Magic Time: Angelfire (54 page)

Colleen and I exchanged glances. “Gone? Gone where?”

“Moved on. I think he’s looking for something, too. Maybe that’s what you have in common. Hope he finds it, whatever it is. Hope both of you find it.”

So much for tidy conclusions. Only on TV does the masked man come out of the shadows and reveal himself to be your long-lost cousin, or the twin brother you never knew you had, or Batman. TV was dead, maybe forever. I was disappointed, but not surprised that its conventions didn’t operate in the real world, if they ever had.

I also wasn’t surprised when Enid pulled me into the dim little hallway behind Jelly’s bar to tell me he wanted to take the flares back to the Preserve. The pain of losing Magritte was etched on his face. His mouth, for which laughing had seemed the most normal state, drew downward at the corners. I was amazed he was still on his feet, still jamming the Source.

“I’m sorry, Cal,” he told me. “It’s just something I feel I gotta do. For Maggie. For the other ones like her. And … for the folks I screwed up back there. Maybe there’s something I can do for them, too, now that I’m clear. I know that don’t make sense, but seems like I ought to try.”

I understood. In fact, it seemed like the most logical, practical, humane thing to do. “It makes sense,” I said. “And I know it’ll make Mary happy.”

“You all could come back with us.”

I shook my head. “I can’t. But, hey, you ask the others. Maybe they’ll want to go.”

He gave me a weird look. “You crazy? You don’t believe that. They’d never leave you. Not in a million years.”

I knew that. Maybe it was the only thing I knew with any certainty, when it came right down to it.

“Something else I gotta tell you before I crash and burn.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. Even in the feeble light that filtered through from the bar, I could see they were bloodshot and red-rimmed from tears and exhaustion. “That guy 
Clay, the guy on that badge you showed me? I met him before. Just didn’t recognize him. He was one of the maintenance guys at Primal. I seen him working around there when I done some late session work. Funny about all that, ’cause I’d swear the guy wore makeup, even back then.”

Clayton Devine had twisted
before
the Change. And come here. From Rapid City, South Dakota. Which meant, what? That the Change had happened there first? By how long? And why? I tried to wrap my mind around that and failed. It made me recognize how close to crashing and burning
I
was.

“Enid, you’re going to have to sleep sometime. Who’s going to shield the flares when you do?”

“I am.” Venus appeared in the hallway behind Enid and moved into our puddle of light.

I swear all I could do was stare at her. “You’re a musician?” I meant “a tweaked musician” but didn’t want to say it.

“I was. Vocals, keyboards. My … Charlie played horn. We’d just signed with Primal Records when everything changed. We got stuck here on the inside. When Charlie… when I saw what happened to Charlie, the music in me just dried up. Just stopped. I haven’t written or sung a note since the Change.”

Enid shook his head. “God Almighty, I only been holding it in since Wisconsin. I can’t even imagine.”

“You’re Vanessa Gwinn,” I guessed.

She nodded.

“She’s going back to the Preserve with us,” Enid told me, then hesitated. “Look, Cal. I owe you…”

I shook my head.

“Yes,” he said, “I
do
. I’m free because of you guys. After I get them all home safe, I’ll come find you. Catch up.”

I started to answer him, realized I didn’t know what to say. I wanted him to find us, but how likely was that, really? I nodded, mute.

He put a hand to my shoulder. “Take your own advice. Man’s gotta sleep sometime. That includes you.”

Man’s gotta sleep
. I was terrified of sleep. How badly I needed it, I only realized when I sat down to consider
where
I would sleep. Most certainly
not
in the room I’d slept in last night, nor in that company. The thought of sharing a room with Doc and Colleen made me feel like a teen who’s terrified of what he might catch his parents doing. What did they call that?

A “primal” moment?

I started to laugh. Sitting alone in a corner of the restaurant with the murmur of other people’s lives going on around me, I laughed. I caught Jelly gaping at me from behind his bar. But that only made the laughter more fierce.

Then, when I thought I would never stop, the tears finally came.

The air is chill and tastes like snow and ash on the tongue. Already the clouds have banked to the north, hesitant, as if unable to believe Chicago is once again open for their trade.

Away to the west I can hear the Voices again, dark and insistent, clear as this day, no longer muddled by Clay’s Black Tower. But I still have the nightmare, because my Black Tower doesn’t stand at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph. My Black Tower, like the Kingdom of God, is within.

And as I stand at Magritte’s pyre with the music draining away and my friends standing close beside me and watching me with apprehension, I think perhaps her death here and now is a good thing. She will never look at me the way Cal is looking at me, the way Doc and Colleen are looking at me. She won’t have to watch me become whatever it is I am becoming.

People are wandering away from the park now. Even Enid and Venus are taking their leave—along with the inscrutable Howard, who will also return to the Preserve, and who, I’m forced to admit, grows on you like fungus.

This morning, as we laid wood on the pyre, he came to Cal and said, “Enid says once we get angelfire to the Preserve, we’ll catch up to you.” He moved in close and fixed Cal with those bulgy, marble eyes and added, “We
will
. Sometimes miracles happen.” He held up his hand, turning it back and forth in the sunlight, and it seemed to me it looked more human.

“Yeah,” Cal said. “Sometimes they do.” They were words of hope, but I saw little of that in his face. And he wasn’t looking at Howard when he said them; he was looking at Doc and Colleen, who seem reluctant to stray more than three feet from each other today. I recognized what I saw in his face then—loneliness.

I look up from the delicate act of constructing a facade and catch their eyes on me. Caught out, Colleen glances at her feet, Doc gazes out over Lake Michigan, and Cal looks straight up into the sky, shivers in the chill wind and says, “It looks like Chicago’s the Windy City again. It’s got to be at 
least twenty degrees colder than it was the day we got here. I wonder what else Primal was holding at bay. I don’t envy these people what they’re going to go through this winter.”

“How long will it go on?” Colleen asks. “Is this like a— a chain reaction? Will the world just mutate until…”

“Until it comes full circle?” Doc finishes. He continues to gaze out over the lake. “They say a fisherman’s children look to the sea. I wonder what our children will have to look to.”

Colleen sways toward him, the thick fabric of their jackets just brushing. A subtle movement. I wonder if they realize how bright are the cords that bind them together.

Cal glances at them and away. He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other and says, “We need to get the horses saddled and packed. If you’d like to stay out here for a while longer, Goldie—”

I shake my head. “No. There’s nothing out here. And you’re right: we need to get going.”

“Where?” asks Colleen. “Have you settled on a route yet?”

Cal rakes a hand through his hair. “Settled, no. But I have an idea. I want to take another look at the map. See what it tells me.”

He says more, but I don’t hear him. The sparks are turning to ashes. The breeze lifts them out over the water, where eventually they will settle and melt away. I think, for a moment, of joining them in the great, sparkling lake. Beneath the great, sparkling lake. But I still have work to do.

The lake and the dying fire and the sky blur, looking like a glittering watercolor. I turn my back on the pyre and walk away. There are Voices calling me and I must listen.

About the Authors

M
ARK
S
COTT
Z
ICREE
has created classic episodes of “Star Trek—The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine,” “Babylon Five,” “Sliders,” and many more. He has appeared as a media expert on hundreds of radio and TV shows and is the author of the bestselling Twilight Zone Companion. He lives in West Hollywood with his wonderful wife and vile little dog.

M
AYA
K
AATHRYN
B
OHNHOFF
is the author of four fantasy novels:
The Meri
,
Taminy
,
The Crystal Rose
, and
The Spirit Gate, from Baen
. Her short fiction has appeared in
Analog
,
Amazing Stories
,
Century
, and
Interzone
, and she has published a number of articles in
Writer’s Digest
and
The Writer
. Maya lives in California with her talented husband, two amazing children, one overzealous little dog, and one incredibly intelligent cat. She and her husband, Jeff, have also released two albums of their music—
RetroRocket Science
and
Manhattan Sleeps
.

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Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

MAGIC TIME:
Anglefire
. Copyright © 2002 by Paper Route, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBoundTM.

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