Magic Time: Angelfire (19 page)

Her eyes struck me with the force of an arctic storm. “
Why?
Why do you believe you stand a snowball’s chance in hell of doing
anything
against the Storm? You saw it— what it did, what it’s still doing. What makes you think you can do
anything
?”

I had to smile. How many times a day did I ask myself that question? “Would you believe me if I told you I had a vision?”

Into the silence that followed, intruded a soft, rhythmic thudding. A peculiar vibration tingled under my feet. Goldie obviously felt it, too, because he put down the rattle and stood, looking puzzled. Mary raised a hand, as if to command silence, and sat listening to the eerie drumming. It seemed to come from everywhere, to be in the room with us.

When the vibration ceased, Mary rose. “Excuse me. I have to go. I’m assuming you won’t be leaving right away.” She was gone in a wash of tension I swear pricked my skin.

Goldie and I stared at each other for a moment, then I asked, “
Is
it in the Badlands?”

He gave me a look he could probably patent. “Now I’m a travel agent? How the hell should I know?”

We moved by unspoken consent to stand on the Lodge’s broad veranda. Down the hill, mellow afternoon sunlight tumbled through trees that were still green into an odd, gleaming mist that seemed to fit the forest like a woolly, translucent bonnet. It reminded me of Boone’s Gap, but this mist seemed benign, like a child’s favorite blanket. There were no angry ghosts in it. It was pleasant here, from the clutter of cottages and tents to the song of wind chimes. If it were not for Tina—no, if it were not for the Source—I’d consider staying. God knows, we all had talents we could put to use in a place like this.

“Bagel dog with kraut,” Goldie murmured.

“Excuse me?”

“Things I Miss Most. Your turn.”

“You have to ask?”

“Now now. This is supposed to be a lighthearted exercise in distraction. The category is Things We Miss Most About Life as It Once Was.”

“Okay. Um… Starbuck’s … double latte, tall, vanilla.”

“Figures. Low fat milk, too, I’ll bet,” he said, and when I nodded, he added, “Yeah, I figured you for a low fat kinda guy.”

“But if I had to do all over again? Whole milk and hazelnut.”

“You devil.”

“
Could
you learn to do what Enid does?”

He sobered and his eyes dropped to his feet. “Tried it. That’s what I was at this morning before Doc came around. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe it just takes practice.”

“
Practice?
Practice
what
?”

“Okay, trial and error, then.”

“Look, you remember the light-globe I used to scare away our Shadow friends?”

“How could I forget?”

“It’s a form of visualization. I imagine the globe; that somehow gathers the photons together and it’s there. That’s roughly the way Enid makes his shield around Magritte.”

“All right, so you understand the mechanism. So far, so good.”

“No.
No
good,” he said, shaking his head. “I work with light. Enid works with sound. They’re two different types of energy—at least so far as the Change is concerned. Enid creates a sonic shield around Magritte, so the Source can’t
hear
her. I could create a light-globe, but all that would do was keep her from being eaten by the local wildlife. It wouldn’t block her from the Source.” He paused to chew on his lip and pick at a knothole in the porch railing. “It’s not just Enid. It’s Magritte. They do it together.” He made a spasmodic gesture with his head. “The shield, the jamming thing.”

“Wait. You’re telling me … What are you telling me?” He shrugged. “They’re a duo. A team. Batman and

Robin, Scully and Mulder, lox and bagels. You can’t have one without the other. Symbiosis. And no room for cream cheese.”

“You and Magritte don’t have symbiosis?”

He glanced away from me so quickly, if we were standing in a courtroom, I’d have smelled guilt.

“What?” I prompted.

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

He wagged his head back and forth and sighed. “Magritte and I … we have some sort of … rapport. We connect. Or maybe she just makes me hot. I don’t know. But we don’t have what she and Enid do. Besides which, he needs
her
protection as much as she needs his. Protection from this Howard guy.”

“Howard? Refresh my memory.”

“His manager. The guy he’s hiding out from here. Irrelevant at the moment. The point is, I just don’t seem to have
it
—whatever
it
is.”

“Full circle. We’re back to Enid.”

He shook his head. “You heard Mary. He’s their lifeline.” “She said something about a battery—the thing that pro-

tects the flares while Enid is gone. What did she mean?” He gave me an odd look and held up a finger. “Listen.” “To what?”

“Shh!
Listen
.”

I heard a dog barking down the hill, water gurgling and splashing, a chorus of wind chimes. Goldie started humming. It took me a moment to realize that the tune was in perfect harmony with the wind chimes.

Enid used
sound
. “The wind chimes?”

He grinned. “Cool, huh? I haven’t verified it yet, but that’s my theory. It would explain a lot. Such as why they’re all over the place, why they all play the same set of perfectly tuned notes, and why something keeps them moving even when there’s no breeze.”

I looked up at the row of chimes along the eaves of the Lodge. There was no breeze, but they were rocking and 
sending out a sheer veil of song. “What keeps them moving?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t had a chance to ask anybody who’d say anything more than, ‘Well, uh, they’re
wind
chimes.’ ”

I grimaced. “I hope the answer isn’t ‘Enid.’ ”

“What if it is?”

“Then our job gets a little harder.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s a way to do this, Goldie. If we can’t account for all of Enid’s talents, then we have to make Mary see that if we don’t shut down the Source, and shut it down soon,
nobody
will be safe
anywhere
. Not even here.”

Goldie’s eyes met mine, grim, troubled. “Cal, there’s something you should know. Enid’s sick.”

A cold fist wrapped around my stomach. “How sick?”

“I don’t know. Magritte says it’s just that he’s doing too much. Maybe she’s right, but intuition tells me it’s something more. He’s pretty used up.”

“Does Mary know?”

“Would she admit it if she did?”

Goldie was right about Enid—he was used up. It was hard to miss. He was right about Mary, too; she didn’t admit it, even when Doc offered to take a look at him.

“Why? He’s just very tired, Dr. Lysenko,” she insisted. “He does an awful lot for us here, and with winter coming on outside, we’ve been keeping him especially busy. He just needs rest.”

I tried to read her face, but she would’ve made a fabulous poker player; I couldn’t tell if she was lying, in denial, or telling the Gospel truth.

I figured Goldie was in a better position to read that situation than I was. If Enid wouldn’t tell him, chances were good that Magritte would. She seemed to trust him—something he found bemusing, but which didn’t surprise me. In a matter of days they formed a peculiar triad: Goldie, Magritte, and Enid. Nothing sexual, except perhaps in my 
friend’s fulsome fantasy world, but something musical and—I don’t know—spiritual, I guess.

I wondered if I still believed in spiritual things. I vaguely recalled that I once had. That Tina had. Or perhaps Tina was the believing part of me, and apart, I believed in nothing but Tina herself.

Doc was up and around on the second day of our stay, limping but mobile. By the end of that day he’d become a fixture. Surprise, surprise. He fit in here, the same way he fit in at Grave Creek; the same way he fit in on the corner of Lexington and Forty-second, the same way I have no doubt he’d fit in in the operating theater of any major urban hospital.

Doc Lysenko, chameleon.

I didn’t fit. So I put myself to work, mostly in the infirmary Doc was helping them piece together. A good place to gather information. There were moments I’d look up from a task and watch everybody fitting in, and I’d try to imagine what life would be like if we found Tina and brought her here. Would I fit then? If Tina was the part of me that believed, was she also the part of me that
belonged
?

Colleen understood this. She didn’t fit in any better than I did. We were misfits together, Colleen and I. Where Doc could get absorbed in the Preserve’s medical needs, and Goldie could just get absorbed—period, Colleen stayed focused. That helped
me
stay focused.

“It’d be really easy to get sucked into this place, wouldn’t it?” Colleen said at the end of our first day in the Preserve. “Just too good to be true.”

I gazed down the long hill at the evening view from the veranda of the Lodge and realized that she’d put my feelings to words pretty much exactly. “Who wouldn’t want a haven like this?”

She laughed, and I could feel the warmth of her gaze on the side of my face. “You. You’re already planning our next move, and that sure as hell doesn’t involve hanging here.”

“No. Because you’re right, as it happens. This place
is
too good to be true. Mary says it’s locked in space and time. But 
it’s not locked. And it’s not safe. The world outside is going to keep changing.”

“Until someone or something stops the Source.”

I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes met mine— open, frankly questioning. Did she take that for granted— that if the Source was somehow conquered or dispersed, the Change would simply stop? I didn’t.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so. I hope it’s that easy.”

She laughed again. “Listen to the man—‘easy’! .. .Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, huh? We just have to keep going until we get… wherever it is Goldman is leading us.”

“Looks that way.”

The moment stretched out between us, silent, as we stood eye-to-eye on the veranda in the soft light of fey torches. I wanted to lean into her, to touch her, to establish something constant between us.

But then she pulled her eyes away, looked back down the hill and said, “So what’s next?”

“Next,” I repeated, pulling my thoughts back from the edge. “Next, I get to know the flares.”

There were seven of them, all but one pulled from the Source’s radar at the point of Change. The one exception to that serendipity was Javier, who had changed while in the Adena mounds. There, he had apparently been protected from the Source by whatever power the place held. The same power, I suspected, that linked it to Olentangy.

Javier and his family had been vacationing in West Virginia when the Change came. He was thirteen. His mother and father were also here. They no longer spoke of making their way home; they now understood that to do so would mean leaving their son behind. They stayed. They fit in.

The flares liked the Preserve’s little chapel. It was the light, Magritte said—the way it slanted through the stained-glass windows, making rainbows in the shadows and tinting 
their auras with the vivid hues of flame, ice, and Saint Elmo’s fire.