Charles settled in with his laptop on the only chair in their room to work on pack finances. Just because the fae were out terrorizing Scottsdale didn’t mean the rest of his work stopped.
Anna pulled out a paperback novel with a half-naked man holding an improbably long sword. He wondered if the sword was meant to be metaphoric. Then he wondered if he should be concerned that his mate was reading a book with a naked man on the cover. Anna stretched out on her stomach to read. Her feet were toward him. Her position gave him a nice view when he needed a break from studying numbers, and he quit worrying about naked men.
A couple of hours later they heard a car drive up and the front door opened. The chatter of happy voices told Charles that the younger children were home—and so was Max. He didn’t sound as happy as the kids. Charles was already logging off and shutting down his laptop when there was a quiet knock on their door.
Anna hopped off the bed and pulled the door open.
“Um, excuse me,” Max said. “But Granddad is down in the car and he’s too tired to get out. Grandma sent me up to get you.”
Charles brushed past him and leapt down the stairs. He was worried, though he knew that was ridiculous. Joseph was dying. He might die tonight, waiting for someone to help him out of the car. He might die a week from now in his bed.
Ridiculous or not, Charles rushed out to the car, where Maggie stood with the door open.
“Don’t you die on me, old man,” she said. “We have some fighting left to do.”
“And arguing, too,” Joseph said, the humor coming through the breathlessness just fine.
“I told you we should go after Mackie’s class,” she snapped.
“But we needed to see how good that stallion Conrad’s been bragging about really is. And then Lucy was riding in the amateur class on that filly she bought from us two years ago.”
“I know why you stayed,” Maggie said. “And it had nothing to do with Lucy’s filly and everything to do with stupid pride. You couldn’t admit you were feeling poorly.”
If she was yelling at him, Joseph was all right. As Charles bent down to lift his old friend, Maggie put her hand on his arm and leaned her head against his shoulder; he could all but feel her pain himself. Maggie was always sharpest when she hurt.
“Let’s get you inside,” Charles said.
“If I die after a day of watching beautiful horses, that would be okay,” Joseph said.
The spirits that seemed to be always hovering around Joseph, even if Charles was the only one who could see them, hit Charles so hard he could barely breathe. Their impact forced him to hesitate, stop walking altogether, and spread his legs a bit to keep his balance.
“You have a task yet,” he murmured when he could. He headed for the house. “Let me see if they’ll give you a little more strength to do what is necessary.”
“Tell those spirits that if they want him so badly, they might cure his cancer,” said Maggie tartly.
“It’s worth my life to tell the spirits anything,” Charles said. “You know better than to ask.”
He was starting to get an odd notion about those spirits. The spirits who petitioned him were not human, they were spirits of the earth and air. That didn’t mean there weren’t spirits of the dead. Usually the dead had a weight to them, a feeling of wrongness. The spirits surrounding Joseph burned with purpose, a heat that made Charles’s heart pound in his chest and called to Brother Wolf. There was nothing twisted or wrong in them.
Still. This incident he and Anna were unraveling involved so many dead innocents: children killed before they had a chance to decide who they were going to be. Unfinished.
The innocent dead … he’d only met one of those and if Mercy, who could see ghosts better than anyone he’d ever met, had not been with him, he’d never have connected that spirit to the child who’d been killed on that stretch of road a dozen years before. Mercy had seen the boy quite clearly, but Charles had only felt a hot sizzle on his skin, like a sunburn, only deeper.
Maybe this heat he felt from these spirits was like that child, only multiplied by all the dead who were owed balance because of the loss of their chance at life. Not rage, but vengeance.
Still, what service could an old man dying of cancer provide for dead children?
“Charles?” Anna asked hesitantly. “Are you going to keep Joseph out here all afternoon?”
He wondered how long he’d been standing still. Without replying he carried Joseph into the house.
“Anna?” he asked. “Could you come with me?” He thought again. “Maggie, it would be best if you stayed with Mackie and Michael.”
“Where do you want me?” asked Max. “I know how to hook up all of Granddad’s machinery.”
Max was like Samuel, Charles thought, a good man to have at your back. And he brought nothing with him that might change the nature of what Charles wanted to do.
Maggie … he didn’t quite trust what Maggie wanted. Maggie was never happy where she was, always looking elsewhere for happiness, for fulfillment. As much as she loved Joseph, and she did, she was not a restful person.
“Yes,” he told Max. “Come with us.”
Maggie looked at him with stricken eyes, and he felt as though he’d struck her.
“Strength and purpose are useful qualities,” he told her. “But for what I’m going to attempt, we need quiet souls.”
He didn’t know if it was enough, but he left Maggie and the kids in the living room and headed up to Joseph’s rooms.
He and Max helped Joseph into the bathroom to take care of the necessities of living, while Anna pulled back the bedding and generally made herself scarce so as not to embarrass Joseph. Charles hadn’t had to say anything to her. His mate was one of the most perceptive people he’d ever met.
They laid the old man, who had once been one of the toughest men Charles had ever met, on the bed, and he struggled to draw breath enough to talk. It made Charles’s heart hurt to see him this way.
“Shh,” said Charles.
He looked around the room for … something. “I don’t suppose there’s still a cello around here someplace, is there?” There used to be. Kage had played cello.
Max frowned. “Actually, I think there is. Kage’s old cello is still in his room here. Grandma makes him play it every Christmas. He starts sneaking practices in along about November. He says he doesn’t take it home because it just sits there and makes him feel guilty for not practicing an hour a day like Grandma used to make him do. Hold on.”
As soon as he was gone, Anna said, “You want me to play?”
“We need music,” he said, knowing it was true. “I think I need you to start it, and the cello is where your music lives.”
“They’re talking to you today,” she said. “The spirits. What are they saying?”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “Usually I know exactly what they want me to do. All I have to do is decide if I’m going to accommodate them or not. This time … all I can do is follow my instincts.”
“Good enough for me,” she said as Max came back into the room with a cello in a canvas carry bag.
Anna took the instrument, stripped away the wrappings, and gave it a cursory examination. “New strings,” she said as she tuned it. “Not a bad instrument.” She took the bow, rosined it briskly, and drew it across the strings.
Her eyebrows rose at the tone. “Better than I thought. Not as good as the one you got me, but it’s better than most student instruments. Do you have a song in mind?”
“Something … beautiful, but still upbeat.” He tried to put his feelings into words.
She nodded and then started playing.
“Lord of the Rings,” said Max, startled.
Charles closed his eyes, listening, and it was all right. He raised his voice in answer to the cello. No words, just music, until the words became necessary. By that time he was so lost in music, which he and Anna had morphed into their own song, that he didn’t even know what language he sang in, let alone what the meaning of the words were. They were just a shape in the music he and Anna made together.
The music built and the power burned down his arms into his hands, so he placed those hands on Joseph. When it was over and the heat was gone, Joseph slept comfortably. The heat, the fire in his veins, was gone. The room was silent, and he knew that his earlier theory was right.
For some reason, the dead, the children killed by the fae who’d attacked the Sani family, were very interested in Joseph. That was something he wasn’t going to share with Maggie and her very Navajo view of the dead. Maybe he should tell Joseph.
He covered the sleeping man while Anna put the cello back in its case. Max took it without a word and they all left, shutting the door quietly. Max started down the hallway farther into the depths of the house and stopped.
He turned back to them and met Charles’s eye.
“Anyone hearing that,” he said, “has to believe in magic.”
He left them. Anna took Charles down the hall in the other direction, toward the main part of the house.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he told her. “I find that somewhat unsettling.”
She took a deep breath, like an actress going onstage, pasted a big smile on her face, and said, “I find it somewhat reassuring that I’m not the only one who feels like I should be running around shouting, ‘Where’s the script? Where’s the script? If only I had a script I’d know what the freak I’m supposed to be doing.’”
While Charles had been making magic, Maggie, Mackie, and Michael had made sandwiches for everyone, since Ernestine had the day off. Maggie had also made a huge effort at cheer for the sake of the children.
“Where’s Chelsea?” Charles asked. Anna remembered that Chelsea was planning on coming home with the kids.
“Teri ate something that disagreed with her, so Mom borrowed an outfit and she’s going to take over Teri’s ride in the western pleasure futurity elimination round,” Max said.
“ánáli Hastiin said she should,” added Mackie.
“Eat,” said Maggie, setting a giant plate of sandwiches down at the table where she’d already set a stack of dishes.
“What are your plans for the rest of the afternoon?” asked Max. “If you aren’t busy, Hosteen suggested I take you for a ride around the ranch. He said to remind you that you are guests, not guards. He had two of his pack follow us from the show grounds. They’re patrolling the grounds.”
Anna looked at Charles.
“Fine with me,” he said.