Magic Time: Angelfire (14 page)

“Usually, people don’t come here without an invitation,” she tells me. “In fact, since Enid and Maggie and I came here, no one has come through that portal that we haven’t
led
through. This is a place of refuge, Mr. Goldman. A preserve of human life. And your ‘little talent’ could put its very existence in jeopardy.”

I look over at Magritte. Her eyes are wide with what I think is concern (though flare eyes can be hard to read, and that little puckering between her brows could be annoyance). Enid is examining a knot in the floorboards. No help there.

“I’m no danger to you, Mary.” I try to reassure her. “My friends are no danger to you. All we want is to talk to Enid in the hope that maybe he can help us.”

“This compound”—she makes a sweeping gesture with one arm—“is locked in a vault that is somehow folded up in space. We don’t understand how. All we understand is that to keep it hidden, we have to bar the doors and windows and mind the locks. You picked my locks, Mr. Goldman. How many more like you are there at home?”

Several things flash through my mind at once. One is Mary’s choice of words; these are
her
people,
her
place,
her
locks,
her
gates I have crashed. Second is a quandary: Do I tell her there is one of me or many?

I opt for the truth. “There aren’t any more like me. At least, not among the people I’m with. None of them saw Magritte until Enid let them. None of them can see through your defenses or pick your locks.”

“No?” She turns on her heel, starts to pace. “But you could let them in.”

“I was kind of hoping you’d do that.”

“So they can talk Enid into leaving us to find this Source?”

“Not necessarily. He may be able to share his talent with us in another way. He might know something we don’t, something we can learn. Pardon me, but I kind of got the idea from Enid that helping people in need is your shtick.”

“My shtick.” A smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “Well, it’s a nice story, Mr. Goldman. It touches the heart.”

Her pacing brings her back into my face. “I have over 120 souls here. And more coming, by invitation, every day. What if you’re not what you advertise yourself to be? What if you have other motives that I can’t begin to divine? Or even if you’re sincere, what happens if the only way Enid can help you is to go with you?”

I hold up my hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll leave.”

She grimaces. “So you can gate-crash again with reinforcements? Try to put yourself in my place. Would you trust you?”

Well, now. Given what the world is coming to, she has a point. Lesson number one in post-Change reality is that if it was ever true that nothing is what it seems, it now goes double.

“If there’s anything I can do to prove we’re harmless…”

Her mouth curls up at one corner. “And how would you go about doing that, Mr. Goldman? How can you be sure you
are
harmless?”

I can’t.

She’s silent for a moment, her eyes on my face, poking, prying, scanning. Then she steps back a pace. “Enid, find our would-be friend something to eat. He is not to go near the caverns. I’m going to call Council.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Enid, docile as all get-out. He beckons with his dreadlocks.

I am dismissed into the care of the Bluesman and the flare. They lead me to a large, bright kitchen where the wood stove puts out too much heat and where a pot of tea is boil-ing—eternally, I suspect. I pull off my ratty coat and get a bowl of some sort of grain porridge and a cup of the industrial strength tea. While Enid and Magritte huddle at the kitchen table and speak in muffled tones about something— most likely what they should do with me—I stare moodily out the window, down the hill to the center of the camp, where the rhythm of early morning activity has established itself.

It’s like watching a dance of insects. They beetle around the fire pit, stop and chat, exchange containers of some sort. Near the residences, people are also busy, beating rugs, hanging laundry, tending animals, scratching at the ground. Very normal in a bucolic, medieval sort of way.

While I watch, the rhythm of the dance changes. From several of the cabins, people emerge as if propelled—two here, one there, another over there, a fourth and a fifth. They converge on the camp center, homing. On their way, they tag and draw along a woman hanging laundry, a man weeding neat rows of something green, another man deep in conversation with a group near the fire pit. From there, they start up the hill toward the Lodge. The people around them, the people they pass by, take note, following their progress, pausing to comment on it.

Call me squeamish, but this display of synchronicity makes my hair stand on end. I swallow a suddenly tasteless mouthful of porridge and set down my bowl. Okay, it’s not
Children of the Corn
—the people coming up the hill are chatting and smiling as they approach—but I am seriously weirded out, nonetheless.

“She called Council,” Magritte says from beside me. Her voice reminds me of the wind chimes. She seems slightly ill at ease.

“Is that a bad thing?” I ask.

“Not a bad thing,” says Enid. “The Council protects us, is all. They’ll do what’s good for the Preserve.”

“Ah. Which may not be what’s good for me and my friends.” Or the rest of the planet. I turn to look at him as straight up as I can. “Look, I meant what I said. Let me go and I’ll take my friends and get out of here.”

Enid drops his eyes. “That’s not my decision.”

“What about the little girl?” asks Magritte. “You ain’t just gonna abandon her?” Her eyes, for a moment, show me as deep and dark a maze as the one I traveled to get here. It doesn’t take special powers to see that Tina’s plight has some special significance for her. After all, she was close to becoming Megillah-fodder herself.

I shrug. “I could tell Cal there was no way Enid could help. But I’d be lying, and I’m not real good at that.”

Her aura seems to fade toward transparence for a moment. Then she looks to Enid,
through
Enid and right down into his soul.

He puts up his hands to ward her off. “Hey, no, baby. Don’t ask me that.”

She says, “What if he could convince the Council—convince Mary—that it was a good thing?”

“How’s he gonna do that, Mags?”

The look they exchange is loaded with subtext. There’s something here I’m not in on.

“With your ability,” I say, “you might be able to free more flares—more fireflies. You might be able to free them all.”

Shaking his head, Enid slumps farther into his chair. “No, man. No way I can do that.”

“Then maybe I can. I’ve managed to harness a few twisted talents. I can see and walk through your portals. Maybe I can learn to do what you do, or maybe I can help you do it.”

Enid grins at me unexpectedly, the furrows alongside his mouth becoming deep smile lines. “Sort of a sideman, huh?” “Or a side
kick
.”

He reaches up to rub his eyes, which are bloodshot, I assume from lack of sleep. “It’s not the same thing. The portals is one thing; the music is something else.”

“I’m willing to try if you are. Look, if Mary is as dedicated to freeing and protecting people as you say, then isn’t this a golden opportunity? A talent like yours could save a lot of enslaved flares. We can find the Source—the Storm.”

“You seem awful sure of that.”

“I am.” Sometimes I wish I weren’t. “But let’s say we
can
free some of the flares. The missing piece in the scenario is where do we take them where they’ll be safe?” I smile. “Nice place you got here.”

Enid and Magritte exchange another verbose look, then Enid says, “Lemme go talk to the Council,” and leaves me alone with Magritte.

I feel her beside me, a cool, blue furnace. I have a swift and unworthy fantasy about what it might be like to make love to her. It shocks me. She is looking at me with those giant cat’s eyes while this slithers through my mind, and the sudden one-two punch of lust and shame drive me over to the hearth, where the heat from my face is lost in the fire. She follows me, so my relief is short-lived.

I try to keep my mind on the problem at hand. “So you were in Chicago when this happened to you?” I ask without looking at her.

“Yeah.”

“Was it sudden? I know with Tina—my friend’s sister— it happened gradually, over several days. We thought she’d gotten some sort of radiation poisoning.”

Magritte’s hands make a series of vague little gestures before she says, “Poisoning, huh? Yeah, it took a while for me to get poisoned, too.” She giggles, but there isn’t any mirth in it. It ends in a strange little hiccup.

I glance at her face and surprise something both bitter and desperate in her expression. “Was it painful?” I ask. “Tina was in physical pain up until… well, until it was over. After, she seemed … relieved … released. I think there was a different kind of pain, then.”

She grimaces, her sharp little flare teeth making her seem feral. “Sounds like sex.”

Well, that catches me napping. I’m speechless, and what’s left of my lust flares (you will pardon the pun) then shrivels right up.

“I don’t know what I’d’ve done without Enid,” she says in a voice like the rustle of dry leaves. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire… Uncle Nathan always said that about me.”

She turns her face away; the flames paint it gold and red, even through her aura of rippling light.

“How close did you get to the Storm before Enid—” “Struck by lightning,” she murmurs. “You ever been in a tornado?”

“Ah, no … an experience I’ve managed to avoid, living in Manhattan.”

“Stay in this part of the country long and you won’t be able to avoid it. Tornado just sucks up anything that gets close. Even at a distance, you can feel the power of it. Like a magnet, pulling at you. You see it; it dances in your eyes. You know it’s a quick trip to hell, but it’s so powerful, so
beautiful
, that part of you wants to walk right up and touch it. You
want
it to take you.”

She pins me with her eyes, suddenly dark as the underbelly of a thunderhead. “Storm was like that. One minute I was dancing for
him
, the next minute I was dancing for the Storm.”

I recall someone a lifetime ago talking this way about cocaine. She got struck by lightning, too, in a manner of speaking. One night, in a cranked haze, she walked right onto the third rail in our tunnel.

“Dancing,” I repeat. “For Enid?” I’m trying, I realize, to wrap my mind around their relationship, as if it matters.

“No, not Enid. Enid is my friend.” She lays subtle stress on the last word. “He was there to save me from one thing, and ended up saving me from something worse.”

“You knew him before the Change?”

“He played at the club I worked before his manager got him a break. After, he’d come back to check up on me, make sure I was okay, talk about getting me out of there. He
tried
to get me out of there.” She shrugged, spilling radiance into the air. “When all the weird shit came down, he was there for me. In the wrong place at the right time, I guess.”

Darkness flitters across her face again like the shadow of wings. It’s the same look I glimpsed earlier when she asked if we’d abandon Tina. I have the sudden conviction that Magritte knows a lot about abandonment. I fight the urge to stroke her cheek. Did I mention I’m a lousy fighter?

She doesn’t flinch away from my touch as I expect. Instead, she turns into it, fixing me with her whiteless topaz eyes, wrapping me in a tingling veil.

From my fingertips, gold-white light fans out across her cheek and bleeds into her own vivid aura. A luminous mist glides over my hand, my arm, my head. It envelops her, too,
and in a moment we’re engulfed in a veil of something kinetic that is both hers and mine. The world is shut out. I hear no shimmer of wind chimes, no snap of flame, no life-noise from the camp outside, not my own breathing, not even my own heartbeat. I am aware only of our mutual amazement.

The opening of the kitchen door pulls us apart. The combined aura explodes soundlessly and the outside world rushes back in. I am dispossessed.

“Council wants to see you,” says Enid, and if he is aware of having interrupted something, he hides it.

The Council meets in a large parlor I suspect was once the staff lounge. There is a huge braided rug around which sit nine people on chairs, bench seats, and pillows. They are an interesting mix, five women (including Mary), four men. They are racially mixed, too—three blacks, one Hispanic, one Asian, two Native American. Mary is the sole Caucasian. They are old and young. Fresh and worn.

Their clothing suggests diversity of social strata, as well. The Asian gentleman wears a sweater that is obviously cashmere, but his L.L. Bean boots are muddy and scuffed. The Hispanic woman next to him is dressed in ill-fitting overalls and a man’s flannel jacket—Kmart wardrobe. They both have very clean but very chapped and callused hands.

In the once real world, clothes said something about who you were. Now I think they might only say something about where you’ve been. The Change has been a great equalizer, I suppose, whatever its faults. Perhaps it’s true that no evil happens that does not bring good in its wake. If there was ever a time you couldn’t judge a man by his clothes, it’s now.

I smooth the loose tails of my own gaudy purple and green plaid flannel and await their verdict.

“Enid has explained what you’re proposing,” Mary says. “On the surface, it sounds ideal. Like Kismet. You have a way of tracking the Storm; we have, just possibly, the means of freeing its slaves and an underground railroad ready to receive them.”

“But?” I prompt.