Magic Time: Angelfire (25 page)

I glanced at Magritte, still sleeping peacefully in the arms of gravity, her aura dimmed almost to invisibility. Her flesh no longer glowed; it was merely pale. Her hair was no longer flame; it was merely strawberry blond silk. She looked almost like a normal woman, with little about her of the dryad. She looked completely vulnerable … and reminded me forcibly of Tina.

I brought my eyes back to Enid’s face. It was more gray than brown and gleamed with a sudden cold sweat.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked me. “I gotta find Howard

and get him to let me use my music the way I want to use it.

But how do I do that? What do I say? What’s the loophole?” “There is no loophole,” I said. “You don’t need one.” “The hell I don’t. This thing’s sucking the life out of me!” “When did you sign this contract, Enid?”

“Last February. Why?”

“And did it say any of this stuff about ‘spells of mist,’ and ‘spirits,’ and ‘covenants’ at that time?”

“Hell, no. Think I would’ve signed it if it did?”

“Well, when you track Howard down—”

“Shit, I don’t have to track him down. I
know
where he is.” “How?” Goldie asked.

“You know that little something you got goin’ with the Storm? Well, I got something like that goin’ with Howard.” I kept my lawyer face on. “Where is he?”

“Chicago. Didn’t imagine he’d ever leave. He hasn’t.”

“Oh, shit.” Goldie murmured the words just loud enough for me to hear, then got up and went to the window, arms wrapped around himself as if he’d caught a sudden chill.

I half watched him as I spoke to Enid, wondering if I’d ever be completely at ease with his sudden mood shifts. “Well, what you say to Howard is that this contract is not the same one you signed in February of this year. It’s changed. Basic law, Enid: no party may change a contract after it’s been signed. This is no longer legally binding.”

“Then why’s it still eating at me?”

I tapped the release clause.

“So, I gotta meet the little shit on his turf? Well, so be it.”

We woke Mary and the others then, in the deep, dark heart of the night, and told them what we’d found. When the telling was over, we sat in silence for a moment, listening to the newly set fire roar in the grate while Doc fed it wood and Colleen poked it into submission.

It was Mary who ended the hush, her eyes on me. “My God, it’s like something out of somebody’s Book of the Dead. So you think if Enid goes to Howard and confronts him with the changes in the contract, he could get out of it?”

“If this legal twist parodies real law, yes.”

“And that will cure him?” She glanced at Enid, worry darkening her eyes. “That will keep these … side effects from happening?”

“I can’t be sure, but it seems to me it’s the only chance he’s got. Unless he stops playing music altogether.”

Enid stared at me. “I can’t do that. Music’s in my blood. In my soul. If I stop playing, I lose myself and…” His eyes moved to Magritte. “I lose everything, everybody I care about. There’s no way in hell I can do that. No, I gotta follow this thing through. I’m going back to Chicago, and I’m gonna settle this—” He hesitated, looking to me again. “Chicago wasn’t where you were headed.”

“Enid, I’m not exactly sure
where
we’re headed. We follow Goldie’s lead in that. Chicago may not even be out of our way.”

“It’s not,” said Goldie quietly.

I glanced over at where he sat, perched on the arm of a chair, Magritte hovering beside him. “What? Something about Chicago we should know?”

He shook his head, his eyes on the frayed knee of his jeans. “Don’t know.”

This was really the wrong time for Twenty Questions. “Did you… see something? Hear something? What?” “Nothing I saw. Or heard. Just… a feeling.”

“Convenient,” murmured Colleen.

Goldie glanced at her, then met my eyes. “Look, if we ex
pect Enid to help us free anybody from the Source, we need to free him first. That puts the Windy City on our itinerary, wouldn’t you say?”

He was right; Enid wouldn’t survive the trip otherwise. “And of course, Magritte is going with us.” Colleen stirred the fire absently, not looking at us.

“Sure she’s going with us,” said Enid. “Why wouldn’t she go with us?”

Colleen gave the logs a sharp jab. Sparks shot up into the flue. “Because if she does, you’ll have to shield her. And if you shield her—”

Magritte’s aura flashed azure and violet. “I gotta go with you,” she said. “I gotta protect Enid.”

“If he doesn’t play, there’s no reason to protect him,” Colleen argued.

“No, you don’t understand,” Enid said. “If Mags doesn’t cover for me, Howard gets control.”

I shook my head. “Gets control?”

“Of me. Of my music. He pulls me to him. He … Look, you know that old story about the red shoes?”

Know it? I lived with it. I used to tease Tina that she practiced as if she wore those damned slippers and that if she didn’t take them off once in a while she was going to dance herself into a coma. “One of my sister’s favorite stories,” I said. “You put the shoes on, you can’t stop dancing.”

Enid nodded. “Howard gets a hold of me, I can’t stop playing. I can’t control what I play. And I can’t control what the music does.”

“Well, considering what it does when you
do
control it,” said Colleen, “that’s a damn ugly thought.”

Damn ugly. I wondered how many more dire revelations Enid had tucked away in his guitar case.

He sank to the sofa, eyes on his hands. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “I’ve turned trees to glass and rocks to powder. I’ve turned water to blood and I’ve made rain burn. And worst of all, I’ve twisted
people
, and those people
know
what I done to ’em. My songs are supposed to soothe souls. To lift them up. D’you know what 
it feels like to have them…” He lost his voice and struggled to recover it. “I gotta get free of this thing, dammit! I’ll do anything to get free of it.”

“Well, I always say,” said Goldie, “when God opens a door, He closes a window.”

Enid ignored him. “Every time I use the music outside the Preserve, I have this dream. There’s a chain around my neck and there’s a chain on my guitar. And the chain leads to this tower. I try to pull myself off the chain, but the Tower says, ‘You can’t go, boy. You belong to me. Your songs belong to me and your soul belongs to me. Read it.’ And then this wind comes up and the pages of that contract dance all around me while I try to gather them up. But I can’t lay a hand on ’em.”

A chill from the heart of a Manhattan January had risen up out of my breast. “A tower?” I repeated. “What was it like?”

Other voices echoed mine. “Was it shiny and black?” demanded Colleen, and Doc asked, “Did it glisten, as if wet?”

“Sweet Cherry Garcia.” Goldie, half standing, sank back to the arm of his chair, his face ashen.

I could see it in their eyes. “We’ve
all
dreamed…” Everyone spoke at once, fear and discovery tumbling out into the room. I raised my hands. “One at a time! Doc?”

He nodded, flashing a haunted look, before he turned his face back to the fire. “In my dreams of Chernobyl, the Black Tower is there. It watches everything I do. I, too, wear chains.”

“Marionette strings,” murmured Colleen. “We’re all connected to it by marionette strings and it’s making us dance.”

Goldie picked at a frayed patch of denim on the leg of his jeans. “I’m inside it. Or maybe it’s inside me.” He kept his eyes averted. “I try to get out, but there
is
no way out. Except to die.”

“I’m inside it, too,” I admit. “I’m trying to find Tina, but instead of finding Tina… I lose all of you.”

“I…”

The whisper of sound drew every eye to where Magritte hung, still, in the air next to Goldie. Her usually bright aura seemed smudged and muted, and she had wrapped her arms 
about herself like a cocoon. She quailed a little under our collective gaze, gliding backward. Goldie reached out a hand to her, stopped just short of touching her. Soft light seemed to pulse between them, or perhaps I imagined it.

“It calls to me in my dreams,” she said. “It has my uncle Nathan’s voice, and the voice makes pools of black, like oil on a road. I try not to, but I fall into a pool and it gets all over me. It gets inside me.” She looked at Goldie then, and I realized that her aura had completely taken him in. “And I drown,” she finished.

The fire made sounds that should have been comforting. Then Doc spoke the words we’d all been thinking: “What does it mean? That we’re being called?
All
of us? By what? Is this the Source? Or is it something else?”

“It can’t be the Source,” said Colleen. “The Source is in the West.”

“Chicago
is
west,” murmured Goldie.

“Yeah,
North
west. You never said it was in the
North
west.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

I cut across the argument. “
Is
it, Goldie? Is the Source in Chicago? The last time you talked about it, you said something about the Badlands.”

“I said, ‘what if.’
What if
it’s in the Badlands.”

“We’ve all dreamed about the same place. Are we going to find it in Chicago?”

He shook his head. “I wish I knew. But I don’t know. I won’t know until we’re moving again. Maybe it’s the Preserve. Maybe it distorts my Source sense just like it distorts the space around it. I don’t know. All I know is, I’ve dreamed of that tower for weeks. In all that time, I never thought of it as an actual place. I thought…”

“That it was the Source?” I finished.

“No, that it was
connected
to the Source in some way. That it was … um … something the Source had put … in me.”

“Looks to me like it’s put something in all of us,” said Enid.

“Well,” said Colleen, “it really doesn’t matter, does it? Either way, we’re going to Chicago. Question still remains, if Magritte goes along to protect Enid, how do we protect her?”

“I’m strong,” protested Magritte. “I’ve got real good at jamming the Storm all by myself. Enid’s so weak sometimes, I’ve had to. Besides, you don’t have a choice. One way or another, I’m coming with you.”

Doc murmured something in Russian and sketched a gesture over his heart. He turned from the hearth. “And I am not,” he said.

Colleen stood, poker in hand, staring at him. “What? What are you talking about? Of course you’re coming with us.”

He kept his eyes on my face. “I am a liability to you, Calvin. Events have conspired to teach me this. This leg …” He patted his left thigh. “This leg will not let me go where you need to go. It has refused to heal as I might have wished. I am slow to move and I doubt I could sit a horse all day—”

“Then we’ll wait until you’re better healed,” I said. “We’ll rest more often on the road.”

He smiled without humor. “You see, already you are planning around my disability. On the road, I would only slow you down, Calvin. At best. And if you face the Source sooner rather than later…”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m sure we can deal with your—”

“Perhaps I don’t want you to deal with it.”
His voice was harsh, ragged. He took a deep breath and went on in gentler tones. “Soft tissue damage is difficult to recover from. Aggravate it and you take a chance of causing a chronic injury. Something from which there is no recovery.” He lowered his eyes. “I have no desire to be a cripple.”

“Shit,” said Colleen under her breath.

Doc glanced at her, then said, “I shall stay here. Here, I can do something for the good.” He turned to Mary. “This place needs an infirmary. While the others go upon this quest, I shall help you build one.”

Mary said, “Doc, are you sure?”

“You need a doctor. Enid does not need a doctor. He needs a good lawyer.” He gestured at me. “Now he has one.”

Mary’s eyes moved from Doc to Enid to me. She nodded silently.

Now was the time to say that we had started this journey together and must finish it together. To give words to the sudden realization that Doc had somehow taken over the care and feeding of that tiny, cowering believer in my soul, the one I thought had disappeared with Tina. But I couldn’t say any of those things, because to do so would have been the height of selfishness.

I was silent.

Colleen gave the logs a vicious stab, then dropped the poker, scattering ash across the hearth. We locked eyes for a moment, her face frozen in an expression I couldn’t begin to read. I expected a sarcastic remark, an outburst of some sort. But she merely brushed past Doc without a glance and left the room.

After a momentary hesitation, he followed.

Goldie pulled the contract out from under my numb hands and handed it to Enid. He made his own exit then, giving my shoulder a light squeeze as he passed me by.

Irrelevantly, I realized he had kept my pen.