The Wild Ways Read Free Page A

she’d accumulated required a station wagon.
    She used to store her extra instruments at her parent’s place, dropping by to grab what she needed when she needed it.
    She used to travel with her six string and a clean pair of underwear stuffed into a pocket on her gig bag. Some days, the underwear had been optional. The roads she used to take had no traffic, no GPS location . . .
    “No idiot driving like a gibbon with hemorrhoids!” she snarled, finally managing to get around the SUV driving 10K under the limit while hugging the center line.
    No Gale ever said driving like an old lady . Old ladies in the Gale family drove like they owned the roads. And the other drivers. And the local police department. And the laws of physics.
    Roaring up the ramp onto Deerfoot, Charlie felt the city tuck itself around her. It was nice. There was nothing wrong with nice.
    Glancing over at Nosehill Park, she searched the curve of the hill for the silhouette of a ten point stag. Even passing at 110K, she could feel the power radiating from both the ancient and current ritual sites, but there was no sign of David. It wasn’t like she’d expected to see him. He’d been spending more time on two feet lately and, for all she knew, he’d headed into town for a beer.
    With the change under control, he’d been talking about finding some consulting work. Everyone felt a job would help him regain the scattered pieces of his Humanity where everyone, for the most part, meant Allie, who still felt irrationally guilty about her part in her brother’s transformation into the family’s anchor to this part of the world. Charlie figured it had been a fair trade for saving said world, but David wasn’t her brother and Allie . . . Well, Charlie loved her, but Allie had a habit of holding on just a little too tight.
    Three weeks ago, just after the Midsummer ritual and before the band had left on this latest mini tour, Charlie’d spent some time with David in the park and he’d seemed fine to her. He’d been managing weekly dinners with Allie and Graham at the apartment over the Emporium, with Katie at Graham’s old condo, and with Roland and Rayne and Lucy at Jonathon Samuel Gale’s old house in Upper Mount Royal. Plus variable members of the family being a given in each case. Over the last year, three sets of Gales—couples of Charlie’s generation—had transferred from the Toronto area to equivalent jobs in Calgary, and bought houses next to each other on Macewan Glen Drive. It wouldn’t be like it had been back in Darsden East when Charlie was growing up, when the Gale girls had run the schools from kindergarten to college, but it was a start.
    Gale boys were too rare to be allowed out alone, but they couldn’t run a ritual without at least one in the third circle, so Cameron, now heading into his second year at the University of Alberta, had been sent west with six of the girls on his list, carefully picked by the aunties to be distant enough cousins to eventually cross to second circle with him. Charlie hadn’t bothered keeping track of the girl cousins who’d come and gone and returned and reconsidered. Cameron’s list, Roland’s list, David’s list—Gale girls flocked around Gale boys like bees around flowers.
    Fortunately, only three aunties were required for a first circle. Although nine short of a full circle, three were enough to keep things going, particularly when backed by Allie’s second circle why yes, I can do scary things level of power. After that whole saving the world thing, Auntie Bea and Roland’s grandmother, Auntie Carmen had gone back to Ontario only long enough to pack up the essentials and have an extended meeting behind closed doors with Auntie Jane. No one could tell Charlie what had been said, but no one doubted Auntie Bea and Auntie Carmen were Auntie Jane’s eyes on the ground.
    When they’d returned to Calgary, they’d been the first to buy property on Macewan Glen Drive as two of the twenty-five