by Tanya Huff
“Leave him alone, Auntie Bea!”
Allie. Stepping up to defend him. Him, but not Charlie. That was weird.
“He’s using sorcery to protect her.”
“Of course he is, he’s hers.”
That sounded like . . .
“Even if they can’t do anything about it.”
...the same stupid shit.
“I thought she was yours,” Auntie Bea sniffed.
He’d never noticed before how completely useless his door was at blocking sound.
“She can pass through any reflective surface.”
It took him a moment before he realized that totally off-topic statement had come from inside his room, then he turned to see Charlie staring at . . .
...a completely innocuous spot on his wall beside his second-season Continuum poster. “Uh . . . Charlie?”
“I can do this,” she told him, her brows nearly touching over her nose. “I can. It’s nothing more than reaching a bigger audience. No, the same audience, but really juicing the arrangement.”
“What are you talking about?”
The argument in the hall paused; they were listening, too.
“Definitely not bigger.” Charlie’s left hand rose up by her shoulder, the fingers curling into familiar patterns. “It’s more . . . like singing louder and rounder at the same time. No, like shaping the music with the rests. Caesurae. Fermata.” She focused suddenly on Jack’s face and, this time, he couldn’t stop himself from stepping back when she grinned. “Birdseye!”
“Don’t you mean bull’s-eye?”
“Not this time. Say something to me.”
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter. Words off the top of your head.”
“Okay, um, I still like you . . .”
The notes she Sang slipped between the words.
“. . . more than I should.”
Alone in his room, he sighed, and opened the door. “She’s gone.”
As Auntie Bea brushed past him, Allie pulled out her phone.
“Mama Mia” rang out from the floor, muffled by a fold in the duvet.
“Gone,” he repeated. Then added as Auntie Bea turned, “Archibald? Since when?”
Breathing heavily, Charlie sagged against the trunk of an ash, and tried to pull in all the wandering bits of her. She felt like she’d gone through a screen. Specifically, through the holes in the screen. The screen was fine. She was . . . probably okay. “What the hell was that all about?” she snarled, having found the bit that was pissed off at being abandoned.
“Professional development.” Auntie Catherine stood and twitched her skirt into place. “As Auntie Ruby would say, Charlotte, you’re lazier than a pet coon. You’d have never gotten there on your own. You wander the world like a metaphysical hobo, playing your music, allowing my granddaughter to call you to heel in her bed, wallowing in the angst of a perpetually broken heart . . .”
“I am not wallowing!”
Auntie Catherine opened her mouth, closed it again, and nodded. “You’re right. You’re not wallowing. I apologize. The rest stands. You’re capable of so much more than you attempt. You accept your boundaries without ever testing them.”
She felt like she’d been playing three-chord songs her whole life. “You could have told me,” Charlie muttered, stripping off the gig bag before she forgot it wasn’t actually a part of her—two arms, two legs, one gig bag holding a guitar and clean underwear.
“Obviously I did tell you, or you wouldn’t be here. You’re welcome.” And as half a dozen trumpets blew a fanfare, she stepped out of the Wood.
The really annoying thing about the fanfare, Charlie admitted, was that she’d provided it. Unintentionally. Inadvertently. Without meaning to, even, but it was all her.
“2008 NBA finals, game six, Celtics and the Lakers.” Auntie Bea sat down beside Jack on the sofa, hands curled around a half-finished afghan.
The afghan was crochet, not knitting, Jack noted. He didn’t relax. A crochet hook, while not as aggressive as knitting needles, could be a weapon in the right hands. Auntie Bea’s hands with her square-cut nails, the small scars on her knuckles, and the smudged tattoo at the base of her thumb looked about right.
“After a rocky first quarter,” she continued, “the Celtics dominated the rest of the game. Final score was 131 to 92, largest margin of victory ever in a championship winning game. I won twelve hundred dollars and replaced the transmission in the van. Three half-bloods on the Celtics that year. Damn, but they can play.” Her smile grew contemplative. “And I do mean they can play.”
Jack looked across the room at Allie, who shrugged and kept folding laundry. When Auntie Bea pointedly cleared her throat, he turned his attention back to her.
“What I’m saying is, you may have hit on the one thing they’d actually want to save. How did they react?”
“They poisoned a piece of pie. Although,” Jack frowned, “she might have intended it for her brother. Am I in trouble?”
“For going along with Charlotte’s plan to speak to the Courts? No. How could you be expected to say no?”
“It wasn’t her plan. It was our plan.”
Auntie Bea ignored him. “For shielding her? How could you know any better?”
“Charlie doesn’t make my decisions for me.”
“I’m sure that’s what you think.” She held up a hand before he could respond, the double strand of green-and-yellow yarn looped around her fingers drawing Jack’s gaze. “Given the circumstances, you can’t think clearly with Charlotte near.”
Okay, maybe he was a little distracted every time she touched him, or was in the same room, or breathed the same air, but . . .
“And given that she’s feeling everything you are and acting as the responsible party, she’s not thinking clearly at all.”
He supposed that was fair, but . . .
“No one ever wants to see family go through this kind of thing.”
Well, duh, but . . .
“Fortunately, you’re young enough you can . . .”
“Jack!”
Allie’s voice seemed to come from very far away.
“Look away from her hand.”
Her hand? Was there a hand behind the yellow and green?
“Now, Jack!”
Eyes watering, he jerked back.
“I can’t believe you even attempted that!”
Jack had never heard Allie so angry. One of Graham’s shirts had begun unweaving itself in her hands, threads wafting to the floor and reassembling into a pale blue doll with white button eyes. “Attempted what?” he demanded. That was one freaky doll.
“The yarn was a charm,” Allie told him, eyes locked on Auntie Bea. “She was getting into your head. It sounded like she was trying to bury your feelings for Charlie.”
“Why not? They’ll never be acted on. Charlotte has her faults, we all know that, but that’s a line she’d never cross. He’ll be significantly better off without them. We need clear heads if we’re going to survive the impact.”
His head slammed into the ceiling.
“Jack!”
“Sorry.” He hadn’t realized he’d changed. Back in skin, he helped Allie up, frantically patting at her smoldering clothes. “Are you okay? Please be okay!”
“Hey.” She grabbed his face, her hands cool against his jaw. “You haven’t raised so much as a blister on me since you’ve been here. I’m fine. You startled me, that’s all.”
“I’ve burned Charlie.”
“You and Charlie have a different relationship.”
“They don’t have a relationship at all and they never will. Charlotte realizes that, and he’s too young to know what he wants.”
“He’s standing right here!” Only Allie’s touch kept him from changing again. “You can’t just do
something like that!”
“Oh, can’t I?” Auntie Bea set the afghan aside and stood. “He’s a Gale and the family comes first. For the family’s sake I can . . .”
“The Ride of the Valkyries” rang out from Charlie’s phone where Jack had tossed it on the coffee table. From Allie’s phone on the kitchen counter. From Auntie Bea’s phone in her knitting bag.
“It’s Auntie Jane.”
“That’s not my ring for Jane,” Auntie Bea muttered digging through the balls of yarn.
Concentrating on fingers instead of claws, Jack picked up Charlie’s phone. “Hello?”
“You had a busy night, Jack, you must be hungry.”
Right on cue, his stomach growled.
“Go get something to eat.”
“Jane?”
The phones did conference calls? Auntie Bea in both ears was twice as much Auntie Bea as he wanted to hear. Figuring Auntie Jane didn’t need to hear from him or she wouldn’t have told him to leave, he silently and carefully set Charlie’s phone back on the coffee table, placed a pale blue, plush moose on top of it, and headed for the door. He’d leave from the roof, no need to bother with clothes. When he glanced back, Auntie Bea had turned away but Allie waved him on, her smile looking more like gritted teeth. Behind her, the clock on the microwave ran backward.
“The Courts chased it into the harbor.”
Charlie turned away from watching the Boston skyline grow smaller in the distance and squinted at the dark-haired, middle-aged woman who’d walked over to stand beside her at the rail. Even bundled into a heavy parka, her proportions were subtly wrong. The harmonics of her voice made Charlie think of fish—and not in a beer-battered with fries kind of way.
“It doesn’t mind the cold,” she continued, her eyes locked on the water, “because it usually lives in the deep trenches, rising only to hunt. Yesterday, the Courts came through an undersea gate riding hippogriffs—looking, I feel obliged to point out, like the worst kind of fantasy poster cliché—and herded it here. It doesn’t like the iron, or the vibration from all the engines, but every time it tries to leave, they chase it back . . . There!”
The curve barely glimpsed for a second below the waves, a lighter blue/gray against the dark water of the bay, could have been mistaken for a whale.
“It’s pretty tired right now; they forced it to travel a considerable distance in a short time, but, eventually, it’ll get angry enough it’ll go after a boat and people will die. Nothing the Courts enjoy more than mass hysteria. We’ve had people out on the water since it was spotted. On the ferry . . .” She patted the metal railing with a web-fingered hand. “. . . on our own boats. We might be able to lure it away from an attack. What are you here to do, Gale girl?”
“Fucked if I know,” Charlie muttered. She couldn’t Sing underwater. “I don’t suppose you know where I could get my hands on a waterproof sound system?”
To her surprise, the Selkie turned toward her and smiled.
* * *
“Are you sure they won’t miss this stuff?” Charlie stumbled and grabbed for the edge of the cabin as the chop that had been unnoticeable on the ferry tossed the small Woods Hole Institute boat around like a cork.
“No, we’re good. I do a lot of independent work, so I’m always signing acoustic equipment out. I’ve been working on communication among phoca vitulina.”
“Say what?”
“Harbor seals,” Dr. Malan explained.
“Okay, then.” Charlie was still having a little trouble getting her head around the whole Selkie with a doctorate thing. At least it was in Marine Biology not something like, oh, eighteenth century English Pastoral Poetry because that, that would be too weird.
Smiling, she handed Charlie the microphone. “I assume you know how to use this?”
“I may have hit a Karaoke bar a time or two.” A heartfelt rendition of “There’s No Place Like Home”—a sea serpent cried out for a classic—gave the serpent an imperative suggestion the Courts couldn’t stop. Although Charlie hoped they’d try.
“He wouldn’t have understood the words,” Dr. Malan pointed out when she finished.
“Doesn’t matter. Music’s about emotion, and he understood that.”
The sudden patch of rough water near the mouth of the harbor might have been a breaching minke, but Charlie preferred to believe it was a member of the Court getting his skinny ass handed to him by a giant snake.
“I was young when we left the UnderRealm.” Dr. Malan paused, hands still on a half coiled cable. “You weren’t singing to me, but I suddenly found myself wanting to see the great ocean again.”
“Yeah. About that . . .”
“Katie . . .” Jack lifted his hands before the keys started melting. Graham had warned him he’d be taking Auntie Carmen to her yoga class if he destroyed another keyboard. “. . . how do you spell coerced?”
“Spellcheck.”
He spun around to face her, the ancient chair releasing a sigh of air that smelled like the inside of an old running shoe. Graham said the furniture destroyed by the aunties while searching for Jack’s father had been replaced from a secondhand store, but, as Jack had grown more used to the way the MidRealm worked, he wondered if what Graham really meant by secondhand store was dumpster. “It thinks I mean corrosion.”
That drew Katie’s attention off her monitor and she frowned across the office. “How can you spell coerced so badly it thinks you mean corrosion? And what are you doing?”
“Graham gave me two column inches to write up the Siren thing in Winnipeg for the paper.”
“Because he feels sorry for you and Charlie?”
“Because I was there.” And because he had to get away from Auntie Bea. And because if Charlie wanted him to deal with any weird happenings in the area, the office of the Western Star was the best place to catch an early heads up. Weird and freaky tabloids by definition kept a close eye on the weird and freaky.
“Right. Did you get a grainy out-of-focus and/or drastically pixelated photo?”
“No . . .”
“Then it doesn’t count.”
“So it’s a pity assignment,” he growled, rolling his chair back from the big metal desk.
“Jack, sweetie, it’s two column inches. He doesn’t feel that sorry for you. So . . .” She waved a hand in his general direction. “. . . knock off the smoke signals before the sprinkler system kicks in again.”
“I can’t change the way I feel.”
“I know.”
“Neither can Charlie.”
“I know. But in seventy years, unless we all buy it in the next two . . .”
Even without Charlie’s ears, Jack could hear the bitterness mixed with fear in Katie’s voice. It made him feel like he was eavesdropping on something private and he wondered if Charlie felt that way all the time. Or if privacy wasn’t something Gale girls worried about.
“. . . either way, she’ll be dead and you’ll be free so I, personally, feel sorry for Charlie. It’s her whole life, however long that life happens to be, it’s a small fraction of yours.”
“You think I’m ruining her life?” No one else had put it like that. He’d been stuck on how her constant refusal to break the rule was messing up his life. And hers.
“I think . . .” Katie sighed and stared at him for a long moment. “I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose,” she said at last. “Now, open a window and let the smoke out. Some things in here, like me, don’t react well to being sprayed with a few hundred liters of water.”
Jack hauled himself up onto his feet. He was ruining Charlie’s life. She’d never said he was ruining her life. She never hesitated about telling him when he pissed her off. Did she not know? Or worse, was she lying to him? Charlie could tell a lie even the aunties would believe. Would she lie if she thought she was protecting him? Sure she’d agreed that t
he whole situation, the liking each other too much, sucked, but there was a world of difference between sucked and ruined.
The window was stuck.
His father’s protection hexes had long since been removed, but they’d warped the frame.
Claws hooked under the lower lip, he put his back into it. The window slammed open. Cracked. Before he could announce it had been an accident, a pack of Pixies slammed into his chest.
A whole pack of them hurt, moth-sized or not. Jack stumbled back, braced himself on his tail, and winced as all but one of the Pixies circled his head, shrieking. Message delivered, they swooped back outside, ignoring the Pixie who’d been stunned by the impact. Jack scooped it up off the floor, but Katie snatched it out of his hand before he could decide what to do with it.
“I’m not eating them anymore,” he muttered, rubbing his chest.
She took it to the window and, as its wings started to move, first slowly then into the familiar blur, she gave it a gentle toss into the air. “Little bastard!”
“Bit you, didn’t it?”
“Shut up. What did they say?” she asked around the finger in her mouth.
“There’s an iceberg in Lethbridge.”
* * *
“There’s a mention of a freezer malfunction at a meat processing plant.” Katie glanced up from the laptop. “Happened right before dawn and it’s still so iced up they can’t get into it. There’s no report of injuries.”
“Iced-up meat fridge.” Jack raised one hand, palm up. “Iceberg.” And the other. “Close enough.”
“You think the Pixies were telling you about a freezer malfunction in Lethbridge?” she asked as he leaned forward to read over her shoulder. “I thought packs of Pixies never left their territory.”
“They don’t.”
“And their territory’s only about a square kilometer.”
“If that. But news spreads fast from pack to pack. Only trouble is, there’s a few hundred packs between here and Lethbridge . . .”
“One pack per kilometer makes two twelve.”
For someone who worked at a freaky happenings tabloid, she was way too fixated on accuracy. “Yeah, that’s what I said. Filter information through a hundred packs and the end result is about as accurate as what you’d get from preschoolers on a sugar high playing telephone.”
