Read DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle for Free Online Page A

cops turned to take notice of them
     as Pierce got out.
    He had driven her home, no picked her up at the party and driven her homeward or townward when. No he had driven her safely
     to his place (where she yes now was) and then returned alone back up the mountain because she had left her, had left behind
     her contact lenses, which he had volunteered to go back and get. And couldn’t find. And so then on the way back into town,
     here, he had encountered something in the road. A raccoon he thought, or maybe a. Something anyway crossing before him. Unfamiliar
     car, too, his own was a Steed sedan, big American. And.
    Beau was there to say how he, Pierce, had come to his, Beau’s, house in a state of bewildered disorientation. Not hurt no,
     a thump on the head maybe. Doctor? No no. Momentary. Fine now. Why had he left before calling the police? Pierce (not for
     the first or the last or the worst time) pleaded ignorance. They studied Pierce’s license, asked if he could step into the
     light here, and they looked into his face with a fierce flashlight; then they made him walk the white line that edged the
     road.
    He could do that, and did. He had stepped forward to take her place here, and would do what further was required of him; he
     would substitute his (momentary, transient) innocence for her guilt, and would take the fall too, he guessed, if there was
     a fall to take. There wasn’t: there were things to do he had never done before, get a wrecker (they worked through the night,
     apparently) and fill out forms; and Pierce’s blameless if brief record was now spotted, he would see the result when he went
     to pay his next insurance premium. But he knew nothing of that then.
    “Something’s going on up at The Woods,” he said to Beau as they drove back. “I don’t know what. Something.”
    “I know,” Beau said, unsurprised. “Yes. We know there is.”
    Rose was asleep when Pierce got back; she had pulled down the covers of the bed but had not undressed, lay sprawled swastika
     fashion across most of the sheet, her long feet bare and her face hidden in her hair. He took off his clothes, suddenly stifled
     and too hot, and lay beside her. When he put out the light the wind seemed to expand, and filled the rooms; in the kitchen
     something fell to the floor with a papery rustle, and Rose awoke. She ascended as though from a deep pool, lifted herself
     and sat up as though on the pool’s edge, looking down within. Then she turned to see Pierce lying long and naked there.
    “There wasn’t really any chipmunk,” she said.
    “Raccoon, I thought you said.”
    “Well there wasn’t any.”
    He pondered what that could mean. That she had no excuse for losing control at that turn. That she had not lost control at
     all, not of the car anyway, which had done what she had asked of it.
Why
was the only question then, and he wouldn’t put it to her.
    “Okay,” he said. She lay again beside him, and put her hands beneath her head.
    The room was growing colder as the mass of air within it was exchanged for the incoming one. She slept; she rose again, tossed
     up and outward will-lessly to her feet, and went off to the john. He listened to the wind and the toilet’s flush. She padded
     back and was clambering again aboard the bed when he stopped her.
    “Wait. Wait a sec.”
    She stood before him where he sat on the bed’s edge. He undid her stiff jeans, pulled at the snap and the strong zipper; she
     rested her hands on his shoulders. He husked her, tugging the denim downward so she could step out. “There,” he said.
    He unbuttoned and took her shirt from her too, and encircled her to unhook the bra in back; lightly stroked her freed breasts,
     looked into her absent eyes; let her back in bed.
    “Scary wind,” she said.
    It really had grown alarming. There were noises out in the world, a descant of bangs and thumps and whistles on the wind’s
     melody that could not be interpreted, would only next day be