Fragile Brilliance (Shifters & Seers) (17 page)

“Are you insane? That one is so thin I don’t know how it’s not collapsing in on itself as it is. No one can throw thinner than that.”

She placed the Vase of Impossible Thinness on a wire shelf beside some other will-probably-never-make-it-to-kiln pieces.

“I can,” she said, turning back to him.

“How?” It had to be impossible, but then her eyes met his, and he knew. As long it was made out of clay, Maggie could do anything.

“It’s a natural talent,” she said with a smile he couldn’t help but return.

Charlie spent Sunday morning patrolling the grounds of Fenrir Farm with Layne. Because of his newfound course work, Charlie hadn’t spent much time with his nephew. And even though Layne didn’t seem to mind, Charlie felt a bit guilty about it all the same.

It took an ungodly amount of effort to get Layne awake, dressed, and outside. More than once Charlie considered just leaving him behind, but he knew taking Layne out was important. It wasn’t just the substitute-daddy-and-me time Charlie’s psychiatrist assured him Layne needed. Following Maggie’s advice from yesterday, Joshua had shown up at two in the morning with a mobile x-ray machine. Because he’s Joshua, he knew exactly what to do, and two hours later Charlie’s gut clenched as he looked at a ghostly version of Layne’s face.

“What do you see?” Charlie asked as they stood on the northern edge of the Alpha Pack’s property. When Layne didn’t answer, Charlie reached over and plucked an earbud out of his ear and asked again.

“I don’t know? Like, trees and grass and shit.”

I wouldn’t have to teach him how to protect himself if I went ahead and killed him myself.

“Look closer. How can someone get onto the property here? Is there anything out of place? Has anyone besides us been through here recently?”

Layne’s gaze never left Charlie’s face.

“For the love of God, just look.”

Still staring at his uncle, Layne gave a sigh of overwhelming boredom. “The fence is low enough even a four year old could climb over it, and for reasons I don’t understand, it’s not electric. Anyone who wanted could crawl right on over and slit our throats in the night, but no one has been over recently because the ivy hasn’t been broken or smooshed. Are we done now?”

Okay, so maybe Layne didn’t need Charlie to show him the ropes.

“What about smells? Do you catch anything off?”

A smirk lifted one corner of Layne’s mouth making him look like a carbon copy of his father. Charlie ran his palm over the sudden discomfort in his chest.

“Well, you smell like a loser. It’s called body spray, man. Buy some.”

“New flash, kid. The commercials lie. Reeking isn’t sexy. I would tell you to ask a girl, but since none of them will actually talk to someone as pathetic as you…” Charlie shrugged off the end of his sentence, and Layne responded by flipping him off.

And winner of Parent of the Year goes to… Anyone but Charlie Hagan.

“Maybe this was a bad idea.” He hated to admit defeat, but this was pointless. Layne obviously knew how to keep his eyes open when it actually mattered, and all the two of them were going to accomplish together was pissing each other off. “Come on,” he said, turning back towards the house. “If we hurry, we can get a pizza before I have to take Maggie back to campus this afternoon.”

Five steps later, he realized Layne wasn’t following him. He turned back around to find his nephew standing with his nose practically pressed against a tree. His eyes were closed, and his hands were balled into fists at his side.

“Layne…?”

“There is something here. It’s all messed up, but I know this scent. It’s… it’s…” His eyes snapped open. “Is this a test?”

Charlie shook his head as he walked back to where Layne was standing. He was about a foot away when he too caught the weird chemical smell of a scent blocker.

“It’s old. From last week,” he said. “I found it the day we found Barros’s body. I’ve had Robby look into it, and he says it’s our neighbor. Apparently the guy is a nature photographer who doesn’t understand property lines. He trampled all over the farm trying to get the perfect shot of a red-tailed hawk.”

“But the smell…” Layne took another deep sniff. “It’s familiar. I know this person, and it isn’t the guy next door.” Charlie didn’t say anything as Layne continued to try to place the scent. He stood back, giving him the space he needed. Part of Charlie hoped he actually teased out something to prove Robby wrong. Charlie’s gut didn’t like his cousin’s explanation, and like Layne, he found something familiar beneath the scent-blocking chemicals.

Layne’s eyes once again snapped open, but this time all the disdain and ire normally shining out from their green depths were gone and replaced by a sheen of vulnerability.

“It’s dad,” he said quietly, and then again with more conviction. “It’s dad, Charlie. I can smell dad.”

Damn it. Just… Damn. It.

“Layne, you know it can’t be your dad.”

“I know it’s not actually him. He’s been dead over a year now. I’ve kinda noticed.” Despite his harsh words and the valiant effort he put into appearing apathetic, Layne still looked like a sad, scared little boy. If Charlie didn’t think it would earn him a black eye, he would’ve hugged him. “I’m saying the smell underneath is the same, like how yours is the same as his. But this is different.”

“Different how?” Charlie had never noticed a similarity in his and Toby’s scents, but he’d never been particularly good at sniffing out the subtle nuances of different smells. Layne, it seemed, didn’t have that problem. He’d just been Changing for two years, but signs of being a Dominant were already starting to show. Not surprising since he completed his first Change at eleven, two years earlier than either Charlie or Jase. “Different like another Hagan?”

Layne took another deep breath and released it on a growl. “It’s too faint, and the scent blocker is screwing it up. I can’t tell.”

Charlie scrubbed a hand over his face, trying to think. Robby was convinced the scent originated with their idiot neighbor. If it had been one of the guys from Romania, he would do his own digging around, but Robby was a Hagan. He’d been one of Toby’s closest friend, and Charlie knew for a fact the guy wouldn’t ever put his family or his Alphas in danger. If Robby said the scent didn’t represent a threat, then it didn’t.

Still, Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling something was off.

“I’ll talk to Liam,” he told Layne. “If there is anything we’re missing, he’ll find it.”

That night found Charlie back at the studio with Maggie. He was actually happy to be returning to the tiny room with its industrial floors, cinder block walls, and inch high layer of dust coating every possible surface. It was beginning to feel like home.

“Here we go,” Maggie said, unlatching the door of the kiln. She opened it about an inch and then stopped. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her chest was rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths. “I can’t look,” she finally admitted.

“What? Why not?” Charlie hadn’t actually fired any ceramics before, but he didn’t expect this to be a big deal. What could have possibly gone wrong? “You know they’re going to be perfect.” It was one of the benefits of being able to manipulate clay with Thaumaturgic skills.

“I don’t know. I just have this really bad feeling—“

“Like maybe you’re over-stressed from an extremely emotionally taxing week? That kind of bad feeling?” Charlie knew all about that feeling. Liam had given him a long, heartfelt talk about it earlier.

Maggie gave him a tiny smile. “Yeah. Kinda like that.” She rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck as if preparing for a fight. “My brain is just being stupid. Nothing happened in the kiln.” She threw open the door. “That would be—“

Maggie froze, her face twisted into a mask of horror. He had to physically move her aside to see the damage for himself.

“What the hell?”

It looked like a bomb had gone off. Debris was everywhere. The lucky pieces were riddled with holes. The unlucky pieces were completely shatter.

“I… I…” A single tear dripped down her cheek. “Oh, my God. Oh. My. God. Who would do this?”

“How did this happen?”

“Wet clay. It had to be wet.”

“Wet clay?”

“Mine was all dry. I know it was. And Chase has been doing this for twenty years. She knows you can’t put wet clay in a kiln. It’ll explode, and…” Instead of finishing, she fished her phone out of her pocket and started pacing.

“Chase?” Because he was a Shifter and the moon was growing in the sky, he could hear their teacher’s confirmation, and Chase swearing the only thing she’d put in there was two little turtles she was making for her nephew. He could see both turtles had mostly survived, although they were missing their heads. Maggie asked if the mysterious Pepper might have put something in, and that was when they learned she was in jail on a drug charge.

“What were the little balls supposed to be?”

Maggie stopped pacing. “Balls?”

“Yeah, the balls of clay you placed on each shelf. Are they supposed to be something, was it wadding, or were you testing air flow around your pieces or something?”

“I didn’t—“ She closed her eyes and Charlie could almost see her thinking through different scenarios. “It was an experiment,” she finally said. “And it went all kinds of wrong. I’m sorry, Chase, but your turtles are kinda dead.”

Chase tried to tell Maggie it was no big deal and her nephew would probably prefer a box of Legos anyway, but Maggie insisted on apologizing for a full five minutes and paying her for damages, which Chase estimated to be a grand total of five dollars. The moment the call was over Maggie slumped down onto the floor and buried her face in her hands.

“Someone sabotaged your pieces on purpose,” Charlie said.

“Fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Five. Five dollars.” Charlie squinted at one of the little turtle figurines. “And that’s for the two of them together, not each. Although, looking at these things, I think she might be swindling you.” He picked one of them up, trying to figure out if paint would make them look less or more like turtles instead of six circle of various sizes stuck together, seemingly at random. “Are you sure Chase knows what she’s talking about? I mean, I would expect the person who is supposed to be teaching me ceramics to actually know how to do ceramics, at least enough to make a kid a turtle.”

“My pieces. The dishes.” Maggie looked up, and even though he hadn’t heard so much as a sniffle, her cheeks were wet with tears. “My stuff was worth fifteen hundred dollars.” She wiped her cheeks and stood. Charlie had the urge to hug her, so he shoved his hands in his back pockets. “It was a commission,” she said, walking over to stand beside him. “It was going to be a complete set of Hulk dinnerware. The buyer was going to pay me fifteen hundred dollars, but they had to be shipped by next week.”

Tears ran down her cheeks again. Somehow the silence with which she wept made it all the more heart-breaking.

“I can’t get it done now. I’ll have to message them and let them know.” She used the back of her hands to dry off her cheeks, although it didn’t do much good. New tears took the place of the discarded ones almost immediately. “Do you think there is any chance they’ll not write a horrible review about my lack of professionalism?”

“We can fix this.” There had to be a way. He couldn’t stand much more of her quiet tears.

“I can’t. Once the clay is set, it’s set. Even I can’t undo what the fire has done.”

“So you make new ones. Big deal. You can have that many plates and bowls thrown by midnight.”

She picked up a plate that was almost usable. “But I have to fire them, and I can’t do that until Saturday.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have to be with it all day, and I have classes Monday through Friday. You should probably remember that since you’re taking them with me.”

Charlie curled up one side of his mouth and raised his eyebrows. It was a practiced look, one that was supposed to say,
I’m-about-to-talk-you-into-doing-something-wonderfully-naughty
. He’d perfected it as a teenager trying to get to second base with whichever girl would give him the time of day, but he hadn’t put it into practice in a very long time.

“Maggie McCray, haven’t you ever heard of the concept of skipping?”

She swiped her cheeks again, this time succeeding in getting them dry. “It’s only the third week of school. No one skips during the third week of school.”

“Why not? It seems like a perfectly good time to skip, if you ask me. We’ve got a few weeks before our first exam, so we’re probably not going to miss anything they won’t cover again.” He could see his logic wearing down her defenses. The spark of hope he saw in her eyes turned his half-smirk into a full-on smile. “Come on, Magpie. We can do this. I’ll clean up this mess while you throw, and then tomorrow we’ll stay here all day and fire.”

“The clay won’t be dry enough—“

“Can you make it dry enough?”

“Maybe.” She ran a finger around the rim of the plate she was still holding. “No, I mean…” She lifted her lashes and met Charlie’s eyes. “Yes. I can do it.”

“Well, then,” Charlie said, grabbing a bowl out of the kiln and silently cursing himself for not realizing earlier that it would be hot, “let’s get started.”

He made Maggie start throwing while he emptied the kiln and took care of the mess. Two plates and one bowl came out undamaged, and Maggie brightly said that she could paint those on Monday while firing the other pieces. Once the kiln was empty, Charlie sat and talked to Maggie while she worked. He told himself it was just because he’d left his computer at home, thinking they wouldn’t be gone long, but he knew he would have done the same thing even if he had it and an entire stack of new comic books with him. The coyote had woken up at the first sign of her distress, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to subdue him. So, instead of fighting it, he indulged that side of himself by talking to her, coaxing smiles and laughs when she began to feel overwhelmed.