“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 clichéd 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.”