“Situation? Seriously? That’s what you’re calling this? You know what? Fine. The family deals with it. When you’ve figured out just how the family is going to keep from dying in less than twenty-two months, you let me know.”

Allie moved toward her, but Charlie shook her head and sidestepped, slipping out the patio door as Auntie Carmen said, “I don’t trust the Fey, present company excepted for the most part.”

There was a single lounge chair left out by pool, the old-fashioned construction of aluminum and nylon tape that had never taken a charm well, next to it a small, round plastic table that had been white before Lyla went at it with her paints. Charlie kicked the table into the pool, gave some serious consideration to sending the chair after it, and sat down instead.

“Stubborn old women . . .”

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. The cold felt clean. Cleansing. Leaning back, she squinted up at the stars and wondered if one of them wasn’t actually a star. She had no idea. She’d never cared about the stars. She cared about phosphor bronze medium strings. About pitchers of draft at Shooters in Thunderbay. About the heartbeat song of the bohdran under “Well Below the Valley.” And for longer than she’d realized she’d cared about Jack. A lot more than she should.

Stars? Not so much.

“It’d serve them right if I Walked away, found a bar, got royally pissed, and picked up a distraction.” Heat charmed into her clothes, Charlie settled in to wait.

“Auntie Bea wants to chain me down at the base of the tower and drop a large rock on me. Just to see what’ll happen.”

Nearly half an hour by her watch. She tipped her head back far enough to watch Jack cross between the house and the pool. “Missing your uncles?”

“Little bit.” He shoved her over and sat beside her. The air between them warmed.

“How mad are they?”

“At you?” He shrugged. “Allie pointed out that you’d been carrying this knowledge longer than any of us and you were due for an emotional break. So they decided to cut you some slack. There’s a ritual in ten days.”

“I know.”

“Auntie Jane’s calling everyone home to take part.”

“Everyone including . . . ?”

“You and me? Yeah. There was a bunch of stuff about using the power we had to hand and that before we went on, we had to know for certain ritual wouldn’t work.”

“Went on to what?” Charlie sighed. The aunties had been pretty definite about not being able to affect the asteroid.

Scales glistened across Jack’s cheeks. “I kind of missed what they said about that.”

“Thinking about ritual.” Not a question. He was seventeen and he still hadn’t spent a ritual in circle.

“Yeah.” He huffed out a small cloud of smoke. “Charlie, I was thinking . . .”

“That explains the smoke.”