Page 25 of Ash Fall

"The powers first. I want to know what everyone has. Not the whole story of everything you've done with them, we don't have time for that tonight, just... what did you each wake up with?"

A beat of quiet holds, everyone waiting for everyone else, and then Jules leans back in his chair and raises one lazy hand. "Air and water. I'm a walking weather report."

"Earth and stone," Gage says simply. "I can move them, shape them. The ground listens to me now."

The ground listens to him. He says it in the same voice he'd use to tell me my Jeep needs an oil change. Something about that calm delivery reassures me and calms me, because this is Gage, my steady, practical Gage, telling me that mountains do what he asks.

"Mine is temperature." Kara wiggles her manicured fingers. "Freezing things, mostly, but it goes the other way too if I concentrate. I'm a woman of many settings."

"You all heard mine at the warehouse, so there's no mystery left there." Torrin's voice is still hoarse, and he doesn't dress it up. "I say a thing with the power behind it, and people do the thing. And I hate it a little more every time I use it, for whatever that's worth."

Under the table, my hand finds his knee and squeezes, and his fingers come down to cover mine and stay there.

"Shadows," Mars says.

One word with no elaboration has my traitor eyes looking to him. He's sitting in his old chair, the one that stayed empty through two years of Sunday dinners. Hearing him add his voice to this circle feels exactly the way it used to and nothing like the way it used to, both at once. I don't have room tonight to untangle which part of that hurts the most.

Then everyone's attention slides to Reid and he goes red from his collar to his hairline.

"Okay, so, here goes." He rubs the back of his neck, curls falling over his forehead and his amber eyes fixed on the table. "Mine is, um. I can hear animals. In my head. Their thoughts, their voices, whatever you want to call it." He lifts his gaze just enough to catch the ring of stunned faces and lets out a resigned breath. "I guess you can all call me Dr. Dolittle now."

"The garage, earlier." Gage sits forward, and I can almost hear the pieces snapping together. "That's what happened to you out there. The headache wasn't from the blast at all, was it? It was Penny the whole time."

"Yeah, that was a lot." Reid's laugh comes out shaky around the edges. "An excited golden retriever screaming her feelings directly into my skull at full volume. She had a week of thoughts saved up and she delivered every single one of them in about nine seconds." He shrugs, and the smile drops off, and underneath it he just looks tired and a little lost. "I'm not sure how it could ever help us at all, but that's what I got."

My heart squeezes so hard it aches. He looks embarrassed, my Reid, sitting there apologizing for the shape of his own miracle so I reach across the table for his hand in support.

"Hey, it might be more helpful than mine." I catch his hand and hold on until his eyes come up to me. "You want to talk about useless? I'm basically a nightlight. I glow when I get scared or panicked, that's it, that's the power. When I'm terrified, I glow. If I'm cornered, I glow harder. And when I'm trying to hide from armed soldiers in the dark, I light up the entire room, which, for the record, is the exact opposite of what that situation calls for." A huff of laughter moves around the table, and Reid's shoulders come down an inch, which was the entire point. "Oh, and also, there's a bonus feature."

I reach up and pull the elastic out of my hair, shaking it loose around my shoulders. Kara's sharp inhale comes before I even look up.

Threaded all through the cinnamon, catching the light, are the white streaks. There's a wide one at my left temple from the basement, and finer ones scattered back through the rest, standing out sharp against my natural color.

"Every time it happens, parts of my hair turn white." I tuck a white piece behind my ear and aim for breezy, and I almost get there. "So yeah, that's fun. At this rate I'll be a hundred percent Elsa by start of winter."

"Okay, first of all, it's gorgeous and I hate you," Kara says immediately, reaching over to lift a streak with two fingers, and her fierce fashion-court delivery pulls the sting right out of the moment the way only she can. "Women pay hundreds of dollars for this exact look and their dye fails within a month. Yours is permanent and dimensional. We're keeping it."

"Noted and appreciated." The laugh that comes out of me is real, and I love her for it. Then I make myself circle back to the question that's actually been eating me since my skin first lit up. "But that's the what, and what I really want to know is the why. Does anyone have any theories about why this is happening to us? Any of it? The powers, the moon, all of it?"

The energy around the table changes, glances bouncing from face to face, and it's Torrin who breaks first.

"I have one. Had it since the second day, actually." He sits forward with his forearms on the table, and even tired and hoarse, his voice pulls every one of us in. "Picture dimensions stacked on top of each other, layers and layers of them, and each layer is a different version of Earth. Not different timelines, different worlds. Same planet, but with different animals, different cities, and maybe one of those layers is an Earth that kept its magic when ours forgot it ever had any." His thumb keeps moving over the back of my hand, slow and steady, while he says the impossible part. "I think when the moon came at us and everything rippled, we got pushed into one of those other layers for a few seconds. And I think when we snapped back, the two worlds traded. We left some things behind, whole towns and people, and we brought some things home with us. Strange buildings, animals that shouldn't exist, and powers that look an awful lot like magic."

The word traded sends a tingle of cold up my back, one vertebra at a time. I remember that ripple, the way the whole world smeared sideways for a heartbeat and a strange man with pointed ears and a sword pointed at me was in front of me. For a week I've refused to think about what I might have glimpsed on the other side of it, and here's Torrin suggesting the other side glimpsed right back at us.

"That’s pretty close to what I found out." Gage tells us. "I met someone on the way home who told me pretty much the same thing from the other direction." He rolls his shoulders, and for the first time since he came back to me, I watch my unshakeable man look genuinely unsure how to say something. "His name is Brannick. He's a wolf the size of a horse, except when he decides to be a man instead, and he calls himself fae-born, a warrior of something called the Ninefold Hunt. He found me as I was walking out of the forest where my plane crashed."

I practically lunge out of my chair to grab his arm at hearing that while everyone else starts throwing questions at him. He holds his free hand that I’m not clutching up and yells over the noise, "I’m fine! I made it out with just some bruises and a wicked headache." He frowns and rubs at his head. "Does anyone else seem to heal a lot faster than normal?"

Jules waves that away. "Yes, yes, blah blah superheroes blah. I want to hear what this wolf man told you!"

Gage sends him an impatient look but carries on. "There was a forest fire that I was running from and a stampede of animals that was about to trample me. That was the first time I felt and used the…magic. I pulled a wall of earth up as a barrier for protection. I didn’t know what I was doing, it just happened. As I was catching my breath, this monster-sized wolf with glowing gold eyes walked around it and scared the shit out of me. Once he shifted into a very large, very naked man, he told me what had happened." He rubs a hand over his beard before the rest comes out. "He told me that the veil between our worlds had torn causing him to accidentally fall through. In his world, humans went extinct a thousand years ago. Humans were too soft with no magic, so we couldn't survive what came with their wars. He was shocked to learn that the magic I used was something new to me. He said I'm tied to the earth and called me Stoneheart. It really rattled him that I woke up with power at all. Where he comes from, magic runs through bloodlines and you train for it, you earn it through trials. According to him, nobody just wakes up one morning and moves earth the way I did."

"You met a fairy tale wolf man," Jules says slowly, "and you're only mentioning this now?"

"There's been a lot going on." Gage shrugs a shoulder like it’s no big deal and then grins. "He also screamed and hid behind me when a jackrabbit crossed the trail, so clearly the Ninefold Hunt has some gaps in its training program. He’s also now addicted to ketchup."

I'm laughing before I can stop it, and it feels almost criminal to laugh with everything pressing down on us, but I let it out anyway because if I don’t, I might start screaming instead. There's a wolf warrior from a world with no humans left in it, and there's an angry dragon in the mountains. We keep talking about these impossible things around this table where we used to argue about board games. It’s just beyond surreal.