Free The Specter Key by Kaleb Nation Page B

shut it out, but it went on whispering a warning. He dismissed it as his nerves from narrowly escaping the room upstairs. The wind was beginning to get stronger and smelled of the water nearby.
    “That man coming in was rude, wasn’t he?” Astara said. “Ran right through you.”
    “Did you see what he looked like?” Bran asked quickly.
    Astara blinked at him and then shook her head. “No, I wasn’t watching either,” she said. “Why?”
    Bran shook it off. “No reason.”
    But inside an indefinable feeling kept pulling at him, and he felt an urge to look at the Nigels one more time. It was as if he could sense someone watching him from the house, though he kept walking briskly to his bike.

Chapter 9
    Nim
    That night, two thick cotton balls swiped from Mabel’s medicine cabinet served perfectly as a bed for Nim. Bran stretched them apart and laid them flat on his windowsill, and she rolled around in the fluff before pressing her face to the window. The glass was almost the size of a cathedral to her. She was curious about everything; she could stare at things for hours.
    “Nim,” she said again, turning to Bran and pointing out the window. He was sitting on his bed, watching her closely. The light from his lamp reflected his face so he could hardly see anything through the window.
    “The house?” he suggested. She shook her head and tapped the glass, insisting he come closer. He did and put his hands up to block out the light in his room. She was pointing down toward the road, where he could see the Schweezer parked askew.
    “That’s Sewey’s car,” Bran said. “It’s a ferocious thing. Run when you see it coming.”
    Nim shook her head and went on tapping at the window.
    “Garbage cans?” he said. “I see a car, garbage cans, the road, Mrs. Hortibury’s garden, and then the next house. That’s it.”
    Nim gave up and fluttered back down to the windowsill. Bran went on looking outside, but there wasn’t anything that he could see. Nim turned her attention to the board of drawings next to his desk, flying up and hovering there for a minute. She gently lifted the edge of one that had been falling so she could see it better and then moved to another, touching the pencil marking and then looking at the gray it put on her hands.
    “Those are my drawings,” Bran said softly, turning from the window. She wiped her other hand across the pencil shading and got it gray as well, and then she darted over to Bran, holding her hands out with a terrified expression on her face.
    “Look, it’s just pencil,” Bran said. “It doesn’t hurt.”
    She didn’t look convinced. Bran gently rubbed her hand between two of his fingers. The gray wiped off instantly.
    “It comes right off,” he assured her. Bewildered, she looked at her hands. Bran sat down at his desk, ripping some paper off the roll beside it. He waved Nim over, and she stepped onto the paper, looking down as he gently shaded a long streak with a pencil.
    “See?” he said, pointing to it. She got down on her knees, looking at the gray closely. Bran wondered how she could have not seen a pencil before. Had she been trapped in that box all her life?
    She rubbed her fingers in the gray, but this time she smiled widely when she saw them. She wiped her hands on a clean part of the paper and looked delighted when they left a faint mark.
    “Hold on, sit over there,” Bran said, unable to keep from smiling. “I’ll show you.”
    She slid back on her knees, watching him very closely. He started to carefully draw the lines, glancing at her every few seconds and seeing that she was held enraptured by his motions. His pencil swept across the paper until very slowly he had formed a likeness of Nim, kneeling down just as she was at that very moment. He shaded her wings in with deep strokes, and then her wide eyes.
    “Look at that,” he said. “I think it’s you.”
    “Nim,” she said excitedly. Bran carefully added the three letters that spelled her