by Tanya Huff
Allie adored her, embraced the uniqueness the rest of family used but didn’t exactly approve of, and harbored half-formed thoughts about taming the wildness. Next to Michael, she loved Charlie best.
“Where is Charlie?” Aunt Ruth asked as Maria grabbed herself an apron and a rolling pin.
Charlie was the exception to the rule that all Gale girls cooked.Younger members of the family scared still younger members with whispered stories of chocolate cupcakes gone horribly wrong. And when a cupcake went horribly wrong in the Gale family, the word “horribly” was not an exaggeration.
Allie shrugged, hoping it looked like she didn’t care. “I don’t know. She wasn’t there when I got up.”
“Because you wasted all that time wallowing in self-pity. Charlotte has gone to bring Roland home from Cincinnati,” Auntie Jane added before Allie could protest that she hadn’t been wallowing. Exactly. “That fool Kirby sent him out to get a deposition.”
“Sent him to Cincinnati? Right before May Day?” Aunt Ruth rolled her eyes, the expression strengthening her resemblance to her sister although her eyes were clearly a lighter gray.
“ Charlotte will have him home in time.”
It was possible Charlie could have him home before he left, but that wasn’t the point. When a Gale said he needed time off, he got it. Given the obsidian gleam in Auntie Jane’s eyes during the discussion, Allie actually felt a little sorry for Roland’s boss. Drawing the ire of the aunties was never smart. Alan Kirby had lived in Darsden East his whole life. He should have known that.
“It’s only Cincinnati,” Maria snorted. “They have an airport, you know. Okay, it’s across the river in Kentucky, which is kind of stupid, but why doesn’t he just fly home for the weekend then fly back?”
“No reason why he should.” Auntie Jane’s tone nearly frosted the windows.
“Dad says no one’s seen Granddad for weeks,” Katie said hurriedly, changing the subject before the mood affected the pies.
For a moment it looked like Auntie Jane would refuse to allow the subject changed, then she snorted. “He’ll be here tomorrow.”
Aunt Ruth frowned, slowly unwrapping another pound of shortening, fingertips dimpling the soft brick. “He’s getting wilder.”
“He’ll be here tomorrow,” Auntie Jane snapped. “We can’t replace him. David’s not ready.”
“For what?”
Allie suddenly found measuring dry ingredients fascinating as her mother returned to the kitchen trailed by a clearly unrepentant Delilah. Auntie Jane was convinced that David was destined to be the next head of the family. Her mother was convinced that Auntie Jane was tottering on the edge of senility. David was too powerful, too independent to be tied so definitively to place.
Too like Granddad had been once? Allie wondered.
“David’s not ready for what?” her mother repeated.
As the inevitable argument began, Katie sidled closer and murmured, “You okay?”
Given the concern in Katie’s low voice, Allie figured that sudden flash of fear had shown on her face.
“Don’t worry,” her cousin continued. “Even if David does take over from Granddad, he’s young. Really young. It’ll be years, decades, before…”
“Don’t.” The flour slipped through her fingers like silk. Impossible to hold.
“He gets tied down, it’ll keep him from going all darkside,” Maria said quietly, pulling a stalk of rhubarb from her mouth, the plump curve of her lower lip stained pink.
“He’s not going darkside!”
“He’s powerful.” Maria flipped up a finger as she counted off the points Allie had just made to herself. “He’s a loner…”
“So what? So’s Gran. So’s Charlie more often than not.”
“He’s a male.”
And there was yet another inarguable point. There were times Allie wished she could argue with her family a little more. Of course, right at the moment, they wouldn’t be able to hear her over her mother and Auntie Jane.
“My son is not hoarding power!”
“Oh, and that’s an unbiased opinion, is it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! How could it be unbiased, I’m his mother!”
“Don’t talk to me about mothers! Not when your own mother is careening about the world like a tetherball!”
“What does my mother have to do with my son?”
“Nothing at all.” Bits of dough flew off her fingers, spattering the kitchen like a soft hail as Auntie Jane spread her arms. Those not involved in the argument ducked. “For pity’s sake, Mary, keep up. We’ve moved on.”
A sudden shadow flickering past the window over the sink cut off a response Allie suspected would be memorable.
Muttering how no one should be worried about what the girls were going to add to the pies, Aunt Ruth leaned forward to check it out.
“It’s Auntie Ruby,” she sighed, head twisted to one side so she could see past the upper edge of the window. “She’s found a broom.”
“I told you she was senile!” More dough spattered as Auntie Jane punched the air in triumph. Allie brushed a bit off Katie’s cheek.
Aunt Ruth sighed again. “And she’s cackling.”
—
Charlie moved through the Wood along the path of Roland’s song. Most days she’d have been there by now-in the Wood, the actual distance between Aunt Mary’s porch and Cincinnati was irrelevant. But today…
The path kept skirting the edges of the dark places beneath the oldest trees. Places Charlie’d just as soon not have to cross. Places she shouldn’t have had to go near. Not for Roland.
Reaching back, she tugged her guitar around and strummed a questing chord.
The path shifted onto higher ground.
She picked up her pace and, when her shoulders brushed between the smooth trunks of young aspens, turned to look back the way she’d come.
Shadows had already claimed the path although, in all honesty, she couldn’t say if it was a mulitude of smaller shadows or one large one.
Either way, it wasn’t good.
—
The clerk at the front desk tracked her disapprovingly as she crossed the lobby and Charlie only just barely managed to keep from flipping her the bird. The shadows had dogged her footsteps for the rest of the trip, and all the clichйd lurking had pissed her right off.
She walked on to the elevator and, as the door closed behind her, swung her guitar back around to the front and began to pick a discordant pattern, trying to give the shadows form now she was out of the Wood. There’d been something almost familiar about them-or it-but she just couldn’t…
“So, uh, what floor did you need?”
Startled, she glanced over at the man standing beside the controls, had a vague memory of him being there when she’d entered, and said, “Ten.”
He gave her a smile that said, Well here we are, stuck together in a small space, and nodded down at the place where her hand remained curled protectively over the strings. “Do you play?”
“No,” she told him as the almost familiar slipped away, “I just like to carry a guitar around with me.”
“Right. Stupid question.” Smile faltering slightly, his gesture drew her attention to her reflection in the stainless steel walls. “You know, you look more like the electric than acoustic type.”
She tossed a strand of her blue, chin-length hair back off her face and growled, “Do you have any idea what a battery pack for an amp weighs?”
“Uh… No.”
“Well, there you go then.”
He shuffled back a step and raised his eyes to the numbers flicking by as though seven, eight, nine had suddenly become the most interesting things in his world. Out the door on nine, he turned, opened his mouth, and closed it again as the elevator door slid shut between them.
The fluorescent lights banished all shadows from the elevator.
Charlie kept an eye on the corners anyway.
—
Roland was in 1015, one
of the small corner suites. Charlie knew damned well Alan Kirby hadn’t booked a suite. Roland’s boss was, in the words of Auntie Grace, tighter than bark on a tree. But Roland was a Gale; if there were upgrades to be had, he’d have them.
His door was slightly ajar-obviously he’d been expecting her.
“Charlie, hey!” Roland closed his laptop when he spotted her walking the short hall and began shoving paperwork into his backpack. “Thanks for this. I could have gotten a flight home, but getting back here on Sunday would have been a nightmare.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
He paused. Frowned. “I know you hate playing taxi, but…”
“I hate people assuming I’ll play taxi, not the same thing.” As a general rule, she didn’t mind making life easier for the family, but that did not include being on call for those too stupid to read a calendar and needing a quick trip home.
“Then if you don’t mind my asking, what crawled up your ass and died?”
“What? Oh, sorry.” She crossed the room to the desk, boots making next to no noise on the carpet. “Nothing to do with you. Just some guy trying to be all friendly in the elevator.”
Roland winced. “How badly did you damage him?”
“Not that friendly. Just friendly.”
He ducked away from the punch she aimed at his shoulder. “The horror.”
“It wasn’t him.” A bit of laminate was loose on the edge of the desk. She absently charmed it back down. “There’s something funky happening in the Wood.”
“Define funky.”
“Can’t. If I could, I wouldn’t be so…”
“Cranky?”
“Bite me. Three year olds get cranky.” But she couldn’t stop herself from smiling back at him. Damned Gale boys anyway. “You ready?”
“Well, since your arrival establishes precedent that funky, however funky, is safe-almost.” Laptop secured, he stretched, back cracking. “You know, I could have flown down here Monday. The deposition won’t be ready until first thing Tuesday morning-but Alan was adamant I be here for the final court dates.”
“The aunties are pissed.”
“I think that was his intention.”
“To get the aunties pissed?” Charlie asked, wandering into the bathroom to pocket the tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner. “The man has a death wish?”
Roland shrugged as she came back into the sitting room. “They haven’t done anything obvious in a while.”
“So he’s poking at them with a you-shaped stick? Moron. What the hell is that?”
With the ease of a man who’d grown up with five sisters, he deftly avoided her grab and tucked the glittering pink unicorn into the larger of the pack’s outside pockets. “It’s a present for Lyla. I always bring her something when I get back from a trip.”
“Technically, you won’t be back from this trip until next Wednesday.”
“I’ll bring her something else then.” He looked so sweetly besotted talking about his three-year-old daughter that Charlie gave half a thought to jumping him. Sweater vests or not, he was David’s age, only twenty-eight, and while law might have left him a little physically soft around the edges, none of the Gales had been short-shrifted in the looks department. Rayne and Lucy, Lyla’s mothers, certainly wouldn’t care.
“So, how’s your band doing?”
“Which one?” Charlie wondered, opening what turned out to be a fake chest of drawers and finding the television.
“The New Age techno head banging thing I saw you do at that…” When the pause extended, she turned to see him standing, half into his jacket, and frowning. “… club.”
“We broke up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Really?”
“No.”
And so much for doing Roland. Sweet guy, for a lawyer, but his idea of music stopped and started around John Williams and usually involved light sabers. She tossed the TV remote on the sofa and spent a moment making sure her strings were in tune. Her B had a tendency to flatten in the Wood. “If we leave now, we’ll be back before Lyla gets home from school.”
“I’d like that. Thanks.” He slipped his backpack over one shoulder. “Where do we leave from?”
“Across the street from the hotel. There’s a shrubbery in that little park.”
Holding the suite’s door open for her, Roland frowned. “You can get in from a shrubbery?”
“I can.” She patted his cheek as she passed. “Because I’m just that good.”
—
The shadows dogged their heels all the way home.
—
“Traveling the Wood is never the same twice,” Auntie Jane scoffed. “And all sorts of things lurk by the path.”
“This was something new,” Charlie insisted.
“What part of never the same twice are you having trouble understanding, Charlotte?”
“But…”
“It’s coming up on May Day,” Auntie Ellen pointed out-unnecessarily as far as Allie was concerned, given that the house already overflowed with family and Uncle Richard had just parked his RV in the yard. “Things are stirring.”
Charlie took a deep breath, visibly holding her temper, and tried again. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“You’ve never seen anything like it?” Auntie Jane sniffed.
“It’s new to your vast experience?” Auntie Ellen sneered.
Auntie Muriel snorted but kept her attention on her knitting. Rumor said Auntie Muriel had been quite the traveler in her youth although, as she had most definitely not gone wild, the traveling in question probably had more to do with planes, trains, and automobiles rather than metaphysical pathways with no actual form.
As Charlie tensed up to respond, Allie wrapped one hand around her arm, anchoring her in place, and pointed out the big front windows with the other. “Look!” she said, loudly. “David’s home!” She had the uncomfortable feeling that Auntie Jane’s eyes literally lit up. Auntie Muriel, her knitting tossed aside to spill in a multicolored tangle off the big leather ottoman, led the charge out of the house. “They’ll never admit you know something they don’t.” She pulled Charlie up against her as they watched the aunties part the sea of younger cousins crowded around David’s car. Gale girls, regardless of age, were attracted to power. “Sooner or later, they’ll send someone to check it out.”
“And then claim omnipotence in family matters.”
“Do you care?”
“Yes. No.” Charlie sighed and pushed a fold into the worn rug with the scuffed toe of her boot. “Probably not. They just get up my ass sometimes, you know?”
“They do it on purpose.”
“Well, duh.You going out to see David?”
Watching her brother lift five-year-old Callie up onto one shoulder, Allie grinned and shook her head. “Not this close to May Day; he’s already showing horn.” Even for her, the pull was nearly irresistible. “You go ahead, though.”
“Tomorrow’s soon enough for that.” Charlie bent to pick up her guitar case, paused, and frowned at the spill of yarn. “What the hell is Auntie Muriel knitting?”
“I have no idea.” Allie shuffled a little farther away from the ottoman. “I was afraid to ask in case she offered it to me.”
—
Every now and then, one of the dimmer bulbs from Darsden East or the surrounding county tried to discover just what exactly went on in the Grove. These days, the family was large enough that David-too powerful for any circle but the first-and those who, for one reason or another, preferred to opt out of the ritual entirely, made up a fourth circle of protection for the other three.
In the old days, the aunties dealt with it.
Auntie Ruby swore her dahlias hadn’t been the same since they stopped.
Stepping into the Grove, Allie nudged Charlie with her hip and nodded across at Dmitri, already dealing with both Marie and either Carrie or Ashley. Without clothing it was almost impossible to tell Charlie’s twin sisters apart.
“Boy needs to pace himself,” Charlie snickered. “It’s going to be a long day.”
—
Dusk had painted shadows where shadows weren’t, trying to fool the eye, but experience and training helped him separate the real from the imagined. In his job, the difference, when there actually was one, could be crucial.
Although he knew the glyphs he wore offered more protection from discovery than camouflage and the dubious shelter of a bush ever could, he pushed himself a little more firmly against the ground when he heard the distinctive sound of his targets arriving. Camouflage and a bush provided a physical comfort the glyphs did not and death would be the best he could hope for if his targets spotted him.
Elbows making a tripod with his body, he peered through the scope, the sigils carved into the metal allowing him to see true forms. He had to admit, the horns were impressive.
His employer had been adamant that this was a recon mission, nothing more, but he couldn’t stop himself from lining up a perfect shot.
Finger curled loosely around the trigger, he whispered, “Bang.”
—
One moment Allie was sound asleep, the next she was staring through the curtain of her hair at a water stain on the ceiling and wondering who’d called her. Charlie remained asleep beside her, one arm thrown up over her head, blue hair fanned out against the pale skin. Next to Charlie, Katie frowned, eyes twitching behind her lids as she dreamed.
Easing out of bed so as not to wake them, Allie headed for the window, picking a careful path around the half dozen girl cousins, Samson, and a strange cat who’d crashed out on mattresses on her floor after the ritual had ended. The sun was up, but only just. Given that he’d no doubt spent most of yesterday being chased around by members of the family too young to go to the Grove, Mozart, the rooster, was probably still asleep in the henhouse, allowing the sun to rise without him. One of the barn cats walked purposefully along the rail fence by the lane. Across the south pasture, at the edge of the woods, a stag lifted his head to test the breeze.
