The Wild Ways (15 page)

Read The Wild Ways Online

Authors: Tanya Huff

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Epic

BOOK: The Wild Ways
4.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“That’s better than letting them hit the ground.”
Allie nodded. “That’s what I said.”
Auntie Carmen looked up from the peaches she was slicing and shot Allie a look that would have curdled cream. Had curdled cream, Charlie noted as Auntie Gwen snorted, glared at Auntie Carmen, and dumped the contents of her mixing bowl down the sink. “Gales,” Auntie Carmen sniffed, throwing a peach pit into the compost bucket, “do not use sorcery.”
“Gales don’t bounce from a hundred feet up either,” Charlie pointed out.
“They had no business being a hundred feet up.” Auntie Gwen’s fingers were white around the handle as she opened the fridge. “Jack should never have agreed when they asked him for a ride.”
“Oh, please, what chance did he have? He had two determined Gale girls nipping at him, both well aware they’re inside his seven-year break and equally aware of what that’ll mean the moment they join third circle.”
“Who may or may not be within his seven-year break is irrelevant.”
Charlie snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“We will not be breeding him back into the lines.” Auntie Bea’s tone froze the water in the measuring cup beside her. The glass shattered. The water rolled off the table and smashed on the floor. “We would not breed him back into the lines if he was the last Gale boy alive.”
“Oh, come on, if he was the last Gale boy alive, you’d have to . . .”
“Charlotte.”
Charlie teetered on the edge of ignoring the warning, but self-preservation won out. “Fine. He’s different. We make use of difference, we don’t embrace it.”
“When have you felt un-embraced, Charlotte?” Auntie Carmen sniffed. “You’re still listed with two boys who haven’t chosen and another two who have, should you want a child without the inconvenience of a husband.
Auntie Bea slapped the sheet of dough over the pie plate. “Not to mention . . .” Each word came punctuated with a jab of her thumbs, pushing the dough down into place. “. . . the situation with Alysha and Graham having sons would be . . .”
“This isn’t about me,” Charlie reminded her quickly, before they could get tangled up in that argument again.
“You have useful talents,” Auntie Bea sniffed.
“So does Jack.”
“Sorcery . . .”
“Isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
“Experience begs to differ.”
“Experience with a dragon? A Dragon Prince?”
“What?”
“Jack is a sorcerer,” Charlie said, slowly, carefully, not giving them a reason to stop listening, “and a Gale boy, and yeah, that combination always goes bad, but he’s also a dragon, raised as a prince.You have no idea how he’ll turn out.”
“Exactly. He’s unpredictable.”
“Wild?”
“Precisely.”
Charlie folded her arms and raised both brows.
“No Gale boy has ever been a Wild Power,” Auntie Gwen stated flatly, dumping the bowl of sliced peaches into the pie.
“Or a dragon.” Charlie dropped down onto the sofa beside Allie. “When will you . . .”
Hand out of sight between her hip and the sofa, Allie pinched her.
“. . . understand,” Charlie amended, “that Jack is unique?”
Lip curled, Auntie Bea rolled on the upper crust. “Alysha’s argument for allowing him to stay . . .”
Translate
stay
as
live
.
“. . . was that he was a Gale boy and Gale boys are not unique.”
“We’re not good with unique,” Allie said quietly before the aunties could weigh in.
Yeah. Understatement. “Actually, Allie’s argument was that he was a Gale under the age of fifteen and therefore could not be judged.”
“His gender seems fairly self-evident,” Auntie Carmen noted.
“Charlotte, stop looking like you want to bang your head against the floor and make your point.”
Auntie Gwen was perceptive. “Stop thinking of him as a Gale boy and start thinking of him as a Gale dragon.” She spread her hands. “New label, new rules.”
All three aunties and Allie stared at her.
Given that she couldn’t stare back at all four of them at once, Charlie focused on Auntie Bea. Auntie Gwen was the most flexible, but Auntie Bea was the one to convince. “Jack’s not a defective Gale boy. He’s a fully operational Gale dragon.”
Dark eyes narrowed. “We got it the first time, Charlotte. And the sorcery?”
“He’s not a Gale sorcerer . . .”
“He’s a dragon sorcerer,” Allie finished, one hand wrapped around Charlie’s arm.
Forehead pleated into a deep vee, Auntie Carmen waved her knife like a wand. “But you just said, he’s a Gale dragon.”
“Ah, but all cats are not Socrates.”
“Yes, Charlotte, you’re clever.” Auntie Gwen pointed the whisk at her, cream dripping off the wires and back into the bowl. “What do you suggest we
do
with this Gale dragon?”
We’re not good with unique.
“Fine.” Charlie sagged back against the cushions and went where Auntie Gwen wanted her to. “He can spend the summer with me. I can teach him how to be a Gale who colors outside the lines. And besides, we could use a roadie; Mark’s got us booked into every freakin’ festival on the island and I am not carrying all that beer. That last bit was a joke,” she added as all three aunties stared. “Look, there’s open space in Cape Breton. Deer, moose, he’ll be fine.”
Allie’s grip on her arm tightened. “Do you remember the hamster you had when you were ten?”
“No. And ow.”
“I do. It died.”
“Hamsters don’t live very long.”
“You sat on it!”
Oh, yeah,
that
she remembered. “Dragons are tougher than hamsters, Allie, and it’s pretty obvious the p . . .” Auntie Gwen’s whisk scraped the side of the bowl and Charlie hastily discarded the peanut gallery. “People who make the decisions in this family don’t want Jack to stay here. And as he’s not here while we’re discussing him, where is he?”
One final squeeze, then Allie released her. “Down in the store with Graham and Joe.”
Charlie stood, tugged down the hem of her shorts, and picked up her mandolin.
“Where are you going, Charlotte?”
“First, I’m going downstairs to ask Jack if he wants to go east.”
Auntie Bea cut three lines across the top of the pie so quickly Charlie wondered if she’d ever been a ninja. “If he’s a Gale, as you two keep saying, dragon or boy, he’ll do what he’s told.”
“You can get more flies with honey, Auntie Bea.”
“I can get as many flies as I want, Charlotte, however I want, but I don’t want flies. And second?”
“Second, I’m heading back. I’ve got . . .”
Tall and slender, with dark hair and dark eyes, they stood at the place where land met sea, looking more real in the dusk than they could possibly be in full sunlight.
“
. . .
commitments. To the band.” Of course to the band.
“And these band commitments, they’re more important than family commitments, then?”
“I’m fulfilling family commitments, Auntie Bea,” Charlie said, and turned to go. Flip flops, not the greatest for pivoting on one heel, but she managed.
“Your pie isn’t ready,” Auntie Carmen pointed out mournfully.
Tempting, Charlie admitted, but pie had never been enough to keep her at home.
“If he agrees . . .” Allie caught up to her at the door.
“When he agrees. My persuasion-fu is strong.”
“Fine, when. How will you get him there? He’s too big to take through the Wood.”
Charlie grinned. “They have these things called planes.”
A dimple flashed in Allie’s cheek. “Yeah, but they smell like ass and make you check your guitar.”
 
 
 
Still licking the flavor of Allie’s cherry lip gloss off her mouth, Charlie glanced over at the mirror and the reflection of her standing in the hall holding her mandolin, a small duffel bag of clothes slung over one shoulder. It seemed she’d grown out of the whole traveling with only extra underwear lifestyle.
Then Allie slowly appeared behind her. Then Katie, then Maria, then Judith, then Lynn, then Rayne, then Holly, then her sisters, her mother, her aunts . . .
Tall, with blonde hair and gray eyes. Some slight differences in shade of hair, in shape of body, in skin tone, but it was easy to see the family resemblance. Charlie had started dyeing her hair when she was fifteen, a way of saying, “
Yeah, I’m different.Want to make something of it?
” With it back to her natural color, nothing visibly separated her from the others.
Then her reflection split down the middle and a glittering dragon stepped out holding her mandolin.
“I’m different on the inside.” She patted the frame. “Like Jack. A little obvious, but thanks.”
The dragon rolled silver eyes and stepped forward with such assurance that Charlie stepped back, convinced for a moment that it was going to step out of the mirror.
“And I thought that whole 3D craze had died,” she muttered going on into the store.
 
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure.” Charlie leaned back against the counter. “You can choose to spend the rest of the summer hanging out with a group of musicians who will very likely teach you a number of bad habits, or you can stay here where the aunties will watch you with suspicion, your cousins will continue to get you into trouble, Allie will treat you like a fourteen-year-old boy, Graham, who could teach you any number of cool things, will insist you do boring office work . . .”
“Hey!”
She ignored him. “. . . and Joe will keep reacting to that Prince thing and resenting it even though he’s never actually lived in the UnderRealm.”
“Wait . . . You resent I’m a prince?” Jack stopped spinning the wheels of an old die-cast tractor and turned a golden gaze on the leprechaun. “Why would you resent that?”
Joe’s freckles disappeared under a sudden flush. “I don’t believe your birth makes you better than anyone else.”
“Yeah, right. That’s ’cause you haven’t met my mother.”
They’d all nearly met Jack’s mother, but she’d been in a hurry to destroy the world and Allie had been in a slightly greater hurry to send her home and that hadn’t left much time for introductions.
Charlie straightened, leaving sweaty smudges behind on the glass. “Bottom line, Jack, being forced to wave the sorcerer flag this afternoon has gotten you a get-out-of-boring free card. So make a decision. I’ve got a beer back east with my name on it.”
“Fine.” He tossed the car back on the shelf. “I’ll go with you.”
“I’m overwhelmed by your enthusiasm. And technically you’ll be sent after me.”
“He’s not flying from Alberta to the east coast.” Feet shoulder width apart, arms folded, Graham’s posture announced he would not be moved.
“Why not? Oh, wait, you mean
flying
?” Charlie flapped her arms. “Duh. Of course not. Put him on a plane to Halifax, and we’ll work out how he’ll cover the last few kilometers when he gets there.”
“I’ll know where you are. I mean I can find you wherever you are,” Jack expanded when Charlie flashed a raised eyebrow at him. “Remember how my mother followed the blood link here? I can follow the Gale blood anywhere.”
“Anywhere?”
“It’s kind of loud. Obvious, I mean.”
“I thought you followed your father’s blood up from the UnderRealm?” Graham growled.
He shrugged. “I didn’t know I was a Gale then, did I?”
They weren’t getting him away from Graham any too soon, Charlie realized. Jack’s tone had tottered on the edge of challenge and in any testosterone-fueled, teenage rebellion, Graham would lose. No matter what Graham thought.
“Great, you’ll get to Halifax, then fly to the island to find me.You’ll need to stretch out after the plane. So, we’re good.” She ruffled Jack’s hair, moving just fast enough to keep from being burned by his reaction, then grabbed the front of Graham’s T-shirt, pulled herself to him, and kissed him good-bye. “I’ve got to go, I was in the middle of something. Well, on the edge of the beginning of something. I think.”

Other books

Whisper Cape by Susan Griscom
Fabulous Creature by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Ascent by Viola Grace
Little Children by Tom Perrotta
This Heart of Mine by Brenda Novak
Santa Fe Woman by Gilbert Morris
Cross of Vengeance by Cora Harrison
The Werewolf Ranger (Moonbound Book 3) by Krystal Shannan, Camryn Rhys
In the Image of Grace by Charlotte Ann Schlobohm