Free Magic Time: Angelfire by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Marc Zicree

under him and brought him down again. “You’re bewitched, you idiot! The music that guy is playing is magic or something. Don’t listen !”
    “Jeez, Colleen, of course it’s magic. That’s why I’m following him. That music has power .” He tried to rise.
    “No shit.” I yanked him back. “Come on, Goldman, show some cojones here. Fight it. Don’t let him get to you.”
    He was shaking his head. “No, no, no, no, no . You don’t get it. I’m not bewitched, Colleen—at least not the way you think. I see what he’s doing . What she’s doing. Either they’re working together, covering each other somehow, or he’s drawn her in with the rest of them.”
    “What the hell are you babbling about? She, who? Who’s working together?”
    “Them—the two of them. The Bluesman and the flare.”
    I jerked my head up for a glance down the trail after the Pied Piper and his fans. Shit , I thought, he’s hallucinating. Doc hadn’t prepared me to deal with this. I had not clue one about how to deal with this.
    I took a firm grip on his shoulders. “Look, Goldie. There is no flare. There’s just a guy with a guitar, hypnotizing people. Hypnotizing you . You’re seeing things.”
    He blinked at me, looking confused for a few seconds while his wheels spun and whirred. Then he said, “You’re wrong, Colleen. I’m not seeing things. There is a flare. She’s hovering over the guy’s head. She’s creating some kind of— of aura around him. Don’t you get it? Somehow the Source hasn’t found her—hasn’t taken her.”
    He tried to move again and I tried to hold him. It wasn’t easy. Goldman is tall, built like a big, lanky cat, and is about as hard to pin down. He struggled half to his feet and dragged me about a yard while I fought to make him hear me.
    “There’s no flare, Goldie! Listen to me— there is no flare !”
    “I can see her. Why can’t you?” He twisted and pulled himself half loose. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”
    “That’s part of his power,” I panted, digging in my heels. “Maybe he … he makes people see whatever they want to see—whatever will make them follow him.” Sounded good, anyway. I wondered if I dared risk concussing him with a swift kick to the head.
    He stopped struggling, catching me off guard. I could hear the wheels again— whir , click , whir . “Now that almost makes sense,” he admitted, “except for one thing. I didn’t want to see a flare. I wanted to see Tina . This isn’t Tina. This is someone very different. Someone I’ve never seen before.”
    “Then why can’t I see her?”
    He rolled his eyes and laughed. “Why can’t penguins fly? They’re birds. Birds fly; penguins can’t fly. Does that mean penguins aren’t birds?”
    Brain freeze. Goldman used my paralysis to break free. I didn’t react in time and ended up on my keester. While he ran for the trail, I was trying to drag myself out of the shrubbery.
    Cursing, I lit out after him. He was faster than I expected and seemed to have a homing beacon on the blues dude. He cheated—cut corners, crashed boonies. This made him easy to track, but harder to keep up with.
    By the time I caught up again, he was right back in the pack, as close to the guy as he could get, staring at the empty air over his head like there really was a flare up there. And all the while, Mr. Blues kept serenading his audience, wrap ping his music and his voice and his words all around them, trussing them up like holiday turkeys.
    I flashed on a dream I’d had last night—the one that had kept me from sleeping. I was a marionette. We were all marionettes. Off to the west, this faceless puppet master stood at the top of a dark, glittering tower with our strings in his hands and made us dance toward the sunset. In my dream I was hungry to go west. Awake, I knew that if we didn’t go west, we’d never find Tina, or have a hope of understanding what was happening to our world, or have a chance to undo it or fight