by Tanya Huff
Allie slid into the other chair and picked up the second mug.
“Yes, that’s possible.”
Black. When she mouthed a silent mine at her brother, he nodded.
“I’ll deal with that if it happens.”
The coffee couldn’t have been sitting there for long; it was still at the perfect almost too hot too swallow but cool enough to enjoy temperature.
“Good-bye, Auntie Jane.” David closed his phone and sighed. “They can’t call you, so they’re calling me.”
“About?”
“Last night.You know they felt the working.”
She knew but not on a conscious level. In all honesty, she hadn’t given the aunties a thought. “Are they mad?”
“You’ve shut them out, Allie. What do you think?”
“They’re mad.”
“They’re curious.”
Curious aunties often ended up wondering why the object of their curiosity had stopped moving. Curious was often worse than mad.
“What did you tell them?” Because it was always them; that was the whole point of the aunties.
“I told them there was a bar fight. And that we won.”
“But you didn’t mention…” She flapped her hands.
David’s brows went up, and he was clearly considering a facetious comment about the motion, but after a moment he decided to play along. “I didn’t.You were right.You’re moving into second circle… and I’m not. This is your play, Allie. I’ll back it as long as I can.”
“And when you can’t?”
“Then I hope you’ll take my advice.” He took a long swallow of his own coffee. “Not that you have in the past.”
“Hey! I got a job with that art history degree!”
“Don’t have it now.”
“If I was still at the ROM, I couldn’t have come out here. All for the best, it’s the Gale way. Now, what happened to you last night? No, wait,” she added before he could answer. “Were you just in the store?”
“No. Why?”
She shrugged. “Just a feeling. And something set the yoyos off.”
“The yoyos?”
“They’re sensitive. Who knew.” When he started to rise, she leaned forward and gripped his arm, pulling him back down. “Who or whatever it was is gone now. I checked. Back to what happened to you.”
“Not really any of your business, little sister.”
Allie gave him a level look over the edge of her mug. She was aiming for their mother-lite and figured she hit it when he paled slightly.
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“You know what.” When she raised her brows the tiniest bit, he sighed. “I took care of it. But if you’re going to make a habit of antagonizing Dragon Lords, we need more family out here.”
“If they thought it would get them anywhere, the aunties would send your entire list out here in a heartbeat, hot on breeding your abilities back in before they lose them. Except they’re not going to lose them.” Allie reached out and wrapped a hand around his wrist. “You’re not going anywhere.”
He half smiled. “You won’t allow it?”
Allie didn’t smile back. “No. I won’t.”
His pulse beat hard and fast under the soft pressure of her thumb and his pupils had dilated. “You looked like Gran for a moment.”
“Good.” Touching him had been a necessary risk. She let him go before things escalated. “Because they’re a little afraid of her.”
David turned his hand over and studied the new charm. “Allie…”
“I mean it. They’ll have to go through me.”
“They’re not,” he began. Then he sighed again. “All right. Thank you. Now, breakfast? I’m starved.”
When Allie took the empty cups back to the counter, Kenny looked past her at David, waiting by the door, and said, “Your brother.” Then he returned his attention back to the customer he’d been serving. She waited until he finished, but it seemed he’d said all he had to say.
As they stepped into the store, as the front door closed and locked, Allie heard the back door open. The muscular arm holding her in place against the glass suggested David had heard it, too. When she glanced up at his face, he mouthed: Stay.
So the second circle/third circle thing hadn’t killed the older brother dynamic.
Allie shrugged and indicated he should get to it.
For a big man, David could move quickly and quietly when he wanted to-although since he was starting to show horn, the quietly probably had a bit of an assist.
“Glad to see you, too.” Charlie’s voice sounded a little muffled. “Now put me the fuck down!”
Allie crossed the store almost as fast and considerably less quietly than her brother had, to find David carefully setting Charlie back onto her feet. She heard a noise, suspected she’d made it, and flung her arms around her cousin hard enough to throw them both back against the inside of the back door.
“I was worried.”
“Got that,” Charlie gasped. “And, ow.”
“Ow?” Allie pulled back. Charlie had shadows under her eyes, a shallow scratch on one cheek, and a scorch mark across the front of her borrowed lime-green corduroy jacket. She smelled of sulfur and the Wood.
“Just a couple of bruises. I had an interesting night.”
Sulfur and the Wood and meat lover’s pizza? “So spill.”
“Upstairs.” She bent and picked up her guitar case, left arm pressed against her side, sucking air through her teeth. Before she finished straightening, Allie’d taken it from her. Charlie shot her a grateful smile and added, “I only want to tell this story once so… Holy crap, David. Do you have Batman tucked in those tights with you or are you that happy to see me?”
Allie turned to see that the mirror had dressed David’s reflection in a Superman suit.
“Man of power,” she explained and gave serious thought to taking a picture. Threatening to spread the image among the younger members of the family would give her blackmail material for years. Charlie’s reflection had acquired dragon wings, and Allie was holding the lizard baby again. “It keeps showing me that,” she murmured, as they started up the stairs. “I wonder what it means.”
“Babies… second circle.” Charlie snorted. “Seems obvious to me.”
“Allie, you didn’t…”
She rolled her eyes and shoved David to get him moving again. “Don’t worry. I like Roland and all, but we didn’t make a baby. Give me credit for a little control.” If it had been Graham, her answer might have been different. It seemed she’d had very little control around him right from the beginning.
The thought must’ve shown on her face because Charlie reached out, wrapped her right arm around Allie’s shoulders, and hugged her close.
“We talked about families,” she said softly, too softly for David to hear. “Back when we had that first coffee together. The whole cousins piling out of the woodwork thing came up. He’d lost a big family, six brothers and two sisters plus his parents in a fire, but he had… has lots of cousins, too. I told him I just had the one brother. No sisters.”
She glanced up at David, already on the landing.
“Aunties would have been happier if he was your sister,” Charlie said.
“The aunties would have been happier if he was three or four of my sisters and a brother,” Allie told her. “Is it weird that we talked about kids the second time we ever met?”
“Don’t sweat it, sweetie, it was likely the connection manifesting early.”
“Right,” Allie snorted. “Some connection.”
“He just chose to leave, Allie. He didn’t choose to never come back.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
Charlie shrugged as she moved past her, through the door David was holding open, and into the apartment. “Maybe it should. Work that rebel thing you’ve got going here. Rise and shine, gentlemen!” She’d slid into her bar voice. The windows rattled. Men woke up in Edmo
nton. “I have tales of daring to share!”
Charlie swallowed her last bite of scrambled eggs with fried mushrooms and garlic and sighed happily as she put down her fork. “That’s better. Seems like that pizza was a long time ago.”
“Tales of daring,” Michael prodded, around a mouthful of toast.
She looked around at her cousins and Michael and Joe and figured she’d kept them waiting as long as she could. Which, to be honest, had been about half an hour longer than she thought she’d be able to, but ritual-and the grounding after it-worked up an appetite, and breakfast had proved to be too tempting to resist. “All right.” Pushing her chair out from the table, she picked up her mug and got comfortable. “I left the bar around ten thirty…”
As she stepped out the back door, Charlie glanced up at the sky. Although she honestly believed the Dragon Lords had run far and fast after they’d had their scaly asses handed to them on a platter, there were another nine, so a little caution couldn’t hurt. The rain had passed and the sky was clear, the stars as bright as they ever got over the city’s lights. No triangular shape blotted out bits of the heavens and the only sound she could hear was a distant horn and what sounded like “I Don’t Care” by Fall Out Boy seeping out of one of the cheap apartments bordering the far side of the parking lot. She was vaguely appalled that she recognized it.
The bartender’s station wagon was all that remained to keep the Beetle company. The rest of the band had left with their friends and family pretty much the moment they’d finished the set. Two of them had babysitters to pay off.
She didn’t see him until she was almost at the car and he straightened from where he’d been leaning against the hood. When he tossed his head, throwing long bangs back off his face, his eyes were a brilliant and familiar green.
Instead of his brothers’ faintly ridiculous “I’m a badass” uniform, he wore baggy jeans with a T-shirt and a gray hoodie under a brown wind-breaker. He didn’t look much older than Dmitri, and that helped dim the want down to a manageable level.
As he’d obviously seen her, retreat seemed an unlikely option.
Charlie adjusted the grip on her gig bag and wished she had the guitar out in her hands. “What can I do for you, Ryan?”
He shrugged, hands shoved into his pockets. “You walk in the Wood. I could smell it on you the other night.”
“Yeah, and?”
“There’s something… around.” A glance to either side, brilliant eyes searching the shadows. “Watching and stuff. I see it…” He waved a hand beside his head. “Here. Out of the corner of my eye. It’s gone if I look at it straight. I have been hunting it because I do not trust anything that watches from the edges, but I think it hides in the Wood when I get close.”
When Charlie spread her hands in the universal gesture for Yeah? So?, he rolled his eyes.
“You walk in the Wood.You can take me. I can hunt it down.”
And bring it back and get my brothers to take me seriously, Charlie added silently. Aloud, she said, “How long has this thing been hanging around?”
“Almost two months… No.” Ryan snorted out two streams of smoke and tossed his hair back again. “Not month, week. Thirteen days. I get days. Sun comes up, sun goes down. Weak means not strong. It’s a stupid word for time.”
“It’s week with two ees.”
“So?”
“Never mind.” Brushing past him, close enough to feel the heated air, she opened the door and slid her gig bag into the backseat. It had been about two weeks ago that the shadow had first shown up in the Wood, nearly pushing her off the path when she’d gone to pick up Roland in Cincinnati and later, when she’d tried to get to Allie, flinging her out of the Wood completely. Odds were good her shadow and Ryan’s watcher were one and the same. Straightening, she shoved the seat back and said, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll take you into the Wood to hunt this thing.”
“Oh.”
“Disappointed?”
“I thought you would need to be threatened,” he admitted.
“Hey, you’re plenty scary just standing there.” When he snorted out more smoke, she grinned. “Yeah, I didn’t believe that either. Get in the car and let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Nose Hill. There’s a lot of wild out there, and with something your size in tow, I may need to get a run at it.”
“I am not that much larger than you.”
“In this shape. But we’ll be taking the other shape with us, right? That’s plenty big,” she said when he nodded.
He looked pleased as he got into the car, and Charlie grinned. Apparently size mattered even to Dragon Lords.
Traffic was light at ten forty on a Wednesday, so they made good time. Ryan tried to look like he was holding the handle on the dash because it was clearly there in front of him to be held, but his grip compacted ridges into the plastic.
“There is much of your family’s magic on this vehicle,” he said with forced nonchalance. “Does it make the vehicle safer for the speed it goes?”
“Not really.” She turned onto 14th Street from Memorial Drive. “Most of the charms make it go faster.”
“Oh.”
Laughing now, not a good idea. “First time in a car?”
“Yes. I have never been to the MidRealm before. It is hard for us to do and all the time there are fewer places of power to ease the way.”
“And that’s why Adam commandeered a Fey gate?” Dragon Lord or not, UnderRealm or not, Adam was going to catch high holy hell from the Courts when he got home if he’d been responsible for the breach in security.
“I do not know commandeered, but when he saw what the youngest was doing, he tricked the guard, made him think the gate was closed so that he would leave.” The young Dragon Lord wasn’t exactly babbling, but nerves had definitely loosened his tongue and he seemed to find talking preferable to thinking about his current mode of transport. Charlie was all over that. “We were not all supposed to come, only those who agreed with Adam, but once the others knew the gate was open, there was no one to stop them. Now we are all here, and there is nothing to do but wait and avoid each other until the time for waiting is over and we know for sure who will stand with us.”
“I thought you were the youngest.”
“I am.”
“You said Adam saw what the youngest was doing.”
“No. I did not.”
Charlie could smell the acrid and unforgettable scent of burning plastic. Confirmation wasn’t necessary; she knew what she’d heard. “So, twelve of you, eh? That’s a big family.”
“Thirteen. We have a sister as well. And thirteen is not large. There were many, many more in the clutch, but…” Charlie caught his shrug in the corner of her eye, the move quintessentially teenage boy. “Mother sat for a long time. She got hungry.”
“Your mother ate some of your brothers and sisters?”
“No, my mother ate some of her eggs. They are not brothers and sisters until they hatch. And she only ate two hatchlings. It is hard for us to ignore meat when it is helpless. Our sister…” He snorted. “… she had to be so careful and she was so angry. That was scary. We all were very careful to stay clear after she finished Mother, although Mother was large enough it took time.”
“Finished…?”
“Eating.”
“Right. And your father? No wait, let me guess. Your mother ate him before she started laying the clutch.”
“Yes.You are clever because Adam says your mothers do not do that.”
“So your sister ate your mother before she started laying? Why didn’t she eat the father?”
Ryan shrugged again. “He wasn’t around.”
Smart guy, Charlie acknowledged.
“And there wasn’t much meat on him,” Ryan continued. “Here, cows are good and buffalo is better. Adam won’t allow us to eat people.”
“But not everyone agrees with Adam.”
“He would make them
agree with this. He knows the MidRealm best.”
“He’s probably right anyway.” Charlie turned into the park at the first entrance past John Laurie Boulevard. “We taste like pork. Eat a pig, have the same experience, no one screams at you.”
“Thank you. That is good to know.”
When she turned off the engine, he released the handle, took a deep breath, and nearly filled the car with smoke when he exhaled. “I do not think any of the others have done that!”
“Good for you,” Charlie coughed, all but flinging herself out into the parking lot. Ryan followed more slowly, trying to look like mild asphyxiation had been his intent all along.
“Ryan…” Wiping her nose on her cuff, she tried again. “Ryan, does Adam know you’re with me?”
“He does not keep me. And besides, he proved you were safe when he went to you this morning.”
“Technically, he went to Allie, but yeah, okay, fair point.” Her gig bag smelled a bit like sulfur, but the guitar inside it was fine. She settled the strap over her shoulder and closed the car door, indicating Ryan should do the same. “There’s a path over there leading into the park. Let’s get this show on the road.”
It wasn’t easy getting Ryan into the Wood. Charlie could usually slip in past a couple of bushes, but carrying the weight of a full grown Dragon Lord… although weight wasn’t exactly right. More like essence. Presence? Charlie was pretty damned sure she felt claws on her shoulder and heard wings at one point during the walk, but she kept playing and kept walking. She’d be damned if the Wood was going to keep her out.
Eventually, she learned enough of Ryan’s song that they got in.
“That,” she panted, dropping down onto a log beside the path, “was not fun.”
I didn’t think it would be so hard. Ryan had slipped back into his true form. Charlie could still hear him although his lips didn’t move. Well, his mouth didn’t move. Dragons didn’t actually have lips. You can rest here while I hunt.