Magic Time: Angelfire (43 page)

“This way.” Our guide crossed the basement in a few strides. We followed without question.

We climbed down farther into a subbasement, crawled (or floated) through a manufactured hole between the foundations of two buildings, then went up a flight of rickety metal stairs and out another window well. We crossed an alley, trespassed into the creepy backstage area of a defunct movie theater, and moved from there to lose ourselves in the sublevel of an abandoned office building.

There were times I was sure there were people along our route, but I couldn’t see anyone. Magritte and Goldie supplied our only light.

Once in the office building, our guide slowed to a stop. He’d long ago pulled off his shades, but only now did he turn to face us, tugging his hood back as he did. By Magritte’s light I could see he was young, maybe a little older than Enid. Skin the color of coffee with cream, eyes so dark brown they were almost purple.

Enid let out a sudden crack of laughter and threw his arms around the guy, squeezing him so hard I thought he’d break him in two. They went way back apparently, and there was much backslapping and bear-hugging to prove it. When that was done, Enid turned to the rest of us and introduced our rescuer as “Tone, one hell of a session man.”

I stood aside and watched as the guys shook hands all around, thanking him for the neat rescue, and Enid asked, “How’d you find us?”

“Funny about that,” Tone said. “We got this old guy in the ’hood that sort of passes for an oracle. He just seems to know all sorts of stuff that goes on downtown.”

“How?” asked Cal. “How would he know about us? How would he know you’d care?”

“Well, when devas come into this place, just about everybody knows—it sort of changes the vibe in the Red Zone.”

Goldie’s eyes rolled toward the layers of concrete over our heads. “There’s a disturbance in the Force, Luke.”

Tone gave him a glance. “Yeah, sorta like that. Anyway, when stuff like that happens, the old guy always seems to have the story. We ask him how he does it, he just smiles and says, ‘I got friends in high places.’ He told us about you guys when you first come in. Says you’ve got a deva and that you didn’t turn her over to the first scum bucket that comes along. That’s a remarkable thing, around here. Had to check it out. Seeing Enid again, man, that’s a pure surprise.”

“We need a place to sit down and do some serious thinking,” Cal said.

“Sure thing. You all ready to commence onward? Your lady there don’t look so good.”

Everyone turned to look at me. I was leaning against the handrail of a staircase that went up into nowhere. The sudden attention made me want to straighten up. Somehow the message got lost between my brain and my legs. I reeled.

Next thing I knew, Cal was standing in front of me, holding me upright. “You all right? Jesus, Doc, she looks like she’s been scalded.”

Doc was there in a breath, concern pinching his face. He took my hands from Cal, held them up to the weak light from above.

“I can’t see. Goldie … ?”

Goldman pushed past Cal, bringing a neat little glow ball for Doc to see by. Doc murmured something in Russian and pressed a finger gently to the back of my hand. “Does that hurt?”

“Just a little. Look, I’m fine. Really. Just kind of winded. And I think Goldman’s cotton candy singed me a little. But I’m okay.” I flashed a weak, nervous smile.

Doc raised a hand to my face, brushing my upper lip. It came away smeared with blood. He looked to Cal.

“What is it?” asked Enid from behind Cal.

“Colleen’s hurt,” said Cal.

“I am not hurt,” I said. “I’ve got a bloody nose. Hasn’t anybody ever seen a bloody nose before?”

Tone was peering at me over Doc’s shoulder. “Man, you musta run into the firewall, huh? That’s gonna sting for a bit. We got stuff that’ll take care of it, though. And I suggest we move on now, if you can, miss, ’cause I can’t guarantee how safe it is down here.”

“The toughs?” Cal jerked his head back up toward where we’d left the Suit and company.

“Hell, no. That surface scum don’t come down here. Other things, though.”

Other things. I didn’t want to find out what kind of other things. “Can we go?” I asked.

Cal brushed hair off my forehead, his eyes searching my face, and something shivered in the air between us, making me wriggle inside. “Are you sure she’ll be all right?”

“Well, not a hundred percent sure,” said Tone. “But I’ve never seen anybody die from it.”

Cal nodded and put us back in motion, at my side every step of the way.

Tone and Enid used their travel time for catching up. You know: “Remember old Fly-by-Night Jones? Well, he got turned into a fruit bat.”

Okay, I’m kidding, but close. Tone let loose with a rush of what happened to the old crowd and who’d been turned into what and who’d just plain disappeared. It wasn’t pleasant. Enid was hearing bad news with practically every other word. This friend or that had gone missing, this family or that was scattered to the four winds, most of the places he called home had been blasted to rubble or looted or both. Weird-looking things were growing or roaming or had taken up residence in parts of their once mundane neighborhood. Made street gangs sound downright cordial.

We finally emerged out of the musty cellars into the cheery red light of day and took a look around. The street was filthy, covered with debris, garbage, and little dunes of 
blown dust that glittered with glass—normal, comforting urban decay.

“Where are we?” I asked Enid.

He smiled. “Near South Side. Home.”

There wasn’t much left of home. But there was something. The farther we went into the Near South Side, the more people we saw. Some of them recognized Enid and stuck to him, so that by the time we got to where we were going, we’d collected quite a handful of interested parties, musicians mostly.

Tone led us to a night club/restaurant on Wabash. Buddy Guy’s Legends. To Enid, this was something of a religious shrine. To Cal and me, it was the perfect bolt-hole—dark, warm, and inhabited by the first friendly faces we’d seen since we left the Preserve. In the restaurant, I fell into a chair at one of the tables, hoping I didn’t look as bad as I felt. My hopes were in vain. In a matter of minutes Doc had commandeered rags and water and some sort of curative liniment and was all over me with the stuff. I drank some sort of special tea that tasted like licorice and went down like slippery maple syrup.

Meanwhile, Tone told the story of our rescue with only the least bit of exaggeration. His audience didn’t seem either afraid or in awe of Magritte, and they applauded the fact that she hadn’t been lost to the Tough Guys.

Weird. It was almost like being back in the previously real world. Candlelight and lamplight reflected off polished tabletops, making the place feel real cozy. Of course, there’s nothing unusual about muted lamplight in a bar. There was a constant throb of rhythm in the air, too, as if a jukebox played somewhere out of sight.

Behind the long, curving bar was a chubby old fellow named Jelly and a stunningly beautiful young woman he introduced as Venus. I wondered if anyone around here kept the names they were born with. Tone, it turned out, was not short for Anthony, but a reference to the fact that Tone was a guitarist obsessed with the sound of his “axe.” The death of electricity had put a nasty crimp in his universe. He’d 
taken up the acoustic guitar, he told us, and was learning to play the saxophone from the neighborhood oracle.

Tone and his friends wrangled food and drink for us and for the restaurant’s other patrons. I didn’t see money or barter change hands, so I suspected it was less a restaurant than a neighborhood mission.

Not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but I did wonder where the food came from. Asking, I was told simply, “Grant Park.”

I drank the broth off some stew and carefully chewed up and swallowed some potatoes. My throat was sore, like it had been scoured with steel wool.

Cal didn’t eat. He asked questions. Foremost of which was what anybody knew about the Source or Storm or Dark or whatever they called it here. They said it was powerful, they said it was dangerous and terrifying and that they didn’t need to know any more about it than that. They did not say that it lived in a gleaming, glass tower at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn.

Naturally, they wanted to know things in return—like why were we so absurdly interested in something that really ought to be avoided at all costs—and Cal told them about what had happened in New York, and Boone’s Gap, and everywhere else along our trail. And he told them about Tina, about the fact that the world as we knew it was being invaded by a sort of metaphysical kudzu and that we were determined to find a way to stop it.

“Whoa, son, whoa!” Jelly interrupted Cal in mid-sentence, grasping the rim of the bar with both of his beefy hands as if it was trying to fly away. “You tellin’ us you’re trying to find the Storm
itself?”

Cal nodded. “Yes. I don’t pretend to understand how, but it’s at the heart of this. At the center of the Change.”

“Shit,” said Tone, and Jelly added, “That’s crazy.”

Cal’s face didn’t change expression. If being accused of insanity undermined his self-confidence, it sure didn’t show.

Jelly said earnestly: “The Storm is bigger than we are, son. I don’t think any of us realizes just how much bigger.”

“Well, we’re not as small as we look,” Cal told him, and there was a sharp edge to his smile.

“Oh, yeah?” said Tone. “So when you find it, what’re you gonna do, stick that fancy sword in it? Shit, you can’t fight a damned tornado with that.”

“It’s not really a storm,” said Goldie quietly. He sat hunched over the bar, his hands around a steaming cup of chicory, Magritte hovering protectively at his side. “It’s … more than that. And it’s less than that. It has a core, a heart. That’s what we hope to stick a sword in. Figuratively speaking.”

“And you think it’s
here
?” Tone asked Enid, eyes narrowed. “Where? In the lake? In the underground? Riding the damned El? That’s fuckin’ crazy.”

Cal looked at Goldie, who dived back into his chicory.

Enid said: “I don’t know if it’s here. I do know that Primal Records is here and I come to get out of my contract with them.”

“Your contract?” repeated Tone, sitting back in his chair. “What d’you mean?”

Enid explained it all: the effect of the Change on his contract, how the contract bound him, the way the music could charm, could shield… could twist. “Cal’s gonna cut my music free and I’m gonna help him find his sister and cut her free. Maybe cut us all free.”

Tone laughed, raucous. “I don’t know which is more crazy, thinkin’ you can get someone back from the Storm, or thinkin’ you can get ’em back from Primal.”

Whatever Tone saw in Cal’s eyes cut his laughter off at the pass. “It sounds as if Enid isn’t the only musician with a … contractual problem.”

Tone lowered his eyes. “There’ve been others.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Cal. “Strange as it seems, the legal bindings in Enid’s contract are still in effect, they just work on a different level. In theory, if we confront the Primal executives, we can void the contract. Which is where we might need your help. Is there a safe way to get into the Chicago Media Arts Building?”

“You’re screwin’ with me, right? You ain’t goin’ in there.

Man, that thing’ll eat her alive.” He jerked his head in Magritte’s direction. “The rest of you it’ll just chew up and spit out.”

Cal shifted from one foot to the other like he’d borrowed some of Goldie’s bees. Made me wish he’d sit down. “What thing?” he asked.

Tone looked at him as if he’d dropped in from another planet. “Primal, what else?”

Cal held up his hands. “Wait a minute. Primal is a record company.”

“Primal is a monster.” Venus was perched on a stool at the end of Jelly’s bar, watching us. She shrugged. “Or a savior, or both—depending on how you look at it. I suppose if it weren’t for Primal, this city would’ve imploded on itself in the first week after. But it didn’t, because of whatever it is that Primal does.”

Cal turned slowly to look at her. “
Primal
generates the firewall?”

She nodded. “Somehow it keeps the Storm from reaching in here.”

“So Primal isn’t… the Storm. Isn’t related to the Storm.”

Our new acquaintances exchanged a series of glances that spoke volumes about the uncertainty of present-day life. Then Venus said, “I don’t see how that could be. Like I said, Primal keeps the Storm out.”

“Or at least it seems that way,” added Jelly. “Hell, I don’t think a one of us can pretend to know jack-diddly about anything these days. All we know is, when Primal’s Red Zone went up, the Storm went away.”

“But
you
think it’s a monster,” said Cal. “You hide from it—why?”

“Back in the beginning, we had some like her,” Venus said. She canted her head toward Magritte, who drifted closer to Goldie. “The Storm got some of them, then Primal put up that bloody canopy and it didn’t get any more. Right about the time we were thanking God for that, they started disappearing again. This time it was Primal doing the taking.”

Cal paled. “Why?”