The Wild Ways (52 page)
Grinneal
had only ever played the song with a single fiddler. There’d never been a harmony before.
had only ever played the song with a single fiddler. There’d never been a harmony before.
Three others joined him.
The Selkie behind the old man’s left shoulder grinned and suddenly wasn’t elderly but eldritch and beautiful. She leaned forward and kissed the back of his neck.
Charlie took a deep breath.
Music had blown the storm back out to sea. Had probably called it in, too, but that wasn’t the point. Music had brought her back through time. Music could do this . . .
A sudden howling gust of wind nearly blew her off her feet.
She staggered three steps forward, felt the edge of the cliff begin to crumble under her foot, fought to turn, fell on her ass when the wind stopped as suddenly as it started, began to slide, gravity taking over . . .
As her left leg flopped off into air, strong fingers grabbed her arm and dragged her back. Then up onto her feet.
Charlie steadied herself on Eineen’s shoulders, but her eyes were locked on the tableau back by the cars. Auntie Catherine lay crumpled on the ground, Paul standing over her, Charlie’s guitar case in his hand. It was so quiet, they could hear orders shouted out on the barge.
“She came out of the side mirror,” Paul said, blinking rapidly, as though his eyes were still trying to convince his brain. “She threw a piece of paper into the air and blew on it and you nearly went off the cliff, so I . . .” He glanced down at the case. “She’s just . . . I’ve never hit a woman and . . .”
Charlie sang a fast E flat minor as Auntie Catherine tried to rise and she slumped back to the ground again. After a moment, when it became clear she was going to stay there, Charlie relaxed. “Okay. Good. And, if it makes you feel any better . . .” Charlie gave Eineen a little shove toward Paul. He looked like he needed an application of Selkie mellowing. “. . . if she’d seen you coming, she’d have found a cornfield.”
“What?”
“Family thing. Never mind. Point is, you wouldn’t have survived the experience. So . . .” Hands in her pockets to hide the trembling, Charlie turned back to the ocean. “. . . the barge is still moving, folks. Once more, with feeling.”
Beyond the wild wood, the road. Beyond the road, the wild sea.
Mark let Tim hold the heartbeat and built a wild rhythm around it, in and out of the melody, over and around the harmony.
As the barge drew even with the cliff, and the music thrummed in blood and bone, and the fiddler in her head played the same song as the fiddlers on the cliff unless the fiddlers on the cliff were the fiddler in her head, Charlie drew in a deep breath, acknowledged that Auntie Catherine unconscious behind her was better than Auntie Catherine conscious pretty much anywhere for a while, and sang a single note.
And held it.
Sang to the land beneath the sea.
Eineen stepped to the edge of the cliff, naked, a belt wrapped around her waist. A woman stepped from behind every fiddler, stepped to the edge of the cliff, naked but for shawls or belts or scarves or sweaters. They were women in the air. They were women when they hit the water. They were seals when they surfaced.
The cliff trembled. Under the barge, the seabed dropped.
The sea dropped.
The barge dropped with it.
And the sea rushed in to fill the space, leaving a perfect oval in the water, the forged signature of a leviathan’s dive.
Charlie changed notes. Mark changed the beat. Bo shook out his right arm, brought the bow back and began “Homeward Bound.”
That, all nine fiddlers knew and had played a thousand times between them.
Out by the oval, the seals surfaced with coughing men clinging to their backs. They brought their living salvage in to shore about a kilometer from the cliff, swimming as close to the gravel beach as they could.
Once the last man staggered out of the waves, Charlie let the note die. When she closed her mouth, her lips stuck together.
One by one the fiddlers stopped.
Then Mark. Then, finally, Tim.
The waves continued to slap lazily against the cliff as the though the barge had never existed.
“Okay, I don’t want to be a killjoy here, Chuck, because that was fucking amazing, but I think the science of this is off.” Peering over his sunglasses, Mark scratched his head with his tipper. “I mean, you disrupted the seabed, shouldn’t there be a tsunami or something?”
“We sank a barge with a song.” Charlie dragged her tongue over her lips without improving the situation much. “Science isn’t really a factor here.”
“Point.” He squinted along the coast to the saved men, some standing in groups, a few kneeling. “They’re going to tell stories about this. Hell, they’re going to write songs about this.”
“No one will believe them.”
“You don’t know . . .”
“I do know. But the seals will get a legend out of it, and that oil field’s not going anywhere, so good PR never hurts.”
“Also point.” He stared at her for a long moment, then grinned. “If you’ll excuse me, Chuck, I think I’ve discovered what that song needs to be played in public.” He hurried off along the cliff to the cluster of fiddlers. Tim rolled his eyes and followed.
Charlie felt something poke her in the arm, turned, and accepted a bottle of water from Paul. “I really do like you, Paul Belleveau. In spite of everything. If Eineen ever gets . . .” She glanced back at the fiddlers.Young and old and apparently happy with their choice. This really wasn’t any of her business. “Never mind.”
He gestured out at the water where the barge wasn’t. “This won’t stop Amelia Carlson.”
“Doesn’t have to.” Best water Charlie had ever tasted. “It just has to delay her plans long enough for me to stop her.”
“You
can
stop her?”
can
stop her?”
Charlie grinned. “I just sank a barge with a song.”
Paul nodded, half turned . . . “What should we do about Catherine Gale?”
“Leave her.”
“Leave her?”
“Trust me.”
“She’s going to be angry.”
“Angry?” Charlie snickered and swayed a bit where she stood. “No. She’s going to be wild.”
Technically, she shouldn’t be anywhere near the Emporium because technically she was upstairs recovering from being crushed by a Troll. However, given that she was, in point of fact, upstairs recovering from being crushed by a Troll, it was unlikely she’d be coming downstairs to run into herself. No harm. No foul.
Slipping in through the back door, the viburnum still quivering in the courtyard, Charlie headed straight into the store and behind the counter to where Boris’ photo hung on a nail that glowed so brightly the light was visible six centimeters beyond the edges of the frame.
Amelia thought the young woman who brushed against her as she left the restaurant looked vaguely familiar, but the fuchsia hair was distracting, Ewan was being entertaining, the stars were enchanting, and the wine had been lovely so, honestly, who had time for vaguely familiar.
The sinking of the barge during the small earthquake off the coast of Cape Breton had opened inquires. She’d directed them all away from her to Captain Bonner and laid as much of the blame as possible on her ex-assistant. Nothing had stuck, but she’d crush Paul Belleveau in time.
This was a delay only. With the permit still in her possession, and the minister still in her pocket, the well would go in. No one stopped needing oil because a few sailors and ironworkers swallowed too much salt water.
Heroic seals. Honestly.
Since she never noticed the nail that had been slipped into one of the worn outside pockets of her Italian leather bag, she never noticed when half a centimeter of seam finally gave way and she lost it.
On the fall equinox, as gray-green clouds scudded across the sky and wind whipped the tops off the waves, the seabed by Hay Island cracked. The rock split across the site where the shallow water well would have been anchored by steel and iron had Carlson Oil not suddenly had to declare bankruptcy.
A tentacle emerged from the darkness below the rock and stretched toward the surface.
There were no seals in the water. Or on Hay island. Actually, given the enormous gold dragon perched on the rookery, there was no room for seals on the island. Fortunately, the Gales had always been a close family.
The seals were safely on Scatarie, their cousins standing behind them holding camera phones.
“You’re on.” Charlie braced herself against the downdraft as Jack took off. He’d grown since he’d left the UnderRealm. Grown, changed, matured a little although he was still, undeniably, a fourteen-year-old boy. He gave a whoop, or the dragon equivalent, when he hit the water.
Auntie Catherine hadn’t Seen the Troll. She hadn’t Seen Jack at the festival when she’d sent the Boggarts. She hadn’t even known it was Jack answering when she’d called Charlie’s phone. She hadn’t Seen the obvious solution.
“Like I told you, Auntie Catherine, I’ve got this end-of-the-world thing covered.”
Bracelets chimed as she tucked hair disturbed by Jack’s flight back behind her ears. “No one likes a smart-ass, Charlotte.”
Bottom line, it wasn’t about forgiveness or understanding or working together for the greater good; it was about being a Gale.
“. . . and although yesterday’s small earthquake off the coast of Cape Breton was the second in as many months, both provincial and federal governments continue to refuse to fund research. Acadia and Dalhousie Universities have announced they plan on sending geophysicists to the region with or without government funding.”
Charlie reached over and turned off the car radio. “And geophysicists still on the shore at moonrise will suddenly find themselves in new relationships as Two Seventy-Five N adds to their resource base.” Under Paul’s leadership, the environmental group had begun to expand onto the international stage. Turned out that Eineen hadn’t changed him, she’d just redirected his focus.
Feet on the dashboard of Charlie’s car, Jack slouched as far as the seat belt would allow and belched.
“Oh, that’s nice.” The small fire on the dash burned out on its own.
“It’s not my fault the old gods taste like a sneaker someone stored fish in.”
Charlie grinned, swerved around a late season tourist, and tossed him a bag of nacho chips. “Remind me to take you out for good calamari some time.”
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