by Tanya Huff
Auntie Carmen nodded. “If we concentrate on saving the family, the family survives. If we try to save everyone, everyone dies.”
Charlie would have pointed out that was a pretty fucking dismal way of looking at things, but since it was Auntie Carmen, that went without saying. “Am I asking you to try and save everyone? No. I’m telling you that you can’t stop me from trying.”
Auntie Bea straightened, shoulders squaring, chin rising. “Are you challenging me, Charlotte?”
“We haven’t enough time to split our resources,” Auntie Gwen said hurriedly as Allie’s hand closed around Charlie’s arm. “We need your power on our side, Charlie.”
Oh, sure. It was Charlie when they needed her. “I’m not taking sides!”
“Because you’re Wild and unconstrained?” Auntie Bea growled. “Another way of saying irresponsible.”
“If you want Wild,” Charlie began. Allie’s grip tightened. Two years of baby lifting had made her a lot stronger than she looked.
“And speaking of Wild, Jack should be here.” Auntie Bea glared around as though she could find him in the shadows. “We’re well aware of who actually spoke to the Courts. Where is he?”
“He’s sleeping,” Allie answered before Charlie could lie. And she would have lied for Jack. “He flew to Winnipeg and back last night to take care of a Siren.”
“Get him.”
“He’s exhausted.”
“And he wouldn’t be if he hadn’t agreed to contact the Courts for Charlotte.”
“He didn’t do it for me,” Charlie said. “We decided together.”
“Together?” Auntie Bea rolled her eyes and the words dripped disdain. “You’re thirty, he’s seventeen, and he would do anything for you.”
Charlie breathed in. Breathed out. Let nothing at all leak into her voice. “Are you saying I took advantage of him?”
Eyes locked on Auntie Bea, Charlie felt Allie release her and step back, reaching past her to pull Graham away, quieting his protest with a soft, “Not now.”
Auntie Bea laced her fingers together, eyes beginning to darken.
“Bea.” Auntie Gwen’s voice barely managed to break the silence. “In this family, Jack’s an adult. He’s fully capable of taking responsibility for his own decisions.”
“If he’s an adult, he should be here,” Auntie Trisha pointed out a little too emphatically.
Auntie Carmen stood. “I’ll go get him.”
Charlie heard Auntie Carmen’s clothing rustle as she walked toward the door. Heard the soft sound of her crepe soles against the hardwood. Heard metal move against metal as the door opened. Heard the difference between hardwood and tile as she walked along the hall to Jack’s bedroom.
Allie said something, but she wasn’t talking to her so Charlie didn’t listen. And she didn’t look away from Auntie Bea.
Heard another door open. Heard the strong, slow beat of Jack’s heart. Heard hers slow to match it. Slow, but pounding so hard she had to clench her fists to contain it.
“I can’t wake him,” Auntie Carmen said when she returned. “He’s fine, I checked, but he’s too deeply asleep to wake. It’s a dragon sleep, not a Gale sleep.”
“Wake him,” Auntie Bea said.
“No.” It was as definitive a no as Charlie could make it. A gauntlet of denial thrown at Auntie Bea’s feet.
Are you challenging me, Charlotte.
You’re fucking right I am.
Auntie Bea flinched as though she’d been struck, as though Charlie’s response had physical form. Then she drew in a deep breath and snarled, “You remind me so much of Catherine right now.”
“Do I?”
“She thought she was too big for the family as well.”
Charlie felt Allie’s fingertips brush her arm, but she’d started moving before Allie’d reached out and was halfway to the door before she heard her name.
“Let her go,” Auntie Gwen advised as Charlie grabbed her gig bag in one hand, tucked her boots under her arm, and yanked her jacket off its hook. “Let them cool down a little.”
“I do not need to cool down, Gwendolyn. I . . .”
Charlie slammed the door on Auntie Bea. Heard the boys start to cry and winced. Consequences. But Allie and Graham would be fine. Allie anchored second circle and she’d stood up to the aunties for Charlie’s sake before. And if the aunties tried to use either Jack or Graham for leverage, they’d be reminded of who’d sent Jack’s mother home. Oh, yeah, Allie could handle the aunties.
But Charlie couldn’t stay. Not if she ever wanted to come back.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs to pull her boots on. Glanced at the mirror as she passed to see two golden dragons. With little experience judging the age of dragons, she assumed that the length of the mustaches meant one of the Jacks was significantly older. “If wishes were horses,” she muttered. The mirror’s heart was in the right place, but seeing what she couldn’t have wasn’t helping.
A familiar voice drew her gaze into the store. Elbows on the glass counter, Joe watched Dan do looping tricks with a pair of yoyos. Dan was definitely cleaner than he’d been and looked to be wearing about half the clothes. He glanced up at her, frowned, and said, “Remember the bears, Charlie.”
When Joe turned toward her, she tried for a sympathetic smile. The look on his face suggested she was a little pitchy. “Don’t go upstairs for a while.”
He nodded toward the painting of Elvis on black velvet. “You’re not the first to be telling me that.”
* * *
Charlie stepped out of the ornamental border and dropped down on the teak lounge next to Auntie Catherine’s. “You Saw this.”
“Can you think of another reason I’d be sitting by a hotel pool at six in the morning? Alone,” she amended after a moment. She nodded at the glass-topped table between them. “The coffee’s yours.”
The cardboard cup had been charmed to stay hot. Fortunately, Charlie could care less about how long ago it had been brewed. “This isn’t Vegas. Where are we?”
“Los Angeles. There’s a singer/songwriter I enjoy who’s playing at the Hotel Cafe on Friday and I dislike changing time zones at the last minute.” Her bracelets chimed softly as she twitched a fold of her batik skirt then chimed significantly louder at a get on with it gesture. “So, talk.”
Charlie pulled off the lid and stared at her reflection in the coffee. “Auntie Bea said I was like you, too big for the family. And now I think of it . . .” She looked up to see Auntie Catherine watching her, wearing what seemed to be an interested expression. “. . . that’s a weird way of putting it. Too big?”
“Our circle is larger . . .”
“Oh, dear lord, I feel a Disney song coming on.”
“. . . making the family a subset of the Wild,” Auntie Catherine continued, ignoring her. “Socrates is a cat. All cats are not Socrates.”
Fighting her way out of a sudden flashback to grade eight math, Charlie frowned. “They’re Socrates and we’re the cat?”
Auntie Catherine sighed and crossed her ankles. She was wearing opalescent silver-gray nail polish the same shade as her hair. “It isn’t time for you to be on your own yet,” she said, avoiding the question.
“And yet you’re always after me to . . . How did you put it? . . . slip Allie’s leash.”
“This isn’t about Allie. Go home.”
Because it was, by auntie standards, more of a suggestion than a command, Charlie returned a less than definitive answer. “I can’t.”
“You can. I Saw you there.”
“I don’t care.” She finished the coffee and crushed the cup. “I’m not going to be tamed by Auntie Bea.”
“On the one hand, good for you.” Bracelets chimed again. “On the other hand, she’s frightened. They all are. The asteroid is outside their circles, and they don’t wa
nt the world to end any more than you do.”
“I doubt that,” Charlie snorted.
“Well, they don’t want their world to end,” Auntie Catherine acknowledged. “It amounts to much the same thing.”
“There’s a lot of people in that qualifier.” She watched dawn tint the ripples in the pool pink and orange. “I’m not ready to stop trying to save them.”
“You’ve made that quite obvious. If you’d pressed your point, Bea couldn’t have stopped you. All four of them working together might have been able to, but I’m not sure they’d have realized that in time. I’m not sure Gwen wouldn’t have stepped away in the end.”
“I have never used my voice against the family.”
“Of course you haven’t. Isn’t that what I just said?”
Her half smile looked entire false. “Did you challenge Auntie Jane? Is that why you left?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Charlotte. I’ve challenged her authority on numerous occasions, but I’ve never challenged her. I play the long game and my sister is as capable of holding a grudge as my granddaughter. Someday, when I’ve Seen enough, I’m going to want to go home.” To die. For a moment, Auntie Catherine looked old. “But that’s me.” The moment passed. “You, however, you need to stop sitting around, watching your ass spread, and feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I’m . . .”
“I still haven’t Seen the impact.”
The words dropped between them like pebbles dropped down a well. Charlie listened to the echoes for a while, then she said, “So there’s still hope.”
“There’s always hope, Charlotte, that’s the point of the story.”
“Yeah, well my story’s a little more complica . . . Oh, crap!” The lounge rocked back as she stood, scraping against the concrete tiles loudly enough to flush a pair of birds from the shrubbery. “I told Jack I wouldn’t leave again without talking to him first.”
One hand raised to shade her eyes, Auntie Catherine grabbed the open edge of Charlie’s jacket with the other, her grip strong enough that her fingers dimpled the leather. “I find it interesting that mentioning hope leads you to Jack. And Jack, if anyone, should understand trouble with relatives.”
“I’m betting Auntie Bea has the courtyard staked out, waiting for me to come back.” Charlie refused to be drawn into a discussion of Jack and hope because there wasn’t any. Nor was she going to mess up the fragile relationship they’d managed to balance between friendship and the happily ever after they couldn’t have by talking about it with Auntie Catherine. “Can you take me through the mirror in his room?”
“Alysha has me blocked. I can’t get into Calgary.”
That wasn’t a no. “You don’t need to. Just point me in the right direction and give me a shove.”
She smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle in her skirt. “Alysha will know you’re back.”
Still not a no. “I’m not worried about Allie.”
“Given the block, it’s possible that the others will feel the way open and once they’ve pinpointed the location . . .”
“I won’t linger.” Charlie took a deep breath and was very, very careful not to let anything that might possibly be considered coercion leak into her voice. “Please, Auntie Catherine.”
“Why not. I have nothing planned until Friday.” I want to help, but I’ll be damned if I let you see that.
Charlie pretended she didn’t hear the subtext. Safer that way.
Tossing her braid over her shoulder, Auntie Catherine stretched, slipped into the Italian leather sandals sitting beside the lounge, and walked to the edge of the pool. “I’ll meet you in the Wood.”
Then she stepped into the water.
And disappeared.
“Okay . . .” Charlie picked up her guitar and stepped back into the ornamental border. “. . . that was unexpected.”
“It’s a reflective surface, Charlotte.” Auntie Catherine looked wilder in the Wood. And completely dry. “If I can be Seen, I can pass through it.”
“Then you didn’t need the viburnum you planted in the courtyard,” Charlie realized.
“I knew that before I got to Calgary.”
“Why were they . . .”
“For you, of course.” The idiot was too obvious to qualify as subtext. “Now, let’s go reassure your dragon.”
His name. Charlie’s voice. Jack snapped from sleep into full consciousness.
“Whoa! Flame down, kiddo.”
“Sorry. I thought . . .” Actually, he didn’t know what he’d thought. Suspected he hadn’t. Reaching out, he repaired the sleeve of her jacket and the edge of the gig bag. “How long was I out?”
“Not very long. A couple of hours.”
“Okay, that explains why I still feel like I belly flopped off a cliff. Onto gravel.” He shuffled back, using his elbows to squash the pillows into shape behind him. “What’s wrong?”
“The aunties are pissed we told the Courts.” She shifted position on the edge of his bed, frowned, and shrugged. “Kind of understandably given the way it turned out. Anyway, Auntie Bea’s on the warpath, so I’m not going to be around much for the next little while.”
“If she’s trying to . . .”
Hand on his chest, she pushed him back onto his pillows. “She’s not. But I might if I stay. They’re all on edge because of the asteroid, and since they can’t push at it, Auntie Bea’s pushing at me.”
The Gales didn’t work the way dragons did. If a dragon took out a more powerful dragon, they became the dragon to beat. If Charlie took out Auntie Bea, the Gales would close ranks against one of their own who upset the order of things and the line between Wild and too different to belong was already pretty narrow. “And your impulse control sucks.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
They realized her hand was still resting on his chest at the same time. Jack grabbed for it, but Charlie pulled free.
“. . . I’m using it all for other things.”
“You don’t have to.” When her brows rose, he sighed. “Okay, whatever. If you’re not going to be around, what’re you doing to do?”
“Keep trying to find a way to stop the asteroid. And deal with the mess the Courts are causing.”
“And what am I going to do?”
“Same thing. We’ll use Winnipeg as your perimeter. You deal with everything closer than Winnipeg and I’ll do damage control farther out.” She cocked her head, obviously listening to something he couldn’t hear, and began speaking faster. “You won’t be able to reach me for a few days, but only until ritual. If I show up and join in, all will be forgiven.”
Jack still couldn’t hear what Charlie heard, but Auntie Bea was close enough now he could catch her scent, even through the closed door. He’d never smelled ozone so strongly. “It’s that easy?” he asked. If Charlie was ignoring the threat, he could ignore it. For a while, anyway.
Her answering smile was all stage presence. It looked sincere, but he’d seen it before. “It’s ritual, and I can rock the hell out of third circle.”
The bed vibrated when Auntie Bea hit the door. Charlie’s charm held but only just. Jack slapped up the grid he used to keep Allie out when the last thing he needed was her being mother-y all over his space. There was a lifetime between thirteen and seventeen and, as they put it in the MidRealm, he had some issues with mothering. “When did you charm my door?”
“Before I woke you up.”
“Charlotte Marie Gale, open the door! Now!”
“She sounds really angry.”
Her smile softened, sliding closer to truth. “I have it on good authority she’s afraid but finds anger a more fulfilling emotion.”
That sounded reasonable, he guessed, but worrying about Auntie Bea’s anger beat worrying about ritual. Jack didn’t want to think about Charlie rocking anything that didn’t involve him.
He stared past her at the end of the bed, found no answers in the lumps his feet made under the quilt, and finally glanced up at her face, trying to look as though it didn’t matter. “Should I warn Cameron? About you being in the ritual?”
Her expression slid under his skin and burned. “No need.”
And Jack remembered he was expected to participate in this ritual as well. “Charlie . . .”
Shaking her head, Charlie stood and shifted the straps of her gig bag. If it looked like she was unsure of what she was denying, he wasn’t sure what he was asking so, in a way, they were even. “I’ve got to go.”
Which was when he realized his room was a little short of greenery. “How?”
“I can tear myself away, trust me.”
“No, I mean . . .” He nodded toward the door. “You can’t go down the courtyard. She’s waiting right outside.”
“Jack Archibald Gale, you do not want to get in the middle of this, young man!” The door vibrated with the force of Auntie Bea’s pronouncement. “And she is the cat’s mother!”
Charlie glanced toward the mirror, took three steps sideways, and waved at her reflection. Her reflection waved back, nothing more or less than what it seemed. “Auntie Catherine can’t break the surface of the mirror to pull me in. Fucking shit!”
“Allie’s barred her.” The quilt slid to the floor as he threw himself out of bed. “She knew that before she sent you to Calgary.”
Charlie whirled to face him. He almost backed up, pushed by the intensity. Almost. “Say that again.”
“She knew that before she sent you to Calgary?”
“She knew she didn’t need the viburnum before she got to Calgary.”
“Sure, whatever.” Jack didn’t see the connection, but he’d seen Charlie tap out that same complicated rhythm on her thigh lots of times over the last four years, white noise to help her put the pieces together. “Look, I could go out the window, get bigger and you could jump. We ride off into the sunset. Well, you ride. I fly.”
“Shhh. Thinking.”
“You are reaching the end of my patience, Jack Archibald Gale!” The grid over the door flared orange. The varnish began to bubble.
