Magic Time: Angelfire (21 page)

She started walking again, anger in every line of her compact body.

I stuck to her. “Come on, Mary. You’re in denial. And there’s nothing to be gained by it. You’re going to lose Enid one way or another.”

“So better your way?” she asked bitterly. “The flares will be destroyed—”

“If you don’t move now to shore up the Veil,” I finished. “How?”

“As Magritte described it, the wind chimes are a focus for power—the flares’ and Enid’s. They provide a sort of sonic veil, but only if they’re kept in motion. Good so far?”

She nodded, slowing her pace slightly.

“Then what we need is a way to keep them moving.” She snorted. “Are you God now, Mr. Griffin? Can you make wind?”

“We don’t need to make wind, we just need—” I broke off and stopped walking, distracted by the sight of several sets of wind chimes sharing a clothesline with some laundry. As I watched, a woman with a baby on her hip and a basket at her feet pulled the laundry to her by rotating a pulley wheel mounted on a tree trunk. The chimes shrilled.

Goldie would have called it an epiphany. Whatever it was, it shot adrenaline into my veins.

“Need what?” Mary asked, her eyes on my face.

“That.” I pointed at the rig of pulleys, wheels, and line. “A system.”

She glanced at it and shrugged. “Yes, but driven by what?”

“Something that never stops moving.”

Her eyes came back to my face, the anger gone. “Water.” For a moment, at least, Mary McCrae and I were on the same page.

We gathered rope, string, twine—anything that could be strung on the odd assortment of wheels we collected. Since 
over a homemade map of the Preserve’s inhabited area, plotting the most strategic places to set up lines, calculating how they would be connected with the locus of the system, the waterwheel.

It was nearly complete, lacking only the integration of its internal gears and the mounting of its big wheel. Colleen cheerfully volunteered to aid in that effort, declaring that waterwheels were right up her alley. Maybe, but her mechanical know-how was unfortunately offset by her lack of people skills. The engineer heading the project, Greg Gustavson, was not keen on the idea of having a “little girl” tinkering with his machinery. I don’t know if that slowed the wheel’s completion. I only know it wasn’t ready when we needed it.

I was in the company of flares that day, or at least, of three of them—Magritte, Faun, and Javier. Of all the flares, it was Javier who reminded me most of Tina. Like Tina, he was intelligent and, like Tina, he had a way of seeming older than his years and a direct gaze that was sometimes disconcerting.

We were in the chapel again, a place I found as calming as the flares did. Maybe it was the warmth and light. Or maybe it was the smell of beeswax, wood, and incense. It felt as if time had stopped there, and the world seemed a normal and safe place.

The first inkling I had that there was anything wrong was when Faun, in the midst of a colorful story about her marvelously dysfunctional family in Nashville, stopped speaking and began silently to cry. Her azure eyes were wide and fixed on the large window above and behind the altar, and I thought she was just feeling the pain of remembrance. But then her lips opened and she uttered a high, inhuman wail, so piercingly sad that it brought tears to my eyes.

Javier and Magritte stiffened, their eyes going to the same window. I rose, following their gazes.

The window was pictorial: Noah’s ark sat upon a grassy landscape while dark storm clouds, filled with lightning, bil
lowed overhead. Animals looked up, two by two, and Noah, in the prow of the great boat, also had his face upturned, his beard wind-flung, his hands raised as if casting a spell or warding off the storm.

The light that had been falling through the window a moment before was gone, dulling the bright glass. The chapel darkened.

Faun wailed again and jerked upward. Javier echoed her, putting both hands over his upswept ears, crushing them against his skull.

Magritte turned frantic eyes to me. “Oh, God, I
hear
it!
Enid!
”

I understood in a chill jolt. Something was wrong with Enid. The Veil was unraveling. It had been a close, still morning; I already knew there was no breeze to move the chimes.

Without warning, Javier was pulled toward the rafters like a puppet on strings. Maggie grabbed him with both hands and began to sing Enid’s “Refugee Song,” wordlessly, her voice high and trembling. Javier’s upward movement stopped, leaving both flares suspended above the altar.

I turned and bolted from the chapel. There were two sets of chimes hanging under the eaves of the porch. I could make a shield of them.

The courtyard had been awash with morning light earlier. Now shadows swam across it, sucking away the sun, devouring the Preserve’s protective aura. Delmar Crow stood on the porch of the leather shop across the way, staring at the sky.

I shouted at him as I reached for the chimes, kept shouting as I yanked them from their hooks and shook a wild cascade of notes out of them. “Flares! In the chapel! The Storm’s getting at them!”

Delmar’s eyes swung to the chapel, realization dawning. He made a gesture of comprehension at me, then turned and disappeared into the leather shop.

Swinging the chimes, I turned back into the sanctuary, driven by the sudden, insistent sound of drumming, which 
seemed to come from everywhere at once. I was terrified that in the moments I’d been gone, Magritte and the others had been taken. But I heard her voice as I crossed the foyer, still reeling out song, trying to scramble the signal. I elbowed my way through the inner doors, chimes singing with every movement.

All three flares hung in midair before the altar, linked only by Magritte’s hands. She burned bright, white-hot, her delicate features twisted with effort. Faun and Javier were guttering flames. Their auras were no longer radiant and lucent, but pulsed with muddy reds and purples. Above them in the rafters a malignant shadow spread its arms, pulling them upward into its embrace. Its voice was like the hiss of whitewater, swiftly building to a roar.

I moved without thinking, chimes tangled in my fingers, rushing up the aisle, leaping, grabbing, managing somehow to get my arms around the struggling flares. I felt the warm chill of their changed flesh, the homely fabric of their clothing. I was surprised when my human weight had an effect; they dropped suddenly and my feet met the chapel’s firm floorboards.

Magritte sobbed in my ear. Her voice faltered. We were buoyed upward.

“Keep singing!” I shouted.

“Scared,” she keened, and turned the cry into a note and the note into a trill of song.

“Me, too,” I murmured, and wondered how long we could keep this up. My arms around the flares, the chimes I held were useless. And Magritte was weakening.

There was a crack like thunder and the ceiling above us ripped apart in a hail of debris. The Storm surged into the breach; I could feel and hear the alien wind, sucking at us from above. It stirred the chimes tangled in my hands, but the chaos voices drowned out their song.

Faun let out a cry of despair and fury and twisted in my grasp, her fists striking glancing blows across my shoulders. Javier screamed. We were being lifted again, tugged from the solid earth toward the looming shadows. I looked up.

The Storm’s maw was gaping, black, eternal and ablaze with unnatural, translucent flame in a thousand hues. And behind it Something smiled, unseen, and hungered.

I don’t ever want to feel that touch again.

I tightened my grip. In response, Faun lashed out with a charge of pure, freezing energy that blinded all my senses. My arms went numb, my legs spasmed, my head exploded with hot-white pain. Faun twisted away and flew upward. Javier shot up after her, slipping from the circle of my arms.

I grabbed desperately, clumsily, losing the wind chimes. But I caught one thin ankle with a hand that seemed part of someone else’s body. With the other hand I captured Magritte, crushing her against my side. I would not let go. I swore it to myself, to Tina, to God, to the Source. I would die before I’d let go of either of them.

Enid’s voice cut through the storm fury like a velvet knife, accompanied by a sheet of chime-song. Melody reached up into the blazing darkness and joined battle with it.

Above us, in the Storm-mouth, Faun twisted this way and that, a stray ember thrown from a fire to die. Javier reached after her. The unearthly wind crescendoed, roaring, wailing like a maddened animal, like a lost soul. Then it was gone so suddenly that all sound, all sensation, seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

And with it, Faun.

I quivered in the aftermath, dimly aware of Enid’s voice flowing around me. Javier was a dead weight in my arms, his fey light extinguished. He weighed no more than a young child. My legs felt as if they were made of rubber, not flesh and bone. I sank to my knees on the hardwood floor.

Magritte, halo dimmed, sagged against me, panting. She touched Javier’s face with a trembling hand. “He’ll be all right,” she whispered. It may have been a promise or a prayer.

We both looked to Enid. He still sang, desperation in his eyes, sweat gleaming on his face. His voice was raw and his fingers faltered on the strings of his guitar.

I got to my feet, passing the limp Javier to Delmar, who had come into the chapel with Enid. “We’ve got to get the water
wheel online,” I said. “I’ll need Colleen, Goldie—hell, I’ll need everybody you can get.”

Delmar nodded. “I’ll take care of these two. And pray the others got to safety.”

“Where will you take them?”

“Down. Into the caves.”

I headed for the unfinished millhouse, trying to keep my eyes from being drawn to the sky. I knew what I’d see. The weak shimmer of chimes, powered by human hands, held the Storm at bay, but it hadn’t been repulsed. Its unnatural clouds roiled overhead, licking the treetops; I felt them as a hot weight on my soul.

Mary met me near the center of camp, Goldie and Kevin Elk Sings at her side.

“Magritte.” The name tumbled out of Goldie’s mouth the moment he saw me. His hand clutched my sleeve.

“She’s okay. How did you—”

“Delmar,” said Mary. She seemed dazed, wounded. “The drums.”

“Faun,” I said.

She nodded. “I know.”

“There was nothing I—”

“I know. If there were a way you could have saved her, she’d be here now. But the others … you… they’re still with us.” Her eyes came in to sudden focus, locked with mine. “We’ve got to protect them.”

At the millhouse the great wheel was still, poised above the water. A cascade of curses rolled from the open door. We dove inside.

The obscene litany came from a stocky gentleman with an impressive shock of white hair and five o’clock snow on his jaw. Within the halo of white, his face was the color of a boiled lobster and glistening with sweat; a sledgehammer was clenched in his fist. Like Thor or Vulcan, Greg Gustavson must surely be capable of tossing thunderbolts.