Free When the Wind Blows by James Patterson Page B

embraced the air with her open wings, and she caught the wave. The breeze whipped her long blond hair behind her. Her
     hair was a stream in the wind.
    Then the earth was sliding along silently beneath her. Except for the whisper of air through her feathers, it was completely
     quiet up here. She soared as if exempt from the laws of gravity. And she saw others taking advantage of the same airflow.
    A red-tailed hawk, a pair of vultures, and smaller crows floated as effortlessly as she did. The hawk circled her, watched
     her. She stared back at its dark, hard eyes.
    “Chill out,” she said to the bird.
    She skimmed the treetops, then dropped beneath them, and finally dipped into the dark green shadows of the woods. She lightly
     brushed the edges of the trees with her wingtips.
    She whipped tight figure eights through the trees.
    What a ride! She felt incredibly connected to the natural world, to the rest of the universe.
    She was made for this!
    Suddenly she slowed herself. The ground was rushing at her. She landed too fast, too hard. Pain mainlined through her body
     and into the hurt shoulder. She stared straight ahead and couldn’t believe what she saw.
    It was that woman again.
    She was a few yards up ahead.

Chapter 25
    D AMN YOU, whoever did this. Damn you to hell!” I cursed loudly, and my voice resounded with the echo.
    I reached down and hauled a horrifying leghold trap out from under a mat of wet and muddy leaves in the gully. Fortunately,
     it hadn’t been tripped by some poor animal.
    Suddenly, I heard something big moving in the woods. The noise was
close.
Definitely a large animal. Or maybe the pitiful trapper himself?
    I froze with the trap dangling from my hands. I turned slowly.
    “OhmygoodGod,” I whispered under my breath. The bird-girl was twenty paces away. It was the same young girl. She was looking
     at me, staring hard. What I was seeing wasn’t possible. But there she was. And she definitely had wings.
    Her face, and probably the longish blond hair, reminded me of Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-old pilot who had crashed her
     plane and died tragically a few years back. The young girl standing before me brimmed with the same kind of spirit and spunk.
     It was in her eyes. She seemed a normal enough girl—except for the plumage, the beautiful wings.
    I was shaking badly. My legs were as wobbly as the ones on my old kitchen table.
This isn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. Get control of yourself right now. Take a deep breath.
    The girl stopped walking through the woods. Her white dress, a smock really, was torn and badly soiled. Her blond hair was
     tangled and snarled.
    She was very still, watching me. Like a hawk, so to speak. Had I found her, or was it the other way around? Was she tracking
     me?
    I was dead sober this time. It was broad daylight.
    This was real. She was as real as I was—sort of. And she was less than thirty yards away from me.
    For a long, silent moment we stared at each other. The clearest green eyes looked out at me from her face. The green of her
     eyes was edged with yellow. Her eyes showed no fear, but her body language was cautious.
    “Hi,” I said softly. “Don’t go. Please.”
    I saw her eyes lower a notch to my hands.
    I still gripped the animal trap. Ugly metal teeth and jaws attached to a rusty chain. The apparatus looked nasty, meant to
     maim.
    Suddenly the girl looked frightened, very afraid. She turned, and began to move away in a hurry.
    She must have thought the trap belonged to me! No wonder she looked so horrified.
    “It’s not mine,” I called after her. “Wait. Please.”
    I dropped the wretched trap and scrambled up a steep gully after her. She was moving fast. I saw a flash of white far ahead
     of me.
    Where in the name of God had she come from? Some kind of mind-boggling birth defect up here in the mountains? An experiment
     of some kind?
Things always go awry.
    The ground seemed to be fighting me as I climbed. Shale slid off