He sobbed the last, got through.
Shaking, she whipped the curtain closed again.
“How did you do that? How did you do that?”
“I don’t know.” Queasy now, dizzy with it, Fallon slid down to sit on the path. “I don’t know. I feel sick.”
He yanked her canteen out of her saddlebag and, crouching, pushed it at her.
“Drink some water. Drink it and maybe put your head between your knees.”
She sipped, shut her eyes. “I see it in my head sometimes. When I sleep mostly. Like that, or other places. It’s always fighting and dying and burning. Sometimes I see people in cages, or on tables, strapped down on tables. And worse, even worse.”
She capped the canteen. “I’m okay now. I don’t know how I did that. I don’t know enough.”
He helped her to her feet, put the canteen away for her. “Where was that place?”
“I’m not sure. I think it was Washington, D.C., but I don’t even know why I think that. I don’t know enough. It’s why I have to go. I have to learn more, I have to, and I’m afraid. I’m so scared. They want to kill me, they tried to kill me and Mom. They killed my birth father. They’ll find me sooner or later. They could come here and find me. If anything happened to Mom and Dad, to you and Travis and Ethan …”
She turned to her horse, pressed her face to Grace’s neck.
“I have to go and learn how to stop them or it won’t ever stop.”
Awkwardly, Colin patted her back. “I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t.”
“Just try to stop me.” The bullheaded bravery, the sincerity and innocence of it, sprang back. “You think because I can’t do stupid tricks and all that crap I can’t fight? I’m going with you, you jerk.”
It touched her, she didn’t know if she could ever tell him how much, that at her lowest point, he stood up for her. “It’s not because of magick.” And, even at so young an age, she understood basic tactics. “It’s not because you wouldn’t fight.”
She wiped at tears, turned, saw he’d shed tears of his own.
“You have to stay because you have to be president.”
“What the fuck?” Even with his newfound love of swearing, Colin reserved the Big F for his most important cursing.
“It’s like this.” Steadier, she began to walk again. “Mom and Dad are like the king and queen, right? They rule. But they don’t know everything that goes on. They’ll know about the stream today unless you guys swore Ethan to secrecy. If he’s not sworn, he’ll blab.”
“Damn it.”
“So they’ll know, but that’s okay. Nobody’s mad about it. But they don’t know everything, and the oldest—that’s going to be you—has to be in charge, too. You have to be president and look out for Travis and Ethan, and Mom and Dad, too. I need to know everybody’s going to be okay. Please. It’s a hard job. You have to make sure everybody’s okay, everybody does their chores and lessons. And you can’t be too bossy about it or it doesn’t work.”
He hip-bumped her as they walked. “You’re bossy.”
“I could be bossier. Lots. Please, Colin.”
They stopped at the rise where so long before their mother had first looked down at the farm, first felt hope again.
“I can be president,” he mumbled. “I already told you I could.”
“Okay.”
She draped an arm over his shoulders, and for a few moments they looked down at home.
Ethan fed the dogs, the old and the young. Travis walked along a row in the garden, filling a basket with green beans. Their father, head shielded by a cap, walked back from a near field with one of the horses, and their mother straightened from her work in the herb bed to wave at him.
She’d take this picture with her, Fallon thought. This and others, wherever she had to go. Whatever she had to do.
Day after day, night after night, Lana watched her children with a kind of wonder. Before the Doom, she’d never given more than a passing thought to having children—someday. She’d enjoyed the life she’d lived, the urban glint of it, with a man she’d loved and admired.
She’d dabbled in magicks mostly for the fun, and her powers had been barely whispers in any case. Or so she’d believed.
Her work satisfied her, so ambitions for more had been, like children, a passing thought for someday.
She’d lived with a writer whose books had found a solid niche. Max had taken the Craft more seriously than she had, and his powers had been more overt—but still, in those days a pale shadow of what would come.
Their love had still held the bright shine of the new and exciting, and the future—if she looked beyond a day or two—had seemed limitless.
Then the world ended. Everything she’d taken for granted, gone in smoke and blood and the screams of circling crows. With the life that sparked inside her that night in January, another world began.
In those months between that winter night and the bold summer day she’d first seen the farm, she’d changed into someone the contented urban woman wouldn’t have recognized. Changed, she knew, not just with the child growing inside her, not just with the rise of her own powers, but fundamentally.
Just as the hungry, desperate, grieving woman Simon found raiding his henhouse for an egg had changed into the woman who lay sleepless in her husband’s arms on a cool autumn night listening to the incessant hooting of an owl.
This woman had learned to love not only for days and weeks and months, but for years. She had planted fields, hunted game, embraced her power. She’d given birth to four children in the bed she shared with the man who’d helped her bring them into the world.
Their world.
But she knew the world beyond this farm, this haven. She’d lived in it, fought in it, survived it. Escaped from it.
And now, after all the loss, the gains, the grief and the joy, she faced sending her firstborn into that blood and smoke.
Simon stroked her back. “We can say no.”
She nuzzled a little closer. “Reading my mind now?”
“It’s not hard when we’re on the same page. She’s just a kid, Lana. Yeah, it was important for us to be straight and honest with her from the jump, not to wait and just spring all this on her, but she’s still just a kid. We sit her down, make sure she knows we’ve got her back on this. She doesn’t have to go.”
“We never lied to her, or kept secrets. And still, I think she’d have known even if we had. It’s in her, Simon. I felt it when I carried her. I feel it now.”
“Remember that time, her first spring? We were working in the garden. We had her napping in the shade under the old apple tree with Harper and Lee. We looked over when we heard her laughing and there must’ve been a couple hundred butterflies and—”
“Faeries, those little lights.” At the pretty memory, Lana could smile. “All dancing around her. She called them.”
“She couldn’t even walk yet. I know she’s not a baby anymore, but, Jesus, she’s only twelve years old.”
Thirteen, Lana thought. In only days now.
Absently she twisted the chain that held the medal of Michael the Archangel, which he wore around his neck. “She’s decided to go.”
“You don’t know that.”
She only spread her hand over his heart.
Under her palm, Simon’s heart tore a little. He lifted his hand to take hers.
They’d promised each other to stand united when the day came, and, whatever choice she made, to stand with Fallon.
“I guess that explains why she hasn’t been fighting with the boys. Has she talked to you about it?”
“No, not with words. I know she was born for what’s about to begin. I know it with all I am. And I hate it.” She turned her face into his throat. “She’s our baby, Simon. I hate it.”
“We can find a way to stop it, stop her.”
Lana shook her head, burrowed deeper. “It’s beyond us, Simon. It always has been. Even if we could, what happens when the boys grow up, when they need a life beyond this farm? Do we keep them here forever, like treasures caught in amber? We’ve been able to give them the life we have, to keep them safe, because of Fallon. Because we were given this time.”