Charlie thought of the old man on the beach and smiled. True.
“And you know his music,” Morag added.
Also true.
“All right, I’ll speak for him.”
All four women looked like they were in their mid-twenties, but Charlie, who knew damned well they were considerably older, couldn’t tell their actual ages. Behavior put Eineen as the eldest and Tanis as the youngest. Case in point, it was Eineen who nodded and said, “Then start at the beginning and tell us how you knew Tanis’ skin was missing.”
“So not the beginning,” Bo muttered, shifting Tanis to a dry spot on his T-shirt.
Charlie snorted. “Valid observation. But once I knew what Tanis was, and noted the level of hysteria . . .”
Tanis sniffed.
“. . . what she’d lost was pretty damned obvious.”
“Not lost.”When Eineen shook her head, her hair rippled across the bare skin of her arms and shoulders like waves. “Stolen. And not the only one. As of last night, three others are gone.”
“So I guess it’s true. They are trying to start up the seal hunt again . . .” Eineen’s glare made Charlie sit up straight and put both feet on the floor. “Okay, not funny. Sorry. You’re sure it was stolen?”
“They left a note,” Morag growled.
“Ransom?”
“Blackmail,” Aisling snarled. “If you want it back, start supporting Carlson Oil’s shallow water well just off Scatarie Island. Scatarie is a nature reserve, and Hay Island, right by the proposed well, is a seal sanctuary.”
There was a nearly audible thud as the final piece dropped into place.
“Subtle,” Charlie sighed.
“Yeah, not really.” Morag echoed Charlie’s sigh.
Not what Charlie’d meant, but since it was an equally valid observation, she let it stand.
“Our family are environmental activists,” Eineen told her. “Since before your people knew what that meant, we’ve been doing what we can to lessen the damage Humans do to our habitat.”
“And the waters off Scatarie have already been damaged,” Morag broke in. “Ever since their test ships were out there doing seismic soundings and stuff, things have been weird. The seabed has shifted . . .”
“Okay, not much,” Aisling interrupted. “But the water temperature has dropped four degrees and there’s about six square meters of sea floor with nothing living on it. Not a crab, not an urchin, not lichen. Nothing.”
“If a sounding can change things that much, what’s a well going to do?” Morag demanded, eyes flashing black. “We have to stop it.”
“We work in the traditional ways . . .” Eineen seemed calmer, but Charlie could hear the anger behind her words. “. . . informing public opinion, making legal challenges, but we find that if we can speak directly to the lawmakers, we can . . .” Her lips curled into the semblance of a smile. “. . . ease them around to our way of thinking.”
Charlie glanced over at Bo. He had his cheek resting on the top of Tanis’ head, both arms wrapped around her. They had his attention, or as much of it as he was able to detach from the woman in his arms, but it didn’t look as though he’d caught on to what Eineen had actually meant. Fiddlers. They didn’t listen to the lyrics. It wasn’t Charlie’s place to fill him in. He’d only doubt his feelings and, besides, it wasn’t like the Gales didn’t do the same thing. Except that the aunties didn’t so much
ease
as terrify.
And speaking of terrified. . . .
“Bo, do you know what Tanis is?”
“Hello, I play the fiddle in a Celtic band. Celtic-ish,” he amended, kissing Tanis’ hair. “‘The Great Selkie’ is on today’s set list. You’re singing it.”
“Right.” Charlie made a mental note to look up the lyrics before they hit the stage. “You told me you two haven’t been going out for long, but you seem remarkably cool about this whole missing sealskin thing. Not cool about it being missing,” she added quickly, “but about it being a sealskin. And Tanis being a Selkie.”
He shrugged as well as he was able, given his position. “That doesn’t matter. From the moment I saw her dancing in the moonlight, she was my whole life. Why should I care about unimportant details when I have her?”
“And I have you!” Tanis twisted in his arms and claimed his mouth.
“Oh, barf,” muttered someone from the sofa.
“Good defense mechanism,” Charlie drawled as the kiss continued, shifting her attention back to Eineen. “True love trumps the unexpected, the unexplained, and, I’m guessing, flippers.”
Eineen spread her hands, the webbing briefly visible. Charlie couldn’t help thinking it was the sexiest webbing she’d ever seen. “Once they have accepted us, it becomes easier for them to accept other . . . oddities.”
“Oh, that’s . . .” Charlie cocked her head, trying to figure out where “O, She’s Comical” was coming from. Bo was the only fiddler in the room, and he was most definitely not playing—although Charlie couldn’t see his left hand, so she wouldn’t swear it wasn’t on his instrument. If the music wasn’t being played inside the cottage and it wasn’t coming from outside the cottage . . . “Can anyone else hear a reel, in A? Anyone? Bueller? No?”
“If you’re hearing things,” Eineen began.
Charlie cut her off. “Then I’m meant to hear them. That’s how we roll. Moving on.” She had a fiddler in her head. Who seemed to be doing editorial commentary. That was . . . okay, that was odd. “So someone at Carlson Oil knows what you are and is using that to keep you from stopping them. The way I see it, you have two options. One, leave them to it and move. Give them free access to what they want and get your skins back. There can’t be that many of you on this side.”
“Some of us have children.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Eineen raised a perfect brow and Charlie actually thought about it for a moment. Selkies had two forms. “Okay.” She glanced at Bo again and left it at that. She didn’t really want to find the point where the Selkie defense mellow gave way to irrational Human squeamishness. “Okay, then, option two. You get your skins back.”
“Duh.” Morag snorted.
Granted out of the water, the Selkies didn’t exactly have a lot of offense.
Give us our skins back, or we’ll stand around the waterfront looking gorgeous.
Unless they could arrange a one-on-one in the moonlight with someone who knew where the skins were, there wasn’t much they could do.
Aisling tucked her legs under her at an impossible angle. “They’re being taken from places Humans couldn’t get into.”
“Then maybe Carlson Oil has made a deal with other Fey. It’s not like you lot all get along.”
“You think we don’t defend against that?” Eineen sneered. “We came here because of the infighting in the Courts.”
They were waiting for her to say she’d help. But the Gales didn’t get involved with the business of the Fey unless they involved themselves first in family matters.
Except for Allie. And that had turned out to be a family matter in the end.
“I have a proposition for you. Meet me in Halifax and we’ll talk.”
Oh, crap.
FIVE
A
S MARK’S DRUM INTRO finished up and Tim took them into Brian McNeill’s “Best o’ the Barley” on his big, forty-five key piano accordion, Charlie stepped downstage, threw in a little mandolin ornamentation, and tried to decide if she was out of her mind. Auntie Catherine had always been considered one of the more unpredictable of the aunties by the younger generations and “unpredictable auntie” wasn’t a comforting sort of phrase. Much the same way “I’ve never seen a rash quite like that” wasn’t a comforting sort of a phrase.
Auntie Catherine embraced the Wild in Wild Power.
When Charlie came into her power the Midsummer she was fifteen and it became obvious she was Wild, Auntie Jane had asked Auntie Catherine, who’d been home for the ritual, if she had any words of advice.
“Live your own life, Charlotte,”
Auntie Catherine had snorted.
“Don’t live the life they tell you to.”
“They?” Charlie asked.
Auntie Catherine sighed. “I suppose brains as well would have been too much to hope for.”
She walked the Wood and she saw the future, and she’d been strong enough to bear Uncle Edward two daughters.
Uncle Edward.
Now replaced by Uncle Evan.
Charlie wondered if Auntie Catherine had gone home for
that
ritual. Seemed like one she’d enjoy.
She’d strung Allie up like a puppet and danced her across Calgary until Allie was in place to defeat Jack’s mother. Her only mistake, not realizing Allie was in place to defeat her as well.
Charlie knew Auntie Catherine was involved with the missing Selkie skins. She knew it the same way she knew “La Bamba” used a I, IV, V, V chord progression. She knew it the way she knew the taste of the soft skin below Allie’s ear. She knew it because Auntie Catherine was in Halifax, and four Selkie skins were missing. It wasn’t rocket science.
There was always the chance that Auntie Catherine had come to Nova Scotia because she’d Seen the skins were about to be stolen. There was a chance that she was here in order to return the skins to their rightful owners and she wanted Charlie’s help. There was a chance the Leafs would win the Stanley Cup, too, although it was an appallingly small chance.
Still a chance.
Like it or not, Charlie would have to talk to her.
As Tim announced that Uncle Jim
never missed a measure of the dance
, she caught back up to wondering if she was out of her mind. And then, as the crowd roared out the final couplet, she remembered she’d thrown her phone off the pier back in Port Hood.
“It’s not a bad thing being one of the two bands playing on the Friday night.” Mark twirled one of his sticks like a baton, both feet keeping time as four local teenagers kicked the shit out of Ashley McIsaac’s “I Don’t Need This” up on the festival stage
.
“Play Friday night and you become the standard all the others are judged by. Of course, you’ve got to take into account that tonight the judges are fresh and by Sunday it’ll be ‘fuck it, give me a beer and give them a ten just to get this over with,’ but still, we play early and we can concentrate on scooping out the competition.”
“Shouldn’t that be scoping?”
“Does it matter? I was thinking of using a melon baller.”
“Okay, then.” Still pleasantly wrung out from their set, Charlie scanned the crowd for Eineen, fully aware that finding one woman amid the dark mass of bodies filling the field in front of the stage was unlikely, bordering on not-going-to-happen. Tanis said she’d stayed, but pretty much from the moment they’d stepped off the stage, Tanis had been attached to Bo at the mouth and so wasn’t exactly at her most coherent. At least she wasn’t crying. Charlie counted that a win.
If Eineen wanted me the way I want her, there’d be a line of power joining our . . . hearts.
No line of power. No surprise.
“Piper in Albion Rising is American. We ran into him last March down in Texas at the Dog and Duck, and Aston hated him on sight. Guy rocks a kilt almost as well as yours truly. Totally a chick magnet . . .” He grunted as Charlie elbowed him in the ribs. “Total woman magnet,” he amended, but Charlie could hear the grin in his voice. “In Aston’s tiny little mind, that was the reason he continuously failed to score.”
“Was it?”
“Probably had more to do with Aston being a dumbass. Aston being Aston. He called this afternoon, wished us luck, and said you were almost good enough to fill his shoes, so maybe we stood a snowflake’s chance in Waa Waa without him. Made so little sense that odds are he was totally looped on painkillers. Not that that’s a gimme with Aston.”
“Killer ax man, though.”
“And if we were a death metal band, that would be relevant, but yeah, he doesn’t suck. Neither do you. You’re better on the mandolin.”
“I know.”
“And smarter.”
“Hard not to be. He lost two fingers petting a seal.”
“He’s better looking.”
“Bite me.”
“Haven’t bitten a girl since Jeanie Bennett in third grade. She swung at me with her backpack which, unfortunately, held a hardcover copy of
The Hobbit.
While I was stunned and reeling, she bit me back. If you’re really nice to me, I’ll show you the scar.” Heaving himself up onto his feet, Mark scanned the crowd as he twitched his kilt back into place. “Which reminds me, I need to find Tim and remind him he’s doing a workshop tomorrow morning at ten.”
“Tim’s doing a workshop?” Charlie tilted her head back so she wasn’t speaking directly to Mark’s sporran. “Seriously?”
“What? He loves kids, and we get points for community involvement. When you see Shelly, remind her I want us all together around two to go over the new arrangement for ‘Wild Road Beyond
.
’ We get a chance to run through it a couple of times and we’ll toss it on the set list at the park on Wednesday night and see if anyone salutes.”