The Seven Whistlers by Amber Benson Christopher Golden Page A

noticeable as a streak
of pure white paint against beige.
    All her life, Arlene had been holding her breath waiting for
this moment — waiting to exhale — but instead, she inhaled sharply.
The black figure darted left along the lake shore, staying beyond the tree
line. It moved so swiftly she caught only glimpses of its perfect darkness as
it ran. So fast. Impossibly fast.
    She watched for several long seconds until she could not see
it any longer. Her heart beat wildly in her chest. The wind came again, but the
mountain air had an earthy, slightly rotten odor now.
    It’s coming this way, she thought. It’s seen me,
and now it’s coming.
    Though she’d spent her life training herself to have faith
in extraordinary things, now Arlene tried to believe that it had been nothing
but a dog, or a wolf, or even a bear. It had been big enough to be a bear, she
thought.
    So fast.
    Nothing was that fast. The lake was vast. How long would it
take for the wolf to make it all the way around to this side? What a stupid
thought. No wolf could have caught her scent or even seen her from that
distance, all the way across the lake. She’d imagined the swift shadow. The
darkness of the warrior monk assignment must have been affecting her more than
she’d realized. Her senses were always open to the wondrous, and today, she’d
let the sight of a shadow get the better of her.
    All of her denials sounded so reasonable in her mind.
    The hell of it, though, was that she still felt it. The
thing had been there. And it was coming, tearing around the rim of the lake,
full of malevolent intent.
    Arlene had spent all those years readying herself to accept
a moment such as this. Now that it had arrived, she could not pretend she did
not see, did not feel, did not know . . .
    She left the easel and the paint, but took the wet canvas,
carrying it ahead of her like some enchanted shield as she hurried for her
Jeep. Once she’d loaded it into the back and climbed into the driver’s seat,
she hesitated a moment, looking doubtfully at the easel sitting there in the
midst of the trees.
    But she wouldn’t be back for it. Not alone, at least.
    Arlene dropped the Jeep into gear and sped off across the
rutted dirt road, tires kicking up a cloud of dust. Heart thundering in her
chest, she tried to catch her breath, and resisted the magnetic pull of the
rearview mirror. As she reached a turn in the road and spun the wheel, she
reached up one hand and turned the mirror away. For the first time in her life,
she was afraid of what she might see.
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    Mike finally had a design he liked for Mabel Rutherford’s
dining room. The problem was that the woman had been a nightmare to deal with
when it came to his sketches. Some people were like that. If they saw the
finished work, the actual piece of furniture, they would remark on its beauty. But
for some reason it seemed to them that the existence of it as a sketch made it
unfinished and felt they were almost required to find fault. That could be a
long process. He’d dealt with Mrs. Rutherford before, and knew she would be
difficult.
    So he’d decided not to show her the sketches for her dining
room. Instead, he was going to bite the bullet and make one of the chairs. If
she didn’t buy it, someone would. The legs and spindles would all be done with
nothing but hand tools. The seat would be finished and edged and smoothed the
same way, but to get the basic shape, he needed the table saw.
    All day he’d worked on the sketches, and by the time he’d
had something that satisfied him, it was nearly dark. He’d stopped for an hour
to have something to eat and to drink several glasses of ice water. He always
got dehydrated while working in the shop, even if all he was doing was
sketching. It was as though the dry wood drew the moisture out of him.
    Now he turned on all of the lights in the shop, and the
place lit up brighter than day. Shadows were misleading when it came to riving
wood, whittling