Magic Time: Angelfire (17 page)

He grimaced. “Last one. I couldn’t get the quiver free before they attacked.”

He handed me the bow anyway and drew his sword. Awkward, with us all crammed into this rocky closet, but it came free of the scabbard with a deadly whisper.

The tweaks had stopped circling their floundering buddy and were moving on us again, like smart ground mist. Cal raised his sword; I held up the crossbow, threatening. They stopped, eyes gleaming, and faded into the mist.

The clearing was silent except for the wounded one’s muffled keening. We listened to our own breathing. We counted seconds. They weren’t done with us.

“Are these the same tweaks we saw before?” Cal murmured.

Saw?
“Hell, how could we tell? But there’s four of them. That’s how many there were left.”

When they reappeared, they’d armed themselves with rocks. They didn’t hesitate to use them. I took the first one in the thigh. I heard another strike with a soft thud and Doc cried out. I fired the crossbow, but another stone smacked my shoulder and the bolt flew away into the fog. I pressed myself into the rubble, gritting my teeth against the pain and disappointment. Except for my knife and know-how, I was defenseless… unless I could bludgeon one of them to death with my crossbow. Cal’s body quivered against mine, dread and adrenaline racing between us like an electrical current.

Rock rang on steel, thudded on bone. Doc moaned and slumped, falling across Cal, who only just pulled his sword out of the way before it did damage.

I jerked forward to stop Doc’s fall, but a stone grazed my temple and then I was falling, too. A haze of sparks rose up to swallow me and the sound of a vast crowd roared in my ears.

Something had me. It jerked me off my feet and sucked me backward into the roaring darkness.

Hate to admit it, but I think I screamed.

A
bove,
B
elow,

and
H
ere

Suleiman-bin-Daoud was strong. Upon the third finger of his right hand he wore a ring. When he turned it once, Afrits and Djinns came out of the earth to do whatever he told them. When he turned it twice, Fairies came down from the sky to do whatever he told them; and when he turned it three times, the very great angel Azrael of the Sword came dressed as a water-carrier, and told him the news of the three worlds: Above, Below, and Here.

“The Butterfly that Stamped,” from
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling

I have been here, and know that the smoke is not smoke, but something far more sinister. I am instantly afraid. I don’t want to be here. I
cannot
be here.

In the villages and farms there is an awakening. A froth of humanity boils from the buildings. Somehow, they are at once antlike and individual; I see the masses and I see faces among them, and I am plunged with them into terror.

I must find a way down from this cliff, but my frenzy accomplishes not a thing. There is no way down. I can only run back and forth along the edge of my aerie, a flightless, dithering bird, trapped by its incapacity.

Fevered, I look again to the pylons of Chernobyl, but again they have changed. Where they squatted like broken gargoyles, there is now a tower. It is black like the candles I have seen in the windows of dark, cluttered shops—a votive to a demon. It glistens as if in a sheath of oil or water or glass. It terrifies me for reasons I cannot name. It terrifies me more than the leaking reactor.

The cloud now reaching to embrace the countryside is neither smoke nor radiation. It is a swarm of insects small as gnats. I tell myself this is a good thing, that these mites cannot possibly be as fearful as the horrors brought by the cloud of radiation.

But the comfort is false; the swarm overtakes the fleeing people and swallows them. They produce their own horrors, for their bite not only draws blood, it destroys and distorts so that what emerges from the swarm is less than human.

Yes, yes, a fine conceit. The Change—I understand. I protest this heavy-handed dictator of a dream.
You may stop now
, I tell it.

But it doesn’t stop. And though I dream knowingly, I cannot stop myself from wishing I could fly from this cliff.
Damn
dreaming. Let me
help!

As swift as thought, I am in the valley. The insects have flown, leaving a countryside that is twisted and torn, and people who are also twisted, dead or dying.

“Dr. Lysenko! Here!” I recognize the voice of a colleague— a Dr. Kutshinski. But his is not the only voice.

“Dr. Lysenko! I have no more dressings. What do I do?” “Doctor—my daughter—please, won’t you look at my daughter?”

“I can’t find my wife. Help me find my wife!”

“Viktor, what’s happening?”

This is Yelena’s voice, and it stops me in my fevered tracks, for she cannot be here. She is at home in Kiev. Safe. Still, I jerk my head up from the man whose wounds I cannot heal, a man whose flesh boils as if liquid and falls away from his muscle and bone.

“
Gdyeh?
Where?” I ask.
“Where?”
I rise.

Someone thrusts a syringe at me. Yes, at least I can stem the flood of pain. But when I reach for the syringe, my hands are manacled.

I cannot suppress a cry of futile rage. Impotent. Shackled. Yes, that’s how it was—
is
.

In the face of futility, I struggle against Shiva (
for behold, I have become the destroyer of worlds
), struggle to become a preserver of lives.

The dream becomes confused, muddy, horrific. I am awash in death and blood, while creatures that are mere parodies of humanity press around me. Always, I am conscious of the Tower, looming over the valley, casting its shadow, drawing my eyes. Though my hands are locked together, I toil.

how much there is to be done? Can you not see the need?” “Papa, when will you come home?”

That is Nurya, whose voice is like the sweet song of a flute.

“Papa?
Papa!
”

I weep. Can they not understand? These people
need me
. “Wait,” I tell my wife and daughter. “I’ll be home when I can.”

They fall silent. Too silent. I turn to see where they have gone and the field hospital dissolves away.

Around me, rain falls. The lights of police cars slither across the slick road and rainbows squirm in shallow, oily pools. The tow truck comes back onto the road now, our little car dangling at the end of a thick chain not unlike the ones I wear. Water streams from it. In all other ways, it seems as normal as the last time I saw it parked in the narrow lane behind our flat.

I look up and the Black Tower is there, like a funeral candle, upthrust from the trees. Its sides, slick and greasy as this patch of road, reflect no light. Somehow it is to blame for this. Or perhaps I am to blame and it merely witnesses my guilt.

Fury, blind and useless, builds up beneath my heart and pushes upward. I raise my hands to rage or supplicate, I am unsure which, and find they are no longer chained.

I wake, or at least I am moved to a different reality. Here, there is light. Sunlight, golden and warm, shrouds all. Then out of the haze comes a being of such beauty, I am stunned to the soul.

It is a girl. She floats a little above me in a halo of blue-white light. My heart leaps. And I dare to hope…
“Oh, he’s awake,” the girl said, and flitted away.

So, I wasn’t dead after all, and this was not heaven and that was neither Nurya nor an angel. I was alive. Absurdly, I was disappointed.

My vision cleared enough for me to see that I was in a mere room. A sunny and pleasant room, to be sure, but a place built by human hands. I gingerly moved arms and legs. My left knee throbbed, convincing me to lie still.

Reflection overtook me. Heaven was not a place to which I hoped to go, but a place I had once lived and from which I had been expelled. I gazed down at my unchained hands and wondered at the language of dreams.

“Welcome back.”

Colleen stood to one side of the door, which was now open, and through which came Cal, Goldie, and a flare—a w
oman, not a little girl. This must be Enid’s flare, Magritte, whom I had taken for an angel named Nurya. Last into the room was a tiny woman with dark, graying hair and piercing eyes.

Cal came to sit at the edge of the bed and gripped my shoulder. “You gave us quite a scare,” he said. He looked weary and perhaps a little anxious.

I had nothing to say, so I tested my voice by asking the first question that came into my head. “How long… ?”

“Almost six hours.” The tiny woman moved to the foot of the bed. “We have no doctor here, only one nurse and a medicine man. Do you think you might be concussed?”

“Possible.”

“Head hurt?” asked Cal.

“Among other things.”

“Well, at least we can offer something for that,” said the woman. “But I’d advise you to eat something.”

My stomach growled on cue and I managed a weak smile. “Advice I shall take, thank you.”

“I’ll see to it.” The flare bobbed and was gone in an aura the color of sky.

I did not miss the way Cal’s eyes followed her; she was like Tina—yet unlike her.

“Is there anything else we should do for you, Dr. Lysenko?” my hostess inquired.

Doctor
Lysenko. How odd it sounded, still. For years no one had called me that, and now it was my name again, my reality. “Observe me,” I said, “in case I should do something peculiar.”

She smiled, her pale eyes kindling. “Now, I like that in a person—humor under duress.” She looked to Cal. “I expect you’ll want to compare notes and catch him up on things. I’ll get Cherise to have a look at him… in case he should do something peculiar.”

She left, and Goldie moved to take her place at the foot of the bed. “That was Mary, of course.”

“I had suspected as much.” I looked at Colleen, who leaned against the doorjamb, aloof. She seemed more than usually subdued. “You are all okay?”

Cal nodded. “Thanks to Goldie’s new friends. Colleen took a knock to the head, too, but fortunately it was just a glancing blow. She never lost consciousness.”

“Ah. You are a better man than I am,
boi baba
,” I told her.

She smiled, and the others threw me a puzzled look. Is muttering Russian a sign of concussion? Well, if not that, perhaps rhyming is.

“We are in the Preserve?” I asked.

Cal’s face became instantly animated. Whatever gray ghost had haunted it passed without rattling its bonds. “This is incredible, Doc. We are
hundreds
of miles from Grave Creek.”

“I don’t understand. The Preserve is not in the Adena mounds?”

“The mounds are only a portal to the Preserve, they link to it across miles of Ohio landscape.”

“But how? By what mechanism?” I found what he was saying strange but not impossible, and it struck me how much like a dream reality had become.

“Unknown,” said Goldie. “The only thing the two sides of the portal seem to have in common is that they were both Native American cultural and religious centers. It makes a strange sort of sense.”

What a perfect turn of phrase. What other sort of sense could it make? “They came through the portal and brought us here?”

Cal nodded, “Just in time, too.”

“And we have found Enid?”

The smile reached his eyes. “It’s just like Goldie said— Enid’s music has the power to render a flare invisible to the Source. Magritte isn’t the only flare here, and he’s protecting them all.”

I tried to sit up but thought better of it. “Then this place would be safe for Tina as well?”

Cal’s expression was suddenly guarded. “If we need a safe house for Tina, this could be it.”

“Except for one small fly in the ointment.” Colleen spoke at last. “Enid can’t leave. Seems he’s the one and only Key