by Tanya Huff
“I said limited influence,” Auntie Bea snapped. “Not grounding myself for every jackbooted thug in a uniform.”
Auntie Trisha stepped between them, hands spread in a placating manner. “Not the time, ladies. Really not the time.”
“Don’t ladies me, you young punk,” Auntie Bea growled. “My eyes didn’t turn dark yesterday . . .”
David stamped his foot. Even in sneakers, it sounded like a hoof against the hardwood.
“We can’t stop it,” Auntie Gwen said softly. “We have to concentrate on surviving it.”
Charlie took a deep breath and counted it in. One, two, three . . .
The family dissolved into argument again. Graham crossed the room to argue NASA with Melissa. Half a dozen of the second circle women had gathered together and Charlie could feel the power building. Their men were securing the breakables. Cameron, Heather, and Bonnie had gathered around a tablet. Lucy kept shaking her head at Roland. Rayne was on the phone. So were Sandy and Gen, two of the other third circle girls on Cameron’s list. Probably talking to their mothers back in Ontario.
“We don’t have time for this,” she muttered. They’d had twenty-two months back when Dr. Mehta found out. Twenty-one and a half now.
“Let them have a moment,” Allie said quietly behind her. “They need to process.”
It wasn’t the incoming asteroid that needed processing, Charlie realized. It was the aunties saying we can’t.
“All right. Enough.” Allie’s voice cracked like a whip over the family, even the aunties falling silent. Apparently, when she’d said moment, she’d meant moment. “I need a list of everyone willing to move to Calgary—third, second, and first circle. Once we have numbers, we’ll work on housing.”
Auntie Vera leaned in close to the camera. “You can’t absorb the entire family, Allie.”
“She won’t need to.” Auntie Jane cut Allie’s reply off. “We have time to branch again.”
“Branch out?” Auntie Bea sniffed disdainfully. “You say that like it’s so easy. If you’ll recall, it took a great disturbance to root this latest branch.”
“An asteroid is about to have a go at wiping out all life on the planet,” Charlie muttered. “Is that a great enough disturbance for you?”
“It might be enough,” Auntie Bea admitted reluctantly.
“Australia usually survives. I say we go south . . .”
“. . . and throw a shrimp on the barbie!”
Charlie couldn’t see them in the monitor, but there was no mistaking her sisters. She was a little surprised they were home, given the way they’d been bouncing around the world.
“We can help the survivors,” Auntie Mary pointed out, leaning in close to the camera.
“The weather will change, there may not be many survivors.”
“The family will survive.” Auntie Jane’s declaration moved her back to the center of the monitor. “That is our bottom line. How many non-family will also survive is still under discussion.”
“There’s too many people in the city now who aren’t us.”
Allie’s head whipped around, trying to identify who’d spoken. Charlie knew who it was, but she wasn’t going to say. They were right. If protecting Calgary meant protecting all the inhabitants, then after the impact they also had to keep them fed and warm. Smarter for Allie to empty the city, leaving only the family, but Charlie doubted she would.
“What about you, Jack?” Heather asked in the pause, cramming the words in as a distraction. “You fly high.”
Charlie turned to where Jack was sitting in time to see him shake his head, hair flopping down over his eyes. Her fingers itched to stroke it back. Surrounded by family. Under the eyes of the aunties. Her fingers had a death wish.
“Not that high,” he said.
“What about sorcery?”
To Charlie’s surprise, the question came from Auntie Jane.
“You’re certainly capable of turning items into things they aren’t.”
At least she hadn’t specifically mentioned the butterflies. “I already said Jack can’t stop this, Auntie Jane.”
“And I believe you, Charlotte.” The clear implication being that they were all fully aware Charlie could ensure belief and no one liked the idea much. Or at all. “Nevertheless, I’d prefer it if Jack spoke for himself.”
Everyone, physically and digitally, looked at Charlie. Then at Jack. So Charlie looked at Jack, too.
Jack swallowed a mouthful of pie and stacked the empty plate with the others on the floor beside him. “Charlie and I already talked about this, back when we assumed the Wild Powers could stop it. I don’t actually control what I do. Things don’t change because I want them to; they change because I need them to.”
“You need this rock to change, dude.” Carmen reached out and punched him lightly in the shoulder.
“He’s had no training,” Graham reminded them.
“Training.” Auntie Jane leaned in, dark eyes narrowed. “Sorcerers in this family are self-taught.”
“And then killed,” Graham growled.
“But if it were heading right for you?” Heather asked, stretching out and poking Jack in the back with her foot. “If the asteroid was overhead, over your head, and it was clear you’d die in the impact, would you make it disappear? Instinctively.”
“I don’t know. It’d disappear or I would.” Jack shrugged. “I might just return myself to the UnderRealm. I wouldn’t know until it happened.”
“So let’s drop a really big rock on him and see what happens.”
“Not helping, Auntie Bea!” Allie snapped, as Jack began to smoke. “Jack, what about your uncles, the Dragon Lords?”
“My uncles?”
Charlie figured that anyone who hadn’t expected the puff of smoke and had inhaled at the wrong time deserved what they got. How could they not know that Jack’s relationship with his uncles was violent at best and . . . Actually, violent pretty much summed it up.
“My uncles,” Jack repeated, once the coughing had died down, “might be convinced to not hunt the family to extinction should they take refuge in the UnderRealm. Although I’d probably have to kill a couple to get that much out of them,” he added thoughtfully. “Besides, we can’t go to the UnderRealm— Charlie already explained.”
The family turned to look at Charlie. She spread her hands in the universal gesture for well, duh.
“All right, then . . .” Allie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Joe, what about the rest of the UnderRealm?”
With a room full of Gales searching for him—although Auntie Gwen looked right at him, Charlie noted—Joe slowly became visible over by one of the bookcases. “What about the rest of the UnderRealm?”
“The Courts. Can the Courts stop the asteroid?”
Charlie caught Jack’s gaze and opened her mouth to say they’d discussed that, too, but snapped it closed again as Auntie Jane said, “The family does not deal with the Fey.”
No subtext. No undertone. A bald statement of inarguable fact, it smothered every other sound in the room. In all four rooms, Charlie realized.
“We do not interfere with them, and they do not interfere with us. We deal with them if they step over the line here in this world,” Auntie Jane continued, her words etched into the silence, “and that is all.”
“That’s clearly not all,” Auntie Gwen muttered. The entire family held its breath. “Joe . . .”
“Was brought into the family by Alysha,” Auntie Bea replied. It seemed that in this, at least, she supported Auntie Jane.
“Jack . . .”
“The events leading up to his conception and subsequent acceptance into this side of his birthright, were entirely unique.”
Charlie saw Auntie Gwen’s lip curl and braced for impact. Auntie Bea was significantly older, but that didn’t necessari
ly mean more powerful. Only in her twenties, Allie was more powerful than any second circle Gale in memory—and that was the sort of thing the aunties never forgot.
“Gwendolyn Victoria Gale,” Auntie Jane cracked the name like a whip, a third circle naming, not a first.
And all the fight went out of Auntie Gwen.
Fine. Charlie had fight to spare. “In case you’ve forgotten a point I made earlier,” she snapped, “an asteroid is about to have a go at wiping out all life on the planet. If that’s not unique enough for you to find a little . . .”
“Wildness, Charlotte?” You are treading on very thin ice.
“Flexibility, Auntie Jane.” I can swim.
“And should we invite the rest of the world into our councils?”
Charlie jerked her arm free of a cautioning touch—probably Auntie Gwen’s, she was the only woman close enough—and glared at the monitor. “That’s not the same, and you know it.”
“Yes, I do. As I know we do not deal with the Fey.”
“Some of them are already leaving.”
“Good. We deal with this situation as we have with others, within the family.”
“Situation? Seriously? That’s what you’re calling this? You know what? Fine. The family deals with it. When you’ve figured out just how the family is going to keep from dying in less than twenty-two months, you let me know.”
Allie moved toward her, but Charlie shook her head and sidestepped, slipping out the patio door as Auntie Carmen said, “I don’t trust the Fey, present company excepted for the most part.”
There was a single lounge chair left out by pool, the old-fashioned construction of aluminum and nylon tape that had never taken a charm well, next to it a small, round plastic table that had been white before Lyla went at it with her paints. Charlie kicked the table into the pool, gave some serious consideration to sending the chair after it, and sat down instead.
“Stubborn old women . . .”
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. The cold felt clean. Cleansing. Leaning back, she squinted up at the stars and wondered if one of them wasn’t actually a star. She had no idea. She’d never cared about the stars. She cared about phosphor bronze medium strings. About pitchers of draft at Shooters in Thunderbay. About the heartbeat song of the bohdran under “Well Below the Valley.” And for longer than she’d realized she’d cared about Jack. A lot more than she should.
Stars? Not so much.
“It’d serve them right if I Walked away, found a bar, got royally pissed, and picked up a distraction.” Heat charmed into her clothes, Charlie settled in to wait.
“Auntie Bea wants to chain me down at the base of the tower and drop a large rock on me. Just to see what’ll happen.”
Nearly half an hour by her watch. She tipped her head back far enough to watch Jack cross between the house and the pool. “Missing your uncles?”
“Little bit.” He shoved her over and sat beside her. The air between them warmed.
“How mad are they?”
“At you?” He shrugged. “Allie pointed out that you’d been carrying this knowledge longer than any of us and you were due for an emotional break. So they decided to cut you some slack. There’s a ritual in ten days.”
“I know.”
“Auntie Jane’s calling everyone home to take part.”
“Everyone including . . . ?”
“You and me? Yeah. There was a bunch of stuff about using the power we had to hand and that before we went on, we had to know for certain ritual wouldn’t work.”
“Went on to what?” Charlie sighed. The aunties had been pretty definite about not being able to affect the asteroid.
Scales glistened across Jack’s cheeks. “I kind of missed what they said about that.”
“Thinking about ritual.” Not a question. He was seventeen and he still hadn’t spent a ritual in circle.
“Yeah.” He huffed out a small cloud of smoke. “Charlie, I was thinking . . .”
“That explains the smoke.”
“Sorry.” Ears flushed, he fixed the scorch mark on her jeans and started to move away.
She sighed, grabbed his sleeve, and pulled him back beside her. “Joke. What were you thinking about?”
“Why don’t we contact the rest of the family?”
“Trust me, anyone who couldn’t tap in tonight will get the word.” The constant sound of conversation spilling out of the house spiked suddenly. Still incomprehensible—thanks to charms etched in the glass—the emotional emphasis was impossible to ignore. Charlie waited until the volume had dropped back down to a background murmur before saying, “Hopefully not all the words.”
“No, I don’t mean . . . This circle in Calgary, it can’t be the first time the family branched. I mean, Gales didn’t spring up fully formed in southern Ontario and start bossing people around . . .” His voice trailed off into doubt as he shifted just far enough to be able to look into her face. “Did they?”
“No.” And once again she was reminded how much family background Jack had missed learning during his first thirteen years. “As the extended dance version doesn’t do much more than repeat the chorus a billion times, let’s stick with the basic tune: a branch crossed the Atlantic, landed in Newfoundland, circled in, and a couple of hundred or so years later branched into Ontario.”
“That’s basic,” Jack agreed. Golden brows drew in. “You and me, we were in Nova Scotia.”
“Yeah. Your point?”
“That’s pretty close. Why didn’t we check if the family in Newfoundland was still . . .”
“We don’t do that.” When Jack’s frown became a silent demand for more information, Charlie sighed. “Look, we weren’t even Gales until we got to Ontario. Right up until Allie and David, when we branched we changed our name and didn’t look back.”
“But Allie and David wouldn’t cut ties?”
“Technology won’t allow us to cut ties. The world’s gotten a lot smaller than it used to be and every generation, it gets smaller still. This . . .” She widened her gesture until it took in Calgary as well as the house and yard. “. . . is something new. The family’s still working out the rules.”
“Okay but that was before the whole asteroid thing. We could find the other branches of the family.” He said we but Charlie heard you and me. He wasn’t wrong. They could. Probably. They were Wild. Rules didn’t apply. Most rules. All but one rule. She watched him walk to the edge of the pool and stare out over the water for a long moment before turning to face her again. “We should warn them. We should all work together to stop this thing.”
Not could anymore. Should. Charlie sighed. “Jack, do you know what a group of aunties is called?”
He grinned and his eyes flashed gold. “A power struggle?”
“Got it in one.”
“I was kidding.”
“No, you weren’t. I’ve met your uncles.” She waited for him to nod—less actual breathing fire among the aunties, but otherwise the two groups were remarkably similar. “Because all of these aunties have known each other all their lives and Auntie Bea acknowledges deep down that she can’t shove Auntie Jane off top of the charts, we manage. They’re, we’re working out new ways of dealing with each other.” Leaning forward, she caught his gaze and held it. “Now think of another circle that has an auntie in the same position as Auntie Jane. That’s the single point where the two circles will touch. If I had to describe it in one word, I’d say boom.”
“Boom?”
“Boom. By the time the concept of working together to stop the asteroid is even mentioned, there won’t be anything to work with. We can try to save the world, or we can go looking for more family and destroy it before the asteroid hits the blog-sphere.”
“Two Dragon Queens can’t share a territory.”
Charlie spread her hands. “And the
re you go.”
A car drove by. Two blocks down, a small dog yapped out an indignant protest Charlie almost understood. The smell of woodsmoke suggested one of the neighbors had lit a fire in their fireplace. Up in the sky, it was neither a bird nor a plane but imminent death.
“Do they know?” Jack asked. The lounge bowed as he dropped down to sit beside her again, his weight not entirely under control.
“Do the other circles know about the asteroid?” Good question. Charlie thought about it for a moment. “If they even still exist, probably not. You have to admit the chain of events that led to us finding out was . . . unique.”
“But if they have a Seer . . .”
“Would they have a bouzouki player with a friend at NASA? Doubt it.”
“Yeah.” He blew a smoke ring and watched it drift away. “So . . . you and me in ritual. All available power in play.” Another smoke ring. Another moment while they both watched it drift. “What do we do?”
Even if she survived the ritual itself without being flame broiled, Charlie didn’t think she could survive afterward, knowing and not having. “We hope the horse talks.”
“What?”
“Anything can happen in ten days. Maybe even the impossible.” She lifted her feet up onto the lounge and stretched out, Jack radiating heat against her hip. She watched another smoke ring dissipate, a soft gray smudge against a cloudless sky. Watched the stars hide death. Just for the hell of it, she sang one long pure note up into the sky. It slid past the power lines, up over the city’s rooftops, aimed at the star that wasn’t. It was mostly defiance. Although the family had bent a few laws of physics in the past—they’d have bent them half an hour ago had she been in the same province with Auntie Jane—Charlie didn’t expect her voice to . . .
A distant light flickered and began to descend.
“Holy crap.” The lounge creaked and swayed as she jerked up. “I did it!” They weren’t going to die! “It’s coming down! And okay, that’s not great, but if I can bring it down, I can break it up. Break it into pieces small enough they all burn up when they hit the atmosphere. Jack . . .” His arm was warm even through the sleeve of his jean jacket. “. . . look it’s . . .”
