The Future Falls (26 page)

“Stubborn old women . . .”

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. The cold felt clean. Cleansing. Leaning back, she squinted up at the stars and wondered if one of them wasn't actually a star. She had no idea. She'd never cared about the stars. She cared about phosphor bronze medium strings. About pitchers of draft at Shooters in Thunderbay. About the heartbeat song of the bohdran under “Well Below the Valley.” And for longer than she'd realized she'd cared about Jack. A lot more than she should.

Stars? Not so much.

“It'd serve them right if I Walked away, found a bar, got royally pissed, and picked up a distraction.” Heat charmed into her clothes, Charlie settled in to wait.

“Auntie Bea wants to chain me down at the base of the tower and drop a large rock on me. Just to see what'll happen.”

Nearly half an hour by her watch. She tipped her head back far enough to watch Jack cross between the house and the pool. “Missing your uncles?”

“Little bit.” He shoved her over and sat beside her. The air between them warmed.

“How mad are they?”

“At you?” He shrugged. “Allie pointed out that you'd been carrying this knowledge longer than any of us and you were due for an emotional break. So they decided to cut you some slack. There's a ritual in ten days.”

“I know.”

“Auntie Jane's calling everyone home to take part.”

“Everyone including . . . ?”

“You and me? Yeah. There was a bunch of stuff about using the power we had to hand and that before we went on, we had to know for certain ritual wouldn't work.”

“Went on to what?” Charlie sighed. The aunties had been pretty definite about not being able to affect the asteroid.

Scales glistened across Jack's cheeks. “I kind of missed what they said about that.”

“Thinking about ritual.” Not a question. He was seventeen and he still hadn't spent a ritual in circle.

“Yeah.” He huffed out a small cloud of smoke. “Charlie, I was thinking . . .”

“That explains the smoke.”

“Sorry.” Ears flushed, he fixed the scorch mark on her jeans and started to move away.

She sighed, grabbed his sleeve, and pulled him back beside her. “Joke. What were you thinking about?”

“Why don't we contact the rest of the family?”

“Trust me, anyone who couldn't tap in tonight will get the word.” The constant sound of conversation spilling out of the house spiked suddenly. Still
incomprehensible—thanks to charms etched in the glass—the emotional emphasis was impossible to ignore. Charlie waited until the volume had dropped back down to a background murmur before saying, “Hopefully not
all
the words.”

“No, I don't mean . . . This circle in Calgary, it can't be the first time the family branched. I mean, Gales didn't spring up fully formed in southern Ontario and start bossing people around . . .” His voice trailed off into doubt as he shifted just far enough to be able to look into her face. “Did they?”

“No.” And once again she was reminded how much family background Jack had missed learning during his first thirteen years. “As the extended dance version doesn't do much more than repeat the chorus a billion times, let's stick with the basic tune: a branch crossed the Atlantic, landed in Newfoundland, circled in, and a couple of hundred or so years later branched into Ontario.”

“That's basic,” Jack agreed. Golden brows drew in. “You and me, we were in Nova Scotia.”

“Yeah. Your point?”

“That's pretty close. Why didn't we check if the family in Newfoundland was still . . .”

“We don't do that.” When Jack's frown became a silent demand for more information, Charlie sighed. “Look, we weren't even Gales until we got to Ontario. Right up until Allie and David, when we branched we changed our name and didn't look back.”

“But Allie and David wouldn't cut ties?”

“Technology won't allow us to cut ties. The world's gotten a lot smaller than it used to be and every generation, it gets smaller still. This . . .” She widened her gesture until it took in Calgary as well as the house and yard. “. . . is something new. The family's still working out the rules.”

“Okay but that was before the whole asteroid thing. We could find the other branches of the family.” He said
we
but Charlie heard
you and me
. He wasn't wrong. They could. Probably. They were Wild. Rules didn't apply. Most rules. All but one rule. She watched him walk to the edge of the pool and stare out over the water for a long moment before turning to face her again. “We should warn them. We should all work together to stop this thing.”

Not
could
anymore.
Should
. Charlie sighed. “Jack, do you know what a group of aunties is called?”

He grinned and his eyes flashed gold. “A power struggle?”

“Got it in one.”

“I was kidding.”

“No, you weren't. I've met your uncles.” She waited for him to nod—less actual breathing fire among the aunties, but otherwise the two groups were remarkably similar. “Because all of these aunties have known each other all their lives and Auntie Bea acknowledges deep down that she can't shove Auntie Jane off top of the charts, we manage. They're,
we're
working out new ways of dealing with each other.” Leaning forward, she caught his gaze and held it. “Now think of another circle that has an auntie in the same position as Auntie Jane. That's the single point where the two circles will touch. If I had to describe it in one word, I'd say boom.”

“Boom?”

“Boom. By the time the concept of working together to stop the asteroid is even mentioned, there won't be anything to work with. We can try to save the world, or we can go looking for more family and destroy it before the asteroid hits the blog-sphere.”

“Two Dragon Queens can't share a territory.”

Charlie spread her hands. “And there you go.”

A car drove by. Two blocks down, a small dog yapped out an indignant protest Charlie almost understood. The smell of woodsmoke suggested one of the neighbors had lit a fire in their fireplace. Up in the sky, it was neither a bird nor a plane but imminent death.

“Do they know?” Jack asked. The lounge bowed as he dropped down to sit beside her again, his weight not entirely under control.

“Do the other circles know about the asteroid?” Good question. Charlie thought about it for a moment. “If they even still exist, probably not. You have to admit the chain of events that led to us finding out was . . . unique.”

“But if they have a Seer . . .”

“Would they have a bouzouki player with a friend at NASA? Doubt it.”

“Yeah.” He blew a smoke ring and watched it drift away. “So . . . you and me in ritual. All available power in play.” Another smoke ring. Another moment while they both watched it drift. “What do we do?”

Even if she survived the ritual itself without being flame broiled, Charlie didn't think she could survive afterward, knowing and not having. “We hope the horse talks.”

“What?”

“Anything can happen in ten days. Maybe even the impossible.” She lifted her feet up onto the lounge and stretched out, Jack radiating heat against her hip. She watched another smoke ring dissipate, a soft gray smudge against a cloudless sky. Watched the stars hide death. Just for the hell of it, she sang one long pure note up into the sky. It slid past the power lines, up over the city's rooftops, aimed at the star that wasn't. It was mostly defiance. Although the family had bent a few laws of physics in the past—they'd have bent them half an hour ago had she been in the same province with Auntie Jane—Charlie didn't expect her voice to . . .

A distant light flickered and began to descend.

“Holy crap.” The lounge creaked and swayed as she jerked up. “I did it!” They weren't going to die! “It's coming down! And okay, that's not great, but if I can bring it down, I can break it up. Break it into pieces small enough they all burn up when they hit the atmosphere. Jack . . .” His arm was warm even through the sleeve of his jean jacket. “. . . look it's . . .”

“I think it's a plane.”

“Shit!”

“It's okay.” He sounded amused so hopefully she hadn't done anything irreparable. “It's landing at the airport.”

“You can tell that from here?”

“Yeah, but I'll go check on it if you like.”

Charlie reached for him as he stood, but only managed to grab the end of his tail. “We will never speak of this.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jack folded his neck nearly in half, lifted a wing, and grinned down at her over his gleaming curve of shoulder. “I'm never going to let you forget it.”

C
HARLIE SLIPPED OUT FROM UNDER ALLIE'S ARM, froze as Graham shifted on her other side, and slid out of bed as he settled. Groping the floor beside the bed, she found a T-shirt and the pair of pajama pants she'd discarded the night before. Bare feet making no sound against the painted floor, clothes in one hand, she shuffled forward until her fingers touched familiar curtains, then she let herself out the French doors and into the apartment.

With early morning light pouring in through the tall windows on either side of the room, she could see well enough to cross toward the kitchen without either night-sight charms or needing to turn on a lamp. So she should've been able to see Jack sitting at the kitchen table, eating something from a mixing bowl that sounded like cold cereal, but with Jack, it was never wise to make assumptions. Should have been able to see him. Hadn't. Not until she was almost beside him and he blinked sleepily up at her. If he asked, she intended to say she'd been absorbed in plans to save the world. And that she'd meant to trip backward over the arm of the sofa, arms and legs flailing.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” Rolling off the sofa onto her knees, she stood, pulled on the pajama pants and T-shirt and walked into the kitchen.

“It's just you kind of spazzed out and it looked like it might have hurt.”

“I'm fine,” she repeated, prying the lid off the coffee canister and spraying grounds all over the counter.

“So I can laugh.” When she flipped him off, he snickered and waved his spoon at the mess. “I could clean that up for you.”

“I don't . . .”

“During my last growth spurt, the one where I got taller than you . . .”

“Shut up.”

“. . . . I spilled stuff all over the place. I got good at cleaning up and coffee grounds go everywhere. Let me help.”

“No, it's all right, I can . . .” Charlie glanced toward him as she spoke and caught the quick flicker of gold in his eyes. “What?”

“It was only an offer to help you clean up,” he muttered. “Not to roll around naked with you until you smell like me instead of Allie and Graham.”

She lifted her arm to her nose. “I don't . . .”

“Dragon.”

“Right.” Leaning against the counter, weight on one hip, Charlie yawned and ran both hands through the tangled mass of her hair. “Does it bother you?”

“A little.”

“I'm not . . .”

“Did I ask you to? It's just . . .” There was suddenly a lot more scale and a lot less skin. “. . . I'm fighting instincts when you smell like them.”

“I didn't know.” And Charlie'd thought the whole misaligned attraction between them couldn't get any worse. Jack fighting instincts that might have even a remote chance of being dangerous to her babies would put Allie in full protection mode. The whole city would go into lockdown. “I'll go shower.”

“Coffee first,” he snorted, tossing his twisted spoon into the empty bowl, mostly skin again. “It's under control, and I worry about you drowning when you're less than caffeinated.”

“Cute.”

“Thanks.”

Coffee sounded like a terrific idea.

“Does it affect the flavor?” she asked as a tiny whirlwind lifted the pile of spilled grounds back into the canister.

“Graham says it doesn't.” The corners of his mouth twitched as though he wanted to smile, but wasn't sure he should. “Allie says it makes it harder to charm.”

“That's not a bad thing.”

“Yeah. That's what Graham says.” The smile broke free and Charlie had to stop herself from taking a step back. Or forward. He didn't look seventeen
when he smiled; there was too much dragon in the teeth and a hint of danger in the curve.

These were not feelings she could deal with before coffee, and she barely resisted dropping the fourth spoonful into her mouth after the first three went into the French press.

“Charlie?”

And now he sounded . . . young. Which he was.

“Yeah, Jack.”

“You need to take me back four years so I can be trained.”

Charlie spilled the coffee again. “What part of the family doesn't deal with the Fey did you miss?”

“This isn't dealing with the Fey, this is me keeping you and probably Katie alive.”

The coffee was taking too damned long. “What?”

“Before the ritual . . .”

“The one the aunties want you and me to join.” That ritual.

“Yeah, before that happens, you have to take me back in time. We'll go out to the badlands where there's room to maneuver and aim for the day my mother came through. I bet that made a mark.”

“Jack . . .”

“Then we drive back to town and I use the imprint of the old gate at the Fort to drop into the UnderRealm. I mean we know I'm not in there, right? I'm in the park. And my uncles collectively got their asses kicked home, so it could be years before they even notice I'm with the Courts. And since we know they
haven't
shown up to screw things up here, they
won't
show up to screw things up here.” He danced the second spill back into the canister and up into a second whirlwind; a dark roast tornado about a foot high. “I'll be back the day I left, trained. Able to control myself. Maybe able to stop the asteroid. You won't even have noticed that I was gone. And I'll be twenty-one. I know,” he held up a hand before she could speak, “it's still nine years, but . . .”

“Jack! It's still thirteen years, I'll be thirty-four.”

The whirlwind collapsed. “What?”

Sagging against the counter, Charlie rubbed both hands over her face. “If I take you four years into the past, I have to live those years. Avoiding myself. Waiting for the day we left.”

“Why? Just go back through the Wood.”

“Go forward?”

“Sure, why not? You're in the past, right? You know the future happened. Go back to where we came in when we went back.”

She'd never thought about going forward, but from the past, she was going into the present, not the future and the present was obviously reachable because they were standing in it. “That might work.”

“Thanks for sounding so surprised.” He took the kettle from her hand and poured the hot water into the press. “I'm going to blame it on the lack of caffeine. You go back to where we came in, only at a different place so you don't end up with yourself, and I'll come back through a gate the next day.”

Leaning forward, inhaling the coffee-scented steam, Charlie went over the idea and couldn't find a flaw. “Okay, smart guy, we can probably bullshit this past the aunties—safety, heritage, why no, I didn't notice anything different about Jack—but what about the Court's price?”

“Four years without you.”

She straightened. “What?”

Jack slid the coffee canister to the back of the counter, eyes locked on his hands. “Four years exiled from the one who completes me. Four years longing. Four years alone. And no happily ever after once we're back together because you'll still be nine years older than me. They'll eat that kind of thing up with a spoon. A Dragon Prince caught in the one rule the Gales won't break.”

“You'll pay them to teach you to be a sorcerer with emotional pain?” It was hard to hear her own voice over the roaring in her ears.

He shrugged. “That's the thing about the Courts; basically, they're dicks.”

“No.”

“They really are.”

“No, you aren't giving them . . . that.”

“You don't get to make that decision.” He turned to look at her then and, if not for the slide of scales up and down his arms, he'd have looked unaffected by what they were discussing. “That's the price to keep the world from ending.”

“Jack . . .”

“We can't let the world end for everyone who isn't family without doing everything we can to stop it. Right?”

Charlie palmed the top of the press and forced it down. It hadn't been
four minutes. She didn't care. At this point, she was willing to Walk back eight minutes, beat herself out of the bedroom, and make the coffee sooner. That Jack would offer so much of himself for those outside the family, well, the
outside the family
was part of the freedom of being Wild, but his total lack of awareness of how astounding it was, of how astounding he was, that was all Jack. The Gale motto was family first. Actually, it was
Omnes Sumus nos Postulo
, “We are all We Need”; Auntie Ruby had embroidered it on a pillow, but family first was close enough.

“Charlie?”

She took a deep breath and met his eyes, letting everything she felt show in hers. “I have to think about it.”

“You've got nine days.”

And that, that didn't sound young at all. Gods, he was complicated. And amazing. “Oh, yay. Another deadline. You know, if I didn't already like you too much . . .”

His smile twisted as he cut her off. “Good thing you do. If it was me feeling stuff all alone, well, plain old unrequited liking too much wouldn't be twisty enough for the Courts. But being kept from someone who completes me . . .”

“Completes you?”

“Totally.”

“Fuck, Jack.” Not the best choice of profanity, she realized.

The cloud of smoke came a heartbeat behind the sound of the apartment door opening. Charlie tried not to think of squids and ink. It was possible she watched a little too much Discovery Channel.

“Honestly, Jack . . .” Auntie Gwen's indignation led the way. “. . . if I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times. You can't smoke around the babies.”

Barely able to see Jack, Charlie stepped back, a hundred thousand performances keeping her hands from shaking as she poured her coffee.

“But they're in their room.” The smoke moved toward the windows. “With the door closed.”

“That's them. We're talking about you.”

“Sorry.”

Auntie Gwen closed the window as the smoke dispersed, invisible in the steady rain. “Don't be sorry, stop doing it. Is that coffee?”

“It is.” Charlie took a long swallow, then asked, “Would you like some?” She was a little impressed by how normal she sounded.

“No, I was inquiring for interest's sake. Of course I'd like some.”

Jack passed over a
World's Greatest Auntie
mug, and Charlie resisted the urge to hum a charm in as she filled it.

“Are Alysha and Graham still in bed?” Mug in one hand, Auntie Gwen checked her watch. “It's almost nine and we need to start finding houses for sale around the park. If enough of the family is moving west, we'll need charms in place early to keep the situation under control and out of the papers.”

“I thought Auntie Jane wanted us to wait until after the ritual?”

“The ritual . . .” Aunt Gwen frowned at the rain on the window for a moment. “While I agree that we need to make every attempt to ensure the family's survival, I have no idea what Jane thinks the ritual will do.”

“Beyond what the ritual always does?” Charlie asked flippantly.

The look Auntie Gwen shot her almost made her regret her tone. “Yes, Charlotte. Beyond what ritual always does. However, and regardless of what Jane chooses to believe, this is no longer a world where we can do as we like, removing inconveniences after the fact.” The edge on her voice made it clear she'd neither forgiven nor forgotten Auntie Jane slapping her down and there would be consequences in due time. “If we want to move a significant portion of the family to Calgary for safety, we need to deal with the Calgary real estate market and that requires Alysha's input.”

As Charlie understood it, the Calgary real estate market could give an extinction event a run for its money in the
holy fucking hell
stress department. Four aunties weren't nearly enough to control it. “I'll go wake Allie.”

“And Graham. He has a useful outsider's perspective.” Auntie Gwen took a swallow of coffee and blinked. “Did you make this, Jack?”

“No, Charlie did.”

“Really? Because it tastes like the sort of coffee people who breathe fire would drink.”

Halfway to the bedroom, Charlie turned and walked backward. “I like it strong, Auntie Gwen.”

“There's a difference between strong and abusive, sweetie.”

About to suggest she pour it back into the carafe if it was so terrible, Charlie's back bounced off a firm barrier. Strong hands grabbed her arms and steadied her.

“Gwen.” Graham sounded more resigned than thrilled to find an auntie in his kitchen on a Monday morning.

“Graham.” Auntie Gwen on the other hand sounded positively perky. And she was smiling. Charlie felt Graham shudder.

“Allie'll be right out.” He moved Charlie away from his chest. “I'm going to go check on the boys. Jack . . .”

“More coffee. On it.”