by Tanya Huff
“Have the aunties been chewing at you about this?” That could definitely explain Auntie Gwen’s expression. Every now and then, opinions shifted from don’t waste a Gale boy on her to breed the Wild Power back into the lines and at nearly twenty-eight, Charlie knew she was reaching the age where the nagging started in earnest. “Second circle ties you down. I need the open road, the wind at my back, and a new horizon out in front of me.”
“It’s quite possible you also need to sing a little less country music,” Allie muttered.
“Not to mention,” Charlie continued, ignoring her, “that the Wild Powers usually skip right from third circle to first.”
“Gran didn’t.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Kicking off a flip flop, Charlie used her toes to comb the dead grass into parallel lines. If the aunties hadn’t been chewing at her, then Allie had brought the second circle stuff up on her own and that freaked Charlie out a bit, too. “ . . . if your grandmother had been a boy, the aunties would have taken her out by now.”
“Not telling me something I don’t already know,” Allie sighed.
They sat quietly for a few minutes. Charlie buried her toes in pale dirt, uncovered them, buried them again, until she couldn’t stand it anymore and glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes left to kill.”
Allie stiffened.
“Sorry.” Charlie pressed closer, but Allie didn’t relax.
Eight minutes.
Five minutes.
Two minutes.
The leaves shivered. A faint line of dust feathered off the top of the hill.
When the wind reached them, it smelled of the dark hollows under tree roots and the sharp, bitter scent of fear.
Allie shivered. Charlie wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
Between one heartbeat and the next, the moon was full and Nose Hill Park went wild.
Back in Ontario, the aunties would be crossing the cornfield behind the big white-and-green farmhouse and gathering on the edge of the wood. Uncle Edward would be out of sight, racing through the deepening shadows under the trees, antlers catching at branches. If this were a modern story, there’d be an out if he survived until dawn. But this was a much older story than that.
Blood would be spilled.
Bonds would be renewed.
The Hunt would feed.
Charlie could hear Allie’s heartbeat, or maybe it was her own. Or David’s hooves slamming into the hard, packed dirt as he ran because he couldn’t not run. Not tonight.
She thought she could hear baying in the distance. Wild laughter beyond that.
Except it wasn’t so much wild as self-satisfied.
The sun had reached the edge of the mountains when Allie jerked and said, “First blood.”
Charlie hadn’t felt it. Third circle clearly wasn’t connected enough and that was fine with her.
It was dark when it ended. Darker than it should have been in the center of a major city under a full moon.
Charlie felt it end. Through her bare feet and legs pressed against the dirt, through her back pressed up against the rock, through all places she and Allie were touching.
Breathing heavily, she turned when Allie did and saw David silhouetted against the light bleed from the city. It was exactly what she’d been looking for driving in from Tony’s house, although she wouldn’t have felt such a wave of irrational relief had she seen him then. He stood for a moment, sides heaving, pelt streaked dark with sweat, then he half reared and ran for the trees.
Allie let out a breath she’d probably been holding the entire time.
They didn’t speak on their way down to the car. There wasn’t a lot to say. Charlie’s stomach growled. They both ignored it.
“You okay to drive?” Charlie asked as they stepped over the low barrier into the gravel parking lot.
Allie threw her the keys.
“I wonder who . . . ?”
“Probably Uncle Evan,” Allie answered before Charlie could finish.
Uncle Evan had the Canada Post contracts for two rural routes. Someone else would be covering them now.
“You know . . .” Leaning on the open door, Charlie frowned into the shadows at the edges of the wood. “ . . . we only have the aunties’ word that Uncle Edward wavered.You ever wonder?”
“If they lie?” The quiet question drew Charlie’s gaze across the top of the car to meet Allie’s, the pale gray of her eyes darker in the moonlight. “We’ll be aunties one day.”
To anyone outside the family, that wouldn’t have sounded much like an answer.
“Evan,” Auntie Gwen confirmed the next morning. She’d stumbled in at five past eight, brushed her teeth twice, then had three glasses of water and a glass of orange juice. Her eyes were still mostly dark from lid to lid; there were unidentifiable stains on her sleeveless blouse, and a scratch up the length of her right arm. Graham had taken one look at her, and his fingers had twitched toward the weapons he no longer carried. Jack had taken a slightly faster look and decided to go into the office with Graham even though the job sucked and Tuesdays were usually a day off. Joe had come over from the apartment but stayed in the store.
“She knows where I am if she wants me,” he’d pointed out when Charlie’d gone down to ask if he was coming upstairs. “And if she doesn’t want me, I’d rather not be in her way.” Joe, Charlie decided, was smarter than he looked.
“Turn the pancakes, Alysha, or they’ll be overcooked on that side.”
Auntie Gwen had poured the pancakes herself, charms were too easy with a ladle of batter and a hot grill, but she’d seen no point in standing over the stove in midsummer when there were younger members of the family available.
Any other morning, Charlie knew Allie would have turned the command into a test of will; this morning, she flipped the pancakes.
When they came to the table, Auntie Gwen buttered each one carefully, poured syrup over the whole stack, chewed and swallowed two dripping forkfuls, and pushed the plate away.
Cradling a mug of coffee between both hands, Charlie could feel the buzz traveling under her skin, trying to get out. She’d spent the night sitting cross-legged on the sofa bed, quietly picking out the melody lines to songs she couldn’t quite hear. A glance at the abandoned pancakes, and she heard herself say, “Still full?”
Allie gasped. Charlie thought she caught a whiff of decaying leaves, saw Auntie Gwen lift her head, and was most definitely not feeling reckless enough to look her in the eye. After a long moment of weighted silence, Auntie Gwen’s fork hit the table at the edge of Charlie’s peripheral vision.
“I’m sorry, Charlotte, I didn’t quite catch that. Would you care to repeat it?”
“Not fucking likely.” When the silence grew more weighted still, she realized she’d answered out loud.
But Auntie Gwen merely sighed and said, “I could use a coffee, Alysha.”
Charlie watched Allie move around the kitchen, watched her walk up and set a full mug on the table, and finally looked at Auntie Gwen because Allie’s path had put the older woman in her direct line of sight. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” Allie asked, frowning.
Charlie shook her head and watched Auntie Gwen wrap her fingers around the mug. They all pretended to not see them shake.
“It was hard not to be there,” she said at last. “Bea and Carmen and I, we have years of ritual tying us to Edward.” She took a long swallow of coffee and added another spoonful of sugar, the spoon rattling against the sides of the mug. “And we lost Janet, Abby, Betty, and Dot.”
“Those horns aren’t just for show,” Allie said softly.
Charlie stared at her cousin. “Well, duh! You knew we lost four aunties and you didn’t mention it?”
“We didn’t lose four. They did.”
“We are them!”
“We were them.”
“Is she still them?” Charlie demanded, nodding at Auntie Gwen.
“She is the cat’s mother.” Auntie Gwen flinched. “Oh, dear God, I
sound like Jane.” She took a deep breath and stared at her coffee. Charlie had to bite her tongue to keep from asking if she was scrying, maybe checking the box scores while she gathered her thoughts. Auntie Gwen had a touching belief that the Jays would pull it out of their collective asses after the All Star Break. A long moment later, she exhaled and squared her shoulders, clearly having come to a decision. “New branches of the family separate, Charlotte. Given modern technology, connections won’t be entirely severed this time—beads on a string is the inane analogy Meredith is using given that there’s only two beads.”
“This time?”
“Don’t be stupid. You don’t honestly think the entire family, from the bright beginning, is there in rural Ontario?”
Charlie glanced up at Allie who didn’t seem surprised. “You knew?”
She shrugged. “Seemed kind of obvious.”
Auntie Gwen sighed. “You haven’t thought about it at all, have you?”
“Why would I?”
“Why, indeed.” This second sigh held subtext Charlie ignored. “To answer your question, Carmen, Bea, and I will always be at heart a part of them—we have too much history there to ever break entirely free. As for the younger members, with every ritual the emphasis will shift until their ties are entirely here. As for you, Charlotte . . .”
“Me?”
“The assumption was that you were too wild to settle. We’ve been reassessing.”
“I haven’t settled!”
“Easy to say.” She smiled a familiar self-satisfied smile and finished her coffee as Allie made faces at Charlie suggesting she disengage. “Bea’s right. Evan isn’t strong enough to hold for long,” she said, putting her mug down.
The aunties didn’t bother with graceful segues.
“There will be challenges. Multiple challenges. We’ll have to tell the county we’re extending the family plot—Ruby’s talking dahlias. Things will be topsy-turvy for a while.”
“Topsy-turvy?”
“Jane again. Remind me to fight that. The point is, we’re looking at uncertain weather patterns, more boys being born, cakes not rising, unnaturally tough pastry, and cabbages shaped like Elvis.”
“Elvis? Seriously?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Charlotte, why would we get cabbages shaped like Elvis?” She stood and stretched, her shirt riding up enough to show a bruise just above her hip and a scrape rising up from the blotch of purple-green.
Charlie scratched at the buzzing under her left forearm and showed teeth in what wasn’t even trying to be a smile. “So, since you couldn’t go home, what were you hunting last night, Auntie Gwen?”
“None of your business, Charlotte. Alysha, you’ll need to cover the store. Joe’s leaving.”
Allie paused, about to remove the rejected pancakes. “Auntie Gwen, we talked about this. He’s my employee.”
“And he’s my . . .”
“Never mind.” When Allie cut her off, Charlie nearly applauded. Auntie Gwen’s descriptions of what Joe was to her made it difficult to look Joe in the eye. And Gales weren’t exactly shy. “I’ll be right down.”
“Good.” She paused at the door and swept a dark gaze over both of them. “There’s a chance Jane engineered this whole thing because she’s afraid Catherine might decide to spend some time at home. Your grandmother always had a frightening amount of influence on your grandfather. The last thing we need is a Wild Power playing at being domestic.”
“Worked out the last time,” Allie muttered at the closed door.
“She wasn’t talking about your grandmother.” The buzzing under Charlie skin revved up.
“Yes, she was. She said . . .”
“She meant me. She thinks I’ve settled.”
Allie smiled, the curve of her mouth an invitation. “Would that be so bad?”
Before Charlie could respond in a way that wouldn’t get her cut off—the sofa bed was a choice not a necessity—she remembered Auntie Catherine’s call. “So, a funny thing happened . . .”
“It could be a coincidence,” Allie allowed a few minutes later, leading the way downstairs.
Charlie snorted. “We don’t believe in coincidence.”
Their reflection showed them joined at the hip.
“Still not double-jointed,” Charlie muttered as they passed.
The store was empty, the door was locked, and there was a note from Joe on the counter. “I sold a yoyo. We’re going to need another box of rhinestone p . . .” The shape of the “p” suggested Auntie Gwen had waited as long as she intended to.
“So . . .” Allie unlocked the door, flipped the sign, and turned to stare measuringly at Charlie. Charlie had no idea what was being measured but had a funny feeling she was coming up short. “Are you going to take the apartment over the coffee shop? It wouldn’t be hard to put in a connecting door.”
Charlie clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering as the buzz reached a crescendo. Before she could answer, before she knew what she was going to answer, her phone ran. “Looks like things are getting back to normal,” she muttered digging it out of the pocket of her shorts. Normal in the Gale family wasn’t over twenty-four hours of phone silence.
“Hey, Chuck! Got a minute?”
“Mark?” It’s Mark, she mouthed at Allie who mouthed back no shit as Charlie moved in between two sets of shelves and made herself comfortable. Back before Calgary, and Dun Good, she and Mark had spent the Nova Scotia summer festival circuit in a band called Wylde Chylde. The spelling had made Charlie’s eyeballs ache and the band itself had been a high-energy mix of styles that had never quite jelled. When Wylde Chylde blew apart, Charlie and the bass player had headed for Toronto and the blink-and-you-miss-it punk revival movement while Mark had formed and re-formed the remaining pieces into something closer to east coast traditional. Their friendship had survived time and distance and step dancing. “What’s up?”
“Aston got bit by a seal.”
“He what?”
“He was out in his cousin’s boat, saw a seal swimming by, and reached overboard to pet it.”
About to poke her finger into a box of plush toys, Charlie reconsidered. “He’s an idiot.”
“Way to state the obvious, Chuck. Fucking seal bit off two of his fingers. Clearly the stupid fucker isn’t going to be playing much for a while.” Mark seldom swore. He considered it the sign of a weak vocabulary. Things must be bad back east. “We need you.”
“I’m already in a band.”
His sigh was deep enough she nearly felt it against her cheek. “Look, Chuck, I wouldn’t ask, but we’ve got five weeks of festival coming up, a good chance of taking top prize, and I know you’ll mesh.You’re at the same e-mail, right? I’ll send you the set list; you’ll be covering guitar and mandolin and you’ve got range enough to sing backup vocals without key changes left, right, and center. You take Aston’s lead; we can change the pronouns on the fly.”
“I don’t . . .”
“Think it over, that’s all I’m asking. Okay, that’s not all I’m asking, I’m totally asking you to ditch the band you’re with for us, but you don’t have to tell me right away. What time is it there?”
She stopped running a die-cast tractor along the edge of the shelf and checked her watch. “Almost ten.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Calgary.”
“Why? Never mind. Look, get back to me by four, four oh five, four ten maybe your time and we can figure out the best place for us to hook up. We’re in Cape Breton, but you’ll fly into Halifax, right?”
“Mark, I don’t . . .” He’d hung up.
Allie was perched on a stool behind the glass counter, the yoyo ledger open in front of her, when Charlie emerged from between the shelves. “So?”
“So Mark’s guitarist lost two fingers to a seal, and he wants me to head east and finish the festival season with him.”
“Seals bite?”
“Apparently.” Charlie waited while Allie recorded the
latest sale, put the ledger away, and straightened.
“Your hair’s blonde.”
Okay, not what she’d expected. “What?”
“Your hair . . .” Allie gestured at the top of Charlie’s head. “ . . . is blonde. It was blonde when you woke up this morning.”
“It was turquoise when I went to sleep,” Charlie muttered pulling an orange plastic hand mirror off a shelf. One of those trick Halloween mirrors, it substituted a skull for her face, but the hair above the empty sockets was definitely her natural ash blonde.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Allie’s tone made the question almost more of a statement.
Cape Breton seals in Fort McMurray. Then on the news in the coffee shop. Then eating Aston’s fingers. That was three.
Meet me in Halifax and we’ll talk.
Okay, four.
The last thing we need is a Wild Power playing at being domestic.
Fine, five. But who was counting.
The buzz under her skin made it hard to stand still.
“Yeah, I’m leaving.”
And the buzz stopped.
Oh, really? she thought, putting the mirror facedown on the shelf. Subtle much?
The thing was, Dun Good had only made it as far as it had because of Charlie. It wasn’t ego and it wasn’t like she’d done it on purpose, but sometimes she wasn’t as careful as she could’ve been with the music. Charm a set of broad shoulders here, a rounded cleavage there, don’t stay on top of the way it’s spreading and, well, it was no surprise people loved the band.
Literally.
Without her, things wouldn’t go as well.
Not ego. Fact.
All right, fine; a little ego.
She didn’t owe the other members of Dun Good anything. They weren’t family. But they had been together for over a year, and breaking up via text seemed like a bad high school cliché, so Tuesday evening found Charlie at Taylor and Donna’s one-bedroom basement apartment, guitar slung on her back, fully aware she might have to charm the lot of them if things got ugly.
Noise spilled out through the open door. Charlie’d arrived last by intent. She stepped over a grubby gray backpack, moved down the short hall to the living room, and saw a natural redhead she didn’t recognize. Strange. The apartment was so small, even Donna usually vacated the premises when the band met there.