“I can handle it,” I told him.
“No,” he said, “you cannot. If you try to drive this chair on your own, you will pull out all of my careful work and you will begin to bleed. The wound was both deep and ragged, Colleen; you will not be able to bounce up and run away from this one. Besides, I imagine Dr. Nelson would disapprove of you bleeding on his so-clean floors.”
“I gotta talk to Cal.”
“Then I will take you to him.”
I gritted my teeth all the way to Nelson’s office. When I saw the look on Cal’s face, my heart lurched. He looked like a crusade about to roll off to the Holy Land.
“What’s he been telling you?” I asked, and cringed at how wimpy my voice sounded. “Did he tell you he saw a flare?”
“Of course he told me.” His eyes were bright and the words bubbled out, mixed with laughter. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
Behind me Doc repeated, “He saw a flare?”
“No,” I said. “He did not. If Goldie saw a flare it’s because he fantasized one.”
The hope in Cal’s eyes faltered. “What do you mean-he fantasized one?”
“I mean there wasn’t a flare. He only thought-”
Goldman cut me off. “That doesn’t make any sense. I told you before: if I’d been fantasizing, I would have fantasized Tina, not someone I’d never met. This flare was a woman- an adult. She was only generically like Tina.”
In spite of Doc’s magic herbs, I was bone weary and I hurt all over. I didn’t have the energy to argue. But I had to. I couldn’t let Cal break his heart on false hope. Again.
I grasped my wheel rims and pushed myself farther into the room, drawing a cry of protest from both Doc and my stitched ribs. “There was no flare, dammit, Goldie! There was a guy with a guitar and a bunch of sleepwalking zombies. He was a magician or a-a hypnotist, and he made you all see what you wanted to see and hear what you wanted to hear.”
“Why?” Cal asked.
“So they’d follow him. You should’ve seen him, Cal.” I nodded at Goldie. “He was… smitten. He was singing the guy’s songs; he was following him like a little lost lamb; he was staring up at him like-”
“Like he had a flare hovering over his head,” said Goldman dryly. Before I could crank out a comeback, he added, “How do you think you ended up in that tree?”
Brain tilt. “He did it-the blues guy.”
“He didn’t even see you coming.”
Yeah, that’s how it had seemed to me, too, at the time. But now it was hard to admit it. “He had a force field of some sort.”
“Oh, you saw it, did you?”
“No, I didn’t see it.”
“Well, I did.” Goldman thumped his chest. “I saw it. And I saw where it was coming from.”
Cal’s eyes were on his face, bright with hope. “The flare?”
Goldman nodded. “She was cloaking him in some way. Not to keep people away from him, I think-there was a little kid holding the hem of his jacket. But when Colleen came flying at him, the flare shot out this… blast of energy. Like a shock wave. Or a-a photon torpedo. That’s what put Colleen in the tree.”
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for me to be fuzzy and weak when I needed to be sharp and clear and strong. I bit the inside of my lip to keep from snapping and snarling.
Cal knelt by my wheelchair and met me eye-to-eye. “You didn’t see any of this?”
I gave him the most straight-up, confident look I could muster and begged him silently to see in it how sure I was. “No, Cal. I didn’t see anything but the guitar player.”
“Did you feel any desire to follow him?”
“No. Not a bit. I just went along because I wanted Goldman not to follow him.”
“Was it as Colleen said, Goldie?” Doc asked. “Did this man’s music mesmerize you? Did these other people seem mesmerized?”
“I’d say they were.”
I snorted. “Oh, yeah, but you weren’t, right?”
“No, Colleen, I wasn’t.”
He sounded so calm and self-assured and-well, sane- while I knew he was nothing of the sort. Looking at Cal’s face, it was clear the sanity card was one I didn’t dare play right now.
“If I had been mesmerized,” Goldie continued reasonably, “you’d still be hanging upside down in that tree.”
Slam-dunk.
He turned to Cal, his eyes earnest, as if he was a wide-open book begging to be read. “There was a flare, Cal. Colleen couldn’t see her-I could. It’s that simple. Colleen didn’t hear the music at first, either.”
“I heard it,” I protested.
“Sure, after you got within hearing range.” He tapped his ear. “I heard it before that. That’s why I went off on my own-to look for the source of it. And I heard it last night when we brought in the Gossetts and Beechers. The kids and the dog heard it, too. So did Jim. He caught me humming it and thought it was a song he knew. It was one of the Bluesman’s tunes.”
Cal gave him a long, searching look. “Are you saying this is what called off the Shadows?”
“I’m saying… it could be.”
Cal turned back to me. “But you don’t believe him.”
Oh, God, but I wanted to sleep. “Oh, hell. Yeah, okay. I guess I believe him. Goldman was singing something about ‘huddled masses’ and driving me nuts. He wandered off, I followed, and-yeah-our Pied Piper friend turned out to have the song in his repertoire.”
“If he heard what you couldn’t hear, mightn’t he have seen what you couldn’t see?”
Put that way, it sounded reasonable, even to me. I should’ve known better than to argue with a damned lawyer.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, anything’s possible, I guess.” I was wilting. Melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Doc’s hand lit warmly on my shoulder. “Colleen needs rest. Perhaps we can explore the meaning of all this in the morning.”
I could tell that neither Goldie nor Cal wanted to wait that long to explore anything.
“In just a moment,” Cal said. “Let’s assume that there is a musician drawing people into following him. And that there is a flare shielding him in some way-protecting him. Why? Why is he collecting people? Where’s he taking them?”
“And for what purpose?” murmured Doc.
“Well, that’s a no-brainer,” I mumbled.
“And, um, how does he protect the flare?” Goldman was tugging at his lip, talking almost to himself. “How does he keep her from being sucked up by the Megillah? Or maybe the question is, how does he keep the Megillah from finding her?”
Cal looked up at him, his eyes intensely bright. “Where’s she from? Maybe she’s not the only one.”
“The Source has Tina, Cal,” I said, sounding surly. “There might be one flare or twenty or even a hundred where this guy is from, but not one of them is Tina.”
“We don’t know that, Colleen. We don’t know where he’s from. For all we know, he may have somehow gotten her away from the Source. She could be a direct link.” Cal rose, looking over my head at Doc, ignoring me. “I want to know where she’s from. And how he’s protecting her.”
“Or enslaving her?” asked Doc.
Cal’s face was grim. “Or enslaving her. Enslaving them.”
I lost track of the murmur of voices. When I came up out of my head-trip, blue and cream tiles were slipping by under the wheels of my chair. I turned my head so I could see who was driving. I recognized Doc’s slender surgeon’s hands and felt a flicker of disappointment.
“Guess I zoned out,” I said. My words came out like mush. “No big deal, though, huh? I didn’t have a whole lot t’offer the discussion anyway.”
“You offered a great deal, Colleen. You do yourself a disservice.”
I shook my head. “What is it about me, Doc? Why am I so damn dense? Why is this shit we’re going through changing everybody but me? I’m like a-a rock. I just sit like a lump while the whole fucking world changes around me. Evolves. Why aren’t I evolving?” Oh, dammit. I was going to cry. What the hell had he given me?