Marc Zicree - Angelfire

Howard made a funny noise somewhere between a whimper and a growl. “Place has a mind of its own. Does what it wants.”

Yes, and it had wanted us to come here.

Goldie murmured something under his breath and wandered off, gazing at the walls, trailing his fingertips across them. I shuddered. I had set my hands to the most horrible wounds imaginable, but the thought of touching the green blood of the Tower made me reel.

Cal was staring at Howard as if the import of his words had finally struck him. After a moment he uttered a growl of frustration and stabbed his sword point first into the floor. It gouged out chips of stone and sent them dancing across the polished surface. He dropped to his haunches behind it, pressing his forehead to the hilt, his lips moving.

Did he pray? I strained to hear him, catching the whispered words.

“Come on, Griffin, use the Force. Think, think, think .”

As if on cue, flute music trilled-a high, mournful melody from the near corner of the room. Goldie, wooden flute at his lips, meandered back and forth, playing. The building rumbled as if in response, vibration passing through the floor beneath our feet.

Cal glanced up at him. “Damn,” he murmured, then turned his eyes to the dully gleaming flare behind the wall. “Is that Tina? I look at her and I see Tina. Goldie sees Tina. Tell me what you see, Doc.”

“I must be honest with you, Calvin. I see a flare who may or may not be your sister. Her features aren’t clear enough for certainty.”

“Colleen?”

She made an impatient gesture. “Yeah. I’d have to agree with Doc. I can’t tell who she is. Look, can we get out of here?” “Sha- zam !”

Goldie’s shout brought us all about, pulses pounding. We turned in time to see him disappear into the wall, grinning. “Oh, shit,” said Colleen. “Not again.”

But Goldie reappeared immediately, beckoning to us with the flute. “Don’t lollygag, folks. Let’s go.”

We moved in unison to the place where he stood, and found a doorway where before there had been none.

“What did you do?” Cal asked.

“You heard Howie: the place has a mind of its own. If it has a mind, the mind can be tricked. Right?” There was an exultant gleam in his dark eyes. He bowed, flourishing the flute. “After you.”

We went through the new doorway into another corridor. When it dead-ended in a few yards, Goldie played another doorway and another. We drew nearer to the flare, spiraling toward her. She grew brighter, clearer, until any of us who had known Tina might recognize her… if we could trust the testimony of our own eyes in this place. Still, looking at her I could believe this was the wraith-child I had treated in Manhattan. Or perhaps I only wanted to believe it.

At the final barrier we stood, listening to muted thunder rolling around us, while Goldie played Kevin Elk Sings’s flute. In the space beyond, the flare that might be Tina held out her arms to us.

Then the barrier was gone and we were through into a long, narrow room from which the ceiling seemed to have been blown away. Wires and cables had been ripped free and in some places hung nearly to the floor. There were a number of flares here, most of them hovering high above us amid the tangle of wiring and mangled ceiling tiles. They seemed not even to mark our passing.

Tina, or what we hoped was Tina, floated against the wall in a near corner. She pivoted to look at us, and Cal rushed toward her, arms outstretched. She didn’t come down to meet him, but merely hung there, just beyond his reach, looking down, her face devoid of expression.

“Tina? It’s me. It’s Cal.” His voice shattered on the words; his arms reached up to her.

“It’s Cal,” she repeated, her voice seeping out in a hushed monotone.

“Tina, I’ve found a place. A place you’ll be safe from the Source. A home.”

“Home?” she echoed.

“Come down, please. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “Afraid,” she echoed, and turned her head toward the far end of the room.

Cal mirrored the movement, sickly green light licking across his face. Out of the gloom an oily bloodied spray arced outward to wrap itself around the bright flare. Cal cried out and leapt back, wrenching his sword from its scabbard, wielding it in both hands. There was nothing he could do. The crimson stain invaded the flare aura and altered it, polluted it. And the poor child, writhing in agony, moaned Cal’s name.

He shrieked rage and launched himself toward the source of the red power, Goldie in his wake.

Something rose up out of the darkness there. Something huge and bright-the titanic golden statue of Nebuchadnez-zar’s dream. I knew this must be Primal, and I suspected I already knew the penalty for failing to offer veneration. It raised gleaming arms and the building rocked. I kept my feet with difficulty, but Cal and Goldie, in frantic motion, tumbled to the floor.

It spoke then, twisting thunder into words. “What an amusing novelty you normals are. Except for you, Mr. Goldman, you’re not quite normal, are you? You have… a delicious strangeness about you. You also have a most receptive mind. I wouldn’t have been able to spring this trap without your help.”

With a wordless cry, Goldie flung out his arms and unleashed an explosion of gold-white light in Primal’s face. It met a wall of crimson but was not repelled. Instead, the scarlet ooze seemed to filter Goldie’s power, to stain it, as it had stained the flare’s aura. Then it spat the stuff out again in a vivid pulse aimed directly at Cal. It caught him in a breaking wave, flinging him backward into the room. He rebounded off the wall and crumpled into a heap nearly beneath the flare.

I scrambled to his side, whispering scraps of prayer. Chaos had entered the chamber, voices shouted, thunder rolled, the very walls seemed to shake. I ignored all. By flare light, I could see that Cal lived. His pulse was strong. Before I could check beneath his eyelids, they fluttered and his eyes opened. They focused, not on me, but behind and above me. They filled with the aqua radiance, grew wide and troubled.

“No,” he said.

I twisted to follow his gaze. Above me, the girl hung, her glow strong but tarnished with red. Her body moved as if in a current, and I thought for a moment that it was her pain that Cal was responding to. But when I gazed into her face, I knew the lie of that. Beneath the fathomless eyes her mouth was curved in an unholy smile.

CAL

Ihurt all over and tingled as if I’d connected with an electric fence. But for the first time in what seemed an eternity my mind was clear. Every perception, every sensation, cut like a shard of glass.

I looked up into that face, a face that should have been Tina’s, and saw something fundamentally and inexpressibly alien. This was not Tina, had never been Tina.

“You all right?” Colleen leaned over me, cutting off my view of the flare, her own face barely recognizable in the ripples of light and dark. Howard peered over her shoulder.

The wave of futile bitterness passed. I took up my sword in one hand, grabbed Colleen’s arm with the other, and hauled myself upright, turning toward the front of the room. Primal stood there in a blaze of his own light, flinging out bright spheres. The flares in the room had congregated above him.

It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. I could now see what Colleen had commented on before-that the flares were tethered to him by a visible web of power. He was drawing on them, sucking up their life to fuel his own.

Goldie was the target of Primal’s volleys. He was huddled in the middle of the room, tucked into himself, rocking back and forth. The fireballs detonated with a fizzing sound, exploding like trick snakes and writhing about him. His golden halo, so bright in the semidarkness, was tinted crimson.