by Tanya Huff
Sliding over, Jack bumped his knees against hers and thought about moving to sit beside her and offering a more physical comfort and . . . His thought process kind of hit a slipstream there and he wondered what more physical comfort could entail. How physical? How comforting? If the world had twenty-two months, how much more stupidly irrelevant could seven years get?
“Jack, the chair.”
“Shit.” He brushed the scorch marks out of the wood and lifted his head to see Charlie staring at him. “What?”
“Sorcery.”
“Okay.”
“You can use sorcery on the asteroid! You could . . . turn it into butterflies!”
The family was never going to let that go. “You turn your cousins into butterflies once and suddenly it’s always butterflies?”
“Pay attention!” Charlie’s freezing cold fingers closed on his jaw and she shook his head back and forth. “You can turn the asteroid into butterflies. Or, if not butterflies, then something else. Something harmless.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” One final shake and she released him. He rubbed his jaw, stopped when he saw her eyes following the movement of his hand, and said, “I can’t.”
“You can’t? Of course you can’t,” she continued before he could explain. “It’s too far away. Okay, we get you into the Orion capsule . . . no, that’s too dangerous. If it was me, I could nudge. I’d have to bludgeon to make them believe you belong, and then what happens if I’ve overwritten crucial information? Not a problem. You can take the asteroid out when it appears in the atmosphere. It’s there! It’s not!” She raised both arms, then grabbed for the quilt as it fell. “It’s a miracle! And, okay, we’ll still have the panic in the streets, but that’s better than the worst case scenario. We’ll call the family home and hunker down. I’m not saying enforced close proximity won’t take out a few of us, but that, that we can live with.”
She looked so pleased—and manic—Jack wished he could let her have the moment. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, I can’t—no matter how close it is. I don’t . . .” Admitting a weakness went against everything he’d been taught for the first thirteen years of his life. Admitting a weakness was like exposing the softer scales on his belly to his uncles’ claws. But this was Charlie and exposing the softer scales on his belly was right up near the top of his list of things he wanted to do. Metaphorically. Sort of. “My sorcery is instinctive. The butterfly thing—I just reacted before they hit the ground. I didn’t do it on purpose. I can’t do it on purpose.”
“Fixing the scorch marks . . .”
He shrugged. “I don’t like it when Allie’s mad at me.”
“Allie’s going to be pretty pissed about being part of a mass extinction.”
“Yeah, but she’s not going to be pissed at me.”
Charlie stared at him for a long minute, then she laughed. “It’s like I don’t even listen to myself. This is the argument Allie and I made to the aunties about you being a Gale. You don’t do sorcery, you use it.” To Jack’s surprise, she actually sounded amused. “Okay, not so funny when weighed against the end of the world and since there isn’t anyone around to train you, it looks like the family habit of killing sorcerers is about to bite us on the ass.” Her smile softened and, just for a moment, Jack saw exactly what she’d meant by I like you too much. He’d been raised in fire, yet her smile still burned. “At least you’ll be safe.”
“I what?” The roaring in his ears had nearly drowned her out. At least he hoped the roaring was in his ears; he half thought he’d changed and given the pressure in his chest a voice. As Charlie seemed neither deaf nor singed, he congratulated himself on his self-control.
“You can go back to the UnderRealm.”
“The UnderRealm?” That was it. He could save her. Them. Save the family. “Not me, all of us. We can all go to the UnderRealm; the whole family.” Relief driving him up onto his feet, he walked to the edge of the roof and blew smoke at the pigeons across the alley.
“Sorry, Jack, but we can’t.” She was standing when he turned. Still wrapped in the quilt. Looking . . . resigned? “Not for any longer than the time between rituals. We’re too tied to the earth.”
“But if I’m a Gale . . .”
“And a dragon. And a sorcerer. You’re unique.”
“So are you.”
“No arguing. But unfortunately, this time, I’m not unique in a way that helps.” Her thumb rubbed across a worn piece of denim, and Jack could feel the charm from across the roof. It was male. He was pretty sure it was the only one on the quilt. It was a simple protection, nothing more than a generic stay safe, and he wondered if her father had made it. During his visit to Ontario, Jack had met Charlie’s mother but not her father, and Charlie never talked about him. Female dragons ate their mates, so Jack hadn’t given his absence much thought. His mother hadn’t eaten his father, but only because the sorcerer had slipped between worlds immediately after. She hadn’t been able to follow until Jack himself had laid out a blood path.
Dragons and Gales were more alike than he’d thought.
“Jack?” She grinned at him, the old Charlie back. “You having an epiphany?”
“Yeah, I guess. How could you tell?”
Her grin broadened. “I can smell the smoke.”
“Crap!” Ears hot, he ground out the bit of burning deck, then crouched to stroke the scorch mark out of the wood. “The Courts have sorcerers,” he said slowly, remembering protections he’d heard his uncles complain about. “Maybe they’d teach me.”
“Could they teach you enough in six months?”
Jack figured Charlie thought she was asking a—what did they call it?—rhetorical question because hope hadn’t returned to her voice. “So put me in the car and drive me back two years,” he said as he straightened. “I’ll catch up.”
“Jack . . .”
He spread his hands, scaled and clawed. “Dragon Prince, remember? I’m essentially immortal. What’s two years? And, since I’m here, I’m obviously not there. Hang on . . .” He didn’t exactly understand how it worked, but he suspected Charlie had no idea either. “. . . if you can take me back two years, then you can take me back . . .”
“You’ve only been here for four years,” Charlie sighed. “Four from thirteen is nine. Even if twenty-one is a step up from seventeen, nine is still more than seven.”
“I know that.” The pale jacket he’d made from the pile of old newspapers left on the roof had no pockets, so he added some and shoved his hands in them. “Dragons ace math.” He’d thought that maybe . . . “How did you know that’s what I meant?”
She shrugged. “First thing I thought of. What does essentially immortal mean?”
“Dragons are killed, usually by other dragons, but they don’t die. However, as all my uncles have pointed out, singly and collectively, there’s never been a half-blood before, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.” Someone hit their horn, someone else yelled abuse. Jack leaned out over the edge of roof and saw a group of teenagers flipping off an SUV speeding away down 13th. He didn’t get humans his age. They weren’t children, they weren’t adults, and they expected to be treated like both. No reason to drop a giant rock on them, though.
He turned back to Charlie to find her folding the quilt. Over the welcome return of her scent, the heavy knit sweater she wore smelled of Graham, and Jack smoked a little, unable to stop his reaction.
“If I took you back two years . . .” His teeth snapped together as he closed his mouth at her gesture. “If. Would the Court teach you?”
The protections around the Courts his uncles complained about had been put in place to keep the Dragon Lords out—there having been extended disagreements in the past on who the apex predators were. The Dragon Lords had been willing to fight it out, but to their surprise, the Courts had a well-honed sense of self-preservation tucke
d under their silken arrogance. Contact between the two races had been minimal for centuries. Minimal, and usually violent. “I don’t know,” Jack admitted reluctantly. “They don’t like us much. Dragons,” he added to be clear. “They don’t like the Dragon Lords much.”
“They don’t like Gales much either,” Charlie reminded him. “So, that’s a last resort. There’s plenty of the Court here, though. Wouldn’t hurt to check with them and see if they can stop it.”
Jack shook his head. “They won’t care. They can go home.”
“The full-bloods, sure, but would they be willing to open their lands to their descendants?”
“No.”
“So would they be willing to let their children and grandchildren die?”
“Yes.” When she looked startled, he shrugged. “They’re assholes, you know that. But there’s stuff about the MidRealm they like, a lot, that they won’t want to give up. Maybe that’ll be enough. If they do anything, if they can do anything,” he amended, “it’ll cost.”
“Doesn’t it always.” While they’d been talking, the air had warmed enough he could no longer see her breath when she sighed before saying, “We should at least check the price.”
“I’ll do it.”
Her eyes narrowed and for a minute he thought she was going to try and tell him he couldn’t, then she smiled without much humor. “You’ve definitely got a better chance of actually getting the twisty buggers to listen. But again, last resort. Well, second last resort. I want to talk to Auntie Catherine again before we widen our circle. She might’ve seen something else.”
“Wouldn’t she have told you?”
“Giving her the benefit of the doubt, she might have Seen something and not have realized it was connected.”
That was possible, Jack acknowledged, although Charlie sounded like she didn’t entirely believe it. “And without the benefit of the doubt?”
“She’s an auntie. Aunties are . . .”
“Are you two coming in for breakfast?”
Jack sucked in a lungful of his own smoke and began to cough. He could feel Auntie Gwen’s regard from where she stood in the doorway of the roof access and he wondered how much she’d heard. Then Charlie was beside him, pounding on his back. “We’re on our way.”
“Alysha thinks you’re hiding something.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t think you’re hiding anything, Charlotte.”
Wiping the snot off his upper lip on the sleeve of his jacket, Jack looked up in time to see Auntie Gwen roll her eyes.
“Neither of you are exactly subtle,” she said. “Secret conversations. Bouzoukis.” Arms folded, she studied first Charlie, then Jack.
Jack squared his shoulders and met her gaze, no child to be cowed merely because he was expected to be. To his surprise, she smiled.
“Really?”
He wasn’t sure what kind of answer she wanted, so he continued hold her gaze without speaking. When she finally turned her attention back to Charlie, he changed enough to blink his inner as well as his outer lid across dry eyes.
“If I ask you what you’re hiding, Charlotte, will you tell me?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Not yet,” Charlie amended.
“Not until you’ve either solved the problem or discovered you can’t solve the problem.”
“Pretty much.”
Auntie Gwen made a noise Jack couldn’t quite identify. It would have sounded like she was accepting the inevitable had the aunties considered anything regarding their interactions with the family inevitable. He supposed the closest translation would be that’ll do for now. “Then I won’t ask. But don’t leave it too long, Charlotte.”
“Trust me, this one has a best-before date.”
He wondered why Charlie’d put the emphasis on this one rather than trust me, then he remembered that once the aunties lost trust, they didn’t bother to ask questions.
“Most secrets do.” Auntie Gwen turned on one heel and started back down the stairs. Her voice floated up from the stairwell. “Sooner or later, it all comes out in the wash.”
As the sound of her footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs, Jack opened his mouth. Charlie pressed two fingers down against his lips before he could say anything. She moved quickly across the roof, crouched in the doorway where Auntie Gwen had been standing, and brushed her palm across the wood. It looked a little like the motion he used when he fixed a scorch mark. When she straightened, she stroked the open door at hip height. As she turned slowly in place, he saw her eyes flash black, rim to rim. Scales rippled down his spine and his tail lashed once, twice in response to the power she almost never showed. It seemed Auntie Gwen had left charms behind. Two obvious charms, but clearly Charlie thought there was at least one more.
He had no idea how she’d managed to hide a charm when he hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
“How,” Charlie asked as though she were unconcerned about eavesdroppers, “can you choke on your own smoke?”
Unsure if the question was camouflage to hide what she was doing from Auntie Gwen, or if she really wanted to know, Jack crossed the roof and joined her. “It went down the wrong way.”
Arm over her head, she patted the edge of the upper framing, grinned, and flashed him a thumbs up with the other hand. “So you blew it out and then sucked it back in?”
“You’ve choked on spit,” he pointed out. “I’ve seen you.”
“Fair enough.” Head cocked, Charlie listened to nothing Jack could hear for a moment, then nodded. “We’re good. That was the last one.”
“Why would she . . .” To name the aunties was to call them. Not always, but it happened often enough Jack decided to be cautious. “. . . leave charms to overhear when she didn’t want to know?”
“She didn’t say she didn’t want to know, she said she wasn’t going to ask.”
“Why . . . ?”
“You tell me.”
He recognized that tone. It was the same tone his Uncle Adam had used when he’d asked why they didn’t flame the lake and eat the pookah after it floated to the surface. He suspected Charlie’d turned the encounter with Auntie Gwen into a lesson on power dynamics to emphasize the difference in their ages. Jack knew Charlie was older than he was; she just couldn’t seem to understand that he didn’t care. And, for what it was worth, parboiled pookah tasted terrible.
“If she asked what we were hiding and you didn’t tell her,” he said slowly, “she couldn’t let that kind of defiance stand. If she tried to force you to tell her, you’d lie and make her believe it and that would shift the power dynamic enough the other aunties would notice. Then it would be you, well, you and me, against all the aunties.”
“Think we could take them?”
“All of them?” He thought about it for a moment, listening to the traffic, smelling the coffee when someone opened the door of the shop, watching Charlie watch him. He considered what he could do and what Charlie could do. And he considered the aunties. “No. We couldn’t.”
“No,” Charlie repeated, smiling, “we couldn’t. But Auntie Gwen’s reason was simpler than that. She trusts that when it comes down to it, the last note is the key the song is in. She trusts we’ll put family first.” Her smile changed, softened and picked up an edge at the same time. Jack fought the urge to flame in response. “You’d stand beside me against the aunties?”
“Duh.”
“Well, that puts the end of the world into perspective.”
“The world isn’t going to end.”
“It’s not?”
“We’re going to stop the asteroid.” Because they had to stop it.
“We are?”
This new smile, Jack recognized. He wasn’t sure when he’d first started seeing it, but he knew now he was the only one who saw it. “W
e are.”
Because if the world ended, then Charlie ended—and Jack wasn’t going to let that happen.
“THEY’RE DEFINITELY HIDING SOMETHING.”
Allie looked up from strapping Evan into his high chair as Auntie Gwen came into the apartment. She didn’t seem angry. That was good. At least Allie thought it was good. She could think of a few reasons why an auntie would be that blasé about being left in the dark and they weren’t good.
“Charlotte not only took out the obvious charms,” Auntie Gwen continued, scooping Edward up as he ran for the door, “she went to the effort of finding and removing the hidden ones. And, as we both know, Charlotte doesn’t do effort. They don’t call it playing music for nothing.”
“If you’re so sure they’re hiding something, why didn’t you ask them what it was?”
Auntie Gwen dropped Edward into the second chair. “You suspected they were hiding something, why didn’t you? Never mind, I’ll tell you; it’ll be both faster and easier. You’re afraid Charlotte won’t tell you. And if she doesn’t, or worse, if she lies to you, that means you’re losing her. That she’s on the last stage of going Wild and she’s becoming like Catherine.”
“Charlie is nothing like my grandmother.”
Evan slapped at her arm. “Mama! Tight!”
“Sorry, baby.” Allie loosened the belt that held him in the chair. “She didn’t come to bed last night.”
“And yet you weren’t alone,” Auntie Gwen pointed out tartly.
“That’s not what I meant. She’s not sleeping.”
“We’ve already established she has something on her mind, something she has chosen to keep to herself. I’m certain Catherine Sees many things she chooses to keep from the family.”
Allie only just kept her reaction from impacting the city as she repeated, “Charlie is nothing like my grandmother.”
“Wild is Wild, Alysha, and Charlotte accepted the responsibility some time ago. As much as she loves you, and she does love you, you need to accept the fact that you’ll never tame her.”
Allie knew Charlie loved her. That wasn’t the problem. “Jack’s Uncle Adam said that to me once.”
