Magic Time: Angelfire (53 page)

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Colleen raise her head from the floor. She fumbled her necklace off over her head, made a beckoning gesture with her fingers, then dropped her head and lay still. Clay didn’t seem to notice her, though she was only about five feet from him.

I took a long, gliding step to my left.

“Maybe,” Clay mused, “my diet doesn’t need to be limited to devas. You can read changed texts, can’t you? Maybe I’ll sample you next. Lord knows what I could do with your little talent.”

I stepped left again, raising the sword.

He glided right, laughing at me. “You don’t actually think you’re going to get near me with that thing, do you?”

In answer I raised it over my head and came right at him.

At that exact moment Colleen wrapped a hand around his ankle, then sliced through the leg of his coverall with her knife. His skin gleamed through the tear for an instant before she reached in and grasped his leg.

He shrieked, convulsing as if caught in a powerful electrical current. A swarm of shimmering sparks raced up his leg to engulf him, devouring his bright new aura.

No hesitation. Not now. I knew what this thing was— what I had to do. I redoubled my grip on the sword, took two strides and ran Clay through. I felt the power in him kicking back through the blade, still battling me. The sword bucked in my grasp as if alive, but I held on—
willed
myself to
hold on.

In a spray of light and blood he pitched backward, sliding off the blade toward the shattered window, dragging Colleen with him.

I flung the sword aside and threw myself down practically on top of her in the debris, wrapping my arms around her as tightly as I could. She let go of his ankle as he went over, stopping our slide just short of the jagged border. We watched as the spot of orange receded into the twilight.

A sigh seemed to issue from every corner of the room, from the building itself. Then the entire place shuddered. There was a loud, long wrenching sound and bits of ceiling tile rained down into the room.

“Shit, the whole place is coming apart,” said Colleen.

I rolled to my feet, drawing her up after me. “Let’s go!”

The Tower shook again, then settled into a rhythmic quaking. Ceiling tiles continued to fall, exploding dully against the floor.

We scrambled from the room, half dragging Goldie, who still clutched Magritte’s frail body to himself. The building no longer toyed with us. It was dying, groaning, pelting us with debris as it disintegrated around us. We escaped through its death throes to the escalator core and descended, sometimes conveyed by tides of other refugees.

Out in the street we put as much distance between us and the Tower as possible. We’d barely gotten across Dearborn when it seemed to sag, settling toward the parking garage at the rear. We took cover in doorways and under ledges, and while we watched, every window in the place blew out, showering debris everywhere. Then flares poured from the building into the sky, which even now was clearing, losing its ruddy gleam. There were dozens of them.

Primal’s ruby dome was evaporating.

For the space of several minutes the sky was amber-washed cerulean. A cold wind whipped the streets and flayed the clouds overhead. But then, in the west, a swift unnatural darkness gathered, blotting out the sunset. The sky went yellow-gray, the way it does before a tornado.

From where I hunkered inside the blasted foyer of the building across Dearborn from the Tower, I saw Enid move out of cover into the middle of the street, his knot of rescued flares hovering close behind him. They were enclosed with him within a shimmering nebula. The light was pure, blue—a weave of flare magic and music.

Enid raised his eyes to the twisted, static-filled clouds, to the fingers of lightning. He’d seen this before. We all had. He put his harmonica to his lips again and played, the sharp, 
sad wail of sound reaching up into the sky to grasp at the escaping flares, to do battle for them with the Source.

In the end fifteen more flares made it into the safety of Enid’s protective pocket of sound; the others were lost— sucked up into the whorl of unnatural wind. When it had taken them, the Storm raged above us, opening and closing its maw, roaring, spewing bright rage, while Enid led the rescued away toward the Near South Side. I had to pray they’d be safe there.

The Storm lingered for a time, reaching after the lost flares, then retreated into the sunset, taking its lightning and thunder with it.

The broken skeleton of the Chicago Media Building pointed up into a clear, dusky sky. Wind scraped walls and windows, whistling around corners. Normal sounds. Natural sounds.

I sagged back against the facade of the building, weakness flooding my limbs. Nearly at my feet, Goldie sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, Magritte’s body limp across his lap. Howard hunkered next to him, sucked into himself.

“I’m fine,” said Colleen in answer to a murmured question I only half heard.

“Let me look at you.” Doc’s voice was gentle, as always, but had an undercurrent of alarm.

I turned, fearing what I’d see. Doc had Colleen’s head between his hands; Colleen was trying to push them away.

“Ni smyesta!”
said Doc sharply. “Don’t
move
.”

“Viktor, stop!”

“You’re bleeding—”

Colleen grimaced. “It’s not my blood. It’s
his
.” She glanced across the street to where the puppet master and his puppet lay in a mound of debris. “Look. See? Just little cuts. Nothing major. Stop fussing.” She imprisoned his hands with hers and looked up into his face. “Stop, Viktor.
Parestanya
.”

He kissed her. With a passion she obviously shared. And all I could think was,
Now, why didn’t I see that coming?

I pushed myself away from the wall and walked across

Dearborn toward the ruined building. I tried to think as I walked. What to do next? We’d have to find some way to protect the flares. With Primal/Clay gone, we might be able to find other musicians like Enid who were now “released” from their contracts. Maybe they’d help us against the Source, too, or maybe they could help get the flares back to the Preserve.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I paused to look back across the street at Goldie, slumped over Margritte in the lengthening shadows with Howard still huddled beside him. That was a mistake. Just seeing them like that made me feel hollow inside. The way I’d felt as I watched Tina change. The way I’d felt in the days after she was gone.

I took a deep breath and moved to where the bodies lay, Primal’s and Clay’s, in a sea of fallen glass and tile. Primal’s remains weren’t so much a corpse as they were a heap of rubble.

Behind me, I heard the crunch of boots on debris.

“This was Primal?” Doc asked, stepping carefully over the littered ground. Colleen was at his side.

I nodded and knelt to pick up a clod of the detritus. “This was never flesh and blood,” he said. “This was—” “Clay,” said Colleen. “Primal was
clay
.” She glanced

over to where the onetime puppet master lay on the ground,

gray as burnt ash.

“A golem,” I murmured.

“A golem?” Colleen repeated. “What the hell’s that?” Doc answered. “An effigy. A lifeless figure made of earth and powered by wizardry.”

Colleen shivered and pulled the front of her shirt together. “He did like word games.”

“What did you do to him?” I asked her. “At the end, when you grabbed his leg. It paralyzed him. What was that?”

She reached into her pocket and held up the wedge of leather Papa Sky had given her. Mr. Mystery’s talisman.

“Before I realized what he was, he tried to …” She glanced sideways at Doc. “He made a grab at me and got a handful of this instead. Derailed him. I thought, hell, why 
not? Nothing to lose, right?” She shrugged, returned the thing to her pocket, then moved to kick at the wreckage.

A moment later she called out, “Hey, look at this.”

She picked her way out of the debris and laid something on the ground at my feet. It was a metal tool kit about the size of a shoe box.

“Where’d you find that?”

“There was a little cavity of some sort in the torso.” She nodded back toward the broken golem. “It split wide open when it hit the ground, but I figure it was right about here.” She gestured at her own midsection.

I knelt to inspect it. It wasn’t locked; in place of a lock, what looked like a piece of bone was shoved through the hasp, holding the box closed. I knocked the bone out with a chunk of rubble and opened the lid.

Inside, sitting in the half-empty metal tool tray, was a sheaf of papers, binder-clipped and held together with a fat rubber band. More specifically, it was a sheaf of contracts. Enid’s, other musicians whose names I didn’t recognize, one I did—Charlie Gwinn, who had chosen death over slavery. He and a Vanessa Gwinn had signed on with Primal as a duo.

I turned them over in my hands. “Huh. What do we do with these now?”

“Burn them.” The voice was Goldie’s. He was standing behind me in the wan light of the setting sun, looking wasted, pale, all the luster gone from his eyes. “So we can move on.”

He wandered off around the field of debris. I followed him with my eyes, wondering why tears wouldn’t come when I so felt like weeping.

“Cal, what do you make of this?”

Colleen had come around to hunker down next to me. She’d moved the tool tray to reveal a collection of pitifully mundane objects. There was a wallet, a badge, a small velvet bag, and an envelope.

I picked up the wallet and flipped it open. There was a photograph in it. In the waning light of a natural sunset, I 
made out a man, a woman, and two children. Smiling. A normal, happy family. The only other contents were three dollars and a driver’s license issued to one Clayton Devine of Rapid City, South Dakota.

The velvet bag contained a wedding ring.

The badge was DOD issue. A security badge, also in the name of Clayton Devine:
MAINTENANCE CREW CHIEF
. The face of the man on the badge was round with delicate features, eyes that had a vague, unfocused look, mouth cocked in a slightly loopy grin.

“Level seven access,” Colleen read over my shoulder. “If that’s anything like the Air Force security ratings, this guy had a pretty high clearance somewhere.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“Somewhere near Rapid City, looks like,” she said.

I flashed momentarily to Mary’s office, to Goldie twirling the little Lakota prayer drum in his hands.
Badlands
, he’d said. I remembered something Clay’s golem had said, too, when I asked how he’d known about the Source.

There was a leak.

I picked up the envelope.
May
, it said. A month? A name? Inside was a single piece of notebook paper with writing on one side. In a barely legible scrawl someone had written,
Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids. I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.

The letter just ended. Was it an aborted first draft, or had he never sent it? I looked at the date scrawled across the top of the letter. A full three months before the Change.

A leak.

I put the stuff into my pocket. “Let’s get back to Legends. Without Primal protecting this place, who knows what’s going to be out tonight?
We can get back to this in the morning.”

Her name was Gwen, not Tina. She was sixteen, not twelve. A child of abusive parents. They were grunters now, and gone. She didn’t even really look like Tina in the light of day.

I wasn’t devastated. Just resigned.

The city was different now. With Clay’s bubble removed, things roamed at night. Chicago would finally face the full effects of the Change.

There wasn’t much sleep for anyone that first night. Most of it we spent realizing our losses and gains, sorting things out and trying to make coherent plans. Papa Sky showed up at Legends about eight o’clock, according to my wind-up Timex. We owed him a tremendous debt, him and his secret friend. Colleen and I cornered him and asked if we couldn’t meet Mr. Enigma now, to thank him personally for his help.

Papa Sky just laughed. “No sir, Mr. Cal, I don’t think he’d’ve let you near him on any account. Not yet, anyhow.”

“What do you mean, not yet?” asked Colleen.

“Well, the way he put it to me, he’s got some thinking to do before that happens.”

I was puzzled and didn’t bother to hide it. “Why should he have to do any thinking about meeting us?”

Papa Sky shrugged.

Colleen chuffed in frustration. “Well, if he won’t see us, will you at least tell him thanks? For all of us.” She waved an arm at the strange rabble in the room.

“I don’t think thanks means diddly to him. I don’t think he helped because he was lookin’ for thanks.”

“What then?” I asked, hoping maybe the answer would shed some light on our mysterious benefactor.

“I asked him that myself, son. He said you and him had something in common. And before you ask—no, he didn’t 
say what. And before you ask—I
can’t
ask him, ’cause he’s gone.”