Magic Time

Prologue

Cal Griffin dreamed chaos.

Darkness, blacker than anything he’d ever conceived of, center-of-the-earth black, no-universe-yet-made black, dead-a-thousand-years black. Voices shouting, so clear that he could distinguish not only male and female, but each separate human soul screaming. He could tell rage from pain from terror. In the darkness of the dream he could hear his own blood hammering in his ears.

The sound of blows, metal on metal-metal tearing flesh. The stink of blood and of earth soaked with blood, of smoke and of charring.

He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded and pleaded-

That he act.

The darkness flailed him, whipped his breath away. He should rise to their call, should help them.

But how?

A shard of light split the blackness like a razor stroke. It glanced across an immense, irregular mound that might have been the bodies of men or merely the things they had used.

An object gleamed atop it, brilliant in the light, and Cal saw that it was a sword. Not opulent and bejeweled but plain, the leather of the hilt palm-worn. This weapon had seen use.

He reached out, seized it. The grooves and creases worn into the hilt by sweaty usage fit his palm. It was his palm that had made them.

As he drew it out, the light danced liquid on the blade, flashed a Rorschach of half-glimpsed living things in its silver-gold. Around him, the cries rose and blended to a single keening of raw need and pain. Holding the sword high, he knew what he must do.

But still he hesitated.

The cry was drowned in thunder that rent the universe apart.

Cal jolted awake.

The silence was shocking after the clamor of his dream. He felt a terrible regret; guilt washed over him. Though the summer night was warm, his body was clammy and he trembled.

He looked at his hand, hoping that. .

That what?

He sat up in bed, rubbing his forehead. The dream fell back into the invisible river of night and was gone.

A murmur sounded from the other room, and he thought, Tina. The Marvin the Martian clock she had given him on his birthday last August displayed the time. 3:10 A.M.

Cal threw back the covers, made his way to the door by the yellow glare of street lamps, the bulbs ringing the sign on Patel’s Grocery, the Amoco billboard on the corner. After three years the ambient light of New York nights still impressed him. So different from Hurley, where all illumination-even the mercury vapors along Main Street-was damped by midnight and the only glow came from the cold, indifferent stars.

Barefoot, he padded across the hall to Tina’s room, not so much concerned that his sister might be locked in a dream as disturbing as his-the nightmares about their mother, the endless, heightened replays of the loss of her, had long since eased back-but mainly to assure himself of the reality of this moment, this place, to jettison the last vestige of dream and accusation.

He slid open Tina’s door, stood watching her. Asleep, curled on her side, her dark hair an anonymous tangle on the pillow, she looked fragile, younger than twelve, and troubled even in repose. Her textbooks-so many! — lay stacked and open about the bed, mingled with myriad dog-eared copies of Dance Magazine and programs from the Met, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, their covers ablaze with pas de deux and arabesque. The posters and clipped pictures taped to her walls gazed down, guardian angels. Anna Pavlova, Fonteyn, Makarova, Buffy. .

On the nightstand, he could discern the framed snapshot Luz Herrera had taken of her at the March recital (the one he’d missed thanks to the damn Iverson deposition). In toe shoes and tights, Tina hung weightless in midleap, enraptured. Beside it lay open a volume from Nijinsky’s diaries. Nijinsky had slid hopelessly into madness, Tina had explained intently to Cal the other day as he’d gulped granola and coffee, and no one could save him. But he had been glorious in his moment.

Under Cal’s bare toes, the shag carpet was worn to the weave: New York wasn’t the place to live if you didn’t have major money; it was a miracle they’d scored this barely affordable sublet as it was. But Hurley, Minnesota, wouldn’t have provided them with even minor money. Not the kind of money that a good college demands, or private schooling, or the array of courses in technique and variations, character and pointe that Tina had been inhaling whole at the School of American Ballet. The kind of money that will buy chances for the future.

And he’d had to make a choice.

We’re doing all right here.

Even if midnight in Manhattan meant the time he usually bid the night-shift paralegals adieu after pulling his fifteen hours of research, memoranda, and every other dreary chore that might fall to a third-year associate drub.

Even if, more often than not, Tina was asleep when he arrived home, and he’d hear of her life secondhand from nannies and hired companions and neighbors charmed and wheedled into keeping an eye on her. They would sing her praises, in awe of some new movement she had mastered, some miracle of expressiveness. Or they’d cluck in disapproval at how she pushed herself endlessly for greater perfection, as though she were pursued.

Her teachers at the SAB had spoken of her promise, that college might not be the path for her, but rather a future with one of the preeminent companies, perhaps their own New York City Ballet. Time would tell, and chance. But there were occasions when she seemed to glow with discipline and joy.

Glorious in her moment.

But, lately, he had learned from her watchers that she had withdrawn, vanishing into herself, into her drive to forge something pure and keen. It worried him, left him with a pang of culpability. And yet. .

They had put that gray town with its gray people behind them, its derelict factory and sky that stretched forever and went nowhere. To have remained there and seen the light in her eyes die, have her old at twenty-five, working at the poultry plant. .

No. Whatever it cost him, no matter how he might have to compress himself to a tight core or sheathe himself in steel, because at Stern, Ledding and Bowen you did what you were bid and never, ever said no. .

He would keep the machine going.

Tina gave a soft moan of protest, turned in her sleep. Stilling his thoughts, Cal backed out, eased the door shut.

Turning, he caught a flash of his tense face in the large practice mirror in the living room, saw the unsettling resemblance to the father who had abandoned them so long ago. In the night-washed hallway, he looked forty rather than twenty-seven. And felt it.

He returned to bed, willed himself to drowsiness. The paperwork on the Schenk suit had to be filed by noon. He put the dream of the sword away from him, as he’d put aside other dreams in the past.

What would I do with a weapon?

His palm remembered the smooth worn leather that fit so perfectly, the way he remembered the smell of rain sweeping across the Minnesota prairies, the summer nights on the front porch listening through the open window to their mother’s voice, all melody, lulling Tina to sleep.

Just before he fell into sleep, he thought: it wasn’t a weapon.

It was a soul.

As he slipped over the edge into dreams again he understood whose.