Free The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff Page A

prefer not to waste his talents dealing with the sort of thing that every other woman in the world manages on her own.
    The purse told the world that she wasn’t helpless. She was aware of her privilege. She was of the people.
    It was a killer shtick.
    The car slid into VIP parking under the studio.
    Showtime.

     
    Earbuds in, music loud enough to rattle the scales on his tail—if he had a tail right now which he didn’t because it wouldn’t fit in this stupid room and yeah, okay, it didn’t suck that he could let down his guard because he didn’t have to worry about his uncles sneaking up on him—Jack dragged another one of Graham’s old comics out from under the bed and propped it up against his knees. Earlier, he’d tried to make issue seven, Crisis on Infinite Earths hover in the air above his eyes and two hours later still wasn’t able to get it down off the ceiling. That was the stupid sort of thing that happened when he actually tried to do sorcery instead of just letting it happen. If Graham saw what had happened to one of his precious comics, he’d be grounded for a month. He wouldn’t have even tried, but he wanted his hands free to deal with a bag of frozen cookies with his name on it.
    After the first time he tried claiming food the way he would have back home, Allie’d put his name on everything he was allowed to eat.
    And bought a new freezer.
    Those things really stank when they melted.
    “Find out who I am here,” he muttered, around a mouthful of gingersnap. “I don’t even know what that means.”
    He was a dragon. But no one outside the family was supposed to know that. He was sorcerer, but even some people inside the family weren’t supposed to know that. He was a Gale and that was all about family who weren’t trying to eat him.
    That was cool.
    Maybe Charlie’d meant he should work on being more of a Gale.

     
    Turned out that Mark’s fiddle player wasn’t missing, just very late, arriving as the band before them took their bows.
    “Look, it was an emergency,” he snapped before Mark could actually articulate all the jumping around and hand waving he was doing. “Tanis, my girlfriend, couldn’t find a family heirloom and she’s a little hysterical. I left when her sisters showed up and I’m here, so calm down. Hey.” He waved the hand not holding his instrument. “You must be Charlie. Bomen Deol. You might as well call me Bo, I can’t get Mark to stop, and before you tell me I don’t look like a fiddle player, I’m ethnically Indian. The Romany came out of India, and some of the best fiddle players in the world are Roma, QED.”
    Charlie grinned. “You get asked that a lot?”
    “You’d be surprised.” He took a deep breath, shook out his shoulders on the exhale, and nodded toward the now empty stage. “Okay. I’m calm. Let’s do this.”
    Tim Waters, the keyboard player and the underreaction to Mark’s overreaction since they’d met playing soccer in university, led the way out onto the polished maple half circle, accordion slung around broad shoulders. Shelly Simpson followed, wrestling her upright bass into position before the stage got any more crowded, muscles moving smoothly under the golden freckles covering her bare arms. “I use the electric a lot of the time,” she’d told Charlie earlier, “but this place seemed to cry out for the all-natural sound.” A few people in the audience cheered when Bo took his place—this was a crowd that appreciated fiddlers.
    To keep things moving, all the bands used the Center’s drums and keyboards. Mark had a set of sticks in his hands and two more plus a pennywhistle tucked in behind the waistband of his kilt.
    “So,” Charlie said as they stepped out of the shadows, “I forgot to ask; this band got a name?”
    “ Grinneal! Scot’s Gaelic for bottom of the sea.” Mark grinned and saluted her with the sticks. “It’s sink or swim time, Chuck!”

THREE
     
    T HE PELTS SMELLED like fish. Paul hadn’t