Magic Time: Angelfire (49 page)

I glanced down at the signatures on the page. “This contract was signed by Daniel Freemont, Glenford Blaker, and Shirley Cross. Are you one or more of those individuals?”

Primal changed aspect again, seeming to grow and inflate, his body blazing golden and glorious. “I AM PRIMAL.”

The voice was immense, room-shaking. Primal’s shadowy courtiers drew back in fear and Howard Russo cringed and quivered against my legs. I was struck with the absurd image of Dorothy and her three stalwarts quaking before the Wizard of Oz. Life imitates art. Except that I wasn’t going to rattle, cower, or shed my straw innards on Primal’s throne room floor.

“Irrelevant,” I said. “The legal fact remains: this contract is invalid. It is no longer binding on either Enid Blindman or Howard Russo.” I nudged Howard out from behind me and held the contract out to him. “Howard Russo, are you prepared to void this contract on behalf of yourself and your client?”

Howard blinked up at me and lifted an uncertain hand. Primal said, “DON’T,” with a voice in which wind howled and trees collapsed.

Howard squinted at the contract so hard his eyes watered. For a moment I thought he might run and hide. Instead he snatched the pages from my hand.

“DON’T.”

Howard stepped out of my shadow, faced the gleaming giant, held up the contract, and ripped it in two. It gave up a flash of sickly green light that lingered like the after-image of fireworks before weeping to the floor. This time the damn thing stayed torn. Howard grasped it with new vigor and ripped it again and again into tiny pieces. He flung them to 
the floor and danced on them. Then he pointed a finger up at Primal and said, “
Done
with you! I am
done
with you!”

I steeled myself for an explosion from Primal—the tirade of a thwarted tyrant. Instead he sat back in his throne with a sound like the roll of low thunder. His eyes, half lidded, looked like twin suns. He guttered toward garnet. “So…” was all he said, and raised an arm the size of a tree trunk. Red mist cascaded down it. Howard flinched back a step, but there was no menace in Primal’s movement. “Not so hasty. This contract is voided, but might we not strike a new deal?”

Howard glanced at me, then back to Primal. “What deal?”

“I still want Enid Blindman. I still want… devas.” He might have been announcing that he craved chocolate. “Why?” I asked.

“I like having my very own pantheon of little gods and goddesses. I like the way they gleam through the darkness. They soothe my troubled breast.” He folded a ruby hand to where a heart might have beat were he human. “They… light up my life.”

“Wow,” said Goldie. “I’m impressed. Half-assed literary allusions, bad song title puns. We could be twins. I think you and the flares protect each other.”

“You again. You’re annoying. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Protection. Isn’t that why you’ve enslaved the flares… and the musicians?” Goldie pressed.

“There are no slaves here. The flares, as you call them, are my guests. The musicians… are in protective custody.” “Why?” I asked.

“Their music is dangerous—to themselves and to others. Surely you’ve realized that. You’ve seen what Enid’s music does. It not only depletes him, it bends things. Reshapes them. Makes them hideous. I don’t like hideous things.” He rolled a glance toward Howard, who bared his teeth. “I bring the musicians here and I channel their abilities. So they can’t hurt themselves or anyone else. A noble cause, don’t you 
“You use them to imprison the flares,” Goldie accused.

I put a hand on his arm and squeezed, my eyes on Primal.

“The music only feeds back because of the contract.” Primal’s perfect head moved slowly back and forth. “Be
cause of the Source.”

“No. The Source gave the music power; the contract made it dangerous.”

For the first time, Primal’s lips moved, showing teeth that might have been made of diamonds. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”

I ignored the question. “No one’s going to cut a deal with you.”

“Oh, Howard will. Howard’s always ready to make a deal. And Howard wants what’s best for his client… and for himself. He’ll convince Enid to stay under contract.”

“Fuck you,” said Howard, then turned and shuffled toward the door.

“You haven’t heard what I’m offering you in return.”

Howard wheeled, beating at his chest with balled fists. “Can you take this back? Make me human? You can’t do that.
Nobody
can do that.” He flipped Primal a pointed gesture and trundled away.

“I think we got what we came for,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Goldie shook himself as if we were waking from sleep. “What we came for,” he murmured. “No, no, we don’t have that.” He stepped in front of me and looked up into the full blast of Primal’s gaze. “The seventh floor.”

Primal seemed to freeze, and Clay said, “There’s nothing on the seventh floor.”

“Yes, there is,” Goldie insisted. “There
is
.”

I tried to pull him back. “Goldie, come on. We’re done here.” I ignored the wraiths hovering around us. Ignored what leaving them here in this state might mean. We had to go on. If we could break the Source, this trap, too, might be sprung.

Goldie shook me off. “There’s something on the seventh floor, Cal. Something he doesn’t want us to see.”

Primal opened his mouth and an earthquake rolled out. “GET OUT!”

Goldie’s aura was suddenly bright enough to make me blink. There was an even more dazzling concentration of light building up in his hands. I lunged at him, grabbing his forearms, desperate to keep him from doing something deadly. He turned his head to look at me. The moment our eyes touched, I was struck with the stark, horrific image of Tina, floating like a Lorelei in an aquarium, listless, almost lifeless, her eyes empty, her fine, pale hair fanned out on the ether. One prisoner among many.

The seventh floor
.

I let go of Goldie. His lightning went off like a fragment of Armageddon, filling the room with stark white flash-fire. I was blinded. He shoved me toward the door.

I heard Colleen shouting behind us, heard Primal roaring, Clay shrieking. Then we were in the hall and the doors closed, shutting the cacophony out. Through the sparks that danced in front of my eyes I expected to see guards, armed and ready to bring us down. What I saw was a guard’s boot just visible around the corner to the main corridor.

Howard, standing at the corner, looked down and nudged it out of sight with one foot, then straightened his sweats. “Not dead,” he told me pointedly. “Just… inconvenienced.”

Goldie shoved past me, heading for the fire escape. “We don’t have time,” he said. “We’ve got to go.”

I snagged his jacket. “Not that way.”

He swung around to face me, eyes desperate.
“Tina.”

“Not now.” I redoubled my grip on his arm and started moving him toward the intersecting corridor where Howard waited impatiently.

He struggled in my grasp. “Cal, for God’s sake! He’s got Tina!”

“How, Goldie?” I kept him moving. “How’d he get her? The Source has Tina. This isn’t the Source. “

“You don’t know that! None of us knows that!”

“This is not the Source,” I repeated, and told myself I believed it, though I found I didn’t want to.

I’d just marched him around the corner when Howard looked up and said, “Where’s the girl?”

I spun around. Colleen was nowhere in sight. We’d left her behind.

Goldie picked that moment to bolt. He caught me completely by surprise, bowling Howard and me both over and onto the floor. From the darkness of the hallway I watched him disappear around the corner. A second later there was a wash of red light and the fire door slammed.

I scrambled to my feet, pulling Howard up after me. I took a step toward the cross corridor, then realized I didn’t know which direction I should go. Colleen was still in Pri-mal’s lair. Goldie … and maybe Tina…

Goldie’s vision washed back over me, making my legs quake.

Howard tugged on my jacket. “I’ll get the girl,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the throne room. “You go for the crazy guy.”

Hesitation gone, I flew around the corner after Goldie, through the fire door, and out onto the escape. I felt the cadence of Goldie’s frantic steps as a dull vibration in the concrete and steel. I looked up. The stairs seemed to zigzag into infinity; I only needed to go as far as the seventh floor. I sprinted, taking two steps at a time.

On the seventh-floor landing the fire door hung open. I didn’t stop to think. I dove into the gloom and dodged swiftly down the hall to the left, guided only by the tentative light from the open fire exit. Within seconds that had dwindled to nothing. I slowed, put my back to the inner wall, and listened.

Nothing.

I moved cautiously along, keeping my back to the wall. When I’d sidled about ten feet I paused again to listen. Still nothing.

“Goldie?”

Behind me the fire door slammed shut, leaving me in total darkness. Someone was behind me in the hallway. My heart rate spiked. I turned back the way I’d come, slipping my sword from its sheath.

“Goldie?”

The building around me seemed to moan softly. Hair rose up on the back of my neck and I was overwhelmed by the sudden conviction that something very unlike Goldie faced me down the hallway. The darkness stirred and shifted. I pivoted and ran, keeping one hand on the inner wall.

Three doors slipped by beneath my trailing fingers. Then the wall fell suddenly away. I turned right. Remembering the escalator core, I shifted to the opposite side of the hall. Four more doors slid by before the wall fell away again. I turned left and stopped.

Ahead of me the corridor glowed a strange, dim green, like light through many layers of thick glass. The walls themselves were black and seemed to be dripping with some kind of viscous fluid that flowed in every direction, unconstrained by gravity. Just beneath the surface, gleaming green runnels of light wriggled as if sentient. Like the veins beneath Primal’s skin.

Behind the walls, or maybe trapped within the walls, amorphous shapes moved languorously and gave up a light of their own. Flares, caught like butterflies in a giant’s display case. There seemed to be dozens of them.

I stood immobile in the middle of my own nightmare—a dreamscape I’d walked right into, in spite of the steps I had taken (or thought I had taken) to avoid it. Colleen was four floors down in God knew what kind of predicament. Goldie was somewhere ahead of me in this maze. My thoughts eddied there, floating with the disembodied shapes behind the thick, translucent walls.

A great sigh breathed over me. I looked ahead, my eyes filling to the brim with the glow of fey light. Without meaning to, I moved forward, feeling a horrible, palpable sense of déja vu.

My worst nightmare.

I moved deeper into the labyrinth, reached another juncture, turned another corner. I heard my name called again, only this time it sounded in my head.

“Cal…”

A gleaming shape wavered behind the wall just ahead of me. It seemed to draw nearer to the barrier, taking on more and more definition. The shape was human, but every limb gleamed with spectral light, and the hair, so white it was almost blue, floated in a bright banner from the head. It moved with the grace of a swan, closer and closer to the barrier.

I moved closer, too, until I had nowhere to go. I pressed my hands against the icy wall and looked into a delicate face with huge, azure eyes, the features blurred by the glass but still recognizable.

“Oh, God,” I sighed, and wept.