by Tanya Huff
After a long moment, David allowed him to look away. “Yes, like Allie and Graham.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? You hadn’t . . .”
“I thought it was a Wild thing.” It seemed obvious—he didn’t feel that way about anyone else in the family and no one else in the family was Wild. Except Auntie Catherine. Jack hadn’t spent much time with her, but it had been enough that he felt confident in saying she didn’t make him feel like Charlie did. Charlie made him feel like he belonged.
“It’s that, too. But, mostly, it’s that ritual is calling and you can’t . . .” David actually hesitated. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his breath pluming like smoke in the cold. “Ritual is calling,” he repeated, “and there’s no one powerful enough to be safe with you.”
“The way Allie is safe with Graham?”
“Yes.”
That sounded more like a sure, why not to Jack. “Except for Charlie.” It always came back to Charlie.
“Yes, except for . . . Jack.”
Steam rose where the damp air touched his skin and, when Jack looked down, he realized he stood in an irregular circle of charred grass about two meters across. The edge of the char stopped at the edge of David’s feet. “Sorry.”
“Ritual’s unanswered call makes you restless. That’s all this is.”
“This?”
“This,” David repeated solemnly. “What you feel for Charlie.”
“Oh.” Was that what they were talking about, what he felt for Charlie? While ritual, or at least what happened during ritual, definitely had something to do with it, Jack admitted, it certainly didn’t explain everything. But it was what David wanted him to think, and it was no skin off his tail if pretending he agreed made David happy. Appeasing the powerful was a basic survival skill. “Okay.”
They stood together in silence for a moment, more aware of the city around them and the land under them than the rest of the family. Except for maybe Allie, Jack amended silently.
“Don’t you ever want to leave?” he asked at last.
“It’s not what I am.”
“Who.”
David snorted, sounding as much stag as man. “That, too.”
“Cha Cha!”
“Edward!” Charlie scooped the toddler up out of the crib, balanced him on one hip, then reached for his brother. She never had trouble telling the twins apart when they were awake. Edward’s speaking voice was pitched a little higher than Evan’s, although Evan could hit a higher pitch while shrieking, and they were seldom quiet at the same time unless they were asleep. They both had brown hair and blue eyes like their daddy and a sprinkle of freckles like their mama. Katie insisted she could tell them apart by the pattern of the freckles. While not entirely willing to call her a liar, Charlie couldn’t.
At just over eighteen months, they still mostly shared a personality.
The moment she reached the living room, they demanded to be put down, so she settled on the floor with them.
The oldest aunties—essentially Auntie Ruby who was two years older than God, well, some gods—believed that the family’s identical twins shared a soul. The remaining aunties agreed that was a remnant of the old beliefs and Gale twins were no more likely to be short a soul than non-Gale twins. The rest of the family pretended not to notice that the aunties had hedged their bets with a distinctly nondefinitive statement. Charlie thought of her younger sisters and wasn’t entirely certain Auntie Ruby was wrong.
“Your daddy says you’ll become more individual as you get older.” Charlie grunted as Edward threw himself off the sofa into her arms, squirming free of her grip in time for her to catch Evan who followed the identical flight path. “Your daddy thinks because he’s a boy and you’re boys, he knows what he’s talking about. But your daddy isn’t a Gale, and Gale boys are in a league of their own, aren’t they?”
Evan burbled what Charlie took as agreement. Edward crawled under the coffee table, emerging a moment later holding a stuffed sheep. He stared at it, as though he’d never seen it before, then threw it across the living room. Evan took off after it—four running steps before he fell and decided crawling was faster.
“Dog!” Edward handed her a piece of a wooden train.
“Not even close, kiddo. Train.”
He shrugged, grabbed it back, and threw it. Evan dropped the sheep and beetled after the train.
It was possible that dog had been in reference to his brother who had apparently learned to fetch while Charlie was gone.
Given that most Gale boys had between fifteen and twenty girls on their lists, most Gale girls moved straight from third circle to first without stopping at stretch marks and cracked nipples and that weird let’s be connected to everything second circle got into. Charlie watched Edward run after Evan, bare feet slapping against the floor, plastic cover on his diaper crinkling with every step, and realized, given the impossible place her interest had fallen, that this might be as close to having children of her own as she’d ever get.
She was good with that.
Both boys looked up as the door into the hall opened, then returned to racing the train and the sheep across the floor when they saw it was only Jack.
Charlie kept most of her attention on the boys because that was the responsible thing to do, but she saved enough to watch Jack shuffle toward the fridge, eyes half closed, one leg of his worn sweat pants torn and trailing on the floor, the other halfway up his calf. The sleeves had been ripped off his Calgary Stampede T-shirt—given his effect on livestock, he never actually got to go to the Stampede—and his golden-blond hair appeared to be sticking up in seven or eight different directions. Fridge open, he tipped back the milk carton, swallowed half a dozen times, put the carton back in the fridge, pulled out a piece of bread, tucked a jar of peanut butter under his arm, and finally closed the fridge.
There were times when he made it easy for her to remember the relationship they were supposed to have, when he made it easy for her to show him the Charlie he thought he knew. It was, she had to admit, the best performance she’d ever given. Okay, maybe second best. She’d once done such a kickass cover of the Cowboy Junkies’ “I Did It All For You” that when they finished the gig the drummer’d walked off stage and become a Trappist monk in New Brunswick. It might’ve been a coincidence, but Charlie didn’t think so.
She waited until he’d started to toast the bread before saying, “Morning, Jack.”
His huff of surprise fed the flame. “I knew you were there,” he muttered as ash and a few black bits of bread still holding their structural integrity fell to the floor. He rubbed the smudge of soot off his thumb and forefinger and swept his hand over the scorch mark on the upper cabinet door, paint smoothing out behind the motion.
“That’s new. When did you become so comfortable with interior decorating?”
“When you weren’t here.”
That might’ve been fraught, except for the petulance. “Jack . . .”
He sighed. “Allie doesn’t like the burn marks so, if I’m alone, I get rid of them before she sees them. If anyone’s there when it happens, I just take the shit.”
“Not so much comfortable as sneaky.” Charlie nodded and grinned. “I like that I’m not anyone.”
He blinked at her, confused. “Yeah, sure.”
He had known she was there. In that he’d known she was home and that made there limited and he’d scented her in her room over in the other side of the apartment and her scent permeated this part of the apartment so it was like he’d known she was sitting on the floor by one of the sofas. Right? Why was she watching him like she’d never seen him burn the toast before? And what did she mean, she liked not being anyone? She was the most someone he knew.
David hadn’t helped. If anything, David had made him more confused. It was still all questions when it came to Charlie.
&nbs
p; The whole time she’d been gone, Jack had kept mental lists of stuff he wanted to tell her when she got back, but he couldn’t remember any of it, so he said, “You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” He kept thinking she’d leave before he saw her. She did that; showed up, did laundry, left. Left without saying good-bye, like by wanting her to stay he’d done something to drive her away. “Allie?”
“Still asleep.”
“Katie’s in your room.” He didn’t bother toasting the two new slices of bread he pulled from the fridge. Charlie’d probably think it was funny to see if she could make him burn them again. “She’s here a lot when you’re not.”
“Katie fills in for the sisters Allie doesn’t have. I’m not her sister.”
“Duh. You know Allie’s going to . . .” He waved at the twins, who turned in unison to stare at him, but when he didn’t burn anything down, they went back to running the train over with the sheep. “You here to have Graham knock you up?”
“What!”
Yeah, that broke the whole too cool for the living room thing she had going. Jack gave himself a mental high five and wished he had a way to record Charlie’s expression. “If Allie’s actually going to produce the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale, you might have come home to help.”
Charlie raised both hands, like she was shoving the idea away. “I didn’t.”
“The aunties think it’d be a good idea.”
“I don’t.”
“Me either.”
“Wasn’t that one too many sevenths?”
He’d mumbled his protest into the cabinet while grabbing the peanut butter, so he wasn’t surprised she hadn’t heard it. Although Charlie usually heard everything. “Graham’s a seventh son of a seventh son,” he said as he turned, “so his seventh son will be the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. And Allie’s a Gale. So, seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale. Dragons are all about keeping bloodlines straight.” It was one of the nonlethal ways they reminded him of the aunties.
“I thought there only was one bloodline.”
“Sure. Now.” Licking peanut butter off the side of one hand, Jack balanced his two pieces of bread on the other and collapsed onto the end of a sofa. From deep between the cushions, he pulled up two fluff-covered cookies, one infant Iron Man shoe, and finally the remote. He flicked the TV on, hit the mute, and started surfing. He wasn’t ignoring Charlie because she kept leaving and he wasn’t ignoring her because David had as much as told him to. He was seventeen not six. He was channel surfing while eating and besides, even if Charlie was doing that I’m not watching you even though I’m really watching you thing she’d started lately, she wasn’t exactly keeping up her side of the conversation.
When Edward face-planted into the cushion next to him, Jack hauled him up onto the sofa by his diaper. At Edward’s age, unable to defend himself from his uncles’ attacks, he’d never left his mother’s side. So far, no one had attacked the twins and, given Allie’s reaction to a misunderstanding with a customer when the twins were napping down in the shop, that was a good thing. Graham had to call Michael and find out how to replace a whole section of the floor. Auntie Gwen had replaced the guy’s memory. And his hair. Weirdly, she’d left his eyebrows to grow back on their own.
Half his attention on the past, and half on Charlie walking scales—musical scales, not his kind—up Evan’s belly, Jack was a little too slow when Edward climbed into his lap and grabbed the remote. “Hey, not for larva!”
“Go!” Edward yelled and threw it across the room. Evan squirmed out from under Charlie’s grip and tottered after it. Instead of bringing it back, he sat down and gnawed on one end.
So much for surfing. Calgary Morning Live started in on the weather and Jack turned his attention back to Charlie.
“You feed them?” he asked as Edward tried to pick a scale off his arm. He shifted the rest of the way into skin and ignored Edward’s dirty look.
“Not yet.” Charlie leaned back on her arms and stretched her legs out. They were tanned, even though the sun hadn’t been out in Calgary for days. Jack wondered whose boxers she had on and hurriedly patted out a bit of smoldering upholstery on the arm of the sofa, hoping she hadn’t noticed. “But Katie told me if they couldn’t wait until Allie got up, I should give them some dry cereal.”
“They need more meat,” he muttered.
“They’re not dragons.”
“Duh. Dragons at that age are meat.” He wondered, given the twins had no sense of smell to speak of, if they ever got Charlie and Allie confused. Charlie’s hair was shorter, but nearly the same honey color. “Why’d you stop dyeing it?”
“What?”
“Your hair. When I first got here, it was all colorful.” Dragons wore their personal colors like warnings. “Now it’s bland and . . .”
“. . . on the morning drive.”
They turned together as Evan waved the damp remote, having gnawed the sound on.
“And now . . .” The anchor smiled at the camera. “. . . a story about our own local Doomsday Dan.”
“Come on, Evan. Give the remote to Charlie.”
“No, Cha Cha!”
“Wait!” Jack leaned forward and Charlie paused, one hand on the remote, the other holding Evan away from it. “I want to watch this. I know Dan. When he won’t go to a shelter, I make sure he doesn’t freeze.”
On the television, in a familiar corner of the park by the zoo, a familiar ragged figure faced the camera.
“It’s just down the road,” Jack added, aware Charlie’s attention was on him, not the television even if she was trying to pretend otherwise. “And that makes Dan . . .”
“One of yours?”
“That’s not . . .” Except it was. “Yeah. Fine.”
“It’s a Dragon Prince thing; you find subjects.” Charlie reached out, grabbed his leg, and shook it. Where most of the family would have looked condescending, she looked almost proud. “Go you.” As she turned her attention to the television, Jack patted out another small fire. “He’s really into that end is nigh thing, isn’t he?”
Dan had his toque in his hand, waving it wildly, the long gray tangle of his hair flapping around his face like greasy wings as he jumped up and down and shouted, “Bam! Bam! Bam! That’s how it ends! Bam! Bam! Bam! All the king’s horses! Bam! Bam! Bam! All the king’s men! Bam! Bam! Bam! Can’t put the sky together again!”
“You could rap that,” Charlie murmured, fingers tapping her thigh.
“Recently someone posted Dan’s . . .” The anchor’s smile broadened in the pause. Jack growled in reaction to all the teeth and gave Edward a hug as the larva growled with him. “. . . warning online, and in a very short time it went viral. We sent Kelly Ahenakew down to talk to Dan.”
Kelly had clearly explained the situation off camera—Jack doubted Dan knew what the internet was. When she pushed the microphone toward him, she said only, “So Dan, what do you think of your sudden notoriety?”
He snorted and Jack gave Kelly credit for not jerking back even though the spray was thick enough for the camera to catch. “I think we’re all going to die.”
“Because the sky is falling?”
Dan glanced up, took one long step to the left, and said, “Yes.”
“The actual sky?”
Dan nodded. “The sky,” he said solemnly, “is heavy.”
And that was the last thing Kelly could get him to say. This time, Jack didn’t protest when Charlie turned the sound off.
“How crazy is he?” she asked thoughtfully.
Jack shrugged. “He’s Human. It’s hard for me to tell.”
“Good point. Thing is, the way I heard it, he believed what he was saying.”
Jack shrugged again. “Belief doesn’t make somethin
g true.”
“I know, but . . .”
She waved it off, but Jack could hear her humming, mouth pressed against the top of Evan’s head. Charlie trusted her ears the way most people trusted their eyes, and she couldn’t seem to think without making noise.
“There’s a lot of things up there,” she said after a minute. “A whole bunch of junk, not to mention a space station, and beyond that asteroids, comets . . . You fly high, Jack. What do you see?”
He snorted. Edward reached up for the swirls of smoke. “Nothing falling.”
“If there was a factual basis to Dan’s claim, don’t you think one of the scientists on that space station you listed might have mentioned it?” Graham pointed out, closing the bedroom door behind him. “They’ve got the best view.”
“Daddy!”
Jack grunted as Edward launched himself off his lap.
Charlie stood as Evan joined his brother’s charge across the living room. “Scientists don’t know everything,” she said as Graham lifted his sons into his arms. “They’d struggle to explain either of us and they wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to explain Jack.”
“They’d have a go at explaining all of us,” Graham muttered, “if they could get us onto a dissection table.”
“Dissection!” the twins chorused in unison.
“Oh, sure . . .” Charlie tossed Jack a smile he couldn’t stop himself from returning. “. . . I get Cha Cha, but they can manage dissection.” She leaned between the boys and gave Graham a kiss. Jack bit back a growl. “Maybe Doomsday Dan is just ahead of the curve. Don’t scientists say an asteroid is bound to hit in the next million years or so?”
“In the next million years or so pigs could fly.” Katie hadn’t exactly snuck up on him. Jack had heard her crossing the apartment; he’d just ignored her because she posed no danger. Well, no more danger than most Gale girls.
Jack swatted her hand as she ruffled his hair. “I could do that. Make pigs fly.” Although he wasn’t sure he could get them to fly under their own power or if it would be more of a controlled fall when dropped.
