Wild Ways

by Tanya Huff

  “Even though you didn’t take and/or lose the thing?”

  He snorted. “Even though. It’s just . . . we’re amazing together, but it hasn’t been that long and maybe her family disapproves of the brown. Or the itinerant musician thing. Or that my family moved here from Toronto.”

  “Toronto? Damn. Around here, that’s definitely going to count against you.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “She have overprotective parents?”

  “I don’t think so but lots of cousins. And her family, it’s tight.”

  “I hear you.” Charlie stared down at her bare toes for a moment. The raised voices across the parking lot blended with the cries of the gulls wheeling overhead and came out sounding like half a dozen aunties arguing in the kitchen. “Could it have been stolen?”

  “What would be the point in someone who wasn’t family stealing a family heirloom? And it sure as hell wasn’t someone in her family.”

  “You sure?”

  He was staring out toward the sea now, never very far away in this part of the world. She could feel the force of his gaze reaching for the distant horizon. “I’m sure.”

  And that was no lie.

  “They’re my cousins, right? You like spent all your time with your cousins growing up; that’s a Gale thing. Family. The cousins out here, they think I’m pretty cool and it’s not like I’m going to be playing soccer with them or anything.” Jack still didn’t understand the point of chasing something and not getting a meal out of it. Sure, let it go a few times, have a little fun running it down, but in the end, eat it.

  Soccer balls tasted like farts.

  And the yelling afterward had gone so long, he’d gotten bored and flown away.

  “Anyway . . .” He folded his arms, looked Allie right in the eye, and tried very hard not to smoke. “Either I’m a Gale, or I’m not.”

  “He’s got you there.” Graham sounded like he was smiling around a mouthful of cereal, but Jack didn’t dare check. Gale girls were tricky. He’d learned that in his first twenty-four hours here. If Allie had a countermove, he needed to stay on top of it.

  But Allie only looked thoughtful. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Just, you know, spending time with my cousins. Like a Gale.”

  “I had no idea you were interested in doing that.”

  “I wasn’t.” Dragons spent time with relatives for two reasons, politics or food. Okay, technically, one reason. “Now, I am.”

  Allie wanted him to be interested. That helped convince her. “No sorcery.”

  Jack snorted. “Gales don’t do sorcery.”

  “Not and survive it,” Graham muttered from the other side of the smoke.

  “All right, this is ridiculous.” Charlie grabbed Bo’s arm and dragged him over to the van. She had no idea what Shelly and Mark were arguing about beyond passenger seating, but it clearly went deeper and just as clearly had no resolution. Odds were, it was left over from Aston, his love of cheese, and his lactose intolerance. “It’s past noon, we’re playing at four, and we’re still not on the road. Bo!” When he pivoted to face her, she held out her fist. “On three.”

  “The original or liz . . .”

  “The original. One. Two. Three. Scissors cuts paper, I ride with Shelly. Let’s go!”

  “Well, that works, too,” Mark observed philosophically.

  Riding with Mark and Tim meant listening to Mark expound constantly about nothing much for the duration of the trip. But the odds of arriving in one piece were higher. Charlie settled in with her bare toes on the dashboard and a bottle of ice-cool plum nail polish in her hand. Between the aunties and Dun Good’s old school bus, she’d used up all fear of dying in a fiery car crash.

  “Uh, Shelly, it’s a twenty-minute drive to Port Hood. Is warp drive really necessary?”

  “You wouldn’t ask that if you were hauling Moby Bass. I want parking as close to the stage as possible and there’s eight other bands who want the same thing. Bump.”

  “Thanks.” Charlie lifted the brush as the car went momentarily airborne. The flight wouldn’t mess things up, it was the landing. Good shocks, though. However, since the car was pre door airbags, she painted a quick plum charm on the gray vinyl interior.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Just a little insurance.”

  “Right, Mark says you’re into something like that Wicca thing.”

  “Like,” Charlie allowed, “but not.” Wicca was a religion. The Gales were a family. “We’ve gotten kind of far ahead of the van.”

  “Yeah, that’s because the van’s so top-heavy. Mark gets up any kind of speed and he splats the curves.” Yanking the wheel hard to the right, Shelly tucked in front of a trailer of openmouthed tourists just before a slightly larger trailer filled the space they’d been occupying in the other lane. She fishtailed on the gravel shoulder for a moment, then got all four wheels back on the asphalt and accelerated.

  Port Hood, the self-proclaimed step-dancing capital of Cape Breton, was the first stop on a festival circuit that would, over the last of July and through all of August, cover the island, knitting together various fairs and community celebrations, as well as the varying and ubiquitous Highland Games. Music was a huge part of the Cape Breton lifestyle, and every summer it became a huge part of the Cape Breton economy as tourists flocked to the island to tap along to the jigs and reels, gawk at the men in kilts, buy tartan-covered kitsch, and create traffic jams that made some of the most scenic coastline in the world the most frustrating to drive. With the mines closed and the fishing heavily regulated, the locals were well aware they needed tourist dollars to survive, but most of them would prefer said tourists stop about midpoint on the causeway, toss their wallets over, and then go the hell home.

  And speaking of home . . .

  Charlie fished her ringing phone out of her bag and checked the caller ID. “My mother. . . .”

  “Say no more.” Shelly turned the radio up. “I’ll be listening to the local maritime weather report.”

  “Thanks.” Years spent with bands that never quite made it big enough to get out of each others’ space, made faking privacy a necessary skill. Charms not needed. Charlie thumbed the connect and pitched her voice below the earnest CBC announcer listing wind speeds coming in off the Northumberland Strait. “Mom?”

  “The twins want to spend three weeks traveling through Europe before school starts.”

  “Okay.” If they wanted to go badly enough, there’d be a last minute seat sale for exactly what they had saved; that was how the family worked. “So they go after the second of the month; what’s the harm?”

  “Do you honestly think it’s safe?”

  “Mom, it’s Europe.”

  “Cultural differences . . . ”

  Personally, Charlie thought Europe could handle it. However, based on the way Montreal had survived the twins’ freshman year at McGill . . . “You want me to check on them occasionally, don’t you?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind popping in and out. Don’t tell them I sent you. And speaking of the second . . .”

  Had they been?

  “. . . I know you’re based in Calgary now, with Allie, but her circles are very small and Cameron will likely have at least a dozen girls to cover . . .”

  “He’s young. He’ll survive.”

  “It’s just that you won’t have many options, not for years, and . . .”

  “Maybe.”

  “And the aunties say you’re traveling again, so . . .”

  “I said, maybe, Mom. Gotta go.” She cupped the phone in her left hand and said, “My mother wants me home for a family thing.” Faking privacy included sharing enough information to soothe unavoidable curiosity.

  “Your family’s tight, right?”

  New branches of the family separate, Charlotte. And then they evidently get into a pissing match over who gets the Wild Power at their ritual. The phone rang again, the tag of a commercial jingle for a children’s cer
eal repeated over and over. Charlie didn’t bother glancing at the screen before she answered. “I didn’t tell my mother which ritual I’d be at, Auntie Gwen, and I certainly didn’t tell her I was going back to Ontario. Auntie Jane’s poking you with sticks.” This time after disconnecting, she dropped the phone back into her bag. They’d chew at each other for a while now and leave her alone. “Oh, yeah,” she sighed, “we’re tight.”

  “Cool. Now, me, I have cousins I haven’t seen since I was twelve.”

  “They move away?”

  “No,” Shelly laughed as she reached for the radio, “we just don’t like each other.”

  Frowning at a half-heard introduction, Charlie blocked her hand. “Hang on a minute.”

  “. . . in many ways it’s actually safer to drill in close to shore. Should, God forbid, anything go wrong at a well off Hay Island, equipment to contain a spill can reach the site much more quickly than it could in a deepwater situation. And it wouldn’t take weeks to cap the wellhead.”

  “So you believe certain other companies took too long . . .”

  “I believe that Carlson Oil has plans in place to cap a wild well off Hay Island in less than twelve hours regardless of weather conditions. Less if we can move some of our operations onto Scatarie Island.”

  “Scatarie Island is a protected wilderness area.”

  “And we’d be there to protect it.”

  “So you agree that things could go wrong.”

  “Of course things can go wrong.”

  Charlie was impressed. The aunties couldn’t have thrown in a more obvious subtextual, What are you, an idiot?

  “And because we acknowledge that,” the entirely reasonable woman’s voice continued, “we’re prepared. Because of the proposed location of the wellhead, we can put our preparations into action quickly and efficiently. We have people on our team, local people, who know how to work these waters. People who’ve survived only by making the right decisions. But putting a well out in the deep water? Well, I think experience has proven that in deep water, sooner or later, the ocean always wins.”

  “She doesn’t say much, but she says it loud.” Shelly snorted and turned the radio off as a used car commercial attempted to raise the ambient noise about seventy decibels. “Amelia Carlson, taking care of the seal problem by dipping them in crude.”

  “There’s a seal problem?”

  “There is if you’re in the bullshit department at Fisheries. I mean, Jesus Christ . . .” The car rose up onto two wheels. Drifted down again. “. . . dudes in Halifax only just shot down a motion to reopen the Hay Island seal hunt. Bo met Tanis at the protests.”

  “Protesting for or against?” It was never wise to assume. If Tanis’ family were fishermen . . .

  “Against. Tanis’ whole family’s big in the environmental movement, run this high-profile group called Two Seventy-five N. Funky ass name, but they’ve got some weight to throw around. You, though, you haven’t been back east for any length of time in a couple of years . . .” Shelly braced the steering wheel with her knee as she fixed her ponytail. “. . . what’s your interest in Carlson Oil’s line of bullshit?”

  “Besides thinking that dipping seals in crude is a bad idea?” Charlie frowned down at her half-painted toenails. “I don’t know yet.” She’d been ear wormed by the chorus since Fort McMurray—seals or oil, rinse, repeat—but still had no idea of the verse.

  The last coal mine in Cape Breton closed in 2001, but when a Swiss mining consortium won the right to develop an abandoned mine site in Dorkin, Carlson Oil had taken notice. If coal was set to make a comeback, Amelia’s father had reasoned, it wasn’t coming back without them.

  As a result, Carlson Oil owned two small abandoned collieries in Inverness County and a much larger old DEVCO mine in Lingan. Hedging their bets, they’d also invested in the wind turbines erected along the cliffs outside of Lingan—the later investment significantly more public than the former. As Paul had told Catherine Gale, local coal got no respect in the media in spite of the fact that coal imported from the United States and South America powered the Lingan Generating Station at the same time as unemployment hovered perpetually around 16 per cent and the economy of Cape Breton tried to fiddle its way into solvency.

  While the collieries across the island in Inverness County were more isolated, the mine in Lingan, the Duke, had gone much deeper with lots of damp, extended cross tunnels perfect for making terrifying old women happy and, more importantly, it was half an hour away from Sydney. About at the limit Paul was willing to have those pelts stinking up his car.

  “You want to take the sealskins from an anonymous storage locker and drop them down the Duke?” Leaning back in her chair, mourning the loss of the ergonomic wonder in her Halifax office, Amelia almost thought she saw here we go again cross Paul’s face.

  “No,” he said, so carefully it convinced her she had indeed seen that flicker of impatience, “I’d descend into the Duke and place them carefully in a cross tunnel. They’d come to no harm.”

  “I was being facetious, Paul.” She steepled her fingers. “Carlson Oil owns the Duke.The . . . creatures behind Two Seventy-five N are going to be looking for those pelts, so they’re going to be looking at Carlson Oil holdings. Particularly those holdings a convenient distant from the remarkably ugly office we’re now spending our time in.”

  “They’d have to be high-level hackers to get through the shell companies between the Duke and Carlson Oil.”

  Amelia waved that off. “Why shouldn’t they be computer wizards? They’re already impossible. You haven’t said anything to convince me that dropping the pelts down a mine . . .” Deliberate phrasing so she could enjoy how well he hid his annoyance. “. . . is safer than anonymous off-site storage. We only have her word for it that there’s a new player, after all.”

  “We only had her word for it that they existed,” Paul reminded her.

  “Point.” Leaning back far enough to cross her legs, Amelia indicated he should go on.

  “When Catherine Gale introduced the new player, she began by reminding me that she, Catherine Gale, had found the pelts and then pointed out that the previous owners of the pelts wouldn’t be able to do the same. She then told me that the pelts wouldn’t be safe in the storage locker. Because she, Catherine Gale, had found them, the new player, whoever the new player is, could also find them. We don’t know what Catherine Gale is, but I doubt there’s only one of her.”

  “That’s a thought to give a person nightmares,” Amelia murmured. Catherine Gale reminded her of the nuns who’d taught at her primary school—only with the powers that terrified children had always assumed the nuns could manifest. Two of whatever Catherine Gale was, well, that was two too many.

  “The conclusion that best fits the facts we have,” Paul continued, “is that Two Seventy-five N have hired something like her to retrieve the pelts. We therefore know they can find the storage locker. Catherine Gale believes the mine will hide the pelts from the new player long enough for the permit to clear if they’re in a tunnel that extends under water.”

  Amelia tapped her upper lip, wondered if it was time for more collagen, and said, “Do we believe her? She could want the pelts in the mine for her own reasons.”

  “Does it matter? For whatever reason, she doesn’t want them found, and that works in your favor.”

  A significant part of Paul’s job description involved shoveling through the details to find the bottom line and, bottom line: Catherine Gale, seal pelts, and the availability of the Duke all came back to keeping imaginary creatures the hell out of her business. Carlson Oil had everything tied up in this well. In order to pay for the platform, the refinery, a new rail line—not to mention bribes and “entertainment” of local officials—she’d sold what she could and borrowed against what was left. If she had to hire a character from a fairy tale to stop a character from a fairy tale in order to finally get that oil out of the ground, then so be it.

  “Take the pelts to the m
ine.” A raised hand held him in place. “Tomorrow,” she told him after a moment spent appreciating the way he’d instantly responded to her gesture. “The rest of today is booked solid and I need you here.”

  “Tomorrow, then. Catherine Gale did say it would take a while for the new player to get up to speed,” he added making a note on his phone.

  “How convenient her information dovetails with my needs.” When Paul ducked his head in silent apology, reminded of which she he worked for, Amelia pushed a government file folder across her desk. “Right now, we’ve kept the honorable member of parliament for Cape Breton South waiting long enough.” Long enough he knew her time was valuable but not so long as to devalue his. “Send him in on your way out to find me a chair exactly like the one in my Halifax office.”

  “That particular chair won’t fit behind the desk, Ms. Carlson.”

  “Then replace the desk.” The Gale woman had obviously rattled him; she shouldn’t have had to tell him that. “Oh, and have the room painted. I can’t work in this shade of green.”

  Jack’s family lunch turned out to be a picnic in Nose Hill Park with an aunt, an uncle, and seven cousins. Aunt Judith and Uncle Randy weren’t married to each other, but both of their mates were at work.

  “We don’t say mates,” Aunt Judith corrected.

  Jack cocked his head and frowned. “Why not?”

  It was another one of those things no one had a good answer for, so he let it go. Maybe Allie would explain later.

  When he’d decided to be more Gale, he’d forgotten that he was pretty much exactly in between the cousins who’d come west for university and the cousins who’d come west with their parents. The older cousins were all working . . .

  Jack stared down at his vanilla-glazed, custard cream doughnut with sprinkles and snorted. “You know this isn’t actually food, right?”

  “You can’t smoke in here,” Melissa sighed.

  . . . so today was all about the kids. He didn’t mind. He’d been youngest for so long, it was kind of cool being the oldest.