Chaos calling, p.1
Chaos Calling, page 1
Chaos Calling
Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle
E. M. Williams
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue: The Queen
I. Toronto
1. Anna — Raccoons
2. Anna — Ambush
3. Jason — Night Shift
4. Dave — Strings
Interlude: Taste
5. Anna — Calling
6. Jason — Spotlight
7. Anna — SkyDome
8. Dave — Purpose
9. Anna — Three to One
II. Questions
10. Malcolm — Epicentre
11. Anna — Muffins
12. Dave — Sister
13. Jason — Kalos
14. Anna — Promise
15. Dave — Homecoming
Interlude: Frenzy
III. Queen’s Park
16. Malcolm — Partner
17. Jason — Departure
18. Anna — Discovery
19. Malcolm — Precinct
20. Dave — Campus
21. Anna — Rodeo
22. Jason — Flight
23. Dave — Battleground
24. Jason — Pearson
25. Anna — Tarkan
Interlude: Fury
IV. Family
26. Dave — Reunion
27. Jason — The Doctors Lin
28. Leona — One More
29. Dave — The Chief
30. Anna — Twins
31. Dave — Auntie
32. Jason — Revelations
Epilogue: Clutch
END OF BOOK I
Appendix
Acknowledgements
Character Index
Pronunciation Guide and Glossary
Love This Book?
About E. M. Williams
Copyright © 2022 by E. M. Williams
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All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without express written permission of the publisher.
To request authorization or to make other queries, please contact E. M. Williams and Circle Star Publishing at inquiries@emwilliams.ca.
For more information, visit emwilliams.ca.
Stock photo by Brxxto via Unsplash
Cover design by Wesley Lyn
Created with Vellum
for A, J, and J,
with all my love
Author’s Note
Chaos Calling is a fictional work drawn from my imagination, and is set in twenty-first-century Toronto. Early on, I decided that my worldbuilding would include a diverse cast that reflects the city’s complexity.
This novel includes both Chinese Canadian and Anishinaabe characters, among many others. I have not attempted to depict their respective spiritual beliefs, teachings, or cultural practices from an insider’s perspective—there are many talented writers from both communities undertaking that important work.
It’s also important that you know that Miinikaa First Nation is a fictitious place. In the world of the novel, however, its placement north of Sudbury would situate it within the very real Robinson Huron Treaty, which was signed in 1850 between the Government of Canada and First Nations people and includes modern-day Sudbury and a great deal of Ontario. There are thirty-nine First Nations that collectively make up the Anishinabek Nation in Canada. Visit www.anishinabek.ca for more information.
I also wish to note that Chinese Canadians, as one of Canada’s largest cultural groups, continue to make valuable contributions to this country on innumerable fronts. As a starting point, readers eager to learn more could visit the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver (https://www.chinesecanadianmuseum.ca/) or the Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto (https://www.cccgt.org/), either in person or online.
For more context concerning my creative process, please see the acknowledgements section, located in this book’s appendix. Additional resources are available on my website: emwilliams.ca.
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Content advisory: This novel includes significant monster violence. It touches on mental health (including depression, anxiety, grief, sudden loss, and suicide), elder care, breast cancer, police and military violence (particularly against Indigenous people), and Canada’s living legacy as a colonial state, including the Sixties Scoop and residential schools, and the ongoing impact of both of these government policies on Indigenous people.
Prologue: The Queen
Stars wheel above our nest as the veil between worlds thins. We fix our gaze upon it, waiting for the merest flicker of a vulnerability.
Soon, whisper our departed mother-sisters from their sacred places within the nest memory. Soon, your turn comes.
The swarm pushes against our scales. We resettle our coils, forcing them to make space. They are restless to hunt. Each day, sea ice gathers on the horizon, and the greyfish schools retreat farther beneath it. Our hunters roam in ever-widening arcs to catch the stragglers. Without fresh skal to strengthen their attacks so that they might puncture the ice, the nest will starve.
But our skal, like our nest’s ascendancy, has dwindled across the generations. Our best hope is to pierce the waning veil and hunt for more precious skal in the worlds beyond.
Soon, our mother-sisters whisper. We draw their long-dead presences closer, some strong, some now faint with age. The moons are close. The veil thins. And this time, its glimmer will pulse above your nest.
The swarm squirms against us, twitching in anticipation as we sift through the nest memories of previous hunts. Which shore shall we find? For there are as many worlds as there are stars, and not all prey carries skal of equal might.
At last, the veil thins to the barest sliver. We tap the skal reservoir within our scales until we pulse with its power. The veil echoes this rhythm, beating in time to us. The swarm bunches closer, augmenting our will as our skal blasts into the sky. The veil quivers a final time and yields.
Rise, we command.
Braying with excitement, the scouts launch themselves into the air to cluster at the edges of the torn veil. For all our might, we have made the tiniest of holes, so narrow that only four of our smallest scouts may squirm through. Our skal rushes ahead of them, blazing a tunnel through the veil’s twisting folds until its terminus in the alien world is secure, anchored by our power.
At the edges of our awareness, we perceive their orange bodies as they slither out beneath strange stars. Their scales flex as they skim over the waters of this new world. Lights burn on the far shore in configurations unlike anything contained in the memories of our mother-sisters. But the night air is thick with the intoxicating scent of alien skal.
Pleasure spreads across our scales as they disappear through the dark.
Part One
Toronto
Chapter 1
Anna — Raccoons
Toronto, ON: Sunday, August 17
“I already told you, Anna. I don’t want the china or any of Mom’s other stuff. Stop making this complicated.”
Anna Lin counts to ten as she paces her galley kitchen, the cordless handset pressed tightly against her ear. Keys jingle on Jason’s end of the line. It’s 9:45 p.m. in Toronto, which means it’s 6:45 p.m. in Vancouver. In fifteen minutes, her twin brother’s night shift starts at St. Paul’s Hospital. Too bad. For once, he can make time.
“Before she died, I would have taken you at your word,” Anna says, struggling to stay composed as remembered shame bakes her cheeks. “Remember the hospital? Literally the first thing you did was yell at me for throwing out that half-frayed lap quilt she used all the time.”
After the funeral parlour’s staff had removed her mother’s body, packing up Chun-Mei’s room had kept Anna’s hands busy while she waited for Jason. Until her brother had appeared in the corridor of the palliative ward, flustered from his rush from the airport, Anna hadn’t realized how much she’d clung to the idea of his arrival, to them being a team again. Their shouting match had erupted right in front of the nursing station.
“I’m almost finished with the house. I’ve only got her study left.” She takes a steadying breath. “Forgive me for wanting to be sure.”
Through the phone, a door squeaks and closes. I should have done this by email, she thinks. Too late now. The microphone is strong; she clearly hears the tumble of a lock and the sound of his footsteps moving down the hallway of his condo. “Still holding onto that, huh?” he mutters at last. “I said I was sorry.”
“That’s not why I called.” Anna stops pacing and tucks the phone between her shoulder and ear, freeing her hands to grab the rounded quartz edge of her kitchen counter. She imagines pushing her frustration through the stone, not through the telephone line. Just make this easy, she wants to say. As children, she and Jason had been so close. With him by her side, she had never found herself the only mixed-race kid in a classroom or on a sports team. They had stayed a package deal, until . . . Her mind instinctively veers from their last year of high school. Everything would be so much easier if you’d just help me.
Taking another deep breath, Anna tries again. “Dad’s practically living in his research lab at SickKids. I saw him for like fifteen seconds last week.” Unable to sleep one morning, she’d gone over to her pare
She resumes pacing, aware of her mounting frustration. Jason isn’t the person you unload to, she chides herself. Not anymore. She takes a breath, but the words keep coming. “Taking care of the house is eating up all my time. Between Mom’s decline, acting as her executor, and emptying that house, I haven’t sold a single property this year.” Her voice edges up and up, like a train whistling along a familiar track, shrill and unstoppable. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to answer a few simple questions every now and—”
“Fine.” The word ricochets down the line, sharp as a gunshot. Something pings in the background, and she hears the whoosh of sliding doors. “I may lose you in the elevator,” Jason says in a softer voice, but his words are layered with a weariness that matches hers. “Look, do what you want, okay? This stuff is your wheelhouse.”
“But—” she begins.
Jason sighs. “Dad gave me the ruby pendant for Margo. I took Mom’s fountain pen and one of her framed photos of the old rose garden. That’s all I want. If you need more help, call one of those junk services. There must be one you use with clients.”
“Yeah,” Anna says, mentally calculating the cost of outsourcing the work. Her discount is good but it’s going to be tight. “Tracking Dad down for cash is tough right now. Could you—”
“Talk later, okay? I’ve got to go.” The line goes dead.
Anna slides the phone back into its cradle, feeling more disheartened than when she picked it up. What were you expecting? she asks herself, staring at the red charging light. In answer, one of her last memories with her mother surfaces.
You demand too much from Jason, Chun-Mei Lin had told Anna the week before she died. Be gentle with him after I’m gone.
What about me? she fumes. Doesn’t he have to be gentle, too?
Turning from the sting of that memory, Anna picks up her yellow notepad and pencil from the counter. In the two months since their mother’s passing, she’s been mired in endless to-do lists. This sheet reads:
china dishes (12 settings/5 serving pieces)
mom’s clothes
family photo albums (9)
A dozen other remnants of Chun-Mei’s once vibrant life follow. She taps the pencil’s eraser against the scrawled words, picturing the china. An heirloom from Erik’s side of the family, the set is old-fashioned but pretty: white with delicate red and gold roses. Thinking of the dishes brings back the last time Anna saw them carefully arranged on her parents’ dining room table: Erin’s fifth birthday dinner, right before Mom went into palliative care.
Tears pool in Anna’s eyes. Swiftly, she tilts her head up to trace the spidery cracks in the ceiling’s plaster. I’m so tired of crying. She’s done it twice today, first, when confronted by the fine black hair caught in her mother’s antique silver hairbrush. The second time, she’d opened a drawer, found the matching pair of jade dragons that she and Jason had played with as children, and sobbed.
My wheelhouse, she thinks, swallowing hard. In the beginning, she’d hoped her professional training as a commercial Realtor would help her to deal with the house. Knowing which decisions to make is easy. Making them is another thing altogether. Her eyes have been puffy for weeks. Disrupting her mother’s thoughtful cultivation of her home by packing up all her treasures is just one more desecration wrought by stage-four breast cancer. Anna is beyond sick of the rooms where her mother’s perfume still lingers in the closets like a spirit, ready to ambush her with longing. And it’s me, not Jason, who has to come back there tomorrow afternoon, and the next day, and the next, until the house is listed.
In one fluid move, Anna picks up the notepad and hurls it at the kitchen wall. Its pages fan as it flies. The faint smacking noise it makes is completely unsatisfying.
“That bad, eh?” Malcolm’s voice asks. Anna spins to find her husband in the doorway, dressed in his police uniform. “Sorry, sweetheart.”
He lifts the notepad off the floor and hands it to her before taking his keys out of his pocket. They drop with a clatter in the red glass dish, which sat on Chun-Mei’s dressing table for years. A month before she died, her mother gave it to Malcolm, informing him exactly how it should be placed on the narrow shelf beside the sink. Whenever the red glass catches Anna’s eye, she’s surprised to find her mother’s dainty thing in her kitchen. But Malcolm has stopped misplacing his keys.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he says.
“Well, calling Jason was a waste of time,” Anna says, tossing her notepad back on the counter. “He doesn’t want anything.” Her husband makes his I’m trying not to say I told you so but I told you so face. She sighs and brushes away a stray hair. “If I hadn’t asked, he would have come back at me later, I know he would have.”
“Jay doesn’t care about stuff.” Malcolm picks up the kettle and fills it with water. A staunch herbal tea drinker, he’s ritualistic about having a cup when he comes home. “Want some?”
Anna shakes her head, rubbing the tension knot forming across her forehead. What I need is sleep. A really great night’s sleep.
“Margo isn’t sentimental either,” Malcolm continues, yawning. “And they haven’t got much room in that condo.”
“No,” Anna agrees. “He told me to call a junk service.”
Malcolm brightens as he flicks the kettle’s switch. “That’s a great idea.” He turns to lean back against the counter, grinning at her despite the circles under his eyes.
As an investigator with Toronto Police’s Financial Crimes Unit, he doesn’t wear a uniform very often. The exceptions usually happen on summer nights like this one, when he picks up an extra shift through the force’s lottery system to work security for the sports stadiums downtown. He still looks good in it, all long legs and wide shoulders. Stepping closer, Anna runs admiring fingers through his brown hair, which is flecked with grey at his temples.
Malcolm smiles. “Didn’t I have the same thought, oh, a month ago?”
“You did.” Despite her irritation with Jason, Anna finds herself grinning back at Malcolm.
His eyes sparkle as he holds her gaze. “And is Jay going to help us cover the cost?”
Anna’s grin slides clean off her face. “He hung up when we got to that. So, no.”
Malcolm grimaces.
“I know, I know.” She throws up her hands. “I’ll call him back.”
“It’s a reasonable expectation,” Malcolm says as Anna’s composure starts to crumble. “Hey, I’m not blaming you.” He pulls her close. “You put your career on hold to support your mom when she got sick. You’re still helping your dad, and God knows, getting answers out of Erik is a pain in the ass.”
“I don’t blame him.” Anna’s eyes burn again. “That whole house brims with Mom,” she murmurs into Malcolm’s shoulder, blinking furiously. “I want to be done with it, too.”
“Soon.” Malcolm kisses the side of her head. “Call a junk service if it gets you one step closer.”
