“If I need your help,” Graham said, “I’ll ask for it.”
Charlie turned to look at him, fully at him, and just for a moment, he thought her eyes had turned a darker gray. “Deal.” Then she winked, and the moment passed.
Later, with Allie’s head pillowed on his shoulder, he stroked along the damp curve of her spine and thought she was beautiful and thought for the first time in a long time he was exactly where he belonged and because he couldn’t entirely shut the reporter up, he thought about that niggling ten percent.
“You’re thinking very loudly.”
“Sorry.”
“You can ask me anything, you know.”
“Anything?”
He could feel her smile against his skin. “I’m fairly certain you’ll keep it out of the papers at this point.”
It might be the only way he’d ever find out. “Are you…” It sounded like such a stupid question even before he asked it. “Are you Human?”
“Was I just that amazing?”
“Allie.” Graham caught her hand before it slid lower on his body.
She sighed. “Yes. No. Essentially. If the world doesn’t end and you decide to stay, there will be babies.”
“He managed that with a dragon.”
“Okay, so not my best argument.” Her thumb stroked the hollow of his hip and he knew she was drawing another charm. He thought about stopping her. He didn’t. “Do you remember your family?” she asked softly. “From before the fire?”
Did he? He pushed through the smoke. “I remember a house too small for the number of people in it. I remember a lot of yelling and laughing and broken toys and the reek of wet hockey equipment piled in the summer kitchen. I remember knowing that wherever I went in town a spiderweb of connections defined me.”
“Good.” She kissed the spot under his ear. “That’s what we are.”
“It’s not all you are.”
“It’s all that matters.”
He wanted to believe that.
Graham lay quietly, one arm trapped under Allie’s body, trying to identify the sound that had woken him. Instinct told him it hadn’t come from one of the five sleeping out in the living room. Jack, maybe. But what was Jack doing up at 6:10?
Allie murmured as he slid his arm free, but he kissed her bare shoulder and she settled back to sleep. He’d left his clothing so that he could dress quickly in the dark, and it only took a moment’s extra time to scoop the boxers he’d worn to bed—and not kept on long—up off the floor.
Staying low, he slipped out into the main room, silent on sock feet, and nearly crapped himself when Auntie Kay turned from the kitchen and waved.
“I couldn’t sleep any longer,” she whispered as soon as he was close enough. “Time change, you know. Bea and Meredith are in the pool. Jane is on the phone with Ruby—the silly old dear was up the water tower again, wrote Surrender Dorothy with the paint left over from when Tom redid the trim on the farmhouse. When Christie started in on that Tai Chi nonsense, I decided to come over and get a start on the biscuits for breakfast. You wouldn’t know where Allie keeps her shortening, would you?”
It seemed safest to merely answer the direct question. “Sorry, no.”
“I have this terrible fear she’s out and that’s, well, that’s just wrong.”
Graham knew where this was going. “There’s a twenty-four-hour convenience store just down the road. Do you want me to go out and get some shortening for you?”
“Would you, dear? How sweet to offer. Get as much as they have. If Jack’s mother doesn’t have us all flying about in circles today, we’ll use it for pies.”
She didn’t offer to pay for the shortening, and Graham didn’t ask. Truth be told, he was just as glad to get out on his own for a few minutes, even if it was just walking a couple of blocks to the store and back. He’d shut the newspaper down—citing a family emergency when he’d made the calls, and his whole life had devolved into waiting for Jack’s mother. The Dragon Queen.
And after?
“If the world doesn’t end, and you decide to stay, there will be babies.”
Yeah, he could use a walk.
As he slipped into his boots, tugging them from the pile at the door, he realized his jacket was still in the bedroom. He pulled what had to be Roland’s off a hook—it had to be Roland’s because although the jacket he’d found was big on him, Michael’s would have been like wearing a circus tent.
Leaning against the wall at the bottom of the stairs were a dozen new corn brooms.
“Do you remember your family? That’s what we are.”
“Oh, yeah…” The orange sale stickers were very bright on the blue handles. The aunties had gotten a deal. No surprise. “… just like my family.”
When he glanced over at the mirror, fourteen reflections glanced back. Most of them were dressed. The one out front was holding a suitcase.
“I’m not leaving, I’m just going on an errand for Auntie Kay. And I’m talking to a mirror.” Since he didn’t have a key to the store, he went out the back door and through the garage. Since anything coming back in would have to get past David, still in the loft, it seemed safest.
He kept close to the walls of the alley and, when he reached the street, stayed close to the storefronts. The sky had lightened enough to keep the Dragon Lords flying high, but one had landed and walked right into the store, so daylight wasn’t exactly the protection it should have been. He kept half his attention on the local pigeons. If they dove for cover, he was heading right under that newspaper box with them.
Early morning traffic had started to pick up by the time he left the store, six pounds of shortening in a bag and the storekeeper’s puzzled gaze still on the back of his head. He didn’t notice the big black SUV before it stopped beside him on the road.
No, he didn’t see the big black SUV before the door opened and Stanley Kalynchuk growled, “Get in.”
“No.”
But he stepped up into the car.
“Hurry!”
He couldn’t stop himself from dropping into the seat and closing the door behind him.
THIRTEEN
The grass across the top of the hill burned first, a circle of black spreading behind a ring of gold. Then the trees ignited with a roar, towers of flame enclosing the summit. The world burned too fast after that for Allie to see the individual pyres. Cars exploded, the slam of sound devolving to gentle popping as the fire spread.
Here and there, amidst the crackle of cooking fat, she saw faces.
Charlie. Graham. Kenny in the coffee shop. Her mother. Her father. Roland’s daughter Lyla. Dr. Yan. The aunties burned last, but even they burned, falling out of the sky trailing tails of black smoke like particularly dirty comets.
Then, when enough of the world had been remade, Jack’s mother rose from the center of the circle where the flames had died to glowing embers. Thunder boomed when she spread gleaming white wings and two of her brothers, tiny against her bulk, tumbled broken from the sky. Scimitar claws extended, she gouged great gashes in the blackened, pitted rock, and roared.
And roared.
And roared.
Left hand groping for something to hold and finding only an empty bed, Allie stared up into the darkness and listened to the sound of her family moving out in the next room, to the sound of the city waking beyond the walls of the apartment, to the sound of claws on rock coming closer.
And closer.
Heat lingered in the hollows next to her so Graham couldn’t have been gone long. Clock said 6:47, so she hoped he hadn’t been gone long. If he was that much of a morning person, there were going to have to be significant adjustments made.
If they…
Although she was fairly certain at this point it wasn’t so much if as when. Not that it mattered, she wasn’t going to scare him away, not again. He could choose when he was good and ready to choose and not a moment before. Here and now, it was enough to know he was…