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

seen to be escaped lawn furniture or blown-away pickets.
    “What if it’s the one?” she said.
    “What one?” he said, but she seemed to be again asleep, anywaydidn’t answer; he looked at her face in the dimness and couldn’t quite tell if her eyes were closed or still open.
    He in fact knew what one, for it was from him that she had heard mythologies of wind, how it bloweth where it listeth, one
     part of Nature not under God’s thumb and therefore perhaps at the disposal of our Enemy; she had heard his stories about changer
     winds, how one had once blown away the Spanish Armada and thus saved England from Catholic conquest, a famous wind which if
     you went to look for it in the records of the time wasn’t there. He had told her of the wind that carries away the old age,
     and the contrary wind that brings in the new age, and of the stillness between. He had told her a lot of things.
    God what a dream-tossed sleeper she was, her arm now flung across him and her open mouth making a child’s soft frightened
     whimper with each exhalation. He didn’t usually permit her to sleep beside him.
    Not something in her path that she had swerved to avoid: more likely something behind and following, which she meant to escape.
Who flies so fast in the night and the wind?
    He shuddered deeply, and drew the sheet over his nakedness.
    When it was late, Robbie came from his daybed out on Pierce’s sun-porch to stand above his father. Pierce, who was fast asleep,
     was amazed at how clearly present the boy was to him, more than he had been since Pierce had begun to perceive him. The golden
     hair of his arms; the awful serenity of his smile, abashing and cheering at once, which Pierce had not often seen, which he
     had sought so often by spiritual and lowly physical means to see. Robbie bent and kissed his father’s cheek, and turned away,
     his duties here done and others and other games summoning him. Unable in the depths of sleep to cry out or call after him,
     Pierce felt him torn away, but he would not remember that: he would remember only how he had suddenly awakened, desolate,
     the woman only alongside him, and the wind enormous.
    The next morning then, a tremulous blue one with flying clouds overhead, Rose sat on Pierce’s sunporch and thought and smoked
     cigarettes while Pierce loaded his boxes and furniture into the same truck (Brent Spofford’s) that had once brought it all
     out of the city and into the country. When they were done they all drove out of the Jambs (waving to Rosie Rasmussen, Pierce’s
     employer, coming out of the drugstore) and went out to Littleville, to the house to which Pierce was moving. He almost expected
     to find it had vanished, magicked away by the wind, but it was there.

3
    A t September’s end, then, Pierce was living by a running river, and Rose Ryder too, a different house by a different river.
     Rose was spending autumn in the summer cabin of an administrator at The Woods Center for Psychotherapy; when The Woods began
     to wrap up its summer programs the administrator moved back to her City house and office, and Rose had her cabin until the
     freezing weather, when she would have to turn off the water, bring in the deck chairs and the grill, board the windows with
     sheets of gray plywood, and look for somewhere else to live till the next fall, a roommate or a room. Meanwhile she could
     watch the woods along Shadow River color, and the deck fill with tattered leaves, and the river steam whitely in the mornings.
     She thought of the little house as hers.
    Pierce’s new house in Littleville was by the Blackbury, the other river that runs through the Faraways, rising from different
     sources than the Shadow’s, springs and melting snows far up in the Appalachians, and eventually subsuming the Shadow on its
     journey to the sea.
    It was Rose who had led him to the house, before he had even moved to the county, when at a moonlit party by a backwater of
     this river he’d invited