“Ice cream!” Elijah threw back his head and laughed. “Tawbewwy!”
“Yes, strawberry. We’ll work on those r’s later. Come on, Marla, let’s get our little man home. It’s good to see you Fallon, Will.”
They settled Elijah in a carrier seat on a bike. Marla got on it, Anna on another. With a wave they rode off, with Elijah’s wings still fluttering.
“They’re good people,” Will commented. “Taking in three damaged kids and making a family. Three magickal kids, as it turns out. You could see he was a faerie?”
“His light’s quiet and shy. And sweet,” she added. “Very sweet.”
“His mother was one of the rescues from the anti-magick cult. Indoctrinated and brainwashed to believe magick was evil. She’d have taught him that, tried to repress what he was.”
“I remember. Petra pretended to come from the same cult, and lived with them here. God knows what she tried to teach him. They are good people, his mothers now. If they’d reacted differently—too strongly, not strongly enough—he might have tried to hide his nature again instead of embracing it.”
“Strawberry ice cream never hurts. You’ve got something on your mind,” he added.
“I came into town to talk to you.”
“Okay. We can head up to the station, or just head up to the house. I was just coming from the house, going to check in with Chuck. Trying to find my wife.”
“Oh, she’s at our place. Having a … meeting with Mom and Fred, Katie. Could we go ahead into Chuck’s den? He could add to this.”
“Sure.”
She turned to Laoch, stroked him. He rose up on his wings, soared off.
“Never gets old.” Shading his eyes with the flat of his hand, Will watched Laoch fly. “Where’s he going?”
“Where he likes. He’ll come when I need him.” As would her wolf, her owl. “Can you tell me if the rescues are acclimating? That’s the wrong word,” she realized. “That sounds cult-like, doesn’t it?”
“Not when I know what you mean. The medicals have set up therapy—group and individual. Physically some of them still need some time to heal. Emotionally’s going to take longer for a lot of them. You know Marlene, right?”
“Town planner.”
“Yeah. She’s playing den mother in one of the group houses. Plus, one of the rescues was a therapist before the Doom. He’s a little shaky yet himself, but it seems like a good idea to have one of their own working with them.”
“It does.” Resilience, she thought, was a light of its own. “How many have left New Hope?”
“Three so far.”
“A smaller number than I figured. And the baby, his mother?”
“Both doing okay, according to Jonah. I saw him earlier.”
They walked around the back of the house where Rachel and Jonah lived with their boys, and to Chuck’s basement entrance.
She smelled freshly mown grass, sun-soaked herbs before they went inside and down.
There she smelled salt, something sugary.
Chuck sat in front of monitors and keyboards and odd electronic boxes, switches, and joysticks.
Fallon could speak countless languages, had within her every spell ever written, but the world of computers posed a thorny mystery for her.
She’d gained a little skill—with Chuck’s help—since coming to New Hope, but for her entire life before they’d left the farm for New Hope, she’d been IT-free.
“Who enters the master’s den?” Chuck slurped at the something sugary in his glass. “Hi, guys.”
“No minions today?” Will asked, as Chuck had a variety of IT apprentices.
“Class dismissed. It’s summer, dude. And my top guys and gals are working on their own with some of the goodies you brought me back from the dungeons. You fried a bunch of it.”
“We were a little fixed on life and death,” Fallon reminded him.
“Yeah, yeah. Well, components are people, too. Anyway, I got Hester seeing if she can revive some of it with the woo-woo.” He reached a hand into a bowl of chips. “Want? Got more. Fixed this old PlayStation out at Fred’s yesterday and scored the chips of potato.”
“I’ll pass on the chips,” Will told him, “but I could use something cold if you got it.”
“Brew?”
“I’m still on duty.”
“Lemonade.”
“Sold.”
Will went over to Chuck’s cold box, took out the jug. “What are you monitoring?”
“I’ve got a PW base in Utah—that’s a new one. They’re just setting up.”
“Branching out,” Will added.
“What I’m getting is that our favorite lunatic, Jeremiah White, sent about twenty from Michigan, had them meet up with a group from Kansas, then pull together with some new recruits in Utah to set this up. They lost about fifteen percent getting there. But they rounded up most