by Tanya Huff
“Does bouzouki mean you’re going to have sex?”
Her boot slid past the last step. The dance across the hall to keep her balance was not one of her more graceful moments. “No. Not sex. Bouzouki means there’s no such thing as a coincidence in this family.” Dropping her voice as they moved through the apartment, she told him about the sudden decision of an engineer to lead the life of an itinerant musician.
She’d left her guitar leaning against the wall by the mirror. A glance at her watch, certain it was near four or five, informed her it was only just past two. They’d had a busy morning.
“Take me with you.”
Weren’t they past this? “I can’t.”
“I know you can’t take me through the Wood, but if we flew . . .”
The warm strength of Jack below her, the sky roads open and infinite. Charlie shook her head to dump the overwrought anthem she could feel building. “There’s nowhere for you to fly to. I don’t know where I’m going until I leave the Wood and get there.”
“Yeah, I get that, but . . .” He stared at the floor for a moment, then squared his shoulders, folded his arms, and looked her in the eye. “Like I said in the park, I don’t like it when you’re not here.”
Charlie wrapped both hands around the gig bag’s straps so she didn’t reach out and press her palm against his chest over his heart. When did he grow taller than her? She didn’t remember that happening. “If it helps, it’s not just you; it’s a Gale thing.”
“It’s not a Gale thing.”
“Yeah, it is.” Even after four years, there was still a lot about the family he didn’t know. Things the rest of them had internalized so thoroughly, they were never mentioned until minor disasters brought them up. If she could make Jack believe that at least part of what he felt was no more than family feelings, that would be best all around. Convince. Not make. Never that. Charlie glanced toward the stairs. “Allie freaks out when I leave because she wants to tuck everyone she cares about close around her and keep them safe. Classic second circle. But don’t mention that makes you think of her as a giant chicken because she really doesn’t appreciate it.” When Jack didn’t share her smile, she let it drop. “David, well, David doesn’t exactly freak out, he never did, but he’s not happy when his people are outside his sphere of influence. And the aunties freak when I leave because I’m Wild, and they figure sometime I won’t come back.”
“You won’t.”
“Sure I will.” But she could hear the lie. Charlie had no idea why Auntie Catherine had finally left, had put herself definitively outside the family’s influence, but Charlie knew, deep down where she knew the way into the Wood, that someday she, too, would slip the family leash. And after her, Jack.
Who’d filled the hall with smoke.
“Oh, that’s mature.” Waving a hand in front of her face, she crossed the hall and opened the back door.
When she turned to face him again, his eyes flashed gold. “It’s not a Gale thing,” he growled. “You said the aunties would tell me what I felt didn’t matter; isn’t that what you’re doing?”
The mirror usually chose to show Jack as a dragon. Not this time. His shoulders were broad and his arms well muscled—probably from all the flying—and although his nose was still a little big, all the individual parts of his face had begun to match up and settle into an attractive whole. His eyes—his reflection’s eyes—were a warm amber and his hair a little paler gold than his scales. A trace of gold glinted along his jaw and his upper lip. His reflection played a set of bongos, two beats on one skin, two on the other.
His heartbeat.
Her heartbeat.
Fingers tight around the straps of her gig bag, Charlie took a deep breath. Fortunately, most of the smoke had dissipated because nothing added to the sincerity of an apology like hacking up a lung. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. But you have to admit, it was pretty indicative of that whole significantly older than you problem.”
“I don’t have to admit anything and it’s your problem.” He was still smoking a little. “You need to get over it.”
She needed to get over him, but as that was unlikely to happen . . .
Given the way his expression changed from challenging to resigned, he’d read that off her face. “What if the bouzouki guy isn’t who we’re looking for?” he asked, chin rising, challenging her to comment on the abrupt subject change.
Yeah. Like that was going to happen. “Gary used to be an engineer, then all at once, bam, he gave up everything to follow a dream. And he had a secret.”
“And he’s the guy because there’s no such thing as coincidence in this family.”
“That, too.”
There was a faint smell of scorched fabric as Jack shoved his hands into his pockets. “Weren’t you leaving?”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“You want me to tell Allie you’ve gone.” His smile showed teeth. “Coward.”
“You betcha.”
* * *
In the Wood, Jack’s song sounded grumpy but not pained. Allie’s sounded fussy but not suspicious. Charlie couldn’t hear the bouzouki.
“Seriously? Now you decided to be coy?”
She checked her tuning, then played “Boys of Blue Hill,” pausing after each measure to listen. Gary’d played it so beautifully in Baltimore it was clearly a signature piece for him.
Nothing.
She played his love for his wife. His decision to follow his dream. The secret that convinced him he had nothing to lose. The cats; singly and collectively.
And more nothing.
“Well, fuck you. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”
Charlie stepped out of the Wood at the Forks in Winnipeg and called Dave Clement.
“Gary Ehrlich? Yeah, he gave me a call yesterday. I sent him to Vermont. George Frost’s band has a line of gigs at small fall fairs through New England and his bouzouki player broke his wrist teaching parkour in Jersey City. Frost’s playing Art on the Street tonight and tomorrow in Carter, Vermont, then I think he’s heading into Connecticut. Give me a minute and I’ll find the list of where he’s heading after that.”
“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 va
guely 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 inside.
“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.