Liz sent an alarmed glance toward Boo-Boo. She couldn’t stop the protection charm. He nodded and stepped forward with his arms outstretched.
“Spirits of the air, release. Let your hold on this one cease,” he recited. He tossed out a pinch of the feathers he always carried in his pockets. They were caught up in the maelstrom that engulfed the singer and whisked out of sight in a twinkling. “To earth softly let her feet return . . .”
“Oh, my God, she’ll crash and burn!” Laura Manning cried, wringing her hands.
“Do y’all mind?” Boo-Boo asked mildly, with a look of reproof at the makeup artist. “I’m chantin’ here . . . and let her then in peace sojourn!” Boo-Boo threw a handful of energy up towards Fionna. Sparks engulfed the woman in white and settled around her waist like a celestial belt. The crowd oohed, thinking it was part of the special effects.
“Technically this here spell doesn’t work, y’know,” Boo said to Liz, hauling an invisible cable down hand over hand. Fionna dropped toward him with a shrill cry that echoed out of every speaker in the hall. Boo resumed pulling, but more gently. “But in point of fact it does, in the hands of real magical folks like ourselves. It’s about as close to telekinesis as departmental regulations go. I’ll show you how if you like.”
“I’d enjoy that,” Liz said, watching with admiration. “Can I help?”
“Just hang on in there protectin’,” he said.
Liz redoubled her chants. When Fionna looked about frantically for them, Liz caught her eye and mouthed, “Keep singing!” Fionna responded like a champion, putting everything she had into her lyrics. Liz felt a rush of affection for her old school chum. She was showing the stuff St. Hilda’s girls were made of.
The pipes hissed, producing a huge cloud of steam. A dragon etched in laser fire stretched up from it and spread gigantic wings that extended beyond the wisps of steam. Uh-oh, thought Liz. The energy here was beginning to take on a life of its own.
The line-drawing dragon nipped at Fionna’s heels. Descending toward the floor through Beauray’s efforts, she was being drawn right into its jaws, bubble and all. It shot out a line drawing of red fire that licked around her legs, causing the fringe on her dress to singe. She kicked at the dragon. Her foot disrupted some of the lines, kicking up sparks. The dragon roared an angry protest. It leaped up, reared back its head, and closed its jaws around her. The protective shell cast by Liz reacted to the attack, blazing up like a light bulb. The dragon burst noisily into a thousand flecks of fire. Tiny flames hissed down onto the stage. The audience, thinking it was all part of the show, screamed with delight. Liz sighed, relieved. Her spell had held. Fionna was safe. Soon, this would be all over, and the concert could proceed uninterrupted.
Fionna kept singing gamely while Beauray continued to haul her down from the air. When she was only a few feet from the floor, there came an audible snap! Fee squawked as the invisible cord broke. She shot up, stopping herself from banging into the Jumbotron with her outstretched hands.
“For pity’s sake,” she shouted, shoving herself away from the multiple grimacing images of herself and the band. “Get me down from here! I’m not a bleedin’ kite!”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Boo, shaking his head. “It’s not strong enough. Whatever that Robbie is pumpin’, it is some powerful mojo.”
“Do somethin’, you sufferin’ fools!” Fionna shouted, her accent thickening. “I can’t do me dance steps up here!”
The band stopped playing to stare at their lead singer hovering over their heads. When the music died away, the crowd let out cries of protest. In the upper stands a few people started to chant.
“No! No! No! No!”
“Oh, no, we can’t have that,” Liz said in alarm. “They’ll start a riot.” She leaned out of the shelter of the speakers, heedless of whether the audience could see her. “Start playing!” she ordered the band. Voe and Eddie looked at each other uncertainly, but Michael strode forward into the center of the round stage, and struck a forceful chord on his guitar.
Bless him, Liz thought.
Automatically, the other musicians followed suit and began to play. Fionna, still hovering above them, started singing again. As the positive side of the energy began to reassert itself, Fionna dropped slightly, lowering to within twenty feet of the stage. The audience, or most of it, cheered.
Not all the protesters stopped complaining. In the area around the apron of the stage, some of the fans began to fight. A skinny man in a T-shirt yelled as he was hoisted up and tossed onto a crowd of bystanders. They threw him off and went to beat up the people who had flung him at them. Up in the stands, more fights were breaking out.
Fed by the anger building in the arena, monsters leaped forth from the steam pipes. Each new creation was larger and more fearsome-looking than before. Each pulled angrily at its roots, achieving a little more distance from the curtain of vapor. It looked like soon they would be able to sustain their reality without touching it. The crowd’s own energy was making the threat worse. These new creatures were drawn in multiple colors, disgusting hues of sickly green, blood red, decay brown. Fans near the stage retreated, shrieking, as the beasts struck out at them. The creatures were still insubstantial, but that could change any moment.
“What’s going on?” Lloyd demanded, appearing at their shoulder. “Make it stop! Get her down from there!”
“We are trying to,” Liz said. “Robbie is employing an astonishing amount of psychic energy.”
“What? I thought she couldn’t do anything if she wasn’t here.”
“Somehow they’re using a kind of remote control,” Boo-Boo said, regarding the security man with reproachful eyes.
“Man!” Lloyd said, crushing his huge hands together. “If I’d known that foolish little bird was capable of causing trouble like this . . . !”
“She’s not to blame, Lloyd.” Liz took a chance using his first name, since he’d never given them permission. “She’s being used. Ken Lewis is behind this.”
That put an entirely different complexion on the situation. Lloyd’s face darkened with angry blood.
“I’d strangle that bloke if I had him here. Have you called the cops?”
“And tell them what?” Liz asked, reasonably.
“Dammit,” Lloyd raged. “Do something! Fee’s afraid of heights!”
He stormed off to his post and began to talk into his cell phone. Liz understood his frustration. She felt it herself.
“Try something else to get Fionna down,” she asked Boo. “In the meantime, I’ll try to put a lid on this outburst.”
Everyone was getting too excited. The protection spell would have to look after itself for the moment.
Calm, she thought, opening her arms wide and leaning back with her eyes closed. Summoning the first lessons she’d learned in the use of power, she called upon the element of Earth to spread out among the crowd. Calm. Serenity. Pleasure. She felt herself floating above all the people, settling down like a hen on the world’s largest nestful of eggs. Everyone must calm down. This kind of outburst was unseemly even for a rock concert. Everyone had to get hold of their emotions and calm down. We are not barbarians here. We are adults at a public entertainment.
It was no easy thing soothing 80,000 people. She tapped all the way down into the bottom of her reservoir of magic to touch the outermost rows of the audience. It was a technique she’d learned from her old grandmother, to scotch negativism at its source by appealing to the need for order within, something within each human being. She urged her mood of calm on the thousands of people, chivvying them to release their harmful emotions in a positive way. For just a moment, everybody’s shoulders heaved up, then relaxed as they let out a huge, collective sigh.
As if to field-test her enchantment, a new laser-born monster, more horrible than before, with glowing red eyes and huge tusks rose up out of the steam pipes, its claws reaching for fans in the first sixteen rows. Liz was rewarded when, instead of screaming in fear, the audience erupted with glee at the exquisite complexity of the special effects, applauded appreciatively, then settled down into a quieter enjoyment of the music.
“Good God,” said Boo-Boo. “Some of ’em are even foldin’ their hands.”
“I had some good training,” Liz said, with satisfaction, “as a room monitor at a girl’s school.”
“That’s mighty impressive,” Boo admitted. “But they’re tied to your emotional state now. If you get frightened or excited, sure enough, the crowd will do the same. We’d have a bloodbath.”
Liz shook her head. “I am capable of retaining my cool,” she said. “I am an Englishwoman.”