I followed along, listening and inching my way over to Goldman, when the tune changed. I’m not much into music, but I recognized the song; it was the one Goldman had been singing earlier-the “huddled masses” thing.
My scalp tingled. I looked again at the faces of Goldie’s fellow travelers. The tingle turned to a chill. These people were dazzled. Enchanted. Bewitched. This guy was hypnotizing them and leading them away to God-knows-where.
I was pissed. First, I tried to distract everybody by yelling and jumping up and down. They didn’t even hear me. Then I concentrated on Goldman. I walked right up in front of him, but he just stepped around me, staring at the Pied Piper like he was having some sort of religious experience.
Only force made sense at that point. I grabbed Goldman by the collar of his flea-bit buckskin coat and threw him into the bushes. He landed hard, but when he came up I had his attention.
“What was that? Dammit, Colleen, I need to find out where they’re going!” He clambered up and started after the parade.
I kicked his feet out from 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, wrapping 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 it.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Suddenly, I was pissed again. Who was this guy and where was he taking these people? And why? What did he have to gain by hypnotizing Goldman, or that woman and her little boy, or that girl? The only answer I could think of made me even more pissed: he was a slaver. It was the only thing that made any sense.
I spent a moment swamped in a hateful, sticky confusion. I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. There were half a dozen people here; I couldn’t exactly run up and knock them all senseless. I had to cut the strings at the source. I pulled my machete, gave a wild-eyed whoop and launched myself at the Pied Piper.
It was like slamming into an electrically charged rubber wall. Something absorbed my attack, then kicked back like a mule. Fireworks went off behind my eyes. Lights flashed, chased, spun. I was spinning, too-through the air-head over heels over head.
I slammed upside down and backward into the trunk of an evergreen. Pain-bright, sharp, shattering pain-shot up and down my right side. I roared aloud and waited for a fall that never came. I was stuck to the trunk of that tree like a damned fly in sap; only it wasn’t sap that held me. My legs and feet were tangled in a network of branches, and something held me tight against the trunk.
Looking up along my right side, I bit back a whimper. A broken limb had pierced that side of my jacket from the back and gone through the sweater and camisole underneath, knitting fabric to flesh. The shattered point stuck out through the jacket just above my waist, stained with blood.
Panic galloped from one end of my body to the other. It took me a long, crazy moment to rein it in. I was still breathing, I told myself. I hadn’t punctured a lung. I wasn’t dying; I was just stuck and hurt… and alone in a forest where feral shadows roamed.
And I was alone. The music was gone. Goldie’s blues guy had blown me six ways from Sunday and strolled off, singing, into the sunset.
I took a calming breath and tried to figure out which was holding more of my weight-the network of twigs or the broken branch. My money was on the branch.
I pulled my chin almost to my chest, trying to see. Pain flared, making the sparks of light behind my eyes dance and twirl. I reached up and felt along the branch stub. Maybe I could somehow wriggle out of my jacket and get free. Tilting my head back, I peered at the ground. It was a lot farther than I’d hoped. Okay, maybe I could just fall a dozen feet onto my head and break my neck.