by Nora Roberts
He hooked his thumbs in his front pockets as he chewed it over, bite by bite. The fact he’d think carefully was the very reason she’d asked him first.
“Four, maybe five. Anson, Jingle, Quint, Lorimar—and maybe Yip. NM”—non-magickal—“elf, witch, NM, and shifter. In that order.”
“Okay, thanks. See you later.”
She moved over to where Tonia’s archery group rotated out.
Duncan’s twin—and it was impossible to look at her and not see him even though Tonia’s features were more delicate, her eyes a summer blue instead of a forest green. The humidity had her hair curling wildly as if it fought to free itself from the restricting band.
She nocked an arrow, let it fly. And hit the straw-man target heart center.
“How’s it going?”
Tonia nocked another arrow. “Not too bad. I’ve got one or two in the batch I just finished with who probably won’t shoot an arrow or bolt into their own foot.”
“Do you work with Marichu?”
“Sure. She’s got potential, and I’m thinking of switching her to a crossbow. She’s got the strength, and I think she’d work better with a crossbow than a compound. She tends to drop her left shoulder—and that’s probably from the damaged left wing. We’re working on it.”
She shot a third arrow. The second had pierced the straw head between the eyes. The third went straight through the groin.
“No straw babies for you,” Tonia said, and smiled. “Music in the gardens tonight. How about we hang?” Before Fallon could answer, Tonia laid a hand on her arm. “We reclaimed it, Fallon. We won’t let Petra or her bitch of a mother take it from us. You said it yourself.”
“Yeah, I did.”
Petra, she thought, her cousin, daughter of her birth father’s brother—and murderer. Blood of her blood.
She pushed it back. “I did,” she repeated. “We won’t.”
“But you hardly ever come. Plus, there’s a guy I’m looking over. You could give me your take.”
Fallon envied how naturally, easily Tonia could “look over” a guy. And if the looking over part hit the mark, move to the next step.
“What guy?”
“Anson, recruit, worked his way up here from Tennessee. Totally cute accent, killer abs, and so far not an asshole.”
“Travis said he was about combat ready.”
“I’d agree there. So come check him out tonight. Come hang with me and Hannah.”
“Next time,” she said and meant it. “I can’t tonight.”
“You’ve got something else cooking?”
“Yeah. I’m still working out the details, and I need to talk to my dad, to Will, some of the others—including you. To start, how many do you think are ready for a mission?”
“Of the boots? A lot of greenies, still.” Tonia signaled so Fallon walked with her to retrieve the arrows. “I’d say Anson with the studly abs. He’s got nearly two months of training—an NM, fearless but not stupid. There’s Quint, who came in about the same time. Witch, damn good swordsman. He’s still learning to harness his magicks, but he keeps it wrapped well.”
“Just the two?”
“Thinking,” Tonia replied, and swiped at sweat on her forehead. “There’s Sylvia—no,” she said with a shake of her head. “Not yet there. Shit, Hanson Lorimar. He’s a show-off, and irritates the crap out of me, but he’s solid. NM,” she added. “There’s Jingle—very fast elf. She’s a little goofy, but she gets down to it when it matters.”
“What about Yip?”
“Shifter. Possible. What’s the mission?”
Fallon started to evade. But this was Tonia. “PW enclave, Arlington.”
Tonia’s eyes widened. “Arlington? It’s huge, and it’s cozied right up with D.C.”
“That’s right.”
“Word is they’ve formed alliances with Dark Uncanny and Raiders, fortified the shit out of the place.”
“That’s right, too.”
Like Travis, Tonia took time to think. A fat jay winged by to perch on the straw man she’d killed, peck at it.
“Fallon, I’m with you, but we just don’t have enough to take it.”
“I’m working on that. Keep it quiet, okay, until I talk to my dad, Will, a few others.”
“No problem. If we could take Arlington . . .”
“It would be a major kick in their ass,” Fallon finished. “That’s the idea.”
With her father, Colin, Poe all doing instructor duty, she walked back home.
To her profound surprise, she found her mother, Fred, Arlys, and Katie swimming in the backyard pool.
“Caught us,” Lana said with a laugh. “So join us.”
“What’s going on?”
“Committee meeting.” Katie, town mayor and one of its founders, who’d given her dark curly hair to Tonia, her green eyes to Duncan, dunked her head back and giggled.
“Somebody’s been into the wine,” Fallon concluded.
“Oh, yes we have!” Fred, naked, flowed out her wings, fluttered up, shaking her curly red mop, then dived back in.
“Come on, baby, give yourself a break, too. Fred’s youngest two are napping.” Lana gestured to where Eddie and Fred’s youngest slept on a blanket in the shade. “The rest of the kids are doing what kids do on a hot summer day.”
“And we’re having a little private party,” Arlys finished.
New Hope’s chronicler, workhorse, founder wasn’t naked. She wore a tank top and underpants as she floated blissfully on her back.
“I can’t think of the last time I swam in a pool just because,” she added.
It occurred to Fallon she’d never seen the four of them this relaxed—and she wondered if, now and again, they had their little private parties when she wasn’t around.
God knows they’d earned them.
“Come on in!” Fred waved her hands, added little fountains to the water. “We’re talking about men. And sex. I really like sex. Makes me all sparkly.”
“I haven’t had sex in . . . Who knows?” Katie finished. “The men I have sex with end up dead.” She slapped a hand over her mouth as a laugh erupted, as Fred slid over to wrap an arm around her. “Oh, it’s not funny. It’s just true. I’m not sad,” she assured Fred. “I loved them both. You know how that is, Lana.”
“I do.”
“I was thinking about having sex with Jeff Barlow.”
Arlys sank, came up spitting out water. “Jeff Barlow!”
“Considering it. But, Jesus, I don’t want to kill him.” Katie laughed again, pushed back her wet ropes of hair. “But since it’s a little lust and not love, maybe.”
“He’s a good soldier,” Fallon said, she hoped helpfully.
Katie shot back an indulgent wink. “I was thinking more he has a nice ass, honey.”
“Oh. Well.” She could feel her mother’s amusement as Lana treaded water and smiled. “I’d say Mark McKinnon has a better one, and he doesn’t have a wife or woman, either.”
Arlys let out a wild roll of laughter as Katie shook her head. “He does have a better ass,” Katie considered, “but he’s at least ten years younger than me.”
“What difference does that make?”
“That’s my girl. Mark McKinnon.” Lana pointed at Katie. “Go for it.”
“I couldn’t . . . maybe.”
“Try not to kill him,” Fallon added, and after a shocked beat, all four women roared with laughter.
“You’re now, officially, a member of our private party.” Arlys sent a splash of water in Fallon’s direction. “Into the pool, girlfriend.”
She needed to get into town, needed to talk to Will, check on the rescues. She needed to—What the hell.
She unstrapped her sword, pulled off her boots. After a moment’s consideration, she stripped down to the skin like her mother and Fred. And for the fun of it, leaped, rolled twice in the air, and dived in.
Later, when she rode into town, Fallon thought how much she’d enjoyed that half hour o
f silliness with a group of women. Her mother’s circle—minus Rachel, who hadn’t been able to get away from the clinic, and Kim, who had an herbalist class scheduled.
She knew her mother’s power, her mother’s strength. She depended on it. How much strength and will had it taken for Lana Bingham, a child in her belly, grief in her heart, to leave New Hope and that circle? To leave it to save the child and everyone, everything she’d left behind?
More than anyone she knew, Fallon decided.
She thought of the other women—she knew their stories.
Katie, who’d lost her husband, her parents, her entire family but for the twins inside her. It had taken strength to survive, more strength, and such compassion, to take another infant whose mother hadn’t survived as her own.
With Jonah’s and Rachel’s help and friendship, Katie had escaped New York with her three infants.
Arlys Reid, intrepid reporter, had watched her colleagues sicken and die of the Doom, had watched her city fall, the world crumble. But she, along with a few brave souls, including Fred, had continued to broadcast for as long as possible.
With Chuck, hacker and IT guru, as her source, Arlys uncovered the truth and the lies. How many lives had she saved by telling the truth? Fallon wondered.
What had it been like for Fred to discover the magick inside her, to sprout wings? For some the emergence of powers brought madness or turned them dark.
For Fred it brought joy, a passion for spreading that joy, and a devotion to defend and protect all.
Her mother had chosen her circle well. Without them, without the sacrifices they’d made, the will not just to survive but to rebuild, there would be no New Hope.
Without New Hope and communities like it, the light would dim, and dark prevail.
She’d intended to ride through town to the police station in hopes of finding Will Anderson. But she saw him standing on the sidewalk talking to a couple—Anne and Marla, she remembered, weavers who raised llamas. Will crouched down to the level of the little boy they’d taken in. After Petra had killed his mother. He’d be about five, Fallon calculated, and chattered happily at Will as they examined a little toy horse.
But as she approached on Laoch, the little boy huddled behind his mother, peeked out at her.
“It’s all right, honey.” Anne stroked his curly cap of hair. “This is Fallon. You remember her. He’s shy until he gets to know you,” she told Fallon.
“That’s okay. I don’t mean to interrupt.”
“We just came into town to deliver some socks,” Marla said. “And stopped into Bygones. Elijah said his alphabet for Mr. Anderson and got a prize.”
“That’s a nice horse.” As Will had done, she crouched down, but didn’t move closer. “My dad made me a wooden horse when I was little. I still have it. And now I have this big guy, too.”
Because she’d looked into the boy, she smiled, then murmured to Laoch in Irish.
He spread his wings.
“Like yours, Elijah. I see the light in you.”
He dipped his head, but she saw his smile, shy and sweet. And his wings, a quick flutter of blue.
Anne pressed her fingers to her lips as her eyes filled. “He never—We had no idea. Oh, Elijah, look how pretty your wings are.”
“We wondered.” Marla leaned down to kiss the top of Elijah’s head. “But he never showed any signs.”
“It takes time for some, especially . . .” Fallon let that go as Anne lifted him, settled him on her hip.
“Yes, especially. I think tonight, after dinner, we’re going to have an ice-cream party with Clarence and Miranda.”
“Ice cream!” Elijah threw back his head and laughed. “Tawbewwy!”
“Yes, strawberry. We’ll work on those r’s later. Come on, Marla, let’s get our little man home. It’s good to see you Fallon, Will.”
They settled Elijah in a carrier seat on a bike. Marla got on it, Anna on another. With a wave they rode off, with Elijah’s wings still fluttering.
“They’re good people,” Will commented. “Taking in three damaged kids and making a family. Three magickal kids, as it turns out.
You could see he was a faerie?”
“His light’s quiet and shy. And sweet,” she added. “Very sweet.”
“His mother was one of the rescues from the anti-magick cult. Indoctrinated and brainwashed to believe magick was evil. She’d have taught him that, tried to repress what he was.”
“I remember. Petra pretended to come from the same cult, and lived with them here. God knows what she tried to teach him. They are good people, his mothers now. If they’d reacted differently—too strongly, not strongly enough—he might have tried to hide his nature again instead of embracing it.”
“Strawberry ice cream never hurts. You’ve got something on your mind,” he added.
“I came into town to talk to you.”
“Okay. We can head up to the station, or just head up to the house. I was just coming from the house, going to check in with Chuck. Trying to find my wife.”
“Oh, she’s at our place. Having a . . . meeting with Mom and Fred, Katie. Could we go ahead into Chuck’s den? He could add to this.”
“Sure.”
She turned to Laoch, stroked him. He rose up on his wings, soared off.
“Never gets old.” Shading his eyes with the flat of his hand, Will watched Laoch fly. “Where’s he going?”
“Where he likes. He’ll come when I need him.” As would her wolf, her owl. “Can you tell me if the rescues are acclimating? That’s the wrong word,” she realized. “That sounds cult-like, doesn’t it?”
“Not when I know what you mean. The medicals have set up therapy—group and individual. Physically some of them still need some time to heal. Emotionally’s going to take longer for a lot of them. You know Marlene, right?”
“Town planner.”
“Yeah. She’s playing den mother in one of the group houses. Plus, one of the rescues was a therapist before the Doom. He’s a little shaky yet himself, but it seems like a good idea to have one of their own working with them.”
“It does.” Resilience, she thought, was a light of its own. “How many have left New Hope?”
“Three so far.”
“A smaller number than I figured. And the baby, his mother?”
“Both doing okay, according to Jonah. I saw him earlier.”
They walked around the back of the house where Rachel and Jonah lived with their boys, and to Chuck’s basement entrance.
She smelled freshly mown grass, sun-soaked herbs before they went inside and down.
There she smelled salt, something sugary.
Chuck sat in front of monitors and keyboards and odd electronic boxes, switches, and joysticks.
Fallon could speak countless languages, had within her every spell ever written, but the world of computers posed a thorny mystery for her.
She’d gained a little skill—with Chuck’s help—since coming to New Hope, but for her entire life before they’d left the farm for New Hope, she’d been IT-free.
“Who enters the master’s den?” Chuck slurped at the something sugary in his glass. “Hi, guys.”
“No minions today?” Will asked, as Chuck had a variety of IT apprentices.
“Class dismissed. It’s summer, dude. And my top guys and gals are working on their own with some of the goodies you brought me back from the dungeons. You fried a bunch of it.”
“We were a little fixed on life and death,” Fallon reminded him.
“Yeah, yeah. Well, components are people, too. Anyway, I got Hester seeing if she can revive some of it with the woo-woo.” He reached a hand into a bowl of chips. “Want? Got more. Fixed this old Play-Station out at Fred’s yesterday and scored the chips of potato.”
“I’ll pass on the chips,” Will told him, “but I could use something cold if you got it.”
“Brew?”
“I’m still on duty.”
“Lemonade.”
“Sold.”
Will went over to Chuck’s cold box, took out the jug. “What are you monitoring?”
“I’ve got a PW base in Utah—that’s a new one. They’re just setting up.”
“Branching out,” Will added.
“What I’m getting is that our favorite lunatic, Jeremiah White, sent about twenty from Michigan, had them meet up with a group from Kansas, then pull together with some new recruits in Utah to set this up. They lost about fifteen percent getting there. But they rounded up most of a community in Nebraska—farming settlement, magickals and nons. They’re estimating to have the base secured—the housing, the weaponry, the supplies, and all that—by the end of the week. So they can have their first round of executions on Sunday.”
He shoved the bowl of chips aside. “Fuckers.”
“We’ve never attempted any rescues that far out,” Will said to Fallon. “They’re not secure yet, but—”
“Now’s the time. They won’t have any Dark Uncanny with them.”
“If they did,” Chuck put in, “it wouldn’t take them days to secure. So, no DUs.”
She shifted Arlington out of her mind for the moment. “Can you get exact coordinates?”
“I’m working on it.”
“How confident are you in your numbers?”
“I’m confident that’s what they’re reporting back to Arlington. I’ve been catching bits of chatter off and on for a while, but it didn’t amount to much before this morning. And like Will said, they’re a hell of a lot farther away than anything we’ve tried. I’ve been banking it, keeping track when I could.”
A new plan, even more ambitious, began to form in Fallon’s mind. “We need everything you have. We’ll get it to Mallick and Duncan. Both have flashed farther than Utah before, and they’ll know who at their base can handle the tagalong.”
She took the lemonade from Will but set it down again as she paced the big room crowded with electronics, with monitors and screens, with shelves stacked with wound-up cables, components, spare parts.
And the scavenged dolls Chuck haughtily called action figures.
“Duncan takes two to scout, get the lay of the land, the setup, the security in place.”
“Elves and shifters are usually best for that,” Will said.
