The Wild Ways (6 page)

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Authors: Tanya Huff

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

BOOK: The Wild Ways
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He held his thumb and forefinger about a centimeter apart. “Just a bit.”
 
Charlie’s phone woke her at eleven the next morning. Graham, Allie, and Jack had already woken her at seven, eight, and eight-thirty, further convincing her that she had to get her own place. A “Ride of the Valkyries” ringtone modulated her greeting to a fairly neutral, “What?”
“There’s no need to be rude, Charlotte.”
That, she’d expected. The particular voice, not so much. “Auntie Catherine?”
“How nice your current lifestyle hasn’t entirely rotted your brain,” Allie’s grandmother confirmed. “I have a proposition for you.”
“A what?” Charlie rolled over and blinked at the ceiling, scratching under the edge of her boxers where the elastic had dug into the skin. Easier to blame the elastic for the itch. “I mean, what kind of proposition?”
“You and I are not so different, Charlotte . . .”
Given the shit Auntie Catherine had put them through, Charlie wasn’t inclined to jump on the Wild Powers
all together now, rah rah, go us
bandwagon. “What kind of proposition?”
“One that will get you out of Calgary.”
“I’m happy here.”
“Please.” That was possibly the most definitive eye roll Charlie had ever heard. “Meet me in Halifax and we’ll talk.”
“Of what?”
“Ships and seas and sealing wax, tentacles and kings. As if I’d risk the others overhearing.”
“Is that what’s causing the buzz in the line?”
“Have a coffee and jumpstart your brain, Charlotte. I don’t have time for this.”
Auntie Catherine had a distinctly emphatic way of hanging up a cell phone.
 
 
 
“Dude!” Charlie smacked the mirror frame on her way by. “Tighten things up. It looks like my skin doesn’t fit.”
In the store, Allie and Joe stood staring at something on the glass counter. Their expressions suggested a hazmat suit might not be a bad idea.
“A nail?” Charlie asked when she got a little closer.
“The nail,” Allie replied glumly. “For the loss of a nail,” she continued when Charlie shook her head. “Horseshoe, horse, battle all lost. This is the nail.”
“It’s rusty.”
“Don’t think that matters,” Joe muttered. He wore a mid-thirties glamour these days. Young enough for Auntie Gwen’s ego, old enough that public PDAs had stopped attracting dangerous attention. The aunties’ response to people stuffing their noses in where they didn’t belong was not subtle by several fairly terrifying degrees of
not
. “It was in a jar with a bunch of screws, nuts, bolts . . .”
“Nails?” Charlie offered.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it do?”
“Nothing until you lose it. Then you lose everything else.”
“So put it back in the jar and sell it.”
Allie looked disapproving. “That’s a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?”
Charlie shrugged. “Depends on how you’re defining irresponsible. Seems like the responsible thing would be to get it the hell out of here. It’s not like family’s going to pick it up.”
“Tony, your drummer, he builds stuff, doesn’t he? Suppose he came down and bought the jar with the nail in it because he needed some cheap screws and then he took it home and somehow lost the nail and lost his wife and his house and . . .”
“Yeah.” Charlie cut her off. “I get it. It’s dangerous. So what are you going to do with it? Lock it up with the monkey’s paw?”
“No . . .” Allie reached under the counter and came up with a hammer. “. . . I’m going to put it where it can’t get lost.” She turned, lifted the signed photo of Boris off the wall, used the claw to pull the more mundane nail, and slammed the lost nail in about two centimeters higher.
“Gale girls know where the studs are,” Charlie said.
Joe snickered.
“Why don’t you go next door and get coffee,” Allie muttered, hanging the Minotaur’s photo back up.
 
Kenny Shoji looked up as Charlie came through the door of the coffee shop, muttered something that sounded uncomplimentary even at a distance, then moved to the row of urns behind the counter to start filling the tall red mugs he kept for the Emporium staff.
“So,” he said without turning, “you’re hanging around again. Wasting your life.”
“I like my life.”
“So you say.”
“I don’t feel trapped!”
He turned then. “Who said anything about trapped?”
“No one. You just . . . I mean . . . Look, whatever.” She frowned purposefully at the small TV next to the cash register. The mute was on, but the banner across the bottom of the screen announced CBC
News at Noon
was showing visuals of the Hay Island Seal Rookery. Why did that sound familiar?
She jumped a little when Kenny set the three mugs down in front of her.
He looked from her to the television and shook his head. “Bad deal that. Some oil company’s been pushing the Nova Scotia government for permits to drill just off the island. All hush hush. Some group that works to protect the seals found out, just about at the last minute, and there were a couple days of protest but they seem quiet now. Lots of oil, the company says, and no one’s arguing that, but too close to shore and way too close to the seals if anything goes wrong.”
“What could go wrong?” Charlie snorted. The visuals changed to an attractive woman speaking earnestly to a reporter. The banner now read
Amelia Carlson, CEO of Carlson Oil.
She wore the glamour money provided in order to look in her mid-thirties, plumped lips lifted in a smile equally as unreal. “I met some guys up in Fort McMurray . . .”
“Good for you!” Kenny’s face pleated into a thousand wrinkles when he smiled. Even when it was a sarcastic smile. “I hear that’s what happens when you hang out in bars. You should watch the news more.”
“. . . they were from Cape Breton,” Charlie continued, ignoring him. “They talked about Carlson Oil trying to get offshore drilling permits. Said the company’d build a refinery and everything.”
“Lots of jobs,” Kenny sighed. “That’s hard to argue with. It’s always been tough going in the Maritimes. I know money was tight back when I was surfing off the north shore.”
“Wait.” Charlie moved her attention from the television to the very old man behind the counter. “You used to surf the north shore of Nova Scotia?”
“That’s where I met Robert August.” He pointed to one of the framed photographs on the wall of the shop. It was a signed, black-and-white shot of a young man in board shorts, cutting a sweeping line down a wave. “That was in the summer and the ocean was still cold enough to freeze your manhood off. And speaking of freezing . . .” He pushed the mugs toward her. “. . . take these before they get cold. Oh, and the apartment’s free end of September. You can have it if you want it.”
Sleeping in without interruptions. Practicing without silence charms. Still close enough to Allie’s cooking. And bed. Charlie opened her mouth to say she wanted, but nothing came out.
Kenny shook his head. “I’d cut you off if I hadn’t already poured. Your lip is twitching.”
 
 
 
Auntie Gwen, Auntie Bea, and Auntie Carmen were waiting by the counter when Charlie got back to the store. Joe had left. Apparently Kenny’s uncanny ability to know who wanted what coffee could be thrown out of whack by the presence of the aunties. Hardly surprising; whole civilizations could be thrown out of whack by the presence of the aunties. And if some of the stories were true, had been.
Auntie Bea looked stoic, Auntie Carmen looked concerned, but Auntie Gwen’s expression lifted the hair off the back of Charlie’s neck. She shot a silent
What’s up?
at Allie, who shrugged an equally silent
I have no idea.
“We just got off the phone with Jane,” Auntie Gwen said as Charlie put the mugs down. “And we decided you should be told this in person.”
“I should be told?” Charlie asked, licking at the coffee slopped on the back of her hand.
“Everyone here in Calgary needs to be told,” Auntie Bea announced. “We’re just starting with the two of you.”
Auntie Carmen shook her head, concerned expression morphing to mournful. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth . . .
And Auntie Gwen cut her off. “Alysha, your grandfather . . .”
Charlie moved to Allie’s side. Alysha’s grandfather, Charlie’s Great Uncle Edward, held the same position back in Ontario that David did here in Calgary. Allie adored him.
“. . . wavered during the ritual at Midsummer. It has been decided, there will be a Hunt.”
TWO
 
A
HUNT?” Behind the shield of the counter, Allie wrapped her fingers around Charlie’s. “Because Grandfather
wavered
?”
“Weakness at the heart of the family cannot be tolerated, Alysha.” Auntie Bea’s dark eyes narrowed. “You know that.”
“But there hasn’t been a Hunt for generations.” Allie’s grip tightened past the point of pain. Charlie gritted her teeth. “Why hasn’t one of the uncles just challenged him?”
“
Just
challenged him?” Auntie Bea snorted.
“David’s tied here,” Auntie Carmen sighed, thin fingers twitching at the hem of her pink polyester blouse. “I’m sure it was the only solution at the time, but no one else is strong enough.”
Auntie Gwen shook her head. “Even if one of the others could defeat Edward . . .”
“And we’re not saying anyone could,” Auntie Bea interjected.
“If they could,” Auntie Gwen continued, “they couldn’t do it easily.”
Auntie Carmen sighed again. “Not easily.”
“David could have,” Auntie Bea snapped.
Auntie Gwen turned on her. “David had a different destiny.”
“Without David . . .” Auntie Carmen’s voice trailed off.
“Without David,” Auntie Gwen continued, “it has to be a Hunt.”
“Without a Hunt, the center will be too damaged to hold,” Auntie Bea pointed out, as though that, at least, should be obvious.
“If the center doesn’t hold . . .” Auntie Carmen’s eyes glistened and Charlie tried not to think of crocodiles and tears.
“If the center doesn’t hold,” Auntie Gwen said definitively, “then the family falls.”
Outside the store, an SUV roared past, bass thumping, two kids walked by arguing about a television show, and half a dozen pigeons muttered amongst themselves as they wandered desultorily around the sidewalk directly outside the door looking for food.
Another moment passed, another SUV, and Charlie realized the aunties were waiting for a response. They’d finished talking. Good. The three of them had been very close to starting in on the eyeball swapping thing and that never ended well.
“So let me see if I can sum up.” When no one objected, Charlie continued. “Uncle Edward wavered. That makes him weak, and we can’t have a weak anchor. Unfortunately, David was the only male strong enough to take him out without taking the kind of damage in return that would keep him from doing his . . .” It wasn’t exactly a job. “ . . . thing. Duty. Under those circumstances, in order to put a strong male at the center of the family, there has to be a Hunt. That it?”

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