She couldn’t do this lying down. Shoulders raised against the chill that crept in the moment she moved her body away from the charms on the chaise, she sat up, tucked her knees to the right of his, and said, “Jack, if you came back before you left, I’d still know that you’d been gone for four years. Ignoring the top forty emo way I’d feel every moment of every year here . . .” She touched her chest. “. . . while it was happening and I’d see them in every way they’d changed you. Not that you were four years older,” she added hurriedly before he could speak, “but the price you paid. I hate the thought of you suffering for any reason. Even to save the world.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “But it’s my decision.”

The urge to yell, “You’re seventeen!” was intense. Charlie sat on it. “I know. And if it comes to it, if it’s our last shot to save the world, I’ll take you back.” His leg jumped under her hand. His pulse matched hers. “But if it turns out that the Courts can’t stop the asteroid, what exactly can they teach you besides a totally useless three point layup?”

He stared at her hand for a moment, then met her gaze, his eyes gold. “They can teach me how to be a sorcerer, and I can figure the details out myself. My father was more powerful than any of them.”

The first few notes of what Charlie thought might be Leonard Cohen’s “To a Teacher” started up, but she shut it down before she could be certain. “How do you figure that?”

“He slept with my mother and survived.” And the subtext said, Duh.

“Valid point.” Forcing herself to break the contact, she lifted her hand off his knee, and leaned back. “Although, you don’t know that the entire Court is unable to match your father’s success . . .” If Jack was going to split hairs, she’d split a few back at him. “. . . only that none of them have tried.”

“And that proves they’re not all hair and attitude. My mother is very beautiful and very powerful and very dangerous and she’d eat any member of the Court who tried to approach her. They’d never discover if they were powerful enough to survive actual sex.”

What counted as inactual sex? Charlie wondered. “She didn’t eat your father.”

“Gales,” he said, his tone suggesting Charlie was being deliberately dim, “are charming.”

“True.”

“And they have a reputation to back up the charm.”

“We.”

“What?”

Charlie caught his gaze and held it. “We have a reputation to back up the charm.”

He snorted. “Your phone is ringing.”