Angol
Three weeks after Bea dissolved into a cornfield in the midwest, the building has developed opinions about the weather.
Not a strong opinion. The fault line isn't running news alerts. It's more that on rainy mornings the floors run warmer than usual, and the candles in the back lounge light themselves on a schedule nobody authorized, and Jen Rosewood is working on finding all of this comforting.
Progress is moderate.
Then Daniel Okafor calls. He's been playing music again - small venues, regular crowds, nothing dramatic - and something is happening in those rooms. Not to him. To everyone else. A quality of attention that doesn't match the size of the crowd. People sitting very still. People crying, not from sadness, from something more like recognition. And the recordings come back completely clean.
He doesn't know what to do with it. Neither does Jen. But she knows someone who might.
The fault line runs three states now. Bea isn't gone - she's distributed, thin and wide and threading through everything, patient in the way that only nine centuries of practice can produce. And when Daniel plays in the Velvet Room, on the line Bea now runs through, every Court in the northeast is going to feel it.
Some of them have been waiting for this for three hundred years.
Some of them are considerably less pleased about it.
Jen Rosewood has handled worse. Probably.
*Acoustic Velvet - Book Seven of the Velvet Room Series.*
*Paranormal women's fiction for women who've built something real and aren't done yet.*
