Magic Time: Angelfire Read Online Free PDF Page A

running down my face.
    He moved first, getting slowly to his feet and taking about five steps toward the wall of fire, peering through its growing gaps.
    I lowered the crossbow and set the safety. My hands shook. “Goldman, you nitwit! Where are you going?”
    He turned to me, his face pale in the light of his torch. His lips moved, but if he said anything, I didn’t hear it. Right about then, someone yanked me off my feet and dragged me up and across a saddle. Upside down, I caught a glimpse of blue-jeaned leg and a battered leather scabbard. Cal.
    He rode away from the flames, and I was well-chilled by the time he set me on my feet several yards past the crossroads. He dismounted beside me while I grabbed stirrup leather and tried not to look as unsteady as I felt.
    He gripped my shoulders, eyes scouring me for signs of injury. “Are you all right?”
    I nodded, glad the early twilight hid my face. “How about Goldman?”
    “He’s okay. One of the refugees snagged Doc’s mare and went out with me to get him. What spooked them? Was it the fire?”
    I shook my head. “They were scared of the fire, but they were working out how to get around it when they… they just took off.”
    “Except for the one you shot.”
    He looked down the slope to where one of our new acquaintances led the exhausted wagon team back toward the crossroads. Beyond them the dying flames cast a strange glow over the meadow. You could still see the single corpse lying there, solid, unmoving… still smoking.
    Cal turned, started to mount up again.
    I grabbed his arm. “Where’re you going?”
    “I want to know what that was, don’t you?”
    “Not especially.”
    He looked down at me, rain dripping down his cheeks, matting his hair to his head. “I’m sorry, Colleen. You didn’t really have a choice, though, did you? It would’ve killed Doc if you hadn’t shot it.”
    I waved that aside. “Forget it. Let’s get these people off the road before those sons of bitches come back.”

    There was just enough room in our covered wagon for our new friends. Cal had carried the kids a ways up the road and stashed them in an outcropping of rocks. That was where we loaded everyone up, lit every lantern and torch we had between us, and headed for Grave Creek. We hadn’t gone far when the dog showed up, exhausted but grinning in canine bliss. He rode in the back, behind the driver’s box, and panted happily in my ear.
    The obvious leader of our refugees was a white-haired guy with a young face and glacier-blue eyes. His name was Jim—Jim Gossett. The pregnant woman was his wife, Emily. Two of the kids were theirs—a boy and a girl. The oldest girl belonged to the other couple—Stan and Felicia Beecher. Stan’s leg was splinted, broken when they’d lost their wagon to what Jim’s boy, Gil, called “pirates.” That explained how they came to be wandering the outback so ill-equipped.
    “It was a real wagon,” the boy told me, “not a funky one like yours.” He sat between me and his dad in the driver’s box, seeming none the worse for wear.
    Kids amaze me. They handle this shit a lot better than us so-called mature adults.
    Jim said things were pretty bad up in Wheeling—a lot of looting was still going on in some parts of town. The hospitals were full to bursting; the shopping malls had turned into armed camps. “Then we get out here. First we lose the wagon, and then…” He shakes his head and shivers. “Weird shit. It was like the whole damn forest was watching us. Dog was going nuts for miles.” He glanced into the one remaining rearview mirror. “Can we go any faster?”
    I urged the team into a weary trot. Behind me, Goldman started humming a soulful little ditty under his breath. “What’s that?” asked Jim.
    Goldman stopped humming. “What’s what?”
    “That song you’re humming. I’ve heard that before.” “Huh. I thought I was making it up.”
    “No. No, I’ve heard that before,” Jim repeated. He was