Marc Zicree - Angelfire

I heard Colleen shouting behind us, heard Primal roaring, Clay shrieking. Then we were in the hall and the doors closed, shutting the cacophony out. Through the sparks that danced in front of my eyes I expected to see guards, armed and ready to bring us down. What I saw was a guard’s boot just visible around the corner to the main corridor.

Howard, standing at the corner, looked down and nudged it out of sight with one foot, then straightened his sweats. “Not dead,” he told me pointedly. “Just… inconvenienced.”

Goldie shoved past me, heading for the fire escape. “We don’t have time,” he said. “We’ve got to go.”

I snagged his jacket. “Not that way.”

He swung around to face me, eyes desperate. “Tina.”

“Not now.” I redoubled my grip on his arm and started moving him toward the intersecting corridor where Howard waited impatiently.

He struggled in my grasp. “Cal, for God’s sake! He’s got Tina!”

“How, Goldie?” I kept him moving. “How’d he get her? The Source has Tina. This isn’t the Source. “

“You don’t know that! None of us knows that!”

“This is not the Source,” I repeated, and told myself I believed it, though I found I didn’t want to.

I’d just marched him around the corner when Howard looked up and said, “Where’s the girl?”

I spun around. Colleen was nowhere in sight. We’d left her behind.

Goldie picked that moment to bolt. He caught me completely by surprise, bowling Howard and me both over and onto the floor. From the darkness of the hallway I watched him disappear around the corner. A second later there was a wash of red light and the fire door slammed.

I scrambled to my feet, pulling Howard up after me. I took a step toward the cross corridor, then realized I didn’t know which direction I should go. Colleen was still in Pri-mal’s lair. Goldie … and maybe Tina…

Goldie’s vision washed back over me, making my legs quake.

Howard tugged on my jacket. “I’ll get the girl,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the throne room. “You go for the crazy guy.”

Hesitation gone, I flew around the corner after Goldie, through the fire door, and out onto the escape. I felt the cadence of Goldie’s frantic steps as a dull vibration in the concrete and steel. I looked up. The stairs seemed to zigzag into infinity; I only needed to go as far as the seventh floor. I sprinted, taking two steps at a time.

On the seventh-floor landing the fire door hung open. I didn’t stop to think. I dove into the gloom and dodged swiftly down the hall to the left, guided only by the tentative light from the open fire exit. Within seconds that had dwindled to nothing. I slowed, put my back to the inner wall, and listened.

Nothing.

I moved cautiously along, keeping my back to the wall. When I’d sidled about ten feet I paused again to listen. Still nothing.

“Goldie?”

Behind me the fire door slammed shut, leaving me in total darkness. Someone was behind me in the hallway. My heart rate spiked. I turned back the way I’d come, slipping my sword from its sheath.

“Goldie?”

The building around me seemed to moan softly. Hair rose up on the back of my neck and I was overwhelmed by the sudden conviction that something very unlike Goldie faced me down the hallway. The darkness stirred and shifted. I pivoted and ran, keeping one hand on the inner wall.

Three doors slipped by beneath my trailing fingers. Then the wall fell suddenly away. I turned right. Remembering the escalator core, I shifted to the opposite side of the hall. Four more doors slid by before the wall fell away again. I turned left and stopped.

Ahead of me the corridor glowed a strange, dim green, like light through many layers of thick glass. The walls themselves were black and seemed to be dripping with some kind of viscous fluid that flowed in every direction, unconstrained by gravity. Just beneath the surface, gleaming green runnels of light wriggled as if sentient. Like the veins beneath Primal’s skin.

Behind the walls, or maybe trapped within the walls, amorphous shapes moved languorously and gave up a light of their own. Flares, caught like butterflies in a giant’s display case. There seemed to be dozens of them.

I stood immobile in the middle of my own nightmare-a dreamscape I’d walked right into, in spite of the steps I had taken (or thought I had taken) to avoid it. Colleen was four floors down in God knew what kind of predicament. Goldie was somewhere ahead of me in this maze. My thoughts eddied there, floating with the disembodied shapes behind the thick, translucent walls.

A great sigh breathed over me. I looked ahead, my eyes filling to the brim with the glow of fey light. Without meaning to, I moved forward, feeling a horrible, palpable sense of deja vu.

My worst nightmare.

I moved deeper into the labyrinth, reached another juncture, turned another corner. I heard my name called again, only this time it sounded in my head.

“Cal…”

A gleaming shape wavered behind the wall just ahead of me. It seemed to draw nearer to the barrier, taking on more and more definition. The shape was human, but every limb gleamed with spectral light, and the hair, so white it was almost blue, floated in a bright banner from the head. It moved with the grace of a swan, closer and closer to the barrier.

I moved closer, too, until I had nowhere to go. I pressed my hands against the icy wall and looked into a delicate face with huge, azure eyes, the features blurred by the glass but still recognizable.

“Oh, God,” I sighed, and wept.

COLLEEN

One thing I’ll say for Goldman-he doesn’t do things by halves. He’d let loose the fireball to end all fireballs and then skeedaddled. In the flash of white light, I saw everyone around me frozen in the act of shielding their eyes. All except Primal. He was just frozen, staring into the blast as if it were no brighter than a candle.

In the speckled darkness after, I did a full 180 and headed for the doors. But there were people in the way, milling, shoving. I pinballed off of them, trying to stay upright and moving toward the doors. I shouted for Cal, for Goldie, even for Russo, but I was drowned out.

I was somewhere near the doors (I thought) when a pair of hands took hold of my shoulder and spun me around. “Cal?”

“Sorry,” said a voice in my ear. “But your friends seem to have left you behind.”

Clay. I turned my head, trying to see him through the purple and green blotches in front of my eyes. In the flare light, his whiteface gleamed moonlike. The eyes were black craters.

“They’ll come back for me,” I said.

Painted lips curved upward into an exaggerated smile.

“Of course they will. And when they do …” He cocked his head back toward the far corner of the room, toward Primal.

Primal was still sitting godlike in his throne, while his toadies milled around him and his flares floated above him on their neon tethers. His head was turning from side to side, the wolf-yellow eyes raking the walls of the place as if he could see through them.

God. Maybe he could.

Clay leaned in, bringing his face close to mine. He was sweating, little beads of perspiration standing out all over his face, making him look like he was wearing a veneer of gleaming bubble bath. “You want to save your friends, don’t you?”

“Duh.”

“I could help you persuade Primal to let them go-at least your lawyer friend and the little gnome. That Goldman fellow’s behavior was just plain insulting. Primal will have to deal with him. He can’t afford to appear soft or weak, after all.”

“What can I do? I’m not a deva or a tweaked musician. I don’t have anything Primal would want.”