Magic Time: Angelfire Read Online Free PDF Page B

wandered into the middle of the exam area. He stopped in front of Cal and tucked his hands under his arms as if to keep them still.
    “Called off?” Cal repeated. “What do you mean, called off?”
    “What do I mean, ‘called off.’ I mean, like… dogs. Like, uh, pets. Like a hunting pack that hears the horn or catches a new scent.”
    “ Whose hunting pack?” asked Jim. He’d been watching Doc check his wife’s blood pressure. “Those weren’t any kind of animals I’ve ever seen.”
    “Hold on,” I interrupted. “Anything might’ve drawn them off. It was cold, wet, windy. And, jeez, this is Goldman talking.” I gave him a sidewise glance.
    He was nodding, his eyes on Cal’s feet. “Yes, that’s right. This is Goldman talking, and he’s a loon, so you can discount everything he says. But not this time. This time, listen to me .” He looked up and hit Cal with a dark, laser beam gaze. “Someone or something called those guys off. I heard it.”
    “What did you hear, Goldie?”
    Cal pays serious attention to everything Goldman says because, according to him, Goldman sensed the Change before it happened and tried to warn him. I had to admit I’d seen him do some pretty eerie things myself, so there were moments I could believe that. This was not one of them. Right now I was pretty sure Herman Goldman was not living on the same planet as the rest of us.
    “Wait, wait,” Jim interrupted. “ Guys? What guys?”
    There was a moment of awkward silence that was about as full of wretchedness as a moment can get. Cal glanced at me, then said, “In our experience the Change seems to affect only human beings.”
    I looked down, picking at the piece of gauze on my hand. Damn burn was already itching.
    “Those were people ?” Emily Gossett put a protective hand on her swollen belly.
    I felt Cal’s eyes on my face. He’d ridden down to the scorched field. Taken a close look at the body. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod.
    “How … ?”
    “How does it happen?” Doc Lysenko pulled the blood pressure cuff from Emily’s arm and finished the sentence for her. His English is better than mine, but it’s laced with the Motherland. “We don’t precisely know. We know only that it is, em, selective. Few people are changed. But there is no way to predict who will be, or when.”
    The silence threatened to suck the air out of the room. Our two hovering nurses had stopped chattering, too, and turned grim attention to Stan Beecher’s bad leg.
    Cal turned back to Goldie. “What did you hear?” he repeated.
    “Hear—what’d I hear?” He started humming.
    “Oh, jeez!” I said. “He didn’t hear anything because there was nothing to hear. Fire was roaring, those things were wailing like banshees, that damned dog—” I glanced over to where the dog in question snoozed peacefully under a gurney. “It was like you said, they caught another scent.”
    “ I said that,” said Goldman, jabbing a thumb into his chest.
    Like that was real important. I said, “We know fire stops them.”
    Cal nodded. “That makes sense. Light sensitivity seems to be a by-product of the transformation. We’ve certainly seen that with the grunters. Tina… Tina was bothered by it too.”
    Every muscle in his face went tight, like someone had turned a ratchet somewhere in his head. Happened every time he spoke her name, and every time, it reminded me of losing Dad. Of course, where Dad went, there was no road back, and that was a long time ago, so it didn’t really bear thinking about. We had at least a chance of finding Tina.
    Cal glanced at Jim and Emily. “But you said you saw them in daylight.”
    “Only in the depths of the woods,” she said. “They stayed in the shadows. They never once came out where we could really get a good look at them.”
    “Until the sun went down,” Cal finished.
    Emily nodded.
    “I wonder how far they range,” murmured Cal. “They could be local, regional—we have no way of