The Future Falls (7 page)

Charlie stayed out of ritual, too, joining him as a fourth circle of protection around the rest of the family. Maybe if Charlie took part . . .

Pulled from his thoughts by the sudden roar of a jet, Jack realized he'd drifted into the approach path of the Calgary airport. Dropping a wing, he slipped sideways, careful to cause as little turbulence as possible. Even at only half his full size, an impact would destroy the plane.

The thought of imminent destruction reminded him of flying in the same sky as his uncles, and feeling slightly nostalgic about the adrenaline rush—less so about the blood loss—he circled back around toward the city.

As he passed over Nose Hill Park, a stag broke from cover and raced across the open ground on the top of the hill. Jack always had kind of a mixed reaction when he saw David running on hooves. He'd eaten a lot of deer since he'd come to this world.

Throwing a glamour on as he circled lower, he changed just before his feet touched the ground to drop the final few centimeters in skin. Normally, he'd create clothing out of whatever he could find around him, but as David wouldn't dress within the boundary of the park, he didn't bother. Neither of them would feel the cold.

David circled him half a dozen times before finally rearing up on two feet and becoming Human—or Human appearing, at least. The Gales didn't talk much about what they actually were, but taking his mother into account, it was clear Jack's father had needed more than mere sorcery to survive his conception.

“Jack.”

“David.” Unlike the girls, all so similar in appearance to someone who'd grown up with the brilliant variations of the Dragon Lords that half the time he still needed scent to tell them apart, Gale boys had a broader choice of coloring. David was tall and muscular with dark hair and dark eyes—rim-to-rim dark when he forgot to change all the way, the physical manifestation of the power he channeled. The aunties and Charlie did it too sometimes, reminding Jack, somewhat uncomfortably, of his Uncle Adam. On the dragon side.

“Problem?”

The anchor to the land, David was the conduit for this branch of the family's power. As far as Jack could tell, he had a pretty raw deal. Allie couldn't leave the city until she crossed to first circle, but David would never be able to spend much time away from the park. Plus, he had to deal with the aunties during ritual. “No, I just . . . I mean I saw you and . . .” He dragged a hand through his hair, pushing it back off his face. “Charlie's back.”

“I know.”

Of course he did.

Jack sighed and dug his toes into frozen bits of grass as the breeze blew the smoke away. “She's home because of Allie.”

“Yes. You want her to come home because of you.”

“Well, yeah, but . . .” When he glanced over, David wasn't smiling. “What?”

“On this land, Jack, I can touch your heart. I know you don't understand, but we have the seven-year splits for a reason—seven years older or seven years younger, no one chooses outside those parameters. Gale girls get more powerful as they age, and we're all attracted to power. That's a potential for abuse the family's chosen to guard against. We haven't always been so civilized.”

“This from a man with antlers,” Jack muttered rolling his eyes. He hadn't known he was a Gale until he was fourteen, so he got a lot of lectures on family dynamics his cousins had practically been born knowing.

David spread his hands, the calluses and dirt making them darker than his forearms. “This from a man with a tail.”

“And wings,” Jack pointed out. “Everyone loves the wings.” He might—or might not—have a list, but he had no shortage of cousins pleading for rides. Although that had an age limit now, too; adults only. It wasn't as if Jennifer and Wendy had hit the ground. And he'd managed to gather up all the butterflies and change them back. He had a feeling at least some of the requests were for rides of a different sort, but while his cousins were blunt with each other, they weren't entirely sure of him. “Charlie's Wild,” he said, not entirely certain why.

“And you're seventeen. Which is why you're stating the obvious. Charlie's thirty. Wild doesn't change that.”

“I'm Wild.”

“I repeat, Wild doesn't change that. It's not going to happen.” Antlers arced up from David's brow.

“Just to be clear, when you say it's not going to happen, you mean me and Charlie? Happening? Like Allie and Graham happening?”

“Allie and Graham are second circle. You and Charlie are . . .”

Suddenly finding himself trapped by the weight of David's regard, Jack stared back as calmly as he could. Within the park, in spite of what their other forms suggested, David was the apex predator. Or at the very least, the greater power—which to the dragon part of him meant the same thing.

After a long moment, David allowed him to look away. “Yes, like Allie and Graham.”

“Oh.”

“Oh? You hadn't . . .”

“I thought it was a Wild thing.” It seemed obvious—he didn't feel that way about anyone else in the family and no one else in the family was Wild. Except Auntie Catherine. Jack hadn't spent much time with her, but it had been enough that he felt confident in saying she didn't make him feel like Charlie did. Charlie made him feel like he belonged.

“It's that, too. But, mostly, it's that ritual is calling and you can't . . .” David actually hesitated. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his breath pluming like smoke in the cold. “Ritual is calling,” he repeated, “and there's no one powerful enough to be safe with you.”

“The way Allie is safe with Graham?”

“Yes.”

That sounded more like a
sure, why not
to Jack. “Except for Charlie.” It always came back to Charlie.

“Yes, except for . . . Jack.”

Steam rose where the damp air touched his skin and, when Jack looked down, he realized he stood in an irregular circle of charred grass about two meters across. The edge of the char stopped at the edge of David's feet. “Sorry.”

“Ritual's unanswered call makes you restless. That's all this is.”

“This?”

“This,” David repeated solemnly. “What you feel for Charlie.”

“Oh.” Was that what they were talking about, what he felt for Charlie? While ritual, or at least what happened during ritual, definitely had something to do with it, Jack admitted, it certainly didn't explain everything. But it was what David wanted him to think, and it was no skin off his tail if pretending he agreed made David happy. Appeasing the powerful was a basic survival skill. “Okay.”

They stood together in silence for a moment, more aware of the city around them and the land under them than the rest of the family. Except for maybe Allie, Jack amended silently.

“Don't you ever want to leave?” he asked at last.

“It's not what I am.”

“Who.”

David snorted, sounding as much stag as man. “That, too.”

“Cha Cha!”

“Edward!” Charlie scooped the toddler up out of the crib, balanced him on one hip, then reached for his brother. She never had trouble telling the twins apart when they were awake. Edward's speaking voice was pitched a little higher than Evan's, although Evan could hit a higher pitch while shrieking, and they were seldom quiet at the same time unless they were asleep. They both had brown hair and blue eyes like their daddy and a sprinkle of freckles like their mama. Katie insisted she could tell them apart by the pattern of the freckles. While not entirely willing to call her a liar, Charlie couldn't.

At just over eighteen months, they still mostly shared a personality.

The moment she reached the living room, they demanded to be put down, so she settled on the floor with them.

The oldest aunties—essentially Auntie Ruby who was two years older than God, well, some gods—believed that the family's identical twins shared a soul. The remaining aunties agreed that was a remnant of the old beliefs and Gale twins were no more likely to be short a soul than non-Gale twins. The rest of the family pretended not to notice that the aunties had hedged their bets with a distinctly nondefinitive statement. Charlie thought of her younger sisters and wasn't entirely certain Auntie Ruby was wrong.

“Your daddy says you'll become more individual as you get older.” Charlie grunted as Edward threw himself off the sofa into her arms, squirming free of her grip in time for her to catch Evan who followed the identical flight path. “Your daddy thinks because he's a boy and you're boys, he knows what he's talking about. But your daddy isn't a Gale, and Gale boys are in a league of their own, aren't they?”

Evan burbled what Charlie took as agreement. Edward crawled under the coffee table, emerging a moment later holding a stuffed sheep. He stared at it, as though he'd never seen it before, then threw it across the living room. Evan took off after it—four running steps before he fell and decided crawling was faster.

“Dog!” Edward handed her a piece of a wooden train.

“Not even close, kiddo. Train.”

He shrugged, grabbed it back, and threw it. Evan dropped the sheep and beetled after the train.

It was possible that
dog
had been in reference to his brother who had apparently learned to fetch while Charlie was gone.

Given that most Gale boys had between fifteen and twenty girls on their lists, most Gale girls moved straight from third circle to first without stopping at stretch marks and cracked nipples and that weird let's be connected to everything second circle got into. Charlie watched Edward run after Evan, bare feet slapping against the floor, plastic cover on his diaper crinkling with every step, and realized, given the impossible place her interest had fallen, that this might be as close to having children of her own as she'd ever get.

She was good with that.

Both boys looked up as the door into the hall opened, then returned to racing the train and the sheep across the floor when they saw it was only Jack.

Charlie kept most of her attention on the boys because that was the responsible thing to do, but she saved enough to watch Jack shuffle toward the fridge, eyes half closed, one leg of his worn sweat pants torn and trailing on the floor, the other halfway up his calf. The sleeves had been ripped off his Calgary Stampede T-shirt—given his effect on livestock, he never actually got to go to the Stampede—and his golden-blond hair appeared to be sticking up in seven or eight different directions. Fridge open, he tipped back the milk carton, swallowed half a dozen times, put the carton back in the fridge, pulled out a piece of bread, tucked a jar of peanut butter under his arm, and finally closed the fridge.

There were times when he made it easy for her to remember the relationship they were supposed to have, when he made it easy for her to show him the Charlie he thought he knew. It was, she had to admit, the best performance she'd ever given. Okay, maybe second best. She'd once done such a kickass cover of the Cowboy Junkies' “I Did It All For You” that when they finished the gig the drummer'd walked off stage and become a Trappist monk in New Brunswick. It might've been a coincidence, but Charlie didn't think so.

She waited until he'd started to toast the bread before saying, “Morning, Jack.”

His huff of surprise fed the flame. “I knew you were there,” he muttered
as ash and a few black bits of bread still holding their structural integrity fell to the floor. He rubbed the smudge of soot off his thumb and forefinger and swept his hand over the scorch mark on the upper cabinet door, paint smoothing out behind the motion.

“That's new. When did you become so comfortable with interior decorating?”

“When you weren't here.”

That might've been fraught, except for the petulance. “Jack . . .”

He sighed. “Allie doesn't like the burn marks so, if I'm alone, I get rid of them before she sees them. If anyone's there when it happens, I just take the shit.”

“Not so much comfortable as sneaky.” Charlie nodded and grinned. “I like that I'm not anyone.”

He blinked at her, confused. “Yeah, sure.”