The Future Falls (4 page)

Gary laughed. “Good choice.” They waved as she unlocked it, Gary's arm around Sheryl's shoulders as they walked away.

Charlie half expected the overture from
Man of La Mancha
to follow them down the street, but when the silence remained unbroken except for a squeal of tires from the passing cab, she turned her attention to her phone. “Katie?”

Katie sighed with enough force Charlie almost felt it. “You hung up on Allie.”

“I was . . .”

“Don't care. Every stoplight in Calgary has been red for the last four hours.”

Charlie checked her watch—2:15 AM EST—and rounded back. “It's 11 PM in Calgary.”

“Yes, and four hours ago it was 7 PM and traffic's been a complete bitch. I'm only grateful you waited until after the evening commute. Do you know why all the stoplights have been red for the last four hours? Why I've been here instead of spending the evening in the park with David? Because you hung up on Allie.”

“Graham . . .”

“Graham got threatened with an ice cream scoop, decided discretion was the better part of valor, and spent the evening down in the store.”

“An ice cream scoop?”

“She couldn't find the melon baller; not the point. The point is, you hung up on her.”

“About four hours ago. Why'd it take you so long to call?”

“We tried. What did you do to your phone?”

“Nothing.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Why would I lie about that? Trust me, if I actually figured out a way to block calls, I'd tell you all about it.” But her phone hadn't rung once while she was in O'Connell's or while she was walking with Gary and Sheryl, at least not until it was time for them to separate. In the last four hours, Charlie hadn't considered flushing her phone down a toilet, tossing it through the open window of a passing cab, or mailing it to Argentina to get a temporary reprieve from family.

She watched Gary and Sheryl turn into the parking lot. Someone or something had really wanted her to spend that time with them. If Charlie ever found out who or what it was, she'd have to thank them. “Is Allie okay?”

“What part of all the lights have been red for four hours sounds like okay to you?”

“I'm on my way.”

“On your way where?”

Okay, maybe she deserved that. “Home.”

“Aim for yesterday.”

She couldn't make yesterday, but it sounded like Allie's reaction had been
strong enough Charlie could have followed it back to the moment right after she'd hung up. “It won't change anything. The lights will still be red, and you'll still be pissed off when you call.”

“Fucking Schrödinger's future,” Katie muttered.

“You're the one who opened the box.” Because the past had already happened, Charlie couldn't know what she was trying to change. If she were going to change it, she already had. If Katie had called and told her to go home to the moment right after she'd hung up, and nothing more, Charlie would have been able to follow the
oom pah pah
of Allie's reaction out of the Wood. Later, Katie would have told her to do something she'd already done and, for approximately four hours, Charlie would have been in both Calgary and Baltimore.

Once Charlie knew she hadn't been with Allie while she was also at O'Connell's, she couldn't go and
be
with Allie.

Being able to exit the Wood at different times had seemed like a kick-ass travel option until it became obvious that fulfilling the parameters was an absolute bitch. Once she'd realized that, Charlie'd let the family know she'd be happy to help with any do-overs, but the person making the request had to work out the details. So far, no one had taken her up on her offer although Auntie Gwen had spent the last three years working on an elaborate plan involving Joss Whedon and a shot-but-never-shown, second season of
Firefly
.

Having passed the church, Charlie rocked to a stop, stared into the shadows under the trees, and sighed. “It's not a park, it's a cemetery.”

“What?”

“I need to concentrate now, Katie.”

“Straight home, Charlie. No detours. She refuses to talk about it until you're here.”

“Talk about what?”

“I don't know, do I? You decided to go bar hopping.”

“One bar,” Charlie began, but Katie'd hung up.

One bar was not bar hopping. Charlie shoved her phone into her pocket. It was
hop
, at best.

The cemetery was old. Historic even. Shadowed by the church and the office building across from it, the graveyard was distinctly darker than the sidewalk she'd left. Sycamore trees whispered overhead. The storm seemed more imminent here.

Modern cemeteries weren't so much cities of the dead as parks filled with inconvenient stone slabs and they usually attracted nothing more dangerous than joggers and dog walkers. The possibility of witnesses—mourners, caretakers, the recently dead—tended to keep thrill seekers and the terminally stupid away. Historic cemeteries, however, with their gnarled trees and high iron fences, time-darkened crypts and worn tombstones, attracted the sort of person who thought burning a few candles and scribbling chalk notations found in musty books bought at library yard sales would have no unforeseen consequences.

It was possible that this particular historic cemetery, enclosed, private, and urban, had, over the long years of its existence, escaped being visited by those sorts of people. Anything was possible; Charlie knew that better than most people. It was possible that the shadows wrapped around the worn stones were the result of a solid object blocking both starlight and streetlights. It was possible. But it wasn't very likely.

She actually didn't need to go into the cemetery to get home. If she didn't want to return to the planter—and she didn't—Baltimore had plenty of other ways into the Wood. Not so long ago, she'd have sketched a charm on the gate to keep people out and figured she'd done her bit to keep the accumulated malevolence from screwing up too many lives. Those who avoided the gates, clambering up and over the wrought iron, would have been looking for trouble so, hey, not her problem if they found it. Making them even less her problem, they wouldn't have been family. Or a threat to her family.

Not so long ago, that would've been enough. But not-so-long-ago was back before a troll had helped her discover that being a Wild Power in the Gale family meant more than charming strangers and collecting metaphysical frequent flyer miles by taking shortcuts through the Wood. Where
helped
meant
holy fucking shit that hurts.

As the shadows shifted beyond the gate, Auntie Gwen's voice rose up out of memory.
“With great power comes great responsibility, a responsibility someone decided generations ago that not everyone in this family can be trusted with. You, Charlotte Gale, are a free electron, able to affect what you will. A warm body between this world and all the metaphysical shit that comes down the pike.”

“Because I'm responsible enough to handle it?”

“Because until you were put in a position where you needed to use it, you had no interest in it.”

“Yeah, still not interested,” Charlie sighed. It was possible this was the reason she'd been drawn to follow the bouzouki, but she doubted it. That had been all about Gary. This felt more like serendipity—in the universe's favor. “What a happy accident that Charlie Gale ended up where she can be made use of,” she muttered, pushed her hair back off her face, and hummed a charm to open the heavy lock. The shadows shifted again. The wrought iron gate swung open so quietly, she could hear the trees rustling.

Although there was no wind.

Not rustling. A warning.
“Go back. Go back. Go back.”

“Chill, guys. I've got this.” She caught the clang as the gate closed and sang it silent. When she turned, she could barely see the cemetery through the gathered dark.

Gordon Lightfoot's “Shadow” started up in the background. “Seriously? Lightfoot?” It switched to Britney Spears and Charlie shuddered. “I can see it's a shadow. Is Shadow. Shut up.” Tucking her thumbs under the straps of her gig bag, and wishing she'd taken out her guitar if only to have something to do with her hands, she took one long step forward.

The world dimmed; the blurred and indistinct surroundings a cross between Corey Hart and Tolkien, between sunglasses at night and the one ring. She felt the shadow prod for weaknesses it could use, knew what it would find, and braced herself.

less human than you . . . half dragon, half Gale . . . rules for Gales don't apply . . . how can they apply . . . you know how you feel . . . you'd take care of him . . . see that he isn't hurt . . . you've been trusted with great power but not with this . . . damned for feelings . . . it's like they think you'd deliberately hurt him . . . you know you won't . . . you know you won't . . . they tell you your feelings don't matter . . . they don't trust you . . . all that power and they still don't trust you . . . he could be everything if you only had the courage . . . do it . . . do it . . . do it . . . show them they're wrong . . . do you want to be alone all your life . . . he'd go with you . . . why live in pain . . .

“Because it's the right thing to do,” Charlie muttered. Salt in open wounds; so much fun. And that had only been the first verse. Those who dared the cemetery after dark—to hide, to sulk, to shit disturb—would be poked and manipulated and shamed and convinced they deserved to have what they wanted. Regardless of consequence. Had the shadow been able to hold a beer, it would have been indistinguishable from the assholes who
finished the night with “Where's your phone, man? We got to put this on Facebook.”

Charlie was deeply in favor of expending the least amount of effort necessary, but this sort of thing, this
deserved
a rousing rendition of “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” Eyes squinted shut against the sudden flare of light, she finished a final irritatingly perky run-through of the chorus as the cemetery came back into focus. Show tunes, one. Gathered malevolence, zero.

That said, it took her a moment to unlock her fingers.

Remaining shadows were nothing more than a temporary absence of light. The sounds of a city in the very early morning—distant traffic, the hum of transformers on the power lines—pushed in from both sides, met in the middle and smoothed out to normalcy.

“Thank you, you've been a great crowd . . .” Names and dates on the gravestones moved in and out of focus as Charlie walked away from the gate. “. . . but it's time to go home.”

In a cemetery this old, it was unlikely she'd pick up any hitchhikers, an annoyance in newer cemeteries where some of the recently dead seem to believe that being incorporeal was an excuse to cling. Given the situation, arriving with a haunt in tow would only put her further into Allie's bad books.

Although, it would also be a distraction . . .

No. Allie'd be distracting enough all on her own. She shouldn't have hung up. She was thirty years old, for gods' sake, and Gale girls learned young what happened to those stupid enough or unlucky enough to make a Gale girl angry. Younger members of the family reported that the boys' washroom at the Darsden East Public School still smelled like cordite and cinnamon.

“Now
that,
” Charlie told Honor Brown, 1871 to 1907, Beloved Wife and Mother, “had been effective use of a muffin.”

She stepped past a weathered obelisk, between two ancient white oaks, and into the Wood.

Two AM in Baltimore. Midafternoon in the Wood. October replaced by perpetual late summer. The smell of asphalt and lingering car exhaust and six hundred thousand sweaty people replaced by the scent of damp earth and growing things with the faintest hint of autumn on the breeze. In all honesty, Charlie had no objection to the smell of civilization—civilization gave her
coffee and beer and the Mesa/Boogie Mark Five—but the Wood was like a member of the family.

After a quick check that she remained alone—Baltimore's aged dead evidently preferred the grave to travel—Charlie took a deep breath and sagged against the smooth bark of the closest birch. The moment she stepped out of the Wood, it had to be business as usual, so it was best she take a moment to regain the joy Gary's music had given her and to make sure nothing the Shadow had poked was seeping past the Charlie everyone expected to see.

The songs of family and friends wrapped around the bouzouki. Steadying. Comforting. Right up until Jack's song pushed its way to the foreground.

“Emotional scab picking. You're a class act, Charlie Gale.” The complex harmonies of Dragon Prince, sorcerer, Gale boy wrapped around her, and in the Wood, where no one would judge, she could . . .

Shit. If Katie'd mentioned the cemetery, Allie would worry.

Worried on top of angry; not good.

Charlie slipped out of the Wood in the enclosed courtyard behind The Enchantment Emporium, the Calgary junk shop Allie had inherited from her grandmother—Charlie's Auntie Catherine and the oldest of the family's three Wild Powers. The shrubs in the small center planting were in full bloom even though, given the season, they should've been completely dormant. “Okay, that's weird.”

She twisted around. The lights were on in Auntie Gwen's loft over the garage, but neither Auntie Gwen nor Joe were in the window, even though both of them would have felt her emerge. Joe wasn't family, as such, and while he might be a little tall for a Leprechaun, he
was
fullblood Fey with all the sensitivity and proclivity to angst that included. They had to have known she was the reason for Allie's mood and Auntie Gwen, at least, wouldn't want to miss the finale.

“I guess she's got her hands on his Lucky Charms.”