Angelfire

TWENTY

CAL

What can I say? When I walked out into the courtyard, when I stood face-to-face with Goldie, I realized I was afraid of him. What I’d seen in his eyes just moments before had hit me like a sucker punch to the stomach. It was a dark, red rage that, until that moment, I would have said he was incapable of.

I wanted to chalk Goldie’s outburst up to battle fatigue. But that would have been naive. Of all of us, Goldie had dealt with the unknown longer and more intimately. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was on the verge of a full-blown manic episode. I almost hoped he was. As vile as that sounds, the alternative was more disturbing.

The morning sun had turned the entire sky burnt orange, as if fires burned somewhere out of sight. The recesses of the courtyard were still in deep shadow, and Goldie, though he was standing in the one spot that caught the weak sunlight, had brought shadow with him.

Magritte hung timidly behind him, as if she, too, were afraid of him-or perhaps for him. Enid, looking puzzled and worried, stood beside her, a supply pack in his hands.

“I need to talk to Goldie,” I said.

Enid glanced from me to Magritte, nodded, and went back inside.

I felt Magritte’s gaze on me as I faced Goldie. His eyes were closed and he shivered as if the Great Lakes chill had sunk into his bones.

A smile pulled across his lips. “What’s gotten into Goldman? That the $64,000 question?”

His eyes opened. They were unreadable. For someone who wears most of his emotions right out on the surface, Goldie can be surprisingly opaque when he wants to be. But I thought the dark fire had died.

Relief loosed the knot of tension in my throat. “I was worried,” I said simply.

“Well, I don’t blame you.” He tilted his head back to gaze up over the rooftops. “I’d be worried, too, if I were you.” “About Russo…”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” He began rocking slightly from side to side. “I should learn to control my temper. Mom always said so. Ph.D. can’t be wrong, right?” He shoved both hands into his jacket pockets. “Didn’t mean to scare everybody.”

“Look, Goldie, you’re going to have to handle having Russo around. We don’t have a choice. We don’t know what’s under that dome. He does.”

He wrapped his arms around himself, still not looking at me. Magritte glided a little nearer, protective.

I pressed. “Can you be around Russo without trying to break his neck? I need to know, Goldie. This is too important-to all of us.”

I tried to read his face for remorse or something like it, but he stolidly refused to let me in. His body language- arms straightjacketed across his chest, the rocking, the sarcasm-all told me that I was not the only one in this courtyard afraid of Herman Goldman.

“You were out of control, Goldie. We need you to stay in control.”

He laughed. “I wasn’t out of control. I didn’t want to be in control. I was pissed at the little rodent.” He shrugged. “Look, I’ve cooled off, okay? I’ve calmed down. I’m fine.”

I moved closer-less than an arm’s length away. Close enough to see the glitter of tears in his eyes. “You’re not fine. You’re scared.”

He answered the challenge with a non sequitur. “Cal, what did you dream last night?”

“What did I … dream?”

He smiled wryly and sang a line of lyric. “ ‘It’s all right; we told you what to dream.’ ”

I recognized it: Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.” A chill cut a broad swath down my spine. “I … I don’t remember what I dreamed.” A lie.

“I always remember my dreams. Always. Every dark, disturbing moment. That’s one of the reasons I don’t sleep much. It’s not terribly restful. But last night, I didn’t dream at all. Or, if I did, Maggie was the dream.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know … Yes, I do know. I’m saying she… jams the Source. She blots it out. Silences it. Hides me from it.” “As you hide her.”

He nodded. “Symbiosis.”

“More than symbiosis.” It was not a question.

He glanced at her, then away. “Yes.”

That was possibly the straightest answer I’d ever gotten from Goldie in all the time I’d known him. I wanted to shake him, tell him to stop tearing his soul apart over something that couldn’t change, that could only be gotten past. Instead I said, “Goldie, I think Magritte would be the first to tell you Russo didn’t do that to her. Wouldn’t you, Maggie?”

She glided over between us, her eyes on Goldie’s face. He turned it away. She moved right up against him, laying fingertips to his cheek. He flinched, but she refused to let him break contact. “Listen to him, Goldie, if you won’t listen to me. He’s right. Russo didn’t put me in that room; my uncle Nathan did that. And he didn’t give me that damn name; my pimp did. A little bit ago, you told me he didn’t own me. Not then, not now. That’s God’s own truth. No one owns me…. except maybe the Storm.”

He looked at her then, his eyes blazing. “No.”

“Then save your hate for that.”

They stood like that for a moment, locked eye-to-eye, their shared aura battling the sun for brightness. I had ceased to exist. Goldie closed his eyes and leaned into Maggie’s touch.

A moment later he met my gaze directly, his eyes showing emotions that once more seemed to flow within the banks of the River Goldman. “Isn’t it about time we blew this Popsicle stand?”

We decided to make the trek into the Loop on foot. Russo was adamant that to take the horses in would result in them becoming food, so we were faced with the problem of how to safeguard them. Russo solved it. He hired a couple of neighborhood teens to guard them for us.

“They do stuff for me,” he told us. “Y’know, get things so I don’t have to go out much. I pay food, clothes, stuff from the other rooms up here. What I don’t need. They’ll watch.”

The human talent for adaptation never ceased to amaze me. The brother and sister thought the horses were “tres cool” (pronounced “tray que-well”) and agreed to baby-sit them for a plaid flannel shirt, a ream of paper, and a mechanical pencil with a tube of replacement leads and seven erasers.

That settled, we spread a map of Chicago out on Russo’s kitchen table and held a huddle over it, deferring to him on our travel route.

“Up Clinton to Jackson,” he said, “ ’cause Van Buren bridge is out. Then head in. There’s a sort of checkpoint there.” “Checkpoint?” Colleen asked. “Armed sentries?”

“Not sentries… exactly.”

“Jeez, Russo. Could you possibly be any more vague?” “Sure. You want me to?”

Doc chuckled and Colleen opened her mouth for a tart comeback.

I cut her off. “What kind of checkpoints, Howard?”

He shook his head. “Don’t have words.” He pointed out the trail on a city map. Three blocks up, two over, cross the river. Easy.

I checked the map over carefully, using my “extended” senses. But the simplicity of the route wasn’t what caught my eye. To my tweaked vision, the Loop district was a splash of red light so intense it obscured any other feature. It was very much like one of those Doppler radar weather maps, only the wrong color. A spot the dark red of a blood clot sat slightly off center in the larger area.

“I don’t like the look of that. What is it?” Goldie pressed a fingertip to the crimson smudge.

I’d half forgotten he could see this stuff. “Howard,” I asked, “what’s at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn?”

Russo gave me a startled glance, then tugged at his lower lip. “Chicago Media Building.”

I shrugged. “Is that significant?”

“Primal Records,” said Enid. “Primal Records is in that building.”

Colleen leaned over the map next to me, watching my face. She poked me in the ribs. “Care to let the rest of us in on this? What do you two see that we don’t?”

“A dense concentration of some kind of power.”

“Which means?”

I shook my head. “No idea. But we’re going to find out. Howard, why would Primal Records give a damn about Enid’s contract? Or yours, for that matter? What could they possibly get out of holding either of you to them?”

The milky eyes dodged toward me, then away. “Not sure. Have to ask them. Gotta be ready t’go.” He got up and trundled away into his office.

I traded glances with the others, then went after him. He was rummaging around in a pack, putting in odds and ends that possibly made sense only to a grunter: scraps of paper, a book, a fistful of stubby pencils.

I stopped in the doorway. “Not sure-but you have an idea.” “No idea.” He didn’t look at me and he didn’t stop his compulsive packing.

“Howard,” I said, patience leaching away, “this is your chance to get free of this contract. Enid said you were his friend. If that’s true, then I’d think you’d welcome the chance to free him, as well. If not for him, for the people he might harm with his music, or the ones he might help.”

He hesitated, pack dangling in one hand, a book in the other. “Like your sister, Tina.”

“Yeah. Like Tina.”

“Doc says she was a ballerina.”

Past tense. I winced. “Yes, she is. A very good one.” “Love ballet,” he said heavily. “Saw Bolshoi once. Magic Flute.”

“That’s one of Tina’s favorites.”

He slid the book carefully into the pack and clutched it to his narrow chest. “Music box,” he said softly.

“What?”

“Choir Girl had one in her room. I remember. Had a ballerina on it. Played, uh, ‘Over the Rainbow.’ Huh. Funny.”

I saw the jewelry box in my mind. Saw the ballerina: a delicate, blue-eyed blonde, graceful, precious.

Russo turned to look up at me, his eyes glistening. “She turned into something beautiful,” he said. “And I turned into this. Why?”

He might have meant Magritte or Tina. “I don’t know.”

He was silent for a moment, then grunted. “Huh. ’N’ you call yourself a lawyer.” He lifted the pack to one shoulder and pushed past me into the living room.

To my surprise, he waddled straight over to Goldie and Magritte and said, “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Goldie echoed.

“Didn’t mean anything by it. Didn’t mean to hurt her.”

Goldie’s face went blank, his eyes concealing his thoughts, but Magritte floated down to the grunter’s eye level and said simply, “Thanks, Howard.”

Goldie gave her a sideways glance, then raked long fingers through his hair. “Shit,” he murmured. “Great, you’re sorry. Fine. You say anything like that again, I’ll-”

“Break my fuckin’ neck?” asked Russo ingenuously.

Goldie looked over his head at me, deadpan. “Roundly ignore you.”

The grunter was still peering up into Goldie’s face. He said, “Don’t let it own you.”

“What?”

“The Dark. Don’t let it own you. Bad Master.”

Goldie’s face was ashen. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Howard pointed. “It’s in your eyes.”

Goldie took a step back, shouldering his pack. “Can we get moving? I’m getting the yips.”

We took to the windy streets, Magritte physically tethered to Goldie with a thousand-pound-pull nylon horse lead, and Howard Russo sporting oversize sweats, the hood of the sweatshirt pulled low over his eyes. A pair of mirrored shades completed the ensemble. He looked like a mutant jawa.

I felt sorry for him. I hadn’t expected to. Of course, I hadn’t expected much of what had happened since the morning the world turned upside down. Since then it seemed to have turned upside down over and over again in myriad tiny ways.

We made our way up to Jackson and turned east. On either side of us buildings rose in an opaque maze. They seemed untenanted, as if we had entered some sort of no-man’s-land. Ahead of us were the Chicago River and the rippling wall of light. The Jackson Street Bridge disappeared into it at about mid-span.

We stopped in unison just short of the bridge. Wind ripped at our clothes and forced stray trash to dance madly around us. It moaned through the bridge’s substructure, hollow and mournful.

“Do we just… walk across?” asked Doc.

Russo, half crouched in front of me, looked back and nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Just walk.”

“I thought it kept people out,” Enid said.

“Does.” Howard turned and moved forward, out onto the span.

The rest of us followed, over the gray-brown rush of water, steel and asphalt vibrating beneath our feet as if alive.

When we reached the shining wall, Russo hesitated. Without even thinking, I stepped past him. I heard a startled hiss from the grunter and the translucent stuff in front of me became suddenly opaque. My hand grazed it in a sizzle of light and sound. I yelped and pulled back, scalded.

“Damn! That’s like liquid fire! How are we supposed to go through that?”

Russo shook his hooded head. “Told you ‘bout the checkpoint. Didn’t listen.” He turned to Magritte, pressed close to Goldie’s side. “You gotta do it, Maggie. Take them through.”

Magritte looked at him for a moment, then took Goldie’s hand. She led him toward the wall. It thinned to transparency before her and she floated in, pulling Goldie along with her. The rest of us followed.

“Man,” murmured Enid. “I do not like this one damn bit.”

The mist tingled and was bone-chillingly cold. I’d come to associate flare magic with warmth, but this billowing, ruby fog brushed us with icy fingertips.

The reddish haze thinned and faded as we crossed the bridge. The bluff, weather-stained walls of massive buildings rose steeply before us on each side of the avenue and curved away into the gloom along the river’s course. On the other side the street was deserted and littered and silent. It was nothing like the Chicago I remembered from my last visit.

When we set foot on terra firma again, we looked down an even deeper canyon than the one we’d just crossed-an avenue flanked on both sides by skyscrapers. Their upper floors were lost in the haze. Sears Tower was just down the street to our left; other giants competed with it to overwhelm us. Crimson light glittered on the windows high up, as if fires burned behind them. But there were no fires there. Those floors would be all but unreachable.

“No wind,” said Goldie. “It stopped when we crossed over.”

“So much for the Windy City,” Enid murmured, peering around. “D’you hear that?”

Goldie nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I hear it.”

“Hear what?” Colleen demanded.

“The music,” whispered Magritte.

“Blues,” said Enid. “But twisted.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Colleen said, frowning.

“Me neither,” I said, trying very hard to detect anything through the gurgle of water behind us. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

Magritte pivoted slowly in the air, head cocked, listening. The rest of us watched her, expectant.

“Goldie,” she said, “go up there, to the corner. Matter of fact, go around the corner so I can’t even see you.”

Goldie stared up at her. “Maggie, no.”

“Do it. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not all right.”

“I want to taste the power, but I can’t with you covering me. If this is firefly stuff, then the Storm still won’t be able to hear me. If this is the Storm, we’re shit out of luck, anyway.”

They locked gazes for a moment, then Goldie slipped the tether from his wrist and handed the loop of nylon to Enid. Clutching his machete, he turned and made his way up to the intersection with many backward glances. With one last look at Magritte, he disappeared around the corner.

I watched her face intently. We all watched her.

She seemed puzzled, uneasy, and fearful in turns. “This is weird. It’s not the Storm, but it’s like the Storm. No, no, that’s not right. It-it keeps changing. And it-” She froze, and the hunted look came to her eyes. The look I’d seen when the Source’s touch was on her. The look I’d seen in Tina’s eyes more than once. “I can’t,” she said. She shuddered and closed her eyes. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me.”

“Maggie?” Enid took a tighter hold on her tether, tugging her to his side.

She opened her eyes then, catching me in a hot pewter gaze. “It’s trying to talk to me,” she whispered. “I can’t let it talk to me.”

Before I could ask her what “it” was, Goldie let out a wild yell. Thrown into fight or flight mode, we ran, weapons ready, Enid dragging Maggie in his wake. Goldie was standing on the far side of the intersection, back pressed to the wall of what had been a bank. He was looking away from us, farther down Jackson Street.

“What is it?” I shouted, dread making my voice sharp. “What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer.

I crossed the intersection on a wave of adrenaline, my eyes reflexively following his. At the bottom of the long city block, people strolled the sidewalks; a variety of wheeled vehicles moved through the intersection; there were street vendors. All eerily normal by any previous standard of normalcy. It was as if we’d stepped back in time to a Chicago that had not yet been through an industrial revolution.

Beside me, Goldie murmured what I took to be a quotation: “ ‘She is always a novelty, for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.’ ”