The Future Falls (45 page)

She expected him to be heavy. Jack was impossible. But the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale was impossibly light. One hand gripping her shoulder, he walked into the Wood like he'd been waiting to step across the border all his life. No sorrow. No regret. Pure anticipation.

Classic rock for the win.

Except . . .

It seemed far too easy.

His grip tightened and in the moment before he let go, Charlie realized the power behind her was to the power in front of her as Miley Cyrus was to Janis Joplin.

She stumbled forward, stumbled
away
, and turned in time to see him change.

The antlers rising from his brow touched the sky. His shoulders grew
broader. His skin a little darker. His clothing . . . gone. His eyes darkened as she watched until they were black from rim to rim.

She could see herself in his eyes. All of herself. All her strengths. All her faults. A glimmer of gold . . . He shook his head, a familiar Gale-boy motion to settle the horn, and broke the line of sight, giving Charlie a chance to jerk free. He hadn't captured her attention on purpose, not that intent would have mattered after she was lost.

She wondered for a moment why it was so quiet, then she realized it wasn't. Everything in the Wood, everything including Charlotte Marie Gale, was singing, for variable definitions of the word singing, the exact same song.

His Song.

Turned out that under the right circumstances, the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale was a god.

“Get out of the Wood, Charlotte.” Auntie Ruby stepped out of the shadows under the distant oaks. “Now.”

Except distant seemed to be right there and . . . “You're dead.” Charlie dodged the ghost's grasp, and kept staggering to the right, too exhausted to stop. “Pretty sure . . . don't have to listen to you . . . after death.”

“We don't have time for this, Charlotte.”

Her voice stabbed through his Song. Like drunks talking about the football game on the TV behind the bar, breaking up the color commentary. Auntie Ruby had carried auntie-knows-best into her afterlife. Auntie Ruby needed to shut up.

“Charlotte!”

“Not listening.” Not to the dead. That's what they wanted, a semblance of life. For an auntie that meant being obeyed.

“You have to go!”

“
You
have to . . .” A pause while she unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “. . . go. You have to . . .” She'd spun to face him again.

He smiled. It was Allie's smile. Except more. Way more.

The Wood began to change. The perpetual late summer became fall.

Perpetual.
Charlie's hands tightened on her guitar.
I don't think that means what you think it means.

Fall became winter. Winter became spring. Summer returned for a heartbeat. The seasons passed. Years passed. Rowan berries ripened and fell. Blossomed. Ripened. Fell again. And again. Charlie locked her eyes on him
because he didn't change and he had Allie's smile. She felt herself grow older and younger. Older and younger again. Felt blood on the inside of her thighs. Felt herself stretch to touch infinity. Snap back with such force she turned inside out and touched the beginning at the other end of all things.

Then it was spring again and the Wood held the familiar promise of May ritual. When he laughed, she glanced down and realized there was more than one type of wood in the Wood.

“Charlotte!” Auntie Ruby had shed the weight of age and settled somewhere between fifteen and ninety. Or on all the years between fifteen and ninety. At once. Her hair was Gale-girl blonde, her eyes both Gale-girl gray and auntie dark. Her body a double handful of dimpled curves over a core of strength. Her grip on Charlie's bicep was impressive for a dead woman.

“You shouldn't be able to do that,” Charlie pointed out, sucking air through her teeth, but keeping her eyes on the prize. “Also, ow.”

“And you shouldn't have been here for that. You never listen!”

“I listen.” Although all she could hear was his invitation. “And, again, ow! Get your fingernails out of my arm!” He flexed his shoulders and Charlie drew her tongue over her lower lip. It no longer felt cracked and bloody. “Let go.”

“No. This is why I'm here. This is why I needed the time you gave me. To keep you from doing something
stupid
.”

“Something stupid?” The weight of the word actually pulled Charlie's head around.

“Fine. Something else stupid. He's not a god, Charlotte,” Auntie Ruby sighed. “He's
the
god. Our god.”

Charlie could hear the truth in her voice. “Our . . . the first? The walk in the woods, feeling horny god?” Who now waited for her across a very small clearing. Sliding the strap off her shoulder, she lowered her guitar carefully down onto the tender shoots of new grass. “That's impossible.”

“You sang your way into a future that didn't exist until you sang your way into it. I don't think you get to say what's impossible.”

She could get her jacket and shirt only as far down her left arm as Auntie Ruby's grip. Whatever. Belt buckle. Button. Although her jeans were so loose she could probably slide them off her hips without undoing them.

“I said, no!”

“And again, ow!”

“Just so we're clear on this, Charlotte,” Auntie Ruby sighed, releasing her, “I'm doing this for you.”

Before Charlie could force aching muscles to move, Auntie Ruby ran past, darting through the beeches, sunlight and shadow flickering over curves and dimples. Tempting enough, Charlie nearly followed.

He snorted, tossed his head, and took up the chase, bare feet striking the grass like hooves.

Hooves. David. Allie! “Wait!” At some point during the years while the Wood changed and her with it, her throat had healed. Her voice was her own again. Whether she had the power to stop him, or he felt he owed her because she'd brought him to their beginning, she neither knew nor cared. The point was, he stopped and turned. Charlie dug her boots into the soil and kept her eyes locked on his face, resisting the pull. The want. The need. “You have to stop the asteroid!”

“No, I don't.” He grinned and she saw the teenage boy laid over the god. Saw Evan dunking a building block into his oatmeal. Edmund throwing a stuffed dragon across the room. Allie pushing a piece of strawberry pie across the table. Aunt Mary. Auntie Jane. Uncle Edward back before the Hunt. Saw every Gale, ever. “Think, Charlie,” he said as she blinked the layers of images away. “Who trained the me that was? Who is the only sorcerer the aunties have allowed to live?”

Who had gone to the Courts to learn.

Jack. In the right kind of love story, it would have been easier now for Charlie to resist, but they'd never had the right kind of love story. “I can't move Jack through the Wood.”

He winked and waved a hand. She tried not to think about how it would feel against her body. “Things have changed.”

The god was back in the Wood.

Charlie'd always known the Wood was larger than the groves she passed through, the copses she lingered in, but now all boundaries had been removed and yet she could feel herself contain the whole.

“His immortal years will no longer weigh so heavily.”

“I did say you shouldn't have been here,” Auntie Ruby muttered, tucking herself under the god's arm and rubbing against him like a pink-and-gold cat.

“So, Jack?”

He nodded and Charlie felt her heartbeat speed up at the movement of his horns. “Jack. Take the teacher, not the pupil.”

She swallowed as his fingers trailed over Auntie Ruby's shoulder. “I have no idea where I am. I can't get from nowhere to there.”

“You need my help, little singer?” Allie's son had faded back into the god. “You have it. For a kiss.”

Before Charlie could step forward, and she knew herself well enough to know she was definitely going to step forward, Auntie Ruby reached up and pulled the hand on her shoulder lower, over the plump curve of breast, across a pebbled pink nipple.

This was not a game Gale girls lost.

He laughed, lifted her into his arms, and, as she wrapped her legs around his waist, said, “For a song then. Something I've never heard.”

He was eternal, but he was also fifteen; there had to be a billion songs he'd never heard. Which to choose? How to choose?

“
Quickly,”
he growled, “while this one leaves me sense enough remaining to help.”

Charlie smiled, muscles unlocking across her back. As the god himself would say,
duh
. Every new performance of any song was a song no one had ever heard because between performances, the performer changed. Neither was the audience the same audience they'd been, although Charlie couldn't think of a time that'd been quite so obvious an observation. People used to recordings believed every piece of music had a definitive sound, its emotional context trapped in amber, a butterfly pinned to a board; beautiful, but dead. Live music was just that. Alive.

Charlie sang the song she knew best. She sang herself. She wasn't the Charlie he'd known growing up. She sang the reflection she'd seen in the god's eyes. Strengths. Weaknesses. Gale. Wild. Wanting. Having. Questioning.

Even Auntie Ruby stopped writhing to listen.

Charlie stepped out of the Wood.

Time had passed. Not seasons, not years; from the surrounding sounds, Charlie guessed hours. It had been early afternoon when she'd arrived to find the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son of a Gale waiting for her and it was almost dusk now.

“Hello, Charlie.”

He looked more Fey than she'd ever seen him look. Like he had no place in a world with engines, electronics, and light beer. And she'd seen him fifty feet long, flying, and breathing fire, so that was saying something.

Her heart, apparently under the mistaken impression she'd suddenly become the heroine in a bad romantic comedy, began to beat faster.

“Jack.”

He'd made his clothes from trees and grass. Charlie'd spent enough time with him to know if they were bought or magicked and the brown jeans and pale green T-shirt were definitely magicked. And subtly wrong. The T-shirt had no bindings at collar and sleeve, the jeans had no seams or fly. He still tucked left, but then right-handed men . . . and Dragon Princes, usually did. He wore no shoes at all in spite of a distinct chill and damp grass. Although, Jack had always run warm.

Warm. She could hear hysteria bubbling up through the experiences of the last day. Year. Century. Centuries?
Time is fluid. Time spent recreating the birth of your history could easily drip.
She bit back the snicker, dried her palms on her thighs, rubbed them again, surprised by how little thigh there was, and pulled herself together to find Jack staring at her like he'd forgotten what she looked like and needed to be reminded. So she stared back. The last time she'd seen him he was “You Suffer,” a song over in 1.316 seconds, and now he was Rush's “2112” and 20.33 minutes long. Relatively. He wasn't a teenager; he was a man. Tall. Large. Muscular. His hair curled against his shoulders, a paler gold than she remembered. A thin, white vertical scar split his left cheek starting below the center of his eye and ending at the angle of his jaw. Scales ran up and down his forearms like golden LEDs. His form had always slipped when he was nervous.

Golden brows dipped in. “You're too thin.”

“I am?” She shifted inside the loose folds of her clothing. “Yeah, well, it took a while to get here.”

The smile was familiar and not. Bigger, like everything else about him and curving around memories she hadn't shared. “Tell me about it.”

She could hear echoes of another world in his voice. “You're not the Jack who taught Allie's son.”

“No. I'm the Jack who will teach him.”

“In the future?”

“In the past.”

“Oh, for fucksake.” The click as understanding dawned was nearly audible. “You stayed at the Courts, didn't you?” She wanted to pace but couldn't look away in case he disappeared again. “You lived there for all the years I sang my way through and only just emerged like a big scaly, sorcerous butterfly to be taken back to when you left to live those years again.”

“What?”

“You know what I meant!” Because Jack would.

And he did. “I'm immortal, Charlie.” He spread his hands, and she tried not to think about how they'd feel against her body. Remembered having the exact same thought in the Wood. Wondered if there were lingering effects of time spent with a god or if she was actually feeling it for this Jack who wasn't her Jack. This Jack, who she didn't know. “I missed you,” he continued quietly. “Not every minute, most of the minutes were pretty distracting actually . . .”

Okay, now she could hear her Jack.

“. . . but it was only twenty years.”

“Only twenty years.”

Her Jack would have shrugged. New Jack moved both shoulders in a minimal, graceful arc that mimicked the memory of a shrug. “Give or take. How many years did you live getting here?” he asked.

“Time doesn't pass in the Wood. Didn't. And that's not the point.” Twenty years. No wonder he'd forgotten how to dress. And shrug. She reached up, holy crap he'd gotten big, and touched the scar.

He wrapped his hand around hers. When she flinched, a touch of cool spread over her skin and the burn faded. “I didn't pay in pain, Charlie. I'll take my younger self to the UnderRealm, to the Courts, and they'll teach me because I ask them to. I learned things while I was there that they don't want spread around.”

“But you won't learn it if they don't teach you.”

“But I have learned it, so they did teach me.”

“So you and I, this you and I, were there when I jumped ahead to bring back the seventh son of yadda yadda and brought you instead?”