Golden Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  “No, not like that,” said Ivy quickly. “It’s just … it’s an important power, that’s all. Because whoever has it can sneak into anyplace. It’s not safe.”

  Where she stays, where she stands, there shall the gates be closed. But I felt Ivy holding something back. It fluttered around behind her words.

  “So you don’t really know what will happen if Callie gives up her power to you?” asked Mr. Robeson.

  “Does it matter?” She said this to me. “You don’t want it, and I do. Please, Callie.”

  Mr. Robeson cocked his head toward me. I saw the question and the answer in his expression, and I agreed with him. “It does matter,” I said.

  Ivy blinked. “What?”

  “What you’d do with the gate power does matter. It matters what the Seelie king would do with it.”

  Ivy leaned forward. “I won’t let it be used to hurt you, Callie, or your family. We can make that part of the promise.”

  I was getting hotter. The itch had reached my shoulder and was creeping across my back. Mr. Robeson eyed me uneasily. A drop of sweat fell into my eyes and I wiped at it, but it stung, and now my eye began to itch.

  “I … I have to think about it,” I made myself say.

  “There’s no time, Callie. You’ve been summoned. You have to go to the court or the summons’ll burn you alive, and once you get up there it’ll be too late to make the wish.”

  “Why?” asked Mr. Robeson. “Doesn’t the king know you’re making this offer?”

  “What difference does that make?” grumbled Ivy.

  “It means things might not turn out as rosy as you paint them. Callie and her family have made enemies. I happen to know that the Seelies do not let their enemies go quietly.” Or at all. I could hear those extra words, even though he didn’t say them out loud.

  “I think you’d better go now, Ivy,” I told her. “You’ve said what you came to say. I’ll think about it.”

  “No!” The word pulled her to her feet. “No! You’ve got to listen, Callie. You’ve got to.” She grabbed my hand, and I gasped and yanked it away. Just her touch sent the itch flaring bright and hard up my arm. “This is our only chance!”

  “Or what?” I cradled my hand against my chest. I was not going to be able to stand this much longer. I could barely sit still as it was. “What’s got you so scared?”

  She went white, and I knew I’d hit it.

  “They’ve threatened you,” said Mr. Robeson. “They’re angry with you, and you’re in danger.”

  “You don’t understand!” she shouted at him. “You’re just a … a human. And you!” She turned on me. “You’re nothing! Your mother’s a weakling and your father’s a traitor and a runaway! You’re a pathetic little bad luck girl and you don’t deserve to be special!” Her eyes glowed white-hot as the sun, and her spell slammed against me.

  I’d never had anybody throw magic straight at me before. I’d seen disguises. I’d fought off monsters. This was different. This grabbed hold of all of me and twisted hard, shoving me down, shrinking me, burning me into a new shape, and that shape was as small and pathetic and weak as she said I was. It hurt. It hurt worse than dust pneumonia. It hurt worse than seeing Jack lying still and cold on the ground.

  I sprawled on the floor, and Mr. Robeson lunged for me.

  “You stay out of this, spook!” Ivy’s hate lashed out and caught him in the chest. Mr. Robeson staggered back. She shouldn’t have done that. He was angry and more than a little bit frightened. I snatched the feelings up and threw them back in a spell of my own. Ivy flinched, and I was able to scramble to my feet. I felt her taking aim at me again. She was strong, but she was a spoiled brat. She’d never actually had to fight for her life. I had.

  I grabbed a plate off the breakfast table and threw it hard at her head. Ivy screamed and ducked, but not fast enough. The plate glanced off her brow and snapped her head back, and she fell into a chair.

  Mr. Robeson was on his feet again. I grabbed his hand. “Wish!” I ordered. “Wish her dead!”

  “No, Callie,” he said.

  “What?” I reached anyway. He had to feel something, something I could use. But he was walled off. I didn’t know people could shut down like that. I could have broken through into his mind, I could have glamoured him into feeling what I needed, but even as far gone as I was, I knew that was a door there was no going back through.

  “Go ahead!” Ivy tried to stand up, and dropped back down again. “I’m not afraid of you, Callie LeRoux! You or your pet n—”

  “Go home, Miss Bright,” said Mr. Robeson. “Tell your people they’ll get their answer. You don’t really want to pick a fight you can’t win, do you?”

  But she did, she really did. Except she was also about to be sick, and when she did stand up, her knees wobbled.

  “You’ll get yours,” she hissed at me. “And so will I. Think about that, Callie LeRoux.”

  She sashayed out and shut the door. I turned to Mr. Robeson. For a moment the fury in me burned so bright, it damped down the itch and the sweat.

  “Why wouldn’t you help me? I could have finished her!”

  “I am not going to help you kill another little girl in cold blood,” he said flatly.

  “She’s a liar and a sneak and she’s helping them!”

  “It’s not about who they are,” he told me with that same implacable, unbreakable calm that had kept his anger from my magic. “It is never about who they are. It’s about who you are. You are not a murderer.”

  “You don’t know what I am.”

  That just earned me a smile. “You’ve moved heaven and earth to help people and to free the father you never met. You about killed yourself to save a friend. You are a good person, Callie,” he said. “Like your father and, I believe, your mother. Your father would not want you to commit a murder to free him.”

  “She would have killed me,” I said.

  Mr. Robeson didn’t move an inch. “That’s on her.”

  Tears joined the perspiration running down my face. He still didn’t move. The strange thing was, where the tears fell, the itching disappeared. “How do you do it?” I wiped the back of my hand across my cheeks. “How do you stay so calm?”

  “You learn control, Callie,” he said grimly. “They’ll push you and push you until you take your swing. You swing hard and stupid because you’re angry, and then they’ve got you. They’re bigger and stronger than you’ll ever be. The only way we win is if we stay smart. To do that, we have to keep control of ourselves, and we have to hang together.” He smiled at me. “That’s the part their kind never learns.”

  I wanted to listen to him. What he was saying was important, but there was too much else going on in my brain for it to sink in properly—including the fact that Ivy was out on the streets and Jack was all alone back in the hospital. I had to get to him. I rubbed my arms. Then I had to find out what this summons really meant. I knew who to ask. The problem was, I was going to have to wake him up.

  21

  Where Are You Goin’ Now?

  Jack was sitting in a wheelchair in his hospital room when we got there. He was way too pale, and even skinnier than usual. If anything, the ring around his mouth looked worse than when we’d brought him in, because it was all peeling and scabby. When I looked at him, the relief was as strong as any magic spell Ivy and all her friends and relations could have hit me with.

  Jack smiled up at me, and I thought I’d keel over on the spot. “Hi, Callie.”

  “Hi.”

  He held out his hand, and I took it. Where his skin touched mine, the itch doubled, but for that moment it didn’t matter. It was Jack’s hand, and he was smiling, and after that, everything had to be okay.

  * * *

  Mr. Robeson talked seriously with the doctor about how Jack needed to go home and rest. He signed the name Jonathan Holland to a bunch of papers, and we wheeled Jack out of there, even though he insisted he could walk for himself. He was steady enough getting into the ca
b we had waiting, but he was breathing too hard by the time it pulled away from the curb.

  The cab took us back to the Dunbar, and Mr. Robeson let us into his tidy hotel room. He called down for some lunch. I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was full of itching. I could barely even sit down, but I made myself do it. I didn’t want Jack to see how bad things had gotten.

  That worked for all of ten seconds. “What’s happened, Callie?” Jack asked.

  I told him about Ivy and the summons, and what had happened afterward. Most of it, anyway. I felt Mr. Robeson settling onto the sofa and looking at me, but he didn’t say anything when I didn’t go into detail about how ready I’d been to kill Ivy Bright.

  “It was a setup, wasn’t it?” Jack asked quietly. “From the beginning. She was just using me. Us.”

  “She’s a Seelie. She magicked us both. It wasn’t your fault.”

  He didn’t believe that, and I didn’t know how to get him to. He’d just have to work it out for himself. I tried to tamp down the leftover anger, because I could feel how Jack was wishing that Ivy’d liked him because he was strong and brave and handsome and just Jack. It wasn’t much of a wish and he was already trying to shove it away, but it was there. I needed to find other stuff to concentrate on, or something important inside me would break in two.

  “I’m going with you,” said Jack. “To the Seelies.”

  “No.” I wiped at the sweat on my forehead. Mr. Robeson had loaned me a handkerchief. It was fine linen, but it grated like sandpaper across my skin. Even the sunlight hurt where it touched me. “Not this time.”

  “You got no right to say where I go, Callie.”

  “They almost killed you!” And he was still weak. Plus I didn’t trust Ivy to leave him alone if she got next to him again. She’d turn those baby blues on him, and Jack would go all hero over her, like he did for anybody who needed help.

  “You think they’re gonna lay off after they’re done with whatever it is they got planned for you?” Jack said all slow and quiet.

  How was I going to answer him? They would come after him and they wouldn’t stop, no matter what happened to me. They’d do it because I cared about him and I was bad luck. And just maybe because he was Jack and even they knew he was special.

  “It’s not safe,” I tried.

  “It never has been.”

  He was right about that. And there was something else: as much as I wanted to protect him and keep him away from Ivy, I needed him. I needed his wishing to help work my magic, but it was more than that. I needed him because he was brave and he was Jack and he was the only person in the whole world I could trust absolutely. I glanced at Mr. Robeson. Well, maybe not the only person.

  “So,” said Jack, “what do we do?”

  I hesitated. I did have a plan. Ivy didn’t know it, but she’d showed me what to do. The first part was going to be tricky, though. Like making a deal with the devil is tricky.

  I decided I could put off talking about that—for now, anyway—and turned to Mr. Robeson instead. “I need to ask you a favor.”

  He gave a half smile, because we both knew I should have said “another favor.” “What can I do?”

  “I need you to go get Mrs. Brownlow.”

  He frowned. “Mrs. Brownlow?”

  “She’s been set up as Ivy Bright’s mother. I don’t know what really happened. Maybe she really is Ivy’s mother. Maybe … maybe they did that thing Jack says fairies sometimes do, when they take a human baby and leave a fairy one behind.”

  “A changeling?” filled in Jack.

  “That’s it. She wants to go home, except Ivy’s got her all magicked up.” That was why the enchantments were so sloppy. Ivy’d never been taught how to do her magic properly, any more than I had. I remembered all the times I’d wanted to make my mama do what I said. If I’d known about my magic … would Mama have ended up like Mrs. Brownlow? I shivered. “Somebody’s got to get her out of there, and find her people if she’s got any. And it’s got to be before Ivy gets back, or she’ll just magic her under again. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but you’ve got a promise on them that they can’t touch you.…” And I’ve got to get you out of the way of whatever’s coming next.

  The words trailed off, and Mr. Robeson looked at me for a long time. I think he guessed what I was really doing, but he just nodded gravely. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Robeson.”

  He nodded again, and I felt something new, or maybe it was something old. It was like a ribbon unraveling in the air between us. It was the promise, the one he’d made to my papa. He’d paid. He was free and could go his own way now without worrying about being pulled back to us.

  It was good for him, and I knew it, but I couldn’t quite manage to be really glad.

  I may not have been hungry, but Jack sure was. When the waiter brought in the plates of sandwiches and bottles of Coca-Cola, he ate enough for ten. I nibbled on a ham and cheese and tried not to scratch too much. There were red streaks on my arms from my fingernails. Soon I’d be drawing blood, and it still wouldn’t be enough. After lunch, Mr. Robeson had the doorman hail another cab, and paid the man twenty dollars to take us wherever we wanted to go. Jack looked surprised when I gave the driver the address of Mrs. Constantine’s house.

  “I’ve got to fix Shake before I do anything else,” I said. Which was true, as far as it went. I didn’t look at Jack when I said it, though. I stared out the window and watched the city streets.

  This was not the kind of detail Jack was likely to miss. “What’s going on, Callie? What are you planning?”

  I didn’t answer. The itch dug its claws a little deeper. I felt Jack waiting.

  “If he promises to help, and promises to leave us alone afterward, I’m going to give him what he wants,” I said finally. “I’ll abdicate. He’ll be heir to the Midnight Throne.”

  Jack was absolutely silent for a long time after that. I glanced from the window to the driver. He was ignoring us. Probably he’d heard stranger things coming out of the back of his cab. This was Los Angeles, after all.

  “Callie,” said Jack softly. “Callie, you gotta listen to me. There’re people out there who’ve just been too bad for too long to turn around. They get hooked on it, like dope or booze. Shake’s like that, Callie. He’s not going to play square for you or anybody else.”

  “I know.” I clenched my fists and rubbed my knuckles over my raw arms. “But he’s also the only one who doesn’t care about the gate prophecy, and he’s the only one who believes I just want to find my parents and get out of this. He wants the throne, and he wants revenge on his parents, that’s all. If I swear off it, he’ll let us go.”

  “You’re going to turn him on your grandparents?” breathed Jack.

  “They did that themselves,” I answered. “I’m just getting me and my folks out from between them.”

  Even Jack had no answer for that.

  When the cab left us in front of Mrs. Constantine’s, I started right for the porch steps, but Jack pulled me off to the side. I winced when he touched me, but I let him steer me behind the hydrangeas, where we couldn’t be seen.

  “I wish they were gone,” Jack said. “Mrs. Constantine and everybody. Just in case.”

  It was a good idea. Ivy was still out there somewhere, and there was no telling what she’d try next, or who she’d been talking to. I took up Jack’s wish and sort of spread it out. Nothing too pushy, just getting a kind of feeling out there. Then Mrs. Constantine decided it was time she did her marketing, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones decided it was too nice a day to be sitting inside. And Miss Whitman decided she wanted to go to the library after all. We watched them from behind the bushes while they walked out the door. Mrs. Constantine came last and locked the door carefully behind her.

  You too, Jack. I spread that wish just a little further. You go too.

  I felt him waver and look at the door. But only for a couple of heartbeats.

  “Not a chance, Call
ie. You are not getting rid of me that easy.”

  I shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  We found the spare key under the flowerpot on the back porch. The house was too warm, despite the breeze coming in from the open windows. The foyer smelled like polish and dust and the remains of lunch. The stairs complained under our shoes as we climbed up to my old room. It hadn’t been let out yet. It hadn’t been locked either, and its window hadn’t been opened. It was stifling in there. A trapped fly buzzed against the glass, searching angrily for an exit.

  “Nothing to it.” Jack’s smile was forced, but I let it go.

  “Be quiet a second. I’ve got to concentrate.”

  It was getting easier to open my magic just a little, and it was no trouble at all to feel the gate I’d created last time I was in this room. It was so clear, I was surprised Jack couldn’t spot it. I eased it open, but I didn’t step through. I just reached in and found that warm, dreamy, sleepy feeling I’d wrapped Lorcan up in. I took hold of the end of it and pulled.

  It took less than a heartbeat. Lorcan was awake and betwixt and between, and then he wasn’t. He was in front of me, both eyes wide open and his broken teeth bared. He lashed out, grabbing the front of my checked shirt and hauling me in close enough to breathe his hot and sour breath all over my face. For one panicked second I thought he was going to bite my throat.

  “Let her go, old man!” Jack swung the room’s rickety chair high over his head. “Let her go now, or I’ll bust your head!”

  “Ah.” Shake’s voice was terribly tight. “The young Mr. Holland. Callie, I see you’ve been busy while I was enjoying my little nap.” But he did let go, and stepped back. “Just a little misunderstanding among family. Nothing at all to worry about.” The lid closed down over his milk-white eye, winking at me. I felt a promise swirling around him, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “I need your help.” I rubbed my neck. The itching redoubled around my throat and on my cheeks where his breath had touched me.

  “Do you?” He raised his eyebrows and smoothed his shirt down. “Well, I find I’m a little busy right now, Callie. People to see, places to go. You understand, I’m sure.” He smiled, all polite, and walked out of the room, heading to his own.