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“Go.” Fallon stood. “You go. We’ll finish making dinner. Go be with Joe.”
Lana didn’t hesitate, she didn’t rush for her coat. She flashed.
She found Eddie, Fred, all the kids sitting on the floor of the living room in the farmhouse. Joe’s head rested in Eddie’s lap. Ethan, her strong, sweet boy, knelt, stroking a hand over Joe as the dog’s breath labored in and out.
She knelt beside him, laid a hand on the old, faithful dog. And knew her son was right. It was time. She met Eddie’s eyes, and her heart broke at the hope in them.
“He won’t eat. Maybe you could . . .”
“He’s so tired, and everything aches.” Ethan spoke gently, stroking, stroking. “He won’t leave you until you say it’s okay. He’ll fight not to rest because the love’s so strong. He still dreams. He dreams of chasing balls and sticks, and going for long walks, playing with you, with kids.”
With hands gentle, tireless, Ethan comforted the dog, read Joe’s heart. “Jem and Scout and Hobo run and play, but he can only watch. He wants to run again, play again, but he won’t unless you tell him it’s okay. He misses Lupa, and knows Lupa’s waiting for him, waiting to wrestle with him and run with him. But you need to tell him he can go.”
“Do you believe that?” Eddie swiped at the tears on his cheeks. “That he’ll go somewhere he can run and chase balls, play with Lupa. Do you really believe that?”
“I know that. Our Harper and Lee are there now. They want to meet him.”
“Can he have a red ball?” Willow buried her curly red head against her mother’s shoulder. “Can he please have a red ball?”
“Of course he can.” Weeping, Fred pressed a kiss to Willow’s hair. She took Eddie’s hand, kissed it.
“Okay. Okay. Y’all say good-bye now.” Eddie took a breath as Joe looked up at him with eyes full of love and trust. “You saved my life. I guess we saved each other. We’ve sure had some adventures, haven’t we, boy? You go ahead now. You take a rest, and let it all go. Then you find Lupa, and meet Harper and Lee, and all the rest. You chase yourself some squirrels.”
Joe licked Eddie’s hand and on a sigh, he went to sleep.
Later, as she walked back home in a borrowed coat, she put an arm around Ethan’s shoulders. “He couldn’t have done it, couldn’t have let Joe go, without you, Ethan. I’m not sure I could have, either.”
“I didn’t want to let him go, but he needed to.” He glanced back. “They’re lighting candles in the windows to help him find his way.”
“We’ll light them, too. Look.” She gestured ahead. “We already have.”
“He’ll come back, you know. Find his way back after a while. Back to Eddie. People do, some animals do, when they love enough.”
He looked at her. It gave Lana a jolt to realize her baby boy now stood eye to eye with her. “It’s why they can’t beat us. I don’t know why they want to kill us, destroy everything that’s good. I can feel what they feel, but I can’t understand it. I know they can hurt us, take from us, but they can’t beat us because we can love a good dog enough to let him go even when it hurts. They can burn the land, but we’ll plant it. They can burn it again, but we’ll plant it again. They can’t stop us. They can’t win.”
“Oh, Ethan.” She drew him closer as they walked toward the lights in the windows. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear tonight.”
“I need you to let me go with Fallon.”
“Not what I needed to hear.”
“They need support staff to deal with the horses, the hunting and fighting dogs. I can fight, but I’d be more useful freeing up a better soldier. You— It’s time, Mom, for you to let me go.”
“You’ve already talked to your father.”
“Now I’m talking to you. All of you go, and I stay.”
“What you do here is—”
“Important, sure. But I’m not a kid anymore, and I have abilities that can and will help during a fight. I need to use them. You need to let me.”
“The gods ask for so damn much.” She looked up at the stars. “Talk to Fallon. I won’t stand in your way. Give me this. We have dinner without any talk of war. We’ll tell Joe stories. After, we’ll talk about this, and whatever your sister needs to tell us.”
“Is she going to tell us she and Duncan got naked?”
“I— Ethan!” His grin brought back her baby boy. “How do you know about that?”
“A little bird told me.”
She had to laugh. “You’re one of the few who can say that and literally mean it. Just keep that to yourself.” She paused at the door. “I’m serious.”
“Dad doesn’t know.”
“Just Joe stories,” she repeated, and opened the door.
After the meal, with the dishes cleared and all the stories dulling the sharpest edge of grief, Lana poured wine for herself and Fallon. Travis, back from Arlington, got a beer for himself and Simon.
Ethan looked at the tea in his cup.
“Why can’t I have a beer? Fallon had a beer when she was my age.”
“A bit older,” Lana corrected.
“And she’d just decked a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man,” Simon recalled. “No magickal assistance. You do that, I’ll personally serve you your first beer. Meanwhile . . .”
“Meanwhile,” Fallon repeated. “There are some things I want to go over here before the formal meeting. I want to hear about the status of the wounded, and the rescues, but before that, I need to talk to you about the POWs.”
“We’ve debriefed about sixty so far,” Simon told her. “Some hard-asses in there. And some who were conscripted, if that’s what we’re calling being rounded up and forced into service. You’ve got some barely older than Ethan, taken from their families, put into training camps where they’re hammered every day about the Uncanny threat. And most of them, nearly all, have family, magickal family members.”
“They turn them, or try to, against us.” Eyes hard, Travis tipped back his beer. “To them we’re the same as the DUs. Shit, plenty of them are waiting for us to torture them the way they do us, or just call down a lightning strike and kill them on the spot.”
“They’re indoctrinated, brainwashed. We know this.” Fallon lifted a hand. “We can, and have, successfully turned some back. It’s vital we continue trying. But for those committed to wiping us out, we need another solution. For some, like Hargrove, that’s life in prison. We can’t sentence potentially thousands more to the same. There can be a choice, for us, for them.”
“Such as?” Simon asked.
She told them about the islands, about the basic outline, one she and Duncan had refined.
“It may be we use one for the harder of the hard-asses, and the other for those we think, or hope, might build another kind of life.”
“It’s pretty radical,” Travis began, but Simon shook his head.
“Not without precedent. The English sent people here—what was the Colonies—and to Australia.”
“Without a choice, and as indentured servants. We’ll give them a choice,” Fallon added. “And they’ll have a kind of freedom. Maybe it’s not a perfect choice. Prison or relocation. We’d need a council of some sort to determine who would be eligible for the choice. And to determine who would be given the choice to come back, and when. We’d need to calculate how much in the way of supplies, equipment, and resources to send with them. It’s going to be complicated, and there will be more than one who argues against giving any enemy combatant a choice.”
“But it’s the right thing.” Though she’d said nothing throughout, Lana had listened, weighed, searched her own mind and heart. “On the way here, the first time, I saw those, with powers and without, who could never be redeemed. Even before the Doom, it was the same. But I saw people who were afraid or des
perate and did things out of fear and desperation they’d never have done otherwise. I’ve used my power to harm, to kill, and will again. That’s a choice we all live with because what we fight against demands it. But we’re not what we fight against, and when there is a choice, we choose what’s right. This is right.”
“Couldn’t have said it better.” Simon toasted her with his beer. “Let’s work it out so when we run up against those arguments, we’ve got the answers. Do you want Duncan in on this?”
At Ethan’s snicker, Fallon sent him a threatening glare. Simon simply looked puzzled. “What?”
“It’s nothing.” With a smile, Lana gave Travis a magickal, motherly buzz. “I’m sure Katie’s happy to have Duncan around. Let’s leave that for tomorrow. So where are these islands, exactly?”
“I’ve got maps.” Rising, Fallon went for her bag, then spread the maps on the table.
By the time she went downstairs, she felt they had more of those answers, and with unified family support a strong force against any dissenters.
When she opened the door to her room, Duncan rose from the chair, set his sketch pad aside. “Took you long enough.”
“I didn’t know you were here. We were working out more details on the islands. You should’ve come up—in. Oh well.”
“It’s a little weird with your family upstairs, and then there’s the idea that if your dad catches me in here, he’ll kick my ass. But.”
“But.” She sealed the door, and went to him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As the commanders arrived, Fallon wondered how long the celebratory air would hold after she laid out the proposed agenda.
She greeted Mick and, amused, tugged on the side braid he’d dyed a bright blue.
“It’s an elf thing,” he told her.
“If you say so.”
“A lot of the shifters are going for tats of their spirit animals. It’s a way of—”
“Embracing heritage,” Fallon finished. She looked around at the mix of people. “And a statement. Magickals won’t hide who and what they are. I like it.”
Duncan moved to her, laid a hand on her shoulder in a way that had Mick’s grin fading. “Mick. Like the blue. Mallick’s here.”
