Magic Time: Ghostlands Read Free

themselves as divine madmen embedded in a staid, magicless reality. And we’re the opposite, Cal thought. Reality has gone mad; we cling to sanity. Such sanity as we make for ourselves.
    Colleen pressed her heels to her gelding’s flanks and the four of them moved ahead at a brisk trot. She turned to Cal. “How ’bout you, Cal? Anything off your map trick?”
    Cal reached back and pulled a Triple-A map booklet from his saddlebag to open it across the pommel of his saddle. He had unearthed it in the looted ruins of a convenience store outside Osage. On their passage from Boone’s Gap to Enid’s Preserve and beyond, he had gained a fitful ability to read a map in a new and frequently useful way, to sense the changed terrain ahead, discern some of its tweaked geography.
    But that skill had utterly deserted him since their showdown with Primal. And now, looking at the creased paper with its tangle of red and blue lines like arteries and veins of a body, he knew he had no special clue as to what lay before them. Only that Tina, if miraculously still alive, was somewhere due west of them, and that they had to keep moving.
    Perhaps as they drew nearer the Source, it was leeching away such powers, drawing to itself the life forces of this new world, as it had seized Tina and the others like her. Or maybe Cal was generally tone deaf to such abilities, and his tin ear had simply returned.
    Cal closed the map book, returned it to his saddlebag. “All I can say is Sioux Falls is about a hundred and fifty miles down the highway. If it’s still there.”
    “And not somewhere in Luxembourg,” Goldie added.
    No telling.
     
    They paused to let the horses drink from a roadside pond, dismounting to give them respite. It had rained yesterday and they’d collected the water in buckets, pans, whatever containers came to hand, transferring it later to bottles and canteens. The water was fresh—with any luck, not too contaminated with stale automotive oils or last year’s pesticides. Had this land once been cultivated? Hard to tell. The prairie grasses had come back this summer, conjured out of the ground like ghost buffalo.
    Colleen grimaced, angling her neck left then right to get the kinks out.
    “Here, let me,” Doc said, and moved to massage her neck with long, skillful fingers. There was a clatter from within her shirt, and Doc withdrew a long chain around her neck. It jangled with the dog tags Cal knew came from her late father, the Russian Orthodox cross Doc had given her in Chicago—and a triangular piece that resembled black leather, but which gleamed, even in the pale light of winter coming, with iridescent fire.
    “Get your hands off my trinkets.” Colleen playfully swatted Doc’s hand away.
    “Yes, but one of them is such an interesting trinket….”
    It was the amulet the old black blind man in Chicago had given her, the ancient sax player the refugee musicians in Buddy Guy’s club had called Papa Sky. The talisman had burned the flesh of the demented half-flare Clayton Devine when he’d seized Colleen, had driven him back in the desperate, charged moment when they’d learned the servant was actually the master, that Devine was secretly Primal.
    The powerful, vital charm had been given them from parts unknown, for reasons unknown.
    You have friends in high places, Papa Sky had told Cal, and the memory brought no comfort, only the disquieting sense that such a friend might well see them as pawns in his grand design, not players in their own.
    Doc was studying the leather triangle closely now. “Organic, almost certainly—”
    “Speak English,” Colleen said. “Or Russian, and then translate.”
    “I would say it came off an animal…but as to which in this brave new world, I would need another specimen for comparison.”
    Another mystery, Cal thought, and one I’d bet hard currency we won’t solve today.
    Colleen placed the chain carefully back inside her shirt. They remounted and moved on.
     
    The wind