to placate Mom. I know you’ve already grilled Chuck on where to find some action next. Maine, right? Vivienne’s troops and ours about to face off on the coast.”
“I’m needed there. I’m not here.”
He heard Eddie’s harmonica join in with someone’s guitar riff. And Rainbow, now a leggy teenager, danced in the air with some faerie friends.
Spring, he thought. Plenty of those signs of spring around him with the greening trees, the young crops, the burst of flowers, the balm of the air as it neared May Day.
Spring bloomed everywhere in New Hope. He wondered if it bloomed wherever Fallon was.
He shoved that thought away, turned his head to look at Tonia. “Anyway, seems to me you were into it with me when we took on those combined forces in Georgia.”
“I was needed. There’s also plenty of need here. We’re barely keeping up with training. And we’re losing Colin again. He’s taken Pennsylvania and going back to Arlington tomorrow. It’s spring, and that takes Eddie and some of the other serious farmers off rotation for scouting. They broke ground on the clinic expansion.”
“After Maine, I’ll be back.”
“That’s what you said after New Mexico.”
“And I came back.” Annoyance bit through the words. “We’re driving them down, Tonia. But the way they’re combining forces, that’s got to be a concern. We’re seeing more and more DUs fighting alongside PWs. More Raiders grouping together.”
“I can’t argue with that. There’s not even a pretext with the PWs now. It’s not magicks they want to destroy. It’s us. Did Chuck tell you about their latest dispatches, what they’re sending out?”
“Yeah. How the Uncannys who fight with them have been purified and redeemed or whatever. Using their powers for the holy war, blah blah. White’s a lunatic, and he’s an idiot if he actually believes the DUs won’t wipe him and the rest of the PWs out the minute they’re not useful.”
“A lunatic, an idiot, but he’s still managed to keep his cult going for more than two decades.”
“Fear and hate can work.” He drank more beer, brooded over the colored lights strung around the garden.
“I know you miss her. We all miss her.”
“It’s not about—” The hell it wasn’t, he admitted. “She said a couple weeks. It’s been nearly five. I shouldn’t have let her go alone.”
“Let, my ass. You don’t let her any more than I let you go to fricking Maine. You’re worried, I get it. Jesus, Duncan, so am I. So’s everyone. She’s been the prime target since before she was born.”
“Then stop making excuses.”
“Not excuses. Reasons. I think living with being the prime target, with being The freaking One takes a toll. Like losing your oldest friend five feet away from where you’re standing takes a toll. Like training recruits knowing when they’re ready to fight not all of them will come back takes a toll.”
“Sounds like somebody else needs some downtime.”
Tonia heaved out a breath. “Maybe.”
A fiddle joined the guitar, the harmonica. A few people started to sing a song he’d heard a few times about life on the farm.
Maybe Fallon had gone back to the farm. He could go, look. The hell with that, he decided, and chugged beer. He wasn’t a dog who’d belly crawl back to the boot that kicked him.
She hadn’t just left, she’d blocked him so he couldn’t even touch her mind, not even in dreams.
The hell with it.
“How about you come with me to Maine,” he suggested, “then when we drive those bastards into the sea, I’ll come back with you. I’ll take some of the recruits off your hands.”
“I could use the help, Duncan, no lie.”
Hannah came over, plopped down on the grass beside them. “Here you are. I’ve been going over clinic plans with Rachel and Mom, and I am seriously done. Where’s my beer?”
Duncan handed her what was left of his. She sighed at the couple of swallows. “It’ll do. Mom says she’s making French toast for breakfast—with pig bacon.”
While Hannah couldn’t read minds, she knew her siblings. “Oh, come on. You just got back.” She swallowed the last of the beer, poked the bottle at Tonia. “You, too?”
“We made a pact. I go shoot a few arrows with Duncan, and he comes back to take some of the training hours off my plate.”
Hannah let out a sigh. “A deal’s a deal. It’s fairly quiet at the clinic. Need a doctor in Maine?”
“You’re volunteering to take some of the heat off us,” Tonia decided.