineteen. She could never know what might trigger his release. She had discovered that three years ago at the Olympics, and she had not used her magic since.
    Now, it seemed, she had no choice.
    She shouted at the big man, striding toward him, small and inconsequential in his shadow. He barely looked at her, but his shaking movement slowed, and he let Allen sag slightly. He was all misshapen, she saw, as if he had not been put together in quite the right way and his parts did not fit as they should, some too large and some too small. He had the look of something formed of castoffs and leftovers, the detritus of the human gene pool.
    Nest shouted harder, and now the strange pink eyes fixed on her. Screwing up her courage and tightening her hold on Wraith, who was already awake and pressing for release inside her, she