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.”

“Sorry.” Ears flushed, he fixed the scorch mark on her jeans and started to move away.

She sighed, grabbed his sleeve, and pulled him back beside her. “Joke. What were you thinking about?”

“Why don’t we contact the rest of the family?”

“Trust me, anyone who couldn’t tap in tonight will get the word.” The constant sound of conversation spilling out of the house spiked suddenly. Still incomprehensible—thanks to charms etched in the glass—the emotional emphasis was impossible to ignore. Charlie waited until the volume had dropped back down to a background murmur before saying, “Hopefully not all the words.”