Free The Homecoming by Carsten Stroud Page A

glancing down the table to where Beth and Hannah and Reed were busy talking about getting the carriage house ready for Beth and the kids to live in it.
    Hannah was a round, plump, angelic little girl who had just turned four, still quite babyish, with large blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. She had pale skin and a slightly loopy smile and a wonderful sense of humor.
    She had a habit of tilting her head to one side if people were speaking to her, and she always focused on their lips while they were talking. She also had trouble getting some words out right.
    He knew this was because she was deaf in her left ear. It hadn’toccurred to him that she was deaf because her father had slapped her so viciously on that ear that he had damaged her hearing. The realization left him with nothing to say.
    Like all kids who have to live with unpredictable parents, Axel had developed an acute ability to sense what was going on in the minds of adults in his world. Axel read Nick pretty well.
    “It’s okay, Uncle Nick. Don’t you worry about her. Mom took her to a doctor. She’s going to get a hearing aid. She’ll be okay.”
    She will now
, he thought.
    And so will you
.
    Nick knew then that no matter what happened here in Niceville—and he had a feeling it was going to be very bad before it got better, if it ever did—he was going to do whatever it took to keep these people safe.
    There was a full moon that night. It shone in through the master bedroom window, a streaming blue light that pooled on their bed. It was so intense that it woke Kate up.
    Through the gauzy drapes she could see it hanging there, a huge blue-white sphere surrounded by a misty aura, now gliding majestically into a bank of clouds. The room grew dark.
    Nick was asleep, at rest, the worry lines fading, making him look years younger. The house was silent. Beth was down the hall in the guest room. Axel and Hannah were sleeping downstairs, on a pull-out sofa in the rec room, where they had fallen asleep while watching a DVD of one of Kate’s favorite movies,
The Kid
, with Bruce Willis.
    She looked at her bedside clock. It was almost three thirty. She lay back on her pillow and tried to make some sense of the disorder that had come into their lives. She tried not to think of where her father might be. She would have to think of it sometime, but not right now. Tomorrow was a Monday, and Mondays were expressly created for dealing with things like that.
    She closed her eyes and was drifting off to sleep when she
felt
rather than heard a sound, a soft, thudding impact, and then a jingle of metal on metal. It was coming from outside. It sounded like it was in the backyard just below her window. She looked over at Nick.
    Still asleep.
    She slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb him. He was a light sleeper, and tended to snap fully awake if he heard anything out of theordinary, a habit he had picked up in the wars. She was surprised that the sound hadn’t wakened him.
    Kate went to the window and looked down into the yard. She heard the thump and jingle again. There may have been a shape, a shadow there, in the middle of the backyard. A big dark shape.
    The yard lights shut off automatically at midnight, but she had a remote on the windowsill that would turn them back on. She was reaching for it when the moon came out from behind the clouds again. The yard filled with moonlight.
    A huge horse stood there in the backyard, pale golden in color, although it was difficult to distinguish color in moonlight. It had a long white mane and four white hooves with feathery white hairs all around them. It was enormous, one of those farm horses—what did they call them?
    A Percheron or a Clydesdale or a Belgian.
    It was cropping the lawn, now and then stamping a hoof and shaking its massive head, making its harness jingle faintly. She stood and stared down at it for a long minute, thinking that it was a magnificent animal, wondering how it had gotten into their