Read Online Magic Time: Angelfire by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Marc Zicree - Free Book Online

one piece at a time. He kicked their little orange-crate bookshelf to pieces, tore up their books, and used his nightstick on their scavenged dishes. Then he did something that just about broke me in two. And that’s when I hit him. Square on the head with Agnes’s toaster oven.
    He ended up with ten stitches; I ended up in jail. I look back and think we both committed crimes that night. Weirdly enough, I think we committed them for the same reasons.
    Colleen is watching all this storm debris flood back through my head. I wonder what she can read in my face. I look away through the trees, admiring the way the watery sunlight sparkles through their crystalline leaves, and she crouches to examine something in the dry grass and leaf-fall that I can’t even see.
    “So you busted up the cop?”
    I can still see the shattered remnants of a family’s pseudolife. The Winnie-the-Pooh they’d lifted from some library, torn and lying in a puddle of dirty water, the remains of a bowl of cereal soiling the cover; the clothing Agnes had so carefully washed that day in the warm leakage of steam pipes, shredded and filthy; Rachel’s bed looking like it had exploded.
    “He broke Rachel’s doll,” I say, as if that explains everything.
    “You assaulted an officer for breaking a child’s toy?” “He ripped it apart with his bare hands.”
    She looks up at me—a long, measuring look. “I don’t understand. Why would a cop do a thing like that, anyway?”
    “Oh, I understand. He wanted them not to have anything to come back to. He wanted to get that family out of the tunnels, and I guess that was the only way he could think to do it. They didn’t belong there. Crackheads and fuck-ups and psychos belonged there, not real people.”
    “Did he? Get them out?”
    “They got themselves out after a while. But that time, they just moved somewhere else to rebuild. Somewhere deeper, safer.”
    “Kind of like most of the folks out here, I guess,” she observes. “Moving, looking for a life, a home, a safe place.”
    I’m wondering if anyone can find those things anymore when Colleen straightens and points with her machete. “This way,” she says, and pushes off into the bush.
    Just as I’m about to ask what she’s tracking, we come upon a clear, well-used trail.
    “Deer?” I suggest, but Colleen is already down on her haunches, checking out the spoor.
    She shakes her head. “People.”
    “Anything else?” I ask warily.
    “Not along here.” She gives me a dark grin over one shoulder. “But then, I’ve got no idea what kind of tracks Shadows make.”
    We follow the trail until it forks. I argue for splitting up, but Commando Colleen is having none of it.
    “There’s no way I’m going back into Grave Creek and tell Cal I lost you out here,” she says. “We stick together, you got that?”
    “Why Colleen, I’m touched.”
    “Screw you,” she mutters, and heads off on the western fork.
    We’ve gone maybe fifty yards when I get a whiff of something, metaphorically speaking. It’s as if a car has driven by with the windows open and the stereo blaring. A snatch of sound, a shiver of almost-recognition and poof! , it’s zipped on by, leaving me standing on the curb playing Name That Tune.
    Ahead of me on the trail, Colleen realizes I’m not right on her heels. She turns back and gives me this look . “I think I heard something,” I say.
    “You think you heard something?”
    “Yeah. Like a snatch of music. Only it wasn’t music, exactly. It was, uh, something else.”
    She sighs. “Would it totally kill you to be coherent once in a while?”
    I sigh back. “That way.” I nod down the trail toward the West Virginia–Ohio border.
    We continue scouting to the west. We find nothing, however, except a few stray folks picking wild grasses and herbs in the woods. They take a speedy hike when they get an eyeful of my bodyguard. I’d beat it, too, if I saw Colleen the Barbarian coming at me out of the bushes