Marc Zicree - Angelfire

His brow furrowed. “Doc, what…? What is it?”

I put a hand to his forehead, brushing aside the tumble of thick curls. No fever. “Close your eyes,” I told him.

He did, grinning nervously. “C’mon, Doc, you’re scaring me.”

Cal had come into the room and caught the exchange. He dropped the packs he carried and hurried to us. “Something wrong?”

As certain as I could be that Goldie’s eyelids showed no sign of increased translucence, I stepped back and shook my head, meeting Cal’s worried eyes. “I had a moment of concern. The aura is so much stronger this morning.” I indicated the distance between Goldie and Magritte, which she had closed since I began my examination, her own face eloquent with distress. The closer she drew, the brighter became the trail of light that connected them.

Cal followed the trail with his eyes. He turned back to me, his face going pale. “You thought he was changing.”

Goldie took a startled step away from us, then caught sight of the radiant cord and blushed violently. “Oh, that. It, uh… I guess the longer we’re together, the stronger it gets.”

He laughed. “I thought maybe I was breaking out in manic hives or something.”

Ah, sarcasm. Dostoevsky called it the last refuge for the soul whose privacy has been invaded. At times it makes excellent camouflage. At others it simply advertises what one wishes to conceal.

Russo had turned from his task at the window and sidled up beside us, his eyes darting, his impossibly wide mouth cracked in what can only be described as a leer. A sound that was more whine than giggle emerged from between his lips. “Told you.” He crooked a finger at Goldie. “ Told you she was good.”

Light exploded in my eyes, buffeting me like a scorching wind-hot, white, searing. It tore Howard Russo off his feet and slammed him backward into the curtains he had so painstakingly pinned shut. The window shattered with a sound like a rifle shot, but the thick fabric held. Russo hung against the forest green velvet for an instant, then pitched forward onto the floor.

In the stunned hush that followed, there was only the sound of our breathing and the muted rain of glass on the street below. I turned fearful eyes to Magritte, certain the spectral attack must have come from her. But she was innocent, staring at Goldie, her hands to her mouth. It was Goldie whose body pulsed with residual energy, Goldie whose eyes poured venom onto the crumpled grunter. He turned his eyes to Cal then, and whatever Cal saw there caused him to take a startled step backward. Goldie brushed past him and left the room, leaving an almost palpable charge of static in his wake. After a moment of hesitation, Magritte darted after him.

Cal and I both moved at once to kneel over Russo’s crumpled body. He was still breathing, thank God, and his neck had not been broken, though by all rights it should have been. We rolled him gently onto his back and I began to check for broken bones.

He moaned and his eyes fluttered open. “Son’fabitch,” he muttered, and tried to sit up.

Cal put a hand on his shoulder and held him down. “Not until Doc gives you a clean bill of health. How is he?” he asked me.

“Lucky to be alive. That was no gentle slap.”

Russo grunted and Cal shook his head, his expression grim. “No, it wasn’t. Damn Goldie. I don’t know what…”

“Possessed him?” suggested Colleen wryly, from behind him. She reached past him to hand me my med-kit. “You know how he is about Maggie. Do you really have to ask?”

They exchanged a long look.

Cal nodded. “Yeah, I do. I’d better go talk to him.” Colleen let out a throaty chuckle. “Be careful.”

She watched him leave the room, then stepped over to the window and reached up to pull the curtains back inside the casement. Outside, more glass shook free to shatter on the asphalt. “We’re gonna have to board that up. I guess I’d better go see if I can score some plywood.”

“Will you help me move Mr. Russo to the couch?”

She hesitated. “Do I have to?”

“Can make it myself,” croaked Russo.

“Colleen,” I said. “Do you not care that Goldie might have killed this man?”

She peered down at him, capturing his gaze. He looked away. “That is not a man, Doc. That is a weasel. And I’m not saying that because he’s a grunter; I’m saying it because he’s a weasel. That was a truly crappy thing he said to Goldie. And I’m damn sure it wasn’t real pleasant for Maggie, either.”

I looked up at her. “Perhaps he doesn’t know any better. He is, after all, not quite himself-something of which he is painfully aware. His humanity is slipping away from him, Colleen. Can you not at least credit him for trying to preserve it?”

She frowned. “What do you mean? What makes you think he’s trying to preserve anything?”

“The little sanctuary in the cellar where he spends his days. This carefully barricaded place where he spends his nights. The clothing he chooses to wear.” I straightened a tweed lapel, then nodded at the book that lay atop the Queen Anne table beside the chair. “That.”

Colleen turned to look. “Dostoevsky. One of your guys.”

I did not smile. “Yes, one of my guys. Crime and Punishment -a book that turns upon what it is to be human. Did you perhaps wonder why he didn’t try to go out during the night?”

“Uh, well, at a guess-because we wouldn’t have let him?”

I shook my head. “He never does go out at night. He doesn’t want to become like them.” My gesture took in the streets and whatever slept below them.

She and Howard Russo shared another look, a longer look, then she turned her eyes to me. They were extraordinarily green and uncharacteristically soft. She squatted next to me on the floor, meeting me eye-to-eye across Russo’s body.

“You’re a piece of work, you know that? I think Goldman would probably call you a mensch. And Viktor, yesterday, when I said that about you not being my father…” She hesitated, her lips pressed together as if to keep words from escaping. Then she leaned across Russo, kissed my cheek, rose and went off to “score some plywood.”

Russo stirred, drawing my attention to him. His eyes were trained on my face. He grunted. “ ’M’not sayin’ a word.”

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?”