Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(12)

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?”