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

wielding her wonder-machete.
    We shout after them about lurkers and loudly suggest they head south, into Grave Creek. They flee due north.
    Colleen insists we track them down and warn them properly. This takes some time off our clock. It also sets Colleen to kvetching at me about the fact that we’ve been out here for hours with no more than the merest hint of anything peculiar. When she decides we’ve gone far enough west, she plops herself down to rest before we head back to town. We’re sitting under a tall but twisted cedar (with comfortingly normal-looking needles) when this little tune pops into my head and starts running in circles up there. I start humming the little tune. Next thing I know, there are words, too. Words calling the poor, the wounded, the huddled masses to refuge.
    “ ‘I lift my lamp beside the hidden door.’ ” Hauntingly familiar, and yet …
    “Must you?” Colleen asks, and gives me a look that tells me her exact opinion of my vocal stylings.
    I stop noodling on the song, which I have just grokked is a sort of lyrically mutated musical version of Emma Lazarus’s inscription for the Statue of Liberty. Appropriate—everything else around here is mutated. And the song won’t leave. It’s circling in my head like it’s got no place to land—words, music, chords and all.
    I look at Colleen. She’s just sitting there, back to bark, eyes closed. There are leaves in her sawed-off hair and a streak of dirt down the side of her nose. I decide not to inform her of any of this.
    “You hear that?” I ask.
    She opens one eye. “Hear what?”
    “You tell me. What do you hear?” I watch her with all my senses.
    She looks around. People always do that—you ask if they hear something and they look for stuff.
    “Wind,” she says. “Leaves rustling—uh, tinkling. Crows—I hear crows. And a stream. What’m I supposed to hear?”
    “Huh. Nothing, I guess.” I lean back against the tree trunk.
    Colleen can’t hear the music, which means one of two things. Either I am missing my meds worse than I thought or this is not natural music. It’s something else.
    I get up.
    “Where’re you going?” Her eyes are still closed, but her hands are snugly around the hilt of her machete.
    “Gotta take a leak,” I lie, and head off into the woods. I’ve got a bead on this thing and I am homing in.
    I walk for about a half mile when I come to a ridge. Below me the twisted woodland drops away below into a streambed. I stop and wonder where to go next. That’s when I hear the music. It’s below me, down in that teeny, tiny river valley.
    I slide down the scarp on my butt, ending up feet first in the creek, which is shockingly green and cold. I wade across, doing my laundry on the fly, you might say, climb up the bank on the other side, part a couple of little cedars, and there he is.
    The first thing I notice about my music man is that he’s playing a very cool guitar. It’s a jumbo blond maple cutaway with a cedar top, mother-of-pearl perfling around the sound hole, and inlay all up and down its rosewood fret board.
    Very cool.
    He’s fingerpicking this gentle blues thing to which he is singing the lyrics I’ve been hearing in my head. He has a harmonica in one of those wire neck braces, and every now and then he toodles a riff that reminds me of trains going through sleepy little towns late at night. It’s a sound that tugs at the soul, that says there is a Place, a Safe Haven, a Refuge that I will find if only I go where the music takes me.
    I disengage, tingling. The music is laced with a power that tickles my brain, stands my hair delicately on end, and makes my skin itch.
    This is when I notice two other things about my Bluesman. One is that he has an audience. A handful of human people of various shapes and sizes are following him, smiling and looking farmisht and punchy, as if what’s floating out of his guitar is an industrial strength euphoric. He’s smiling, too, and his chocolate