The Enchantment Emporium (Gale Women #1)

The Enchantment Emporium (Gale Women #1) Page 1

Shoot the moon was considered to be one of the more dangerous yoyo tricks. Not particularly complicated-nothing like the crossovers of a Texas Star-but a moment's inattention and the odds were good that 35.7 grams of hardwood would be impacting painfully off the front curve of the human skull. There were rumors that, back in '37, Canadian and World Champion Joe Young had once bounced a Shoot the Moon and continued to ace the competition with no one the wiser until the next day when the bruise began to develop. She didn't know about that, and she didn't put much trust in rumors, but she did know that when Joe Young died during the war, the sport lost a master.

She executed the trick perfectly.

Pulled a glow-in-the-dark yoyo from the box, turned off the lights in the store, and did it again.

Perfectly.

Pity there was no one around to see.

In a valiant but ultimately futile effort to keep herself amused, she had a yoyo on each hand and was walking alternate dogs when the shadow finally blocked out the light from the street spilling through the grimy glass of the door. It took her a moment to pull the string off the second finger of her left hand and, in that moment, the metal doorjamb began to groan.

Another moment and it would buckle.

Lips pressed into a thin, irritated line, she shoved both toys more-or-less away and strode over to the door. It wasn't locked, but that was clearly a detail these sorts of late-night visitors never bothered to check.

Yanking it open, she squinted up at the misshapen silhouette and snapped, "What took you so long?"

This was clearly not the expected response.

"Were you planning on getting up any time soon?"

Allie pulled the pillow over her head, hoping her mother would consider that answer enough. She was twenty-four years old, unemployed, friendless, and back home with no prospects. As far as she was concerned, she was entitled to stay in bed all day if she felt like it.

The silence, weighted heavily with unspoken advice, ended with a nearly audible eye roll, and the sound of her bedroom door closing.

Good. The last thing she needed right now was the kind of practical, levelheaded analysis of the situation her mother excelled at.

Pillow still over her head, she stretched out her left arm and patted the empty spot in the bed. Charlie was gone. Given how cool the sheets were, she'd probably been gone for a while. Stretching out her right arm, she patted the other side of the bed. Dmitri was gone, too. Face pressed into the bottom sheet that smelled faintly of fabric softener and sex, Allie frowned and tried to remember what day it was.

Her job as a research assistant at the Royal Ontario Museum had ended on Tuesday, the grant money that had paid her having finally run out with no hope of renewal. With almost a month's warning, she'd been trying to get the last of the Cypriot artifacts into the new cataloging program. The Classical /Hellenistic period-the bulk of the collection-had made it in, but it seemed as though the Cypro-Geometric period never would. She hated leaving things unfinished.

She hated leaving.

Or more specifically-she hated having to leave. Hated the feeling that her life was out of her control.

It wasn't as though she'd loved the job-although in all fairness, she'd enjoyed rummaging about the back rooms at the museum attempting to bring order out of chaos-it was just that she wasn't finding the old joke about fine arts degrees and "would you like fries with that" particularly funny these days.

Her Uncle Richard and three cousins had arrived on Wednesday to help pack up her tiny apartment and haul home the stuff she hadn't sold or handed off to other cousins in the city. The family didn't exactly own things communally, but there were cooking pots still being passed around that predated frozen food. Charlie had stayed with her, they'd spent Wednesday night on an air mattress; she'd handed the keys in Thursday before they'd crammed the last bits and pieces of her life into the back of a borrowed car and left the city-Charlie complaining all the way home about the mode of transport-so today had to be Friday.

Friday, April 30th.

Which answered that question at least-Dmitri was at school.

Charlie could be anywhere.

Once again, she'd been left alone.

Her fingers plucked at the quilt the aunties had made for her, not needing to remove the pillow to find the square centered with a piece of one of Michael's old shirts.

Left alone just like stupid Michael with his stupid perfect boyfriend and his stupid perfect job out in Vancouver had left her alone.

"Alysha Catherine Gale!" Age had not stopped Auntie Jane's voice from carrying clearly up to the second floor. As if age would dare. "If you aren't out of that bed and downstairs in this kitchen in fifteen minutes, I will make you sorry you were ever born!"

No chance Auntie Jane would leave her alone.

And an even smaller chance that every word she'd said wasn't to be taken literally.

Sometime in the night, Dmitri had sketched a charm on her right calf. He'd probably thought she wouldn't notice it down there, but then he was young and still incredibly indulged. Eyes rolling, she erased it, smiled fondly at the old charm Charlie had retraced on her shoulder, and stepped out of the shower to find Samson, one of the family's four border collies, drinking out of the toilet.

"Don't tell me you've learned to go around the door," she muttered, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and hauling him back. She hadn't bothered to stuff the old rusty hook into the equally rusty eye, but the bathroom door was still closed.

Tail slapping into her knees, Samson ignored her.

Allie made it downstairs with twelve and a half seconds to spare, wrapping an elastic band around the end of her hair and tossing the wet braid back over her shoulder. As expected, her mother and Auntie Jane were in the big farmhouse kitchen baking pies, the two of them both working at one end of the old rectangular table. Allie paused on the bottom step.

Gale girls had sisters, that was a given.

There were inevitably four or five girls in the family to every boy.

Her gran, her mother's mother, Auntie Jane's youngest sister, had three girls. No boy. That was strange but not unheard of.

Allie had a brother, David. He was four years older and hadn't that set the aunties to talking. Boys were never born first.

She had no sisters.

"He got the Gale that should have been spread out over half a dozen girls," Auntie Jane had been heard to sniff, her dark eyes watching David. "What's he going to do with it, that's the question."

This close to ritual, the kitchen should have been full of Gale girls, laughing, talking, making sure the right things went into the pies.

"Your Aunt Ruth will be over later with Katie and Maria," her mother said, without looking up from the block of shortening she was cutting into the flour. "And your Auntie Ruby has just gone down to the cellar for more apples."

"Senile old bat'll probably forget what she's down there for," Auntie Jane snorted, expertly flipping the rolled pastry onto a pie plate, a move she'd probably made a million times. The family was big on pie and Auntie Jane admitted to being over eighty-although she got nasty when people tried to be more specific. A minimum of eighty years and say a minimum of a hundred pies a year... "And if you'd hauled your lazy carcass out of bed before noon," she continued, interrupting Allie's attempt at math, "there'd have been four of us all along. So, stop seeing the empty places at the table and get over here. The family's coming home, and pies don't make themselves."

Unable to argue with the familiar and clearly inarguable observation, Allie grabbed an apron off the hook by the door but circled the table until she reached the coffeepot over by the big six-burner stove. "You want me caffeinated," she said before either woman could comment on the delay. "In the interest of only having apples go into the pies."

"Ruth is bringing rhubarb from her cold frame," Auntie Jane sniffed, dark eyes disapproving-of her attitude not the rhubarb, Allie assumed. "If you're sufficiently caffeinated before she arrives, you can start preparing the pastry."

"Apples, rhubarb..." Allie pulled her favorite mug from the cupboard and filled it. "... either's better than a helping of 'I don't give a flying fuck.' "

"Alysha!"

Oh, crap. Had she said that out loud? Had she missed one of Dmitri's charms? He was still young enough to find putting her on the spot funny. Unfortunately, it turned out she had nothing to blame but her own big mouth.

"Sorry, Mom." Ears burning she took a long swallow and stared at her reflection in the dark liquid. "It's just that..."

"You lost your job, and Michael's in Vancouver with Brian. We know, honey." The sympathy in her mother's voice drew Allie's gaze up off the coffee. "But tomorrow's May Day, most of the family will be home, so, if you could, get over yourself."

Were her mother's eyes a darker gray than they'd been when she'd been home last? Mary Gale was fifty. That was all. Fifty. Allie'd taken a week off work for the big family party back in the fall. Fifty was too young.

"Change happens, Alysha." Auntie Jane seemed grimly amused by the inevitable. "Although the girl has a point, Mary. Remember what happened when Ruth let her mind wander that time during peach season? We were months sorting out the mess."

"I was sixteen, Auntie Jane. Let it go." The screen door slammed and Allie's Aunt Ruth pushed past her to dump an enormous armload of rhubarb in the sink. Her eyes were still Gale gray, but then Aunt Ruth was three years younger than her sister and...

"Allie!"

She managed to slide her mug to safety on the counter in time to return her cousin Katie's hug. "Shouldn't you be out flogging swamp land to unsuspecting city folk?"

Katie grinned. "I took a personal day. Pies won't bake themselves."

Impossible not to grin back. "So I keep hearing."

"And I thought you were friendless," Auntie Jane snorted as the two girls giggled together over the inevitability of family.

"Is Michael still out west?" Katie asked sympathetically, snagging Allie's mug and draining it.

Keeping one arm linked with her cousin, Allie grabbed another apron and dropped it over Katie's head. "Apparently he loves his job, and he and Brian are disgustingly happy."

"That sucks."

"Tell me about it."

"I'll send him a pie."

They turned together to stare at Auntie Jane.

"What?" Upending the big earthenware bowl, she dumped the mass of pastry out onto the table. "Michael's as much as family, and he loves my blueberry pie."

"We don't have any blueberries."

Dark eyes narrowed. "We do if I'm making blueberry pie."

That was also inarguable.

"You gave him a charm?" Allie asked as Aunt Ruth, clearly assuming they'd never get to it on their own, deposited Katie at the sink and shoved her toward the huge scarred cutting board beside it.

Auntie Jane sniffed as she separated the dough into fist-sized balls. "Why not?"

"Because he moved away." Allie chopped the flared end off a piece of freshly washed rhubarb with more force than was strictly necessary.

"No reason to give him a charm if he'd stayed in Darsden." A round of dough slapped down onto the table hard enough that it continued to quiver for moments after. "You let him leave when you refused to change his mind."

Sure, she could have changed his mind, made him believe what she wanted him to believe, but that would have changed Michael. Made him not! Michael. And what would have been the point in that?

He wouldn't be in Vancouver with Brian right now.

Shut up.

"I stood by him." And occasionally in front of him, shoulder to shoulder with her cousins. Gale girls protected their own. Not that Michael, smart, handsome, and on every sports team Darsden East High School offered had needed a lot of protection. "I let him be who he was."

"He was fifteen. He wouldn't have even noticed."

"He's not family, Auntie Jane."

Things were done for the sake of family that weren't done to an outsider no matter how close to family he was.

"He could have been, Alysha Catherine!"

Everyone had adored Michael-still adored Michael-and the aunties, all expecting a chance to integrate Michael's line, blamed Allie for his absence.

Allie scooped the could haves away into the bowl with the cut rhubarb-the could haves of her and Michael and a life she could see so clearly she sometimes forgot which life she was waking into-and gave thanks, not for the first time, that she hadn't inherited her gran's ability. In a family that drew an arbitrarily adjustable line between maintaining the status quo and interfering with the outside world, foresight was a curse. She totally understood why Gran had gone wild, leaving home and the nagging of the aunties. The other aunties.

Because, of course, Gran was also an auntie.

Although not hers.

Sometimes family life got complicated.

The screen door slammed again and Katie's younger sister Maria backed into the kitchen, the top of a stack of aluminum pie plates tucked in under the prominent curve of her breasts. She wasn't as tall as either Katie or Allie but was definitely curvier. A distinction the scoop-necked T-shirt had been clearly chosen to emphasize. "Delilah's in the apple tree again, Aunt Mary."

Muttering about the damned dog, Allie's mother wiped her hands on her apron and headed out into the yard.

Maria dropped the pie plates on the table. "Still don't see why it matters."

"Best to stop it before it matters; border collies can cause a lot of blossom damage." Auntie Jane glared a spinning plate to a stop just at the table's edge. "And she'll knock the young apples off later in the season. Are these all Christie had?"

"They're all Auntie Christie said she had," Maria told her. Then she turned to face the counter, full upper lip curled. "Allie."

Allie blinked. That had sounded like a challenge.

"Ignore her." Katie dropped the last of the cleaned rhubarb onto the cutting board and dried her hands on her apron. "She's just being a bitch because Dmitri slept here last night."

Aunt Ruth glanced up from setting wrapped dough balls in the fridge to rest. "Don't call your sister a bitch, Katie."

"Sorry. She's being a cow because Dmitri slept here last night. She has plans for him."

With barely more than a year between them, Dmitri and Maria wouldn't be a bad match, but Dmitri was only just finishing high school and it would likely be years before he chose. Still, with so few Gale boys available, attempting to stake an early claim wasn't an entirely bad idea. By the time Dmitri was ready to settle down, Maria might have discouraged some of her competition.

"Don't worry about me." Setting the bowl of cut fruit on the table, ceramic ringing against the wood, Allie reached past it for the sugar. "He was only here because he's working his way through his list and I haven't been around much."

The arch plucked into Maria's brows rose higher still. "You can't be on his list."

"Alysha and Dmitri are as far apart as you and Dmitri," Auntie Jane pointed out.

"But she's old!"

"Thank you so much." Allie didn't bother watching her tone. It was rhubarb. It was going to be tart anyway. "He's been eighteen for a month; I may be elderly, but I'm well inside the seven-year break."

"Well, fine..." Maria poked her finger into a block of shortening. "... you're on his list; that's why he wanted to sleep with you. Why did you sleep with him?"

The sudden silence in the kitchen was complete. The only sound, the distant command that Delilah was to get down out of the tree. Immediately.

Allie stared at her cousin. Knew Katie had turned from the sink and was staring as well. Aunt Ruth snorted. Auntie Jane answered for them all. "Turn down a Gale boy?"

Maria's blush dipped down to tint her cleavage. "Never mind."

She looked so miserable, Allie took pity on her. "Charlie was here, too."

Charlie, at nearly twenty-six, was definitely not on Dmitri's list. Her presence made it clear Allie wasn't remotely serious about making an actual connection with her young cousin. Charlie, like Gran, was one of those oddities the family threw up every now and then and was, because of what she could do, nearly as indulged as one of the boys. Half the aunties wanted to see if they could breed her ability back into the lines, stabilizing it, while the other half insisted its very instability argued against tying up one of the Gale boys on the attempt. Charlie ignored both halves, and no one doubted, given her talents, that one day she'd go wild.

Allie adored her, embraced the uniqueness the rest of family used but didn't exactly approve of, and harbored half-formed thoughts about taming the wildness. Next to Michael, she loved Charlie best.

"Where is Charlie?" Aunt Ruth asked as Maria grabbed herself an apron and a rolling pin.

Charlie was the exception to the rule that all Gale girls cooked.Younger members of the family scared still younger members with whispered stories of chocolate cupcakes gone horribly wrong. And when a cupcake went horribly wrong in the Gale family, the word "horribly" was not an exaggeration.

Allie shrugged, hoping it looked like she didn't care. "I don't know. She wasn't there when I got up."

"Because you wasted all that time wallowing in self-pity. Charlotte has gone to bring Roland home from Cincinnati," Auntie Jane added before Allie could protest that she hadn't been wallowing. Exactly. "That fool Kirby sent him out to get a deposition."

"Sent him to Cincinnati? Right before May Day?" Aunt Ruth rolled her eyes, the expression strengthening her resemblance to her sister although her eyes were clearly a lighter gray.

" Charlotte will have him home in time."

It was possible Charlie could have him home before he left, but that wasn't the point. When a Gale said he needed time off, he got it. Given the obsidian gleam in Auntie Jane's eyes during the discussion, Allie actually felt a little sorry for Roland's boss. Drawing the ire of the aunties was never smart. Alan Kirby had lived in Darsden East his whole life. He should have known that.

"It's only Cincinnati," Maria snorted. "They have an airport, you know. Okay, it's across the river in Kentucky, which is kind of stupid, but why doesn't he just fly home for the weekend then fly back?"

"No reason why he should." Auntie Jane's tone nearly frosted the windows.

"Dad says no one's seen Granddad for weeks," Katie said hurriedly, changing the subject before the mood affected the pies.

For a moment it looked like Auntie Jane would refuse to allow the subject changed, then she snorted. "He'll be here tomorrow."

Aunt Ruth frowned, slowly unwrapping another pound of shortening, fingertips dimpling the soft brick. "He's getting wilder."

"He'll be here tomorrow," Auntie Jane snapped. "We can't replace him. David's not ready."

"For what?"

Allie suddenly found measuring dry ingredients fascinating as her mother returned to the kitchen trailed by a clearly unrepentant Delilah. Auntie Jane was convinced that David was destined to be the next head of the family. Her mother was convinced that Auntie Jane was tottering on the edge of senility. David was too powerful, too independent to be tied so definitively to place.

Too like Granddad had been once? Allie wondered.

"David's not ready for what?" her mother repeated.

As the inevitable argument began, Katie sidled closer and murmured, "You okay?"

Given the concern in Katie's low voice, Allie figured that sudden flash of fear had shown on her face.

"Don't worry," her cousin continued. "Even if David does take over from Granddad, he's young. Really young. It'll be years, decades, before..."

"Don't." The flour slipped through her fingers like silk. Impossible to hold.

"He gets tied down, it'll keep him from going all darkside," Maria said quietly, pulling a stalk of rhubarb from her mouth, the plump curve of her lower lip stained pink.

"He's not going darkside!"

"He's powerful." Maria flipped up a finger as she counted off the points Allie had just made to herself. "He's a loner..."

"So what? So's Gran. So's Charlie more often than not."

"He's a male."

And there was yet another inarguable point. There were times Allie wished she could argue with her family a little more. Of course, right at the moment, they wouldn't be able to hear her over her mother and Auntie Jane.

"My son is not hoarding power!"

"Oh, and that's an unbiased opinion, is it?"

"Don't be ridiculous! How could it be unbiased, I'm his mother!"

"Don't talk to me about mothers! Not when your own mother is careening about the world like a tetherball!"

"What does my mother have to do with my son?"

"Nothing at all." Bits of dough flew off her fingers, spattering the kitchen like a soft hail as Auntie Jane spread her arms. Those not involved in the argument ducked. "For pity's sake, Mary, keep up. We've moved on."

A sudden shadow flickering past the window over the sink cut off a response Allie suspected would be memorable.

Muttering how no one should be worried about what the girls were going to add to the pies, Aunt Ruth leaned forward to check it out.

"It's Auntie Ruby," she sighed, head twisted to one side so she could see past the upper edge of the window. "She's found a broom."

"I told you she was senile!" More dough spattered as Auntie Jane punched the air in triumph. Allie brushed a bit off Katie's cheek.

Aunt Ruth sighed again. "And she's cackling."

Charlie moved through the Wood along the path of Roland's song. Most days she'd have been there by now-in the Wood, the actual distance between Aunt Mary's porch and Cincinnati was irrelevant. But today...

The path kept skirting the edges of the dark places beneath the oldest trees. Places Charlie'd just as soon not have to cross. Places she shouldn't have had to go near. Not for Roland.

Reaching back, she tugged her guitar around and strummed a questing chord.

The path shifted onto higher ground.

She picked up her pace and, when her shoulders brushed between the smooth trunks of young aspens, turned to look back the way she'd come.

Shadows had already claimed the path although, in all honesty, she couldn't say if it was a mulitude of smaller shadows or one large one.

Either way, it wasn't good.

The clerk at the front desk tracked her disapprovingly as she crossed the lobby and Charlie only just barely managed to keep from flipping her the bird. The shadows had dogged her footsteps for the rest of the trip, and all the clich��d lurking had pissed her right off.

She walked on to the elevator and, as the door closed behind her, swung her guitar back around to the front and began to pick a discordant pattern, trying to give the shadows form now she was out of the Wood. There'd been something almost familiar about them-or it-but she just couldn't...

"So, uh, what floor did you need?"

Startled, she glanced over at the man standing beside the controls, had a vague memory of him being there when she'd entered, and said, "Ten."

He gave her a smile that said, Well here we are, stuck together in a small space, and nodded down at the place where her hand remained curled protectively over the strings. "Do you play?"

"No," she told him as the almost familiar slipped away, "I just like to carry a guitar around with me."

"Right. Stupid question." Smile faltering slightly, his gesture drew her attention to her reflection in the stainless steel walls. "You know, you look more like the electric than acoustic type."

She tossed a strand of her blue, chin-length hair back off her face and growled, "Do you have any idea what a battery pack for an amp weighs?"

"Uh... No."

"Well, there you go then."

He shuffled back a step and raised his eyes to the numbers flicking by as though seven, eight, nine had suddenly become the most interesting things in his world. Out the door on nine, he turned, opened his mouth, and closed it again as the elevator door slid shut between them.

The fluorescent lights banished all shadows from the elevator.

Charlie kept an eye on the corners anyway.

Roland was in 1015, one of the small corner suites. Charlie knew damned well Alan Kirby hadn't booked a suite. Roland's boss was, in the words of Auntie Grace, tighter than bark on a tree. But Roland was a Gale; if there were upgrades to be had, he'd have them.

His door was slightly ajar-obviously he'd been expecting her.

"Charlie, hey!" Roland closed his laptop when he spotted her walking the short hall and began shoving paperwork into his backpack. "Thanks for this. I could have gotten a flight home, but getting back here on Sunday would have been a nightmare."

"Yeah, whatever."

He paused. Frowned. "I know you hate playing taxi, but..."

"I hate people assuming I'll play taxi, not the same thing." As a general rule, she didn't mind making life easier for the family, but that did not include being on call for those too stupid to read a calendar and needing a quick trip home.

"Then if you don't mind my asking, what crawled up your ass and died?"

"What? Oh, sorry." She crossed the room to the desk, boots making next to no noise on the carpet. "Nothing to do with you. Just some guy trying to be all friendly in the elevator."

Roland winced. "How badly did you damage him?"

"Not that friendly. Just friendly."

He ducked away from the punch she aimed at his shoulder. "The horror."

"It wasn't him." A bit of laminate was loose on the edge of the desk. She absently charmed it back down. "There's something funky happening in the Wood."

"Define funky."

"Can't. If I could, I wouldn't be so..."

"Cranky?"

"Bite me. Three year olds get cranky." But she couldn't stop herself from smiling back at him. Damned Gale boys anyway. "You ready?"

"Well, since your arrival establishes precedent that funky, however funky, is safe-almost." Laptop secured, he stretched, back cracking. "You know, I could have flown down here Monday. The deposition won't be ready until first thing Tuesday morning-but Alan was adamant I be here for the final court dates."

"The aunties are pissed."

"I think that was his intention."

"To get the aunties pissed?" Charlie asked, wandering into the bathroom to pocket the tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner. "The man has a death wish?"

Roland shrugged as she came back into the sitting room. "They haven't done anything obvious in a while."

"So he's poking at them with a you-shaped stick? Moron. What the hell is that?"

With the ease of a man who'd grown up with five sisters, he deftly avoided her grab and tucked the glittering pink unicorn into the larger of the pack's outside pockets. "It's a present for Lyla. I always bring her something when I get back from a trip."

"Technically, you won't be back from this trip until next Wednesday."

"I'll bring her something else then." He looked so sweetly besotted talking about his three-year-old daughter that Charlie gave half a thought to jumping him. Sweater vests or not, he was David's age, only twenty-eight, and while law might have left him a little physically soft around the edges, none of the Gales had been short-shrifted in the looks department. Rayne and Lucy, Lyla's mothers, certainly wouldn't care.

"So, how's your band doing?"

"Which one?" Charlie wondered, opening what turned out to be a fake chest of drawers and finding the television.

"The New Age techno head banging thing I saw you do at that..." When the pause extended, she turned to see him standing, half into his jacket, and frowning. "... club."

"We broke up."

"I'm sorry."

"Really?"

"No."

And so much for doing Roland. Sweet guy, for a lawyer, but his idea of music stopped and started around John Williams and usually involved light sabers. She tossed the TV remote on the sofa and spent a moment making sure her strings were in tune. Her B had a tendency to flatten in the Wood. "If we leave now, we'll be back before Lyla gets home from school."

"I'd like that. Thanks." He slipped his backpack over one shoulder. "Where do we leave from?"

"Across the street from the hotel. There's a shrubbery in that little park."

Holding the suite's door open for her, Roland frowned. "You can get in from a shrubbery?"

"I can." She patted his cheek as she passed. "Because I'm just that good."

The shadows dogged their heels all the way home.

"Traveling the Wood is never the same twice," Auntie Jane scoffed. "And all sorts of things lurk by the path."

"This was something new," Charlie insisted.

"What part of never the same twice are you having trouble understanding, Charlotte?"

"But..."

"It's coming up on May Day," Auntie Ellen pointed out-unnecessarily as far as Allie was concerned, given that the house already overflowed with family and Uncle Richard had just parked his RV in the yard. "Things are stirring."

Charlie took a deep breath, visibly holding her temper, and tried again. "I've never seen anything like this."

"You've never seen anything like it?" Auntie Jane sniffed.

"It's new to your vast experience?" Auntie Ellen sneered.

Auntie Muriel snorted but kept her attention on her knitting. Rumor said Auntie Muriel had been quite the traveler in her youth although, as she had most definitely not gone wild, the traveling in question probably had more to do with planes, trains, and automobiles rather than metaphysical pathways with no actual form.

As Charlie tensed up to respond, Allie wrapped one hand around her arm, anchoring her in place, and pointed out the big front windows with the other. "Look!" she said, loudly. "David's home!" She had the uncomfortable feeling that Auntie Jane's eyes literally lit up. Auntie Muriel, her knitting tossed aside to spill in a multicolored tangle off the big leather ottoman, led the charge out of the house. "They'll never admit you know something they don't." She pulled Charlie up against her as they watched the aunties part the sea of younger cousins crowded around David's car. Gale girls, regardless of age, were attracted to power. "Sooner or later, they'll send someone to check it out."

"And then claim omnipotence in family matters."

"Do you care?"

"Yes. No." Charlie sighed and pushed a fold into the worn rug with the scuffed toe of her boot. "Probably not. They just get up my ass sometimes, you know?"

"They do it on purpose."

"Well, duh.You going out to see David?"

Watching her brother lift five-year-old Callie up onto one shoulder, Allie grinned and shook her head. "Not this close to May Day; he's already showing horn." Even for her, the pull was nearly irresistible. "You go ahead, though."

"Tomorrow's soon enough for that." Charlie bent to pick up her guitar case, paused, and frowned at the spill of yarn. "What the hell is Auntie Muriel knitting?"

"I have no idea." Allie shuffled a little farther away from the ottoman. "I was afraid to ask in case she offered it to me."

Every now and then, one of the dimmer bulbs from Darsden East or the surrounding county tried to discover just what exactly went on in the Grove. These days, the family was large enough that David-too powerful for any circle but the first-and those who, for one reason or another, preferred to opt out of the ritual entirely, made up a fourth circle of protection for the other three.

In the old days, the aunties dealt with it.

Auntie Ruby swore her dahlias hadn't been the same since they stopped.

Stepping into the Grove, Allie nudged Charlie with her hip and nodded across at Dmitri, already dealing with both Marie and either Carrie or Ashley. Without clothing it was almost impossible to tell Charlie's twin sisters apart.

"Boy needs to pace himself," Charlie snickered. "It's going to be a long day."

Dusk had painted shadows where shadows weren't, trying to fool the eye, but experience and training helped him separate the real from the imagined. In his job, the difference, when there actually was one, could be crucial.

Although he knew the glyphs he wore offered more protection from discovery than camouflage and the dubious shelter of a bush ever could, he pushed himself a little more firmly against the ground when he heard the distinctive sound of his targets arriving. Camouflage and a bush provided a physical comfort the glyphs did not and death would be the best he could hope for if his targets spotted him.

Elbows making a tripod with his body, he peered through the scope, the sigils carved into the metal allowing him to see true forms. He had to admit, the horns were impressive.

His employer had been adamant that this was a recon mission, nothing more, but he couldn't stop himself from lining up a perfect shot.

Finger curled loosely around the trigger, he whispered, "Bang."

One moment Allie was sound asleep, the next she was staring through the curtain of her hair at a water stain on the ceiling and wondering who'd called her. Charlie remained asleep beside her, one arm thrown up over her head, blue hair fanned out against the pale skin. Next to Charlie, Katie frowned, eyes twitching behind her lids as she dreamed.

Easing out of bed so as not to wake them, Allie headed for the window, picking a careful path around the half dozen girl cousins, Samson, and a strange cat who'd crashed out on mattresses on her floor after the ritual had ended. The sun was up, but only just. Given that he'd no doubt spent most of yesterday being chased around by members of the family too young to go to the Grove, Mozart, the rooster, was probably still asleep in the henhouse, allowing the sun to rise without him. One of the barn cats walked purposefully along the rail fence by the lane. Across the south pasture, at the edge of the woods, a stag lifted his head to test the breeze.

That explained it.

On her way to the door, Allie grabbed a pair of jeans she thought were hers and a McGill sweatshirt that had to belong to Holly. Samson watched her go, one ear up, but didn't follow.

She couldn't find a matching pair of rubber boots that fit in the jumbled pile on the back porch, so she pulled on a green boot to go with the black one she already wore. Saturday's unseasonably adjusted warm temperature had already begun to cool but hadn't fallen far enough for Allie to take yet more time to find a jacket. Skirting the edge of the pasture where the new green was just beginning to show, she reached the point where she'd seen the stag and pushed her way in under the trees.

"Granddad?"

"Over here, Allie." He was sitting on a fallen log, in an old, stained pair of work pants and a quilted plaid jacket. There were caches of clothing all around the county, the girls taking turns to maintain the protective charms. Above his head, the air shimmered; antlers still very much evident.

Allie frowned and tried to remember the last time she'd seen him without them. Or for that matter, the last time she'd seen him up at the house.

"Is that face for me, little one?"

"Sorry." He smelled wonderful, like the woods and the wind, and, when he hugged her, his grip was strong, his arms sure. If he'd taken any damage the day before, he wasn't letting it show. No one really wanted to replace him, but when their blood was up, Gale boys-from Uncle Richard to Zachary, who'd only just joined the circles-tended to act first and think later.

"Worrying too much, Allie. Just be."

Dropping down beside him on the log, she rested her cheek on his shoulder. "It's hard to just be when you're out in the world, Granddad."

"Good thing you're here, then." He kissed the top of her head. "I can't protect the ones who wander. Off to school. Off to jobs."

She wondered if he ever wished he could leave, if ever he wanted to roam farther than the land the family claimed. If that was even something he could want after being the family's tie to place for so long.

"We always come home, Granddad." It was all she could offer him. For herself, well, it wasn't coming home she objected to. Home and family defined her as much as it defined any Gale. It was the failing at having a life thing she found less than stellar.

"Not everyone comes home." His snort had little humanity in it. Allie wrapped one of his callused hands in both of hers, skin to skin, to hold him in this shape a little longer. "There are always those who make other choices," he said at last and, from his tone, she realized he wasn't talking about her.

She'd expected Gran back for May Day, expected her to appear and demand to know just what, exactly, everyone thought they were doing. She hadn't been the only one.

"Be just like Catherine to show up at the last minute," Auntie Jane had muttered entering the Grove. "Make us shift the whole first circle to accommodate her."

But she hadn't come, and Auntie Muriel had anchored the day with Granddad. It would have been wilder with Gran there. Allie was old enough now to know that wasn't always a good thing. This part of the world had storms enough and no one appreciated a rain of frogs.

Especially not the frogs.

They sat quietly together as dawn shifted to morning, and then Granddad drew his hand from hers.

"Your brother is on his way. We have to talk, he and I."

"David's not..."

"Just talk," he told her as he stood. But the shimmer had grown more pronounced, and she could see the point where the antlers grew up out of bone. "We aren't controlled by what the old women think is likely to happen." When Allie couldn't control her expression in time, he grinned. "Although it's easier to maintain that belief out here in the woods-and you didn't hear me say it." He bent, carefully, to kiss her cheek. "Come and find me again to say good-bye before you go."

"Where am I going?"

"That choice, little one, is yours."

Somehow she managed to keep her reaction to that bit of Yoda philosophy from showing on her face.

David met her halfway across the meadow and they adjusted their paths to leave a little more room between them, knowing the steps of the dance without having to consciously consider them. By tomorrow or the next day they'd be fine, but this morning, with David still showing an impressive rack of horn, better to be safe than sorry.

"Your boots don't match."

"It's a new style." She pointed at the red curve cut into his cheek, centered within a purpling arc of bruises. "Tell me that wasn't Dmitri."

"It wasn't." When she continued to stare pointedly at him, he rolled his eyes. "Uncle Evan."

"How's he?"

David shrugged one broad shoulder, as though the information wasn't worth the effort of moving them both. "He'll live."

"Good. Granddad's just inside..."

"I know."

Allie rolled her eyes and kept walking. Never exactly chatty at the best of times, David was clearly having one of his more taciturn mornings. She wondered how his moods went over at work-surely the police forces that called in Dr. David Gale, brilliant young criminologist, expected a little more verbal bang for their consultant buck. Or maybe, as long as he got it right when he took the stand, they didn't care. She'd ask him later, he was always in a better mood when he'd stopped manifesting.

Crossing the yard, she caught sight of a familiar figure heading into the henhouse. It was still early enough that her father, as one of the rare Gales by marriage, was likely to be the only male of ritual age awake-well, except for David who preferred to be the exception to most rules. Her dad and Michael used to do things together while the rest of the family moved through the circles and she wondered if he missed having Michael around. She took a step toward the henhouse, chasing the long line of her shadow.

Paused.

No. Missing Michael was not on the morning's agenda.

Surrounded by family, she had plenty of things to do.

Much like pies, pancakes and sausages didn't make themselves and there'd be people looking for breakfast soon enough.

Around nine thirty, Uncle Richard and Aunt Marion began herding their branch of the family back into the RV, Uncle Richard favoring his left side. At nine forty, they discovered they were one short. At nine fifty, Allie found their four-year-old granddaughter Merry sound asleep in the tree house, a sausage clutched in one chubby fist.

"She wanted to spend the night up there," Brianna sighed, handing her daughter up to her exhausted looking husband. "I told her she was too young." Then she grinned, gray eyes sparkling. "David and I spent the night up there after senior prom. I was so sure he'd choose me."

"But you and Kevin..."

"Are completely happy, Allie, never fear. He loves the farm as much as I do. David would have gone insane."

All three of them winced as a long blast from the RV horn set the dogs barking.

"I think Dad wants to get going."

Allie kissed one cousin good-bye, waved at the other, and blew kisses at Merry who laughed and blew kisses out the back window all the way down the lane.

Just past eleven, the last group emerged from the haymow.

"For pity's sake, boy," Auntie Jane snorted as Dmitri shuffled carefully into the kitchen, "there's salve for that. Use it before those trousers rub you raw. Downstairs bathroom. And you lot," she snapped at the girls who gathered around the table as he left the room, "stop giggling. He didn't get in that condition all on his lonesome."

Allie pulled a platter of pancakes out of the oven where they'd been keeping warm. "He needs to learn to pace himself."

"He's young. He'll recover."

By two that afternoon, only Aunt Ruth and her family remained, helping to put the house to rights.

By supper, there was only Charlie.

"This is nice." Auntie Ruby poked at her vegetables with her fork. "Although in my day, we actually cooked the carrots. I guess no one cares what old people think anymore."

Allie looked around the table and moved her leg just far enough to touch Charlie's knee with hers. Her parents, David, Auntie Ruby-who'd lived with them all of Allie's life-Auntie Jane-who'd moved into the old farmhouse after her husband had died-and Charlie, who'd had lunch with her immediate family and returned by midafternoon announcing that if she spent another moment with the twins, she'd strangle them both. Auntie Ruby was right; it was nice. Okay, so she didn't have a job and she didn't have Michael and she'd moved back in with her parents at-God forbid-the ripe old age of twenty-four, but she still had family.

For a Gale, family was everything.

David left after supper, needing to be back in Ottawa for work first thing Monday morning. His current job involved very hush-hush consulting with the Mounties, although he refused to give specifics.

"We don't keep secrets in this family, David Edward Gale."

David bent and kissed the top of Auntie Jane's head. "If I told you what I was doing, I'd have to shoot you."

"I'd like to see you try." She hooked a finger through his belt loops to hold him in place. Allie held her breath until it became obvious he wasn't about to try and break free. "In my day, David Edward, Gale boys chose by twenty."

"But in your day, Auntie Jane, you were one of the choices."

"I'm not saying that wasn't incentive..."

Was Auntie Jane actually blushing? David was scary powerful.

"... but you are perilously close to having choices made for you. The time will come, and sooner than you think, when your duty to your family can no longer be set aside.

"But that time is not now." His tone made it entirely clear he wasn't asking for her agreement.

"No, not now." And Auntie Jane's tone added, but soon. It also added: We have every intention of bringing all that power you're flashing around back into the lines one way or another, young man, and this delay is not helping your case as far as our suspicions about you are concerned. We'd prefer you to come willingly, but we're perfectly willing to bind you if you don't, and our patience is running short. Also, you need to call your mother more often. She worries.

The aunties hadn't invented subtext-at least these particular aunties hadn't, Allie didn't want to make assumptions about the originals-but they squeezed every possible nuance out of it.

Charlie left the next morning after breakfast.

"I've got a friend in Halifax going into the studio today," she explained, tossing David's old hockey bag over one shoulder and picking up her guitar. "I told him I'd sit in." Head cocked, a strand of blue hair fell down over her eyes as she studied Allie's face. "I'll stay if you need me to."

"To hold my hand because I'm friendless and unemployed?"

"Something like that."

Allie kissed her quickly and gave her a shove off the porch. "I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"Just go."

"All right, then."

"You can't keep Charlie in one place, Allie-kitten."

Allie leaned back against her father's arm and watched the shimmer between the apple trees dissipate. "I know."

"She'll come back to you. She always does."

"I know."

"She reminds me a lot of your grandmother."

"Didn't need to hear that."

He gave her one final squeeze, and grabbed his backpack. "Gotta go, kid. High school history doesn't teach itself." He paused, halfway to his truck. "You could always think about teaching, Kitten. Add a master's of education to that fine arts degree. As I recall, you used to have mad skills with macaroni and glue."

"I'll think about it, Dad."

"You want something to do with your life besides standing around and feeling sorry for yourself?" Auntie Jane yanked open the door and thrust a basket into her hands. "Go get the eggs."

The hens had no advice to offer. Mozart tried to eat her shoelaces.

By the time the mail came that afternoon, she'd made three batches of cookies and a lemon loaf.

"There's something for you, Allie." Her mother tossed a pile of sales flyers onto the table and held out a manila envelope. "No return address. Maybe it's a job offer."

"I haven't applied for any jobs, Mom."

"That might be why you're not working, then."

"I just lost the last one," Allie muttered, opening the envelope. "And Dr. Yan was positive we were going to get that funding renewed so why would I have been looking?"

"Are you asking me?"

"No." She pulled two sheets of paper from the envelope, unfolded them, read them, and frowned. "This isn't... I mean, it's not..."

"Isn't not what?" Auntie Jane demanded, plugging the kettle in.

"It's from Gran. It says if I'm reading this, she's dead."