Magic Time: Angelfire (20 page)

They didn’t seem to mind when I crashed their little gathering the morning after our arrival. I perched on the edge of a pew while they arrayed themselves about the altar like kinetic votive candles. If the gathering was odd, so was the chapel. The altar sported the usual cross, along with a menorah, a Lakota ceremonial pipe, a doll-size Buddha, and some relics I didn’t recognize.

A Bible verse stirred my memory:
And My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations
. Maybe we were seeing the fulfillment of prophecy.

We talked about the Preserve, about Mary, about Enid. I mentioned the wind chimes casually, commenting on how many of them there were. The other flares turned to Magritte in eerie unison, and Magritte gave me a long, searching look and said nothing. And when I asked them about the Storm, there was a silence so deep I could hear the candles burning.

Then a girl with the unlikely name of Faun asked, “What’s to know about the Storm? It’s why we’re all here. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“How did it affect you? How did it call to you? My sister talked about hearing a Voice or Voices. ‘The one and the many.’ Is that what you heard?”

They exchanged glances, and for a moment no one spoke. Then Javier said, “It wanted me to belong to it. The way I belonged to my family. It
told
me I belonged to it. It made me think…”

“Think what?”

“That it was where I was meant to be,” he finished. “That I wasn’t like my mom and dad anymore. I was… different. And I needed to be with my own kind.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about it, Javy,” said Faun. “You know how it gets when you think on it too much.”

Javier looked from me to Faun and back again. “Your sister’s like us?”

“Yes. She wasn’t as lucky as you are, though. It found her.”

Auras rippled and shifted hues. Eyes, deep and mysterious as twilight, traded glances.

“When I was in the mounds,” Javier said, “I could feel it calling me. Somehow, I knew it couldn’t reach me as long as I stayed where I was. But after a while I
wanted
to leave the mounds. It made me want to leave. To go find it. Mom and Dad kept me there… and then Enid came. They were so scared. I’ve never seen them so scared.” He shook his head. “Then, I didn’t understand why.”

My blood chilled. “Do you now?”

He didn’t answer, but glanced over at Magritte, who hovered lightly above the pew on which I sat like a lump of coarse clay. “Should we tell him about Alice?” he asked.

Magritte’s expression went through a series of changes as she decided again how far she could trust me. “Enid found Alice up on Put-in-Bay Island. She was in the last of the Change and the Storm’d come for her.” She said the words as if they were dangerous. “Enid got to her just before the Storm did, and we barely made it back into the cave. But Alice… wasn’t very strong. When she’d hear the Storm, she’d listen. One night, she just left. She went back through the northern portal to the island and it got her. Enid followed, to try and bring her back, but it was too late.”

“What do you mean, when she’d hear the Storm? I thought you couldn’t hear it inside the Preserve.”

“Sometimes you can,” said Javier quietly. Terror and longing merged uneasily in his eyes, and I remembered Tina telling me that she wondered if she ought to just embrace the power tugging at her, heed the voices telling her how perfect a union it would be.

I remembered, too, as clearly as if I lived it again, our last moments together in the Wishart house in Boone’s Gap. The simple white board structure had held something too complicated and paradoxical for me to comprehend: two men, one less than a man, one more than a man. Bob Wishart, crippled, disintegrating. His brother Fred—
Doctor
Fred Wishart—a cocreator of the Source. Coauthor of the real Doomsday Book.

A piece of the One.

In the moments of quiet I tried to avoid, I could still hear Fred’s voice, gentle, trying to explain to me and to Tina why he held a tiny mountain mining town in deadly thrall.

If I let go, I’m destroyed, too. Something bad needs me to be whole.

Something bad.

I’d been warned. And when Fred Wishart had been sucked into the void between Boone’s Gap and whatever place the Source inhabited, Tina was gone with him, torn away by an unnatural wind. Gone, while I lay in an impotent heap, stunned, broken, knowing her terror as starkly as if it had been me in the Storm’s embrace.

I wanted never to feel that combination of emotions again.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” said Faun. “And I don’t think the rest of you should talk about it, either. It’s bad luck.”

The others seemed to agree. They drifted away in silent consensus, Javier giving me a long backward glance. Only Magritte stayed.

“They’re scared,” she said when they’d gone. “The Source is evil, but it has a pretty voice. I think that makes it more evil, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I also think that makes it more dangerous. You say you can hear it in here. How is that possible?”

She just looked at me and shook her head.

“The wind chimes—Goldie thinks they’re what protects you when Enid’s gone. Is that what they do? Is that when you can hear the Storm—when Enid’s gone?”

Her lips curled. “That Goldie’s pretty sharp.”

Yeah, and I wished he were here. Maybe he could get her to open up. “What makes the wind chimes work, Magritte? Does Enid do something to keep them moving? Is he the only one that can do that, too?”

I watched her glide along the altar, touching the sacred things there one after another as if they might protect her. Her movements had the feel of ritual—as if this were something she performed regularly as a ward.

“Look, Magritte, I know Enid is sick. Is that why the Source gets through sometimes, because he’s getting too weak to stop it?”

She swung around to look at me, her eyes wide and stricken. When she spoke, her voice was nearly a whisper. “When it came for me, I felt its touch. It was the same touch I felt every time I …” She hesitated, her hand cupping the little Buddha. “My johns really liked it when I started to change. They said it was like doin’ an angel. I was with a john when I changed final. The Storm came quick and sudden and it touched me. It was like somebody’d took that john and multiplied him times a million.”

Her hand had clenched around the Buddha. Now she let go, stroked it gently, and moved on to the next relic. “I don’t ever want to feel that touch again. I’ll die first.”

I didn’t have to ask if she meant it. I tried to put Tina out of my head, to stop thinking like a brother and start thinking like a strategist. “I don’t want you to feel it, either. I want to stop the Storm. Completely. And it’s possible that you and Enid might be instrumental in that. Maggie, I need your help. Tell me about the wind chimes. Is Goldie right—are they what protects you inside the Preserve?”

She was silent long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. Then she said simply, “Partly.”

“Partly. What else is there?”

“Enid’s music. Us fireflies. And this place. It’s a powerful place. It all kind of works together. But when Enid’s … when he’s gone, we have to work harder to tune out the Storm.”

“How do the chimes work? Do you know?”

She shook her head. “Enid says they scramble the signals. So we don’t hear the Storm clear and it don’t hear us.” “Does Enid have to move the chimes?”

“No. Anything can move ’em, but you can’t count on the wind around here, so he keeps them going. It’s in the music—in his head.”

“Maggie, do you have any idea why the Source wants you?”

She looked up from the altar, her face caught in a fall of bloodred light from the window behind the altar, the white silk of her tunic stained with it. “It’s hungry,” she said.

The strategist sat silent while the brother faced the horrible possibility that his sister might be dead—that the Source, for whatever reason, literally devoured flares. I forced my throat to make sound. “Do you… do you think it kills the flares it takes?”

“Not the way you mean. A pimp doesn’t kill his girls. At least not all at once. He just uses them up, bit by bit.”

Nausea swept me. I fought it down. “Maggie, can you hear the Storm now?”

Her eyes locked on mine, she shook her head. “Not right now. But I think some of the others do. I know Faun does. She’s not very strong.”

“And Enid? How strong is he?”

She stared at me from those bottomless eyes for an eternity.
“I think he’s dying.”

I caught up with Mary in the caverns, walking into the middle of a scene that involved a trio of snarling grunters and a red blanket. The problem: one of them had it; the other two wanted it. They were in the process of ripping it apart when Mary stepped in and snatched it away from them. They turned on her in unison, showing fangs, reaching for the lost prize.

Adrenaline kicked in; I drew my sword and got in the way.

If the grunters were surprised, Mary was outraged. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that damned thing away!”

I stood my ground between her and the grunters. “They were about to jump you.”

“They were not. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk over them as if they weren’t there. They’re
people
, dammit. Regardless of what they look like.”

I lowered my sword slightly and gave ground—a little. I 
glanced at the grunters. They dropped into defensive postures, eyes shuttling warily back and forth between the two of us.

Mary, meanwhile, swung a backpack down from her shoulder and pulled out more blankets. “This is a different sort of place than you’ve been before,” she told them. “There’s no treasure to be hoarded here. And there’s enough for everyone to have what he needs.”

They shuffled forward in unison, still snarling, eyes darting suspiciously. One reached his hand out for the red blanket. Mary smiled and gave it to him. He clutched it to his chest, grunted out something that sounded like “Thanks,” and headed off into the gloom. The other two dove for the backpack.

“Blue!” said one. “Want blue!”

“Mine!” said the other. “Blue
mine
!”

In another second they’d be fighting again.

I took a step forward. “Hey, fellas! Why are you here, huh?”

They both turned their milky eyes up to me and blinked.

“Didn’t you come here to find a more human life? Didn’t you come here because you didn’t want to end up alone, or wandering around with a pack of animals?”

Mary picked up the cue and grabbed a couple of blankets, which she held out, one to each grunter. “He’s right, boys. Try to remember what brought you here. You want to be better than what your friends outside have become? Well, being better starts here.”

“You’re a natural,” she commented as we made our way back to the surface after the incident.

Tweaked torchlight fluttered and ran across the rough walls, making and unmaking shadows. It was hard not to suspect them of harboring danger.

“A natural what?”

“Leader.”

“I was going to say the same of you.”

“Bullshit. If you’re so impressed with my leadership, why the hell did you run me over back there?”

“Run you over? Mary, I thought they were going to tear you to pieces. They can do that. I’ve seen them.”

“So have I. But you forget—the very fact of their having followed Enid in here shows that they’re different. You saw it yourself. They’re better than that.”

“I only hoped they were.”

She stopped in the middle of the room the tour signs called “Indian Council Chamber” and smiled up at me, her hands clasped in front of her like a schoolteacher … or a Buddha. Torchlight turned her graying hair to deep gold, burnished her face, and softened the lines there.

Breath caught in my lungs; she reminded me, sharply, of someone from a past I’d lost. I hadn’t thought of my mother for what seemed an eternity, and suddenly her ghost was standing an arm’s length away.

“Well,” she said, “it seems your hope was rewarded. Your cynicism didn’t get you anything but hollered at.” She turned and began walking, now raising a hand to greet one of her subterranean citizens—human and twist—now reaching out to touch the moistly glistening walls.

Neither of us spoke again until we came out at the top of the spiral stair. The sound of wind chimes was heavy in the air. Mary struck out across the campground.

“Magritte says Enid is dying,” I said.

Mary turned around so fast, I thought I heard static electricity. “Magritte isn’t a doctor. But she is young and emotionally needy. A desperate combination.”

“We brought you a doctor. You won’t let Enid see him.” She shook her head and began moving in the direction of the Lodge. “Enid is just very tired. I told you—”

I matched her stride. “What you’ve told me doesn’t tally with what I’ve seen. He can’t stay awake. Sometimes he can barely walk straight. From what Goldie says, sometimes he can barely
stand
. The flares can hear the Source whispering to them through Enid’s Veil. I know you’ve already lost one, and I know it was while Enid was here.”

She paled, stopped. “Who told you that?”

“The flares.”