by Tanya Huff
“Oh, for . . . Allie, focus!” Charlie released her wrist and stepped back. “Jack and I are dealing. We talked. It’s cool. Well, it’s actually pretty fucking lousy, but everyone in the world dying in twenty-two months kind of puts our incredibly bad timing into perspective, don’t you think?”
“No, it’s . . .” Allie stared down into the bowl, at the spatula, up at Charlie. “You were serious about that?” She’d finally dropped the irritating, second circle, mom-voice. Charlie hated that voice. “You were serious about the asteroid? That’s . . .” She blinked, stumbled sideways, bounced off the end of the dining room table, pulled out a chair, and sat. “Everyone dies in twenty-two months.”
And that was the difference between them. Allie went straight from the cause to the effect. “That’s what they tell me.”
“That’s not . . . I mean, we can’t . . .” The lights flickered, throwing the apartment into momentary late October gloom, and the mixer turned on again.
Charlie unplugged it, then just to be on the safe side, turned off the oven before moving to the dining room, pulling out a chair, and turning it to face Allie. Hands on her cousin’s knees, she leaned forward. “Calm down, you’re going to hyperventilate. Rosin your bow, Allie-cat. I need you to call the aunties together.”
“Rosin my what?”
“Ow!”
The toddler weight lifting program had put some muscle behind Allie’s swing. “How long have you known?” she demanded through gritted teeth.
“About the asteroid?” Auntie Catherine. Dan. Vermont. Gary. Charlie added it up. “Twenty-four hours. About everyone dying?” Southern California. Auntie Catherine. “Maybe ten.”
“Then can I have a minute to deal!”
“Sorry.”
Allie shrugged off her apology and frowned. “This is why you didn’t come to bed last night.”
It wasn’t a question, but Charlie nodded anyway. It was most of the reason.
“Okay.” Her gaze drifted around the room, settled for a moment on Evan’s slightly scorched plush dragon, then returned to Charlie. “Other countries have space agencies.”
“Dr. Mehta—she’s the scientist I spoke to at NASA . . .”
“Wait.” Allie raised her hand. “You know a scientist at NASA?”
“Yes, she’s . . .”
“You have friends who aren’t musicians?”
“Yes. Although technically, she’s not my friend, she’s the friend of Gary the bouzouki player. Yes,” Charlie expanded before Allie could ask, “he’s the bouzouki player. That’s why he was important. Dr. Mehta says the other agencies have been contacted. They’re trying, but . . .”
“Okay. Stop.” She stared at her raised hand for a moment, waved it a couple of times, and finally cupped it around the curve of her stomach. “There’s really an asteroid? A big falling rock?”
As Charlie’d already established the lack of a death wish, she figured the temptation to say, no, just kidding was probably the lack of sleep talking. “Yeah. NASA calls it an extinction event.”
“And you can’t stop it and Jack can’t stop it.” Or you wouldn’t have bothered telling me, added the subtext. “All right, then.” She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them again, Charlie could see the light of determination in them. Or possibly it was the reflection of the light over the dining room table; either way, Allie’d clearly come to a decision. One hand still curved around her belly, she tossed her braid behind her shoulder with the other and picked up the stuffed dragon. “I’ll call the family together.”
“Not the whole family,” Charlie cautioned, “just the aunties.”
“For this kind of thing, the aunties will need to pull power from ritual. Ritual needs the whole family. We might as well tell them all at once.”
“We’re dead in twenty-two months if we don’t stop this, Allie. The fewer people who have to live with that, the better.”
“The more people who know,” Allie countered, “the better the chances are of finding a solution. And if it comes to it, wouldn’t you rather know you’d been doing as much as you could for as long as you could?”
“That’s . . . reasonable.” And it wasn’t like the family couldn’t keep a secret. “I just . . .”
“You don’t want anyone else to feel like you’re feeling. Admirable, but Wild doesn’t mean you have to do it alone, Charlie. It’s time to stop protecting us; we’re all in this together. And we’ll stop it. All of us. Together.”
Charlie could hear no possibility of failure in Allie’s voice. “That’s my girl.”
The stuffed dragon bounced off her face.
“And now that’s settled, didn’t you used to call me stupidly masochistic for falling in love with my gay best friend?”
Given the time of year and the temperatures after dark, they held the family meeting in the house they’d inherited from Jonathon Samuel Gale or, more specifically, from Stanley Kalynchuk, the sorcerer Graham had been working for when he met Allie. Though they were one and the same, the house had been in Kalynchuk’s name and therefore the will Roland had drawn up—heavily charmed by the aunties—had also been in Kalynchuk’s name.
“I don’t care what he was calling himself,” Auntie Bea had sniffed. “You’re a lawyer, Roland Edward Gale. Fix it.”
There’d been discussion about selling the property and using the money to buy and demolish two or three smaller houses closer to the park, but four years later they still weren’t positive they’d removed every trace of Kalynchuk’s sorcery. Nor were they sure how to safely dispose of most of the collected artifacts in the vault, particularly those they couldn’t identify.
“This one looks like a gilded pookah penis,” Allie muttered, lifting the lumpy golden cylinder off the shelf.
“It really doesn’t, dear.” Auntie Carmen patted her on the arm as she passed.
It was the only property they owned large enough for the whole family, although the location meant that using it post ritual required designated drivers. They’d hung onto it mostly because of the pool. No one wanted to lose the pool, particularly not when Jack could keep the water warm enough for even a Calgary winter just by half submerging. During the later months of her first pregnancy, Allie’d spent a lot of time floating tucked up against Jack’s side.
A quick glance around the room found Jack next to Cameron. They got along well, probably because Jack had never manifested horn and challenged for position—although Allie supposed had never manifested horn or challenged for position was more accurate as Jack’s manifestation leaned more toward teeth and claws than the Gale norm. Charlie stood by the breakfast bar, fingertips drumming out the percussion to music only she could hear. She wasn’t looking at Jack, he wasn’t looking at her, they weren’t acknowledging the other’s presence in any way, and yet Allie barely needed to squint to see the connection between them. Second circle was all about connection. Charlie kept forgetting that.
Once we work out how to prevent an asteroid impact, I’ll work on them. She couldn’t erase thirteen years, but there had to be something she could do to ease their way.
Every Gale in Calgary, fifteen and older, had gathered in the kitchen or the huge family room attached. Pies already in the oven filled the space with the comforting scent of pastry and baking apples. Across the family room, at least one auntie always close at hand, David not only maintained a human seeming but was drinking a beer. The children, and they’d finally begun to have a comfortable number of them, were downstairs, charging around the basement under the supervision of the younger teens. Jennifer, Judith and Dave’s oldest, had rolled her eyes with all the aplomb of a Gale twice her age, balanced Evan on her hip, and said, “Don’t worry, Allie, every adult in the city is one floor away. Wendy and I can handle it.”
Three laptops were open on the high sideboard, one linked to Ashley’s apartment in Toronto, one to Sa
ra’s apartment in Ottawa, and one, on the most panoramic setting possible, to a laptop in the old farmhouse outside Darsden East where the aunties jostled for position in front of the camera. Auntie Vera was sitting with Auntie Ruby—no one needed to call it a death watch, they all knew what it was—but the rest were there. There were others, at school or working too far away to make it home, listening in. With only a few hours’ warning, this was the compromise.
She’d called, they’d come.
Unable to stop herself from glancing up at the ceiling, she saw that the blades of the fan needed dusting and saw no sign at all of an asteroid large enough to wipe everything she loved and most of what she only tolerated off the face of the Earth. Of course there wasn’t. It was still millions of kilometers away even if she could feel the weight settling on her shoulders.
“Charlie.” Allie beckoned her out into the center of the room. “Let’s do this.”
“. . . and that’s where we stand right now.” Charlie flipped up a finger. “Big rock incoming.” And another. “Six months to panic stations, twenty-two to impact.” And a third. “Current trajectory as far as they can tell with that big hunk of metallic rock in the way, puts impact somewhere at the upper edge of Hudson Bay . . .”
“So it won’t hit us!” Auntie Carmen pried a damp, balled-up tissue out of the sleeve of her sweater.
“. . . having come in on a thirty-degree angle,” Charlie continued, “from the north.”
“So it won’t hit us,” Auntie Bea repeated grimly.
“Given its size and at the speed it’ll hit, if the blast wave doesn’t wipe out Darsden East, the spray of debris will.” Heather looked around the suddenly silent room. “What? Am I the only one who watches the Discovery Channel?”
“No,” Charlie told her, “you aren’t. NASA can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. Jack can’t stop it. If we could, it’d be a Wild Power problem and we wouldn’t be here tonight. So, let’s pretend every possible Armageddon, Bruce Willis comment has been already been made . . .” She glanced over at those members of the family old enough to remember the movie, her gaze brushing past Jack on the way by because she could, “and pick it up after we’ve decided that Michael Bay was not providing us with an instruction manual.”
“Bruce Willis would kick that asteroid’s ass,” Gabbie muttered. Her husband nodded.
“Not an instruction manual,” Charlie repeated.
Frowning, Melissa shook her head. “I doubt we’ve got six months. There’s one hell of a lot of telescopes pointed at the sky. A lot of the data in NASA’s catalog of NEOs came from private scopes.”
“NEOs—Near Earth Objects,” Cameron explained as half a dozen voices called out questions. When Melissa turned to look at him, he blushed. “What? More than just muscles and a dick here.”
“Cameron Edward Gale!” Even with charms adjusting the volume, the laptop speakers crackled.
His blush deepened. “Sorry, Mom.”
“You’re certain this isn’t Catherine messing around with us?” Auntie Bea asked.
“What part of I spoke to the scientist at NASA who discovered and is tracking the asteroid did you miss, Auntie Bea?”
“The scientist you found because of an unstable telepathic street person, Charlotte?”
“Seventh son of a seventh son, sorcerer’s ex-hitman.” Charlie pointed at Graham. “Gale, Dragon Prince, sorcerer.” Her finger moved to Jack, then she spread her hands. “I shortcut through a place that doesn’t actually exist and Auntie Catherine screencaps the future. Crazy telepathic street person isn’t all that out there.”
“And the bouzouki?”
“The bouzouki player, Auntie Bea. The instrument itself wasn’t much help.”
“Catherine,” Auntie Carmen began before Auntie Bea could answer.
“Came to me first,” Auntie Jane interrupted, moving in closer to the center monitor, her tone stilling the quiet ripples of conversation.
“Of course she did,” Auntie Carmen sighed into the silence.
And then, as though confirmation from an auntie had been all that was required, the silence ended in a roar of sound; muted from all three laptops, loud enough to press against the privacy charms etched into the outside walls of the house in Mount Royal.
Charlie could hear curiosity, annoyance, and speculation, but no fear. Melissa and Heather and the other members of the third circle were arguing about the strength of the ritual needed while Cameron protested there was only one of him. They were young enough to believe they were personally invincible. The second circle was old enough to know individuals might fall, but believed the family could stand against anything. None of them had seen despair curve Auntie Catherine’s shoulders.
The aunties . . .
The aunties were being too quiet. Charlie’d hoped for smug superiority of the honestly, it’s just a falling rock, what’s all the fuss about variety, but she was getting nothing at all. Not here. She glanced at the laptop screens. Not from any of the aunties back east.
Was it because Auntie Jane had already known? If the aunties had gotten together and come up with a solution without bothering to tell anyone, Charlie planned to be pissed. The last seventeen hours of knowing she was helpless had felt more like three years. The noise dropped to background muttering as she moved to stare directly into the center camera. “So, what’s the plan, Auntie Jane?”
“What makes you think I have a plan, Charlotte?”
“Auntie Catherine came to you first.”
Auntie Jane snorted. “And I didn’t believe her.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Auntie Bea picked up a pair of oven mitts from the counter beside the stove and pulled them on, the lime-green silicon snapping around her wrists.
“Catherine told me the sky was falling.” Auntie Jane’s slate-gray brows nearly met over her nose. “She didn’t mention anything as prosaic as an incoming asteroid.”
Straightening from the oven, Auntie Bea set a steaming apple pie down on the cooling rack. “You probably said something to put her back up.”
“Catherine’s back is always up,” Auntie Jane pointed out. “And you didn’t pinch your edges properly, Bea. There’s juice dripping onto the counter.”
“First, you can’t see my edges pinched or not from the angle that laptop is set at, and, second, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Catherine’s position.”
“First, you never pinch your edges properly, you haven’t for fifty years, and second . . .” Thirty-six-hundred kilometers to the east, Auntie Jane’s frown deepened. “. . . Catherine has never grown out of the I know something you don’t know stage. She enjoys taunting the family with it.”
“She enjoys taunting you with it.” Auntie Bea set another pie on the rack. “The rest of us are not so favored.”
“I’m pretty sure she enjoys taunting me,” Charlie put in.
A third pie joined the first two. “I stand corrected, Charlotte.”
Auntie Gwen slid one of the big chef’s knives out of Auntie Bea’s reach, and the women not in the kitchen shifted so they were more definitively between Auntie Bea and the men. As the Calgary circles had grown, Auntie Bea had become less Auntie Jane’s eyes and ears in the west and more her competition.
“Enough.” The lights flickered and the kettle, although it hadn’t been plugged in, came to a boil. Charlie glanced over at Allie who clearly had no intention of allowing the shifting power dynamics to take center stage, not when her babies were at risk. “My grandmother’s part in this is done.”
Auntie Bea pulled off the oven mitts. Auntie Carmen and Auntie Trisha, holding pie lifters, moved to flank her. Auntie Gwen set a stack of dessert plates on the island. All four aunties stared into the center monitor with such intensity that the two flanking laptops flickered in and out of blue screen, once, twice, three times, until they settled.
Glancing around th
e room, Charlie knew everyone present had come to the same conclusion—they’d skip the pie. “All right. We have an ETA, a trajectory, and an impact site. What do we do?”
“We could throw up berms to the northeast,” Allie said, tucked up against Graham’s chest. “Deflect the blast wave and the debris.”
“We can,” Graham agreed, glancing over at the laptops on the sideboard, “but we’re a province and a half away from the impact. Southern Ontario is . . .”
“Toast.”
“Toast?” Auntie Carmen turned on Roland. “This is your expensive law school vocabulary? Toast.”
“If we throw a berm up to protect Darsden East, it’ll only become an advance wave of the debris field.” Roland spread his hands. “Superheated earth and rock, destroying everything in its path. Toast, Nana.”
“We can protect Calgary with a full first circle.” Auntie Gwen passed Roland a piece of pie. He passed it on.
“It’s a little early to discuss shifting the family around, Gwen,” Auntie Jane sniffed.
“No, it isn’t.” Auntie Meredith sitting in a rocking chair away from the computer, raised her voice enough to silence four rooms of ambient noise. “We can’t stop the asteroid.”
“Can’t?” A glance at the four aunties in the kitchen showed a surprising lack of argument. Charlie’s skin felt too tight. “Just like that? You haven’t even discussed it!”
“We are of the earth,” Auntie Bea said, and Charlie noted how at least half the people in the room turned to look at David. The other half kept their attention on the aunties, which was always wise.
“It’s a rock,” Charlie growled. “I can’t Sing it in a vacuum, but it’s a rock.”
“Do not use that tone on me, Charlotte Marie Gale.” The pie lifter left Auntie Bea’s hand and hit the granite countertop with a definitive crack. “We are of this earth. The rock is not. It’s not even in contact with the earth, and we have limited influence in the sky.”
“You might remember that when the police helicopters are up,” Auntie Carmen muttered.
