by Tanya Huff
“It’s me.”
It wasn’t. But it was. “It may take . . .”
“Immortal. I’ve got time.” The smoke puffed out again, and he swallowed. Unless his tells had changed, he was about to ask her a question he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to. She took a deep breath of her own. “Charlie, what happened to the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale?”
Not the question she’d expected. Although not entirely surprising. “Long story.”
The underbrush rustled. Auntie Ruby giggled.
“Okay, short story,” Charlie amended. “I’ll tell you later.”
* * *
The moment they stepped out of the willows on the riverbank across from the zoo, Charlie’s phone rang.
Jack flinched and muttered, “Didn’t miss that.”
“Auntie Jane,” Charlie told him, glancing at the screen. She tossed the phone over her shoulder into the river. “Don’t want to know.” Didn’t want to discuss it. Not until all the loose ends had been neatly tied and clipped. “So this is the day Jack . . . you, disappeared. I woke up and you were gone.”
He hadn’t gone yet. She could feel him . . . them . . . in the part of her heart that was his . . . theirs. It made the memory of the loss all the more painful.
“Ow.”
Given the muscle sheathing his arm, no way her punch could have hurt him. “So, go.” It seemed Singing them out of the Wood had roughed up her throat again. And made her eyes water. “Convince yourself to go back to the UnderRealm and learn from the Courts for twenty years.”
“Charlie.”
She was not going to look at him. He could wait for the rest of his immortal life. It looked like that clump of goldenrod wasn’t quite dead. Way to hang on there, goldenrod.
“I have to go because I’ve already gone. He has to go. I don’t intend to ever leave you again.”
“You’re leaving me right now,” she muttered, actually heard herself, and winced. Heat blooming across her cheeks and up her ears, she turned to face him. “Sorry. That was self-indulgent at best and petulant at worst.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Only one of them rhymes with flatulent, but the point is, it’s not about me.” She ran her hand back through her hair and frowned at the amount the breeze gathered up and took away. A quick charm and individual hairs flared in the air like a flock of fireflies—it wasn’t a good idea to leave body bits lying around. “Because if it was about me,” she continued as the ash drifted to the ground, “it’d be about a grilled cheese sandwich and a plate of sweet potato fries. Go. Tell yourself what you have to in order to make this work.”
“Are we okay?”
“You and me?”
He cocked his head, a dragon movement translated to skin. “I don’t see another you and me standing here, do you?”
“We’re . . . Jesus, Jack, don’t you think are we okay is a little premature? We’ve been apart for twenty years, we’re strangers.”
“Look in my eyes and tell me that.”
“Seriously?”
His hands completely engulfed her shoulders. Charlie wasn’t used to feeling petite. It was strange although not entirely unpleasant. “Look in my eyes and tell me we’re strangers.”
Closer to his pupils, his eyes were a lighter amber although that might’ve been only the contrast between the amber and the black. His lashes were as long and thick as she remembered, tipped with gold. In them, she could see the absolute certainty that they were meant to be together. In spite of that, they were not the eyes of a seventeen year old. There were faint lines at the corners, and she could see the top point of the scar. He had history on his face they hadn’t shared. “Eye-to-eye, Jack, we’re strangers.” Before he could speak, she pressed her palm against his chest and nearly got distracted by the muscle. The steady beat that matched her own pulled her back. “Heart-to-heart, though, we’re okay.”
He wrapped his hand around hers, bent his head, and kissed her fingertips. Twenty years in the Courts, she reminded herself as he backed up and changed. What else had they taught him?
Except for the mustaches which were now a good meter and a half long and curled at the ends, his dragon form had changed less visibly than skin. He was still enormous, golden, and powerful—only more so. “While I’m there, I’ll stop the petty mischief the Courts have been pulling in the MidRealm.”
“It stopped when Jack, young you, disappeared.”
A great many teeth flashed. “I know.”
Of course he did. That was when he’d been there. In the Courts. With his younger self. “So, after . . .”
Wings spread, he paused.
“. . . where do we meet?”
“I’ll find you. I can always find you.”
“That’d be kind of stalkery if you weren’t a big golden dragon,” she muttered, watching him fly away. Rising up over Calgary. Growing smaller in the distance. She bit her lip until it bled because if she called him back, he’d come.
Heart-to-heart, they were the kind of love song that had drunks crying into their beer.
Charlie considered making the ten-minute walk to the Emporium and grabbing some food, but couldn’t remember if she was already there. Didn’t matter, she had an errand of her own to run and now, or whenever she currently was, was as good a time as any.
Spring continued to bust out all over the Wood, but at least the giggling had stopped.
Jack watched his younger self rise up into the air in answer to the perceived threat of a passing dragon and remembered being that young. That intense. That certain he’d do anything, sacrifice anything to save the world. Not for the world’s sake, but for Charlie. He’d been appallingly easy to manipulate.
Twenty years without her.
Twenty years meant nothing to an immortal, his younger self had told her that over and over, but he’d only lived for seventeen years when he made the choice.
Twenty years had lasted a lifetime.
He pivoted on one wing and headed into the sun, his younger self straining to keep up.
He could still feel the press of Charlie’s hand against his chest, even though it had pressed skin not scales.
His younger self hadn’t asked him, wouldn’t think to ask him, if it would be worth it.
They both knew the answer.
“What the hell have you done to yourself?” Auntie Catherine grabbed Charlie’s arm and dragged her into her hotel room.
“I haven’t . . .” Charlie stumbled as she was spun around to face a full-length mirror.
“How much weight have you lost?”
It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t a magic mirror. Charlie frowned and her reflection frowned with her. She looked like a bobble head, her skull out of proportion, her teeth too big for her face. Fingers shaking, she unzipped her jacket and tugged up her T-shirt. Her ribs looked like a xylophone—two, actually, one on each side—her breasts were hanging loose in the cups of her bra, and she had no idea how her jeans continued to defy gravity given the absence of anything resembling hips. Hip bones, yes. Hips, no. “Like the song says,” she sighed, “no one gets to live consequence free.”
“And what song might that be, Charlotte.”
“Not important, and I’m paraphrasing anyway.” As the T-shirt billowed down into place, she stepped out of the mirror’s line of sight and dropped down into the desk chair. And swore.
“Of course it hurts.” Auntie Catherine passed her a pillow. “You have no meat on your ass. You have seconds to convince me not to call Alysha.”
“She’s taking your calls now?”
“Charlotte.”
“It’s a long story. Or it will be.” Charlie made grabby hands at the cup of coffee Auntie Catherine had just poured, took a long grateful swallow, and started at the beginning. Reconsidered and j
umped ahead to Jack disappearing. Paused while Auntie Catherine ordered food.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ve forgotten that you’re hungry. Considering how you look, your brain has begun to interpret hunger as the normal way you feel. Go on.”
So she continued and got through babies, ritual, and taking the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale into the Wood before Auntie Catherine stopped her again.
“You nearly killed yourself to discover Allie and Graham’s youngest becomes the god who begat the Gales?”
“Seriously, who says begat?”
“Charlotte.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
Auntie Catherine crossed her legs, studied her pedicure, and said, “I’m less surprised than I suspect I should be. Go on.”
Going on meant Jack. What Jack had done. What Jack was doing. What needed to be done. Charlie got through it, set her empty mug down on the desk, and went into her big finish. “So you need to call me, the me of now and not the me that’s here, and tell me, her, you’ve Seen two bears that look like . . .”
The knock on the door was professionally diffident, but the call of room service impossible to ignore.
The smell of the carrot-and-ginger soup pulled Charlie up out of the chair before the cart was entirely in the room. Unable to get around Auntie Catherine to the soup, she ducked under her arm, snatched up a warm cheese bun, and devoured half in one bite.
“If you choke, I won’t save you,” Auntie Catherine pointed out. “Slow down.”
“Ms. Gale.” He was an older man, in his forties Charlie guessed, and he held out a bulging manila envelope. “This arrived at the hotel for a Ms. Charlotte Gale in the care of Ms. Catherine Gale and your room number. Front desk had me bring it up.”
“My phone.” Charlie explained after he left, less well tipped than usual, she suspected, if both his and Auntie Catherine’s expressions were anything to go by. “I threw it in the river back in Calgary, but it has a shot of the bears on it.”
“The bears I need to call and tell you I’ve Seen?”
“That’s right.” She passed it over.
“Those are memorably ugly bears.”
“Aren’t they. You’ve Seen them after they’ve been worn out being held by a baby. A single baby. Not twins.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
“Because you actually having that vision, the exact vision I needed, when I needed it, was too much of a coincidence. Yay, time travel.”
“This will never work, Charlotte.”
“It already has worked.” Tongue half out to lick cheesy grease off her fingers, Charlie frowned. “It has to be the bears, doesn’t it? Because if you tell me you’ve Seen me and older Jack, I might miss the ‘hi I’ll be your god tonight’ part of the program.”
Auntie Catherine rolled her eyes and passed her a napkin.
* * *
Charlie stepped out of the Wood about two meters from Jack’s gate. She watched him emerge, watched him change, and watched reluctantly as he clothed himself in gray and purple using stone and the last wild asters of fall. She felt his heart beat faster when he spotted her and hers sped up to match.
“It’s done,” he said. “They’ll teach me, and they’ll make a few trips into the MidRealm to fix some of what they’ve broken.”
“The ass head?”
With the temperature below freezing, the cloud Jack snorted was half smoke, half water vapor. “It took convincing, he was zero for sixteen on free throws, but, yes, the ass head goes. Once things have been put right, they’ll stay home. And speaking of home, I really miss Auntie Mary’s apple pie.”
“It’s the wear clean underwear charm, adds a certain piquant flavor.”
Charlie wasn’t sure if she’d moved or he had, but they were standing so close together the cool October air between them had begun to warm. If she had to trade this Jack for the Jack she sat with on the roof . . . “Damn it! I have to take you further back. Allie has to see you flying over the store.”
“Why . . .”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve already done it.”
His nostrils flared as they went through the Wood, but she kept him moving.
After dropping him off in the past, Charlie stepped back in and immediately back out again three days later to stand in front of the Emporium and think “Remember the bears, Charlie.” at Dan. She was there, in the store, watching Dan do yoyo tricks. If she could’ve come up with a way to make things easier on herself, on Jack, she’d have thought that also, but she hadn’t, so she couldn’t. Then back in the Wood and out to pick Jack up by Drumheller where he waited, lounging on the same ridge she’d found him on once before.
Breathing heavily after the climb, she sagged against his side.
“You need to regain your strength.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You asked a great deal of yourself.”
“I had no idea what I was asking of myself.”
“You could’ve quit once you realized.”
“Forty or four, you still do the show.” She toppled over when he changed, but he caught her before she hit the ground. “Good reflexes.”
“I will never let you fall.”
There were a number of things she thought of replying, but after twenty years navigating the Courts, she figured he was allowed a few definitive prince-like statements. She’d have plenty of time to break him of the habit.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s everything, right?”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t bothered to dress. A patch of scales glittered in the center of his chest and he rippled when he breathed. He leaned in. She leaned in. Time to see if they had a future . . .
She jerked back. “Oh, crap!”
* * *
“And then Jack blew up the asteroid. Are you going to eat that?”
“And then Jack blew up the asteroid?” Allie glared at Charlie as Graham pushed his plate across the table. “We’re going to need a little more than that.”
Charlie swallowed a mouthful of pie, sighed, and dug her fork into Graham’s untouched piece as she said, “It seems pretty self-explanatory to me.”
“Exploded?”
“First 2007 AG5, then Armageddon.”
Kiren could almost hear Dr. Grayson thinking during the lengthening pause. “Both of them?” he asked finally.
“Both of them,” she confirmed. “Obliterated.”
“I’m not sure obliterated is a scientifically valid observation, Dr. Mehta.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s accurate. We’re still running the numbers . . .” Phone tucked against her shoulder, Kiren paused to accept a printout from one of the astrogeologists down the hall, both of them ignoring how her hands were shaking. “. . . but it looks like there isn’t a piece left out there as big as a basketball.”
“How?”
“No idea. We’re showing a massive, unidentifiable energy spike, and then double booms.”
“The Russians? The Japanese? China?”
“Best point of origin we’ve got, given that we’re working around massive amounts of interference from the Aurora Borealis, is somewhere in the upper atmosphere over Alberta.”
“Canada?” Kiren pretended not to hear Dr. Grayson’s giggle. It was as much relief as disbelief, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t made a few weird sounds herself. “The Canadians don’t have that kind of tech. The Canadians are flying fifty-year-old helicopters.”
And keeping them in the air, Kiren added silently. Points for both engineering and ingenuity.
“My money’s on the Chinese,” Dr. Grayson continued. “Or the SpaceX guys. Who knows what they’re up to lately, right? Okay.” He took a deep breath, entirely audible over the phone. “Okay. I’ll
inform the director. I want everything you’ve got sent to my desk ten minutes ago. Good work, Dr. Mehta, thank you.”
Kiren sent the file as he hung up. Taking a deep breath of her own, she pulled her cell phone out of her desk drawer and flipped through the contact numbers, pausing to stare at one she’d never called. A number with no name, automatically added at 7:43 AM after the night Charlie Gale had spent on her couch. A night she hadn’t expected to remember.
Personally, she wouldn’t count the Canadians out.
Finger poised over the number, she reconsidered. There was another call she had to make first.
“Come on, really . . . What part of fully operational Dragon Prince slash sorcerer are you not understanding here?” Charlie pushed her empty plate away, angled her chair a little closer to Jack’s, and glanced around the table.
As accustomed as the family was to what others might term unusual, the appearance of the new, older Jack had been unexpected. Like the Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup unexpected—not impossible but very, very unlikely. Joe had nearly dropped to his knees and had lost control of his glamour entirely. If Graham had been able to antler up, he would have—a random passerby on the street could’ve sensed the metaphysical attempt. Edward and Evan had regarded new Jack suspiciously until he changed, then they’d thrown themselves under his wings and into the loops of his tail. Their reaction had gone a long way to defining Allie’s, who then considered herself free to have a terrifying freakout about Charlie’s weight loss. Although she’d moved to support Joe, Auntie Gwen had been suspiciously quiet.
She’d remained quiet all the way through the severely edited version of Charlie’s trip to the future—seventh sons, gods, and Auntie Ruby redacted. Allie, Graham, and even Joe had interrupted, but Auntie Gwen hadn’t said a word.