The Wild Ways Read Online Free Page B

referring to Dragon Lords meant no need to marinate. He knew a legitimate threat when he heard one.
    “So if the attacks have stopped, what’s the problem?”
    “He’s working twelve hours a week at the Western Star this summer,” Graham told her.
    “At your skeezy tabloid?” That was new. She leaned away from Graham’s swing. “Why?”
    “Why?” Allie rolled her eyes. “Because school’s out and he needs to do things like a normal boy.”
    If anyone asked, they were home schooling Jack which had the added benefit of being the truth, even if lessons tended toward it’s a bus, you can’t fight it rather than algebra. Although Roland had also taught him some algebra. Dragons were surprisingly good at math.
    “Yeah, but he’s not a normal boy.” Charlie flipped up a finger. “Dragon Prince.” And another. “Sorcerer.” And a third. “Gale. Strike three.” She frowned at the sheen of turquoise on her nails, the same shade as her hair. “Oh, that’s definitely too precious. What the hell was I thinking?” The buzz crawled across her forehead.
    “Why is your eyebrow twitching?”
    “It’s a thing. Back to Jack.”
    “When it comes right down to it,” Allie sighed, “this world isn’t shiny and new anymore. No one’s threatening to eat him, and he’s bored.”
    “So send him to the farm; Auntie Jane’ll threaten to eat him.”
    Auntie Jane made Auntie Gwen look reasonable. Auntie Jane made Simon Cowell look reasonable.
    “Only as a last resort.” Allie’s lip curled. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life listening to the aunties go on about how I failed to deal with him.”
    When Jack broke through from the UnderRealm looking for his father—Stanley Kalynchuk aka Jonathon Samuel Gale—the aunties had been forced by circumstances to explain that sorcerers were Gale boys gone bad. Jack was both a Gale boy and—thanks to the magical means of his conception—a sorcerer, but Allie had argued that, as a Gale, until he turned fifteen he was too young to be judged. The aunties had agreed, and Allie and Graham had started their marriage as the de facto parents of a teenage boy with a Dragon Prince’s power and undetermined sorcerous abilities, who not only smoked in bed, but occasionally set fire to his pillow.
    The first few months had been fun. Allie had overreacted, Charlie had underreacted, and Graham had hit the roof about the marshmallow roasting over the coals of an empty industrial building by the airport. Somehow or other, mostly because Jack absorbed new information like a sponge, they’d muddled through.
    Charlie swallowed the last mouthful of pie and pushed her plate away. “So send him off to eat a bison and sleep for week while he digests. Works while the Stampede’s on.”
    Horses and cattle at the Saddledome, barely two kilometers away from the Emporium, were more temptation than anyone expected Jack to resist.
    “Unfortunately his cave was a little to close to Drumheller.” Graham stacked his empty plate on hers. “Couple of dinosaur guys from the Tyrrell found his scat and nearly had kittens. I had to cover the story in the Star to discredit it. I’m not saying it isn’t a skeezy tabloid,” he added when Charlie snickered. “I’m just saying I don’t need anyone else calling it that.”
    “Sensationalist rag?”
    “That’s better.”
    “He’s been so moody lately,” Allie explained. “I miss how he was in the beginning. You know, minus the whole burning things down and using sorcery to jump the line at the Apple Store.”
    “He’s fourteen. That’s the definition of moody.” Charlie at fourteen had a brief, intense flirtation with Three Days of Grace. “And now that I think of it, isn’t fourteen a little young for a job?”
    “He can’t exactly join a soccer team, can he?”
    Stronger. Faster. Liable to eat the opposing strikers. It was like raising Clark Kent had Clark Kent been likely to make a meal of Lana Lang.
    In spite of the imagery,