The Future Falls (16 page)

“Thanks, Dave, no need. I'll catch him in Vermont.”

*   *   *

Charlie came out of the Wood in a cemetery, near a section of Civil War graves surrounded by trees large enough to have been planted at the same time as the dead soldiers. Many of the graves, even those so worn the names could no longer be read, had the sticks of paper flags pushed into the earth by the stones. Those who'd left the flags hadn't intended their offering to stake the dead in place, but, fortunately, the dead were beyond intent. As a result, Carter had one of the most peaceful cemeteries Charlie'd ever been in.

The sky was clear and the temperature was about fifteen degrees warmer than it had been in Calgary. After tucking the guitar back in the gig bag, she unzipped her jacket, shook the damp out of her hair, and checked to make sure the charm etched into the glass had set her watch to local time.

She could hear “Ashokan Farewell” playing as she made her way toward the street, and it took a moment to realize the music wasn't inside her head but coming from a stage down the road to the right.

Art in the Street was just that. Art. In the street. To Charlie's eye some of the art looked more like craft and some of the craft looked more like kitsch, but Auntie Kay made corn husk dolls she sold for a stupid amount of money to tourists, so Charlie had to admit that her idea of art was fairly basic to begin with. The dolls, Auntie Kay explained, were perfectly safe as the tourists had no idea who the dolls represented. In that instance, intent counted. Auntie Kay's intent had always been to take as much money from the tourists as possible.

Carter had few cross streets. Large frame houses, so familiar in the New England states, lined the road through town, their faded paint and vaguely shabby air giving them a look of genteel poverty. The B&B/general store combination across the street from the church, however, had clearly been recently bought by someone with money, its red-and-green trim fresh and gleaming. From the way the nearer displays of carvings, paintings, and quilts seemed to be funneling people into the store, Charlie suspected the owners were the driving force behind the fair.

Charlie turned right, toward the music. And froze.

The three-story, gray frame house was classic Vermont. The windows full of teddy bears, not so much. Little plush faces stared out from every window on all three floors, their eyes locked on Charlie.

“Optical illusion,” she muttered, heading for the stage. She didn't have time for this. A dozen steps later, when she glanced toward the house again, the bears were still staring. And not only the bears facing the front of the house, but the bears who'd been facing the graveyard a moment before. “Oh, come on, guys. I'm here to talk to Gary. That's all.”

Polyester fur faded from the sun, noses pressed against grubby glass, the bears stared. A large powder-blue-and-white bear, slumped on the sill in the third-floor dormer, looked almost exactly like a plush toy Charlie'd owned
as a child. It also looked depressed, but there was always a chance she was reading too much into its expression.

“Ashokan Farewell” ended, and she could hear a bouzouki laying in a harmony line to “The Factory Girl.” Gary's sure touch was nearly drowned out as her personal soundtrack played “Cardiac Arrest” by the Teddybears. Odds were high
shake your bonemaker
was meant to be more metaphysical in this case as the windows full of depressed teddy bears were full-out disturbing.

It was the Baltimore cemetery all over again. Only with more polyester.

The bears weren't Gales, it therefore wasn't Gale business. Walking past, leaving the bears staring out at the world, would not result in large-scale death and destruction by the Dragon Queen and it would not assist one of the old gods to rise. Walking past would take her to the man who had the answers she needed in order to put the phrase
millions will die
into context because those millions would definitely include Gales. Standing at the point where the front path met the sidewalk, ready to walk past, Charlie could see the small crowd watching in front of the stage, the pole lights shining down . . .

The bears stared down at her.

The hair lifted off the back of Charlie's neck.

“If we start cleaning up the crap people get into, where does it stop?”
the aunties snapped when the young inevitably asked why the family didn't help if it could.
“Best we keep our own house clean, treat them like adults, and let them make their own choices. Why would we want to fill the world with dependent children when we already have a surfeit of purple-haired smart-asses who play their music too loud, and if you want to know what tragically hip really means, you take a look at your Auntie Rose from behind. There are articles of clothing that should not come in a Two X, but does she listen to me? No.”
Specifically, that had been the answer Charlie'd gotten when she'd asked.

Influenced by too much television, her younger sisters occasionally hunted in the world's darker and nastier places. Hunted, Charlie corrected silently, having been corrected significantly less silently by the twins. The word required a capital H. Her sisters were pretentious maniacs with a slightly scary Joss Whedon obsession, but, as Allie pointed out, better they got that out of their system when they were away from home.

Charlie'd played in some of the world's darker and nastier bars, but that
wasn't quite the same. She considered calling the twins in, but aside from the bears, Carter seemed like too nice a place to deserve them.

Her arrival had been delayed by the need to make a phone call. That usually meant something. It was possible, it meant she'd spend less time waiting for Gary to finish playing before they could talk. Possible. But it wasn't looking very likely.

“There's no one home right now, is there?” she asked the bears, and wasn't even a little upset when they didn't answer. The person or persons responsible were probably spending a lovely fall afternoon with their neighbors enjoying Art in the Street. With a locally sourced candy apple in one hand, they'd probably gotten caught up discussing the merits of scrollwork over lathe work and wouldn't be back for hours.

“It looks like they're silently screaming ‘
help me
,' doesn't it?”

She glanced over at the man who'd paused beside her, and sighed. “Yeah. It does.”

He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and grinned sheepishly, his teeth a pale curve within his beard. “Of course they aren't really.”

“Of course they aren't,” Charlie muttered as he crossed the street to greet a woman selling fabric art. As the band finished up with “The Factory Girl,” the crowd applauded with polite enthusiasm. “Fine,” she told the bears, wondering what part of Wild Power meant being at the beck and call of stuffed toys. “It's not like I can drag him off the stage before the show ends. I might as well spend the time dealing with you.”

She was absolutely not going to acknowledge the feeling that Jack, who brokered agreements between feuding Brownies and made sure Dan didn't freeze, would have been disappointed in her had she refused to help.

A sign on the front lawn declared the house a B&B called The Teddy Bears' Picnic.

“Of course it is.”

On the way up the walk, Charlie pulled her guitar out of the bag and reflected on how the 2010 Teddybears album containing the song “Cardiac Arrest” had been called Devil's Music. “Foreshadowing,” she sighed. “The sign of quality metaphysical fuckups.” No one answered her knock, or, after she discovered it, the ringing of the brass doorbell.

A simple charm popped the door open.

Too easy?

“Don't even start,” she muttered.

Given the bears in the windows, Charlie had expected to there to be bears all over the house. While she couldn't guarantee it was the same in every room, the four she could see from the large foyer had bears
only
in the windows. She wasn't sure if that was better, or worse.

The furniture looked old and shabby, but comfortable. The walls in the sitting room to the left were covered in red flocked wallpaper. The scuffed hardwood floors were covered in worn rugs. The banister on the stairs leading up to the second and third floors had been painted black and the stairs themselves were covered in red-and-black paisley carpet. Nothing about the house said evil lived there.

Nothing but the bears, and they wouldn't shut up about it.

Charlie half thought she could smell the lingering scent of homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Yeah, well, baking was not a character reference. The aunties baked. The younger members of the family learned to stay away when the breeze carried the scent of gingerbread.

The teddy bears knew she'd entered the house. She could feel their awareness like pop rocks fizzing against her tongue . . . only she felt it all over. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant feeling.

Standing quietly, fingers resting lightly on the strings, she took a moment to figure out what to do next. The bears were pressed against the windows, staring out. Free the bears. Break the windows. Break the windows from the
insid
e.

“All of a sudden, I miss my Orange Thunderverb 200.” Cranking the big old amp up to eleven would certainly make what she was about to do easier. Humming “Teddy Bears' Picnic,” she reached into the watch pocket of her jeans and swapped out her flat pick for a thumb pick. While her hands played the song, Charlie built a charm with her voice. She didn't
know
that all the windows had to be broken at the same time, but better safe than sorry. The charm fought to fly free. She fought to hold it while building it larger, stronger.

A small part of her attention pointed out that she was standing with her back to the front door and someone was hurrying up the walk. So much for the standing around holding a candy apple scenario. She should've charmed the door locked, but it was too late for that.

Without David to pull the power and Allie to feed it to her, she needed time.

If you go down to the woods today . . .

The skin between her shoulder blades crawled as the door opened.

...safer to stay at home.

Fingers grabbed at her gig bag.

Jerking forward, she released the charm.

The house filled with sound—although the charm itself made no noise. The windows shattered.

For every bear that ever was there . . .

The grip on her gig bag fell away and Charlie spun around in time to see a totally innocuous looking old man fall to the floor. A bit of powder blue fuzz clung to the grizzled stubble on his upper lip. He looked Human—although that didn't mean much, David and Jack both looked Human at least half . . . a quarter of the time.

Her skin had stopped sizzling.

The teddy bears slumped on the sills of broken windows or flung out on the lawn with the glass were no more than grubby, stuffed toys.

While people outside loudly argued about the possibility of a second, larger explosion, Charlie headed for the back door. The kitchen, with its faded linoleum floor and painted plywood cabinets, smelled
interesting
but she didn't pause to find out why because she honestly didn't want to know—many of the aunties' kitchens had faded linoleum and painted plywood cabinets and
interesting
smells. In her experience
interesting
was just a little too general a description to be safe. The bears were free, the rest could be left to the good people of Vermont.

She reached for the back door to the sound of “Footsteps” by the English doom metal band Warning.

A warning about footsteps.

Footsteps?

“Technically, they're foot
print
s and I don't think we have to worry about CSI Vermont,” she muttered, glancing back to make sure she hadn't left a trail. Tucking her hand up into the sleeve of her jacket, she opened the door and slipped outside. Somehow, she managed to get across the yard and back into the cemetery without slicing her boots on pieces of broken glass or leaving too obvious a trail and, fortunately, the loud speculation from the crowd
now inside the house and gathered around the old man covered any noise she might have made.

She barely heard her phone ring.

“Well, you've been a little busy, haven't you, Charlotte.” Auntie Jane, however, came through loud and clear.

The fieldstone wall around the cemetery was about hip-high. Charlie planted her ass on a spot free of moss and lichen and swung her legs over. “You felt that?”

“Did I feel you poking into things that were none of your business, releasing certain energies without discovering if those energies were vicious or benign, not to mention being directly responsible for the snuffing out of a power without ever considering if that power might possibly be a guardian protecting the people you profess to be so concerned about rather than a jailor illicitly confining the innocent?”

“He was a guardian?”

“Don't be ridiculous, Charlotte; he was a nasty piece of work. Once his sort's started on stuffed toys, the world is a better place without them.
But he was neither family nor bothering family and should have been left alone. Why are you in Vermont?”

“I'm here to see a friend who's playing at a street fair.”

“You're in Vermont for the music?”

“Have you met me? It's why I go anywhere.”

“Only for the music?”

“And, apparently, the teddy bears.”

“I see. So given this was clearly a case of a Wild Power assuming she knew best . . .” When Auntie Jane hesitated, Charlie frowned. The aunties liked to pause and allow their listeners a chance to really realize just how much trouble they were in. This didn't sound like that kind of a pause. It sounded, strangely enough, like Auntie Jane was unsure. “. . . have you spoken with Catherine recently?”

“Auntie Catherine?” Charlie couldn't see a clear path from teddy bears to Auntie Catherine, but that didn't mean Auntie Jane couldn't. “This morning in Vegas. Why?”