“You’ve choked on spit,” he pointed out. “I’ve seen you.”

“Fair enough.” Head cocked, Charlie listened to nothing Jack could hear for a moment, then nodded. “We’re good. That was the last one.”

“Why would she . . .” To name the aunties was to call them. Not always, but it happened often enough Jack decided to be cautious. “. . . leave charms to overhear when she didn’t want to know?”

“She didn’t say she didn’t want to know, she said she wasn’t going to ask.”

“Why . . . ?”

“You tell me.”

He recognized that tone. It was the same tone his Uncle Adam had used when he’d asked why they didn’t flame the lake and eat the pookah after it floated to the surface. He suspected Charlie’d turned the encounter with Auntie Gwen into a lesson on power dynamics to emphasize the difference in their ages. Jack knew Charlie was older than he was; she just couldn’t seem to understand that he didn’t care. And, for what it was worth, parboiled pookah tasted terrible.

“If she asked what we were hiding and you didn’t tell her,” he said slowly, “she couldn’t let that kind of defiance stand. If she tried to force you to tell her, you’d lie and make her believe it and that would shift the power dynamic enough the other aunties would notice. Then it would be you, well, you and me, against all the aunties.”

“Think we could take them?”

“All of them?” He thought about it for a moment, listening to the traffic, smelling the coffee when someone opened the door of the shop, watching Charlie watch him. He considered what he could do and what Charlie could do. And he considered the aunties. “No. We couldn’t.”

“No,” Charlie repeated, smiling, “we couldn’t. But Auntie Gwen’s reason was simpler than that. She trusts that when it comes down to it, the last note is the key the song is in. She trusts we’ll put family first.” Her smile changed, softened and picked up an edge at the same time. Jack fought the urge to flame in response. “You’d stand beside me against the aunties?”

“Duh.”

“Well, that puts the end of the world into perspective.”

“The world isn’t going to end.”

“It’s not?”

“We’re going to stop the asteroid.” Because they had to stop it.

“We are?”

This new smile, Jack recognized. He wasn’t sure when he’d first started seeing it, but he knew now he was the only one who saw it. “We are.”

Because if the world ended, then Charlie ended—and Jack wasn’t going to let that happen.

CHAPTER SIX

“THEY’RE DEFINITELY HIDING SOMETHING.”