The Wild Ways (45 page)
The only thing that got him and Charlie through was that Uncle Adam clearly didn’t believe he could do it and was still just far enough away.
He fell with Charlie through the gateway into Fort Calgary, softening her impact with the ground as much as he could. She made a sound that hurt his heart as he twisted and yelled, “Stop being a gate!” before his Uncle Adam decided to follow.
He could hear the water and the traffic and smell people and engines and he was so close, but he couldn’t pick Charlie up. He just couldn’t. He was so tired and the rock was so heavy . . .
Inside the rock, Charlie’s phone rang.
And rang.
And rang.
He found enough energy for claws and dug the rock away above the sound then ripped Charlie’s pocket getting the phone out.
“Allie?”
“Jack?”
“Help . . .”
Turned out he wasn’t too old to cry after all.
The fiddler in her head was playing “Homeward Bound.” Charlie’d had enough fiddle music to last her a while so, in an effort to get it to shut the hell up, she opened her eyes.
“Her eyes are black!”
Allie.
“Don’t worry, Catherine’s used to go black off and on for years before the change.”
Auntie Bea.
“That’s not reassuring!”
Allie again. She sounded upset. Charlie wanted to say something reassuring, but she just didn’t have it in her. The fiddler had stopped, though. Taking advantage of the silence while it lasted, she drifted off to sleep.
Next time she opened her eyes, Auntie Gwen seemed to be wiping her face with a warm cloth. Seemed to be. It was always best not to take the aunties for granted, especially when laid out flat feeling like overcooked pasta.
“So, you’re back with us, are you? Don’t answer that,” she added as Charlie scraped a dry tongue over cracked lips. “Let me get you some water first.”
The water, in a sippy cup shaped like an elephant, was room temperature and the best thing Charlie could ever remember drinking. “What happened?” she managed after half a dozen careful swallows.
“You took out a Troll, the Troll nearly reciprocated, and Jack brought you home through the UnderRealm having remade the Troll into a kind of a cast. He saved your life. We laid you out on the hill, called a ritual, and put your pieces back together. Allie insisted on you returning to the apartment, so Jack gave up his room although you’d hardly know it since he’s been in here most of the time. Congratulations on accepting the responsibilities of a Wild Power, and don’t ever do anything like that again.” Auntie Gwen’s dark eyes glistened. She brushed angrily at the single tear that rolled down her cheek and added, “Call your mother. She nearly broke the second circle apart trying to get to you and, apparently, your sisters are displacing their teenage angst by hunting vampires in the catacombs under Paris.”
“There’s vampires under Paris?”
Auntie Gwen sniffed. “Not for much longer if your mother is to be believed.”
“How long?” Charlie asked. Nothing hurt, but the sheet seemed to weigh a hundred kilos, holding her flat.
“Since Jack brought you home?” Auntie Gwen helped her sit up, jerking the pillows up with her as support. “Nine days.”
“Nine days! I’ve got to call Mark! Wait . . .” Her mistake; frowning hurt. “He has my number, why hasn’t he called me?”
“Jack crushed your phone.”
“He what? Why?”
“The poor boy was a bit upset. Did you miss the part about nearly dying, Charlotte?” She stepped back and folded her arms. “You’ll just have to write off your little festival group in exchange for being alive. The injuries you had don’t heal overnight. Wouldn’t have healed overnight even if we’d allowed Jane to bully us into sending you back to Ontario. This is where . . .”
“Charlie!”
That Allie stopped her charge before she threw herself into Charlie’s arms told Charlie more about how badly she’d been hurt than anything Auntie Gwen had said. Up to and including
nine days
and
nearly dying
. She opened her arms. “It’s okay, Allie-kitten.”
nine days
and
nearly dying
. She opened her arms. “It’s okay, Allie-kitten.”
Well, relatively okay, Charlie thought as Allie clung to her and cried. But breathing was highly overrated anyway.
Allie had said Jack could go in first, but Jack liked Graham too much to put him through that. The poor guy’d been cried on pretty much twenty-four/ seven from the moment Charlie’d been brought from the hill. Allie’d held it together until then, but the moment Charlie’d been moved into his room, she’d stopped being the Gale who led the second circle, who anchored the family in Calgary, who’d kicked his mother’s tail—and the rest of her—back to the UnderRealm, and became kind of impressively weepy. Her and that seal-girl back east could have a weep off.
Allie’d wanted Charlie in the big bedroom with her and Graham, so Jack offered his before the aunties could move her out of the apartment altogether. There was more room and more family at his father’s old house, but Allie moving in would have shifted the power dynamics and who could get better with all that going on?
It was weird that Allie knew Charlie was going to be all right, but still couldn’t stop crying. Jack had totally stopped worrying the moment the ritual was over. He let the aunties fuss over him, scrubbing down his scales and fixing his wing and then, once Charlie was settled, he’d changed, flown north, snatched up a buffalo from a ranch herd, and carried it into the mountains to eat. Then he’d slept for three days.
When he got home and Charlie was still asleep, he still didn’t worry. An injured Dragon Lord found a safe place to hole up and sleep until he recovered, and Gales were almost as hard to kill as dragons.
No one could get to Charlie, but they could get to him and, for the first time, there was no question he was a Gale boy with all the indulgences that entailed.
Now that Charlie was awake, he was a little worried about how long Allie was staying in there with the door closed after Auntie Gwen had left. If they were having sex in his bed, that would be just too creepy. When the door finally opened, he breathed a sigh of relief and turned to Graham who seemed likely to pace his way through the floor. “You go. I can wait.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve got things to do.” Jack used his fork to gesture at the line of pies on the kitchen counter. Seemed like every member of the family in Calgary had shown up with two or three every day since Charlie’d come home. The charms were pretty basic—
get better, don’t be sad, we’re in all in this together
. The Gales who’d baked then may have called the charms something else, but that’s how Jack read them. Aunt Judith had been making meat pies, figuring that even Gales couldn’t live indefinitely on lemon meringue. Aunt Judith was currently Jack’s favorite aunt. And given all the pie he’d been eating, he felt great. Very reassured.
get better, don’t be sad, we’re in all in this together
. The Gales who’d baked then may have called the charms something else, but that’s how Jack read them. Aunt Judith had been making meat pies, figuring that even Gales couldn’t live indefinitely on lemon meringue. Aunt Judith was currently Jack’s favorite aunt. And given all the pie he’d been eating, he felt great. Very reassured.
Even David had been in and out, although he hadn’t brought pie. He had the changes mostly under control now. Jack liked to think he’d helped with that.
When Graham went into the bedroom, he left the door open.
Jack appreciated the gesture. Not that he’d been feeling excluded or anything.
The last slice of strawberry ice cream pie and a half a slice of peach pie later, Graham stuck his head out of the room. “She’s wondering where the hell you are.”
“I’m right here.” He licked his fork.
“Missing the point, kid. Get your ass in here.”
Jack sighed and stood. He stretched, scratched under the edge of his T-shirt, and padded barefoot across the room. When he paused at the door, Graham reached out and gripped his shoulder.
“She’s fine. A little damp, given Allie’s reaction, but fine.”
“I know.” Jack shook himself free. “I was there when they fixed her. She’s just been sleeping.”
“Okay.”
Okay? He had no idea what Graham meant by that. He pushed past, ignored whatever Allie had to say as she moved to join her mate, man, Graham at the door, and stopped at the foot of the bed.
Charlie was sitting up against a pile of pillows. Her hair was sticking out and needed washing and she had purple shadows under eyes although he didn’t know why because she’d been asleep for nine days. She was drinking out of one of Richard’s sippy cups that Aunt Judith had brought over even though she was sitting up.
And she was fine.
“Hey.” She put the cup down and held open her arms. “Come here.”
Jack didn’t remember crossing the rest of the room. There was a damp spot on the T-shirt Charlie was wearing, but he hadn’t made it.
“I’m okay.”
“I know.” When he’d seen her last, they’d said she was fixed, but she’d been all limp . . .
“Hey, you saved me.”
“I know. I bit Uncle Viktor’s wing off.” He felt her laugh. He liked that she laughed about it because it was pretty cool.
“For what it’s worth, if they try to send you back or make you do anything you don’t want when you’re fifteen, they’ll have to go through me first. Actually,” she added as he sat up and wiped his eyes that had totally gotten wet off the mess Allie’d left on Charlie’s shirt because he wasn’t crying, “I’d have had your back regardless, but I have a feeling it means a little more now.”
Her eyes were black. Then she blinked and they were gray again.
Jack took a deep breath and waved the smoke away as he exhaled. “There’s pie.”
Charlie shifted Graham’s hand from her hip to Allie’s, slid out from under Allie’s arm, and got out of bed without waking either of them. Years of bands and bars and leaving town early the next morning, had given her mad skills in slipping away, no fuss, no muss. Although, after nine days, it should surprise no one that she couldn’t sleep.
Grabbing a robe on her way out of the bedroom, she thought about looking in on Jack, but he was fourteen, not four or forty, so she kept going out of the apartment and down the stairs to the store. Or the hall behind the store.
The mirror shimmered in the light coming through the courtyard windows.
Her reflection, dressed in the red-and-black-checked dressing gown, appeared to be wrapped in silver bands.
She leaned in, cheek pressed against the cool glass, hands lightly gripping opposite sides of the frame. “I’m glad to see you again, too.” Straightening, she rubbed at the smudge her face had left with the sleeve of the robe. “Enough of this mushy stuff, though. I’m fine. What’ve you got for me?”
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