by Tanya Huff
Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
The
Enchantment
Emporium
Tanya Huff
Copyright © 2009 by Tanya Huff.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1477.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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ONE
Shoot the moon was considered to be one of the more dangerous yoyo tricks. Not particularly complicated-nothing like the crossovers of a Texas Star-but a moment’s inattention and the odds were good that 35.7 grams of hardwood would be impacting painfully off the front curve of the human skull. There were rumors that, back in ’37, Canadian and World Champion Joe Young had once bounced a Shoot the Moon and continued to ace the competition with no one the wiser until the next day when the bruise began to develop. She didn’t know about that, and she didn’t put much trust in rumors, but she did know that when Joe Young died during the war, the sport lost a master.
She executed the trick perfectly.
Pulled a glow-in-the-dark yoyo from the box, turned off the lights in the store, and did it again.
Perfectly.
Pity there was no one around to see.
In a valiant but ultimately futile effort to keep herself amused, she had a yoyo on each hand and was walking alternate dogs when the shadow finally blocked out the light from the street spilling through the grimy glass of the door. It took her a moment to pull the string off the second finger of her left hand and, in that moment, the metal doorjamb began to groan.
Another moment and it would buckle.
Lips pressed into a thin, irritated line, she shoved both toys more-or-less away and strode over to the door. It wasn’t locked, but that was clearly a detail these sorts of late-night visitors never bothered to check.
Yanking it open, she squinted up at the misshapen silhouette and snapped, “What took you so long?”
This was clearly not the expected response.
—
“Were you planning on getting up any time soon?”
Allie pulled the pillow over her head, hoping her mother would consider that answer enough. She was twenty-four years old, unemployed, friendless, and back home with no prospects. As far as she was concerned, she was entitled to stay in bed all day if she felt like it.
The silence, weighted heavily with unspoken advice, ended with a nearly audible eye roll, and the sound of her bedroom door closing.
Good. The last thing she needed right now was the kind of practical, levelheaded analysis of the situation her mother excelled at.
Pillow still over her head, she stretched out her left arm and patted the empty spot in the bed. Charlie was gone. Given how cool the sheets were, she’d probably been gone for a while. Stretching out her right arm, she patted the other side of the bed. Dmitri was gone, too. Face pressed into the bottom sheet that smelled faintly of fabric softener and sex, Allie frowned and tried to remember what day it was.
Her job as a research assistant at the Royal Ontario Museum had ended on Tuesday, the grant money that had paid her having finally run out with no hope of renewal. With almost a month’s warning, she’d been trying to get the last of the Cypriot artifacts into the new cataloging program. The Classical /Hellenistic period-the bulk of the collection-had made it in, but it seemed as though the Cypro-Geometric period never would. She hated leaving things unfinished.
She hated leaving.
Or more specifically-she hated having to leave. Hated the feeling that her life was out of her control.
It wasn’t as though she’d loved the job-although in all fairness, she’d enjoyed rummaging about the back rooms at the museum attempting to bring order out of chaos-it was just that she wasn’t finding the old joke about fine arts degrees and “would you like fries with that” particularly funny these days.
Her Uncle Richard and three cousins had arrived on Wednesday to help pack up her tiny apartment and haul home the stuff she hadn’t sold or handed off to other cousins in the city. The family didn’t exactly own things communally, but there were cooking pots still being passed around that predated frozen food. Charlie had stayed with her, they’d spent Wednesday night on an air mattress; she’d handed the keys in Thursday before they’d crammed the last bits and pieces of her life into the back of a borrowed car and left the city-Charlie complaining all the way home about the mode of transport-so today had to be Friday.
Friday, April 30th.
Which answered that question at least-Dmitri was at school.
Charlie could be anywhere.
Once again, she’d been left alone.
Her fingers plucked at the quilt the aunties had made for her, not needing to remove the pillow to find the square centered with a piece of one of Michael’s old shirts.
Left alone just like stupid Michael with his stupid perfect boyfriend and his stupid perfect job out in Vancouver had left her alone.
“Alysha Catherine Gale!” Age had not stopped Auntie Jane’s voice from carrying clearly up to the second floor. As if age would dare. “If you aren’t out of that bed and downstairs in this kitchen in fifteen minutes, I will make you sorry you were ever born!”
No chance Auntie Jane would leave her alone.
And an even smaller chance that every word she’d said wasn’t to be taken literally.
Sometime in the night, Dmitri had sketched a charm on her right calf. He’d probably thought she wouldn’t notice it down there, but then he was young and still incredibly indulged. Eyes rolling, she erased it, smiled fondly at the old charm Charlie had retraced on her shoulder, and stepped out of the shower to find Samson, one of the family’s four border collies, drinking out of the toilet.
“Don’t tell me you’ve learned to go around the door,” she muttered, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and hauling him back. She hadn’t bothered to stuff the old rusty hook into the equally rusty eye, but the bathroom door was still closed.
Tail slapping into her knees, Samson ignored her.
—
Allie made it downstairs with twelve and a half seconds to spare, wrapping an elastic band around the end of her hair and tossing the wet braid back over her shoulder. As expected, her mother and Auntie Jane were in the big farmhouse kitchen baking pies, the two of them both working at one end of the old rectangular table. Allie paused on the bottom step.
Gale girls had sisters, that was a given.
There were inevitably four or five girls in the family to every boy.
Her gran, her mother’s mother, Auntie Jane’s youngest sister, had three girls. No boy. That was strange but not unheard of.
Allie had a brother, David. He was four years older and hadn’t that set the aunties to talking. Boys were never born first.
She had no sisters.
“He got the Gale that should
have been spread out over half a dozen girls,” Auntie Jane had been heard to sniff, her dark eyes watching David. “What’s he going to do with it, that’s the question.”
This close to ritual, the kitchen should have been full of Gale girls, laughing, talking, making sure the right things went into the pies.
“Your Aunt Ruth will be over later with Katie and Maria,” her mother said, without looking up from the block of shortening she was cutting into the flour. “And your Auntie Ruby has just gone down to the cellar for more apples.”
“Senile old bat’ll probably forget what she’s down there for,” Auntie Jane snorted, expertly flipping the rolled pastry onto a pie plate, a move she’d probably made a million times. The family was big on pie and Auntie Jane admitted to being over eighty-although she got nasty when people tried to be more specific. A minimum of eighty years and say a minimum of a hundred pies a year… “And if you’d hauled your lazy carcass out of bed before noon,” she continued, interrupting Allie’s attempt at math, “there’d have been four of us all along. So, stop seeing the empty places at the table and get over here. The family’s coming home, and pies don’t make themselves.”
Unable to argue with the familiar and clearly inarguable observation, Allie grabbed an apron off the hook by the door but circled the table until she reached the coffeepot over by the big six-burner stove. “You want me caffeinated,” she said before either woman could comment on the delay. “In the interest of only having apples go into the pies.”
“Ruth is bringing rhubarb from her cold frame,” Auntie Jane sniffed, dark eyes disapproving-of her attitude not the rhubarb, Allie assumed. “If you’re sufficiently caffeinated before she arrives, you can start preparing the pastry.”
“Apples, rhubarb…” Allie pulled her favorite mug from the cupboard and filled it. “… either’s better than a helping of ‘I don’t give a flying fuck.’ ”
“Alysha!”
Oh, crap. Had she said that out loud? Had she missed one of Dmitri’s charms? He was still young enough to find putting her on the spot funny. Unfortunately, it turned out she had nothing to blame but her own big mouth.
“Sorry, Mom.” Ears burning she took a long swallow and stared at her reflection in the dark liquid. “It’s just that…”
“You lost your job, and Michael’s in Vancouver with Brian. We know, honey.” The sympathy in her mother’s voice drew Allie’s gaze up off the coffee. “But tomorrow’s May Day, most of the family will be home, so, if you could, get over yourself.”
Were her mother’s eyes a darker gray than they’d been when she’d been home last? Mary Gale was fifty. That was all. Fifty. Allie’d taken a week off work for the big family party back in the fall. Fifty was too young.
“Change happens, Alysha.” Auntie Jane seemed grimly amused by the inevitable. “Although the girl has a point, Mary. Remember what happened when Ruth let her mind wander that time during peach season? We were months sorting out the mess.”
“I was sixteen, Auntie Jane. Let it go.” The screen door slammed and Allie’s Aunt Ruth pushed past her to dump an enormous armload of rhubarb in the sink. Her eyes were still Gale gray, but then Aunt Ruth was three years younger than her sister and…
“Allie!”
She managed to slide her mug to safety on the counter in time to return her cousin Katie’s hug. “Shouldn’t you be out flogging swamp land to unsuspecting city folk?”
Katie grinned. “I took a personal day. Pies won’t bake themselves.”
Impossible not to grin back. “So I keep hearing.”
“And I thought you were friendless,” Auntie Jane snorted as the two girls giggled together over the inevitability of family.
“Is Michael still out west?” Katie asked sympathetically, snagging Allie’s mug and draining it.
Keeping one arm linked with her cousin, Allie grabbed another apron and dropped it over Katie’s head. “Apparently he loves his job, and he and Brian are disgustingly happy.”
“That sucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I’ll send him a pie.”
They turned together to stare at Auntie Jane.
“What?” Upending the big earthenware bowl, she dumped the mass of pastry out onto the table. “Michael’s as much as family, and he loves my blueberry pie.”
“We don’t have any blueberries.”
Dark eyes narrowed. “We do if I’m making blueberry pie.”
That was also inarguable.
“You gave him a charm?” Allie asked as Aunt Ruth, clearly assuming they’d never get to it on their own, deposited Katie at the sink and shoved her toward the huge scarred cutting board beside it.
Auntie Jane sniffed as she separated the dough into fist-sized balls. “Why not?”
“Because he moved away.” Allie chopped the flared end off a piece of freshly washed rhubarb with more force than was strictly necessary.
“No reason to give him a charm if he’d stayed in Darsden.” A round of dough slapped down onto the table hard enough that it continued to quiver for moments after. “You let him leave when you refused to change his mind.”
Sure, she could have changed his mind, made him believe what she wanted him to believe, but that would have changed Michael. Made him not! Michael. And what would have been the point in that?
He wouldn’t be in Vancouver with Brian right now.
Shut up.
“I stood by him.” And occasionally in front of him, shoulder to shoulder with her cousins. Gale girls protected their own. Not that Michael, smart, handsome, and on every sports team Darsden East High School offered had needed a lot of protection. “I let him be who he was.”
“He was fifteen. He wouldn’t have even noticed.”
“He’s not family, Auntie Jane.”
Things were done for the sake of family that weren’t done to an outsider no matter how close to family he was.
“He could have been, Alysha Catherine!”
Everyone had adored Michael-still adored Michael-and the aunties, all expecting a chance to integrate Michael’s line, blamed Allie for his absence.
Allie scooped the could haves away into the bowl with the cut rhubarb-the could haves of her and Michael and a life she could see so clearly she sometimes forgot which life she was waking into-and gave thanks, not for the first time, that she hadn’t inherited her gran’s ability. In a family that drew an arbitrarily adjustable line between maintaining the status quo and interfering with the outside world, foresight was a curse. She totally understood why Gran had gone wild, leaving home and the nagging of the aunties. The other aunties.
Because, of course, Gran was also an auntie.
Although not hers.
Sometimes family life got complicated.
The screen door slammed again and Katie’s younger sister Maria backed into the kitchen, the top of a stack of aluminum pie plates tucked in under the prominent curve of her breasts. She wasn’t as tall as either Katie or Allie but was definitely curvier. A distinction the scoop-necked T-shirt had been clearly chosen to emphasize. “Delilah’s in the apple tree again, Aunt Mary.”
Muttering about the damned dog, Allie’s mother wiped her hands on her apron and headed out into the yard.
Maria dropped the pie plates on the table. “Still don’t see why it matters.”
“Best to stop it before it matters; border collies can cause a lot of blossom damage.” Auntie Jane glared a spinning plate to a stop just at the table’s edge. “And she’ll knock the young apples off later in the season. Are these all Christie had?”
“They’re all Auntie Christie said she had,” Maria told her. Then she turned to face the counter, full upper lip curled. “Allie.”
Allie blinked. That had sounded like a challenge.
“Ignore her.” Katie dropped the last of the cleaned rhubarb onto the cutting board and dried her hands on her apron. “She’s just being a bitch because Dmitri slept here last night.”
Aunt Ruth glanced
up from setting wrapped dough balls in the fridge to rest. “Don’t call your sister a bitch, Katie.”
“Sorry. She’s being a cow because Dmitri slept here last night. She has plans for him.”
With barely more than a year between them, Dmitri and Maria wouldn’t be a bad match, but Dmitri was only just finishing high school and it would likely be years before he chose. Still, with so few Gale boys available, attempting to stake an early claim wasn’t an entirely bad idea. By the time Dmitri was ready to settle down, Maria might have discouraged some of her competition.
“Don’t worry about me.” Setting the bowl of cut fruit on the table, ceramic ringing against the wood, Allie reached past it for the sugar. “He was only here because he’s working his way through his list and I haven’t been around much.”
The arch plucked into Maria’s brows rose higher still. “You can’t be on his list.”
“Alysha and Dmitri are as far apart as you and Dmitri,” Auntie Jane pointed out.
“But she’s old!”
“Thank you so much.” Allie didn’t bother watching her tone. It was rhubarb. It was going to be tart anyway. “He’s been eighteen for a month; I may be elderly, but I’m well inside the seven-year break.”
“Well, fine…” Maria poked her finger into a block of shortening. “… you’re on his list; that’s why he wanted to sleep with you. Why did you sleep with him?”
The sudden silence in the kitchen was complete. The only sound, the distant command that Delilah was to get down out of the tree. Immediately.
Allie stared at her cousin. Knew Katie had turned from the sink and was staring as well. Aunt Ruth snorted. Auntie Jane answered for them all. “Turn down a Gale boy?”
Maria’s blush dipped down to tint her cleavage. “Never mind.”
She looked so miserable, Allie took pity on her. “Charlie was here, too.”
Charlie, at nearly twenty-six, was definitely not on Dmitri’s list. Her presence made it clear Allie wasn’t remotely serious about making an actual connection with her young cousin. Charlie, like Gran, was one of those oddities the family threw up every now and then and was, because of what she could do, nearly as indulged as one of the boys. Half the aunties wanted to see if they could breed her ability back into the lines, stabilizing it, while the other half insisted its very instability argued against tying up one of the Gale boys on the attempt. Charlie ignored both halves, and no one doubted, given her talents, that one day she’d go wild.