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What had it been like for Fred to discover the magick inside her, to sprout wings? For some the emergence of powers brought madness or turned them dark.
For Fred it brought joy, a passion for spreading that joy, and a devotion to defend and protect all.
Her mother had chosen her circle well. Without them, without the sacrifices they’d made, the will not just to survive but to rebuild, there would be no New Hope.
Without New Hope and communities like it, the light would dim, and dark prevail.
She’d intended to ride through town to the police station in hopes of finding Will Anderson. But she saw him standing on the sidewalk talking to a couple—Anne and Marla, she remembered, weavers who raised llamas. Will crouched down to the level of the little boy they’d taken in. After Petra had killed his mother. He’d be about five, Fallon calculated, and chattered happily at Will as they examined a little toy horse.
But as she approached on Laoch, the little boy huddled behind his mother, peeked out at her.
“It’s all right, honey.” Anne stroked his curly cap of hair. “This is Fallon. You remember her. He’s shy until he gets to know you,” she told Fallon.
“That’s okay. I don’t mean to interrupt.”
“We just came into town to deliver some socks,” Marla said. “And stopped into Bygones. Elijah said his alphabet for Mr. Anderson and got a prize.”
“That’s a nice horse.” As Will had done, she crouched down, but didn’t move closer. “My dad made me a wooden horse when I was little. I still have it. And now I have this big guy, too.”
Because she’d looked into the boy, she smiled, then murmured to Laoch in Irish.
He spread his wings.
“Like yours, Elijah. I see the light in you.”
He dipped his head, but she saw his smile, shy and sweet. And his wings, a quick flutter of blue.
Anne pressed her fingers to her lips as her eyes filled. “He never—We had no idea. Oh, Elijah, look how pretty your wings are.”
“We wondered.” Marla leaned down to kiss the top of Elijah’s head. “But he never showed any signs.”
“It takes time for some, especially . . .” Fallon let that go as Anne lifted him, settled him on her hip.
“Yes, especially. I think tonight, after dinner, we’re going to have an ice-cream party with Clarence and Miranda.”
“Ice cream!” Elijah threw back his head and laughed. “Tawbewwy!”
“Yes, strawberry. We’ll work on those r’s later. Come on, Marla, let’s get our little man home. It’s good to see you Fallon, Will.”
They settled Elijah in a carrier seat on a bike. Marla got on it, Anna on another. With a wave they rode off, with Elijah’s wings still fluttering.
“They’re good people,” Will commented. “Taking in three damaged kids and making a family. Three magickal kids, as it turns out.
You could see he was a faerie?”
“His light’s quiet and shy. And sweet,” she added. “Very sweet.”
“His mother was one of the rescues from the anti-magick cult. Indoctrinated and brainwashed to believe magick was evil. She’d have taught him that, tried to repress what he was.”
“I remember. Petra pretended to come from the same cult, and lived with them here. God knows what she tried to teach him. They are good people, his mothers now. If they’d reacted differently—too strongly, not strongly enough—he might have tried to hide his nature again instead of embracing it.”
“Strawberry ice cream never hurts. You’ve got something on your mind,” he added.
“I came into town to talk to you.”
“Okay. We can head up to the station, or just head up to the house. I was just coming from the house, going to check in with Chuck. Trying to find my wife.”
“Oh, she’s at our place. Having a . . . meeting with Mom and Fred, Katie. Could we go ahead into Chuck’s den? He could add to this.”
“Sure.”
She turned to Laoch, stroked him. He rose up on his wings, soared off.
“Never gets old.” Shading his eyes with the flat of his hand, Will watched Laoch fly. “Where’s he going?”
“Where he likes. He’ll come when I need him.” As would her wolf, her owl. “Can you tell me if the rescues are acclimating? That’s the wrong word,” she realized. “That sounds cult-like, doesn’t it?”
“Not when I know what you mean. The medicals have set up therapy—group and individual. Physically some of them still need some time to heal. Emotionally’s going to take longer for a lot of them. You know Marlene, right?”
“Town planner.”
“Yeah. She’s playing den mother in one of the group houses. Plus, one of the rescues was a therapist before the Doom. He’s a little shaky yet himself, but it seems like a good idea to have one of their own working with them.”
“It does.” Resilience, she thought, was a light of its own. “How many have left New Hope?”
“Three so far.”
“A smaller number than I figured. And the baby, his mother?”
“Both doing okay, according to Jonah. I saw him earlier.”
They walked around the back of the house where Rachel and Jonah lived with their boys, and to Chuck’s basement entrance.
She smelled freshly mown grass, sun-soaked herbs before they went inside and down.
There she smelled salt, something sugary.
Chuck sat in front of monitors and keyboards and odd electronic boxes, switches, and joysticks.
Fallon could speak countless languages, had within her every spell ever written, but the world of computers posed a thorny mystery for her.
She’d gained a little skill—with Chuck’s help—since coming to New Hope, but for her entire life before they’d left the farm for New Hope, she’d been IT-free.
“Who enters the master’s den?” Chuck slurped at the something sugary in his glass. “Hi, guys.”
“No minions today?” Will asked, as Chuck had a variety of IT apprentices.
“Class dismissed. It’s summer, dude. And my top guys and gals are working on their own with some of the goodies you brought me back from the dungeons. You fried a bunch of it.”
“We were a little fixed on life and death,” Fallon reminded him.
“Yeah, yeah. Well, components are people, too. Anyway, I got Hester seeing if she can revive some of it with the woo-woo.” He reached a hand into a bowl of chips. “Want? Got more. Fixed this old Play-Station out at Fred’s yesterday and scored the chips of potato.”
“I’ll pass on the chips,” Will told him, “but I could use something cold if you got it.”
“Brew?”
“I’m still on duty.”
“Lemonade.”
“Sold.”
Will went over to Chuck’s cold box, took out the jug. “What are you monitoring?”
“I’ve got a PW base in Uta
h—that’s a new one. They’re just setting up.”
“Branching out,” Will added.
“What I’m getting is that our favorite lunatic, Jeremiah White, sent about twenty from Michigan, had them meet up with a group from Kansas, then pull together with some new recruits in Utah to set this up. They lost about fifteen percent getting there. But they rounded up most of a community in Nebraska—farming settlement, magickals and nons. They’re estimating to have the base secured—the housing, the weaponry, the supplies, and all that—by the end of the week. So they can have their first round of executions on Sunday.”
He shoved the bowl of chips aside. “Fuckers.”
“We’ve never attempted any rescues that far out,” Will said to Fallon. “They’re not secure yet, but—”
“Now’s the time. They won’t have any Dark Uncanny with them.”
“If they did,” Chuck put in, “it wouldn’t take them days to secure. So, no DUs.”
She shifted Arlington out of her mind for the moment. “Can you get exact coordinates?”
“I’m working on it.”
“How confident are you in your numbers?”
“I’m confident that’s what they’re reporting back to Arlington. I’ve been catching bits of chatter off and on for a while, but it didn’t amount to much before this morning. And like Will said, they’re a hell of a lot farther away than anything we’ve tried. I’ve been banking it, keeping track when I could.”
A new plan, even more ambitious, began to form in Fallon’s mind. “We need everything you have. We’ll get it to Mallick and Duncan. Both have flashed farther than Utah before, and they’ll know who at their base can handle the tagalong.”
She took the lemonade from Will but set it down again as she paced the big room crowded with electronics, with monitors and screens, with shelves stacked with wound-up cables, components, spare parts.
And the scavenged dolls Chuck haughtily called action figures.
“Duncan takes two to scout, get the lay of the land, the setup, the security in place.”
“Elves and shifters are usually best for that,” Will said.
“Yeah. He’ll know. Relay the intel. By the end of the week, you said.”
