Attention caught by a familiar sound, Charlie glanced up at the loft over the garage and grinned. Auntie Gwen and Joe were home. Her grin broadened as the rhythm and intensity increased. Joe was full-blood Fey; he’d survive.
As Charlie crossed the small courtyard between the store and the garage, leaves rustled. All three of the dwarf viburnum in the center bed leaned toward her, creamy white flowers trembling.
She could step into the Wood right now. Step out anywhere she wanted to.
Anywhere.
This was where she wanted to be.
There was nothing wrong with that.
The back door to the Emporium was never locked. It stuck a little, though. The buzz now making the muscle in her right calf jump, Charlie jerked the door closed behind her, turned, caught sight of her reflection in the huge antique mirror hanging in the back hall and said, “I’m happy to see you, too, but I’ve never met Paul Brandt and I’m not double jointed.”
The mirror had belonged to Allie’s grandmother, Charlie’s Auntie Catherine. They’d found it up and running when Allie’d inherited the Emporium and, given that magic mirrors were rare on the ground, the odds were high Auntie Catherine had activated it. Problem was, she’d been banished from the city before providing an owner’s manual. Although they had no proof, what little evidence they had suggested that, for Auntie Catherine, the mirror had been a full orchestra. Metaphorically speaking. For the rest of them, it was more a twelve year old with a kazoo and a dirty mind. Almost literally.
Auntie Catherine was, like Charlie, one of the family’s Wild Powers, but if that had given her an edge with the mirror, Charlie couldn’t seem to get her own ducks in a row. The mirror reacted to her the way it reacted to everyone else—with juvenile lechery and vague affection. It reminded Charlie of Uncle Arthur, only without the persistent pinching.
Resting her palm against the mirror, fingers spread, Charlie watched as her reflection’s hair color cycled through various blues, reds, greens, purples, paused on the short cap of turquoise she currently wore, and finally finished with the dark blonde/golden brown that was the Gale family default.
“You’re right,” she sighed, suddenly very tired. “The hair’s become shtick.” She sagged forward until her whole body pressed against the glass and wondered, yet again, how Auntie Catherine had slid inside. What had she seen inside the mirror? Had she been Alice or the Red Queen?
Stupid question.
She’d been the Jabberwocky.
Because Auntie Catherine had done what every Gale with Wild Powers did. She’d gone Wild. The
we know best
of the aunties had become a much less restrained
I know best
and anything that made the aunties seem restrained, was pretty freakin’ scary.
In the mirror, Charlie’s reflection aged, hair graying, gray eyes darkening to auntie black.
“Yeah, I know.” She straightened, feeling every kilometer of the drive south from Fort McMurray in a retired school bus with no air-conditioning. Her reflection continued to lean against the inside of the glass. “You’re not going anywhere and I’ve still got plenty of time to work out how Auntie Catherine did it.”
Halfway up the back stairs, the door to the apartment on the second floor slammed open, slammed shut, and Charlie suddenly found herself facing a seriously pissed-off teenage boy—the smoke streaming out of his nostrils a dead giveaway of his mood. He rocked to a stop and glared, hazel eyes flashing gold, pale blond hair sticking out in several unnatural directions, wide mouth pressed into a thin line.
“Jack.”
“Oh, you’re back.”The smoke thickened. “Good.You can tell Allie I don’t have to put up with this stuff!”
“She’s making you listen to Jason Mraz again?”
“What?” He had to stop and think, rant cut off at the knees. Charlie gave herself a mental high five; she rocked at pissy mood deflection. “No! She thinks I’m helpless!”
“Does she? Well, she thinks Katy Perry is edgy, so . . .” Charlie shrugged, letting the wall hold her up for a while. “Where are you heading?”
“Flying!”
“It’s . . .” It was too much effort to look at her watch, so she settled for general and obvious. “. . . late.”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s what Allie said!”
“Yeah, but
I’m
not trying to stop you. Go. Fly.” She waved the hand not holding the guitar in the general direction of the back door. “It’s not like you can’t handle anything that sees you.”
“That’s what Graham said,” Jack admitted, the smoke tapering off.
“He’s smarter than he looks. Just try to handle it
non
-fatally, okay? I’ve had a long day, and you know Allie’ll make me come with her to deal with the bodies.”
“Bodies.” His snort blew out a cloud of smoke that engulfed his head and he stomped past, close enough Charlie could feel the heat radiating off him, but not so close she had to exert herself to keep from being burned. “Jack, don’t burn down the building,” he muttered as he descended. “Jack, don’t turn the Oilers into newts and then eat them. Jack, don’t eat
anything
that you can have a conversation with. This world sucks!”
He made an emphatic exit out into the courtyard, slamming the door with enough force that the impact vibrated past Charlie’s shoulder blades.
“Well . . .” Charlie lurched away from the wall’s embrace and up the remaining stairs. “. . . that explains why the door’s sticking.”
Jack loved hockey, although he thought it wasn’t violent enough. He’d spent his first season as an enthusiastic Calgary Flames fan, learning the unfortunate fact that enthusiasm wasn’t enough and devouring their opponents wasn’t allowed.
The new scorch mark on the apartment door came as no great surprise.
“Because he’s fourteen,” Allie was saying as Charlie let herself in, put down her guitar, and closed the door. “And we’re responsible for him.”
“He’s a fourteen-year-old Dragon Prince and a fully operational sorcerer.” Graham wasn’t visible, but the double doors to their bedroom were open, so Charlie assumed that Graham was out of sight in the bedroom. There were other, less mundane possibilities, but he’d probably sound a lot more freaked had Jack made him invisible, microscopic, or transformed him into furniture. Again. He’d made a surprisingly comfortable recliner. “There’s nothing out there that can hurt him.”
“You’re missing my point.” Even looking at the back of Allie’s head, Charlie could see her eyes roll. “He’s a fourteen-year-old Dragon Prince and a fully operational sorcerer.”
“That’s what I said.” Graham sounded confused.
Charlie snorted. “Dude, she’s not worried about
Jack
.”
Allie spun around and Charlie had a sudden armful of her favorite cousin. At five eight, Allie was an inch taller, but she was in bare feet and Charlie’s sneakers evened things out.
“Don’t you ever knock?” Graham asked, coming out of the bedroom, charms covering more skin than the shorts. Most of the charms were Allie’s, a couple were Charlie’s, and one was David’s. And wasn’t that interesting. “Never mind,” he continued, crossing toward her, “stupid question.”
He didn’t bother pulling Allie out of the hug, just wrapped his arms around both of them and squeezed. Graham wasn’t exactly tall—Charlie knew damned well he lied about being five ten—but he was strong. Even working full time at the newspaper, he’d managed to hang on to the conditioning his previous part-time position had required. Although, why an assassin needed muscle when the big guns did all the work, he’d never made clear to Charlie’s satisfaction.
“Did we know you were coming in tonight?” he asked, dropping a kiss on Charlie’s temple.
“I did,” Allie gasped, crushed between them. “Charlie, sweetie, you stink.” A judicious elbow broke Graham’s hold.
“Yeah, twelve hours on the highway in a bus without air-conditioning will do that.”
Graham snorted. “Even to a Gale?”
A quick pit check suggested
stink
was an understatement. “Please, we sweat flowers.”
“Seriously?”
“Occasionally.” Charlie patted Graham’s cheek and Allie’s ass on the way to the bathroom. “If Jack starts another apocalypse while I’m in the shower, fix it without me.”
“He’s a teenager.” Washed, dried, and wearing black silk boxers under a faded
Dun Good
tank, Charlie snickered into her mug of tea and added, “He has to spread his wings.”
“Wow, that’s original .” Allie poked her in the shoulder as she set a piece of strawberry pie down on the table and handed her a fork. “You should put it to music. And he’s been spreading his wings plenty. They had to stop mail delivery in Bayview because a
hawk . . .
”
In the three weeks Charlie had been gone, Allie’s air quotes had gotten a lot more emphatic.
“. . . kept attacking the postal worker.”
“Big difference between a hawk and a dragon, Allie-cat. And Jack’s a big dragon.”
Allie dropped in the chair next to Charlie and prodded her in the thigh with her bare feet. “Jack’s a sorcerer. And we know his uncles played with their sizes, so it may be a Dragon Prince skill and have nothing to do with sorcery.”
Too tired to make the obvious
played with themselves
comment, Charlie waved her fork, bits of pie crust speckling the tabletop. “Yeah, but no teenage boy would willingly make himself smaller. Dragon. Prince. Sorcerer. Doesn’t matter which, it’s not going to happen. It’s all bigger is better at that age. Actually . . .” She frowned thoughtfully as she chewed. “ . . . bigger is better at any age. Ow! Allie!”
Graham sat down across the table with his own piece of pie. “Somewhere in there you have a valid point, but the attacks on the postie stopped when Gwen threatened to clip Jack’s wings.”
Jack had spent his first thirteen years under the tender care of his uncles. Tender care when referring to Dragon Lords meant no need to marinate. He knew a legitimate threat when he heard one.
“So if the attacks have stopped, what’s the problem?”
“He’s working twelve hours a week at the
Western Star
this summer,” Graham told her.
“At your skeezy tabloid?” That was new. She leaned away from Graham’s swing. “Why?”
“Why?” Allie rolled her eyes. “Because school’s out and he needs to do things like a normal boy.”
If anyone asked, they were home schooling Jack which had the added benefit of being the truth, even if lessons tended toward
it’s a bus, you can’t fight it
rather than algebra. Although Roland had also taught him some algebra. Dragons were surprisingly good at math.
“Yeah, but he’s not a normal boy.” Charlie flipped up a finger. “Dragon Prince.” And another. “Sorcerer.” And a third. “Gale. Strike three.” She frowned at the sheen of turquoise on her nails, the same shade as her hair. “Oh, that’s definitely too precious. What the hell was I thinking?” The buzz crawled across her forehead.
“Why is your eyebrow twitching?”
“It’s a thing. Back to Jack.”
“When it comes right down to it,” Allie sighed, “this world isn’t shiny and new anymore. No one’s threatening to eat him, and he’s bored.”
“So send him to the farm; Auntie Jane’ll threaten to eat him.”
Auntie Jane made Auntie Gwen look reasonable. Auntie Jane made Simon Cowell look reasonable.
“Only as a last resort.” Allie’s lip curled. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life listening to the aunties go on about how I failed to deal with him.”
When Jack broke through from the UnderRealm looking for his father—Stanley Kalynchuk aka Jonathon Samuel Gale—the aunties had been forced by circumstances to explain that sorcerers were Gale boys gone bad. Jack was both a Gale boy and—thanks to the magical means of his conception—a sorcerer, but Allie had argued that, as a Gale, until he turned fifteen he was too young to be judged. The aunties had agreed, and Allie and Graham had started their marriage as the de facto parents of a teenage boy with a Dragon Prince’s power and undetermined sorcerous abilities, who not only smoked in bed, but occasionally set fire to his pillow.
The first few months had been fun. Allie had overreacted, Charlie had underreacted, and Graham had hit the roof about the marshmallow roasting over the coals of an empty industrial building by the airport. Somehow or other, mostly because Jack absorbed new information like a sponge, they’d muddled through.
Charlie swallowed the last mouthful of pie and pushed her plate away. “So send him off to eat a bison and sleep for week while he digests. Works while the Stampede’s on.”
Horses and cattle at the Saddledome, barely two kilometers away from the Emporium, were more temptation than anyone expected Jack to resist.
“Unfortunately his cave was a little to close to Drumheller.” Graham stacked his empty plate on hers. “Couple of dinosaur guys from the Tyrrell found his scat and nearly had kittens. I had to cover the story in the
Star
to discredit it. I’m not saying it
isn’t
a skeezy tabloid,” he added when Charlie snickered. “I’m just saying I don’t need anyone else calling it that.”