Marc Zicree - Angelfire

He kissed her. With a passion she obviously shared. And all I could think was, Now, why didn’t I see that coming?

I pushed myself away from the wall and walked across

Dearborn toward the ruined building. I tried to think as I walked. What to do next? We’d have to find some way to protect the flares. With Primal/Clay gone, we might be able to find other musicians like Enid who were now “released” from their contracts. Maybe they’d help us against the Source, too, or maybe they could help get the flares back to the Preserve.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I paused to look back across the street at Goldie, slumped over Margritte in the lengthening shadows with Howard still huddled beside him. That was a mistake. Just seeing them like that made me feel hollow inside. The way I’d felt as I watched Tina change. The way I’d felt in the days after she was gone.

I took a deep breath and moved to where the bodies lay, Primal’s and Clay’s, in a sea of fallen glass and tile. Primal’s remains weren’t so much a corpse as they were a heap of rubble.

Behind me, I heard the crunch of boots on debris.

“This was Primal?” Doc asked, stepping carefully over the littered ground. Colleen was at his side.

I nodded and knelt to pick up a clod of the detritus. “This was never flesh and blood,” he said. “This was-” “Clay,” said Colleen. “Primal was clay .” She glanced

over to where the onetime puppet master lay on the ground,

gray as burnt ash.

“A golem,” I murmured.

“A golem?” Colleen repeated. “What the hell’s that?” Doc answered. “An effigy. A lifeless figure made of earth and powered by wizardry.”

Colleen shivered and pulled the front of her shirt together. “He did like word games.”

“What did you do to him?” I asked her. “At the end, when you grabbed his leg. It paralyzed him. What was that?”

She reached into her pocket and held up the wedge of leather Papa Sky had given her. Mr. Mystery’s talisman.

“Before I realized what he was, he tried to …” She glanced sideways at Doc. “He made a grab at me and got a handful of this instead. Derailed him. I thought, hell, why not? Nothing to lose, right?” She shrugged, returned the thing to her pocket, then moved to kick at the wreckage.

A moment later she called out, “Hey, look at this.”

She picked her way out of the debris and laid something on the ground at my feet. It was a metal tool kit about the size of a shoe box.

“Where’d you find that?”

“There was a little cavity of some sort in the torso.” She nodded back toward the broken golem. “It split wide open when it hit the ground, but I figure it was right about here.” She gestured at her own midsection.

I knelt to inspect it. It wasn’t locked; in place of a lock, what looked like a piece of bone was shoved through the hasp, holding the box closed. I knocked the bone out with a chunk of rubble and opened the lid.

Inside, sitting in the half-empty metal tool tray, was a sheaf of papers, binder-clipped and held together with a fat rubber band. More specifically, it was a sheaf of contracts. Enid’s, other musicians whose names I didn’t recognize, one I did-Charlie Gwinn, who had chosen death over slavery. He and a Vanessa Gwinn had signed on with Primal as a duo.

I turned them over in my hands. “Huh. What do we do with these now?”

“Burn them.” The voice was Goldie’s. He was standing behind me in the wan light of the setting sun, looking wasted, pale, all the luster gone from his eyes. “So we can move on.”

He wandered off around the field of debris. I followed him with my eyes, wondering why tears wouldn’t come when I so felt like weeping.

“Cal, what do you make of this?”

Colleen had come around to hunker down next to me. She’d moved the tool tray to reveal a collection of pitifully mundane objects. There was a wallet, a badge, a small velvet bag, and an envelope.

I picked up the wallet and flipped it open. There was a photograph in it. In the waning light of a natural sunset, I made out a man, a woman, and two children. Smiling. A normal, happy family. The only other contents were three dollars and a driver’s license issued to one Clayton Devine of Rapid City, South Dakota.

The velvet bag contained a wedding ring.

The badge was DOD issue. A security badge, also in the name of Clayton Devine: MAINTENANCE CREW CHIEF. The face of the man on the badge was round with delicate features, eyes that had a vague, unfocused look, mouth cocked in a slightly loopy grin.

“Level seven access,” Colleen read over my shoulder. “If that’s anything like the Air Force security ratings, this guy had a pretty high clearance somewhere.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“Somewhere near Rapid City, looks like,” she said.

I flashed momentarily to Mary’s office, to Goldie twirling the little Lakota prayer drum in his hands. Badlands , he’d said. I remembered something Clay’s golem had said, too, when I asked how he’d known about the Source.

There was a leak.

I picked up the envelope. May , it said. A month? A name? Inside was a single piece of notebook paper with writing on one side. In a barely legible scrawl someone had written, Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids. I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.

The letter just ended. Was it an aborted first draft, or had he never sent it? I looked at the date scrawled across the top of the letter. A full three months before the Change.

A leak.

I put the stuff into my pocket. “Let’s get back to Legends. Without Primal protecting this place, who knows what’s going to be out tonight? We can get back to this in the morning.”

Her name was Gwen, not Tina. She was sixteen, not twelve. A child of abusive parents. They were grunters now, and gone. She didn’t even really look like Tina in the light of day.

I wasn’t devastated. Just resigned.

The city was different now. With Clay’s bubble removed, things roamed at night. Chicago would finally face the full effects of the Change.

There wasn’t much sleep for anyone that first night. Most of it we spent realizing our losses and gains, sorting things out and trying to make coherent plans. Papa Sky showed up at Legends about eight o’clock, according to my wind-up Timex. We owed him a tremendous debt, him and his secret friend. Colleen and I cornered him and asked if we couldn’t meet Mr. Enigma now, to thank him personally for his help.

Papa Sky just laughed. “No sir, Mr. Cal, I don’t think he’d’ve let you near him on any account. Not yet, anyhow.”

“What do you mean, not yet?” asked Colleen.

“Well, the way he put it to me, he’s got some thinking to do before that happens.”

I was puzzled and didn’t bother to hide it. “Why should he have to do any thinking about meeting us?”

Papa Sky shrugged.

Colleen chuffed in frustration. “Well, if he won’t see us, will you at least tell him thanks? For all of us.” She waved an arm at the strange rabble in the room.

“I don’t think thanks means diddly to him. I don’t think he helped because he was lookin’ for thanks.”