The Future Falls (8 page)

He
had
known she was there. In that he'd known she was home and that made
there
limited and he'd scented her in her room over in the other side of the apartment and her scent permeated this part of the apartment so it was like he'd known she was sitting on the floor by one of the sofas. Right? Why was she watching him like she'd never seen him burn the toast before? And what did she mean, she liked not being anyone? She was the most
someone
he knew.

David hadn't helped. If anything, David had made him more confused. It was still all questions when it came to Charlie.

The whole time she'd been gone, Jack had kept mental lists of stuff he wanted to tell her when she got back, but he couldn't remember any of it, so he said, “You're up early.”

“So are you.”

“Couldn't sleep.” He kept thinking she'd leave before he saw her. She did that; showed up, did laundry, left. Left without saying good-bye, like by wanting her to stay he'd done something to drive her away. “Allie?”

“Still asleep.”

“Katie's in your room.” He didn't bother toasting the two new slices of bread he pulled from the fridge. Charlie'd probably think it was funny to see if she could make him burn them again. “She's here a lot when you're not.”

“Katie fills in for the sisters Allie doesn't have. I'm not her sister.”

“Duh. You know Allie's going to . . .” He waved at the twins, who turned in unison to stare at him, but when he didn't burn anything down, they went back to running the train over with the sheep. “You here to have Graham knock you up?”

“What!”

Yeah, that broke the whole
too cool for the living room
thing she had going. Jack gave himself a mental high five and wished he had a way to record Charlie's expression. “If Allie's actually going to produce the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale, you might have come home to help.”

Charlie raised both hands, like she was shoving the idea away. “I didn't.”

“The aunties think it'd be a good idea.”

“I don't.”

“Me either.”

“Wasn't that one too many sevenths?”

He'd mumbled his protest into the cabinet while grabbing the peanut butter, so he wasn't surprised she hadn't heard it. Although Charlie usually heard everything. “Graham's a seventh son of a seventh son,” he said as he turned, “so his seventh son will be the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. And Allie's a Gale. So, seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale. Dragons are all about keeping bloodlines straight.” It was one of the nonlethal ways they reminded him of the aunties.

“I thought there only was one bloodline.”

“Sure. Now.” Licking peanut butter off the side of one hand, Jack balanced his two pieces of bread on the other and collapsed onto the end of a sofa. From deep between the cushions, he pulled up two fluff-covered cookies, one infant Iron Man shoe, and finally the remote. He flicked the TV on, hit the mute, and started surfing. He wasn't ignoring Charlie because she kept leaving and he wasn't ignoring her because David had as much as told him to. He was seventeen not six. He was channel surfing while eating and besides, even if Charlie was doing that
I'm not watching you even though I'm really watching you
thing she'd started lately, she wasn't exactly keeping up her side of the conversation.

When Edward face-planted into the cushion next to him, Jack hauled him up onto the sofa by his diaper. At Edward's age, unable to defend himself from his uncles' attacks, he'd never left his mother's side. So far, no one had
attacked the twins and, given Allie's reaction to a misunderstanding with a customer when the twins were napping down in the shop, that was a good thing. Graham had to call Michael and find out how to replace a whole section of the floor. Auntie Gwen had replaced the guy's memory. And his hair. Weirdly, she'd left his eyebrows to grow back on their own.

Half his attention on the past, and half on Charlie walking scales—musical scales, not his kind—up Evan's belly, Jack was a little too slow when Edward climbed into his lap and grabbed the remote. “Hey, not for larva!”

“Go!” Edward yelled and threw it across the room. Evan squirmed out from under Charlie's grip and tottered after it. Instead of bringing it back, he sat down and gnawed on one end.

So much for surfing.
Calgary Morning Live
started in on the weather and Jack turned his attention back to Charlie.

“You feed them?” he asked as Edward tried to pick a scale off his arm. He shifted the rest of the way into skin and ignored Edward's dirty look.

“Not yet.” Charlie leaned back on her arms and stretched her legs out. They were tanned, even though the sun hadn't been out in Calgary for days. Jack wondered whose boxers she had on and hurriedly patted out a bit of smoldering upholstery on the arm of the sofa, hoping she hadn't noticed. “But Katie told me if they couldn't wait until Allie got up, I should give them some dry cereal.”

“They need more meat,” he muttered.

“They're not dragons.”

“Duh. Dragons at that age
are
meat.” He wondered, given the twins had no sense of smell to speak of, if they ever got Charlie and Allie confused. Charlie's hair was shorter, but nearly the same honey color. “Why'd you stop dyeing it?”

“What?”

“Your hair. When I first got here, it was all colorful.” Dragons wore their personal colors like warnings. “Now it's bland and . . .”

“. . . on the morning drive.”

They turned together as Evan waved the damp remote, having gnawed the sound on.

“And now . . .” The anchor smiled at the camera. “. . . a story about our own local Doomsday Dan.”

“Come on, Evan. Give the remote to Charlie.”

“No, Cha Cha!”

“Wait!” Jack leaned forward and Charlie paused, one hand on the remote, the other holding Evan away from it. “I want to watch this. I know Dan. When he won't go to a shelter, I make sure he doesn't freeze.”

On the television, in a familiar corner of the park by the zoo, a familiar ragged figure faced the camera.

“It's just down the road,” Jack added, aware Charlie's attention was on him, not the television even if she was trying to pretend otherwise. “And that makes Dan . . .”

“One of yours?”

“That's not . . .” Except it was. “Yeah. Fine.”

“It's a Dragon Prince thing; you find subjects.” Charlie reached out, grabbed his leg, and shook it. Where most of the family would have looked condescending, she looked almost proud. “Go you.” As she turned her attention to the television, Jack patted out another small fire. “He's really into that end is nigh thing, isn't he?”

Dan had his toque in his hand, waving it wildly, the long gray tangle of his hair flapping around his face like greasy wings as he jumped up and down and shouted, “Bam! Bam! Bam! That's how it ends! Bam! Bam! Bam! All the king's horses! Bam! Bam! Bam! All the king's men! Bam! Bam! Bam! Can't put the sky together again!”

“You could rap that,” Charlie murmured, fingers tapping her thigh.

“Recently someone posted Dan's . . .” The anchor's smile broadened in the pause. Jack growled in reaction to all the teeth and gave Edward a hug as the larva growled with him. “. . .
warning
online, and in a very short time it went viral. We sent Kelly Ahenakew down to talk to Dan.”

Kelly had clearly explained the situation off camera—Jack doubted Dan knew what the internet was. When she pushed the microphone toward him, she said only, “So Dan, what do you think of your sudden notoriety?”

He snorted and Jack gave Kelly credit for not jerking back even though the spray was thick enough for the camera to catch. “I think we're all going to die.”

“Because the sky is falling?”

Dan glanced up, took one long step to the left, and said, “Yes.”

“The actual sky?”

Dan nodded. “The sky,” he said solemnly, “is heavy.”

And that was the last thing Kelly could get him to say. This time, Jack didn't protest when Charlie turned the sound off.

“How crazy is he?” she asked thoughtfully.

Jack shrugged. “He's Human. It's hard for me to tell.”

“Good point. Thing is, the way I heard it, he believed what he was saying.”

Jack shrugged again. “Belief doesn't make something true.”

“I know, but . . .”

She waved it off, but Jack could hear her humming, mouth pressed against the top of Evan's head. Charlie trusted her ears the way most people trusted their eyes, and she couldn't seem to think without making noise.

“There's a lot of things up there,” she said after a minute. “A whole bunch of junk, not to mention a space station, and beyond that asteroids, comets . . . You fly high, Jack. What do you see?”

He snorted. Edward reached up for the swirls of smoke. “Nothing falling.”

“If there was a factual basis to Dan's claim, don't you think one of the scientists on that space station you listed might have mentioned it?” Graham pointed out, closing the bedroom door behind him. “They've got the best view.”

“Daddy!”

Jack grunted as Edward launched himself off his lap.

Charlie stood as Evan joined his brother's charge across the living room. “Scientists don't know everything,” she said as Graham lifted his sons into his arms. “They'd struggle to explain either of us and they wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to explain Jack.”

“They'd have a go at explaining all of us,” Graham muttered, “if they could get us onto a dissection table.”

“Dissection!” the twins chorused in unison.

“Oh, sure . . .” Charlie tossed Jack a smile he couldn't stop himself from returning. “. . . I get Cha Cha, but they can manage dissection.” She leaned between the boys and gave Graham a kiss. Jack bit back a growl. “Maybe Doomsday Dan is just ahead of the curve. Don't scientists say an asteroid is bound to hit in the next million years or so?”

“In the next million years or so pigs could fly.” Katie hadn't exactly snuck up on him. Jack had heard her crossing the apartment; he'd just ignored her because she posed no danger. Well, no more danger than most Gale girls.

Jack swatted her hand as she ruffled his hair. “I could do that. Make pigs
fly.” Although he wasn't sure he could get them to fly under their own power or if it would be more of a controlled fall when dropped.

“Jack.”

He looked up in time to catch Evan as Graham dropped him into his arms.

“Don't make pigs fly.”

Allie woke up as Graham got out of bed. She kept her breathing steady, listened to him dress, heard the short burst of sound as he opened the bedroom door into the living room, and relaxed back into the only real quiet time she'd get all day. Reaching out, she checked on the boys, checked on the family in the city, checked on David and was thrilled to find him out of the park and eating breakfast with Auntie Carmen and Auntie Bea. With any luck, his presence would mute their smugness at her news.

It looked like they were getting their seven sons.

Given the Gale ratio of sons to daughters, she and Graham and Charlie had laughed about the thirty-five girls they'd have to get through for seven boys. The only thing keeping the aunties from putting Graham out to stud was that cursory research on blended families suggested the seven boys had to be full siblings.

She could still draw the line at four.

“And if a condom can't stop your daddy, there's always more permanent solutions,” she murmured as she stroked the slight curve of her stomach—a curve that had nothing to do with this set of twins and everything to do with the last set. And possibly all the pie her mother had been sending. The permanent solution would mean she and Graham would no longer be anchoring second circle, fertility being nonoptional, but there were enough second circle Gales out here now . . .

Of course none of them had the benefit of their grandmother's meddling, the need to defeat the Dragon Queen making them strong enough to hold the entire city.

They could take turns so no one would have to hold it for more than the space between rituals, but with Calgary changing so quickly on its own, they'd have to scramble to keep up.

“Looks like we're doing this, babies.” She sat up and threw off the covers. “So let's do it right.”

After she broke the news to the aunties, she'd call Peggi and talk her into moving west. Her son would horn by next ritual and Cameron needed backup. The city could always use another pharmacist and her husband could return to school for the master's degree he always talked about. Both her older daughters were already third circle so, if they didn't want leave Darsden East in their last years of high school, there was plenty of family to take them in. Peggi wouldn't be hard to convince; Allie'd heard she hadn't spoken to Auntie Jane since the Hunt for Uncle Evan.