The Future Falls Read Free

lightning strike from the metaphysical black cloud hanging over his head.
    A few days later, the music led her to a campground on a river, emptied of the summer tourists and filled with family in all but blood. Although the days were still pleasant enough, the nights nudged freezing. Charlie barely noticed the chill as she jammed until dawn with old women and young men and old men and young women and banjos and mandolins and fiddles and a dozen guitars. There was even a set of pipes and although the piper got pelted with bottle caps every time he began to play, he was clearly a familiar and loved part of the circle. Charlie had to fight to keep her power from rising with the music. She let it go once, after midnight had safely passed and let her creation hang in the air for a moment after the last note had been played.
    â€œWell, damn,” breathed the piper as wings and scales and fire dissolved into the night.
    Then one of the banjo players picked out the opening bars of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.”
    And they were off again.
    The next day Charlie stopped off at a coin laundromat in Austin—even Gale girls needed clean underwear—then stepped out of the world, back into the Wood, and listened for where the music would take her next.
    Allie’s song wove through a stand of rowan, berries formed in the Wood’s perpetual late summer but never getting a chance to ripen. She could follow Allie’s song home, only Charlie wasn’t ready to go home yet—and not only because Allie’s song sounded a little sharp. Allie wanted Charlie to stop wandering. To stay home for more than a few months at a time. To allow herself to be gathered in under Allie’s newly maternal wing.
    Jack’s song moved through the crowns of the birches, never settling, skirting the line between the Wood and what passed for sky in a place that ended where the trees ended. Like Allie’s song, Jack’s song had always been separate from the family symphony—hardly surprising given the unique combination of Dragon Prince, sorcerer, and Wild Power. Charlie stood for a moment, wrapped in what was almost a symphony on its own, well aware that with very little encouragement, Jack’s song would fill the Wood until it was the only song she could hear. “Oh, no, you don’t.” Hands clenched sotightly her knuckles ached, she concentrated on not hearing him, not veering toward him, pulled by the power of his song.
    Fortunately, Charlie had been walking the Wood for almost as long as Jack had been alive.
    â€œUnfortunately,” she muttered, following a fiddle through the maples, “I’ve been walking the Wood for almost as long as Jack’s been alive.” Irony was a bitch.
    The fiddle joined a drum and led into the shadows under the oldest oaks where she lost the melody. Drums often led back to the aunties and she really wasn’t in the mood to deal with that. Them. They’d poke and they’d pry and, while misdirection was possible, she’d pay for it later. Where the aunties were concerned,
later
was a guarantee. Avoidance had been working for her so far, so avoidance remained her best bet.
    Spanish guitars. An accordion. A pipe organ that made the leaves on the alders quiver.
    Curiosity almost sent her after a marching band, but the memory of the 2011 Rose Parade stopped her. Who knew massed potted roses would be enough greenery to give her an exit from the Wood? Or that the Rose Queen would be so high-strung? Although the screaming and the flailing
had
provided an opportunity for Charlie to slip away.
    Power prickling under her skin, she cocked her head to catch something that sounded like a bluegrass mandolin. Richer. Fuller. A little like a cittern . . . No, a bouzouki. Flat picking “Snug in a Blanket,” interwoven around a bass guitar, a fiddle, and a bodhran. Irish then, not Greek.
    Now
that
was a worthy distraction.
    Grinning, Charlie followed